Rate of Change

[Vidhyanath Rao]

<JoatSimeon at aol.com> wrote:

> -- actually, in their earliest attested forms, the languages are
> transparently quite closely related, both lexically and in terms of
> syntax; [...] Or sentences having to do with elementary activities;
>"Ten horses of my father are pregnant" [...] etc.

I am not sure that without hindsight, equus and hippos sound
"transparently quite closely related". And if we take not generic
sentences, but those relating to past tense, I doubt that they will
sound very close to each other. How about translating the following:
    I had a white horse. I used to ride every day. Yesterday, it
    tripped, fell down and broke its leg. So, I have to go to the
    market to buy a new horse. I hope that it will be as good as
    the old horse.

Try translating these into various IE languages and see how similar they
look in terms of morphosyntax. For real fun, try translating them into
languages at the same point in time, say 2nd BCE Latin, Koine Greek and
Pali/Prakrit [Sanskrit was a learned language by this time].

---

I had started drafting the above, but did not get around to finishing
it. But recent remarks concerning use of morphemes vs "morphology" led
me to resurrect this. I am not sure what "morphology" was meant to be in
this context. For example, the PIE perfect is in Latin the perfective
(and narrates), in Greek, perfect was a resultative (though in Koine,
started to merge with the aorist) and it is the aorist that narrates,
and totally lost in Pali (in late Brahmana /upanishad prose, perfect
narrates legends/myths and is unusable in the above passage for
translation) and narration was with the preterit which was the result of
the merger of the "imperfect" with the aorist. It is the relatedness of
the morphemes and our knowledge of how syntactic categories evolve and
tend to evolve, that allows us to see the connection between the forms.

In other words, when it came to verbs, it is the morphemes played a big
role in relating IE languages, not morphosyntax.