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Re: Linguistic Universals?

From:Charles <catty@...>
Date:Thursday, November 11, 1999, 20:00
"Grandsire, C.A." wrote:

> OV languages are more likely > to use postpositions (here again, Arabic and Japanese are perfect > examples). SVO languages can have both, and exceptions exist (Latin is > mostly SOV -at least for the unmarked order- but uses prepositions).
Latin is the one that puzzles me most ... Why have both morphological cases (inflections) and also have prepositions? Were the prepositions "originally" (there was no true origin I suppose) adverbs? Apparently they also glued them onto verbs to make productive series like in-* and pro-* etc. Odd, because this pattern does not extend back into PIE. I guess some pre-Latin conlangers did it around 1000 BC?