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Re: Basque Gender Marking (was Re: Further language development Q's)

From:Tamas Racsko <tracsko@...>
Date:Monday, September 27, 2004, 10:09
On 25 Sep 2004 11:07:57 "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@UCH...> wrote:

> There are much better examples (e.g., Georgian) of verbs agreeing > with all arguments, so you need not have cited Sumerian.
There is another important factor of choosing examples, that is the available knowledge of the individual, in this very case: mine. :)) I am much more familiar with Sumerian than with Georgian. The others I leave unanswered because IMHO they belong rather to the discipline of the gnoseology than to the linguistics. Its another interesting topic but I would not be discuss it here. However, if sign languages can be treated as languages, I do not find it heretic to treat witten Sumerian as a laguage, even if its vocal form would be a completely different idiom. I do not find it a possible theory to state that people in 3000 B.C. would have tried to cheat us by inventing an unnatural "conlang", i.e. written Sumerian. Therefore, if it would be a conlang, it still would reflect real, natural features of early Mesopotamian linguistic area that is worth to cite as examples.