zompist bboard

Came across this laundry list of grammatical oddities in the course of some Googling. I think it's especially appropriate in light of the recent discussion of linguistic "universals". (The author marks all rarities which violate published universals with bright pink dots.)

http://wwwlot.let.uu.nl/zs2001/papersPl ... teiten.pdf

Comment on bilabials:

Proto Iroquoian, and most of the Iroquois daughters prior to European contact, had no bilabials whatsoever. E.g., classical-traditional Mohawk has none; but it has gained limted /p/s and /m/s from the few French and English loanwords in its lexicon. To this day, /p/ and /m/ are considered only periphereal phonemes of Mohawk, not usually even listed with the rest of the canon.

That is extremely interesting. I love the fact that many of their universal-violating examples come from languages as well known as English and German... oh, and this....

zero exponence for plural, non-zero for singular (not singulative!) as well as dual

...which I guess answers the question I asked a while back about whether this occurred in any natlangs.

One thing, though. Under what interpretation does German have /kx/?

Ahribar wrote:One thing, though. Under what interpretation does German have /kx/?

It said 'dialectical'; I don't think Standard German has that.

/kx/ is found in Bavaria and probably a few other places. It arose at the same time /pp\/* and /ts/ did, but didn't catch on in the North.

* which is itself also realized as /p_df/ and maybe /pf/.

pharazon wrote:

Ahribar wrote:One thing, though. Under what interpretation does German have /kx/?

It said 'dialectical'; I don't think Standard German has that.

It occurs in--in fact, it's a defining characteristic of--Südalemannisch or "South Alemannic". The designation includes a large chunk of Schwyzer-Tüütsch (in Höchstalemannisch or "Highest Alemannic" spoken south of Bern, it becomes /x/) and small areas in the extreme south of Baden west of the Bodensee, in southwest Germany. I used to live in Freiburg mere kilometers north of the Kind/Chind isogloss.

It's also found in Südtirolisch, but I know far less about isoglosses in Bairisch.

Ooh, this is cool.... A wealth of new ideas!

?no number inflection at all on any personal pronouns

How does that actually work?

interrogative pro verbs
(schematically, ?The dog WHATed the boy?? ? ?It bit him?,
?The dog HOWed? ? ?It howled like this?)

Sweet! Didn't we talk about pro-verbs awhile ago?

Maknas wrote:Ooh, this is cool.... A wealth of new ideas! :wink:

?no number inflection at all on any personal pronouns

How does that actually work?

You speak English, which lacks number inflection in one of it's most frequently-used personal pronouns, and you can't imagine?

I would suppose that speakers would supply appositional noun phrases when clarification became important. "You, the whole family, will go on ahead while I, me and my wife, will join you there tomorrow." What language(s) does he say has/have this feature?

linguoboy wrote: What language(s) does he say has/have this feature?

Mura Pirah? (isolate, Macro-Chibchan); Kawi (Old Javanese, Malayo-Polynesian, Austronesian)

linguoboy wrote:

Maknas wrote:Ooh, this is cool.... A wealth of new ideas!

?no number inflection at all on any personal pronouns

How does that actually work?

You speak English, which lacks number inflection in one of it's most frequently-used personal pronouns, and you can't imagine?

I would suppose that speakers would supply appositional noun phrases when clarification became important. "You, the whole family, will go on ahead while I, me and my wife, will join you there tomorrow." What language(s) does he say has/have this feature?

*slaps head*

For some reason I misread that as having no inflection for person

That gives me an idea... How would a language with no inflection for person work... Could it?

linguoboy wrote:You speak English, which lacks number inflection in one of it's most frequently-used personal pronouns, and you can't imagine?

Ja ne znaju kak govorit' pa-anglijskij jazyk

If you're prepared to just use nouns and forget about pronouns, you could get along without inflection for person. But it wouldn't take long for people to invent pronouns out of words such as "speaker", "listener", etc. unless there was some barrier in their way in preventing them from doing that.

"object before subject in basic word order" occurs only in...three apples?

I get the same. However, is there a language geek on the board who doesn't know that the language in question must be Hixkaryana? The reference is to Derbyshire and Pullum, who together edit the Handbook of Amazonian languages. Derbyshire has written extensively on Hixkaryana.

linguoboy wrote:I get the same. However, is there a language geek on the board who doesn't know that the language in question must be Hixkaryana? The reference is to Derbyshire and Pullum, who together edit the Handbook of Amazonian languages. Derbyshire has written extensively on Hixkaryana.

A real language geek, however, can supply three languages that exemplify OVS, OSV, and VOS.

http://www.zompist.com/kitgram.html#sentorder

I liked the page, not least for its skewering of supposed universals. You'd think that people would learn...

Freaky - on page 17 it mentions some odd plurals in Hawaiian and Samoan which I mentioned (as occurring in Māori) just last night in a post in Sonib's C&C thread Long & short sounds with phonemic value. So this violated universal occurs in most of the branches of Polynesian - if it occurs in Tongan or Niuean as well (the other major sub-branch) then its ALL Polynesian.

Edit:
after a quick google search, Tongan has at least one of these plurals - motu'a, pl. maatu'a 'parent'.
(In Māori it's matua, pl. maatua), also meaning 'parent'.

eehaa!

What about the plural of wahine that is similar?

Turtlehead wrote:What about the plural of wahine that is similar?

Probably mentioned that in my original post in C&C in a thread that has probably been deleted by now. Was referring to nouns which have long vowels in the plural in Polynesian - they are smallish group of 'people' words. My point was that if these plurals occur in Māori (or any East Polynesian language and/or Samoan) AND Tongan they must also be reconstructed for Proto-Polynesian given the positions of those languages in the generally accepted subgroupings of Polynesian.

How many words are as irregular as tamaiti and tamariki?

linguoboy wrote:I get the same. However, is there a language geek on the board who doesn't know that the language in question must be Hixkaryana? The reference is to Derbyshire and Pullum, who together edit the Handbook of Amazonian languages. Derbyshire has written extensively on Hixkaryana.

I have four examples on my grammar page http://crg4.com/linguistics/grammar.html: Guarijio, Hixkaryana, Apurinã, and Xavante. Wikipedia also lists Jamamadi, Kayabí and Nadëb as OSV and Tapirapé as "to some extent" OVS.

linguoboy wrote:Came across this laundry list of grammatical oddities in the course of some Googling. I think it's especially appropriate in light of the recent discussion of linguistic "universals". (The author marks all rarities which violate published universals with bright pink dots.)

http://wwwlot.let.uu.nl/zs2001/papersPl ... teiten.pdf

I think
http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/rara/nav/search.php
is now its official home.

Also, there's a "Universals Archive" at a closely related site:
http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/nav/search.php