Talk:Zero-marking language

Vietnamese

Hello, I am a Vietnamese and just want to say that the grammatical inflection in the Vietnamese language is not possible because the Vietnamese language is monosyllabic (therefore analytical) and the phonetic laws of the Vietnamese phonemes do not allow it to add consonants or additional affixes, suffixes or prefixes to yield inflected or derived forms. Also Thai or Laotian do not have the gramatical inflection. However learning foreign languages is still possible and there are no problems with it. --Tranminhtu (talk) 18:51, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Sources

I have added the request for more citations. The WALS link is a good quality, but is unfortunately very brief. The other external link is just an abstract - it's very, very cursory and is mostly original research. Does anyone know of any more reliable sources on this topic? -WmGB (talk) 23:37, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Examples

It might be nice to have some examples of Zero-marking languages and examples from those languages in order to give the reader some idea of a typical zero-marking language. Also, this would allow the reader with a link to investigate further into those zero-marking languages. 128.208.35.11 (talk) 23:42, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

Afrikaans

Does Afrikaans count as a zero-marking language? It doesn't mark verbs or nouns (except pronouns) and adjectives are not modified to match the noun. CodeCat (talk) 13:50, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Romance languages =

"It has been suggested that verb-final languages may be likely to develop verb-medial order if marking on nouns is lost.[citation needed]" It's true for Romance languages. Latin was a Subject-Object-Verb language that marked nouns as nominative or accusative. But modern Portuguese, Spanish and French lost this marks. So, these languages rely on a Subject-Verb-Object order to distinguish between subject and object. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.74.91.59 (talk) 00:35, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Is Zero-marking language original research?

It seems fair to me that the idea "Zero-marking language" is there, analogues to "typed vs untyped" in programming language camp, so I am a bit confused. I am not linguistician, so I urge anyone who see this message fix it. --14.198.220.253 (talk) 08:09, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Pirahã is not zero-marking

I've removed a claim about Pirahã being zero-marking. 'Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language' (DOI 10.1086/431525) portrays it as morphologically complex: "Although the complexity of the verb is very high, with perhaps more than 16 suffix classes, there is nothing about its semantic composition, stress, or morphological attachment that requires recourse to the notion of embedding to account for Pirahã morphology." Samalou (talk) 14:01, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

On the other hand, I now see that WALS lists it as isolating, which is probably where the previous editor got it from. Samalou (talk) 14:01, 7 October 2020 (UTC)