Re: The map of typological features

On 7 Jun 2006 17:28:00 -0700, Darkstar
<darkstar100@xxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:1149726480.103402.105870@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:

Nathan Sanders wrote:

In article <1149083702.013656.216900@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Darkstar" <darkstar100@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nathan Sanders wrote:

[...]

It's all described in books, encyclopedias and other
sources. I don't have to do my own field research or go
to Micronesia to find out how they talk over there. Any
kind of work is based on other people's work. In this
particular example, some encyclopedia article cited
nasals to be "widespread" or something to that extent
and I took this opinion to be "generally accepted".

Do you know how *they* defined "widespread"? If not,
your map is even more fuzzy. Smith might mean
widespread within the phoneme set, while Jones might
mean widespread in the lexicon, and Alberts and Lewis
mean widespread in actual speech, but use different
thresholds.

Obviously, within the lexicon and word formation methods
(in the case of reduplications).

It's not at all obvious. It isn't even clear at this point
that you know what definitions your various sources were
using, or considered that they might be using the word in
different ways.

[...]

Linguistics is still one of the humanities.

Only for those who don't know what linguistics is.
Because of the wide variety of topics it covers,
linguistics transcends the humanities-science split,
though the methodology is more aligned with the sciences
than with the humanities.

So what kind of standard algorithms or workable programs
can perform a phonological analysis for an arbitrary
piece of spoken speech in some rare language -- Hadza,
for instance? I think manual analysis is the only
acceptable way in most cases.

This appears to be a non sequitur. Either that, or you have
a *very* limited view of scientific methodology.

[...]

Give me at least some examples from any IE, FU or Alt
languages of the north that extensively use
reduplications to replace grammatical categories
(plural, pronouns, etc)

[...]

But to conform to your limitations, how about Ancient
Greek reduplication for perfect, pluperfect, and future
perfect?

Are they unique to Greek or can you find something similar
in many IE languages? Probably not.

On the contrary, it's an inheritance from PIE. It's present
in Sanskrit, and there are at least traces in Latin, Gothic,
and Old Irish, to name just the ones that I'm sure of. 'In
so far as they have a perfect, reduplication is the general
rule in the historical [IE] languages.' (Szemerényi,
Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics, §9.4.3)

in formal speech.

Why limit it to formal speech? Most language use is
informal!

We certainly wouldn't include stuttering or uncertainity
markings as a form of reduplication. It must be a part of
the standardly accepted speech. The discourse elements
you mentioned are not part of textbook grammar or even
dictionary lexics.

But they are part of normal speech that you're arbitrarily
excluding.

[...]

IE languages have never been truely tonal.

Ancient Greek and Proto-Slavic were most certainly "truly
tonal"! There may have been restrictions on which tones
could appear where, but this is likely true for any tone
language (tone sandhi, tone spreading, etc. are widely
attested in tone languages).

ASFAIR, tones in Greek followed the position of the
dynamic stress. Correct me if I'm forgetting something.

Until the end of the classical period the Greek accent was
described in terms of pitch, not stress. The shift from a
pitch accent to a stress accent seems to have taken place
with the development of Koine; see, e.g., Geoffrey Horrocks'
survey of the history of the language.

[...]

Brian
.

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