Hi Manuel,
I too am an amateur. What I posted about OV structure was what I had read,
but it seems reasonable to me. As regards Latin, was it really an OV
language, in the sense that Turkish or Japanese are? I know that in Caesar,
Cicero, Livy et al. this seems to be the case, but they were writing in a
contrived and deliberately archaic style. I've found a couple of quotes from
different periods of Latin which seem to show that in ordinary speech, the
earlier structure seems a bit like German, in that verbs are final in
subordinate clauses, but the positioning of the main verb is fairly free.
Combined with the fact that none of the descendant languages show any sign
of verb finality, this suggests to me that classical Latin was moving
towards VO, which is inevitably a slow process, which, by the English
example, is still not complete.
1. Early Latin - Plautus
tantas divitias habet, nescit quid faciat auro
2. Classical - Cicero
Quid ego tibi videor in epistolis? nonne plebeio sermone agere tecum?
3. Imperial - graffito at Pompeii
Admiror, paries, te non cedidisse ruinis
qui tot scriptorum taedia sustineas
3. Late - Aetheria or Sylvia (Peregrinatio ad Loca Sancta)
Tunc ait ille sanctus presbyter: ecce hic est in 200 passibus; nam si vis,
ecce modo duco vos ibi.
4. Christian - Augustine
Christus, inquit, Jesus, id est Christus Salvator. hoc est enim Iesus. nec
quaerant grammatici quam sit latinum, sed christiani quam verum.
I've just noticed that these examples also show adjectives before nouns :
tantas, plebeio, sanctus. So what does it all mean? That Latin was in a
transitional phase?
Cheers
Dennis
----- Original Message -----
From: Manuel Rosario <indoeuropean@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, 12 April, 2000 7:39 PM
Subject: Re: [cybalist] Adjective First
>
> I'm amateur of linguistics and want to post a question:
> Why Latin shows OV structure with adjectives after nouns?
> Sorry for the trivia.
> Manuel
>
>