From: fournet.arnaud
Message: 57094
Date: 2008-04-09
----- Original Message -----
From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
>
> > Is Chinese the result of a TS + Tai-Kadai creolization?
>
> I don't think we can prove Old Chinese had verb inflection.
>
> Torsten
> ================
>
> Old-Chinese (AD -1000) can be proved to have cases for pronouns.
> At least three cases : subject, accusative, genitive.
> It can be proved to have verbal morphology : #m-Root-s
> It can be proved to have apophony : *nap "enter" *nop "interior".
>
I know, but no inflection for number and person in verbs.
Torsten
================
To have complicated conjugation paradigms is useless in the first place.
Most languages do without them.
It's not a proof of creolization.
Now it's theoretically provable that Chinese could have verb inflection.
As a rule, the earliest texts in Old Chinese do not show any morphology
but this is because it's not written not because it did not exist.
We have clear proofs of that.
Variant readings of the same character kept by tradition are often caused by
little differences of shape, caused by morphology which was richer than now
in Old Chinese.
In order to prove verb inflection, one would have to sort out all variant
readings in old texts, check if the traditional variants are valid and try
to see if some variant readings display a constant pattern that can be
traced to person or number. It's theoretically possible. This requires an
amount of knowledge and patience that makes PIE studies a child's play. I
suppose nobody so far has been bold enough to try this research. And it
would also require a highly accurate reconstruction system for proto-Chinese
3500 years ago. It's like looking for a ghost's finger prints.
Declension in pronouns is more obvious.
Arnaud
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