#maybe next i will learn a polysynthetic language. JUST KIDDING ! i value my sanity

[yo9urt]

more japanese thoughts hashtag linguistics major posting

last night i was thinking about このそのあのどの and how the existence of the whole こそあど family essentially shows us that those 4 prefixes have some sort of longstanding historical association with here/there/far/[question] and then i Realized. the reason この、その、あの、どの have to be followed by a noun is because they're literally "here/etc. の [thing]"...it's literally just の doing its classic possessor/noun relationship job...actually its probably better to say that instead of having to be followed by a noun, nouns have to be PRECEDED by the の group because の　is there to establish that relationship...(whereas if you just use これ　etc. there's no relationship to establish because you already packed the thing into the word itself...)

^ i actually dont know if thats true on a linguistic level but honestly it makes so much sense im 99.9999% sure its true

having spoken an analytic language from birth and learned a fusional synthetic language in school i find it so fun and cute to see how an agglutinative synthetic language does things and to be able to compare them! with english being analytic we inflect for almost nothing (there are only 7 inflectional morphemes in this entire paragraph so far) and just kind of lay everything out on the table and of course we have a stricter word order, spanish and japanese both have MUCH more inflection going on (looking at you adjectives and adjectival nouns) but spanish as a fusional language prefers to take all that meaning and stuff it into 1-2 morphemes/inflections whereas japanese makes long stacked strings of visible morphemes each with 1 individual concrete meaning. like legos. idk it's just really cool to learn about this kind of thing in school and on wikipedia and wherever and then actually learn 3 different kinds of languages and see it in action