How do polysyllabic languages originate?
Indo-European languages are all about the stem, which is basically a sandwich of consonants with a vowel filling. Chinese started off this way before losing most of their end consonants.
e.g.
amo
amas
amat
The stem is am- and was originally something like HAM or KHAM in Proto Indo-European.
But then you have languages ike Japanese or Hawaiian where very basic words can have double or triple decker sandwich structures.
Naka-yama and Zhong-shan are written the same way, but the difference in root structure is very obvious.
In Latin it would be Mediomons, Mediomontem; here you have MED and MONT as the roots, and -io- as an archaic genitive, then -s and -em for the nominative and accusative. It's actually more like Chinese than Japanese in root structure, the Chinese just leave the grammatical elements implied.
But Nakayama is NAKA and YAMA, not NAK and YAM joined grammatically.
What I'm wondering is this: at the most primitive stage of the language, how is root structure established? In Chinese and Latin, it's a one syllable consonant sandwich, but how did this happen?
>>1219838
Maybe I'm wrong and some linguistically informed /his/torian will come to the rescue, but most likely thia thread is a bit too smart and specific for /his/.
Maybe get an account on a small internet forum for linguistics and do a similar thread there.
>>1219846
Yeah the problem is that you are too smart for the rest of the world, it's not the retardedness of your thread at all.
If I was to take a rough guess m8, they probably created some form of structure after the need for polysyllabic words was fore filled, explaining such messy inconsistencies as you state. They'd make do with whatever they had made in the past, for such things that require the immediate creation of new types of words due to a threat of war or something equally primitive.
Or the king could've just done it with his divine right. Y'know.
I'm not versed in linguistics, but, I think you're assuming that Japanese and Hawaiian both "started" as mono-stem languages and that they proceeded to "add on" the polystem stuff.
I'd wager (but again I'm a mere layman) that these languages (and language families) came out of the "prehistorical muck" (so to speak) polysyllabic.
>>1220379
Mate, why would I refer to myself in third person and reply to myself over a question, not even reinforcing an opinion like a normal samefag? I'm not OP dumbass. I was giving a suggestion to a guy who wasn't gonna get many responses here. And he really didn't get many replies.
It's funny that you use Japanese and Hawaiian as examples, as they are the two most prominent examples of languages that utilize parts of the brain more that are more associated with empirical and structured reasoning, and less of the brain that's associated with linguistic usage, than other languages.
>>1219838
Very simply:
All languages undergo sound changes over time. Changes in which parts of words end up lost are pretty common. Thus, words tend to 'wear down' toward being monosyllabic.
However! — there are much fewer possible short words than long words. So, as words wear down, more and more of them become homophones, so that speakers can't tell them apart. What happens next is that people start compounding words or adding more derivational affixes to them so that they can tell them apart again. Thus, words eventually end up being long again.
Then the cycle repeats forever.
As far as just roots go: one of the biggest things that matters is the phonological complexity and constraints of the language. Japanese has (relatively) very few possible syllables, so roots end up longer since they need to be distinguishable from each other. Proto-Indo-European and Old Chinese had complex phonologies with many possible syllables, so they could express the same number of concepts using fewer syllables overall (since there were many more to choose from).
>>1221150
Makes sense. I hadn't thought of consonant clusters.
Is it possible that root structure indicates a language's age?
Babytalk starts with simple CV syllables, often repeated, so a population with few elders might undergo a simplification of phonology, or vice verse, get more complicated as elder lore amasses.
So, just daydreaming on this possibility, polynesian or Japonic languages might indicate a very high ratio of children to adults in the founder populations. Young women, children and a few middle aged men could have fled a war by canoe, for example.
Why was Mosley so cute?
>>1222414
BEADY
>>1222402
>Is it possible that root structure indicates a language's age?
No. You would need every root change in order to do that. What are you even asking?
I fucking hate people like you.
>>1222498
Languages can be broken down enough that they grow back as something else entirely. That's what I mean by age - how long ago this starting point was.
