VMS - Language Families Casting

[davidjackson]

Imagine a language, in which you agglutinate not necessarily words, but rather affixes or suffixes.

Then it's not strictly agglutinative. It is synthetic. Synthetic languages form words by affixing a given number of dependent morphemes to a root morpheme. (Most Indo-European languages are synthetic).

Furthermore, let us say it is a fusional language, rather than an agglutinative language. Morphemes in fusional languages are not readily distinguishable from the root or among themselves. Several grammatical bits of meaning may be fused into one affix. For example, the Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the first-person singular preterite tense form comí ('I ate'); the single suffix -í represents both the features of first-person singular agreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature. (See You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

So this fits with Stolfi's core / crust  / mantle theory - we are seeing modifiers to the stem. Agglutinative languages (think of German or Inuit) tend to produce very long words, which isn't what we see in the VM corpus.

Ok, you´re right, this could also be an artificial language, but I think far back in the past, languages were much more easy then today.

Actually, the opposite is often postulated to be true. Compare a modern language like English with Latin or Hebrew, Assyrian or ancient Turk. The subject is far too complex for me to boil down to a couple of sentences over my porridge, but it is often the case that the older a language is, the most rigid and complex it becomes.

Interesting opinion from an completely other view than mine, but it is possible. What do you think, the writer of the VMS would do, if he would risk a ban by the church for his explorations and his country has the strongest allied force of the church against itself? Would the work then also be state sponsored? I don´t think so.   undefined

An often suggested view of the medieval (pre 1400's) Church, but not one that is really backup up by historic evidence. The European Church was fragmented and often in hock to local political leaders, it was not a supre-European power state capable of instilling terror into local rulers. Heck, they couldn't even stamp out the local cults that they hated such as the Adamists.
And why would the Church have tried to ban exploration? They never did before. Indeed, they supported Spanish and Portuguese exploration - European expansion carried the power of the Church with them. I've certainly never heard of a Church decree against exploration, quite the opposite.