Re: Theory on the evolution of Languages

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 06:37:52 -0400, Afian <yann_kiraly@...> wrote:

>No offense. The following is simply a collection of clarifications.
>1. I didn't say tenses or cases got any simpler or more complex, only that
>they became more.
"Became more"? Adjust your terminology. Say "the number of tenses
increased". "Became more" is much too vague.

>2. I said that when I say tenses, I also mean aspects of them.
Well then, specify, specify, specify. Linguistics is a science, and
linguists are like most scientists: terribly precise people. You'll cause
confusion if you don't get specific.

>3. Hungarian has a future construction. If the will-future is a tense,
>this is too.
Erm... that's normally classified with modals. It's not technically a tense.
English really has only two tenses: past and non-past. Same goes with
Japanese and (I think) Arabic. In Mandarin, all designation of time/tense is
by modals.

>4. English also has the genitive. (This is Tim's ball.)
Technically, no. -'s is a clitic. You can apply it to whole phrases, like
"This is the King of Sparta's ball." Genitive in Latin, for instance, is
much more restrictive. Latin would make something like "This ball King-GEN
Sparta-GEN", "King" in the genitive having "ball" as its object and "Sparta"
in the genitive having "King" as its object. (Latin speakers, by all means
correct me if I'm wrong.) So, again, it's a clitic that indicates ownership,
not a regular expression of the genitive case.

>5. I meant to say that the tenses declined to three in Hungarian, not
>Proto-Uralic.
I'd use "decreased". "Decline" is what you do to nouns to put them in the
genitive case or what else.

Ben

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