I knew this about Finnish, but this sentence from Peter's reply caught me
off guard: "For McWhorter to be correct, there would have to be some feature
[in] the language that depended on whether nouns were definite or
indefinite, and I know of none." Not knowing enough about Latin, Russian, or
Japanese, I can't speak to this. If the requirement is simply being able to
distinguish definite from indefinite *when necessary*, then I stand by what
I said earlier. However, if the requirement is that some feature in the
language depends on such a distinction, then Peter (and others) may well be
right, and this is not a universal feature of human language. But I don't
know how McWhorter intended the list of universals to be understood.

Dirk

On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 4:40 AM, Benct Philip Jonsson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Dirk Elzinga skrev:
>
>> So "Russian, Japanese, and quite a lot of other
>> languages" have no way to signal the distinction
>> between definite and indefinite? I find that
>> hard to believe. McWhorter refers simply to
>> "fundamental features" of language; not
>> fundamental morphological categories, which is
>> how many in this thread seem to be reading it. A
>> language may not have articles (the usual marker
>> for definiteness) but that doesn't mean that
>> definiteness is not marked.
>>
>>
> That's how I read it too. One not-so-exotic
> language which is sensitive to definiteness
> without having articles or any other morphemes
> dedicated to its expression is Finnish, where
> definite objects are in the accusative case but
> indefinite objects are in the partitive case. Both
> cases have other, partly overlapping uses too,
> e.g. the choice between them can signal whether
> the verb action on the object was carried to
> completion or not, i.e. to mark
> perfective/imperfective aspect. The partitive is
> also used for both subjects and objects referring
> to an unspecified or partial quantity of some
> larger entity (hence its name), and the accusative
> is for most nominals isomorphous with other case
> forms (the genitive in the singular and the
> nnominative in the plural).
>
> Incidentally this has interresting effects on how
> Finnish speakers process definiteness in other
> languages. If I ask my girlfriend what 'milk' is
> in Finnish she will say _maitoa_ (in the
> partitive) but if I ask for the translation of
> '*the* milk' she'll say _maito_ (nominative).
> However if I ask for 'house' or 'the house' the
> answer to both will be _talo_ in the nominative.
> Still she insists that the nominative and the
> partitive are the indefinite and definite forms of
> Finnish, despite my efforts to show her that
> countable subjects and local case forms in Finnish
> aren't sensitive to the distinction.
>
> Still she and other Finnish L1 speakers handle
> definiteness in Swedish and English (and probably
> other languages, tho that is outside my
> experience) with nary an error, although they make
> many other errors -- in the deictic domain notably
> to conflate/mix up gendered/sexed pronouns. This
> also shows that Finnish speakers do keep track of
> the definiteness of discourse participants, even
> though the overt expression of the distinction is
> only partial and overlapping with other functions
> compared to Swedish or English.
>
> /BP
>
>
>  On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 2:51 AM, Peter Bleackley
>> < [log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>  staving Benct Philip Jonsson:
>>>
>>>  I just found an interesting list of syntactic
>>>> features deemed to be fundamental, in the
>>>> sense that they occur in all (or at least the
>>>> vast majority?) of human languages, as opposed
>>>> to "ornamental" features which may be more or
>>>> less useful but arise as a chance outcome of
>>>> diacronic change (I guess what Lass would call
>>>> "making things out of junk.
>>>> # a. Definite/indefinite opposition (possibly
>>>> #    via zero marking of one)
>>>>
>>>>  Not found in Latin, Russian, Japanese, and
>>> quite a lot of other languages. The first
>>> proposed universal on this list seems not to be
>>> one at all!
>>>
>>> Pete
>>>
>>>
>>