LL-L "Grammar" 2009.01.05 (06) [E]

[Lowlands-L List]

===========================================
L O W L A N D S - L - 06 January 2009 - Volume 06
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please set the encoding mode to Unicode (UTF-8).
If viewing this in a web browser, please click on
the html toggle at the bottom of the archived page
and switch your browser's character encoding to Unicode.
===========================================


From: Luc Hellinckx <luc.hellinckx at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Idiomatica"

Beste Marlou,

You wrote:

yes, it seems the definition of the time span called "this" is the crucial
thing. I think the scots got it! -- But now I am very curious as to the Turk
thing about locations. What do they do with their prepositions?! Can you
tell me?

I was once told that students with a Turkish background had greater
difficulty grasping 3D-geometry and topology, because Turkish has no
separate prepositions and rather builds constructions at the back of words
like suffixes.

Whether this alleged handicap was significant and substantial, I can't tell.



Kind greetings,



Luc Hellinckx


----------

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

It is certainly true that Turkish, other Turkic languages and in fact all
Altaic languages, being of the agglutinating type, postpose elements that in
Germanic languages are prepositions. However, it is not true that Turkic
languages only use suffixes and enclitics as is often claimed. There are
quite a few "separate" words that have the function of our prepositions. The
only difference is they are postpositions rather than prepositions; in other
words they follow nouns rather than precede them. In most cases these are
actually nouns; e.g. Turkish *masanın altında* ("table+'s
place-below+its+at" = "in the space below the table") 'underneath the
table'. But there are also postpositions that may not be derived from nouns;
e.g. Turkish *Allah aşkı için* ("God love+his for") 'for God's sake'.

I believe that the Uralic languages (e.g. Finnish and Hungarian), which are
also agglutinating, use a larger number of suffixes than do Altaic ones.

I would be very surprised if the story about 3D-geometry and topology could
be backed up. I don't know if "Turkish" here means "Turkish of Turkey" or
"Turkic" in general. If it applies to Turkish and there was a linguistic
connection with this allegation, then speakers of all Turkic, Mongolic,
Tungusic and Uralic languages as well as of Korean and Japanese (which use
postposed particles) should be found to share this problem. I would be
surprised to find that they do.

*Tüdelkraam? Tüünkraam?*

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lowlands-l/attachments/20090105/2e9b41ea/attachment.htm>