Re: Future English
From: | Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...> |
Date: | Sunday, December 29, 2002, 23:39 |
Quoting Amanda Babcock <langs@...>:
> Didn't this thread actually come from the artificiallanguages2 list?
>
> On Sun, Dec 29, 2002 at 06:01:58PM -0500, Nokta Kanto wrote:
>
> > Could be, although languages don't seem prone to conjugating at the
> > beginning of words.
>
> That merely depends on the language's own rules of order. Mohawk puts
> tense and agreement as prefixes.
Right. The real generalization, that made by Greenberg, is that
SOV languages tend strongly to be suffixing, and SVO languages
tend to be prefixing. That is, languages tend to grammaticalize
morphemes on the opposite side of the verb from the projection
of nominal arguments.
=========================================================================
Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
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Chicago, IL 60637