Tom Wier wrote:
>> Quite high actually. English is the most famous example, but French very
>> nearly followed suit as well.
>
>Well, that isn't exactly a very large sample. It actually *is* a
typologically
>rare thing to have. It just so happens that Western European languages are
>a Sprachbund: grammatical features that one has are likely to spill over
into
>the neighboring, not closely related language. So, the fact that French
has it
>(and German, and Italian IIRC) is not good evidence that
While I completely agree with you here, I'd like to point out a non-European
language that does this. Ainu. I'm not sure where this feature would have
come from, since it isn't in any other language in the area from what I've
seen.
Marcus