Are there "universal truths" about language?
In several recent postings, I’ve discussed two studies recently conducted in New Zealand: one on the origins of human language by Quentin D. Atkinson and colleagues published in Science, and the other...
View ArticleOn statistical universals
In yesterday’s posting, we’ve come to a conclusion that statistical universals (e.g., “Languages with both adjective-noun and noun-numeral orders are extremely rare”) are useless for a learner trying...
View ArticleModern Hebrew: old or new? (Part 2)
As mentioned in the previous posting, in Ben-Yehuda’s own time many perceived his “revived” form of Hebrew as a modernized version of the old language, Biblical Hebrew. Some liked the continuity and...
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Was Proto-Human an SOV language?
Most scholars agree that all of today’s languages descend from a common ancestral language, Proto-Human, which was spoken by behaviourally modern humans (BMHs) some time between 200,000 and 50,000...
View ArticleThe evolution of word order and “free word order” languages
In the previous posting, I outlined the recently proposed theory by Gell-Mann and Ruhlen on the origin and evolution of word order. According to their proposal, the most recent common ancestor of all...
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More on the evolution of word order and rare word orders
In the previous posting, I discussed one set of problems with Gell-Mann & Ruhlen’s theory on the origin and evolution of word order (also discussed in an earlier posting); these problems concern...
View ArticleParametric theory of word order, language acquisition and historical change
In the previous posting, I outlined an alternative theory that treats the order of major sentential constituents — subject, object and verb — not as a primitive, but as a result of several binary...
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More on word order, morphological types and historical change
In a comment to the previous posting, Venelina Dimitrova raised a number of interesting issues, which I thought it would be best to address in a separate posting rather than in the comment section. 1....
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Syntactic feature or scribal convention?
In an earlier post, discussing the birch bark document 607/562 (see image on the left), I mentioned a peculiarity of word order in this brief crime report: the appositive phrase (=extra description)...
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Kusunda, a language like no other?
Kusunda is a dying isolate language. Gyani Maiya Sen, a 75-year-old woman from western Nepal, is its last known speaker. There are some 100-160 people in the Kusunda tribe, and some of them know a few...
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