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:
“Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.”
—Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–1886)