Re: FYI re: Greenberg's Universals

In a message dated 2000:10:03 5:35:06 PM:

>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)
, smithma@UCLA.EDU writes:

>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.)
    That is my feeling too. For instance, Austronesian languages are hardly
represented well and neither are pidgins and creoles ...
    So much for Greenberg's Universals... ::makes look of vague annoyance::

    czHANg