Re: USAGE: Classification questions
| From: | John Cowan <cowan@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, August 7, 2003, 3:56 |
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Christopher Wright scripsit:
> I'd say that the fundamental order is SVO, with SOV being a relic of Latin.
Not so much a relic of Latin, as the fact that object pronouns have been
made into proclitics. In French, they have arguably become prefixes,
so that French now has free word order.
> I'm not familiar with Klingon, but many of the uninitiated make no
> distinction between agglutinating and inflecting. Looking at a Klingon
> grammar sketch (one that seems unsure of itself), it has a few
> agglutinating features such as compounding verb with indirect object
> pronoun.
Klingon is emphatically agglutinating: it has been described as
"an exuberant Amerind-style template machine". But the subject-object
agreement marker is a single marker, not two separate ones. This
closely resembles the situation in Hungarian, IIRC.
--
John Cowan jcowan@reutershealth.com www.reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand
on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.
Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land,
to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.
--Thomas Henry Huxley