Linguistic Paper
A) 1. What parts of speech are found in this text?
Nouns, pronouns, verbs, and prepositions are found in this speech. 2. Identify all the inflectional affixes. What is their function? What kind of affixes are they?
In this text, I find that gender, number, and case are marked. Gender is marked as masculine, feminine and neuter. For example, ‘medi-o-que’ means and in the middle where middle is a masculine word. Number is marked as singular and plural. Latin has case distinction, in which six kinds of cases are included. They are nominative case, genitive case, dative case, accusative case, ablative case, and vocative case separately. In detail, the nominative is used to indicate the subject of a finite verb, for example, ‘Qu-is’ in the text represent the nominative case. The genitive case is used when one noun modifies another and is often used to show ownership, like ‘de-orum’ means ‘of the god’. Dative case is used to indicate a noun which is indirectly affected by the verb, such as ‘nobis’ means ‘from us’ in the text. Accusative case indicates an indirect object similar to dative case, like ‘te’ means ‘you’ in Latin. Ablative case is referred to as the adverbial case because it is used to modify a verb by place, time, and so on, like ‘aequor-e’ means ‘of the ocean’. Finally, vocative case represent names are being addressed directly, ‘Palinur-e’ for instance. Since all cases are marked at the end of the word in the text, they are represented as suffix. For example, ‘Qu-is’ includes suffix ‘-is’. 3. Is Latin agglutinative, polysynthetic, isolating or fusional? State your reasons.
Latin is neither an isolating nor agglutinative language. It is polysynthetic and fusional. It is a language with high ratio use of synthetic words and large use of non-linear markers. To distinguish isolating, agglutinative and fusional languages, is to see how morphemes are combined. Latin has the inflectional affixes marked almost through the end of every single word.
Nouns, pronouns, verbs, and prepositions are found in this speech. 2. Identify all the inflectional affixes. What is their function? What kind of affixes are they?
In this text, I find that gender, number, and case are marked. Gender is marked as masculine, feminine and neuter. For example, ‘medi-o-que’ means and in the middle where middle is a masculine word. Number is marked as singular and plural. Latin has case distinction, in which six kinds of cases are included. They are nominative case, genitive case, dative case, accusative case, ablative case, and vocative case separately. In detail, the nominative is used to indicate the subject of a finite verb, for example, ‘Qu-is’ in the text represent the nominative case. The genitive case is used when one noun modifies another and is often used to show ownership, like ‘de-orum’ means ‘of the god’. Dative case is used to indicate a noun which is indirectly affected by the verb, such as ‘nobis’ means ‘from us’ in the text. Accusative case indicates an indirect object similar to dative case, like ‘te’ means ‘you’ in Latin. Ablative case is referred to as the adverbial case because it is used to modify a verb by place, time, and so on, like ‘aequor-e’ means ‘of the ocean’. Finally, vocative case represent names are being addressed directly, ‘Palinur-e’ for instance. Since all cases are marked at the end of the word in the text, they are represented as suffix. For example, ‘Qu-is’ includes suffix ‘-is’. 3. Is Latin agglutinative, polysynthetic, isolating or fusional? State your reasons.
Latin is neither an isolating nor agglutinative language. It is polysynthetic and fusional. It is a language with high ratio use of synthetic words and large use of non-linear markers. To distinguish isolating, agglutinative and fusional languages, is to see how morphemes are combined. Latin has the inflectional affixes marked almost through the end of every single word.