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There is 1 message in this issue.
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1. Re: What's a good isolating language to look at
From: Dirk Elzinga <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2005 09:24:34 -0700
From: Dirk Elzinga <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What's a good isolating language to look at
On 12/6/05, R A Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> João Ricardo de Mendonça wrote:
> > On 12/6/05, *Gary Shannon* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
> >
> > I would really like to learn more about how a real
> > live isolating language works.
> [snip]
>
> > The usual examples of isolating languages are Mandarim and Vietnamese. I
> > guess Mandarim should be the easiest to find references for in the West.
>
> Yes, but Mandarin does have grammatical affixes; it is not purely
> isolating. In fact it has been argued on this on this list (more than
> once IIRC) that English is more isolating than modern Mandarin.
>
> But by all accounts, Vietnamese is (almost) 100% isolating. The trouble
> is that few natlangs sit nice and neatly in these language types thought
> up by 19th century linguists.
There is an easy way to find out which language is more
analytic/synthetic. Take representative texts from each language,
count up the number of words and then the number of morphs. You can
then make a ratio of morphs/words--the "synthesis index"--for the
languages in question. In a 1960 paper, Greenberg used this method and
came to the conclusion that English had 1.68 morphs per word, on
average. Vietnamese had 1.06. (Other languages that Greenberg looked
at were Sanskrit, 2.59; Anglo-Saxon, 2.12; Persian 1.52; Yakut, 2.17;
Swahili, 2.55; and Eskimo, 3.72. I looked at Shoshoni and my own
conlang, Miapimoquitch, and came to 1.57 and 2.43, respectively.)
It would of course depend on the kind of text you selected as
"representative". My strong impression is that a medical journal
article (for example) would be morphologically more complex than, say,
a mystery novel. I just asked a corpus linguist here in the
department, and he has not heard of anyone actually publishing on this
question (i.e., relative morphological complexity of different
genres). I feel a research project coming on ...
Dirk
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