DLW's Renewed Absence

[David L. White]

        As my never-ending efforts to get a life, someday become a real boy,
etc., seem, however unaccountably, to be bearing some fruit, I am going to
have to vanish for two or three months, in order to prepare two conference
papers in that time (not to mention that the deadline on the other one,
which is still far from perfect, got extended, a mixed blessing indeed.)
Just a few notes before I check out.
        Apologies to DGK to mis-interpreting his "one" as a "we".  The same
process has been noted in colloquial French, so I suppose I am in good
company.  The answer to my question "Why bother?" is "Because of the Old
European place-names", which I admit I overlooked.  But I do not see that
substituting for 1) Herodotus, optatives and all, 2) the Aeneid and
associated legends, and 3) an archeologocailly unfalsifiable hypothesis
positing Proto-Etruscans in the northern Aegean, 1) nothing, 2) nothing, and
3) an archeologically unfalsifiable hypothesis positing proto-Etrucans
somewhere else, really helps very much.
        With regard to "mixed languages", I am of course aware of the
supposed examples in Thomason and Kaufmann.  I must however object to their
assertion that, in influence between languages, "anything goes".  There are
at least two things that do not go:  1) mixed finite verbal morphology, and
2) redundant suffixes from a primary language intruded, rather than added
to, verbal forms of a secondary language.  To illustrate the second, I note
that when Turkish sufiixes were added on to Greek verbs and suffixes in
(dying) Anatolian Greek, they were indeed added on, so that the order of
elements was Greek verb + Greek sufix + Turkish suffix.  Apparently things
like Greek verb + Turkish suffix + Greek suffix do not occur.  This is
perhaps not terribly surprising, but it is not what an assertion that
"anything goes" would suggest.   Mixed nominal morphology, by the way, does
occur, if I am right in remembering that the Rumanian feminine vocative os
from Bulgarian.
        Taking all these things together, plus the fact that finite verbs
are ordinarily "higher in the tree" than NPs, I suggest that the genetic
descent of a language can always (theoretically) be traced through finite
verbal morphology, where this exists.  This will never be mixed, and its
affixes will always be found closer to lexical verbs than are foreign
affixes, if the examples I am aware of are a reliable guide.  Using this
standard, Mednyj Aleut is Russian, Michif is Cree, and Ma'a is Bantu.  Each
is a rather bizarre and severely influenced version of its putative genetic
ancestor, but technically there is little reason to think that what Thomason
and Kaufmann call "normal transmission" of finite verbal morphology has in
fact been interrupted, for in each case it is there, unmixed and un-intruded
upon. To some extent it is a matter of what we call things rather than what
they are,  but in any event I thought it worthwhile to point out that the
somewhat wild claims of Thomason and Kaufmann are arguably exaggerated, as
there are restrictions 1) that they fail to note, and 2) that can at least
possibly be used to determine genetic descent, considerably reducing the
incidence of "linguo-genesis" and/or "mixed languages", perhaps to zero.  Be
all this as it may, I am sure Dr. Trask would not assert that any of the
extreme developments adduced by Thomason and Kaufmann have anything to do
with Proto-Celtic, so we are at least in agreement on that.  Not only is the
finite verbal morphology of Celtic clearly IE, so is the nominal morphology.
        My answer to Dr. Justus's question is that my source is Palmer's
("the Greek Language") transliteration into Roman characters, and I have no
idea what it is based on.

Dr. David L. White