No Proto-Celtic?

[Xavier Delamarre]

le 23/05/01 5:17, Stanley Friesen à sarima at friesen.net a écrit :

> At 09:58 PM 5/20/01 +0200, Xavier Delamarre wrote:

>> And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
>> on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a flexional
>> language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this) where the
>> SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

> Only that is not true.  Even a free word order language has a preferred,
> *neutral* order.  In Latin that order was SOV.  Word order variations in
> such languages are used to encode variations in emphasis and attitude -
> they are *not* meaningless.

    But in a flexional language, especialy of the old IE variety, they are
of secondary importance. They belong to stylistics, not to grammar.

    Even in modern French the difference of meaning between 'une tres grande
maison' and 'une maison tres grande' is minimal ; you can use both sentences
freely to express exactly the same thing (no difference in style or
emphasis). Modern Slavic languages could provide many more examples.

    I maintain that the problem of word-order is irrelevant to the study of
PIE grammar, as much as declension in Chinese or gender in Finnish. But of
course you can write a monography on 'how to express gender in Finnish'.

    It is striking the the SOV /SVO / VSO is a typical obsession of the
English speaking scholarly world, possibly due to the mother tongue where
word order is more important than in the other IE languages.

    I would rather recommend, as Watkins did, to learn PIE syntax in the
last three volumes of (Brugmann-)Delbrueck's Grundriss, than in Lehmann's or
Friedrich's books.

    XD