Re: a "natural language" ?

Hallo!

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004 09:28:36 -0600,
"Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...> wrote:

> From:    Joerg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
> > I also have the impression that the majority of the world's languages
> > have fewer irregularities than most IE languages.  Perhaps the
> > Europe/Middle East/India area is one of above-average irregularity.
>
> In my experience with the languages of North America and the
> Caucasus, this is not at all the case.  On top of all the other
> things that make Georgian a difficult language to learn, it is
> replete with suppletive verb (and noun!) stems, a number of
> different kinds of verbal and nominal ablaut, sometimes intersecting
> one another but sometimes not, and many verbs which simply lack
> certain stems and so have to recruit other stems to fill out
> paradigms.
I never seriously tried to learn Georgian, but I did try to get to
an understanding of how its morphology works - and found that none of
the sources I found gave comprehensive paradigms, and couldn't figure
it out from examples, either.  Apparently, this is because things
are frantically irregular in Georgian!

>       In North America, most if not all surface phonological
> processes are morphophonological in the Algonquian languages, which
> means one must frequently simply memorize not only stems but
> inflectional collocations many times, which, because of their
> baroque morphologies, often means hundreds or thousands of
> things to memorize. Meskwaki certainly has many of the same
> problems that Georgian has as well. The Caddoan languages are famous
> for their fusional morphologies, whose protoagglutinativity was
> destroyed as you suggest below by numerous sound changes over the
> centuries.
I am not very familiar with North American languages, but I have heard
that their morphologies are formidable.

>       There is, in other words, little reason for me to see
> Europe or IE-languages as somehow special in regards irregularities.
> In fact, many of them have somewhat less irregularity than some
> languages I've studied.
I see.  I was perhaps misled by the clarity of the grammar sketches
I have seen which simply glossed over the irregularities and
morphophonological complexities of the languages concerned.

> > But if you look at the (well-known) history and prehistory of the
> > Indo-European languages, you'll see that a great chunk of their
> > grammatical "messiness" (multiple declensions and conjugations, etc.)
> > is due to regular sound changes wreaking havoc with the inherited
> > paradigms.
>
> Yes, that's often the case.  But languages with much more
> complex morphological systems than IE-languages can be far,
> far worse, let me assure you, for purely morphological reasons.
So IE actually occupies a middle position on the irregularity scale,
I assume.  I think Old Albic is less irregular than many IE languages,
but I hope not unrealistically so.  (The grammar sketch I posted
on June 21 perhaps gives the impression that it is more regular
than it actually is, but I mentioned a few sources of irregularity.)

Greetings,

Jörg.