Re: FYI re: Greenberg's Universals

Jonathon Chang wrote:
>     FYI: Greenberg's 1966 study surveyed only 30 languages:
>Basque, Serbian, Welsh, Norwegian, Modern Greek, Italian, Finnish (European);
>Yoruba, Nubian, Swahili, Fulani, Masai, Songhai, Berber (African);
>Turkish, Hebrew, Burushaski, Hindi, Kannada, Japanese, Thai, Burmese, Malay
>(Asian);
>Maori, Loritja (Oceanic);
>Maya, Zapotec, Quechua, Chibcha, Guarani (American Indian)
That's a horrible distribution!  The European segment isn't bad, but the
rest -- it left out huge portions of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.  And
saying "Zapotec" is like saying "Germanic" -- there are currently at least
30 languages all called Zapotec, they can be very different.  (For example,
it doesn't seem like a single one of them has an identical pronoun system
-- lots of cognates, but each language is very idiosyncractic and a
reliable reconstruction has not been possible so far.)

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Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
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