Re: Greenberg's universals for SVO languages & CaosPidginruff-sketch

Marcus Smith wrote:

> Tom Wier wrote:
>
> >> -- case is less common, and when present, usually doesn't not follow an
> >> ergative pattern.
> >
> >Right -- although I believe the figure is about 25% that show some
> ergativity,
> >whether morphological (like Basque) or syntactic (like Dyirbal).
>
> According to Comrie, Dyirbal is not SVO.
As David has pointed out, it's really quite free.  I've heard some say that
it does not even have a basic wordorder, although I can't remember whether
this comes from the mouth of Dixon or not.

> The examples Comrie gives of Basque
> do not show an SVO pattern either.
Indeed.  I noticed that after I sent off my letter... I was responding to his
ambiguous (in isolation) request for more universals, not specifically universals
about SVO.

> >> -- often have definite articles (OV languages tend not to).
> >
> >...or more precisely, grammaticalize definiteness.  Mam, a language I worked
> >on, for example, assumes that words will be definite, and marks only singular
> >and plural indefinite articles.  (Mam is VSO)
>
> Well, VSO is not SVO -- the two orders do have different typologies in this
> respect.  SVO does tend to have definite articles, while the other orders tend
> to express definiteness with no articles (like Mam) or with demonstratives
> (like Comanche, IIRC).
Again, I realize this.  I misread your original post.

> > My friend once joked that he'd hate to have
> > to learn a purely fusional language, where the logical extreme might be
> > something like "po" encapsulates everything written by Gauss or something
> > -- literally all the words.
>
> Hmm.  Then a purely agglutinative language taken to the logical extreme could
> express the same thing with a single word that's thousands of syllables long.
> Gee, I hope the stressed syllable is the first, otherwise it would be hard to
> anticipate the word's rythm.
Note, however, that this would be easier to use, in theory, since you would
not have to learn a separate word for every possible utterance, but only
manipulate the morphology, even if that might be hellishly complicated.

> >> Of course, as somebody pointed out in another message, universals are just
> >> statistics.  I know of no absolute universals except things like "All
> >> languages have vowels".
> >
> >Some have claimed even that's not true.  I read once, somewhere, that there's
> >a language in Papua New Guinea that has no phonemic vowels -- although I
> >suspect this to be apocryphal, or a misinterpretation.
>
> But the presence of epinthetic vowels makes it conform to a strict
> interpretation of the universal.
Except that universals are almost always made about phonology,
not phonetics.  I mean, we all make sounds on the phonetic level
that can really veer from normal "universals" about phones every
once in a while.

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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