--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Harald Hammarström <haha2581@...>
> wrote:
> > > (*<ta dváraN> => *<taN dváraN> > <tU dvorU>), or how Baltic
came
> to lose
> > > the neuter gender altogether.
> >
> > Speaking of which, are there any non-Germanic, non-Anatolian IE
> languages
> > that merged the three genders into neuter vs. non-neuter? (i.e not
> > into masc. vs. fem).
> > /H
>
> Not that I've heard of.
> On the general topic of "suspicious creolisation", I read somewhere
> in a book on Latviann that the verbs of the Curonian dialect of
> Latvian have lost all inflection for number and person.
> And on the general topic of "suspicious Anatolian features in
> northern Europe" there's the 3rd sg. -s of (northern) English, and
of
> North Germanic, and the '-t' of Englsh 2nd
sg. 'art', 'wast', 'wert',
> which are supposed to be documented late in the history of that
> language (thus coming from 'below'?).
>
Also, what became preverbs and post-/prepositions in later IE, were
free particles in Hittite and early Sanskrit. That looks similar to
the "dangling prepositions" that are regularly banned in English, but
standard in Scandinavian, Dutch, and colloq northern German ('da hab'
ich Verständnis für' "that have I understanding for", ie "I can
understand/accept that").
Or, as I remember from an English textbook we read in the Gymnasium:
Emnglish officer interrogates german POW in his best trench German in
WWI: 'Wo kommen Sie her?'; subscript note comment by the Danish
Teacher's Association (the publisher): '"Where do you come from?",
ungrammatical, should be 'Woher kommen Sie?'.' Wrong, it's common in
Northern Germany.
All the Gmc languages have a set of locativic pronoun + preposition
of the type 'th/wh/here<preposition>', ie. 'thereof', 'wherewith',
But they differ as to social status, in English and the Scandinavian
languages and in Dutch they are "high" and slightly stuffy; in German
they're (supposedly) standard (but only in the south, afaIk, modern
compromise: 'dafür hab'ich Verständnis für', with preposition twice).
What I find curious is: why the r-locative?
Dutch is even weirder in this respect: it also separates the -r
pronoun from the preposition, eg. 'Daar heb ik nooit van
gehoord' "There have I never of heard", ie "That I've never heard".
So 'thereof' > 'there ... of'.
What is this -r case really? I think that when (if) (p-)PIE was an
active language (which have different cases for the 'subject' of
active and static sentences) -r was the mark of the 'subject'
of 'static' sentences.
Torsten