Re: Active, Was: Help with grammar terms

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