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I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme? Also, the languages are head-marking (meaning that grammatical relations are encoded on the ver

I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme? Also, the languages are head-marking (meaning that grammatical relations are encoded on the verb) which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations. That said, you're absolutely right that it is English that is the outlier here. I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features). (I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.)

bradrn 5y ago
> I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme? You’re very probably right, though such ‘extreme’ examples are at least more representative of world languages than English is. Possibly more representative is something like, say, Jarawara: ee to-ka-haba ee-ke ahi, fare owa teme-ne ite jaa, Boniwa; Boniwa teme-ne ite jaa, ee to-wa-ke-bana-ka But that doesn’t emphasise my point nearly as well. > Also, the languages are head-marking … which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations. Sure, but dependent-marking languages generally aren’t nearly as agglutinative as head-marking one, which again doesn’t illustrate my point too well. > I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features). I personally like the list of Standard Average European features at https://risteq.net/languages/ https://risteq.net/languages/. And then English is highly isolating on top of that, which in and of itself is fairly uncommon (at least outside SE Asia and W Africa). Personally, I suspect that IE is no weirder than any other language families (TNG and Sino–Tibetan are at least as weird); people just tend to think of it as ‘average’ when it really isn’t. > (I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.) Why, thank you! Honestly, I joined HN mostly to talk about programming, but there seem to have been lots of linguistics articles lately, so that’s what I’ve ended up talking about a lot. (There’s a fair bit of XKCD 386 about it, really.) But I post more regularly on linguistics here: https://www.verduria.org/ https://www.verduria.org/ (And IIRC I believe the lack of notifications is intentional, though I don’t know the details.)

bradrn 5y ago

> I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme? You’re very probably right, though such ‘extreme’ examples are at least more representative of world languages than English is. Possibly more representative is something like, say, Jarawara: ee to-ka-haba ee-ke ahi, fare owa teme-ne ite jaa, Boniwa; Boniwa teme-ne ite jaa, ee to-wa-ke-bana-ka But that doesn’t emphasise my point nearly as well. > Also, the languages are head-marking … which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations. Sure, but dependent-marking languages generally aren’t nearly as agglutinative as head-marking one, which again doesn’t illustrate my point too well. > I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features). I personally like the list of Standard Average European features at https://risteq.net/languages/ https://risteq.net/languages/. And then English is highly isolating on top of that, which in and of itself is fairly uncommon (at least outside SE Asia and W Africa). Personally, I suspect that IE is no weirder than any other language families (TNG and Sino–Tibetan are at least as weird); people just tend to think of it as ‘average’ when it really isn’t. > (I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.) Why, thank you! Honestly, I joined HN mostly to talk about programming, but there seem to have been lots of linguistics articles lately, so that’s what I’ve ended up talking about a lot. (There’s a fair bit of XKCD 386 about it, really.) But I post more regularly on linguistics here: https://www.verduria.org/ https://www.verduria.org/ (And IIRC I believe the lack of notifications is intentional, though I don’t know the details.)