Re: FYI re: Greenberg's Universals

In a message dated 10/3/00 10:36:17 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
yl112@CORNELL.EDU writes:

> <puzzled look>  Isn't Japanese an agglutinating isolate (or next best
>  thing), like Korean, rather than an isolating language?  In Korean the
>  influence of Chinese seems mainly to be in the writing and in loan words,
>  *not* the grammar.  Japanese grammar makes sense to me, but I look at
>  interlinears of Mandarin and find them utterly confusing (from a
>  conversational-knowledge-of-Korean standpoint).
I can assure you that Japanese is not a fully isolating language. There are
those particles, but you can lump them in with the word before them if you
choose for the most part, and the verbs and adjectives *definately* aren't
isolating. (example of adjectives: atatakai- is warm. atatakatta- was warm.)
Some of the problem may be that Japanese is written without spaces except in
romanization (and sometimes not very many then either!), so that it's hard to
tell where words break. Nor, unlike Mandarin, is Japanese a tone language,
although the stresses of words involve pitch rather than volume.