Fetch

[Jess Tauber]

Hi. Chiming in on serialization- "bipartite" languages seem to have an
affinity for arising out of serialized bits and pieces- witness the
crazy-looking stems in Klamath, for instance- even accounting for the
bodypart/instrument and pathway terms, the roots are decidedly
unusual-looking. In Siouan roots have always bothered me in terms of their
makeup and semantics- from the above perspective everything now makes sense.

Serializing languages seem to be, crosslinguistically, for the most part verb
medial, isolating, analytical, when in full bloom- skews from this in terms
of constituent order type, morphological type, etc., start to change the
nature of the system.

The instrument/bodypart set in Siouan is very old, and degenerate- in such
stages bipartite languages seem to allow the importation of, from without the
stem, fresh blood in terms of iconically transparent forms (this is true in
Pomo for instance, which has a similarly degenerate instrument/path complex-
the more robust the system is the fewer such terms there seem to be- as in
Klamath, Nez Perce, etc.)- and Siouan does indeed have its share of such
transparent forms. The sound symbolic shifts may be party to this.

This is all very new to me, and while such putative historical developmental
pathways won't apply to every language in the Americas, they might apply to
enough to make looking a profitable enterprise. Very interesting stuff.

Jess Tauber
zylogy at aol.com
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