FWIW there is a theory that there is a cycle of language change, though it seems maybe there is not a lot of evidence for the isolating → agglutinating step. IIRC the idea is something like that if you have a “simple” (isolating) language that uses helper words instead of morphology eventually those words can lose their independent meaning and get smushed together with the word they are modifying.
FWIW there is a theory that there is a cycle of language change, though it seems maybe there is not a lot of evidence for the isolating → agglutinating step. IIRC the idea is something like that if you have a “simple” (isolating) language that uses helper words instead of morphology eventually those words can lose their independent meaning and get smushed together with the word they are modifying.