difficulty of borrowing inflectional affixes  Discussion in
'Etymology, History of languages and Linguistics (EHL)' started
by Gavril, Jul 17, 2013.    1. Gavril Senior Member
English, USA     Inflectional affixes are among the least (if
not the least) borrowable elements of a language. What is the
leading theory (or theories) on why inflectional affixes are so
rarely loaned?      Two possibilities that seem likely to me are
1) affixes are not very "marked" semantically -- speakers don't
usually think about them in isolation (though this is far from
impossible) but are more likely to think about combinations of
them with phonetically longer elements      2) affixes are often
phonetically minimal, and therefore are often difficult to
*mention* in isolation, even if one wanted to do so.      What
other theories have been proposed?     Last edited by a
moderator: Jul 17, 2013   2. palomnik Senior Member      Let me
make sure that I understand what you're talking about. Do you
mean, for example, inflect