Re: Head-marking languages and adpositions?

Amanda Babcock sikyal:

> Hey, now there's a good idea: a list of the minimal set of languages from
> among the world's language families that could exemplify all the different
> extremes.  The smallest sample set that would encompass:
>
>         - a good model [isolating | agglutinating | polysynthetic] language
>         - a good model [nominative-accusative | ergative | active | trigger]
>           language
>         - a good model [head-initial | head-final] language
>         - a good model [dependent-marking | head-marking] language
I'll give this a shot. I nominate:

Turkish as agglutinating, nom-acc, dependent-marking
Mohawk (or related langs) as polysynthetic, active
Tagalog as trigger, head-initial, head-marking

I'm pretty sure that there are some Indic langs that can qualify as both
isolating and ergative, which then takes care of it.

Note that since you have 4 options in one category, you can't do this
with less than 4 languages.

Apologies for any errors in the above.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/

"What are you, a dentist? Or a hippie?
Or some kind of hippie dentist?"
--Strong Bad (of Homestar Runner)

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