Re: "Tagalog, it's got a Trigger System," She Said (was; QUESTION-New project)

On Mon, 15 Feb 1999 15:46:06 -0500 Tim Smith <timsmith@...>
writes:
>At 04:00 AM 2/15/99 -0500, Steg Belsky wrote:
>>Actually, i just realized...
>>Rokbeigalmki works exactly the same way!
>>Because of the way verbs are formed/conjugated, when you say:
>>_sha:hhya ozu-mwe_
>>to mean "Shaya went" what you're literally saying is:
>>"Shaya, he went"
>>....weird....
>>-Stephen (Steg)
>Actually, in a sense, a huge number of languages work that way: all
>the
>languages in which subject pronouns are optional because they're
>redundant
>(the pronoun being implicit in the subject agreement marking on the
>verb),
>like Spanish and Italian.  Like in Latin, if you say "Brutus Caesarem
>interfecit" ("Brutus killed Caesar"), you're literally saying "Brutus,
>he
>killed Caesar", because the "he" is implicit in the _-t_ suffix on the
>verb
>(which marks third-person-singular subject agreement).  (Thus it's
>perfectly
>grammatical and normal to say simply "Caesarem interfecit" ("he/she
>killed
>Caesar) if it's clear from the context who the killer was.)
Rokbeigalmki is even more redundant than that, from the point of view of
the actual word, since the subject-tense complexes (_ozu_ in the above
example) actually are made of the pronoun (oz, "he") plus a vowel
signifying tense (u, "past").  So not just because of the verb's form,
like in Latin or Spanish, Rokbeigalmki actually uses the pronoun itself
as a vital part of the conjugation.
I think that's what you're talking about below, right?


-Stephen (Steg)

>Furthermore, it seems clear from recent work on grammaticalization
>that
>subject agreement markers originate as exactly the sort of "redundant"
>subject pronouns that you're talking about.  The pronoun starts out
>being
>used only when there's no noun subject, as in "Standard" English; then
>it
>becomes mandatory even with a noun subject (as in Rokbeigalmki and in
>the
>dialect of English that you're talking about); then it becomes
>phonologically attached to the verb, first as a clitic and finally as
>an
>affix.  (The line between "clitic" and "affix" is very fuzzy.)
>Also, I think this phenomenon of mandatory subject pronouns is found
>in many
>regional and ethnic varieties of English, not just yours.  I suspect
>that
>this will eventually become part of the standard language, and that
>sometime
>centuries or millennia in the future, verbs in whatever language(s)
>is/are
>descended from English will have subject agreement prefixes that are
>recognizably derived from these subject pronouns.
>
>- Tim
>
>-------------------------------------------------
>Tim Smith
>timsmith@global2000.net
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