Grammar
The Yupik languages, like other Eskimo–Aleut languages, represent a particular type of agglutinative language called an affixally polysynthetic language.
Yupik languages "synthesize" a single root at the beginning of every word with various grammatical suffixes to create long words with sentence-like meanings. Within the vocabulary of Yupik there are no more than two thousand roots and around four hundred lexical suffixes, but these can be combined to create meanings that in most languages are met by multiple free morphemes.
Although every Yupik word contains one and only one root that is rigidly constrained to word-initial position, the ordering of the suffixes that follow can be varied to communicate different meanings, this being essentially done via recursion. The only exception lies with case suffixes on nouns and person suffixes on verbs, which are restricted to the end of the words on which they occur.
Yupik is an ergative language both in nominal and verbal morphology. It has obligatory polyagreement on all verbs with subject and object, though not with the theme of a ditransitive verb.
Read more about this topic: Yupik Languages
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“The new grammar of race is constructed in a way that George Orwell would have appreciated, because its rules make some ideas impossible to express—unless, of course, one wants to be called a racist.”
—Stephen Carter (b. 1954)
“All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble or centuple use and meaning.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Grammar is a tricky, inconsistent thing. Being the backbone of speech and writing, it should, we think, be eminently logical, make perfect sense, like the human skeleton. But, of course, the skeleton is arbitrary, too. Why twelve pairs of ribs rather than eleven or thirteen? Why thirty-two teeth? It has something to do with evolution and functionalism—but only sometimes, not always. So there are aspects of grammar that make good, logical sense, and others that do not.”
—John Simon (b. 1925)