Superlative Forms and Swallowing Camels

[Steve Long]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Sun, 3 Sep 2000 10:19:19 EDT. jer at cphling.dk wrote:

<<The consequence is that, e.g., in Indo-European, certain disputed groupings
MUST be accepted unless we are willing to swallow very awkward camels:...
[e.g.,] the Celtic superlative in *-isamo- and the Italic one in *-is(s)amo-
... cannot be assumed to have been borrowed from the other (would you borrow
a new form of the superlative, if your language has a perfectly good one
already?)....>>

(Hi, Jens!)
I must ask of course how we know that one language or the other already had
"a perfectly good form of the superlative?"

With all due respect to the writer, from whom I've already learned a great
deal, I must ask whether the case is as clear cut as he perceives it.  This
camel might be the kind you find in animal cracker boxes -- bite-sized.

Ironically, two relevant languages make no morphological distinction between
the comparative and the superlative - Manx and French.  If this says nothing
else, it proves that languages can find themselves without any form of the
superlative, much less "a perfectly good one."

Whatever forces caused the loss of the superlative in those languages may
have caused an earlier loss in either Celtic or Italic.  And that would have
meant one or the other of those two languages may have been in need of a
superlative form and therefore had a very good reason to borrow it.

And doesn't the question <<would you borrow a new form of the superlative, if
your language has a perfectly good one already?>> work both ways?  Why would
"Italo-Celtic" innovate a superlative form when they already had a perfectly
good one?

In my mind this raises again the question of how one distinguishes between a
borrowing and descent from a common ancestor, IF the word or form is actually
old
enough to predate indicia of borrowing.

Also, there are those of us who suspect that going back 4000+ years creates a
great deal of uncertainty about what languages -- both IE and non IE -- the
form could have been borrowed from.

The reconstruction the author offers -- "the Celtic superlative in *-isamo-
and the Italic one in *-is(s)amo- cannot be imagined to be parallel
developments (from *-mHo- [whence Ital./Celt *-amo-] with deictic vs. *-isto
with other adjectives)" -- does not foreclose the possibility that
development is one that occurred in some third language (or the specialized
dialect of an influential, itinerant linguistic community -- like scribes or
priests) and that both Latin and Celtic "borrowed" it independently.

And finally, why would a language borrow a word like "superlative" when
presumably back in the days of Old English, it "already had a perfectly good
one?"

Regards,
Steve Long