From: G&P
Message: 67298
Date: 2011-03-30
[Full text below for people interested, though I suspect there aren’t any.]
>> >>Latin seems to drop markers right and left
> >>Sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not. Standard
> >>interpretation says they're dropped, I say they're added.
>> Actually, both are right.
Torsten said:
>That would have been a relevant objection if I had been trying to provide an alternative analysis of Tacitus' sentence
Not everything is about you, Torsten. I was replying to the comment at the top. If you want a reply to your idea that verb forms originated in participles, I’ll make it clear that I'm discussing that idea, not this one.
Peter
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com,
"G&P" <G.and.P@...> wrote:
>
That would have been a relevant objection if I had been trying to provide an
alternative analysis of Tacitus' sentence in terms of classical Latin grammar,
which would have amounted to saying that its dependent clause construction is
syntactically ambiguous in Latin, but I am not, since, as I made clear in my
last posting, I am not trying to provide an alternative analysis of Tacitus'
sentence in terms of classical Latin grammar, but an alternative analysis of it
as a relic of a construction that existed in PIE and earlier, where I think the
forms of the whole mi-conjugation was originally non-finite, not finite forms.
> >>Latin seems to drop markers right and left
> >Sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not. Standard
> >interpretation says they're dropped, I say they're added.
>
> Actually, both are right. Classical Latin sometimes inserts clause
> markers where the earlier language did not need them, and sometimes
> omits them in ways that the earlier language did not. But Latin is
> a real language. Even when markers are absent, it is usually clear
> what the sentence structure is. It is also an "architectural"
> language, so that linguistic ambiguity is difficult to achieve.
> (There are overlapping forms within the morphology, which are
> ambiguous, but I think you're talking of ambiguity in clause
> structure.)
Torsten