Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?)

Thomas McFadden tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu
Thu Jun 28 19:22:36 UTC 2001


it seems to me that explanations of this type (both the one from
Vidhyanath Rao and Patrick Ryan's response to it) are going to run
serious danger of violating some desirable version of the uniformitarian
principle.  unless i misunderstand what they're arguing.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Vidhyanath Rao" <rao.3 at osu.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 9:34 PM

> <snip>

>> Most importantly, similar forms can be used to turn a clause into an
>> adjective: "The man who came yesterday" can be rendered as
>>     neRRu    vanta    manitan
>>    yesterday [come] man

>> This suggests a very different explanation: Finite verbs came from
>> verbal nouns and the order stem+pronoun then will be due to the usual
>> order of adjective+noun.

> [PCR]

> First, I think we should explicit note that Adj+N is the order associated
> with SOV.

> The application of this to IE is that I propose that IE or the language that
> produced IE had a stage in which a statement like

> *mon(u) *sek

> could be interpreted to mean either

> 'the man is cutting (something)', or

> 'the man is cut',



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