Re: "easiest" languages, SE Asian word-order typologies (was Rating Languages)

On Wed, 26 Sep 2001 00:44:27 EDT, J Y S Czhang <czhang23@...> wrote:

>    So I think Archaic Chinese had it's start as a pidgin & then around the
>Shang Dynasty (1700 - 1100 BCE, roughly) it was well on its way to bein' a
>native language (at least for the Han).
I remember rumors that Sergei Starostin found some lexicostatistical
anomaly about creoles, and that Old Chinese had a similar anomaly when
compared with the rest of Sino-Tibetan.

>    Wonder what influences coulda made Mandarin become such a
>"head-final"/left-branching language (modifier(s) + head word) ?
But this was already a feature of Old Chinese. And Tibeto-Burman langs
tend to be more left-branching than Chinese, on the average (e. g. they
are often verb-final).


Basilius

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