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Re: Isolating natlangs?

From:H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
Date:Thursday, January 13, 2005, 18:51
On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 06:12:09PM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:
[...]
> No, not Mandarin (or AFAIK any other variety of spoken Chinese). Like > modern English, it is largely isolating but does have some bound > grammatical morphemes (affixes) like, for example, the verbal aspect > morphemes -le and -zhe, and several others. Indeed, it has been argued on > this list that modern English is more isolating than Mandarin (but not an > argument I think worth pursuing).
I seem to remember seeing that argument before some time ago. I think the perception that Chinese is purely isolating may be due to the (not so accurate) impression that every syllable corresponds with a different "word" (which is not really true, but is a commonly promoted ideal/misconception). [...]
> The trouble is that natlangs have this horrible tendency of not fitting > neatly into the three-way topologies of te 19th century theorists ;)
[...] Which is why I've no qualms about making such bizarre yet naturalistic (to me it is!) things as the Ebisédian case system... ;-) T -- Why do conspiracy theories always come from the same people??

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Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>