Re: [tied] Daci

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 12695
Date: 2002-03-15

From:  "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
Date:  Fri Mar 15, 2002  10:26 am
Subject:  Re: Daci
 
> ... 2) an acquaintance of mine, who was once married to a Polish woman and claims he speaks Polish, said this happened in Polish too (but then he says many other extraordinary things; he used to be a chemical engineer working with various wood-impregnating materials, containning, among other things, mercury, which reminds me that since lithium is a di-valent metallic element, as are lead and mercury, and not used for any biological compound in living creatures, perhaps it works by replacing those heavy metals in organic, amino-acid-based compounds, but this was a digression...).
 
The existence of the construction in some northern dialects of Russian is a well-known fact, but your friend misinformed you about Polish. (By the way, whatever the digression is about, lithium, being one of the alkali metals, is monovalent.)
 
> The point I was trying to make, some sentences back, is that such constructions may "hide" in the language. You ask native speakers of the language: "In your language, do you say so-and-so?". "No", they say. But they do. It may even surface first time in poetry, contrary to your argument against the early appearance of a "do" construction in English.
 
All right, if a native speaker's word means anything, we ain't got no articles in Polish, and very certainly no postfixed articles. Not even hidden ones. And please don't tell me that that's what native speakers always say, unless you can prove me wrong empirically.
 
> ... Now to the application: Obviously the late appearance in the Balkan languages of suffixed articles can't be used as an argument that it wasn't used in the spoken language. Imagine the experiment that all we knew of 21st century Russian was a collection of various laws. Would we conclude from them that Russian had a suffixed article -ot, -ta, -to? Not very likely, I'd say.
 
What we can state with any degree of plausibility is that Bulgaro/Macedonian Slavic (plus some Serbian dialects) developed the inherited noun + enclitic pronoun syntagm (originally a marginal construction) into a system of obligatory definiteness-markers, which co-evolved with a similar system in Romanian (+ Albanian) and was perhaps inspired by the latter. We can date, roughly, the emergence of the the full-fledged system. It's easy to speculate that the system might derive from Dacian, since Dacian is dead and the Dacians can't protest. However, to quote Wittgenstein, "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen".
 
> And as to Greek: Didn't already Classical Greek have a prefixed independent (*so, *sa, *tod) based definite article?
 
So what? Albanian also has a "free" article that precedes some nouns and substantivised adjectives. What was once "pre-" may easily become "post-" (witness East Scandinavian articles). Such shifts are common in contact situations.
 
> As for your argument that Albanian would have lost inherited suffixed definiteness because of upheavals in the morphology; yes, I understand your point, but I think you put the cart before the horse: A language will not let the morphology of a form deteriorate, unless the language has decided (pardon the metaphor) that that form is superfluous.
 
The functionalist claim that a language will not permit "indispensable" morphemes to undergo phonological erosion is empirically falsified by numerous cases in which a theoretically "undesirable" change does occur. How would you determine, as a linguist, which elements are really superfluous (or, for that matter, which are indispensable and cannot be lost)? If you argue a posteriori that "X must have been superfluous because it disappeared", the argument becomes a circular pseudo-explanation.
 
Grammatical categories are often lost or merged (together with their functions) without any kind of compensation (think of grammatical gender in English, or the optative in NW Germanic, or the dual in language after language). Sound change is not blocked just because it eats up the morphology. Phonetic reduction very often destroys inflections, and people learn to live without them. Most case forms fell together in Old Albanian (so that now singular nouns have only two cases, the nom.-acc. and the dat.-gen.-abl.) and the speakers did not protest. Why should they have opposed the loss of postfixed articles rather than let the phonology do its damnedest and see what happened?
 
Piotr