R: Re: R: Re: Degrees of volition in active languages (was Re: Chevraqis: asketch)

Teoh wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 13, 2000 at 12:56:12PM +0200, Mangiat wrote:
> [snip]
> > BTW, I, too, think Greek 'So:krate:s' is ungrammatical. I have never
found a
> > Greek proper name without the article. Well, I think Greek uses a lot
> > articles. Indeed I've never studied all its declension patterns, you can
> > work well even if you remember the declension of 'ho, he, tò'.
>
> Yeah, actually, now I recall my Greek professor emphatically saying in
> class, "Use the article with proper names!". Some manuscripts, he said,
> may omit the article, but as a rule, *we* were never supposed to omit the
> article.
>
> As for the Greek article... it's actually quite an awesome thing. It's
> much more flexible than, for example, the English article, especially when
> used as a pseudo-pronoun (which, IIRC, is where it developed from). To
> say something like "the woman who had been taught", you can simply use the
> feminine article with a participle: "he: pepaideumene:". (Literally, "the
> one (feminine) having been taught (perfect ptcple).) Makes for nice,
> compact sentences! :-)
Yes, when you speak of syntetic languages, the Greek language is always a
good exemple.

> But talking about the history of the Greek article... it used to be the
> personal pronoun, and in some contexts it still retains that meaning.
PIE 'so, sa, tod' > Gr. 'ho, he tò'. I think that's the origin. 'tod' may be
related to the 3rd sg. p. of the indicative. Indeed all the articles in
modern IE langs seem to derive from IE pronominal forms (Romance 'ille' in
Latin meant 'that'; German 'd-' related to 'to-d'?).

>I
> find this quite interesting, esp. related to inventing derived condialects
> from ancestor conlangs. I'd love to know what different ways people have
> come up with when creating a derived conlang. So far, it seems to me that
> the most common method is to just apply a sound change to words, and make
> slight changes to grammar rules. Has anybody actually come up with
> something similar to the pre-classical Greek pronoun becoming the Attic
> Greek article -- i.e., the form of the word stays the same but develops a
> new function?
Yes, there will be someone there out. I just can't rember who.

Luca

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