Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

At 10:49 pm -0400 21/10/98, Nik Taylor wrote:
..........
>
>Well, I don't think that these polysynthetic types *are* older than
>"modern" types.  Your example of "animal-cow" is essentially a
>gender-marker (animal gender).  When such classifiers become mandatory,
>and spread to other words in the sentences (e.g., adjectives, verbs,
>pronouns), then they become genders.
Absolutely.  They are typical of the Bantu-langs of central & southern
Africa; and those languages are not polysynthetic, but are rather of the
agglutinating type.

>
>Actually, I think that polysynthetic is the newest type.
Certainly I find it incredible that the inhabitants of pre-European America
may be thought to have retained the 'original' sort of linguistic structure
over many millennia as their forebears wandered across the old world and
over the Bering Straits and gradually settled the new world.  I'd have
thought there'd have been quite a lot of linguistic evolution going on
there.  Certainly it's difficult to believe the polysynthetic structure of
(some of) the native American languages was a retention of the structure of
the 'Ursprach'.

>My personal
>theory is that the first language was a few words, no grammar.  Much
>like pidgins, relying on context.
Having agreed with Nick throughout this debate, I do part company with him
here.  As I said in an earlier mail, we had a similar exchange on AUXLANG a
year or so back & this notion was expressed then.  Tho whether Nick would
go along with the : "Ug no like Ig - Ug kill Ig" (Why do comic books always
have 'stone-age' men called Ig, Ug, Og and the like??) school and link this
to arguments for inferior & superior languages is another matter.

.......
>fusional languages appeared, and finally those inflections were lost,
>returning to isolating, and so the cycle continued.
I certainly think a cyclic model rather than linear one probably more
accurately reflects language evolution.

>Or, perhaps, language appeared full-blown, like ISN (idioma de signos
>nicaraguense), where deaf people, who had never learned sign language,
>pooled together a group of crude signs into a pidgin, dubbed LSN (lengua
>de signos nicaraguense).  Children observed this and created a
>full-blown language, ISN.
Yep - this is way I tend to see things.   But as we will probably never be
able to prove whether Nick's idea or mine was actually the case, I don't
see any real value in arguing around the point.

>If Tommie's theory that the human mind
>prefers polysynthetic was true, one would expect a polysynthetic
>language to have emerged, yet it is, IINM, isolating.
That IMHO is a stronger argument against the "predisposition of the human
mind" theory.  Also I've not noticed any tendency either among my children
or bilingual grandchildren to develop any polysynthetic tendencies as they
aquired English (the grandchildren's other language is French  :)

Ray.