mobile pronouns (was: No Proto-Celtic?)

[Thomas McFadden]

a point that should be brought up here is that languages seem to prefer
suffixes to prefixes in general, but it is not the case that languages
prefer VS order.  in fact it's strongly dispreferred.  and clitic pronouns
generally appear closer to the beginning of the sentence than full noun
phrases do, so positing a proto-language that was SV with full NP
subjects but VS with pronoun subjects would strike me as very odd (do such
languages exist?).  so i don't think we can argue based on agreement
suffixes alone that a language was VS at some point in its history.

On Sun, 20 May 2001, Lionel Bonnetier wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

> In a SOV language, when S is a short pronoun, and you feel S is
> linked to V rather than O, you might switch to OSV or OVS, the
> latter being preferred if the OV group is felt as a strong
> cluster.

> That's another non-linguist's opinion...

> (Hello everybody, I'm new on the list. I've always been
> interested in linguistics, but I work in technical programming,
> though I'm trying to get to natural language processing and
> semantics. Etymology is a constant source of inspiration for
> me to shed light on how ideas interconnect.)