zompist bboard

I'm working on an extremely isolating language, and I'm trying to find models outside of Chinese and its sphere of influence--there don't seem to be many. I looked into some of the New World languages that WALS lists as "minimally affixing"--Osage, Nisga'a, and Mixtec--but only Mixtec had much grammatical information and it looked more agglutinating (albeit with a relatively low morpheme-per-word ratio). (Frankly I have a hard time believing either Osage or Nisga'a are even vaguely isolating considering their locations and close relatives, but since I can't find any information to say otherwise...) Anyway, could someone point me to any sort of grammatical sketch of an isolating language outside of the Sinosphere or Southeast Asia? Or even one in the Sinosphere or Southeast Asia that looks nothing like Mandarin. I'm simply trying to get a broader perspective.

Zaarin wrote:Or even one in the Sinosphere or Southeast Asia that looks nothing like Mandarin. I'm simply trying to get a broader perspective.

Classical Chinese is pretty distinct from Mandarin as it's commonly spoken, in my opinion, it being an extremely analytic language, and having all sorts of odd things from the point of view of modern colloquial Mandarin (heavy use of short sentences in parataxis leading to ambiguous subordinate clause syntax, heavy use of zero-derivation (forming causatives and nominalizations and whatnot with little syntax), no resultative affixes, a lack of number distinction in personal pronouns, ambiguous interrogative and indefinite pronouns/adverbs, greater use of pronoun-dropping for both subjects and objects than Mandarin...). The main problem is that all the good reference grammars are in Mandarin: Pulleyblank's Outline does cover a large part of the ground, but it doesn't compare with He & Yang's magnum opus. You might learn more from working your way through textbooks, looking at how the language works in context too, but that's slower as it involves learning some of the language.

Zaarin wrote:I looked into some of the New World languages that WALS lists as "minimally affixing"--Osage, Nisga'a, and Mixtec--but only Mixtec had much grammatical information and it looked more agglutinating (albeit with a relatively low morpheme-per-word ratio). (Frankly I have a hard time believing either Osage or Nisga'a are even vaguely isolating considering their locations and close relatives, but since I can't find any information to say otherwise...)

Yeah, that's kind of weird. I suppose it's valid if you look only at the inflection of NPs, since the only common affixes there seem to be the possessive ones and those may be fossilised to kinship terms. (At least Quintero doesn't provide any information on applying them to any other nouns.) But the verbs are polypersonal, carrying in addition to personal affixes reciprocal, suus, and locative inflections, as well as suffixed negation and evidential markers.

What the hell, here's an example:

waðáhkištǫpapi hkǫbra
wa-á-Ya-hkik-Ya-tǫpe-api Wa-kǫ-Wa-da
P1P-LOC-A2S-REFL-A2S-look-PL A1S-PREV-A1S-want
"I want you to look down upon us."

As for isolating languages of the Americas, you might want to look at Mobilian Jargon. Drechsel's your man. Unfortunately, it's moribund if not extinct altogether and the surviving corpus isn't large, but there's still enough to maybe give you some ideas. There's some debate (which Drechsel gets into) on whether it predates European contact or not. Either way, it derives primarily from languages which are extensively agglutinative (i.e. Muskogean), which is interesting in its own right.

@Serafin: That sort of terseness and potential ambiguity sounds very much like what I'm going for, so I'll look into that.

linguoboy wrote:As for isolating languages of the Americas, you might want to look at Mobilian Jargon. Drechsel's your man. Unfortunately, it's moribund if not extinct altogether and the surviving corpus isn't large, but there's still enough to maybe give you some ideas. There's some debate (which Drechsel gets into) on whether it predates European contact or not. Either way, it derives primarily from languages which are extensively agglutinative (i.e. Muskogean), which is interesting in its own right.

Huh, that's not what I would have expected of Mobilian Jargon; I would have expected it to be more...well, Muskogean. I'll check it out.

Zaarin wrote:I'm working on an extremely isolating language, and I'm trying to find models outside of Chinese and its sphere of influence--there don't seem to be many.

A few other big ones are Yoruba and Gbe.

Some areas of Indonesia apparently have these:

John McWhorter wrote:Donohue & Denham (2014), using the data in the World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath, Dryer, Gil & Comrie 2005), identify radically analytic languages as limited to, indeed, Southeast Asia and the aforementioned area of West Africa, plus Indonesia and the island of New Guinea. In Indonesia the relevant cases include 1) colloquial Indonesian dialects; 2) various languages of Flores such as Keo, Ngadha, Lio, Ende, and Rongga; 3) ones of East Timor such as Tetun Dili, Tokodede, Mambai and Waimaha (cf. McWhorter 2011a: 223-60 for diachronic proposals on analyticity in Flores and Timor) and 4) cases on the northern coast of Papua cases including Abun, Tidore, Tobelo, Tehit, Moi, Meyah, Moskona, Ireres, Sogub, Hatam and Mpur (Paauw 2007).

Finding reference materials for any of these is left as an exercise for the reader, though…

Tropylium wrote:

Zaarin wrote:I'm working on an extremely isolating language, and I'm trying to find models outside of Chinese and its sphere of influence--there don't seem to be many.

A few other big ones are Yoruba and Gbe.

Some areas of Indonesia apparently have these:

John McWhorter wrote:Donohue & Denham (2014), using the data in the World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath, Dryer, Gil & Comrie 2005), identify radically analytic languages as limited to, indeed, Southeast Asia and the aforementioned area of West Africa, plus Indonesia and the island of New Guinea. In Indonesia the relevant cases include 1) colloquial Indonesian dialects; 2) various languages of Flores such as Keo, Ngadha, Lio, Ende, and Rongga; 3) ones of East Timor such as Tetun Dili, Tokodede, Mambai and Waimaha (cf. McWhorter 2011a: 223-60 for diachronic proposals on analyticity in Flores and Timor) and 4) cases on the northern coast of Papua cases including Abun, Tidore, Tobelo, Tehit, Moi, Meyah, Moskona, Ireres, Sogub, Hatam and Mpur (Paauw 2007).

Finding reference materials for any of these is left as an exercise for the reader, though…

Thanks! For some reason I didn't even think to look at Africa...

You may be interested in this paper by John McWhorter, who says it's not a coincidence that extremely isolating languages are only found in East Asia, a certain area of West Africa, and among the languages conventionally considered creoles - that radical analyticity (as opposed to moderate degrees of analyticity in languages that still have notable synthetic and/or agglutinative characteristics) is always the result of large-scale acquisition by adult learners.

Porphyrogenitos wrote:You may be interested in this paper by John McWhorter, who says it's not a coincidence that extremely isolating languages are only found in East Asia, a certain area of West Africa, and among the languages conventionally considered creoles - that radical analyticity (as opposed to moderate degrees of analyticity in languages that still have notable synthetic and/or agglutinative characteristics) is always the result of large-scale acquisition by adult learners.

An interesting and surprising read. That would explain why truly isolating languages are so hard to find examples for. Thanks.

Porphyrogenitos wrote:and among the languages conventionally considered creoles

I was going to bring creoles up as well, most English derived creoles are pretty isolating (though perhaps not extremely), although one could quarrel about what is, and is not, a bound affix.


JAL