Re: Brithenig

At 11:13 am -0500 3/4/00, Matt Pearson wrote:

[....
>
>Welsh is not V2 now, but I have heard arguments to the effect that it
>was at an earlier stage.
Presumably the same would've been true of Gaelic (both Irish & Scots).
But I would like to see the evidence.  AFAIK the earliest attested forms of
insular Celtic show a preference for VSO word order.

Middle Cornish is still largely VSO, but shows distinct shift towards the
V2 word order.  Modern Cornish & Breton are V2.

>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.
"Topic" & "focus" are, of course, very different things.  The Germanic
langs, apart from English, are typically topic-fronting & this seems to be
the more common type of fronting in languages which exhibit this feature.

>Perhaps Welsh was originally V2, and then
>lost the obligatory fronting operation.
Welsh does front the focus (not the topic).  'Unmarked' sentences with no
focus are VSO.  The non-pro-drop pronouns of the spoken language always
follow the verb (or conjugated preposition).

>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.
Considerably lesser.  Neither Spanish nor Portuguese have developed
partitive articles and it is possible in those languages to have plurals
without prefixed articles.  In Spanish we can say: "¡Hasta luego, amigos!"
but in French we must say, "Au revoir, les amis!".  It is also possible to
use 'mass nouns' as we do in English with prefixed articles; in French the
partitive is normally obligatory.

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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