The order in which demonstratives,Num,Adj.,&Noun appears

[mallu]

I came across a paper titled 'Universal 20 without the LCA'.In the paper the attested and unattested order of DEMonstrative,NUMerals,Adjective &Noun is given which is quoted from Cibque,G.2005 'Deriving Greenbergs Universal 20 and its exceptions'.The list gives the following order as unattested

DEM A NUM N.
 But This doesnt hold for Malayalam(an Indic Language)
see an example
DEM       A               NUM          N.
aa        cheriya         pathu    mangakal
Those    small           ten       Mango-pl ( meaning-Those 10 mangoes which are small)
 The sentence is grammatical.Does it disprove Cinque?  Has his been ever challenged.
Hope someone would kindly answer.

[Daniel]

Is there a non semantic (syntactic) reason to distinguish numerals from adjectives?

[mallu]

non semantic (syntactic) reason-  No apparently no reason outside semantics/pragmatics.But isn't it so in English too? Other than they appear in a particular order?

[freknu]

I have no idea what the "universal 20" is supposed to be, nor do I see why this pattern would be the only one.

cf.

de små fyra
they.PRON small.AD four.CARD
the four small ones

de fyra små
they.PRON four.CARD small.AD
the four small ones

de små fyra husen
they.PRON small.AD four.CARD houses.SB
the four small houses

de fyra husen små
they.PRON four.CARD houses.SB small.AD
the four small houses

fyra husen de små
four.CARD houses.SB they.PRON small.AD
the four small houses

I don't know what a Swedish (as in from Sweden) linguist would say, but I don't see this word order as strange at all. Word order can be quite flexible, even without the full-fledge inflectional system of Old Norse or Proto-Germanic.

The same probably works in all Norse languages, and likely in German and related languages. I'm a little unsure about English. And when you get to languages like Latin you can throw it right out the window, with the incredibly flexible word order.

[mallu]

What do they mean by unattested in this context?uncommon?

[freknu]

Proven and unproven — e.g. reconstructed PIE is unattested, because there is no direct evidence to show it existed, it is inferred through deduction from comparative linguistics; while Old Norse on the other hand is attested, there are runestones and manuscripts to prove it.

[Daniel]

Also, I should have asked above: is that the only possible order (or even the dominant) order in Malayalam (or Swedish, for that matter)?

The point about Latin is a good one: Greenberg's universals are about the dominant word order in languages, not about potential word orders.

[freknu]

Ah, dominant word order, then it makes a lot more sense!

[mallu]

In Malayalam it is only a possible  word order .Rarely found in speech or writing.

[Daniel]

Ok, then that is not a counterexample. The universals are about dominant word order only.

(And I don't think any of them have actually survived as absolutes-- but almost all are still valid statistical tendencies. The new interesting question is why they are most often found like that, not why there are no exceptions-- there are exceptions, but the general pattern still exists. Why?)