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Re: Indo-European question

From:Tom Tadfor Little <tom@...>
Date:Sunday, June 17, 2001, 1:51
Pat wrote:
>I just ordered a dictionary of Indo-European roots to play with, and I >started wondering -- how did we get inflectional endings? > >Were they originally postpositions which became attached to the nouns?
I used to wonder the same thing. I eventually learned that the question itself harbors a bias--modern English speakers encounter inflections when studying foreign languages, and so see them as something alien that must be explained. Sometimes languages become more inflected as they evolve, sometimes they become less inflected. The process you are describing can and does happen, but unless there is specific evidence to argue that it happened in some particular case, there's no reason not to regard inflections as just as primordial as other features of the language. In dealing with a reconstructed language like Proto-Indo-European, it's not easy to track the history of the inflectional system back to some kind of specific origin, any more than it is to say where a specific root "came from". In _The World's Major Languages_, the article on Indo-European reports a hypothesis that Proto-Indo-European was once an isolating language, gradually developing its inflections (the suggestion is that the nominative and accusative differentiated early (as ergative/absolutive), with the endings apparently arbitrary. Later, the oblique cases developed, possibly as you suggest, from adverbs and particles fusing onto the noun stems. I don't know how widely accepted this hypothesis is.
>If so, why do they seem to differ among languages so much? -um in Old >English marks the plural dative, but in Latin -um marks the accusative and >neuter of some nouns. > >Also, why do different nouns have different endings for different genders? >If, say, the genitive post-position was -i, why is -ae the feminine Latin >ending? Wouldn't it be -i accross the board?
The reconstructed PIE inflectional system is pretty regular and not very complicated. The different forms appear as the language evolved and differentiated into subfamilies; a dominant force was just the process of regular sound-change, which affects inflectional endings just as it does stems. The -ae, for example, comes from -a- (stem vowel) + -i (genitive ending). As early Latin evolved into the classical language, ai became ae, not just in the genitive ending but generally throughout the language. In PIE, the genitive singular is an -s ending (found in Latin third declension nouns); the Latin -i apparently comes from a distinct way of expressing a similar concept, not a sound-change from PIE. In other words, inflections are caught in the currents of language evolution just like everything else. Cheers, Tom ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tom Tadfor Little tom@telp.com Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA Telperion Productions www.telp.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~