Re: Degrees of volition in active languages (was Re:Chevraqis: asketch)

"H. S. Teoh" wrote:
> What I meant to say was, I know that sometimes languages do gain
> complexity, but I haven't quite figured out why it would.
Quite simply, words become affixes.  For example, in the development of
Latin to the Romance Langs, the original future tense had been lost (due
to sound changes that caused it to be homophonous with the imperfect in
certain conjugations, IIRC).  The Romans used several ways to get around
it, once was infinitive + habere, originally with a meaning of something
like "have to ___", thus, instead of the classic _cantabo:_ (I will
sing), you had _cantare habeo_, by the time you get to the Romance
langs, this has been contracted to (for Spanish) _cantaré_ < _cantar_ +
_he_ (the descendant of habeo).  Originally, this was a clitic, and
object pronouns could insert themselves between the infinitive and the
ending, thus _cantar-lo-é_, which still exists in Portuguese
(canta-lo-hei, IIRC).  Another common phenomenon is for adpositions to
become case-suffixes.  I can't think of any specific examples from
natlangs, but conlang-wise, W's cases are derived from postpositions,
for example, the inessive case suffix -ka comes from a postposition _ka_
meaning "in".  Modern French, as has been discussed several times, is
developing personal prefixes from what were originally unstressed
pronouns, such as "Marie, moi, je la déteste" (sp?), literally "Mary,
myself, I her hate", where, altho written as separate words, _je_ and
_la_ are pronounced as part of _déteste_, as if it were "Marie, moi,
j'ladéteste", or something like that.  One could imagine a situation in
the future where those have become obligatory prefixes, so that even
when word order is normal it would be required, like "(Moi) je la
déteste Marie"

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