Root versus lexical languages.

[Sean Crist]

On Wed, 8 Dec 1999 s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca wrote:

> Dear List members--

> I distinctly remember having been taught, as an undergraduate, that one
> can distinguish ROOT LANGUAGES from LEXICAL LANGUAGES. The latter are the
> more common type and consist of those languages (like English) where, as a
> rule, lexical items stand in isolation from one another, i.e. derivation
> is not regular or transparent. Root languages, on the other hand, are
> languages like Sanskrit or early Semitic languages, where derivation is so
> regular and transparent that, by taking a small number (800 to 1000) of
> roots, one can generate the bulk of the lexicon: this transparency is such
> that, for example, in an Arabic dictionary, roots, not words, are what is
> listed.

> My question is twofold:

> 1-Can anyone point me to published work comparing these two types of
> language,

> and

> 2-While the transformation of a root language into a lexical language is a
> banal, commonly observed phenomenon (from Sanskrit to the modern
> Indo-Aryan languages), is anything known about the reverse, i.e. how a
> lexical language turns into a root language?

Your terms "lexical" and "root" correspond roughly to the traditional
terms "isolating" and "inflectional" (or "fusional"), respectively.  The
three traditional types of language- isolating, agglutinative, and
inflectional- should be taken as useful but imprecise descriptive terms.
Languages do not fit neatly into one of these three slots; it's a matter
of more or less.

You'll often hear rather simplistic statements about other characteristics
which are supposed to go hand in hand with one of these morphological
types.  For example, it's said that Latin, as an inflectional language,
has "free" word order, while English, as an isolating language, relies on
word order to convey the same grammatical information.  Actually, the word
order in Latin is anything but free; you cannot arrange Latin words in any
arbitrary order.  Likewise, there is a certain range of freedom in English
word order.  Much the same syntactic constraints apply in all languages,
regardless of what kind of morphology (if any) the language has.

As for how an isolating language goes to an inflectional language, the
real question is how a language can develop inflectional morphology which
it didn't previously have.  One way- and probably the main way- is for a
previously separate word to become fused to another, i.e. reinterpreted as
inflectional morphology on another word. This is where the modern English
regular past tense -ed comes from; in prehistoric Germanic, the verb which
comes down to us as "did" came to be fused on to other words as a suffix,
producing the Germanic weak verbs.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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