Re: [tied] Stative/Perfect; Indo-European /r/

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>
wrote:

>
>
> tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> > > Curious that such an unusual language
> > > would become the current most widely spoken language in the
> world, in
> > > terms of geographical extent and numbers of speakers as a

second

> > > language.
> >
> > Not really so curious. It only shows that a neat spelling system
> is not
> > as important as whatever gives a language its political and
> cultural
> > prestige. The army and the navy behind it, for example ;)
> >
>
> The main reason is it's so heavily creolised (because of the
> Nordwestblock and pre-Celtic component?) and therefore without the
> inflectional complications which beset its self-prestigious
> competitors, French with its numerous verbal forms, not to mention
> the complicated noun paradigms of German (it seems only Slavs find
> German uncomplicated
> ;-).
>
>

One or several languages or dialects spoken in the area delimited by
the Weser-Aller and Somme rivers (and on the British Isles?),
characterised by having neither the Germanic Grimm shift nor the
Celtic loss of /p/, spoken up to around the 1st century BCE-1st
century CE when it was overrun or assimilated by Germanic-speakers
presumably from the Suebian confederation. It survives in glosses in
Germanic (possibly also in insular Celtic) and personal and place
names. They are identified by surviving
-p-, by roots of the form TVT-, where T are unvoiced stops, and the
suffixes -k-, -s-, -st- and -andr-. Hans Kuhn is the one who
invented the term and did most work on it. There's plenty of it in
the archives.


Torsten