Re: Prefixes and typology

On 5/28/05, Doug Dee <AmateurLinguist@...> wrote:
> 
> In a message dated 5/27/2005 5:43:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> zaintoum@GMAIL.COM writes:
> 
> >one thing that I've noticed
> >in typology is that in all the VSO or head initial languages that I've
> >seen, or that I think I've seen, all of them have some grammatical
> >alterations that occur in the first part of the word, like they use
> >more prefixes or lenition or similar. I wanted my current language to
> >be fairly typical of Head Initial ones, but I'm wondering if a
> >language that is almost exclusively prefix-favoring would be possible
> >or typical.
> 
> According to what I've read on the subject, VSO languages have more 
> prefixing
> than SOV languages do, but still tend to have suffixes as well. While 
> there
> are a lot of languages that are (almost) exclusively suffixing, hardly any 
> are
> (almost) exclusively prefixing.


:nods: I was going to say pretty much the same thing. There's nothing 
typologically impossible about an exclusively prefixing language, but 
they're rare. Also, I can't think of any language that's as seriously 
prefix-stringing as the seriously suffix-stringing languages are. 

Why's this? Not sure, but my intuition is that affixes-gone-wild, at least 
on nominals, is more a property of dependent-marking languages than 
head-marking ones, and verb-initial languages tend towards the head-marking 
side of things.

One feature of verb-initial languages that isn't well-known is that, 
according to some studies by Freeze and Georgopoulos, no verb-initial 
languages have the word "have". Their studies are admittedly genetically and 
areally biased, focusing on Mayan and Austronesian, but their predictions 
seem to hold in general. Of the top of my head, Breton has a "have" -- at 
least, there's a Breton word glossed as "have" -- but I don't really know 
any Breton so I don't know whether it's a counterexample.

Some examples at random:

Irish:
Tha car agam.
"There's a car at me." (I have a car.)

Welsh:
Mae cath gyda fi.
"There's a cat with me." (I have a cat.)

Tzeltal:
'Ay ta jts'i'e.
"There's the my-dog." (I have a dog.)

Itzaj:
Yaan inwixim.
"There's my-corn." (I have corn.)

Hmm, that's the extent of what I can do without dictionaries. Let's see what 
Freeze has for us:

Yucatec:
Yaan huntul ciimin ti' inpaapa.
"There's one horse at my-father." (My father has one horse.)

Palauan
Ng-ngar gnii a berruk.
Exists it raft-my. ("I have a raft.")

Anyway, there's another bit of verb-initial minutae to make your language 
more typologically realistic.

Welcome to the list!
-- 
Patrick Littell
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Voice Mail: ext 744
Spring 05 Office Hours: M 3:00-6:00

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