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

From:    Tamas Racsko <tracsko@...>
>  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.
Granted. :)

> 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.
There's a difference though between sign language and the kind of
language reconstructed for Sumerian:  the structure of sign languages
is amenable to modern falsification and testing; the structure of
Sumerian is not, pending the discovery and analysis of new texts.

> 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.
The point Thomsen was trying to make in the quote I cited in my
last post was precisely that Sumerian was *not* "written" even
in the same way that, say, Chinese is written.  Modern Chinese
uses many logographic and syllabic elements, and actually attempts
to reflect the entire speech stream, so that what few grammatical
elements exist in Chinese (e.g. perfectivizing -le) must be present.
The same cannot be said of Sumerian:  especially early on, it was
often the case that *no* grammatical elements were written down,
just (some of the) verbal and nominal roots deemed important to
remember the oral text, since Sumeria was still an *oral* culture.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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