>Gunnar Gällmo wrote:
>Don't you mean an "isolative" language?
>"Agglutinative" languages, like Finnish (and I think
>Turkish), do have a lot of inflections (Finnish
>actually has about twice as many grammatical cases as
>Pali), but unlike inflectional languages the roots
>themselves are not changed - the affixes are just
>added.

I don't know Burmese, but as of late I've been
becoming very interested in it. I've often seen
it referred to as agglutinative because of the
lengthy strings of postpositional particles which
influence the syntax of a sentence. This is a
feature of the Tibeto-Burman family of languages
which hasn't carried out the 'isolating' process
as thoroughly as, say, Chinese.

By adapting this feature of the language, Burmese
scholars have developed the 'nissaya' style of
commentary on Pali texts, where the particles are
given particular technical senses for explicating
the syntax of glossed Pali words. For example a
particle can indicate that a word is the 'agent'
of a sentence, or an 'object', or belongs to any
other kaaraka category. There are dozens of these
specialized uses of the particles in commentarial
style Burmese.

I believe that this might tangent the relational
grammar subject, even if the RG materials which
Ven Pandita has provided are in English.

best regards,

/Rett