Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

Quoting Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>:

>
> One curious thing about English though is that it's often painted as a
> relatively isolating language, but as I understand it (and I might be
> *wildly* wrong here, which is the simplest explanation) German tends
> not to use its genitive, preferring expressions including 'von', and
> doesn't like its simple past tense, preferring expressions paralleling
> English past perfects, whereas English enjoys the use of both... OTOH,
> I've never heard anyone claiming that German's a relatively isolating
> language...
I think the genitive is a bad example, since many would deny that English has an
inflectional genitive at all. A little-used on surely beats none!

While the German simple past, outside of a couple very common verbs, is indeed
little used in spoken German (the spoken varieties of standard High German, at
any rate; I should better not make any generalizations about what goes on in
dialects), it has much more verbal morphology than English, so it seems less
isolating to me.

> BTW---if a language forms everything with clitics (like English seems
> to want to), does it necessarily count as isolating or agglutinative or
> something, or can it be whatever it darn well feels like based on other
> aspects?
I'd consider it isolating - clitics are syntactic words, and
isolating/agglutinating primarily refers to syntax, not phonology (or that's my
understanding).

It's been said that an extremely agglutinating language is indistinguishible
from an extremely isolating one, tho.


One tangentially interesting thing is that while written English and German tend
to be brimful with contractions, at least the later even in highly formal
registers, written Swedish tends to have very few except in the most informal
writings (chat messages and the like). A sentence like _Jag åkte inte till honom
igår_ would in rapid speech come out something like [jA 'OktEntE ten I'go:r`],
but even in chat-speak I'd wouldn't contract anything in the written form
beyond |till honom|>|till'n|.

                                                 Andreas

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