Today's variation, tomorrow's change

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On the discussion around the dictum

"Today's morphology is yesterday's syntax" (Givón),

I think it ought to be said (as George Dunkel of Zurich and I have been
doing for some time now when given the cue) that this is exactly what old
pre-traditional, i.e. pre-Neogrammarian, Indo-European Studies did from
the very outset. Have a look into Franz Bopp's Vergleichende Grammatik
from the mid-1800s and you'll find every possible line of speculation in
terms of what is now called grammaticalization: Guesses about how "to be"
could have a role to play in forms containing an /s/, or "to go" where
there is a /y/ - any such thing. It is deeply ironical that criticism
currently levelled at Indo-Europeanists (who have been criticised as long
as there has been general linguistics for not doing that instead) has now
taken the form of a friendly advice to go back to the time before our
predecessors sobered up.

Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen