| Lemma | inflective language |
|---|---|
| Categoria grammaticale | N |
| Lingua | inglese |
| Sigla | Sapir (1921) |
| Titolo | Language |
| Sinonimi | |
| Rinvii | affixing (inglese) analytic language (inglese) classification (inglese) concept (inglese) expression (inglese) method (inglese) polysynthetic language (inglese) radical element (inglese) scheme (inglese) suffixing (inglese) synthetic language (inglese) to fuse (inglese) |
| Traduzioni | |
| Citazioni | An inflective language [...] may be analytic, synthetic, or polysynthetic. Latin and Greek are mainly affixing in thier method, with the emphasis heavily on suffixing.[...] Affixing alone does not define inflection. Possibly everything depends on just what kind of affixing we have to deal with. There are [...] a large number of languages that fuse radical element and affix in as complete and intricate a fashion as one could hope to find anywhere without thereby giving signs of that particular kind of formalism that marks off such languages as Latin and Greek as inflective. Nothing could be more erroneous than to imagine that symbolic changes of the radical element, even for the expression of such abstarct concepts as those of number and tense, are always associated with the syntactic peculiarities of an inflective language. We shall do best, it seems to me, to hold to 'inflective' as a valuable suggestion for a broader and more consistently developed scheme, as a hint for a classification based on the nature of the concepts expressed by the language. |