Re: Isolation and word order
| From: | J Y S Czhang <czhang23@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, June 19, 2003, 3:31 |
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In a message dated 2003:06:18 01:07:04 AM, Yitzik the Curious Snakie writes:
>I'm gathering material for an a priori Indochina-styled conlang. I saw
>that major EAsian natlangs with isolating morphology (Chinese, Thai,
Vietnamese)
>use SVO word order. Are there any isolating natlangs with a different word
>order?
Lisu, a Lolo-Burmese language, is a pretty close to an free order
isolating language. But IIRC there is some form of "contextual focusing" (what the
differences are between topic-focus and contextual focus is a little confusing
to me)... also IIRC there is a general preference for SOV and SVO.
BTW Lisu has come up this list before...
---
Hanuman Zhang, MangaLanger
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_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_
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