LL-L "Grammar" 2008.07.14 (05) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L  - 14 July 2008 - Volume 05
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From: Heiko.evermann at gmx.de
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2008.07.14 (01) [E]

> Dear Jonny, but you should know there is also a NEW Latin, without gender,
> difficult verb conjungations, cases etc. and there you have that world
> language you were talking about: Interlingua.
> Check the site http://www.interlingua.com/

Well, I had a look at http://www.interlingua.com, read a bit and it hurts my
eyes. I have digged a bit further:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua_grammar
Oh, no, what a mess compared to the nice, simple grammar of Esperanto.

The German Wikipedia lists 1500 speakers of interlingua, whereas Esperanto
passes the million.

Esperanto, too, does not have gender distinction, it does not have difficult
conjugations, it only has two cases (nominative and accusative) which allows
for a great flexibility of expression and it has a vocabulary that is easy
to
understand plus it comes with a nice sysematic approach to word formation.

If anyone ever needs a planned language, Esperanto is ready. The only
drawback
is that the major players involved (like e.g.) the Americans, do not want a
planned language.

Hartlich Gröten,

Heiko

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From: Stan Levinson <stlev99 at yahoo.com> <Heiko.evermann at gmx.de>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2008.07.14 (04) [E]

I'm no expert on Chinese, but actually there are a number of 'particles'
that are quite effective in indicating verb aspect as completed, as ongoing,
as a continuing state, etc.  So it's not like they don't have complexity,
they just don't have morphological complexity.
Stan
> 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/

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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

----------

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

Hi, Stan!

Quite so, daddy-o! I alluded to that in one of my previous postings in this
thread. At the moment I can only think of a change or completion indicator
(了 *-liǎo* 'realize' > *-le*) and a progression indicator (着 *-zhāo*'suffer' or
*-zhù* 'show', 'prove' > *-zhe*) as Mandarin particles, well, and also the
degree indicator (得 *-dé* 'get' > *-de*). I pretty much consider the rest
auxiliary, modal or aspect verbs, if these ought not also be considered such.
All of them are verb-derived. The same principle holds true in the other
Chinese languages. Verb modification of this sort is very common among the
world's languages, is very refined in Turkic languages.

Cheers!
Reinhard/Ron
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