Re: [tied] PIE Word Formation (1)

> I see no reason why PIE might not be considered an (originally)
>agglutinative language, like Finno-Ugric languages. All the
>inflectional and conjugational endings seem to have been originally
>quite regular and pan-schematic (by this I mean the same suffixes
>applied to all varieties of nouns or verbs, etc. - maybe there's a
>more accurate word, but I can't think of it at the moment), as

though >they were originally independent words or particles with
specific >meanings. Where does the line between agglutinative and
analytic >lie, at least in the case of IE?


My very personal view: The reason natural grammatical categories and
inflectional endings don't match in analytic/inflectional languages
is that indigenous grammarians or philosophers thought up those
grammatical categories as part of a theory of the world, into which
Procrustean bed the language as it was at the time was squeezed.



Torsten