What comes to mind here is the scene in "Lost in Translation" where Bill Murray's character is at the commercial shoot, and he keeps getting confused because what the director says is much longer than what his interpreter is telling him. I wonder if this was caused in part by the fact that Japanese is a poly-synthetic language?,(reply>), Japanese is agglutinative, <b>not</b> polysynthetic - polysynthesis relies on incorporating more than one lexical root from more than one word class in a lg's verbal/clausal complexes. However, in Japanese, verbal complexes just have permutations of verbal roots - you cannot have a noun root intervening in between, whereas in many polysynthetic lgs, such a situation is possible.