No Proto-Celtic?

[bruce fraser]

 I believe Prof. Trask refers to Friedrich's chapter 'The Devil's Case...',
in the 1976 Festschrift 'Linguistic Studies Offered to Joesph Greenberg...',
which is rather difficult to track down. The basis of the argument appears
in Friedrich's 'PIE Syntax: the order of meaningful elements' (1975), and he
also discusses it in JIES 4, (1976).

Bruce Fraser

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>From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
>Date: Wed, 16 May, 2001, 1:38 PM

> Most of you will be acquainted with W. P. Lehmann's book arguing that PIE
> must have been an SOV language with typical SOV syntax.  After that book
> appeared, someone -- I think it was Paul Friedrich, but I'm not sure, and I
> apologize if I've got this wrong -- wrote a riposte, in which he argued
> that PIE must have been VSO.  This article was mischievous in tone, and the
> author made it clear that he was writing only as a devil's advocate, in
> order to show that a plausible case could be made for VSO order, if anybody
> wanted to do that.  I think the article was in Lingua, but I can't remember
> that either.  Gad -- why have I forgotten so much stuff?