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Re: Never violate a universal unless it seems like a good idea at the time

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Friday, September 5, 2003, 1:17
On Thu, 4 Sep 2003 10:11:52 +0100, Peter Bleackley
<Peter.Bleackley@...> wrote:

>Reading Greenberg's list of universals > >http://angli02.kgw.tu-berlin.de/Korean/Artikel02/Appendix3.html > >I've discovered that Khangaþyagon violates universals 2,3,6,10,12, and >possibly 23 although I'm not sure of his terminology. This is mainly >because Khangaþyagon is based on what seemed plausible to me without >reading the list. > >I'd be interested to know how many universals other people's conlangs >violate, and whether this came about naively or deliberately.
"Zircon" (still unnamed conlang made by Zireen) and Vizaki (one of the new Zireen languages) are predominantly VOS. I got the idea after someone on the list suggested looking at Tzotzil (http://www.zapata.org/Tzotzil/), which is VOS and ergative. At the time I was working on Lindiga, which is either VSO or VOS based on other considerations (topic relevance and/or definiteness). Lindiga doesn't allow SVO unless you count clefts, so it might violate universal 6, although whether it has dominant VSO order is debatable.