Standard Average European Totally Explained

Everything about Standard Average European totally explained

Standard Average European (SAE) is a concept introduced by Benjamin Whorf to distinguish Indo-European and especially Western Indo-European languages from languages of other grammatical types. According to Whorf, people whose languages have very different systems of grammar perceive reality in different ways and conceive of it in different forms. He further hypothesized that language wields a profound influence on human thought - this is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Studies of grammatical systems appear to support the existence of large language groups or sprachbunds. The more central members of the SAE sprachbund are Romance, Western Germanic, Baltic and Slavic. The North Germanic and Eastern European languages tend to be more peripheral members. Alexander Gode, who was instrumental in the development of Interlingua, characterized this language as Standard Average European.(External Link

)(External Link

) The Romance, Germanic, and Slavic control languages of Interlingua are reflective of the language groups most often included in the SAE sprachbund. Piron described the vocabulary of Esperanto as being largely Romance and especially French, with Germanic and Slavic elements. (External Link

). However, Piron didn't describe Esperanto as being Standard Average European.

Standard Average European as a sprachbund

According to Martin Haspelmath (2001), the SAE languages form a sprachbund characterized by the following features:

definite and indefinite articles (for example English the vs. a);
postnominal relative clauses with inflected, resumptive relative pronouns (for example English who vs. whom);
a periphrastic perfect formed with 'have' plus a passive participle (for example English I have said);
a preponderance of generalizing predicates to encode experiencers, for example experiencers appear as surface subjects in nominative case, for example English I like music);
a passive construction formed with a passive participle plus an intransitive copula-like verb (for example English I am known);
a prominence of anticausatives in inchoative-causative pairs, for example in the pair The snow melts vs. The flame melts the ice, the intransitive verb is derived from the transitive);
dative external possessors (for example German Die Mutter wusch dem Kind die Haare = The mother washed the child's hair);
verbal negation with a negative indefinite (for example English Nobody listened);
particle comparatives in comparisons of inequality (for example English bigger than an elephant) ;
equative constructions based on adverbial-relative clause structures (for example French grand comme un élephant);
subject person affixes as strict agreement markers, for example the verb is inflected for person and number of the subject, but subject pronouns may not be dropped (only in some languages, such as German and French);
differentiation between intensifiers and reflexive pronouns (for example German intensifier selbst vs. reflexive sich).

Besides these features, which are uncommon outside Europe and thus useful for defining the SAE area, Haspelmath (2001) lists further features characteristic of European languages (but also found elsewhere):

verb-initial order in yes/no questions;

comparative inflection of adjectives (for example English bigger);

conjunction A and B;

syncretism of comitative and instrumental cases (for example English with my friends vs. with a knife);

suppletivism in second vs. two;

no distinction between alienable (for example legal property) and inalienable (for example body part) possession;

no distinction between inclusive ("we and you") and exclusive ("we and not you") first-person plural pronouns;

no productive usage of reduplication;

topic and focus expressed by intonation and word order;

word order Subject Verb Object;

only one gerund, preference for finite subordinate clauses;

specific "neither-nor" construction;

phasal adverbs (for example English already, still, not yet);

tendency towards replacement of past tense by perfect tense. There is also a broad agreement in the following parameters (not listed in Haspelmath 2001):

absence of phonemic opposition velar/uvular;

only pulmonic consonants;

at least three degrees of vowel height (minimum inventory i e a o u);

predominantly suffixing morphology;

moderately synthetic fusional morphological typology;

nominative-accusative morphosyntactic alignment. The sprachbund defined this way consists of the following languages:

Albanian;

Greek;

Hungarian. The Balkan sprachbund is thus included. Not all the languages listed above show all the twelve listed features; the western European languages show more SAE features than the eastern and northern ones, with German, Dutch, French, Occitan and the Northern Italian languages at the core of the sprachbund. All SAE languages except Hungarian are Indo-European languages, but not all Indo-European languages are SAE languages: the Celtic, Armenian and Indo-Iranian languages remain outside the SAE sprachbund, as do the non-Indo-European languages of Europe except Hungarian.
The Standard Average European sprachbund is most likely the result of ongoing language contact beginning in the time of the Völkerwanderung and continuing during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance until today. Inheritance of the SAE features from Proto-Indo-European can be ruled out because Proto-Indo-European, as currently reconstructed, lacked most of the SAE features.

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