Re: FYI re: Greenberg's Universals

H. S. Teoh wrote:

>On Tue, Oct 03, 2000 at 05:51:57PM -0400, Jonathan 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)
>
>Hmm. No Mandarin?? How did he miss it, it being such a prominent (and
>prominently isolating) language in the Orient? And no English either? Why?
The lack of Mandarin is rather odd, but perhaps he left it out due to the
close association Japanese to Chinese languages.  It is important in a
distributional study not to clump your languages in a particular area
(something he did a good job of BTW).  If he already had a good
representation of isolating languages, then it may be reasonable to drop
Mandarin off in favor of Japanese.

As for English, it was probably a good idea not to include it.  First of
all, he already has a Germanic language: Norwegian.  He certainly would not
want to have two Germanic languages on his list.  Since he also apparently
wanted a Celtic language, it would be best to use something other than
English, since all the Celtic languages have been influenced to some degree
by English.  He would want to rule out any skewing that came from a
similarities between contact languages.  That might be a reason to avoid
German too, since he used Italian.



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