Re: Indo-European question

>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.
Hi Andreas.

This may be true, I suppose, but it arouses my suspicion. It's difficult to
imagine where hard evidence would come from, and it reminds me a little too
much of the "caveman talk" of pulp fiction and B movies, which probably
owes its origin to Europeans talking creole with native peoples and
assuming that the grammatical simplicity of the speech was a reflection of
the "primitive minds" of those they were talking with. It seems more
plausible to me that lexical growth and strategies for expressing
relationships between words would evolve in tandem, and both have probably
been with us for as far back as one cares to go. I'm having trouble
imagining people saying things like "I walk house" for centuries or
millennia, not knowing whether the speaker is walking to the house or from
the house and so missing 50% of their appointments.   ;)

But either way, I'll stand by my original statement, because the question
was about "explaining" inflections as deriving from free morphemes that
were already in place to express relationships between words...so we were
talking about a stage well past any hypothetical "string of roots without
syntax" proto-language. My comment was that thinking an inflectional
strategy for expressing relationships requires explanation but that a
free-morpheme or word-order strategy does not reflects a cultural bias. In
fact, if the history of Indo-European languages over the last few millennia
is any guide, one might judge the inflectional strategy to be more basic
and the preposition/word order strategies to represent an evolutionary
development that invites explanation.

Cheers, Tom


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tom Tadfor Little               tom@telp.com
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Telperion Productions           www.telp.com
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