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Is analyticity normal? | ||
Tags: Linguistics | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4029 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 9 of 11 18 August 2014 at 7:12pm | IP Logged | ||
I just want to confirm, did you read all of the paper I linked? Could you offer some opinions on what McWhorter directly claimed? Old Chinese and Hmong fit the criteria for pure analyticity, heck, Old Chinese pronouns didn't have plurality either. In your humble opinion, did they just end up like that because they could? Take into account the grammar processes too of Hmong and Old Chinese, wh-in-situ, no word order difficulties (only SVO, OSV is BARELY tolerated in Hmong), lack of mandatory grammatical markings, no morphophonemic processes, no derivational methods aside from reduplication, this is not only analyticity but a grammar that has much in common with a creole. Slight off topic: I may be mistaken but you seem to imply that infective languages are inherently more irregular for being so but that is not the case, hittite is fusional but extremely simple, simpler than English despite having more inflection. The irregularity and redundancy of features of modern IE languages and those influenced by them is exceptional and not a mere matter of lazy sound changes. Sound changes are like a 1/6th of it. Edited by Stolan on 18 August 2014 at 7:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4665 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 10 of 11 18 August 2014 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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Futurity in Portuguese:
''I will love'' Latin: amabo vulgar Latin: amare habeo early Portuguese: amar hei Portuguese: amarei poetic Portuguese: hei de amar colloquial Portuguese: vou amar So, the tendency is not the one toward definitive analytic structure, but the one of ''what goes around comes around'' analytical -> synthetic -> analytical -> synthetic -> analytical -> ... Edited by Medulin on 18 August 2014 at 10:34pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 11 19 August 2014 at 1:42am | IP Logged | ||
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I read the article through, but didn't study it assiduously for days (and I can't open it at the machine I'm using right now - even after removing the extra space).
The main point seemed to be that only creolization could result in a 100% analytic language freed of all the usual complications of naturally grown languages, and the rest of the text was dominated by a discussion of possible candidates for this process, none of which are known to me. In this context I found it relevant to point out that it would be hard to achieve total analyticity because most languages contain elements on different stages of the circle mentioned by Medulin - and total analyticity would presuppose that all these tendencies in a language somehow became synchronized. Like McWhorter I find it likely that the occurence of total analyticity takes something like a clash between languages, resulting in the creation of a new simplified language mostly spoken by adults as a secondary language. Whether this actually happened anywhere is beyond my horizon. Edited by Iversen on 19 August 2014 at 1:54am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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