Re: Breton (WAS: first try at conlanging)

On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 09:35:04PM -0500, Elliott Lash wrote:
> > > Though, I'm not very good at it. I did my final project last semester on
> > > the syntax of Breton Copular Sentences...and I needed help at some points.
> >
> > Did you come to any interesting conclusions?
>
> Er...not really. I just figured out the deep structure of the sentence
> which appears to show that the Copula (underlyingly: eo) is not really
> a verb in Breton, but a tense licensing element. In essence the V
> position is empty. Also, when certain movement rules take place, like
> Subject Fronting, then the copula takes the surface representation <zo>.
> I didn't go into to much detail about the locative copula <eman~>. It
> was really a quite interesting topic and I wish I had time to look into
> it more. I also found that the same restraints movement apply in Copular
> sentences as in Long-Head Movement cases, but the elements being moved
> are different. I'm prolly not explaining it well.
>
> Elliott
Well, I'm not really familiar with some of your terminology, examples would
help (off list if you think it's too far OT). The tendency in all the
Celtic languages is for the copula to become less and less of a verb,
ending up as an unchanging syntactic marker (eg the historical development
from Old Irish to say Scots Gaelic or Manx). In p-Celtic the historic
copula still breaks surface now and again in middle Welsh (as _ys_).
Cornish and Breton make much use of patterns like :
_me a gar Breizh_ "I love Brittany" and
_Breizh a garan_  "ditto"
Historically these are "('Tis) I that loves B." and "(It's) B. that I love"
but I suspect the surface forms may have been reinterpreted. Nevertheless
this analysis explains why in _me a gar_ _te a gar_ etc. the verb stays
in the 3s, it agrees not with the fronted pronoun but with the "particle"
_a_ which is a relative pronoun and the "true" subject.

AFAIK _zo_ is the relative form of 3s pres "to be" used with definite
subjects, like Welsh _y sydd_, _sy_, so eg. _me a zo mat_ is basically
"(It is) I that is good".

The _eman~_ forms are quite interesting. They seem to start off as just
the 3s and 3pl locative, but in Breton spread to all persons. In Welsh
OTOH _y mae_ _y maent_ stay as third person only but spread from being
purely locative to include many kinds of sentences with dative clauses,
especially those with _yn_ + verbal noun.

All three langs have several words for "is" depending on whether the
the subject is fronted or not, whether it's definite or indefinite,
whether the sense is locative (or dative), and they all have rules which
are quite similar, but as they say, the devil is in the detail.
I'm sure there's a thesis there for someone :)

Keith