#language maps

Tenseless languages

Language that do not possess the grammatical category of “tense”, although obviously, they can communicate about past or future situations, but they do it resorting to adverbs (earlier, yesterday, tomorrow), the context (pragmatics), but mostly aspect markers, that show how a situation relates to the timeline (perfective, continuous, etc.) or modal markers (obligation, need, orders, hipothesis, etc.)

An enjoyable blog post from Humans Who Read Grammars summarizing many language family maps. Excerpt: 

It's clear that the kind of maps that are typically used to depict the spatial distribution of languages of a single language family are fraught with difficulties. Typically they deal with multilingualism very poorly, the data they display is usually from different sources that could be decades if not centuries apart, some maps below are based on ethnography and not on linguistics and how these line up is often not straightforward, the list goes on and on. That being said, classification in terms of family membership is one of the primary means of classifying languages, and only through the history of language families we can understand how some languages have spread and others have died. Hence, the geographical perspective on language families is an important one. Here I am mostly after polygon maps of language families, and not maps per country (big on Ethnologue) or using points (to be found on Glottolog and LL-MAP).

Relativization strategies

How do languages form relative clauses like “the man that ate bread went home”.

Relative pronoun/particle/complementizer - “the man [that/who ate bread] went home”. Typical of Indo-European, Uralic and Semitic languages. 

Correlative relative (non-reduction) - “the man [who ate bread], [that man] went home or "the man [he ate bread] went home” - this strategy involves an anaphor, repeating the antecedent with a noun/pronoun. Pronoun retention is also lumped in here. This strategy occurs in Indo-Aryan languages (Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, etc.), in Mande languages (e.g Bambara in Mali), Yoruba, Lakhota, Warao, Xerente, Walpiri, etc. 

Nominalized/participial relative - “the [bread eating] man went home" or "the [bread eaten] man went home" - I lumped this two together because the behaviour is very similar - used in Turkic, Mongolic, Koreanic, Dravidian, and Bantu languages. 

Genitive relative - “[ate bread]'s man went home" - used in Sino-Tibetan, Khmer, Tagalog, Minangkabau, and Aymara. 

Relative affix - “the man [ate-REL bread] went home” - used in Seri, Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages and Maale (Omotic). 

Adjunction - “the man [ate bread] went home”, with no overt marker just justapositions modifying the main clause. Used in Japanese, Thai, Shan, Lao, Malagasy. 

Internally headed relative - "[the man ate the bread] went home", the nucleous is in the relative clause itself. Used in Navajo, Apache, Haida. 

Nonconcatenative morphology

Nonconcatenative morphology, also called discontinuous morphology and introflection, is a form of word formation in which the root is modified and which does not involve stringing morphemes together sequentially.

It may involve apophony (ablaut), transfixation (vowel templates inserted into consonantal roots), reduplication, tone/stress changes, or truncation. 

It is very developed in Semitic, Berber, and Chadic branches of Afro-Asiatic. It also occurs extensively among other language families: Nilo-Saharan, Northeast Caucasian, Na-Dene, Salishan and the isolate Seri (in Mexico).

Prefixing and suffixing languages

Mostly prefixing - Most Berber languages, Bantu languages, Guarani, many Macro-Ge languages, Mayan languages, Oto-Manguean, Mixtec, Siouan, Navajo and many Na-Dene languages, some languages in northwest Papua and northwest Australia. 

Mostly suffixing - Indo-European, most Afro-Asiatic, Turkic, Mongolic, Dravidian, Austronesian, Northeast Caucasian, Eskimo-Aleut, Uralic, Koreanic-Japonic, most Pama-Nyungan languages.

Equally prefixing and suffixing - Cree, Ojibwe, O’odham, Tarahumara, Pilagá, Carib, Central Atlas Tamazight, Tuareg, Iraqi Arabic, Zande, Krio languages, Ewe, Toba, many languages in east Papua-New-Guinea, Basque, Nortwest Caucasian, Celtic. 

Little affixation - typical of isolating languages, in Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Hmong-Mien, Nilo-Saharan, Mande, languages of West Africa, many Austronesian languages.