Re: Greenberg's universals for SVO languages & Caos Pidgin ruff-sketch

On Fri, Sep 08, 2000 at 07:31:44PM -0400, Jonathan Chang wrote:
[snip]
>     OBConLang-ish: Bahasa Indonesia - a former pidgin based on Malay - seems
> to fit the Greenberg universals for a SVO language.
Malay (Bahasa Melayu) is an SVO language too. In fact, AFAIK, the two are
grammatically 90% identical, and 80% of the vocabulary is identical.
Interestingly, now that you mention it, it's very true that possessives
are noun-genitive. Nouns aren't really inflected for the genitive, but
it's understood that way, eg.:
        keretanya = his/her car (kereta, car, + 3rd person suffix -nya)
        kereta Abu = Abu's car.

And yes, prepositions are used:
        dia dari kampung - he/she(dia) is[0] from(dari) the village(kampung)
and modifiers follow nouns:
        kereta baik - good(baik) car(kereta)
        rumah putih - white(putih) house(rumah)

Not so sure about question particles tho... but they *do* lean towards the
front of the sentence:
        ke mana dia pergi? - where did he go, literally, "to where he goes?"
However, this trend exists mainly in formal written language; in spoken
Malay, the above question tends to become:
        dia pigi mana? - he goes where? (pigi = colloquial slang for "pergi")

Of course, we might be witnessing a change in the spoken language which
hasn't quite carried over into the written forms yet (which is presumably
based on the more traditional version of the language). In fact, when I
was in school in Malaysia, the teachers emphasized the difference between
"bahasa pasar" (marketplace talk) and "bahasa Melayu" (the "official",
formal version of Malay). So, "ke mana dia pergi" would be the "correct"
form, whereas "dia pigi mana?" is bahasa pasar. Obviously, "bahasa pasar"
is highly discouraged, but that just provokes the students to speak it all
the more. :-)

>     It was once said that Malay is/was the "Italian of the Orient" (Paul
> Carus, "Esperanto, Ilo, and Malay," _Monist_ , Chicago, XIX, #3, July 1909...
> Carus advocated Malay as a world language back in 1909!!!
> Amazing...)
[snip]

Eeek! *shuddering in recollections of horror of being forced to learn a
language that isn't really useful outside of Malaysia/Indonesia today*


T