Re: a "natural language" ?

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. 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. 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.

> 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.

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