Comment by seabass-labrax

I was also a bit skeptical of the article's claim that oral languages don't have as many relative classes. The only example of a 'European' oral tradition given is Norwegian, which as many people know is quite distant from other European languages more obviously in the Romance or Germanic families. Being exclusively oral is just one of many features of indigenous American languages; why pick on that as the reason why their grammar is different rather than mere geographical and linguistic distance from Europe?

Your example of Chinese is a good one. The aesthetic appeal of four-character combinations seems to have been adopted by Japanese, which uses these constructs for bureaucratic or legal terms, whereas colloquial Japanese speech might use a relative clause instead - exactly the opposite situation to what the article describes!