No Proto-Celtic?

Douglas Carswell dcarswell at home.com
Tue Jun 5 03:17:20 UTC 2001


Couldn't modern colloquial French be considered on its way to a Subject-Verb
and Verb-Pronoun language?  Since the original pronouns have become weak, many
speakers now append the emphatic pronouns to the verb.  I viens, lui.  You can
also append it after a noun is used, i.e. Jean viens, lui.  Even though the
pronouns looks like an afterthought, many French speakers always append the
pronoun now (especially when there is no noun phrase), so it is no longer used
for emphasis, but is normal.  Emphasis is created by shifting the pronoun to
the beginning of the sentence, i.e. Lui, i viens.  However, in the standard
language, it is currently not required after the verb, and is often interrupted
by a noun phrase object.  I'm not saying it is a Verb-Pronoun language yet, but
it certainly is looking like one.  I can't think of a "standard" language that
is, however.  Any other thoughts on this?

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Indo-European mailing list [mailto:Indo-European at xkl.com]
	On Behalf Of Thomas McFadden
Sent:	Friday, June 01, 2001 1:58 PM
To:	Indo-European at xkl.com
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.

[ moderator snip ]



More information about the Indo-european mailing list