Re: FYI re: Greenberg's Universals

On Wed, 4 Oct 2000 Togonakamane@AOL.COM wrote:

> 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.
Hmm.  By  "isolate" I meant that Japanese hasn't definitively (to my
knowledge) been put in a language family; and it did seem to me that if
Japanese functions like Korean then it couldn't be very isolating at all.

Korean also seems to be pitch-accented, which I hadn't even noticed until
a friend pointed out that my voice-pitch was going up and down as I read
a letter from my mom, and when I tried varying the pitch levels on
syllables for trial words they sounded wrong.  :-p

YHL