Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Active, Was: Help with grammar terms

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Monday, January 24, 2000, 17:06
At 11:08 24/01/00 -0500, you wrote:
> >It shares a number of features with Hittite, because it is quite >archaic, not because of proximity. It is spoken, from the perspective >of someone in that world's European landmass, in the farthest reaches >of the Inscrutable Orient. > >Most notably, it shares the two gender system (animate/inanimate); 3 >numbers (S/D/Pl) where S & Pl are not completely distinguished and >pure dual usage is much reduced (i.e., the dual can be used for any >two things, not just natural pairs (cf. the paral in Tocharian which >is for natural pairs)); 8 cases in singular nouns, 4 in plural; two >personal pronoun forms (emphatic/unemphatic); two tenses (pres. and >past), also shared with Germanic; two verb types; two voices, though >the medio-passive is much reduced; postposing (noun+postposition). >With Tocharian, another "eastern" IE lang, and other IE langs, it >shares several verbal moods and familiar person endings (-o, -s, -t >like Latin, etc.), SOV order and articles like many modern languages. >
Phonologically speaking, does it keep the so-called laryngeals? As far as I know, only Hittite kept them among the IE languages. I'm currently re-reading a small booklet on Indo-European (from the series "Que sais-je", a series of small booklet about any subject you can imagine - the ones about linguistics and languages happen to be generally very good - ) and I find that very interesting. The most interesting part is the fact that PIE seems so foreign compared to the languages it gave birth to! Christophe Grandsire |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G. "Reality is just another point of view." homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org