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Isolating non-tonal languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5448 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes  Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 1 of 4 29 March 2010 at 12:09am | IP Logged |
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What are some languages that are isolating and do not use tones that come to your mind? Just trying to figure out which languages would be the easiest to English speakers in terms of grammar. Edited by chucknorrisman on 29 March 2010 at 12:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 4 29 March 2010 at 2:31am | IP Logged |
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Indonesian and Cambodian are isolating but neither is tonal (however a few dialects of Cambodian ARE tonal).
See this site for a list of 165 languages organized by "Fusion of Selected Inflectional Formatives" (click on "show map" for a map of these languages). There're categories for "Exclusively isolating", "Tonal/isolating", and "Isolating/concentative". http://wals.info/feature/20 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5567 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 3 of 4 29 March 2010 at 3:03am | IP Logged |
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Actually, Indonesian isn't really an isolating language. Its grammar is certainly very analytic, but the language does have a number of affixes. I believe many of the other Austronesian languages are isolating though, such as Hawaiian. Edited by Levi on 29 March 2010 at 3:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6140 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 4 of 4 29 March 2010 at 1:27pm | IP Logged |
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In one of The Teaching Company's courses (I think it was The Story of Human Language)
the professor says that there are very few such languages and to prove his point his uses Chrau as an example - it's on the bottom line of the link. However I can see any reason why Khmer shouldn't be on the list as its standard form isn't tonal and has become isolating. Interestingly the other Munda languages which are still spoken in India are quite morphologically complex; it seems Khmer has been influenced by the surrounding isolating languages. Also I agree with Levi that the Pacific languages seem to meet both criteria. Two languages which also spring to mind are Tetum-Dili (official language of East Timor) and Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea). They both have the additional advantage of using a lot of European vocab (Portuguese and English respectively). There are quite good resources for both but finding a native speaker or, perhaps more damagingly, any web presence for these two is quite difficult. Of course, you could argue that an isolating non-tonal language would be easiest for a speaker of any language rather than just English-natives. IMHO, the language where you can most "get away" with translating word-for-word from English is probably Spanish (especially for the written language). Edited by Fat-tony on 29 March 2010 at 1:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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