Linguistic Maps

Relativization strategies

How do languages form relative clauses like “the man that ate bread went home”.

If you know about the languages left in blank, please let me know!

Orthographic depth

Languages have different levels of othographic depth, that means that a language’s orthography can vary in a spectrum of a very irregular and complex orthography (deep orthography) to a completely regular and simple one (shallow orthography). 

English, French, Danish, Swedish, Arabic, Urdu, Tibetan, Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Lao, Chinese, and Japanese have orthographies that are highly irregular, complex and where sounds cannot be predicted from the spelling. These writing systems are more difficuld and slow to be learned by children, who may take years. In the medium of the scale there’s Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, Greek, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Korean, where there are some irregularities  but overall the correspondence of one sound to one phoneme is not that bad. At the positive end of the scale there’s Italian, Serbo-Croat, Romanian, Finnish, Basque, Turkish, Indonesian, Quechua, Ayamara, Guarani, Mayan languages, and most African languages (because there were no history of spelling, so a new one of scratch was made as very regular), they all have very simple and regular spelling systems, with usually a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. These are very easily learned by children. 

Orthographic depth has several implications for the study of psycholinguistics and the study of language processing and also acquisition of reading and writing by children. 

Note: remember that there’s no objective numbering on the three categories I made, there are more than just these three categories, because it works like a spectrum. Three categories were used just as a means for simplification. 

Pronounciation of the Latin alphabet letter <Ç> 

(it includes the Cyrilic letter Ç, which is homographic with the former)

Existential constructions

An existential construction is like the English verb “there to be” in the sentence “There are many countries”. 

Possessive existential: uses the verb “to have” like in French “il y a” (lit. it there has”, or Brazilian Portuguese “não tem jeito” (there’s no way, lit. not has way), or in Serbo-Croatian, and many southeast Asian and Chinese languages, and Swahili. 

Copula existential: uses the verb “to be” or an equivalent, like English “there is/are”. Most Slavic, Baltic, Uralic, Mongolic and Indo-Iranian languages work like this. Also, Korean, many Germanic languages, Iraqi Arabic, Kannada (Dravidian, in India), Mixtec languages, Italian, Greek, Armenian, Georgian. 

Existential verb: Portuguese, Spanish, Sardinian, Catalan, Occitan, Yoruba, Malay-Indonesian have a special existential verb. For example in Portuguese is “haver” and Spanish “haber”. In Portuguese (and only in he formal register in Brazilian variety) there’s “há um problema” (there is a problem) in which “haver” means exactely “there to be” and nothing else (although it’s also an auxiliary verb with a multitude of grammatical functions). Etymologically “haver/haber” meant “to have” (btw, despite the similarity with English, the verbs are not related).

Other verb: Dutch, German, Swedish, Japanese, Hausa and Somali have another verb which is used for this meaning. In German is “gibt” (give), and in Swedish is “finnas” (to find).

Adjective: for most Tukic languages it’s an adjective “var” (or some related word), which in fact works like a particle. 

Locative existential: it appears in Maori, Maltese, Tunisian and Lybian Arabic, as a place adverb. lt co-occurs with other types like in English “there”, French “y”, Catalan “hi”, Italian “ci”, and there’s also a locative preffix in Swahili. 

Prepositional pronouns: a pronoun fused with a preposition, it occurs as “fi” (with it/him) in some Arabic languages/dialects. 

If you know the languages left in Blank please write in the comments. 

Predicative possession

This map shows alternative ways of conveying the “to have” meaning found in English and most European langugages. Many languages express this through an existential clause, for example, for the sentence “I have a house” the literal translations in the four subtypes would be:

Locative/Dative possessive - At-me house is. OR To-me house there is. 

Genitive possessive - Mine house is. OR My house-mine there is. 

Topic possessive - As far as I am concerned, house there is. OR As for me, a house exists. 

Comitative/Conjunctional possessive - a house with-me exists. OR I house and/too/while (is)

Note: please ignore the word worder as it is extremely variable.