--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "elmeras2000" <jer@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:
>
> > Likewise, Jens objected to my ideas on PreIE because if I'm
> > correct, it would appear then that for whatever reason IE
speakers
> > were clinging on to "thematicism" as a vital feature of their
> > language instead of letting it go because it would seem "easier"
> > from a grammaticists perspective.
>
> In point of fact I objected to an unsupported guess that speakers
> introduced such a device for no apparent reason other than
clinging
> on to it. It is commonplace that languages carry inherited stuff
> around with them for millenia on end (think of the three genders
and
> the ablaut grades which have long since lost any function they may
> have had), but it is not a generally observed fact that they just
> invent funny morphological distinctions without any functional
> correlate.
Ablaut functions as a tense marker in English, e.g. _sing_ v. _sang_
and _fling_ v. _flung_. That's not so different from one of its
original functions, perhap the only original _function_ as opposed
to a mere phonetic concomitant.
What function did gender agreement achieve? Was it ever justified
as a means of separating adjectives and nouns? In PIE, was it just
a means of having contrasting 3rd person pronouns? (Classifiers
have that use in Thai; I'd guess also in Chinese. It doesn't seem
clear whether their selection is lexical or is semantic as in
English _he_/_she_/_it_. _Him_/_her_/_it_ is a very useful survival
of the gender system in English.)
I can see how gender marking on the verb can serve as an alternative
to case marking on the noun phrases, but that is not relevant for
PIE. I suppose this is another argument that non-Anatolian PIE
should not have acquired a new gender. The argument doesn't work if
you can sustain the claim that Russian has 5 genders - derived from
3 by the animacy split.
One of the ideas floating around is that thematicising a noun made
it definite. (Demonstrative *e again.) I'm not sure that that idea
can be disproved. The problem is that is very difficult to discern
any meaning in the thematic vowel, but I'm sure Glen is simply
suggesting that it had some meaning without getting involved in a
fruitless discussion as to its meaning.
Richard.