Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Tommie Powell wrote:
> There's a world of difference between a language which _permits_  polysynthetic
> expressions (like French) and a language which _requires_ them (like Cheyenne).
>
> How can you (Nik) and Ray blithely ignore that difference?  It's the difference
> between being free to express a particular thought in a variety of ways (as in
> what I've called "modern languages") or being forced to express it in only one
> way (as in what I've called "Stone Age languages").
Well, "permitting" and "requiring" aren't as much a difference as you're
making it out to be.  I don't know much French, but it's my
understanding that in spoken colloquial French, those polysynthetic
tendencies are obligatory.  Most languages only have one or two ways of
expressing a gramatical relationship.  For example, in Spanish, you must
say "Lo veo", never "*Veo lo" (and it's only a small step from using
clitics to making it into a prefix, "loveo", as it already has in the
imperative, e.g., "ma'talo"), altho one has a choice as to "Yo lo veo"
and "Lo veo", or "Puedo verlo" and "Lo puedo ver".  And the restriction
on syntax is a characteristic of polysynthetic languages, not "stone age
languages".  Look at the history, too.  French is descended from Latin,
an inflecting language, with great freedom of word order.  Modern French
has some polysynthetic tendencies, and has a more restricted word
order.  The polysynthetic tendencies are new *and*, IINM, *growing*.
Perhaps one day French will be polysynthetic, or at least
agglutinating.  We have observed among other languages an evolution
*toward* the polysynthetic type, and I can easily see how a language
might evolve from isolating to that.  Imagine if English began to use
suffixes like "-ize" and the like more, so that words like
"presidentize" became the norm (meaning "elect president") (Bill Clinton
was presidentized in 1992 and 1996, or "Bill Clinton waspresidentized
in1992 and in1996.", where "was" has become a prefix, as has "in").  I
grant that polysynthetic *may* be more common among stone age peoples,
simply due to the fact that they would communicate with other peoples
less.  A polysynthetic language would tend to become more isolating with
a large number of L2 speakers, so that "make X" would tend to replace
"X-ize", to use an English example, but that's not because isolating is
any more "advanced" or "sophisticated".

--
"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
was hanged." - Irish proverb
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