No Proto-Celtic?

[Gabor Sandi]

From: Gabor Sandi g_sandi at hotmail.com
Reply to: Thomas McFadden <tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: No Proto-Celtic?

>> To us it may look strange that the pronoun would have come after the verb
>> and not before, but this may happen, and it is standard in modern Irish,
>> isn't it?  E.g.: Scri'obhann SE' litir (he writes a letter).

>but thats because Irish is VSO, i.e. subjects in general follow the
>verb, whether they are pronouns or full NPs.  what you seem to be arguing
>for here is that in PIE full NP subjects preceded the verb, while prnonoun
>subjects followed it.  that's a very different thing, and would be rather
>surprising, i think.  again, does anyone know of such a lanuage that is
>actually attested?

Actually, I don't think that I said anything about the position of full NP
subjects relative to verbs. Still, having a different order for personal
pronouns is not that unusual, is it? In the Romance languages the direct
object of the verb normally comes after the verb if it is an NP (Je vois le
chien), but before the verb if it is a personal pronoun (Je te vois).

Whether a similar switchover can happen with the subject is another
question. I don't think that there is a theoretical reason why it can't.

For pre-PIE there is also the possibility that it was an ergative language,
with the subject of an intransitive verb behaving differently from that of a
transitive one (and like the object of a transitive verb).

For the sake of argument, let us say that *me *se *te are the singular
pronouns serving as the subject of intransitive verbs and as the object of
transitive ones, and that they normally follow the verb.

According to this hypothesis, *es me, *es se, *es te are normal for "I am",
"thou art", "(s)he/it is". If, for the sake of argument again (I am really
sticking my neck out here), we hypothesize a particle *so (coincidentally
identical to the ergative 3rd person pronoun) as the ergative particle, the
phrases "the bear sees me/thee/him" would have been sg. like *harkto-so weid
me/se/te. Here the pronoun (in the accusative) still comes after the verb
(which would be unmarked for person in the 3rd pers.sing.), i.e. the normal
word order would have been transitive EVS (with E for ergative case and S
for the case functioning as object of a transitive and subject of an
intransitive verb) and intransitive VS.

Admittedly there are problems here, including the fact that older IE
languages definitely favour VSO word order, and the PIE second person
pronouns begin with a *t, but I shall leave discussion of these issues to
another time.

All the best,

Gabor