Re: Artyom Kouzminykh: Answers & proposal

Fabian wrote:

> Consider the following conceptual equivalents:
>
> noun            verb
> preposition     auxiliary verb
> inflected case  inflected tense
>
> Now, this isn't an absolute thing, as many languages have both prepositions
> and inflected cases. But consider that a language that uses inflections is
> going to have a lot fewer words in any utterance. Conversely, a language
> that uses prepositions and auxiliary verbs extensively (and no inflections)
> is going to have every word in a dictionary in an easy-to-look-up format.
> The only real question is which of these really *is* simpler.
Interesting and a good explanation. But my crackpot theory of the day is
that deeply underlying everything else (to be hopefully undisprovable),
there is a parameter for syntax that may be set head-first or -last,
and another for morphology that may be again h-f or h-l; when they
are in-phase the result is extremely either isolating (Chinese)
or polysynthetic, and word boundaries seemingly disappear; otherwise,
the lang is "transitional". Or it could be due to something I ate ...