Miguel:
>>The issue in Mandarin, an SVO language, that inspired me was from
>>a conversation with a Chinese friend I know.
>
>Mandarin is a bit of a special case. Quoting Comrie's "Language
>Universals and Linguistic Typology":
That may be so but the word order of Mandarin has no bearing on
my proposed word order of a Mid IE. The idea from Mandarin
I took was concerning marking the boundary of a phrase with two
particles, not word order.
>The question is, how did the nominative (or the accusative, for that
>matter) become marked?
We both know that the *-m is loosely called an "accusative" marker,
yet in reality, it is the "animate definite accusative". The
gender of a word was always distinguished for both subject and
object through the use of endings or the lack thereof. Definiteness,
in Mid IE, while marked with differing case suffixes (*-m and *-et&)
in the accusative, could not be expressed in the nominative without
the use of a particle *s& in Mid IE.
Your recourse, a vague analogical change via verbal forms, is
highly assumptive and nonsensical in comparison. I rely on little
assumption here since the accusative _was_ limited in its use as
I've describe it and it's highly likely because of both phonetics
and grammatical function that nominative *-s derives from *so.
It's a cut and dry case.
>"S-marking may have arisen out of a passive construction"
Why complicate things more than you need to? I don't deny that there
were ergative constructions (to make inanimate agents) in preIE,
although I see the agent as being marked in the genitive with
unmarked patient. Agent is different from subject and so to are the
nominative and genitive endings... requiring yet more assumption on
how their differences happened.
Wasteful list of what-ifs. Rest your head, Miguel, and listen to
what I'm saying for once. You assume too much.
- gLeN
_________________________________________________________________
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail