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On Feb 3, 2012, at 7:34 PM, Alex Fink wrote:
> I would have a suspicion that
> many conlangers have read about expressions of predicative possession and
> how they vary cross-linguistically, so there are plenty of non-transitive
> "have" out there; but "need" there isn't such a literature on, so when one's
> coming to "need" one makes it a transitive verb 'cause that's what English
> does, and ergo that's what's Normal...
Certainly true, if it's true. I suspect it's not. After all, everyone should at least be familiar with French, which has a verb for "have" but not for "need", employing the following expression to for necessity:
avoir besoin de...
"to have need of..."
Arabic is similar.
Anyway, the thrust of your e-mail seems to be this:
On Feb 3, 2012, at 7:34 PM, Alex Fink wrote:
> It's funny how the reaction that the word "universal" engenders for a large
> segment of the membership here is "nosirree Bob! no-one can tell _me_ what
> to do!" In contrast talk of "naturalism" doesn't seem to do that. But what
> are universals but statements of certain combinations of properties that,
> empirically (at least for the good ones), go against naturalism?
Absent of a historical explanation, a linguistic universal is nothing but "lorem ipsum" for a conlanger—or at least for one working on a naturalistic conlang. It's something like coming up with a list of common motifs in American novels. It might be interesting to someone studying American novels, but of what use is it to an American novelist? If the novelist is doing good work, whether or not what they're doing matches an observable pattern is immaterial. Conversely, a novelist doing bad work isn't going to improve the quality of their novel by having it match up as nearly as possible with a list of properties common to novels in his/her genre.
In short, caring one way or another about a linguistic universal is likely indicative of a flawed methodology, when it comes to creating a naturalistic language. (Well, unless your criterion for naturalism is, "How well does this match up with the list of linguistic universals linguists have named...?")
David Peterson
LCS President
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www.conlang.org
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