Talk:Sawi language (Papuan)

19 Verb Tenses? Really?

The only information in this article comes from a 1974 book called "Peace Child" by fundamentalist Christian missionary Don Richardson. Mr. Richardson is better known for writing several poorly researched books about Jesus Christ appearing in other, non-related religions and one of the many post 9/11 books about how evil Islam really is. He has no relevant education; he studied linguistics at a Christian-sponsored school for missionaries, but has no degree. I have serious doubts about the claim that the Sawi religion has "19 tenses for every verb" in "Peace Child" and I think he was probably inflating the difficulty of learning the language for his own glorification UNLESS he didn't mean tenses marked in the verb alone - and if he's using this definition the claim is unremarkable as English has over 30 tenses by that definition. I think this article was created to corroborate the questionable claims in the Don Richardson article and should probably be deleted. 69.154.76.219 02:31, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

So what other sources are there for this language - and why delete the only entry for an entire culture of people? Get a blog. It might help.Brian0324 13:35, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

The fact that there are no other sources does not make the one source cited here more credible. I have no information specifically on the Sawi language, but closely related languages such as Asmat are better documented and don't have anywhere near this level of compexity. I did not delete the entire entry, only the section about the number of tenses which is obviously inaccurate (Mr. Richardson's book claims that every verb had 19 tenses, and even in languages that do have large number of verb tenses not all of those tenses could apply to EVERY verb). This claim about the language's complexity can only be found in one fictionalized book which is full of inconsistencies. 69.154.76.219 17:28, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Could someone who has a copy of Peace Child say whether this book has any further detail about the apparently highly unique Sawi language? If we are going to leave the "19 tenses for every verb" claim in the article, we should bring it up the the standard of other language articles that go into detail about the grammar of the language, i.e. explain what each of these 19 tenses are and how they are indicated in the verbs (i.e. inflection, suffix or prefix, modifying words) so this claim has some context. 69.154.76.219 13:41, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I missed that someone has added some more information about the verb tenses before my last edit. This is an improvement over the way it was when I first brought up these questions, now could we get some more information about what tenses this language has? 69.154.76.219 13:45, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

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