Re: Isolating natlangs?

On Wednesday, January 12, 2005, at 08:06 , Aquamarine Demon wrote:

>> Of the two conlang projects I have going right now one of them is
>> mutating in the direction of becoming more isolating.  However, I'm not
>> at
>> all familiar with isolating languages as they occur in the wild, and I'd
>> love to look at the grammar for one or two examples.
[snip]

> Well, I don't know much about it, but pretty much every place I've seen
> gives Chinese (Mandarin) as an example of an isolating language.
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).

In fact it seems that very few natlangs are 100% isolating. The only one
that I know of that is always quoted without qualification is Vietnamese.
It may be that Thai, which was mentioned here recently, is also 100%
isolating - I do not know enough about it to comment otherwise.

The trouble is that natlangs have this horrible tendency of not fitting
neatly into the three-way topologies of te 19th century theorists   ;)

Ray
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