Re: inalienable possession
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, November 18, 1998, 20:39 |
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At 12:35 18/11/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>> That's what we call genius! (I'm kidding!) My own personal=
opinion
>> is that the only universal you can find in language (or anywhere else)=
is:
>> everything you can think about can exist in reality. That's why I think=
the
>> discussion of naturalness against unnaturalness seems meaningless to me:
>> everything you can create is natural (if not, you couldn't have thought=
of
>> it).
>
>That's not true at all. There are lots of possibilities that simply
>don't exist, Sally's split-nominative is a good example.
Yes, at present, they just don't exist. That doesn't mean that they
can't exist, or that they never existed (maybe a language now extinct
without any descendor had a split-nominative like Sally's one). Who knows?
There are only 5000 languages all over the world, and certainly millions
(perhaps an infinity) of systems that could be languages. So it's normal for
me to think that everything is possible. Whether it is attested or not,
that's another question. In France, linguists speak of 'attested' or
'unattested' features of language, never of 'possible' or 'impossible'. We
don't know the rules (the universals) that govern language. How then can we
know what's possible or impossible?
AFAIK, no
>language has that, and yet it's quite a simple, and, in retrospect,
>obvious distinction. Center-embedding I can think of, but no language
>uses that, not regularly, at any rate. I don't think that any languages
>mix pre- and postpositions, except for a few formulaic forms (like
>English "thereof", or Latin "mecum").
Mandarin does mix pre- and postpositions as Mathias said. I read
that other languages do the same.
>
>> Couldn't it be in some natlangs the origin of their cases? I've=
read
>> somewhere that prepositions came often from others nouns or verbs.=
Imagine
>> the evolution: verbs->pre-postpositions->case endings (or beginnings).
>
>Almost always verbs --> postpositions --> case-endings. It's probably
>quite common, I don't know of any examples, but that process would
>probably take a long time, so it's not surprising that there'd be no
>known examples. We know of verbs --> adpositions, and postpositions -->
>case-endings. For example: the English verbs "concern" had the
>participle "concerning", which is now a preposition. Mandarin Chinese
>uses the verb "give" as a preposition marking indirect object.
>
>> I also
>> remember that in some languages, prepositions are conjugated like verbs.
>
>The Celtic langs do that with persons, tho the verbs don't. For
>example, in Irish: dom =3D to me, duit =3D to you, etc.
>
>--
>"It has occured to me more than once that holy boredom is good and
>sufficient reason for the invention of free will." - "Lord Leto II"
>(Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert)
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