Re: Matein Einlich (Modern English)

From:    Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>
On 9 Feb 2005, at 2.23 pm, Matt Arriola wrote:
> > That's pretty cool, but why did everything switch around all of a
> > sudden? (postpositions, suffixed article, etc)
>
> Postpositions could come about, perhaps, by reanalysing things like 'to
> take (something) off' and generalising from that. I would suppose such
> a process would either be slow and incomplete or very quick and sudden.
Usually, such changes cooccur with a more general change in branchedness.
Georgian, e.g., in the last 1500 years or so has undergone a more or less
complete change from being almost entirely right-branching (noun-adj,
noun-gen, noun-rel, etc.) to being almost totally left-branching.  And
similarly, what prepositions it had are almost entirely absent now
except in archaizing quotations, having been supplanted by postpositions.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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