Re: Celtic and Afro-Asiatic?

On 9/14/05, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:

> You say that some of these are to your knowledge not found
> in Semitic languages; I must say that I haven't seen some of them
> in Celtic.  Perhaps that's all just snake oil.  Perhaps it is
> little more than VSO word order with its typological ramifications.
> Calling anyone knowledgable about VSO languages other than Celtic
> and Afro-Asiatic: do these languages show the same features?
>
Many of the most salient of the properties mentioned above are not
exactly consequences of verb-initial order, but there are definite
connections.  (VOS and VSO languages share most of their syntactic
properties; almost anything that applies to one applies to the other.)
 The polypersonal verb agreement and inflected prepositions are
definitely connected; they're both indicative of a preference for
head-marking, which is verb-initial in spades.

I won't go through every one, showing how each appears in other
verb-initial languages, because I probably couldn't do so (and first
we have to figure out whether these properties are actually shared by
Celtic and Semitic, anyway).  (Also, a lot of these I can find in
other verb-initial languages, but since they're not really artifacts
of verb-initial languages it wouldn't be productive.)  I'll touch on a
few, anyway: I've seen it argued that the "defective" agreement within
certain orders is an artifact of VSO; if anyway wants an article name
I'll go find it.  Malagasy (VOS) exhibits initial consonant mutation.
The metaphoric use of family terms is widespread across families and
word-order typologies, but I might as well mention a *lot* of
metaphoric genitives in the Mesoamerican languages.  (Itzaj: "Uwal
uyok" = "the young (in the sense of puppies) of his foot" = "toes")

Anyway, it's speculative (and fringey) to argue for genetic
relatedness or substrate influences based on syntactic similarities.
(It can happen, of course, but you need a lot more evidence.  For
example, it's pretty clear Nahuatl became verb-initial-y in contact
with Mesoamerican, but we have a huge amount of evidence of
sub/superstrate, including, crucially, a lot of borrowed vocabulary
and the speakers living in the same general part of the world.)  This
is especially true for verb-initial orders, since they are very
typologically "consistent".  The features that do really correlate
with verb-initial order correlate much more reliably than any other
orders.

Oh, and if I look around, I can probably find you a book claiming
Semito-Mayan contacts as well.  Might be a fun read!

--
Patrick Littell
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