Re: Conlang collaboration

En réponse à Doug Dee <AmateurLinguist@...>:

>
> I think I've seen it claimed that the lack of pro-drop in French, unlike
>
> Italian & Spanish, is a result of Germanic influence.
>
> Is that likely?
>
Unlike what John says, I doubt very much that the V2 stage of Old French (which
wasn't as strict as in Germanic languages. It was just a writing habit, and
there are quite a few hints that the spoken language didn't mind beginning a
sentence with a verb) was influenced by Old Frankish. Spanish and Italian have
received about as much Germanic influence as French, and they didn't evolve
that way.

I personally think that the language became non-pro-drop because its verbs lost
most of their personal endings due to sound changes, unlike in other Romance
languages (you see the same influence in Spanish, where ambiguous verbal forms
get quasi-automatically a subject pronoun to disambiguate them), so the subject
pronoun began to be use, first optionally to disambiguate, then felt mandatory
when its use became more widespread and that the stressed oblique forms "moi,
toi, etc..." began to be used in other contexts than as complement.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.