Grambank shows the diversity of the world's languages

sciencedaily.com

9 points·docmechanic··5 comments

I am a bit surprised about the number of 'unknowns' in the data for my mother toungue (Dutch) [1]. Are these still open questions with respect to the Dutch language or is it simply that no expert on Dutch grammar has been asked to contribute.

[1] https://grambank.clld.org/languages/dutc1256

I see 8 out of 195 "unknowns"which seems to be pretty good coverage. The remaining unknowns are things like serial verb constructions and reduplication, which are very uncommon in European languages. I'm not sure why these are uncoded but based on my knowledge of the methodology for Grambank it's possibly that these typological features aren't mentioned in any source. I agree it seems like these should be straightforward to code however, I'll ask someone

"What shapes the structure of languages? In a new study, an international team of researchers reports that grammatical structure is highly flexible across languages, shaped by common ancestry, constraints on cognition and usage, and language contact. The study used the Grambank database, which contains data on grammatical structures in over 2400 languages."

Would be interesting to see how fictional/constructed languages compare to the collected data.

That's a bit like studying the biodiversity of Narnia. The interesting things about languages is how they're used, and the vast majority of constructed languages aren't used at all (for communication, at least).

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