Well, and linguists do tend to have peculiar senses of humor and not be
ashamed to share them.

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 5:27 PM, And Rosta <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> David Peterson, On 23/03/2011 22:10:
>
>  On Mar 23, 2011, at 2◊19 PM, And Rosta wrote:
>>
>>  And Rosta, On 23/03/2011 21:12:
>>>
>>>> My fourth reaction was to wonder about the aetiology of the reference
>>>> to Tokana, Skerre&  Watakassi. The text itself makes it seem like
>>>> they come from the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures. Could some
>>>> naive research assistant have looked at CALS instead of WALS?
>>>>
>>>
>>> No. Tokana (Okuna) and Watakassi (Uatakassi) aren't in CALS. Mysterious.
>>> Apart from the article itself, the only googlable page mentioning Tokana,
>>> Skerre&  Watakassi is one of Janko Gorenc's, which of course is just about
>>> numbers.
>>>
>>
>>
>> This was our initial guess as well, and we came to the same conclusion, of
>> course, since those two languages are *not* on CALS, as you point out. The
>> only plausible explanation I can think of (especially since no source is
>> given) is that this was simply a joke on the part of one or more of the
>> authors. After all, the comment, in the greater context of the paper, has
>> little bearing on their findings, and what they're doing with the paper;
>> it's just a comment. Perhaps one of the authors is a conlanger (unbeknownst
>> to us, it would seem, since I don't recognize any of the names in the
>> context of conlanging, and no other conlanger has claimed to either [so
>> far]), and they decided to throw those in as a gag just to see if it would
>> fool the review committee and other linguists.
>>
>> And, I might add, evidently it did. If someone who was the intended reader
>> of this paper had actually figured this out, they probably would have
>> mentioned it *somewhere*, and my guess is something like this would probably
>> have found its way onto Language Log.
>>
>> Granted, there are a lot of ifs in that idea. It could very well be they
>> googled "ergative" and "VSO" and, through some roundabout means, came to
>> descriptions of those languages...
>>
>
> I like the suggestion that it was a joke. It's more charitable. Also not
> implausible. And engagingly subversive.
>
> Also, Tokana was VSO but active (fluid-S) rather than ergative, tho it does
> have an ergative case. I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with Skerre and Watakassi:
> are they actually VSO and ergative? (If so, the authors deserve a kind of
> credit for their knowledge of conlang typology.)
>
> --And.
>



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window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.  --Arthur Rimbaud