Re: Why are primitive (read, archaic) languages so un-primitive?

From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti_at_europe.com)
Date: 06/09/04 

Date: 9 Jun 2004 06:49:15 -0700

Eugene Holman wrote:
> All languages have a difficult job to do, and in Europe many languages
> have interacted with each other to the extent that they show a general
> drift from the synthetic structures of Latin, e.g. amâmur 'we-are-loved'
> to the more analytical structure we see in its daughter language Italian:
> (noi) siamo amati. The Latin form is a single word consisting of six
> sounds, the Italian is three words, one of them, noi 'we', optional,

Sorry for splitting hairs, but this difference in the syntax of
subject personal pronouns between Latin and Italian actually does not
exist.

Just like in Italian we say "(noi) siamo amati", in Latin they said
"(nos) amamur": in both languages the pronoun "we" is optional, and
only expressed to emphasize the subject.

> another, amati, which would have a different ending if the subject was a
> group of women: (noi) siamo amate.

Right. Also consider that Italian has two alternative auxiliary verbs
for forming the passive: "essere" ('to be') and "venire" ('to come').

Between "(noi) siamo amati" and "(noi) veniamo amati" there is a
slight semantic difference, comparable to the difference between
English "we ARE loved" and "we GET loved": while the first form just
means that someone loves us, the second might imply something like
"without we have to do anything for being loved", or "whether we want
to be loved or not".

AFAIK, this nuance could not be expressed in Latin -- not by the verb
clasue, anyway.

> I do not that the Italian is simpler
> than the Latin, in some ways, particularly the introduction of
> inflectional agreement with the subject, it is more complex.
> Conventionally it is written as three words, although in speech it is a
> single phonological phrase and thus a quasi-word.

This is wrong: Italian auxiliary verbs are not bound to their main
verb more strictly than any two other words in a sentence.

Consider that they are not even inseparable: between an auxiliary and
the main verb you can insert adverbs or parentheticals. E.g.:

- "Siamo *molto* amati" ('We are loved *very much*');

- "Siamo --o perlomeno siamo stati-- amati" ('We are loved --or we
have been, anyway--.');

- Siamo, per così dire, amati" ('We are loved, in a sense').

Also, the order of the two verbs is not strictly fixed (they can be
inverted, and they often are in poetry), which is another strong hint
against gramaticalization.

Apart nitpicking, I fully agree with your main point, that whenever a
language gets simplified in some aspect, it gets more complicated in
some other point. After all, all human languages must fulfill the task
of communicating the whole spectrum of human experience, so there's no
reason to think that they should not all have more or less the same
degree of complexity.

Ciao.
Marco

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