Re: FYI re: Greenberg's Universals

At 6:09 pm -0700 3/10/00, Marcus Smith wrote:
[....]
>
>The lack of Mandarin is rather odd, but perhaps he left it out due to the
>close association Japanese to Chinese languages.
Eh?  The two languages are not AFAIK remotely connected.  They have *very*
different grammatical structures, and that's what Greenberg's Universals
are about.

The only connexions between the two languages that I am aware of are: (a)
Japanese script was developed from Chinese script; and (b) Japanese has
borrowed a lot of vocabulary items from Chinese.

If we take any notice of (a), then Greenberg should've taken, say, Hebrew
or Arabic, and ignored all the languages now written a script derived from
the old Semitic script, i.e. all languages written in Greek, Cyrillic or
Roman alphabets!

If take connexion (b), then he might as well have ignored all European
languages except Greek (since Latin borrowed from Greek)!

If we ignore both (a) and (b), then I don't understand what Marcus is saying.

[....]
>(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.
It's arguable, as you will see from the Conlang archives (especially from
the Mark Line era) whether modern Mandarin is an "isolating" language or
not.  What surely is not controversial is that Japanese certainly is 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.
Er?  In what way has Breton been influenced by English??
----------------------------------------------------------------------

At 8:40 pm -0700 3/10/00, LeoMoser(Acadon@Acadon.com) wrote:
>From: "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>
[...]
>Because he already had a Sino-Tibetan language in
>the form of Burmese.
But, er, isn't that a bit like saying because he included, say, Hindi, then
he could ignore all other Indo-European languages?

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Have I missed something in my observations above, or am I right to be
rather puzzled?

Ray,
genuinely wanting enlightenment.



=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
=========================================