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What areal features are shared among the Almean languages?

Ngo wrote:What areal features are shared among the Almean languages?

Among all of them, none. But there are smaller regions showing areal features. The Cadhinorian languages, Kebreni, and Flaidish are all SVO, for instance; Ismain, Kebreni, and eastern dialects of Verdurian share some sound changes (e.g. intervocalic voicing); there are other grammatical similarities in this area, though not necessarily found in all languages.

Xurno forms another area, tending to head-last order; there are also grammatical features shared with Wede:i, Cuolese, the Chia-Sha languages, etc.

Naviu and the Western languages are VSO and share some other features.

What's an areal feature?

Eddy the Great wrote:What's an areal feature?

Linguistic features common to an area, irrespective of language family relationships. In other words, nearby languages don't just borrow vocabulary, but grammatical features. The classic example is the Balkan languages; another is Southeast Asia. Arguably French and English (at least) share a number of areal features.

And Finnish <-> Germanic languages, some verb constructions in Finnish (with auxiliaries) are originally from German and Swedish, and the syntax has also been strongly affected (word order, idiomatic expressions).

zompist wrote:

Eddy the Great wrote:What's an areal feature?

Linguistic features common to an area, irrespective of language family relationships. In other words, nearby languages don't just borrow vocabulary, but grammatical features. The classic example is the Balkan languages; another is Southeast Asia. Arguably French and English (at least) share a number of areal features.

So like Akkadian borrowing verb-final word order from Sumerian? Would the borowing of scripts count or is an areal feature just grammar?

Dazi wrote: So like Akkadian borrowing verb-final word order from Sumerian? Would the borowing of scripts count or is an areal feature just grammar?

I think that they do not. Is not the world divided into just a handful a very large areal groups? I think that each continent and New Guinea show there own areal features and that Eurasian is divided into several very large groups.

Dazi wrote:Would the borowing of scripts count or is an areal feature just grammar?

Ironically, they might not count just because they're such good examples. What I mean is, it's very obvious that scripts are borrowed within regions, without regard to language family. Teasing out borrowed grammatical features is more challenging.