Re: svo, sov, etc...

Wiktor S. wrote:
>
> > If sorting all 6,912 languages seems a bit daunting, you could start
> > with the big ones. By the time you've done the largest 100 languages
> > or so, you've accounted for 80-90% of the world's population, and the
> > distribution of types will probably not change much after that. See
>
> What if some rare S&O&V order _causes_ the language to be less popular?
> Maybe SVO and SOV are so popular because they somehow attract more speakers.

This sounds like a tautology to me.

>
> If so, selecting more popular languages further favours more popular
> sentence orders.

But if you've determined which order-type is spoken by 90% of the
world's population, then the remaining 10% is not going to upset the
broad picture, even if the smaller languages were _massively_ skewed in
some different way from the larger ones. I think a small random sampling
of small languages would be sufficient to show that this is not the
case.

Ross Clark
.

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