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Re: Theory about the evolution of languages

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Saturday, August 21, 2004, 4:56
From:    Jim Henry <jimhenry@...>
> "Mark P. Line" <mark@...> skribis: > > 2. Clitics can't go just anywhere. They're just as much a part of the > > morphosyntax and phonology of the language as any other. (A counterexample > > would have to be a clitic that can attach to any word of any sentence, > > while producing some coherently modified meaning of any constituent it > > might thereby make itself part of. That's not very likely, is it.) > > Esperanto has at least one prefix (mal-) and several modifier > particles (ne, jam, ankaux, ecx...) that can precede just about any > word. A language that has non-syllabic clitics with the same meaning > or role as those is readily imaginable, though I don't know of an example > offhand.
I would be very wary about making any theoretical claims on the basis of how a constructed language works. Although there are a few native speakers of Esperanto, the level of fluency that most Esperantists have is so minimal that it's difficult to distinguish an important generalization about language from some failure of the speaker to acquire the language perfectly (as most adult speakers will). One possible counterexample along the lines Mark mentions would be several clitics in Meskwaki, such as _iyo_ "of course". Meskwaki is a fairly radically nonconfigurational language, where any constituent tends to be assigned a particular surface word-order on the basis of discourse-functional properties. These clitics thus show up in surprising places, though their tendency is to be in second position and enclitic. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637