'substantial surprise'

Esa Itkonen eitkonen at utu.fi
Thu Apr 23 14:13:19 UTC 2009


Dear Funknetters: Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson have written an important article 'The myth of language universals' (Behavioral and Brain Sciences). Their thesis is that our knowledge of linguistic diversity is far from complete. Even the most self-evident generalizations may be, and are, falsified. On two occasions they mention the fact that one way to express sentence negation in Ancient Tamil is by means of zero (i.e. lack of tense marker). In brief, "almost every new language description still guarantees substantial surprises".

In fact, it need not even be a NEW language description which produces a substantial surprise, it can also be an old but neglected one. Again, interestingly, we have to do with Ancient Tamil. Proto-Tamil (from which Ancient Tamil had descended) is assumed to have had at least four inflecting cases, Ancient Tamil had seven (or eight if vocative counts too), and Modern Tamil has eight (if benefactive in N-DAT-aaka does not count). Against this rather unexceptional background it is rather surprising to learn that case-endings could be, and were, either interchanged or simply dropped in Ancient Tamil. There can be no doubt about this fact. It is directly documented by all existing texts; it is confirmed by the (two thousand years old) grammar Tolkaappiyam; and it is further confirmed by such living authorities on Ancient Tamil as Thomas Lehmann and Asko Parpola. This phenomenon of suffix-dropping extends to non-finite verbs as well, with the result that a typical sentence is jus
t a string of uninflected roots, with the final word (= finite verb) as the only inflecting one.

How can this phenomenon be explained? Is it due to the fact that all existing texts are poems? When asked, Lehmann replied: "This could be the answer", while Parpola shrugged: "Nobody knows."

In any case, this phenomenon is surely interesting enough to be more widely known (or so I naively thought). Hence, I wrote a paper (in 2003) and sent it to a typological journal. It was rejected by two referees both of whom declared the phenomenon in question to be impossible.(And, believe it or not, one of the referees ALSO claimed it to be thoroughly common, and even one that occurs in the author's, i.e. my, native language, i.e. Finnish, which borders on insanity.)

This was not the first time that my ideology has clashed with that of referees. I do not see the value of repeating what has been said hundreds of times before; rather, I see the value of inventing/discovering something new. 90% of the referees with whom I have dealt with during the last 35 years or so, hold the opposite view. This is why, if my contribution has been accepted at all, it has more often than not been accepted by the editor and contary to the referees' opinion.

To sum up, this phenomenon is real; it provides a "genuine surprise" à la Evans & Levinson; and it can be read on my home-page (click below) under the title "A case system with interchangeable and optional endings" (2003).

Esa 

Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen



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