Re: Indo-European question

Tom Tadfor Little wrote:
>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.
In most articles etc that I've read on the genesis of human speech th author
seems to assume that "Proto-World" was isolating, and did at the earliest
stage lack any means for expressing number, case, tense etc - it'd've
consisted only of stems strung together to form rough sentences, along the
lines of "I hunt fox"="I hunt/hunted/will hunt fox(es)". If this is correct,
inflection really is something "later that must be explained", but I don't
know whether this view is commonly accepted among linguists.

                                             Andreas
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