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Which five structural traits are shared by nearly all Mesoamerican languages?
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Essentially all languages within the Mesoamerican linguistic area share five structural traits that distinguish them from neighboring languages outside the region. These traits are:1
- Nominal possession: A construction where the possessor follows the possessed noun, such as "his-house the man" to mean "the manās house".1
- Relational nouns: Locative expressions formed by combining a noun root with a possessive pronoun, such as "my-head" to signify "on me" or "at its stomach" to mean "in".1
- Vigesimal numeral systems: Counting systems based on the number 20.1
- Non-verb-final basic word order: These languages avoid subject-object-verb (SOV) order, instead utilizing VOS, VSO, or SVO structures.1
- Shared calques: A variety of loan translation compounds, such as "deer-snake" for "boa," "bird-stone" or "bird-bone" for "egg," "leg-head" for "knee," "stone(-ash)" for "lime," and "hand-neck" for "wrist".1