Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Raymond A. Brown wrote:
> The pro-complements in a verbal string in modern French are all bound
> morphemes and come in a very fixed order; the speaker has the option of
> inserting the bound morphemes in the required places.   That neither makes
> modern French a "Stone Age" language nor 'computer-like'.
I thought his description of "computer-like" human languages was fishy.

> Personally, I still have little doubt whatever that if I were to be
> transported back 4000 years or more I'd still find a variety of isolating,
> fusional & agglutinatives complexes in a wide variety of 'mixes'.
Quite likely.  Actually, I suspect that the very first language(s)
was/were *isolating*, rather than polysynthetic, but that can't be
tested.

However, he may have a point about polysynthetic being more common with
stone-age peoples.  Agricultural people *would* trade more, and there'd
be people speaking it as a second language, that would tend to slightly
creolize the language.  So, the fact that polysynthetic languages tend
to be associated with stone age peoples isn't evidence that it itself is
a "stone age type".

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