Languages Of The World » word order

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 ...

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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 descripti...

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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 sectio...

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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 bi...

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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 concer...

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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...

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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,...

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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 conti...

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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 le...

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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 th...

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