Re: What's a good isolating language to look at

On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 07:52 +0000, R A Brown wrote:
> João Ricardo de Mendonça wrote:
> > On 12/6/05, *Gary Shannon* <fiziwig@yahoo.com
> > <mailto:fiziwig@...>> wrote:
> >
> >     I would really like to learn more about how a real
> >     live isolating language works.
> [snip]
>
> > The usual examples of isolating languages are Mandarim and Vietnamese. I
> > guess Mandarim should be the easiest to find references for in the West.
>
> Yes, but Mandarin does have grammatical affixes; it is not purely
> isolating. In fact it has been argued on this on this list (more than
> once IIRC) that English is more isolating than modern Mandarin.
Could you perhaps direct me to one of these posts? With Google not
searching the archives anymore, and the only results the listserv's own
engine for "english mandarin isolating" being a post almost identical to
this one (you forgot to mention Thai! ;) and a couple of responses to
it, I can't find much...

--
Tristan.

> But by all accounts, Vietnamese is (almost) 100% isolating. The trouble
> is that few natlangs sit nice and neatly in these language types thought
> up by 19th century linguists.