Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
Message-ID: <600@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 29 Jan 88 07:27:12 GMT
References: <143@blic.BLI.COM> <6565@drutx.ATT.COM> <161@blic.BLI.COM> <2026@russell.STANFORD.EDU>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 50
Summary: That hunting hypothesis

In article <2026@russell.STANFORD.EDU>, nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU (Hideyuki Nakashima) writes:
> I was wrong in two points:
> 1) supposing Europe was primarily hunting culture.
> 2) supposing Latin was verb-middle.
> 
> Being both of them negated, isn't there still a chance to corelate
> real-timeness to word order?
>   (agriculture - Latin/Japanese - verb-last,
>    hunting - English - verb-middle)
> (I admit that German is an exception.)

E hoohaa ana teenei koorerorero.
    
A recent issue of Scientific American had an article on the prehistory
of agriculture in Europe.  It is even older than I had thought.
English started out as a Germanic language like Old Norse or Old
Icelandic, was phonologically influenced somewhat by contact with
Welsh, and then was hit by the Norman conquest:  the Normans being
Scandinavians who had recently adopted French.  Hunting had not been
of primary economic importance for any of these groups for a long time.

Before trying to find explanations for features of English or any other
language in the culture of its early speakers, would it not be wise to
take the not-very-difficult step of finding out what that culture WAS?

Let me quote a sentence from King Alfred's preface to "Pastoral Care".
(Sorry about the transliteration into ASCII; suggestions welcome.)
          '              v  '               '       
	Tha   gemunde   ic hu  seo ae  waes earest on Ebreisc
	Then  recalled  I  how the law was  first  in Hebrew
         '                              '  '    '
	getheode funden, and eft,     tha hie Crecas geleornodon,
	language found,  and in turn, when it Greeks learned,
          '              '   '              '
	tha wendon      hie hie   on  hira  agen getheode ealle,
	then translated it  they into their own  language entirely,
            '          '      'v
	and eac  ealle othre bec.
	and also every other book.

The time period we are talking about is the very late 9th century,
about 1100 years ago.  Note the position of funden and geleornodon.
This is recognisably English, but the word order is rather different.
My own suspicion, for what it is worth, is that the loss of inflexions
has had more influence on Modern English structure than any strictly
cultural phenomena (testable, perhaps, by looking at non-English
pidgins?).  Modern French is SVO, and the development of French out
of vulgar Latin is pretty well documented.  Did the French drop
agriculture and switch over to hunting?  Pull the other one, it's
got bells on.