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Re: Linguistic Universals?

From:Charles <catty@...>
Date:Friday, November 12, 1999, 0:00
Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:

> > Why have both morphological cases (inflections) > > and also have prepositions? > > Well, so does Greek, Germanic, Celtic,... Redundancy is one possible > answer. But note that some prepositions can govern two cases, with > different meaning, so it's not quite useless.
I wouldn't dare to call any language feature useless. The uses are often very subtle though. In this instance, not so subtle:
> > Were the prepositions > > "originally" (there was no true origin I suppose) > > adverbs? > > That's the assumption. The IE noun cases had quite vague senses when > used alone (not as a core argument of the verb), and adverbs were > often used to specify more precisely the relation of these non-core > nouns to the verb action. So they were reinterpreted as prepositions.
Now it makes more sense to me. (If it was happening already in PIE.)
> > 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. > > Says who? Verb prefixes occur in Samskrta (the name itself is an > example), Slavic, Greek, Germanic, Celtic, and probably in the > branches I don't know about too. It's true that no prefixed verb forms > are normally reconstructed specifically for PIE, but that does not > mean they were not used then.
OK, they used different adverbs ... makes sense too.
> And I think I once saw a list of examples where different branches had > the same (non-obvious) meaning for specific prefix-verb combinations, > which would point to that meaning being 'invented' in PIE times.
Sometimes I get a really good answer ... poly-thanks.