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

From:    Tamas Racsko <tracsko@...>
On 24 Sep 2004 "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@UCH...> wrote:
> > Our understanding of its phonology and morphology are based
> > almost entirely on how Sumerian words borrowed into Akkadian
> > were pronounced, sometimes centuries after Sumerian ceased to
> > be spoken as a living language.  It is therefore difficult if
> > not impossible to know whether these kinds of collocations that
> > you mention are not just cliticized forms, and we can therefore
> > not know whether to call Sumerian polysynthetic (to the extent
> > that that term has any real meaning).
>
>   As for the phonetics, maybe you are true. However we make
> statements even on PIE phonology that is also a reconstruction.
> IMHO therefore this argument is not enough to preclude the theory-
> making.
(1) I didn't say that we can't make claims about Sumerian. I said
we must be wary about it.
(2) Deriving phonetic properties via the comparative method is
not at all like trying to figure out phonetic properties of
phonemes based solely on a writing system we know to be very
ill-suited to the language.  The large number of homophonous
words in Sumerian suggest that it may have been a tone language
of some kind. If so, so crucial a facet of the language is
completely irrecoverable from the writing system alone.

>  As for the morphology, I see things differently. We do not have
> to reach phonetical level to form morphological analysis (it is
> much more explicit in a logographic language).
On the contrary: Sumerian is notorious for lacking special
determinatives for morphological information through much of
its history.  Let me quote from Thomsen's grammar of the language:

  "The Sumerian language never attempted to render the language
  phonetically correct, exactly as it was spoken.  The very
  first stages of writing as attested in Uruk and Gemdet Nasr
  (about 3000 BC) were pictographic or ideographic in nature,
  thus rendering only the most important words like catchwords
  of an account or a literary text. This principle was never
  totally abandoned in Sumerian writing, although more and more
  grammatical elements and phonetic complements were gradually
  added. [...] Thus when we try to find out the morphophonological
  structure of the Sumerian language, we must constantly bear in
  mind that we are not dealing with a language directly but are
  reconstructing it from a very imperfect mnemonic writing system
  which had not been basically aimed at the rendering of morpho-
  phonemics.  [...] ... we must state that strictly speaking the
  only thing that we can do on this basis [of the writing being
  used as mnemonics] is to try to describe how some grammatical
  relations are expressed **in the writing** [Thomsen's emphasis].
  Since we cannot take the texts at their face value a detailed
  grammatical description of the language as presumably spoken
  would be a rather uncertain task of reconstructing.  As stated
  by M. Civil one of the pitfalls facing the Sumerologist is the
  assumption that 'what is not written in the texts is not in
  the utterance', and other pitfalls are erroneous reconstructions
  of grammatical elements where they perhaps never were present."
  [Marie Louise Thomsen _The Sumerian Language_ pp. 20-22]

Sumerian may well have been polysynthetic, and these formatives
you mention may thus not have been clitics.  The point I was trying
to make is that whenever you talk about Sumerian, you can't get
around the fact that much of our understanding is and always will
be conjectural.  Thomsen says so many times in her book, of which
the above quotes are just a fairly representative selection. There
are much better examples (e.g., Georgian) of verbs agreeing with
all arguments, so you need not have cited Sumerian.

> (Btw, in English literature, is there distinction between terms
> "polysynthetic" and "incorporating"?)
I believe others have already answered this better than I could
have, so I'll let their answers stand.

 =========================================================================
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