Re: Standard Average European (was: case system)

Hallo!

On Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:44:11 -0400, Eldin Raigmore wrote:

> "Standard Average European" is the name of a sprachbund or linguistic area.
> In linguistics the usual meaning of that phrase, when it has a formal
> meaning,
> is that sprachbund.
>
> The SAE sprachbund is "_genetically_" diverse; that is, it contains members
> of
> several linguistic families.
Most of the SAE languages are Indo-European, but not all Indo-European
languages are SAE, and Hungarian is considered an SAE language by Martin
Haspelmath, although a marginal one.

> It runs through both the northern and southern borders of the continent of
> Europe.  However, the western "border" of the sprachbund is somewhat east
> of the western border of Europe, and the eastern "border" of the sprachbund
> is
> somewhat west of the eastern border of the continent. ("Border" is in quotes
> because the boundary is fuzzy, and has enclaves and exclaves.)
The boundary is indeed very fuzzy.  Basque is clearly outside SAE,
the Insular Celtic language are a bit closer but still not really
SAE.  The Balto-Slavic languages, Albanian, Greek and Hungarian
form an extensive "grey area" in eastern Europe.

> If I remember correctly, English and Maltese are "marginal members" of the
> SAE
> sprachbund.  Also, if I remember correctly, Eastern Celtic languages are in
> the
> SAE but Western Celtic languages aren't.
I think both branches of Insular Celtic are different enough from the
SAE profile to warrant their exclusion.

> Does anyone have better details about what's in and what isn't in the SAE
> linguistic area?
At the core of the sprachbund are most of the Germanic and Romance
languages, showing most of the SAE features (see below), with Baltic,
Slavic, Albanian, Greek and Hungarian being more peripheral members
which show only some of the features and others not.

> And, does anyone have any information on what the areal features of these
> languages are?
As usual, Wikipedia is your friend:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European

Besides the 12 features listed therein, there are several other
features common to the SAE language, but less characteristic
because they are frequently found elsewhere, such as SVO order,
accusative alignment, moderately synthetic predominantly suffixing
morphology, absence of a phonemic velar/uvular opposition and
absence of non-pulmonic consonants.

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