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From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Etruscans [was: Re: The Coming of the Greeks]
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Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 16:15:00 GMT
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In article <56t4sd$bjr@fridge-nf0.shore.net>,
Steve Whittet <whittet@shore.net> wrote:

>>        So what? Attempts to estimate such rates of change have been 
>>fraught with controversy. Mr. Whittet, why don't you actually *study* 
>>historical linguistics for just once in your life???

>The reason they are fraught with contraversy is because the models
>assume a linear development. That is the part that doesn't work.

>When you look at it properly in terms of a rate of growth which
>increases at an increasing rate and connect that to the increased 
>use of boats for transportation in the 3rd millenium, what once were
>barriers now become connections, the model works just fine.

	You are dragging in a whole lot of irrelevant stuff, obfuscating
like an ink-squirting squid. The changes that I have in mind are changes
in phonology, grammar, and basic vocabulary, where it is not quite clear
that one language necessarily improves on another. For example, Old
English had u-umlaut and the fricative "kh" sound, which Modern English
lacks. OE niht was pronounced more like German nicht than modern English
"night". Also, Old English had 4 noun cases, agreement of adjectives with
nouns in gender, number, and case, and the common Germanic distinction
between "strong" and "weak" adjective conjugations -- and only 2 verb
tenses, which can be interpreted as imperfect (incomplete) and perfect
(complete) (futurity, for example, was indicated by appropriate adverbs
["later", etc .]);  though with a greater number of personal endings. 

	Modern English has serious grammatical changes; gender is now
natural rather than grammatical, only two adjectives agree with nouns, and
that only in number ("this/these", "that/those"), the only remnants of a
case system are a personal-pronoun nominative/oblique distinction ("I/me",
"he/him", "she/her", "we/us", "they/them"  -- "it/it" follows the
Indo-European Neuter Law) and the possessive suffix 's, the two tenses of
Old English are preserved, though supplemented with a large number of
compound tenses, and most of the personal endings are gone (present 3d.
pers.  sing. -s is the main remaining one; only "to be" and "to have" are
more irregular than that). 

	I also note that most, but not all, of English's basic 
vocabulary, especially such important items as pronouns, are inherited 
from Old English; there are such borrowings of semi-basic words such as 
"mountain". Even so, Old English looks like a foreign language to a 
modern-English speaker -- because of the phonological and grammatical 
changes. And those latter two are what Mr. Whittet has chosen to ignore.

	[a lot of confusion of a language with its vocabulary...]
-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
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