(Untitled)

[wwidsith]

So today I have been thinking about relative pronouns (that's right, it's a very boring day at work). I recently discovered, to my surprise, that there was no such thing as them in Indo-European; for some reason I had always assumed it was quite a basic, old-ish function of language.

In the Germanic languages, they borrowed the demonstrative

Comments

[muckefuck]

That's true about the Celtic languages, but it's not as scary as it seems. Compare:

Seo an leabhar a thabharfad don pháiste. "Here is the book that I will give to the child."
Seo an páiste go dtabharfad an leabhar do. "Here is the child that I will give the book to."

(This is Munster dialect. In other forms of Irish, the relative pronoun remains the same and only the use of eclipsis rather than lention distinguishes the two usages, e.g. Seo an páiste a dtabharfaidh mé an leabhar dó.)

[wwidsith]

crikey, it's not often a relative pronoun is the longest word in the sentence! awesome though. thanks.

[muckefuck]

Huh? The relative pronoun is a or (Munster only) a/go. Tabharfad/Tabharfaidh mé is "I will give". (Although it's true that this a is unstressed and often dropped in speech.)

Oh, and it would probably be remiss of me not to mention that there is a special relative form of the verb used in certain dialects (a holdover from Old Irish). For instance, Connaught Seo an leabhar a thabharfas mé don pháiste. So, again, you can drop out the relative pronoun and, between what's going on at the beginning and end of the verb, there would be no doubt in your mind what tabhair is doing in this sentence.

[wwidsith]

Doh yes, I see.

Re pre-noun inserts in English: not unlike blues lyrics? I'm thinking of Louis Armstrong, "I got those ‘gee my feet are killin' me, since I'm in the infantry’ blues..."

[muckefuck]

Oh, and a lot of languages--including Chinese and Japanese--don't need relative pronouns because they are left-branching rather than right-branching, at least when it comes to relative clauses. Thus, Chinese 歐尼爾讓他看我騎過的馬 Ōu Níěr ràng tā kàn bèi wǒ qí guò de mǎ "O'Neill let him see I ride-pass horse" = "O'Neill let him see the horse that I rode". 的 de here is the same particle used to set off other noun modifiers, e.g. 斑斑的馬 bānbān de mǎ "spotted horse".

Believe it or not, this construction is also possible in the Germanic languages, e.g. German das von mir gerittene Pferd "the by me ridden horse" = "the horse I rode". Even in English, we have colloquial turns of phrase like "that not-approved-by-me message". (It's interesting to note that while this is mostly a feature of spoken English, so-called "pre-noun inserts" in German are chiefly confined to the literary register.)

[wwidsith]

That's very interesting - especially as I don't think you can do that in OE. I wonder how early that developed in German. It sounds rather Joycean in English...I like that a lot!

[muckefuck]

It's a fair question. I think relatively late since a present-tense insert requires the present participle (e.g. der auf dem Hippokampen reitende Mann "the man riding on the hippocampus") and this is a late mediaeval or early modern borrowing from Latin, IIRC.

[weofodthignen]

I doubt very much I have the logic to really contribute to these musings, but I have 2 or 3 small thoughts . . .

There's the inflected infinitive in Anglo-Saxon. Something is very interesting syntactically about that, and how it relates to things like the Latin gerund. If I didn't know better I'd suspect literary influence on A-S grammar there, but in any event, it and the subtleties of word order in the poetry make me wonder whether interestingly packed relatives aren't there, just analyzed differently.

Are you aware of the difference in usage in the US regarding relative clauses? The restrictive/nonrestrictive distinction, made with comma and "which" vs. no comma and "that" (in some people's usage, "that" also for non-restrictive references to peopleI note that classic A-S usage is a double pronoun for a relative: se þe, etc. This is modern "he who"/"that which" and similarly musty German "das was." I wonder how far these are Latin-influenced, from the POV of Latin having used interrogatives for the purpose? But I also