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