Language Universals

Problems for Review:The fact that English uses 3 words to express "I have seen" indicates that it is an analytic language. The only inflection used is the -n added to see. Greek seems to repeat the root of the verb to indicate the perfect tense and use a suffix to indicate the subject in both dedorka and bebeka. Japanese doesn't seem to differentiate between the simple past tense and the present perfect, with mimashita meaning both have seen and saw (like in question #4). There also seems to be no indication of the subject, like in English, so it is not as synthetic as Greek is.Think about the languages you know and the language you are studying in MLC 110 and answer the following: (a) How would these languages, particularly the language your are studying, be described in linguistic terms? (b) What characteristics of the language you are studying are the most important for you to know about? (c) What characteristics of the language will you focus on to meet your own goals?(a) Morphologically, Persian is a very synthetic language. It is also a SOV language. I have read that in colloquial spoken Persian it is not uncommon for word order to be rearranged and sentences to take a SVO form. Adjectives follow nouns while it seems to use prepositions rather than adpositions, which is uncommon for OV languages. Spanish is much more similar to English, but it also has some similarities to Persian in noun-adjective relationships and the ways that phrases are linked together.(b) Syntax is probably the most important aspect of Persian for me to learn about. I've gotten much better at it, but I am still pretty slow at discerning the meaning of a spoken sentence even if I know all the words in it. Suffixes are also a really important part of the language. Words can often have multiple suffixes attached to them, which makes it important to understand both their meaning and to recognize their presence to identify the root word.(c) I am going to focus a lot on the way that compound sentences and verbs are structured and linked together. I've found that their are a lot of similarities to Spanish, and also English, in this regard but I still haven't learned most of the little nuances.
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