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Re: Celtic and Afro-Asiatic?

From:Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>
Date:Thursday, September 15, 2005, 0:21
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 PHIL101: W 6:00-8:50 Voice Mail: ext 744 Fall 05 Office Hours: W 5:00-6:00, by appointment

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Ph.D. <phil@...>