Re: Never violate a universal unless it seems like a good idea at the time
| From: | Estel Telcontar <estel_telcontar@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, September 5, 2003, 2:29 |
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--- Peter Bleackley wrote: > Reading Greenberg's list of universals
> I'd be interested to know how many universals other people's conlangs
> violate, and whether this came about naively or deliberately.
As far as I can tell, Ikanirae Seru only violates universal 9:
"Universal 9. With well more than chance frequency, when question
particles or affixes are specified in position by reference to the
sentence as a whole, if initial, such elements are found in
prepositional languages, and, if final, in postpositional. "
Was my violation of the universal deliberate? Well, at age 10 or 11, I
thought I was being very innovative by inventing a question particle,
or "spoken question mark". So I did set out to do something different.
But as I had no idea that there were actually real languages that had
question markers, it definitely wasn't Universal 9 that I set out to
defy. I likely didn't even know there were languages with
postpositions.
It is only a "well more than chance frequency" universal.
Estel
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