LL-L "Grammar" 2008.07.14 (04) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 14 July 2008 - Volume 04
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2008.07.13 (04) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Grammar
>
> to a range of families. Among the Sino-Tibetan languages, for example,
> take the Chinese ones...
>       * Gender: none
>       * Plural: only in three personal pronouns
>       * Verb tense: none, except one particle expressing change and
>         another expressing progress
>       * Word inflection: none
> As in the case of English, sentence structure is rigid because it
> plays an important grammatical role.

Um... good point. Would it be possible to invent a grammar-sparse
language which still allowed a flexible sentence order, I wonder? Are
there any natural languages like that?

I suppose it could be that the two principles conflict logically.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Lexicon

Sandy:

Um... good point. Would it be possible to invent a grammar-sparse
language which still allowed a flexible sentence order, I wonder? Are
there any natural languages like that?

I have never come across any, and I doubt there are any. At the very least,
you need to distinguish subject from object, or else you don't know who does
what to whom. And you also need to distinguish indirect objects from direct
objects in many cases. Lack of morphological marking must be compensated for
by syntactic marking, i.e., syntactic slots serving as markers. I don't know
what other sort of device you'd use, except perhaps intonation, and I guess
that would be a type of morphological marking if it existed.

Old English syntax is a lot more flexible than is Modern English syntax,
simply because the morphology came to be simplified so much. Although not to
quite the same extent, it applies to Old Norse and Icelandic versus Modern
Scandinavian, for instance, also to Old Frisian versus Modern Frisian, Old
Low Franconian versus Modern Dutch and Afrikaans, and Old Saxon versus Low
Saxon. Among the Germanic languages, it seems to be only Icelandic, Faroese
and German that preserved most of its morphology and thus syntactic
flexibility, Yiddish probably a little less.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

•

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