The parallel development of Greek and Latin: The relative pronoun and the 'article'

Abstract

In this paper I will again consider the topic of Latin pronouns discussed at the Jerusalem colloquium of 1993. My opinion on this subject is much the same as presented in my book Über das Lateinische 1997, but I hope to develop my position at least in one point. My book's topic regards both the Indo-European prehistory of Latin and its development and passage into Romance. In this paper I wish, therefore, to consider some aspects of the pre-history of Indo-European languages and the history of Greek and Latin. In particular I will examine my contention that pronominal reference was influenced by giving up or changing the early kinds of subordination, in particular the Acl, and by a lesser use of the participle. Before examining the development of subordination we must explain how subordination was used in early Indo-European times and consider whether the clauses consisting of Subject and Predicate were the basic tool by which words were combined to give voice to the thought of the speaker. The philosophical and logical foundation of the generaly accepted theory which takes the clause as the center of the expression as truth value was developed no earlier than Aristotle's time and is today questioned by some philosophers (cf. M.Dummett 1996: 23f.). At any rate the syntactic combination of words was an important element of these changes, along with some other crucial changes concerning demonstrative-deictic pronouns and the declension of nouns and pronouns. One of the most important changes was the substitution of cases with prepositions. My idea was and remains that the use and development of these elements were and are linked. Moreover I note that, even in Chapter 29 of Brought to you by | Nanyang Technological University Authenticated Download Date | 6/8/15 1:59 AM

Latin parts of speech in historical and typological context

“…In Hittite, reflexivity is coded by the particle -za-, which however does not have a pronominal origin, and which appears in the clause initial chain of clitics. Owing to this diversity, the reconstruction of a PIE reflexive form is controversial (Calboli 2000), and some scholars such as Puddu (2005) The fact that the adjective was not considered as an autonomous part of speech in the classical grammatical tradition may also find a correspondence in typology: since Dixon (1977), it is acknowledged that many languages lack adjectives or restrict them to few functions such as age ("old," "new"), dimension ("little," "big," "long," "short"), value ("good," "bad"), or colour ("black," "white," "red"), while other qualities are coded by nouns or verbs (cf. also Wetzer 1996; Dixon and Aikhenvald 2004).…”