Re: Isolating natlangs?

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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