Re: [tied] PIE Word Formation (1)

On 2006-03-29 20:29, andrew jarrette wrote:

> Thak you for your service of providing us with a comprehensive
> explanation of IE word formation, Piotr - we're actually getting it free.

You're welcome, and for me it's an opportunity to organise my own ideas.

> My comment is the following: IE is traditionally regarded as an
> analytic language, is it not? (At least its descendants like Latin and
> Greek are.)

_It_ isn't and _they_ aren't. They're all traditionally regarded as
inflecting (or fusional) synthetic languages.

> But according to the principles you and other IE
> philologists/linguists have put forth, 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?

If we correct that to "between agglutinative and inflected", there is no
sharp demarcation line. In the former case there's a tendency for each
grammatical function to be marked with a separate affix; in the latter,
there's a tendency to have just one grammatical desinence per word,
expressing a whole complex of functions (e.g. a masc.acc.sg. ending
rather than three concatenated markers of [masc.], [acc.] and [sg.].
However, mixed types are not uncommon, and there are some agglutinative
constructions in PIE. An agglutinative language may develop into a
fusional one if for some reason (e.g. assimilatory sound changes)
boundaries between affixes become obscured and several morphemes end up
compressed together into a single unit with a complex meaning.

Piotr