[Lingtyp] What is the opposite of syncretism?

[Christian Lehmann]

As for the terminological question:

The idea behind the term /syncretism/ is 'mixture'; it is based - with 
some non-canonical morphology intervening - on the Greek verb for mixing 
(the English wikipedia is on the right track with this). However, this 
idea fits better the religious concept of syncretism. The linguistic 
concept is not really a kind of mixing things, but a failure to 
distinguish them. Its opposite is differentiation or distinction. If you 
want a Greek term, it would be /diacrisis/. This is actually an English 
word (all Greek and Latin terms are English words ...), although 
heretofore occupied by other disciplines with different meanings.

/Discretism/ would be the habit of being discrete - not recommended.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Am 15.08.2023 um 03:27 schrieb Cat Butz:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I'm presenting a pronoun paradigm of Dalkalaen this week at the 
> Affixes symposium in Turku. It exhibits both some very weird 
> syncretism (same marking of 1EX and 2nd person) and the opposite of 
> that (e.g. plural being marked differently in all four persons). What 
> do we call that? Just differential marking?
>
> Thank you, and hopefully see you on Thursday/Friday,
-- 

Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Rudolfstr. 4
99092 Erfurt
Deutschland

Tel.: 	+49/361/2113417
E-Post: 	christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
Web: 	https://www.christianlehmann.eu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20230816/1b851d01/attachment.htm>