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Re: Isolating natlangs?

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Thursday, January 13, 2005, 18:12
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 =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com =============================================== Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>