Re[2]: [tied] Re: Pronunciation of "r" - again?

At 5:57:27 AM on Monday, October 10, 2005, Andrew Jarrette
wrote:

[...]

> Having said that, I still don't believe I am wrong in
> regarding English as an "atypical" Indo-European language.
> I believe that if a language is unique (in the effective
> meaning of the word, see below), then it must also be
> atypical. No unique language can be typical. A typical
> language may also have one or two unique properties along
> with many shared properties. I find that English has many
> unique properties along with a relatively low number of
> shared properties.

Welsh: VSO, initial consonant mutations, collective nouns
that form the singular or unit by suffixation (<plant>
'children', <plentyn> 'a child'; <coed> 'a forest', <coeden>
'a tree'), inflected prepositions, voiceless nasals,
belted-l, retains /T/, has /gw/ < /w/. I think that these
are all fairly uncommon in IE languages.

I suspect that one could come up with a pretty good list for
(spoken) French, too, starting with its arguably
agglutinative verbal system and very free word order.

In the other direction, it seems to me that you're ignoring
all sorts of properties that English shares with quite a few
other IE languages, e.g., its lack of lexical tone or pitch.

[...]

> - as you know, anyone who learns a language that uses the
> Roman Alphabet always learns the written language as well
> as the spoken language.

On the contrary, I know that this is false. I cannot
imagine where you got such an idea.

Brian