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

From:Thomas R. Wier <artabanos@...>
Date:Sunday, September 10, 2000, 17:27
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. ====================================== Tom Wier | "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." ======================================