Comments on: A Few Good Things http://gravitonic.com/2005/10/a-few-good-things Life, technology, and other good things Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:22:50 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Andrei http://zmievski.org/2005/10/a-few-good-things/comment-page-1#comment-467 Andrei Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:59:03 +0000 http://www.gravitonic.com/n/?p=128#comment-467 Yes, but at least Vietnamese doesn't make you swallow your tongue while trying to pronounce words. :) Swahili would be interesting indeed, although the thrust of this paper was on phonemic analysis, which deals only with sounds of the language rather than its grammar or semantics. What you mention about Swahili makes it a head-marking language, meaning that the syntactic relationship between the nuclei (head) of a phrase and its dependents is coded morphologically on the head, rather than the dependents. Many Native American languages are head-marking; consider a Lakhota sentence: Na-wíčha-ya-x?ų. stem-3pl(undergoer)-2sg(actor)-hear 'You heard them'. The whole phrase is a verb with markings. That's just one of the reasons I love linguistics.. Yes, but at least Vietnamese doesn’t make you swallow your tongue while trying to pronounce words. :)

Swahili would be interesting indeed, although the thrust of this paper was on phonemic analysis, which deals only with sounds of the language rather than its grammar or semantics. What you mention about Swahili makes it a head-marking language, meaning that the syntactic relationship between the nuclei (head) of a phrase and its dependents is coded morphologically on the head, rather than the dependents. Many Native American languages are head-marking; consider a Lakhota sentence:

Na-wíčha-ya-x?ų.
stem-3pl(undergoer)-2sg(actor)-hear
‘You heard them’.

The whole phrase is a verb with markings. That’s just one of the reasons I love linguistics..

]]> By: Simon http://zmievski.org/2005/10/a-few-good-things/comment-page-1#comment-466 Simon Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:38:17 +0000 http://www.gravitonic.com/n/?p=128#comment-466 It could be worse - you could have picked a tonal language like Vietnamese... I've always thought that Swahili would be interesting to learn - the use of prefixes instead of conjunctions for person and tense is a beautifully subtle and simple way of doing things. I'm sure I'll get to say it in person, but happy birthday, old man. ;) It could be worse – you could have picked a tonal language like Vietnamese…

I’ve always thought that Swahili would be interesting to learn – the use of prefixes instead of conjunctions for person and tense is a beautifully subtle and simple way of doing things.

I’m sure I’ll get to say it in person, but happy birthday, old man. ;)

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