Re: FYI re: Greenberg's Universals

On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, Marcus Smith wrote:

> 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.
<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).

YHL