Re: Linguistic Universals?

> Date:         Thu, 11 Nov 1999 12:00:05 -0800
> From: Charles <catty@...>
> Latin is the one that puzzles me most ...
> 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.

>                             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.

>          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.

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.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)