Re: ? how would you classify this language ?

On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 18:35:48 +0200, Rodlox <Rodlox@...> wrote:
>  Please bear with me for a moment, as your reply to this will greatly expand
> my understanding of language groups & language evolution...
>
>  Assume that, tomorrow or the next day, you either encounter or create a
> (con)language which has the following features:
> * Indo-European word order.
> * Semitic grammatical rules.
> * Sino-Altaic phenomes.
>
>  into which group would you classify it, however tenatively?
Mainstreamly, you wouldn't.
For an example, you have Japanese, which has been observed to have, roughly:
	* Altaic grammatical rules
	* Austronesian phonology
[I'm not sure a compelling argument for the familial relationship of one language
to another can be made by word order.]

As mentioned elsewhere, it's the roots of a language that generally are the best
indicator of its genetic relationship. In the case of Japanese, there isn't
much widely-accepted evidence for its basic roots belonging to any family, so
mainstreamly it is unclassified. (I lean towards the Altaic hypothesis.)

Sometimes the situation is more complicated still, as in the case of pidgins and creoles
(which Japanese has also occasionally been accused of being).

> also, which of those (rules/phenomes/order/other) is most prone to change
> through time?  which is least prone to change?
Everything changes, I'm not sure at what rate though. As far as lexical items go, I
understand that verbal morphology is the least likely to be borrowed; so if you
have verbal morphology, it's most likely to be original to the language--or at
the very least, nativized before grammaticalization.


	*Muke!
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