Re: Language Change
| From: | Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, January 4, 2000, 7:03 |
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On Mon, 3 Jan 2000, 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? All comments appreciated!
English word order changed, becoming *much* more strict as we lost our
case endings. I've read mostly poetry in Old English (and word order is
godawfully free in poetry -- so free you sometimes have no idea what the
verb is for thirty lines), but I seem to recall that the prose word order
is SOV for the most part.