At 4:19:50 PM on Monday, June 5, 2006, aquila_grande wrote:
>> There is no reason to attribute any of these to AA
>> influence.
> Why not?
> Historically, these are typical AA properties, and they
> are seen first in the IE languages that came into direct
> contact with AA languages.
The properties in question (which were inexplicably snipped
from the previous post) were:
> -Word order: SVO/VSO instead of old IE SOV.
> -Definite article
> -Preprositions instead of cases or postpositions
> -Attributs after their head
> -Loss of flexional comparative and superlative, and
> development of constructions like it: grosso, piu grosso,
> il piu grosso
> -Two genders - masculine and feminine
Well outside the Mediterranean:
* NW Germanic seems to have been SOV. The earliest Old
English still favors SOV, but late OE favors SVO.
Icelandic has also become SVO. Each has a definite
article derived from a demonstrative pronoun, and it's
not the same pronoun.
* Swedish and Danish have reduced three genders to two.
* Insular Celtic has gone from three genders to two in
historical times. It also innovated VSO word order.
* Lithuanian has gone from three genders to two.
AA influence is not involved in these changes, so clearly AA
influence is not needed to explain similar developments
elsewhere. And the notion that Romance developments are
evidence of AA influence on Latin is just plain bizarre,
never mind that I'd expect significant influence on syntax
to be accompanied by significant lexical borrowing.
Brian