No Proto-Celtic?

Thomas McFadden tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu
Fri Jun 1 18:59:33 UTC 2001


>     I maintain that the problem of word-order is irrelevant to the study of
> PIE grammar, as much as declension in Chinese or gender in Finnish. But of
> course you can write a monography on 'how to express gender in Finnish'.

again i don't think it's irrelevant, but it is incredibly hard (maybe
impossible) to reconstruct, in distinction to phonology and
morphology.  and it probably is irrelevant to the study of PIE phonology
and not terribly relevant to the study of PIE morphology.  so for all
intents and purposes arguments over PIE word order haven't and won't
have much of an effect on the general study of PIE, which is after
all largely restricted to phonology and morphology and the parts of
syntax that interface closely with the morphology, like case marking and
agreement.  but writing about PIE word order is not like writing about
Chinese declension.  PIE word order clearly existed, and it was relevant
to the grammar because it was a part of the grammar.  and the
counterargument that highly inflecting languages are different in this
respect simply doesn't go through.  note that German is more restricted
than French in the possible orders of nouns and adjectives, but German
has much more extensive agreement morphology than French.  note also
again that Finnish, a very highly inflecting language, allows a
considerable degree of word order variation, but not total freedom.  the
possibilities are constrained in a number of ways by the grammar.

writing about PIE word order is maybe a little more like writing about
what color the dinosaurs were.  it's interesting and relevant, and we can
make guesses based on what we know about similar animals in the present,
but it's really hard to do with any claim to certainty at this point, so
any hypothesis is going to be very tentative.



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