Greetings to all!
I am not a linguist but I enjoy your list very much. Although my English
is not good, I would like to add something to the following message:
tgpedersen@... wrote:
> --- In cybalist@..., MCLSSAA2@... wrote:
> >
> > Accidental resemblances can happen in grammar as well as in
> > vocabulary. E.g. putting a pronoun prefix on subject as well as on
> > verb :: for "I, Peter, sing", French has "Moi Pierre je chante",
> and
> > Nahuatl has "niPetoloh nicuia", exactly parallel, and completely
> > accidental. So, e.g. how much reliance is there in such things
> > as looking for areas of ergative languages?
>
> That puzzled me too. Is there some Spanish dialect (or perhaps style
> of Spanish) that does something similar that might have influenced
> those that wrote down the language?
>
> Torsten
Torsten,
The Spanish translation of "I, Peter, sing" is "Yo, Pedro, canto".
If somebody says this in a meeting, for example, I am sure that any
listener would think that the speaker is addressing to some Pedro who,
of course, it is not the subject of the sentence. In fact, as a native
Spanish speaker, I feel that a construction like this in common speech
(in the sense of some Pedro talking about himself) sounds affected or
weird.
On the other hand, it is common to find plural forms like "nosotros,
los cantores, cantamos" ("we, the singers, sing") or "nosotros, Juan y
Pedro, creemos" ("we, John and Peter, believe"), but I insist, the first
person pronoun + name + verb construction seems to be strange.
I don't know if this explanation may be useful...
Omar