linguoboy wrote:
Talib wrote:
Take a look and see if this makes more sense to you than it does to me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsez_language#VerbsComplex enough, but not as bad as Georgian. Now if only some of those periphrastic tenses grammaticalised the auxiliary to the point of synthesis and then we'd be within sight of Crazytown!
Navajo is definitely a contender. Believe it or not, there ARE rules, just loads of them

But Navajo doesn't hold a candle to Lushootseed or Coeur d’Alene. While grammaticaly it'll make a grown man cry, it's consonant clusters are nothing to sneeze at. While this isn't a typical word, the clusters are typical:
xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ . I think it has 17 consonants in a row. "he had had a bunchberry plant"
Tlingit is also nightmarish. I did my dissertation on Tlingit.
I'll give a quick example:
yas'eil - rip
tléil x'éitx yaa ees'él'jeek - Don't tear it open
(vowels will change in the
middle of a word!)
s'ísaa woóshdax xwaas'éil - I tore it apart
x'úx' kaxas'él't - I am making a pile of paper
gèiwoo kawdis'éil' - The net is ripped
daak yaawas'él' - earring (it is pierced/torn through)
Maybe some of you can see the root
yas'éil throughout. It's easy to say it's obvious when you're
reading it, but in "real life", it's the farthest from easy. The underlines letters are separate letters.
x sounds like you're coughing up a piece of popcorn kernel stuck on your tonsil, but
x' is extra special. It's a mix of that sound plus chunky snot mixed in. (That's how a member of the tribe explained it to me!)
While Cherokee is considered agglutinative, compared to Northwest Pacific languages, it's like Indonesian!