Re: Language Change

At 11:24 pm -0500 3/1/00, Mia Soderquist wrote:
>Could someone explain some of the ways that grammar of a language
>might change over time? I can see that it might gain or lose
>tenses, affixes of various sorts, etc, but is word order likely
>to change?
Most certainly.  Latin was essentially a SVO language; the modern
Romancelangs are basically SVO, tho with considerable variation.

The traditional Celtic languages are VSO, but Breton (and I think modern
Cornish, tho I'm not sure) has become a V2 language.

The Germanic languages had a word order similar to that still used in
modern German & Dutch, i.e. main clauses are V2 & subordinate clauses are
verb last; English & the scandinavian languages have moved toward VSO
orders in both clauses.

In short, word order is IME quite likely to change.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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