In a message dated 1/29/2002 7:58:25 PM Central Standard Time, ragnarok@pobox.com writes:
to summarize the sporadic but relevant bits of Anthony Fox's _Linguistic
Reconstruction: an Introduction to Theory and Method_: SVO languages are
more likely to be prepositional; SOV tend to be postpositional. OV tend to
be agglutinative, with (C)CV syllable structure, vowel harmony, and pitch
accent, while VO tend to be inflecting. OV languages have adjectives before
nouns, VO have them after. Verb-final languages will have a case system.
This gives us the following for the two styles:
Pro-SVO: prepositional (1)
Anti-SVO: isolating, adjectives before nouns. (2)
Pro-SOV: CCV syllables, adjectives before nouns. (2)
Anti-SOV: prepositional, isolating, no pitch accent, no vowel harmony, no
cases. (5)
In other words, lojban doesn't really fit either mold. but it has some of
both. however, since 1/2 is slightly larger than 2/5, I conclude that it is
closer to an SVO language - but not by much.
These sound like statistical groupings, not implicative connections. English is almost as "peculiar" as Lojban in this. The percentages are only signifcant if all the factors have equal weight, which I doubt (the positional factors are more likely associated than the morphophonology, say).
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