Re: question about classifiers

Patrick Dunn wrote:
> My question is, therefore, if I'm going to have these fifty or so pronouns
> but no nouns, how did these pronouns evolve?
Hmmm, a former noun-possessing stage?  Or a former serial verb stage.
For instance:

krz  qa xa  etu
give I  you it.is.manufactured

And word order was fairly free.  Then, later, _etu_ was shortened to
_tu_ and migrated to a fixed order, in the process losing it's
"verbness", and evolving into a suffix

krz-qa-tu-xa
give-I-it-you

> In Earth languages with things like classifiers (you know, like in Thai),
> how do these words evolve?  Are they just worn-down forms of the thing
> they clasify?
I believe so.  I suspect that what originally motivated their
development in languages with them is either areal influence, or, in the
case of the original language with it, too many homophones.  For
instance, if a word _zang_ could mean "chicken", "boat" or "book" you
might have "food-zang", "travel-zang" and "thing-zang" or something like
that, with the first element evolving into a classifier by becoming
restricted in use.

> Or are they separate words with their own evolution?  And
> how would the Advenae develop classifiers for things like "space crafts"
> or even "mechanical object"?
Why have classifiers?  You already use seperate verbs for things like
"read".  You could have something like

"They buillt it.  You fly in it" for "They built a space ship"

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