Actually, object pronouns are always attached to verbs in most varieties of Romance, it's just that this isn't consistently indicated in their respective orthographies. In the Spanish phrases lo leí "I read it", te quiero "I love you", and me lo has dicho "You've told me it", the object pronouns form a single stress group along with the following verb. The linguistic term for this process is cliticisation. Since these object pronouns can't take primary stress, the only way to emphasise the object is by repeating it in a prepositional phrase, e.g. Te quiero a ti "I love you".
In French, which unlike Spanish has vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, it's easier to se what's going on. Moi, je t'aime is, phonologically, two words: /'mwaʒ(ə)'tɛm/. In fact, some cheeky linguists have proposed analysing French as a polysynthetic language like Cherokee based on its use of "pronominal affixes".
Incidentally, the general name for the kind of affixes you talk about for Cherokee is portmanteau morpheme. Osage has only one: wi, which means "I to you", e.g. wioxtai "I cherish(ed) you". All the other permutations are compositional, although this may be obscured by various morphonological processes, e.g. ąðioxtai "You cherish(ed) me" but ąškǫšta "You want(ed) me". It seems likely to me that the Cherokee prefixes were also compositional/agglutinative in the past, but became portmanteau/fusional over time.
Incidentally, a similar system is found in Basque although there the pronominal elements are generally restricted to auxiliaries. For instance, forms of *edun "have" are used for most transitive verbs. The form for "you to me" is nauk (fam., male), naun (fam., fem.), nauzu (form., sing.), or nauzue (pl.). So maite nauk "You [male, fam.] love me". But "I love you" (to the same person) is maite haut.
Still, you can see a pattern here: There's a consistent link vowel u preceded by a direct object prefix and followed by a subject
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In French, which unlike Spanish has vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, it's easier to se what's going on. Moi, je t'aime is, phonologically, two words: /'mwaʒ(ə)'tɛm/. In fact, some cheeky linguists have proposed analysing French as a polysynthetic language like Cherokee based on its use of "pronominal affixes".
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Incidentally, a similar system is found in Basque although there the pronominal elements are generally restricted to auxiliaries. For instance, forms of *edun "have" are used for most transitive verbs. The form for "you to me" is nauk (fam., male), naun (fam., fem.), nauzu (form., sing.), or nauzue (pl.). So maite nauk "You [male, fam.] love me". But "I love you" (to the same person) is maite haut.
Still, you can see a pattern here: There's a consistent link vowel u preceded by a direct object prefix and followed by a subject ( ... )
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