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:
“I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.”
—Louis Aragon (1897–1982)
“Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The old saying of Buffon’s that style is the man himself is as near the truth as we can get—but then most men mistake grammar for style, as they mistake correct spelling for words or schooling for education.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)