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Re: Rating Languages

From:Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...>
Date:Friday, September 28, 2001, 17:59
On Fri, 28 Sep 2001 12:58:50 -0400, Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:

>Basilius wrote: >>Hear, hear! Somali is indeed no.1 in my list, too. >>Plus tones. Plus semitoid morphology. With I forget how many articles, >>partly conveying tense (in nouns!) And on the top of all that, the most >>alien syntax I've ever dealt with. > >I picked up a Somali dictionary on sale, some years back, and it looked >daunting indeed. Someone cited a Somali web-page in this thread; I recall >the phonology being MUCH more complex than that webpage indicates.
Sure. Doesn't even mention tones, while a lot of morphological categories depend on them.
>>No.2 in my list is Tagalog. Mainly 'cause I don't know if it's still >>nominative-accusative, and I don't understand how its four passives >>interact with word order, and no grammar I've seen cared to describe >>the exact rules for secondary stress/vowel length/vowel deletion... > >My knowledge of Tagalog comes mainly from reading the dictionary, and >occasional articles, but: Nom-Acc doesn't seem to be a consideration. >Word order may not be all that important either, since the verb form and
the
>various nominal markers usually indicate what's what. For ex: > >"Mary sliced the chicken with a knife in the kitchen" As you probably >know, you can focus (more or less: subjectivize) on any of _Mary, chicken, >knife, kitchen_ (and I think there may be a verb/action focus too-- at
least
>there is in some related langs.) In each case, the verb has a special >prefix/suffix, and the corresponding focussed noun has a distinctive marker >and IIRC comes right after the verb. (Tag. is generally verb-first.) Nouns >not in focus may or may not have special markers, and word order may not >matter if context is clear.
My point wasn't that there may seem to be any ambiguity. Rather, too much choice. You can raise nearly anything to subject position; you can vary the order of nominal actants; you can invert parts of the sentence using an inversion marker (_ay_, IIRC); and still you can invert the position of the components in a noun phrase... For purposes of subjectivization/topicalization/focussing, most langs are happy with one or two of the above options... How on earth is all that *USED*?
>Stress, I know, is difficult. It can be contrastive for CVCV and CVCVC >forms; predictable (ultima) for CVCCV(C). Some suffixes shift stress, >others don't; some prefixes and reduplications require a secondary stress >(equiv. to vowel lengthening), and _I think_ there are rules.;-)
My impression, too ;)
>The big >problem is that it isn't indicated in writing.
Nor in grammars I've had access to (not consequentialy, at any rate) ...
>Vowel deletion IIRC isn't >all that common and probably has to do with historical factors, so you just >have to memorize.
To memorize something, one needs it listed, right? ;)
>Bloomfield, way back in 1917, did a very exhaustive and well known study. >There's also Paul Schachter and Fe Otanes, _Tagalog Reference Grammar_, >Univ. of Calif. Press, 1972.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen either... Basilius