Dear Gunnar

Thank you for your kind comment. My linguistic knowledge is not much,
but I would like to improve it.

You wrote:

> --- "Ven. Pandita" <ashinpan@...> skrev:
>
>
>>Burmese is what some call an "agglutinative" language whereas Pali is an inflectional language. Burmese entirely lacks inflections such as declensions and conjugations
>>that Pali has.
>>
>>
>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.
>

In the case of Burmese, we also have many cases, which are added to
roots without any change to the roots themselves. If such a process is
to be called an "inflection", let it be. When I said "Burmese entirely
lacks inflections", I mean that such "inflections" cannot be made into
paradigms like those in Pali and Sanskrit because, theoretically, any
given root can accept any affix. Moreover, even with all words each
having a root with a proper affix in a given sentence, word order is
still important --- we can't make arbitrary changes to it.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

with metta

Ven. Pandita


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