Re: Rating Languages

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