Re: Brithenig

Ray Brown wrote:

>>Not much.  However, Brithenig is not pro-drop, almost the only Romance
>>language save French that isn't (Rumansh doesn't count, as it has been
>>mugged by German).  This suggests to me that it passed through a V2
>>period, as the Germanic languages did (German is still in it, of course),
>>and Old French did too (doubtless under Germanic influence).  If so,
>>and if the influence was also Germanic, then undoubtedly it was Old
>>English that was the culprit.
>
>This is an interesting observation.  I'd assumed Brithenig was non-drop
>because phonetic attrition of final syllables, hence morphological endings,
>made it necessary to have pronoun subjects to avoid ambiguity.
>
>The question is whether the use of subject pronouns hastened the attrition
>of endings, or whether the attrition of endings triggered the mandatory use
>of subject pronouns.  If the former is correct, then I guess the V2 phase
>theory is compelling and the only possible influence has to be Old English.
>
>But I have to question whether this must be so.  The modern French custom
>of always putting an article, or some other determinant, before a noun
>phrase was clearly triggered by the loss of final -s marking the plural in
>speech.  Welsh has shown a similar loss of endings; it is noteworthy that
>spoken Welsh is also not pro-drop.  Clearly this cannot be attributed to a
>V2 phase as the pronouns come _after_ the verb & Welsh remains VSO object
>language in unmarked sentences.  The move to add the pronouns in speech was
>to add clarity & avoid ambiguity.
I would be very hesitant about appealing to loss of agreement morphology
as an explanation for the disappearance of pro-drop.  Pro-drop and
rich agreement often go hand in hand, but they hardly entail each other:
Russian has rich person/number agreement on verbs, but is not especially
pro-drop, while Japanese and Korean drop pronouns left and right, and
have absolutely no agreement on the verb (unless you count honorific
morphology).

Welsh is not V2 now, but I have heard arguments to the effect that it
was at an earlier stage.  V2 order and VSO order are clearly closely
related:  In head-initial V2 languages like Icelandic and Swedish, V2
may be thought of as VSO, where some argument (usually the subject,
but in principle any constituent) obligatorily moves to the preverbal
"topic/focus" position.  Perhaps Welsh was originally V2, and then
lost the obligatory fronting operation.

And as for French, the obligatoriness of determiners is to a greater
or lesser degree echoed in the other Western Romance languages
(e.g. Spanish) where the plural suffix has not been lost.

Matt.