Re: Metaconlinguistic terminology et alia

At 11:29 am -0700 15/6/99, Charles wrote:

[WORD ORDER & CASES]
>Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>
>> >> subject-verb-object doesn't seem exactly difficult to me.  This word
>>order
>> >> is favored by both English & Chinese which probably accounts for more
>>than
>> >> half the inhabitants of the planet.
>
>Creoles, too.
Yes, indeed.

It still surprises me how little regard conIALists give to Creoles and,
indeed, the process of pidginization & creolization.  (Before I'm flamed -
I know some do, but I'm still surpised at how few this enlightened band
seem to be.)

Pidgins have no other raison d'etre than to serve as auxiliaries languages.
The vast majority have been ad hoc, unstable and short-lived - and
unrecorded.  But some have endured and reached a degree of standardization
and served as an IAL for many decades, such as the AngloChinese Pidgin from
which we have derived the common noun 'pidgin'.

Where pidgins survive and become the first language of a community we get
creolization; IMHO creoles should be the serious subject of study by any
conIAList.

>> I could have listed the
>> _very many_ languages from around the globe that use the SVO word order.
>>
>> The other common word order is SOV but this, it seems to me, is less common
>
>Neat essay at: http://www.srv.net/~ram/syntax.html
>Roughly, SVO 40%, SOV 40%, VSO 15%,
>and all three of the OS orders combined, 5%.
I'll look at that.  I wonder whether the figures represent percentages of
languages or whether they reflex numbers of speakers.  The latter seems
more important to me in the context of IALs.

......
>
>Europe and perhaps all the Indoeuropean daughter languages
>have moved from OV+case to VO+prepositions.
Not all daughter IE languages - the Indic languages still retain SOV order
and, of course, the insular Celtic langs have changed to VSO.  But I agree
that the general tendency among IE langs has been towards SOV.

>No real reason, just a sort of areal drift.
I think the drift away from the case system is connected.  With either VSO
or SOV systems one needs some way of knowing where the subject noun phrase
finishes and the object noun phrase starts.  The use of different cases is
a convenient method - not the only method, I know, e.g. modern Welsh does
it very well without any case system.  But it has been observed that the
SVO word order does neatly separate the two noun phrases.  I think it is no
co-incidence that both Chinese & English, though quite unrelated languages,
favor that word order since both languages have abandoned case endings for
nouns.

>> Do Finnish children have no more or less trouble
>> acquiring their 17 cases than 1 and 2 year old anglophone children have
>> with word order?
>
>Must be nearly the same, because the cases have become a little
>irregular, exhibiting I-think-it's-called sandhi phenomena. (?)
>But they are still 99% equivalent to prepositions.
I know that.  But what I'm concerned with is the ease or difficulty of
_acquisition_ - the learning process.  Personally, I suspect no study has
been carried out to compare the two systems in this regard.

[snip]
>
>There could be some kind of quantifiable measure of irregularity,
>but case vs. prepositions would almost have to be equivalent.
>And even irregularity may be easier in pronunciation, I suppose.
Quite so - that's often why these irregularities occur.  But I think there
is certainly a quantifiable difference between the agglutination of
relational affixes and the use of a case system in the traditional IE
manner.  Both Volapuek & Esperanto retain cases _and_ also use seperable
prepositions.  It's the latter system which I question.

[PHRASAL VERBS]
>.......
>> you, non-native speakers do.  For many years when we lived in south Wales
>> we had foreign language assistants living in with us.  I'd always assumed
>> that what foreigners would find most difficult about English was our
>> spelling.  Not a bit of it - that was merely a quaint English eccentricity.
>> No - what, without exception, they complained about were "English phrasal
>> verbs"!
.....
>
>In English, they often amount to entirely separate idioms.
Absolutely - which I understand is one reason they cause so much trouble.

>Basic English used them to "simplify" the verb system,
>with dubious results.
I think you are being very kind to Basic English, Charles  :)
The result to my mind was not dubious: it made the verbs the darn sight
more difficult.

>Many natlangs have effectively simpler,
>more regular verb systems, e.g. Farsi has even a regular "to be".
...and why not, indeed?

[CONSTRUCTED IALs]
>> This thread began IIRC because we were speaking about conIALs.
>
>I'm afraid it is like talking about religion. We start
>with brotherhood and end up killing each other!
The analogy is, alas, too true in my experience - and I do not want the
bigotry I've seen elsewhere come onto this list, which is why I'm trying to
tread carefully here (probably not entirely successfully, but I am trying).

>> In any case - excuse the pun - you think a fair degree of reaular
>> morphological apparatus with a fairly flexible word order (I assume) is
>> better in a conIAL than minimal morphology and a more rigid word order.
>
>I think either could work beautifully; all depends on the implementation.
Possibly - I believe in the free market here.  People are free to design
anything they wish as a conIAL.  All I said was that I would have no
declensions & rely on a fairly fixed word order.  Then in true auxlang
style I get accused of choosing something simply because that's the way
it's done in English and, really, an different system is better.

Sorry - I've been through all this ad nauseam before.  I know a little
better than to relexify English and call it a conIAL; I do think my things
through (though I will not always be right).

>But current concensus is that creoles (SVO, mostly isolating) are best
>(= easiest) for 2nd language acquisition. Fashions can change, though.
Indeed they can - but will creoles?  :)

[TERMINOLOGY]
.....
>> For example, my understanding of 'loglang' is rather narrower than this and
>> links it to clausal form logic.  And I can assure you than the terms IAL
>> and auxlang are, in practice, imprecise.
>
>I like precise ambiguity, myself ...
...to which I give a definite maybe  :-)

Ray.