Re: CHAT: R: Italian Particles

At 1:41 pm +0200 18/4/00, BP Jonsson wrote:
>At 16:51 18.4.2000 +1200, andrew wrote:
>
>>Hmm.  I'm just wondering if this feature could be adapted for Brithenig
>>(Celtic substrata and all that) and how.
>
>Which would make'em an areal feature, since I just adopted them for
>Maneyx! :-)
Yes - but do you mean by "'em"?  Andrew's comment is regarding the reduced
compulsory proclitic subject pronouns of the GalloItalic dialects, which
surely an extension of the pan-Romance use of proclitic verbal
pro-complements?   The pleonistic adverbs mentioned below and the
pleonistic particles (like Welsh 'mi'/'fe') used to some extent in the
Celticlangs do not seem to me to be the same thing.

>They provide a way to convert a V2 language into a VSO language.
Yet the trend in the Brittonic langs has surely been from VSO (still
preserved AFAIK in the Gaeliclangs & still the norm in Welsh) towards V2
word order (now the norm in Breton).

All the evidence points to (insular) Celtic as being _originally_ VSO.  Why
this should be so is AFAIK unknown and one of those features that
"Celto-Semitists" like to point as evidence of Semitic influence  :)

>In Old
>Norse one often finds a pleonastic adverb (mostly _nú_ or _þá_) which
>induces a kind of virtual VSO.  I've been playing around with the idea of
>turning these adverbs into tense marking prefixes...
Yep - a possible development, methinks, but not what the mis-named "Italian
particles" are.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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