tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Sep 27 12:01:19 2000
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Re: tlhIngan-Hol Digest 27 Sep 2000 08:00:02 -0000 Issue 1676
On 27 Sep 2000 [email protected] wrote:
> Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 08:26:51 -0700
> To: [email protected]
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: tera'ngan Holmey rurHa''a' tlhIngan Hol
> Message-ID: <[email protected]>
> > >It is my understanding that Klingon's OVS structure is unlike that
> > >of any natural Terran language.
There are about 10 languages in the world with OVS, all in the
Amazon; Hixkaryana is the best known, and there's a grammar of it
available. The discovery of Hixkaryana and the others is fairly recent,
and Derbyshire's grammar was published in '85.
AUTHOR Derbyshire, Desmond C.
TITLE Hixkaryana and linguistic typology / Desmond C. Derbyshire.
IMPRINT Dallas, TX : Summer Institute of Linguistics ; [Arlington] :
University of Texas at Arlington, 1985.
> > This seems to be a rather rash statement. There are a limited number
> > of ways that the Subject, verb and object of a sentence can be
> > ordered with regard to each other. With the thousands of languages in
> > existence, many use the OVS order. If Okrand really were the first to
> > come up with the idea, he would deserve a Nobel prize.
There's no Linguistics Nobel prizes, and in fact there are good cognitive
reasons why languages avoid putting the object in front of the
subject; the overwhelming majority of the world's languages are SVO, SOV,
and VSO. The rarest ordering is OSV, with four languages, also in the
Amazon.
Linguistic universals, positing statistical tendencies for the grammars of
the world's languages, have been around since Greenberg's work in the
'60s; so Okrand was well aware of how rare OSV is (and there's no
guarantee he even knew of Hixkaryana's existence as a counterexample when
writing Klingon). Violating universals is an obvious way of making an
"alien" language, and it has already been pointed out (Beesley's paper in
HolQeD?) that the combination of retroflex and alveolar stops does
something similar.
--
Nick Nicholas; TLG, UCI; [email protected]; www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis
"Electronic editors have to live in hope: hope that the long-awaited
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(Peter M.W. Robinson)