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

At 11:08 PM 2/15/99 -0500, Steg Belsky wrote:
>On Mon, 15 Feb 1999 15:46:06 -0500 Tim Smith <timsmith@...>
>writes:
>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").
That sounds like Hausa, which has the tense marking on the subject pronoun
rather than on the verb.

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?
Sort of.  What I'm saying is that probably _all_ verb-subject agreement
affixes are ultimately derived from subject pronouns; it's just that in some
languages they're farther along in the process of being fused with the verb
than in others.  The Latin 3rd-person-singular suffix _-t_ bears no
resemblance to any of the Latin third-person pronouns, but presumably it's
descended from some much older pronoun that had already become fully affixed
in Proto-Indo-European.  It's a cyclical process: independent words become
clitics, the clitics become affixes, the affixes get squished together with
other affixes and with lexical stems, and eventually they're eroded by
phonological change and disappear; in the meantime, new independent words
take over the same functions (optionally at first, used as stylistic
variants or for extra emphasis, then becoming mandatory as the old affixes
disappear), and the cycle repeats.  This happens not only with subject (and
sometimes object) pronouns becoming agreement affixes on verbs, but also
with auxiliary verbs becoming tense/mood/aspect affixes, with adpositions
becoming case affixes, etc.  Thus languages evolve from isolating to
agglutinative to fusional ("inflectional") and back to isolating, etc.
Obviously I'm grossly oversimplifying, but I think it's generally agreed now
that something like this is the general pattern.

-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

The human mind is inherently fallible.  It sees patterns where there is only
random clustering, overestimates and underestimates odds depending on
emotional need, ignores obvious facts that contradict already established
conclusions.  Hopes and fears become detailed memories.  And absolutely
correct conclusions are drawn from completely inadequate evidence.
        - Alexander Jablokov, _Deepdrive_ (Avon Books, 1998, p. 269)