interesting languages

[varwoche]

A friend (not a linguist) told me (not a linguist) that the Basque language -- Euskara -- has certain elements that are not well understood in historical context, in terms of uniqueness compared to surrounding languages. Here are some things I found while casually researching the topic:

Euskara is known to be a 'free word order' language; this means that the order of the phrases in the sentence can vary article

Basque and Spanish are diametrically opposite in many respects. The position of the head is one amongst many differences; Basque is head-final whereas Spanish is head-initial. Therefore, the basic word order in Basque is SOV and SVO in Spanish. Nevertheless, they both share some properties, both having strong verb morphology able to licence pros and displaying free word order. In both languages, every possible word order combination can occur. article

Spanish permits "every possible word order"?

Turkish is also a free word-order language. article

Estonian has a comparatively free word order article

Then the opposite, when what we know as multiple words are bound into one word:

there is no independent Navaho word to mean mother or father, sister or brother, ear, tooth, or leg, or even shoes or bow and arrow ... one must use morphologically complex words meaning someone's mother, someone's father article

And from same source:

In analytic languages words tend to consist of free morphemes, i.e., they are monomorphic. Chinese and Viet. are the most purely analytical: nearly half their words are monomorphic, and also monosyllabic. Since analytic languages usually have relatively few derivational or inflectional morphemes, they tend to form words by combining free morphemes into compounds. Thus a preponderance of both simple and compound words tend to be a feature of analytic languages. Nearly half of all Chinese words are monomorphemic, and most of the rest are compounds of the type gascan, blackboard, etc, such as dianhua telephone, or diankan TV. Of all the European languages, English is the most analytic, and it also contains many compounds.

 

[Cleopatra]

In a Greek forum I post, somebody linked the blog of a guy who claims things about the existence of Greek genes, Greek DNA , Greek Language and stuff like that and I had to brush my Kavalli-Sfortza, "Genes, Peoples and Languages" where he clearly states that there is no genetic connections with groups that speak specific languages and yet I wonder.

How is it possible to create literatture and philosophy with a tool( language) that has a free order in words?

 

[LW]

How is it possible to create literatture and philosophy with a tool( language) that has a free order in words?

Easy.

You use the free order to emphasize the part of the sentence that you want to be emphasised.

 

[Luciana]

Then I don't understand what "free word order" is. If Spanish has that quality, then so does English, according to the definition given in the article: " this means that the order of the phrases in the sentence can vary."

I had a friend whose mother had suffered some brain damaged. She functioned well, except for one thing - word order.

The first sentence in the previous paragraph, for example, she'd say "had brain mother whose a I friend suffered some"... It was a challenge to the other party!!! She knew she had this problem, but she was incapable of organizing the sentence in the proper order, therefore, she'd just repeat many times the same info until the other person figured it out. Both funny and sad.

 

[Luciana]

Easy.

You use the free order to emphasize the part of the sentence that you want to be emphasised.

Let's not confuse "word order" with "order of the phrases". It is completely different. Zero word order and yes, we're up to problems if not chaos, like the example I gave above of the brain damaged woman.

Changing the natural order of phrases is very common stylistic tool, and a legitimate one in all the languages I know or heard about.

 

[epepke]

Spanish permits "every possible word order"?

No, it doesn't. At least not like Latin and to a lesser extent German does. The case structure is far too weak.

There was a movement in the 17th century to mangle phrase and word order in poetry. The idea was to make it hard to figure out, so reading the poem involved some puzzle-solving skills. Francisco de Quevedo was big on this.

Spanish, like English, is a Creole language at heart and shares much of the same grammar.