No Proto-Celtic?

[proto-language]

Dear Gabor and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gabor Sandi" <g_sandi at hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 5:24 AM

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

<snip>

> 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,

[PCR]

I certainly would support the idea that "nominative" *-s began life as a marker
of the ergative case but rather than terming it a "particle", I consider the
likeliest origin for it as a postposition corresponding to an IE *-so, 'with',
cognate with Slavic proposition *so.

[GS]

> 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

[PCR]

I know that you are familiar with all the arguments which have been advanced to
"prove" a SOV word-order for IE but I would be greatly interested to learn your
arguments for VSO.

<snip>

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec
at ec hecc, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim
meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138)