I said:
>IE doesn't seem to have the typical order that an SOV language should have
>(such as the placement of the negative before the verb, and relative
>particles placed before the clause).
Piotr:
>What makes you think that *ne wasn't placed before the verb?
Ugh, Piotr, you misunderstood. We agree completely. You're trying to
convince
someone that wasn't even objecting to a PIE SOV order. Reread the above.
I _do_ think that *ne was placed before the verb. But a typical SOV language
like say Turkish seems to have negatives AFTER the verb. In IE, this order
only appears in questions as with Latin /Estne?/ and that seems strange for
an SOV language... but I do not deny that IE was SOV, just not "typical" SOV
because it was in a state of transition from SOV to SVO as I just said.
I'm certain that the earliest layers WERE of an SOV order, the same tendency
as seen in Uralic and Altaic. I've mentioned this before. The transition of
SOV to SVO was thought by the author to be occuring _while_ IE was splitting
up, and thus was not complete. I'm agreeing with this idea and see a couple
of steps happening between the "true" SOV state of pre-IE and the atypical
SOV state with negatives before verbs of IE proper.
- gLeN
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