Re: Grammar structure of the various stages of IE

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...>
wrote:

>
> In general, the loss of most unstressed vowels that marks the
> beginning of the Late IE period provoked large changes to not
> only the phonetics of IE but to the accentuation, syllabics and
> subsequently the entire grammar of the language. An originally
> regular accent automatically became unpredictably "mobile",
> causing a chain-reaction that caused urgent need to regularize
> unpredictable ablaut and accent patterns. Thus, if it seems that
> I blame Late IE for much of the language's idiosyncracies and
> stubbornly refuse to blindly project much of the reconstructed
> grammar of IE back to some outrageously ancient stage called
> Nostratic, this is probably in a nutshell the reason why.
>
>

Such a language would need a lot of intellectual "maintenance" in
order not to collapse into a simple agglutinative language or
be "creolised" in some other way. Some people have said that the
history of IE grammar is simple > complicated > simple; does the
first transition correspond to the rise of a class of "memorizers"
needing rules for the languages in order to use mnemotechnics and the
latter to their being made redundant by the invention of writing?

Torsten