From: andrew jarrette
Message: 44009
Date: 2006-03-30
>>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.) 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?
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Horror of horrors! I am mortified -- I can't believe I used analytic where I meant inflectional. I think I have to go back to school and take an introductory linguistics course, among others. Plus I realize that if IE were agglutinative, it would have have the same case-endings in the plural and dual as in the singular, plus a plurality or duality marker. Forgive me my wanderings.
Andrew Jarrette