# Could a language with no declension evolve into one with declension



## thelastchoice

I have a question that I could not find an answer to it.

Is there any example of a language without declension that evolved into one with declension?
For example, Latin is highly declined langauge with noun case and complex verb conjugation, while langauges that were derived from latin such as French has no declension. Is there any case in which a language with no declension (noun cases)such as syriac , evolved into a a descendant language with declension.?


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## cyberpedant

It would seem to me that most, if not all, started with the simple and later became more complex. Have a look here: Evolutionary linguistics.
One theory I've heard is that languages first used particles to express relationships (such as ownership and time) and later the particles were attached to the head word, resulting in conjugation and declension.


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## Riverplatense

I couldn't think of any. At best one can find some «tendencies», such as German regular simple preterite (_leb-te_, which derives from an analytic form — if I'm not wrong) or new kinds of «vocative» such as _Valè _(Valeria) in Italian or _Тань _(Таня) in Russian. But I'd say these aren't real vocatives and one might just tend to call them like that because of some IE languages with a vocative case in their declension.


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## Riverplatense

cyberpedant said:


> It would seem to me that most, if not all, started with the simple and later became more complex.



However, it's pretty difficult to explain things there's no direct evidence for. And where there are sources, it's rather difficult to maintain such an argumentation. Of course, it would be more than strange if people, when they started to talk, would have used a highly elaborated language, but if you look at, e. g., the development of Latin to Vulgar Latin and the Romance languages, it's difficult to go for that opinion. I'd rather say it's all about substitution. Nothing gets really lost, nothing is really new. And, of course, there are always the two big motors of change: thriftiness and redundance, so rather than a linear one it could be a «cyclic» development.


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## ahvalj

There are two sides in this question. From the formal viewpoint, there are many instances when the languages acquire new grammatical cases (e. g. Uralic languages are very active in this: if I am not mistaken, more than a half of the modern Hungarian case forms developed already in Central Europe in the last millennium) or when the old case forms get replaced with the new ones, formed from postpositions (Ossetic, modern Indic languages, Armenian). The main question, however, lies in the overcoming of a psychological barrier leading from a language without declension to a language with such, and I can't recall any attested language in Western Eurasia that did so in the recent past. However, I agree that for many tens of thousands of years of the history of the human speech, the rise and disappearance of the declension systems should have occurred many times.


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## Delvo

People have been speaking languages for at least fifteen hundred centuries. If languages could evolve from type X to type Y but not from type Y to type X, then all surviving languages after all this time would be type Y.


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## Scholiast

Greetings


Delvo said:


> People have been speaking languages for at least fifteen hundred centuries. If languages could evolve from type X to type Y but not from type Y to type X, then all surviving languages after all this time would be type Y.


Just one observation. Of course Delvo has a sound point in principle. But it occurs to me that, while spoken languages are constantly subject to evolution, there are two (relatively) modern developments which are likely to inhibit that evolution, or at least to impinge on it significantly.
The first is literacy (along with the wide availability of printed, and now written matter in electronic form); the second is other forms of mass-communication, travel and migration. The first will tend to arrest structural or syntactical changes in the "standard" form of a language (especially if their are printed texts which are regarded as in any sense "canonical", like the Koran or the Bible; the latter will tend to the extinction of more complex conjugational or declensional systems, as is instanced by (a) the emergence of _koine_ Greek in place of classical Attic; (b) the disappearance of most inflected forms from modern English as a result of the mediaeval collision between A-S and Norman French. I am sure other examples could be found.
Σ


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## Riverplatense

Scholiast said:


> there are two (relatively) modern developments which are likely to inhibit that evolution [...] The first is literacy



Greetings!

I wouldn't really say literacy can inhibit the evolution. Of course it can cause a «delay», but I don't think prescription and tradition can conserve a non-natural state. The destiny of Latin is a good example. Literacy and grammarians couldn't make the Classical declension and conjugation (and thus the syntax) «eternal». And you can find such syntactical changes also in modern languages. Some of them are about to become «standard», others are already.



Scholiast said:


> the latter [scil. other forms of mass-communication, travel and migration] will tend to the extinction of more complex conjugational or declensional systems



But you can also find examples showing the opposite case, such as morphologically relevant metaphony, the Romance conditional, and conjugation systems where sound reductions are compensated by «internal» flexion, such as changes of vowel quality/quantity. On the other hand that's, of course, just a few examples, about some of them one can also entertain doubts and the most developments we can follow seem indeed to show a development from synthetic to analytic typology. However, I'm not totally sure about whether or not the new structures are necessarily less complex. They may be as the grammatical-morpheme inventory is concerned, but not always in terms of categories.


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## Scholiast

Greetings once more


Riverplatense said:


> The destiny of Latin is a good example. Literacy and grammarians couldn't make the Classical declension and conjugation (and thus the syntax) «eternal»


Of course they couldn't. But that was because the "classical" language (of Cicero and Caesar) was in any case only ever studied and used by a tiny ruling (or, later, a juristic, ecclesiastical and eventually academic) élite; and the varieties of vulgar spoken Latin, with their local lexical and grammatical influences from other Italic and other dialects and tongues, used by an overwhelming majority of the population and which gave rise to the Romance languages, were precisely not anchored in or stabilised by standard written forms.
Σ


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## Riverplatense

Yes. But those who wrote didn't have any other stable source than Classical Latin. They didn't _learn _to write Vulgar Latin, I think. And yet they _wrote _Vulgar Latin. But of course you are right if you say that an overwhelming majority of the population used only Vulgar Latin.

And yet there are also some phenomena of syntactical changes in modern languages with grammaticographic and written tradition, such as the shift of Ital. _lui_ from an object to a subject pronoun, the corresponding shift of _egli_ from a free to a (semi)clitic pronoun, the «prepositional accusative» (which can also be understood as a tendency towards an objective conjugation) in some Romance languages/dialects, the general tendency of using object pronouns in free/predicative position (_it's *me*_, Ital. _io e *te*_ etc.) or case syncretism, such as German _wegen *des* Regen*s*_ → _wegen *dem* Regen_. Or, a rather recent change, the tendency of (particularly Brazilian) Portuguese to loose it's «pro-drop» state. There have been people arguing against all of these shifts, and so do a lot of grammar books or canonized literature. And yet they couldn't be stopped.


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## Gavril

Riverplatense said:


> And yet there are also some phenomena of syntactical changes in modern languages with grammaticographic and written tradition, such as [...] the general tendency of using object pronouns in free/predicative position (_it's *me*_, Ital. _io e *te*_ etc.)



I agree that it's very rare to see "It's I" in speech or writing anymore, but that doesn't mean that "It's me" has become widely accepted in writing (except writing that is meant to sound colloquial or conversational). People find ways around using object pronouns in this context: e.g. they might write "I was the one who ..." rather than "It was me who ...".

On a side note, Armenian was mentioned as a language that has innovated new case endings through fusion with postpositions. This may be true to some extent, but from what I've read, Armenian's extensive loss of final syllables and collapsing of consonant clusters makes it difficult to assess the origin of many of its affixes (including most of its case suffixes) to begin with.

For example, the now-productive plural suffix -*եր* (-_er_) may come from a fused adverb *_itero_- (cognate with Latin _iter_ "again"), or a derivational suffix *-_Vro_- (the first vowel is uncertain), or another source.


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## thelastchoice

Thank you so much. You are all awesome. Very enriching insights and a lot of information. I really appreciate your feedback.


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## francisgranada

ahvalj said:


> ...  more than a half of the modern Hungarian case forms developed already in Central Europe in the last millennium ...


I don't think so, but I've never counted them ... In other words, (almost all of) the  Hungarian case endings* were present already in the oldest written sources, even if in the oldest manuscripts (let's say till the 12/13th century) some of them are written _separetely_, which suggests that they were perceived rather as postpositions and not as "true"  suffixes/case endings. However, you are right in the sense that the development of the Hungarian case endings* (whenever it happened...) surely didn't change the agglutinative character of the Hungarian language. 

A propos: a part of the Indo-Iranian languages has lost the IE declension system, and later on, they have developed a new agglutinative-like case system. I.e. if I do understand the original question correctly, this might be an example for a group of languages that have lost the declension, but later on they have developed a kind of new declension, even if in it's "initial phase" it is not a true IE-like declension, but rather something between the _declension _and _agglutination_.   

*I have some difficulties with using the term "case ending" in case of the agglutinative languages, but it's another question ...


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## Gavril

francisgranada said:


> A propos: a part of the Indo-Iranian languages has lost the IE declension system, and later on, they have developed a new agglutinative-like case system. I.e. if I do understand the original question correctly, this might be an example for a group of languages that have lost the declension, but later on they have developed a kind of new declension, even if in it's "initial phase" it is not a true IE-like declension, but rather something between the _declension _and _agglutination_.



Maybe the bar shouldn't be raised too high when trying to identify what you call a "true IE-like declension", though?

For example, Finnish is often characterized as an agglutinative language, but some of its most common affixes, such as _-i-_ (which indicates noun plurality before most case suffixes), actually seem less agglutinative (in many respects) than certain inflectional suffixes in e.g. Latin.


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## ahvalj

francisgranada said:


> I don't think so, but I've never counted them ... In other words, (almost all of) the  Hungarian case endings* were present already in the oldest written sources, even if in the oldest manuscripts (let's say till the 12/13th century) some of them are written _separetely_, which suggests that they were perceived rather as postpositions and not as "true"  suffixes/case endings. However, you are right in the sense that the development of the Hungarian case endings* (whenever it happened...) surely didn't change the agglutinative character of the Hungarian language.


I relied on the interpretations like this one:
_Майтинская КЕ · 1955 · Венгерский язык. Часть I:_ 133


> К пространственным падежам относятся десять весьма употребительных падежей, оформители которых большей частью в XII–XIII веках нашей эры еще только превращались из послелога в падежный оформитель.


"Spatial cases are comprised of ten quite common ones, whose markers in the 12–13th centuries of the Common Era were mostly still in the process of turning from postfixes into case markers".

I think the boundary between a postposition/preposition and an affix lies in the ability of the former to be separated by another word (e. g. the first element in _in silvā_ would have been a case prefix if no adjective could have been placed between _in _and _silvā; _in contrast, the Spanish _decirlo_ and _decírselo,_ despite being written together, are not agglutinative forms since their constituting elements can be placed elsewhere, e. g. in _me lo digo_). So, we should check whether in the oldest Hungarian texts these future case affixes can be separated from the nouns by any other lexically independent element: unfortunately, I haven't seen reliable examples.



francisgranada said:


> A propos: a part of the Indo-Iranian languages has lost the IE declension system, and later on, they have developed a new agglutinative-like case system. I.e. if I do understand the original question correctly, this might be an example for a group of languages that have lost the declension, but later on they have developed a kind of new declension, even if in it's "initial phase" it is not a true IE-like declension, but rather something between the _declension _and _agglutination_.


This change is attested in its development in the Middle and New Indic languages. I don't remember the details, but from what I had read long ago I recall that, while having lost most of the inherited cases, these languages never abandoned the declension altogether, so the idea that the nominals may have case forms persisted there during the last two millennia. I also forgot to mention the Tocharian languages where the same thing has occurred.

The most unusual in the Indo-European declension is the existence of three independent sets of markers for the Singular, Dual and Plural: I don't know any other family where not occasional case markers, but the entire system would be organized like this. True, we probably can trace the roots of some of these forms, e. g. the Acc. Pl. *-_ns_ looks like the Acc. Sg. *_-m_ with the pluralizing _-s,_ or the Instr. Pl. _*-bʰis,_ found in some groups, looks derived in the same manner from the Instr. S. *-_bʰi,_ present in Armenian (though in Mycenaean Greek the same ending serves for the Instr. Pl.), but overall the speakers of the earliest attested IE languages most probably didn't already perceive these case markers as related.

It seems to me that this organization was the main reason for the subsequent collapse of the old declension system in most branches: there simply was no way to replenish the case endings that went eroded with time, since the language should have provided not one but two or three case markers, one for each number. A very Indo-European approach was found in Old Lithuanian, where (probably under the Uralic substrate/adstrate influence) four new spatial cases emerged from the former postpositions *_ēn_ (?) "in" (Greek _ἔν_), _na_ "on" (Greek _ἀνά_) and _pi_ "at" (Greek _ἐπί_) — to express the number distinctions, they were added to the existing case forms in the Singular and Plural (I don't recall having ever seen the corresponding Dual forms mentioned):

to form the Inessive (that has replaced the old Locative in modern Lithuanian and Latvian), *_-ēn_ was added to the former Locative (in the Sg.) or Accusative (in the Pl.): _šakojè_ "in the branch" (_<*-āı̯-ēn_), _šakosè_ "in the branches" (<*_-ās-ēn_), cp. the obsolete and dialectal inherited Locative _šakosù _(_*-ā-su_);
to form the Illative, -_na_ was added to the Acc. Sg. _*-n+na>-na>-n_ and to the Acc. Pl. _*-(n)s-na>-sna:_ _šakonà~šakoñ_ "into the branch", _šakósna_ "into the branches";
to form the Adessive, -_pi_ was added to the Locative (the original one in the Sg. and to the form already extended with the postposition *_-ēn_ in the Pl.): _šakáip(i)_ "at the branch", _šakósemp(i)_ "at the branches" (Acc. Pl. _*-ās + ēn + pi_);
to form the Allative, -_pi_ was added to the Genitive: _šakõsp(i)_ "towards the branch" (_*-ās-pi_), _šakum̃p(i)_ "towards the branches" (_*-ōn-pi_).
In principle, PIE had tools to build a distinction between the expression of the number and case. You may remember, we recently discussed the Slavic forms for "eyes" and "ears" where I mentioned that the Dual forms in Slavic and Indo-Iranic were formed from the Nom./Acc. Du. stem (post-PIE _okʷī _"a pair of eyes"). The common IE way to form the Nom./Acc. Pl. was _*-(e)hₐ,_ originally a collective suffix, e. g. post-PIE *_okʷā~okʷəₐ_ "several eyes". The other cases in the Plural were formed from the original stem (e. g. Gen. Pl. *_okʷom_ "of the several eyes"), but, if the principle found in this word in the Dual could have been extended to the Plural, the language could have received a system when the Dual and the Plural in the neuter words would be characterized by different stems and different endings, i. e. Nom./Acc. *_okʷī_ — *_okʷā,_ Gen. *_okʷīı̯ou̯s_ — **_okʷāom_, Dat./Abl. *_okʷībʰō_ — **_okʷābʰos_ etc. (the forms with * are real, the ones with ** are imaginary). Then we can assume that the endings in the Dual and Plural get leveled with time, so that the language would come to a system when the difference between the Dual and the Plural forms would lie in the stem vowel, _ī _vs. _ā _for the consonant stems_._ If that system then had embraced the masculine and feminine words and the Singular, e. g. Sg. _*okʷ-_ — Du. _*okʷī-_ and Pl. _*okʷā-_ + identical or almost identical case endings (like the Instrumental Sg. _**okʷ-V-bʰi — _Du. _**okʷ-ī-bʰi — _Pl._ **okʷ-ā-bʰi_), it could have reached an agglutinative stage and become able to maintain itself and expand by embracing postpositional forms (_**okʷ-V-pi _"at the eye",_ **okʷ-ī-pi _"at the pair of eyes", _**okʷ-ā-pi _"at several eyes" or _**okʷ-V-tos_ "from the eye",_ **okʷ-ī-tos _"from the pair of eyes", _**okʷ-ā-tos _"from several eyes" etc. without an end).


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## francisgranada

ahvalj said:


> ...  I think the boundary between a postposition/preposition and an affix lies in the ability of the former to be separated by another word (e. g. the first element in _in silvā_ would have been a case prefix if no adjective could have been placed between _in _and _silvā; _in contrast, the Spanish _decirlo_ and _decírselo,_ despite being written together, are not agglutinative forms since their constituting elements can be placed elsewhere, e. g. in _me lo digo_). So, we should check whether in the oldest Hungarian texts these future case affixes can be separated from the nouns by any other lexically independent element: unfortunately, I haven't seen reliable examples.


Both the affix and the postposition is always at the end of the noun, and it appears only _once _(i.e. it is not attached to the adjectives preceding the noun). From this point of view both the suffixes and postpositions behave rather like the IE prepositions, not case ending. Now I am not able to find any example where it would make sense to put a lexically independent element between the noun and the suffix or postposition. Perhaps, it's not a criterion in Hungarian-like agglutinative languages. However, the plural marker - obviously - can lie in between:

affix: _nagy ház*ban*_ - in big house; _nagy házak_*ban *- in big houses
postposition: _nagy ház _*felett *- above big house; _nagy házak _*felett *- above big houses
(_nagy_ - big, _ház _- house, -_k_ plural marker)

The main difference seems to be that the postpositions have one only form, while the affixes typically have more forms according to the rules of the vocal harmony. E.g. _ház*ban* _but _kert*ben* _(in garden).

An observation that may be interesting:  the "case endings" (affixes) are all monosyllabic (except one pseudo-case ending, the so called "formal": _-képpen_). On the other hand almost all the postpositions have two syllables. It seems to be true also for the past (though I haven't checked them all), e.g. the today's affixes _-ra/re_ and_ -ba/be_ were disyllabic postposititions before the 12th century: _reá _and _belé_, respectively.


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## ahvalj

francisgranada said:


> An observation that may be interesting:  the "case endings" (affixes) are all monosyllabic (except one pseudo-case ending, the so called "formal": _-képpen_). On the other hand almost all the postpositions have two syllables. It seems to be true also for the past (though I haven't checked them all), e.g. the today's affixes _-ra/re_ and_ -ba/be_ were disyllabic postposititions before the 12th century: _reá _and _belé_, respectively.


The same is attested e. g. in Estonian: the Comitative -_ga_ vs. the separate preposition _kaasa_ "with" (_minuga kaasa = conmigo, _with the same element used twice), and Karelian: the Comitative _-nka_ vs. the separate preposition _kera_ "with" (_miunke = miun kera_ "with me": _aššu miunke linnah Bremenih_ "go with me to the city of Bremen" : Bremenskoit šoittajat (1936) | Karjalan Rahvahan Kirjasto, the verb is astua - Wiktionary, _-h_ is the Illative ending). In Turkish, we find _benim ile ~ benimle_ "with me", though of course it can't be a rule in the languages.


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## Delvo

When people say a language has forms for singular, dual, and "plural", does that mean the plural and dual overlap (2 could be either of them), or the "plural" starts at 3 (which means it's not really "plural" but something else that should have a different name like "triplural")?


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## ahvalj

Delvo said:


> When people say a language has forms for singular, dual, and "plural", does that mean the plural and dual overlap (2 could be either of them), or the "plural" starts at 3 (which means it's not really "plural" but something else that should have a different name like "triplural")?


In older Indo-European languages, the Dual is used for objects found in pairs ("eyes, hands, twins, parents") as well as for any two objects mentioned in the same sentence (e. g. in the phrase "I and my father went home" the verb will stand in the Dual); before disapparing, the Dual sometimes becomes confined to objects found in natural pairs. The Plural was used for objects found in three or more. These numbers thus don't overlap.


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## Dib

Some more thoughts on Scholiast's proposed influence of (universal) literacy on language evolution... I also think that this - along with established grammatical works - are slowing down recognition of grammatical changes. Take French conjugation for example. The analysis of forms like "je parle, tu parles, il parle" etc. as stand-alone pronoun+verb inflected by suffixes is purely based on literacy. If we remove the constraints of spelling, we may refine the position to claiming that French has mostly lost inflection in present singular: it's essentially "je/tu/il parl". However, we are still operating under the influence of the established analysis of these phrases as subject+verb.

If we approach the same clauses from a different analytical framework (e.g. Bantu-like or Athapaskan-like), we can claim French has developed a new verb-template based conjugation where subject and object markers are prefixed to the verb into specific slots, so that "ils me tiennent" could well be analyzed as an instantiation of such a template (subject marker - 1st/2nd person object marker - 3rd person object marker - verb stem - tense/mood marker - personal ending: il-me-x-tienn-x-x). Note that je, te etc. cannot be used anywhere outside this template. In this analysis, the true pronouns would be moi, toi, etc. which can occur freely, and add emphasis, like pronouns of pro-drop languages do. The answer to "qui te voit?" is never "je", but "moi". Similarly, the answer to "qui vois-je?" is not "te" but "toi". So, "je te le dis" may be analyzed as the pro-drop version of "moi, je te le dis" or "je te le dis, toi", etc. In other words, je, te, etc. have essentially become agglutinative inflectional markers in colloquial French, which may well be analyzed as having developed a moderately complex template-based conjugation - quite distinct from the Latin origins; but literacy and historical bias prevents us from recognizing it.

~~~

I should mention that this analysis of French grammar is not my brain-child. Unfortunately, I don't have the references handy at the moment. Therefore, I fleshed out the specific examples from what I remembered of the spirit of the arguments, I had read before. Since this is an ad-hoc write-up on the matter, please forgive its crudeness.


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## Swatters

That kind of inversion is limited to writing and formal speech though and is vanishingly rare in spontaneous conversations. The only remaining arguments against an affixal interpretation for colloquial French's weak pronouns are the possibility for the not quite dead clitic "ne" to intervene between the subject pronouns  and the rest (but that's the syntactic context where it tends to disappear the most) and the movement of the object pronouns in imperatives (positive "Donne-lui" versus négative "Lui donne pas") although that's being regularized away in some dialects.

That doesn't mean those pronominal affixes function completely as agreement markers yet, but they've been clearly moving in that direction.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> +++


Besides deviating from the topic question, our discussion has split into several topics. In this post I will focus on the plurality of -_s_.

The modern Lithuanian situation is indicative of this question: yes, a foreign speaker, seeing the pairs _avimì : avimìs_ and _sūnumì : sūnumìs_ may interpret them as an opposition of the original Singular form vs. another one derived from the former by the means of a pluralizing morpheme -_s _(though this seems to be the only place in the Lithuanian grammar that would allow such an interpretation of this -_s_). Actually, manuals of various languages are full of such "rules", which have certain mnemonic value (e. g. the foreign grammars of Russian often "derive" the _m_-Participles from the Present Pl. 1, like _делаем_ "we do" → _делаем(ый)_ "the one being done"). However, Lithuanian speakers don't analyze these endings as compound ones: they simply know that _avimì, sūnumì_ are the forms used for the Instrumental Singular and _avimìs, sūnumìs_ for the Instrumental Plural, without isolating an Instrumental format -_mi_- (especially since other declension types don't follow this pattern. e.g. _výru — výrais, mergà — mergomìs_).

Etymology doesn't answer whether the modern speakers' perception is correct. Traditionally, the Instr. Sg. form is derived from _*-mi_ (cp. Old Church Slavonic _gostьmь, synъmь_ from earlier Common Slavic _*gastimi, *sūnumi_), whereas the Instr. Pl. one from _*-mīs_ (cp. OCS _gostьmi, synъmi < *gastimī(ṣ), sūnumī(ṣ))_, and this is what you'll find almost anywhere in the literature. Indeed, the final acute lengths have shortened in Lithuanian, and in South-Eastern Lithuanian as well as the Standard language they have merged with the old short vowels, so this interpretation of -_mi_ causes no problems and fits well in the Indo-European context. However, there is a problem: in Samogitian (North-Western Lithuanian) the short_ *i, *u_ have become _ẹ, ọ,_ whereas the old final acute _*ī, *ū,_ when shortened, have become _i, u,_ and, surprisingly, the Instr. Sg. ending is not the expected _**-mẹ<*-mi,_ but -_mi_ in north Samogitian (_Zinkevičius Z · 1980 · Lietuvių kalbos istorinė gramatika. I: _224 & 233) — suggesting it has come from *-_mī_, which would disagree with any other attested IE language but would fit the pattern Pl.=Sg.+_s_. So, regardless of how old is this vowel in the Instr. Sg. ending, it must have been created by the speakers by analogy with the existing Instr. Pl. form — yet, it remains unknown whether they perceived the _-s_ in the Pl. as a pluralizer or they simply leveled the vowel in the two related formants without much thinking (cp. _darovati — daruju_ in Old East Slavic but _daruvaty — daruju_ in Ukrainian).

Let's go back to the Proto-Indo-European declension. How many endings in the Sg. and Pl. can be reliably considered appropriate for your interpretation?

Nom.: _*suhₓn-u-s_ — _*suhₓn-eu̯-es:_ _s_ in both

Gen.: _*suhₓn-eu̯-s_ — _*suhₓn-eu̯-om:_ _s_ in Sg.

Dat.: _*suhₓn-eu̯-eı̯_ — _*suhₓn-u-bʰo(s):_ _s_ in Pl. (but Gaulish _-bo_) but the endings in Sg. and Pl. are unrelated

Acc.: _*suhₓn-u-m_ — _*suhₓn-u-ns:_ s in Pl. and it looks derived from Sg.

Instr. I: _*suhₓn-u-hₑ_ — _*suhₓn-u̯-i(hₓ)s:_ Avestan Sg. _vohū, xratū, xraϑwā,_ Pl. _vaŋuhiš; _the Sg. _-hₑ_ is found in other declension types across many IE languages, e. g. Lithuanian _vyru_ < _*vīruo_ (attested in the compound adjectives, _senuoju_) < _*u̯īrō_ < _*u̯ihₓrohₑ; _in the _i_-declension, Lithuanian, has a parallel Instr. Sg. _avì_ (_Zinkevičius: _224) < _*hₒeu̯ihₑ _(if ancient); in the _u_-stems, the parallel _sūnù_ can be both from _*suhₓnuhₑ _or influenced by the _o-_declension_ (vyru)
_
Instr. II: *_suhₓn-u-bʰi_ — *_suhₓn-u-bʰi(hₓs):_ _s_ in Pl. (but Gaulish _-bi_ and Mycenaean _-φι_), the Sg. form is attested _only_ in Armenian and Balto-Slavic: in the light of the Avestan _*suhₓnu̯i(hₓ)s, _the Instr. Pl. *_-bʰi(hₓ)s _looks like a merger of *_-bʰi_ and *_-i(hₓ)s,_ which actually may have been the source of this "pluralizing" _s_ (for the merger cp. the Indo-Iranic Dat./Acc. Pl. _-bhyas_ from *_-bʰi(s)_ × _*-bʰo(s))
_
Loc.: _*suhₓn-eu̯-i~*suhₓn-ēu̯ — *suhₓn-u-su:_ _s_ in the Pl. but in the "wrong" place (the only instance of this position in the entire declension), plus the interpretation relies on the unattested Sg. **-_u_ and the insecure Greek _-σι:_ for an unbiased observer, the endings of the Sg. and Pl. look unrelated

Abl.: _*suhₓn-eu̯-t — *suhₓn-u-bʰo(s): _the Sg. is attested in Avestan (_vaŋhaot, xrataot_) and Old Latin (_castud_); Abl. Pl. = Dat. Pl., the Sg. and Pl. endings are unrelated

Voc.: _*suhₓn-eu̯ — *suhₓn-eu̯-es:_ _s_ in Pl., but the latter is simply a Nom. Pl.

So, for a PIE speaker, the pluralizing _s_ may have appeared in the Acc. Pl. and probably in the Voc. Pl.  — the latter based on a misinterpretation, yet looking like possessing a true plural _-es_. The Instr. forms are obscure and I am inclined to think that the _*-i(hₓ)s_ forms in the Instr. Pl. are older, since they don't fit the simpler pattern. The affixment of _*-bʰi_ to the Instr. Pl. in Mycenaean and Gaulish and to Instr. Sg. in Armenian and Balto-Slavic (+ see the Lithuanian problem above: if it is ancient, then only in Armenian and Slavic) doesn't allow to deduce which is the original value of this formant: Sg., Pl. or simply postpositional. The Dat. Pl. has _-s_ everywhere but in Gaulish, yet the fact that the Gauls were less successful in producing written record than the Greeks or Romans doesn't make the evidence of that language less relevant (_-bo_ is attested in a number of inscriptions). In any case, where is the Dat. Sg. **_-bʰo_? Yes, we have Old Latin _sibei,_ Oscan _sífeí,_ Prussian _sebbei,_ Slavic _sebě,_ Old Indic _tubhyam,_ Avestan _taibya~taibyō,_ yet these are two personal pronouns, and the final vowels don't agree (Italic and Prussian have the usual Dat. Sg. _*-eı̯,_ which looks like a leveling; the Slavic, Indic and Iranic forms have no analogies: none comes directly from _*-bʰo_ in any case).

Summarizing, the evidence that _-s_ acted as a pluralizer in the PIE declension remains based on only two secure forms. As an exercise in speculation, I can suggest that the source of this _-s _was the above opposition Voc. Sg. _*suhₓn-eu̯ _"son!" : Nom. Pl. (acting as Voc. Pl.) _*suhₓn-eu̯-es _"sons!", which may have induced the creation of Acc. Pl. -_ns_ according to the same pattern (that the vowel is always present in the Nom. Pl. _*-es_ is obviously non-phonetic, cp. the Gen. Sg. _*-es/-os/-s_ depending on the stress pattern, so the original model may have been Voc. _*suhₓn-eu̯ — *suhₓn-eu̯-s : _Acc. _*suhₓn-u-m — *suhₓn-um-s_). Then it seems to have stopped, and the presence of -_s_ in some other Pl. forms doesn't fit the pattern Pl.=Sg.+_s_… Your turn.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> ...



Since the mod has not yet split off this discussion into a new thread, I went ahead and started one.


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## myšlenka

Dib said:


> [...] we can claim French has developed a new verb-template based conjugation where subject and object markers are prefixed to the verb into specific slots, so that "ils me tiennent" could well be analyzed as an instantiation of such a template (subject marker - 1st/2nd person object marker - 3rd person object marker - verb stem - tense/mood marker - personal ending: il-me-x-tienn-x-x).


Alluring as this analysis might be there are a few potential problems apart from the ones that have been mentioned (the optional negative enclitic _ne_ and subject-verb inversion). First of all, clitic pronouns don't appear obligatorily. If all the verbal arguments are full nominal phrases, the verb can appear without any clitics. Second, subject clitics are not required to be repeated in coordinated structures, e.g. _il chantait et dansait_. Third, the French interaction between simple tenses, composite tenses and different auxiliaries messes things up, i.e. the template only works in simple tenses. Fourth, such an analysis would make French a pro drop language (with prefixed person/number agreement) and my gut feeling is that that is just wrong.


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## Gavril

myšlenka said:


> Alluring as this analysis might be there are a few potential problems apart from the ones that have been mentioned (the optional negative enclitic _ne_ and subject-verb inversion). First of all, clitic pronouns don't appear obligatorily. If all the verbal arguments are full nominal phrases, the verb can appear without any clitics.



This is a valid point, although it isn't unheard of for conjugations to have unique "pronoun-subject" forms that aren't used when a semantically equivalent noun is the subject: cf. Welsh _gadawo*nt* hwy_ "they left" versus _gadawo*dd* y dynion _"the men left".



> Second, subject clitics are not required to be repeated in coordinated structures, e.g. _il chantait et dansait_.



Wouldn't this logic also disqualify Spanish -_mente_ from being an affix? (e.g. _lenta y tranquila*mente*_ "slow*ly* and calm*ly*")



> Third, the French interaction between simple tenses, composite tenses and different auxiliaries messes things up, i.e. the template only works in simple tenses.



Could you clarify what you mean here? Subject pronouns seem just as obligatory with aux. verbs as with non-auxiliaries (_j'ai_, _tu as, il a _...).



> Fourth, such an analysis would make French a pro drop language (with prefixed person/number agreement) and my gut feeling is that that is just wrong.



This analysis seems to obviate (or come close to obviating) the difference between "pro-drop" and "non-pro-drop" languages to begin with, though.


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## Hulalessar

As Dib points out, if you stand back from French you can analyse in some interesting ways; see post 34 in this thread: Evolution of Language Whilst French is far from being an agglutinating language like Hungarian, it seems to be developing agglutinating tendencies. It offers some support for the theory that language change is cyclic. The problem is that if there are cycles they take place over such a long period that there is no evidence of any language having gone through a complete cycle.

A bit of a problem in linguistic analysis can be deciding whether something is an inflection or adposition or that rather elusive thing called a clitic. I cannot help feeling that the concept of a clitic has only arisen because of a reluctance to accept that a word (another slippery concept) can be less than a syllable. Is there any real justification for saying that "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" is not six words as indicated in writing?


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## Nino83

Hulalessar said:


> As Dib points out, if you stand back from French you can analyse in some interesting ways; see post 34 in this thread: Evolution of Language Whilst French is far from being an agglutinating language like Hungarian, it seems to be developing agglutinating tendencies.


I'm not convinced.
Pronouns simply replace nouns: _Jean-Pierre chante une chanson, les élèves chantent une chanson._ In this case _il_ and _ils_ are neither present nor required.
About object pronouns, some "agglutination" is true for each Romance language, for example European Portuguese has _mésoclise_, _dar-*te*-ia_ (I would give you), in imperative tense _dim*melo*_ (Italian), in infinitive tense, _decir*melo*_ (Spanish), but we have _devo far*lo*_ (Italian) vs. _je dois *le* faire_ (French) or _dim*melo*_ (Italian) vs. _*me* diz (isso)_ (Brazilian Portuguese, with the omission of the direct object pronoun). So, in verbal conjugation Italian, Spanish and European Portuguese are more agglutinative than French or Brazilian Portuguese.
About articles. They are not affixes indicating plurality, in fact they are used also with uncountable nouns, *le*_ lait_. The article indicates definiteness. _Je ne mange pas de pommes, j'ai mangé *les* pommes (qui tu as achetées_).
A language is agglutinative when it uses compounding on a regular basis and this is not the case of French. Compare _tennis shoe_ (compound or noun adjunct), _Tennisschuhe_ (compound) but _chaussures de tennis_. Germanic languages are more agglutinative than Romance languages, French included.

Anyway, it is not a matter of orthography. Classic Latin and Ancient Greek used _scriptio continua_ but they were not agglutinative languages.


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## myšlenka

Gavril said:


> Wouldn't this logic also disqualify Spanish -_mente_ from being an affix? (e.g. _lenta y tranquila*mente*_ "slow*ly* and calm*ly*")


It certainly shows that Spanish _-mente_ can attach to larger units than the bare adjective. The problem I was thinking of was that the proposed verb template would have to be very flexible as to which agreement positions are filled.


Gavril said:


> Could you clarify what you mean here? Subject pronouns seem just as obligatory with aux. verbs as with non-auxiliaries (_j'ai_, _tu as, il a _...).


Subject pronouns are obligatory, but I was thinking more about the position of object pronouns and the general ordering of tense, aspect and person/number agreement. Given that the three most used tenses in colloquial French are _présent_, _passe composé_ and _futur proche_ we would need three different verb templates to account for the variation.


Gavril said:


> This analysis seems to obviate (or come close to obviating) the difference between "pro-drop" and "non-pro-drop" languages to begin with, though.


Yes, and I wonder why this would be empirically more adequate.


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## Hulalessar

Nino83 said:


> I'm not convinced.
> Pronouns simply replace nouns: _Jean-Pierre chante une chanson, les élèves chantent une chanson._ In this case _il_ and _ils_ are neither present nor required.
> About object pronouns, some "agglutination" is true for each Romance language, for example European Portuguese has _mésoclise_, _dar-*te*-ia_ (I would give you), in imperative tense _dim*melo*_ (Italian), in infinitive tense, _decir*melo*_ (Spanish), but we have _devo far*lo*_ (Italian) vs. _je dois *le* faire_ (French) or _dim*melo*_ (Italian) vs. _*me* diz (isso)_ (Brazilian Portuguese, with the omission of the direct object pronoun). So, in verbal conjugation Italian, Spanish and European Portuguese are more agglutinative than French or Brazilian Portuguese.
> About articles. They are not affixes indicating plurality, in fact they are used also with uncountable nouns, *le*_ lait_. The article indicates definiteness. _Je ne mange pas de pommes, j'ai mangé *les* pommes (qui tu as achetées_).
> A language is agglutinative when it uses compounding on a regular basis and this is not the case of French. Compare _tennis shoe_ (compound or noun adjunct), _Tennisschuhe_ (compound) but _chaussures de tennis_. Germanic languages are more agglutinative than Romance languages, French included.
> 
> Anyway, it is not a matter of orthography. Classic Latin and Ancient Greek used _scriptio continua_ but they were not agglutinative languages.



I think that what some are suggesting is that French has acquired agglutinating tendencies which have gone unnoticed. Of course you have to decide exactly what you mean by "agglutinating" which in turn involves a discussion on whether certain parts of a language are particles, inflections or clitics. I have never thught of compounding two nouns as agglutination.

What is known and agreed is that in the transition from Latin to Modern French a huge number of "endings" have been lost. The question is whether the language is in the process of acquiring a new set of affixes. It is quite difficult to conduct a thought experiment because its history is well known and because of the way it is written.

If we take French nouns, most do not have distinct plural forms except in writing, but we know more often than not when a noun is plural because of the form of a word which precedes it. Instead of pronouncing the <s> at the end of a word you put in front of it a word which indicates it is plural: _les_, _des_,_ mes_, _tes_, _ses_, _nos_, _vos_, _ces_, etc. The fact that another word may come before the noun suggests they cannot be affixes, but that depends on your definition of an affix involving the idea that it cannot be separated from the noun.


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## Gavril

myšlenka said:


> It certainly shows that Spanish -mente can attach to larger units than the bare adjective. The problem I was thinking of was that the proposed verb template would have to be very flexible as to which agreement positions are filled.



I don't think the system would have to be so convoluted: it's not unheard-of to see only the first verb conjugated in a longer chain of verbs. Again, an example from Welsh:

_Gadawodd ef am hanner dydd ac yn y prynhawn prynu bara_
"He left at mid-day, and bought bread in the afternoon", literally "He left ... and buy [inf.] bread"



> Subject pronouns are obligatory, but I was thinking more about the position of object pronouns and the general ordering of tense, aspect and person/number agreement. Given that the three most used tenses in colloquial French are présent, passe composé and futur proche we would need three different verb templates to account for the variation.



What would be an example of a composite-tense verb phrase that is harder to analyze (in an agglutinative framework) than a simple-tense verb?



> Yes, and I wonder why this would be empirically more adequate.



Maybe because "pro-drop" (in the sense of a feature that can be turned on or off) is itself a questionable concept? It's still unclear to me whether any language truly *prohibits* the dropping of subject pronouns when the contextual background is adequate, and when prescriptive strictures are removed. For example, English is often characterized as "non-pro-drop", but in colloquial language, subject pronouns are routinely omitted: cf. _Gotta go now_ = "I have to go now".


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## myšlenka

Gavril said:


> I don't think the system would have to be so convoluted: it's not unheard-of to see only the first verb conjugated in a longer chain of verbs. Again, an example from Welsh:
> 
> _Gadawodd ef am hanner dydd ac yn y prynhawn prynu bara_
> "He left at mid-day, and bought bread in the afternoon", literally "He left ... and buy [inf.] bread"


The Welsh example comes close to Swahili (from what I could read) and the difference with respect to French would be that French inflects all verbs in a coordinated chain.



Gavril said:


> What would be an example of a composite-tense verb phrase that is harder to analyze (in an agglutinative framework) than a simple-tense verb?


What I had in mind, was that tense and subject agreement would have different slots in the template depending on the tense. Assuming that subject and object clitics are actually prefixed agreement inflections, tense would appear between right after these in composite tenses and after the main verb in simple tenses. Adopting an alternative spelling with hyphens to clarify:

_1) Nous-l-achet-ons
_1.pl.subject - 3.sg.object - buy - present/1.pl
_2)_ _Nous-l-avons-acheté_
   1.pl.subject - 3.sg.object - past/1.pl - buy

It is by no means harder to analyze, but I don't see the theoretical gain. Negation would pattern with the tense affix as well as various sentential adverbs.


Gavril said:


> Maybe because "pro-drop" (in the sense of a feature that can be turned on or off) is itself a questionable concept? It's still unclear to me whether any language truly *prohibits* the dropping of subject pronouns when the contextual background is adequate, and when prescriptive strictures are removed. For example, English is often characterized as "non-pro-drop", but in colloquial language, subject pronouns are routinely omitted: cf. _Gotta go now_ = "I have to go now".


I guess the difference lies in whether it's done in a generalized way or not. Omitting subjects in English seems to be limited to the first person in declarative sentences and to the second person in interrogatives.


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## francisgranada

Gavril said:


> ... Wouldn't this logic also disqualify Spanish -_mente_ from being an affix? (e.g. _lenta y tranquila*mente*_ "slow*ly* and calm*ly*") ...


 An interesting question. Some examples from Hungarian, for comparison:

Affix:_ London*ban* és Rómá*ban* _  (*In* London and *in *Rome)
Postposition: _London és Róma _*felett * (*Over *London and Rome)

An affix cannot be used only once for more independent members (nouns), but a postposition yes. The same principle is valid also for your example: _lassa*n* és nyugodta*n*_ (slow*ly* and calm*ly*). 

However, the following represents a different situation:

Affix:_ A szép és nagy Londo*ban* _(*In* the beautiful and big London)
Postposition: _A szép és nagy Londo*n* _*felett * (*Over *the beautiful and big London)

In this case the adjectives (_szép, nagy_) even if separated by _és _(and), they qualify/belong to the noun following them (_London_). Thus, both the affix and the postposition _must _appear only _once _(at the end).

(So, from the Hungarian-like agglutinative  point of view, the Spanish -_mente _would not be a true affix)


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## Gavril

myšlenka said:


> The Welsh example comes close to Swahili (from what I could read) and the difference with respect to French would be that French inflects all verbs in a coordinated chain.



But does it inflect all of them for person, or just for tense/aspect?



> I guess the difference lies in whether it's done in a generalized way or not. Omitting subjects in English seems to be limited to the first person in declarative sentences and to the second person in interrogatives.



It isn't. Compare the following examples:

1.
A: _Where's John?_
B: _Left early -- said he was feeling ill. _

[I would say that the tone of this sentence is more "blunt" than if the pronoun had been included, but it's no less comprehensible.]

2.
_Want some more? _[= _Do you want some more?_]


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## Dan2

Gavril said:


> It's still unclear to me whether any language truly *prohibits* the dropping of subject pronouns when the contextual background is adequate, and when prescriptive strictures are removed. For example, English is often characterized as "non-pro-drop", but in colloquial language, subject pronouns are routinely omitted: cf. _Gotta go now_ = "I have to go now".





myšlenka said:


> I guess the difference lies in whether it's done in a generalized way or not. Omitting subjects in English seems to be limited to the first person in declarative sentences and to the second person in interrogatives.





Gavril said:


> It isn't. Compare the following examples:
> A: _Where's John?_
> B: _Left early -- said he was feeling ill. _


I agree that this shows that in some cases dropping a 3rd-person subject is possible.


Gavril said:


> _Want some more? _[= _Do you want some more?_]


Here you are dropping a 2nd-person subject in an interrogative, which myšlenka listed as a possibility.


Gavril said:


> It's still unclear to me whether any language truly *prohibits* the dropping of subject pronouns when the contextual background is adequate, and when prescriptive strictures are removed.


Some time ago, in a different thread in this forum, I offered the following:


Dan2 said:


> In the dialog,
> - John never even finished high school.
> - Yes, but I've noticed that ___ speaks very well.
> note that
> a) the verb is unambiguously marked for 3rd person singular
> b) the context makes it 100% clear who the subject is
> c) other languages have no problem with subject-drop here ("che parla bene")
> And yet in English, even in the most informal speech, we simply must include "he".


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## Gavril

Dan2 said:


> Here you are dropping a 2nd-person subject in an interrogative, which myšlenka listed as a possibility.



Sorry, I read the post too quickly and thought M. had said "imperatives" (which is another context in which subject pronouns can be absent).



> In the dialog,
> - John never even finished high school.
> - Yes, but I've noticed that ___ speaks very well.
> (...)
> a) the verb is unambiguously marked for 3rd person singular
> b) the context makes it 100% clear who the subject is
> c) other languages have no problem with subject-drop here ("che parla bene")
> And yet in English, even in the most informal speech, we simply must include "he".



I think it is rare but not impossible to omit the subject pronoun here (in colloquial speech), at least if there is a noticeable pause after the word _that_:
_
Yes, but I've noticed that ... speaks very well.
_
If the word _that_ is omitted, then it's even easier to imagine someone saying this.

(Edit: The sentence _I've noticed that speaks very well_ could be interpreted to mean "I have noticed that 'that' [whatever it refers to] speaks very well" -- maybe this existing interpretation gets in the way of an alternative, "pro-drop" interpretation of sentences like this.)

If you'd like to continue talking about this topic, can we start a new thread instead of continuing this one (which was not specifically about pro-drop)?


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## myšlenka

Gavril said:


> But does it inflect all of them for person, or just for tense/aspect?


Do you mean French? The fusional character of the French tense and person affixes makes it a little difficult to inflect a verb with just tense/aspect.

As for pro-drop, English allows it to a certain extent but I would still stay there is a _vast_ difference between English and what you find in Slavic/Romance and Chinese/Japanese. If you don't like the term "pro drop" to describe this difference, it doesn't mean that the difference will go away.


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## Gavril

myšlenka said:


> Do you mean French? The fusional character of the French tense and person affixes makes it a little difficult to inflect a verb with just tense/aspect.



Yes, I mean French. Isn't the sentence type we're discussing (_Il marchait y parlait_) an example of verbs being inflected only for tense, in speech at least?



> As for pro-drop, English allows it to a certain extent but I would still stay there is a _vast_ difference between English and what you find in Slavic/Romance and Chinese/Japanese. If you don't like the term "pro drop" to describe this difference, it doesn't mean that the difference will go away.



There probably is a difference of degree (in the laxity of pronoun-dropping) between English and Slavic/Romance, because English doesn't have as many disambiguating personal affixes as they do.

The pattern of subject-pronoun usage in Chinese and Japanese would probably be closer to that of standard English if the "grip" of prescriptivism on English were loosened, i.e. if prescriptive rules were updated to reflect what is colloquially possible. But, again, this is somewhat of a side-issue that I think belongs in a separate thread.


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## myšlenka

Gavril said:


> Yes, I mean French. Isn't the sentence type we're discussing (_Il marchait y parlait_) an example of verbs being inflected only for tense, in speech at least?


While it's true that many French verbal endings are to large extent artificial in that they don't reflect actual endings in the spoken language, they are not completely void of person information. The ending in this particular case, -_ait_, is pronounced [ɛ] and carries information about tense (past) and aspect (imperfective) as well as person. It is not unambiguously third person singular but that doesn't mean it has been left unmarked.


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## Gavril

myšlenka said:


> While it's true that many French verbal endings are to large extent artificial in that they don't reflect actual endings in the spoken language, they are not completely void of person information. The ending in this particular case, -_ait_, is pronounced [ɛ] and carries information about tense (past) and aspect (imperfective) as well as person. It is not unambiguously third person singular but that doesn't mean it has been left unmarked.



So your analysis, if I understand correctly, would be that [ɛ] = "1-3sg. or 3pl. imperfect"?

Maybe there is some validity to this idea, but it does not (by itself) show that _je_/_tu_/_il_/etc. are not also treated as affixes: e.g. _il parlait _could be represented as [3sg.masc.]-"speak"-[singular or 3pl. imperfect].

The logic you applied to French -ai- can also be applied to languages typically described as agglutinative: e.g. the ending -_a_ in Finnish verb-forms such as _kannattaa _could be said to indicate "infinitive or 3sg. pres. indicative". Without context, _kannattaa_ can either mean "to support" or "s/he is supporting".


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## Nino83

Hulalessar said:


> I think that what some are suggesting is that French has acquired agglutinating tendencies which have gone unnoticed. Of course you have to decide exactly what you mean by "agglutinating"


Agglutinative: each affix has only one meaning, different affixes can be attached to a word but each affix mantains its *exclusive* meaning.
Finnish: talo (house) > talo*lta* (*to* *from* the house) > talo*i*lta (*to* *from* the house*s*). Talo (stem) - i (plural marker) - lta (ablative marker)
Fusional: each inflection gives us more than one single information.
Latin: cas*ǎ* ( 1° decl., nominative, singular) > cas*ā* (1° decl., ablative, singular) > cas*īs* (1° decl., ablative plural). You can see that *ǎ*,* ā* and* īs* are three different inflections.
That said, as Francis said: "an affix cannot be used only once for more independent members (nouns), but a postposition yes".
So, the personal pronoun "je" it's not an affix, because you can say "je le dis et le *maintiens*" (Le Monde).
Also prepositions cannot be considered affixes, because you can say "La croissance, des conceptions différentes à Berlin et *Paris*" (Le Monde).
French has not cases, but it has grammatical gender.
Articles: l*e* (masculine, singular), l*a* (feminine singular), l*es* (plural), d*u*, *au* (m. s.), de *la*, a *la* (f. s.), des (plural)
Demonstratives: c*e* (masculine, singular), c*ette* (feminine singular), ces (plural)
These ones are all fusional.
We can say that French changed, passing from a synthetic stage to a more analytic stage, this inclued non pro-drop, auxiliar verbs for passive forms, compound tenses and so on.
About pronoun, it is a matter of word order. _Il me le donne/veut me le donner, donne-le-moi_. But this happens also in other Romance languages, as said before.
Last, but not least, the fact that French speakers pronounce prosodic units like they were a single word is a matter of prosody.
We have the words_ am*ì*, pet_*ì*_t_ (with a stress in the last syllable when in isolation) but into a sentence they become _l'*à*mi de Pi*è*rre | va avec la p*ə̀*tite f*ì*lle | au pet*ì*t caf*é*_. This is prosody, not grammar.

I think the difference between agglutinative (one affix, one function) and fusional (an inflection, more functions at the same moment) is important.


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## myšlenka

Gavril said:


> So your analysis, if I understand correctly, would be that [ɛ] = "1-3sg. or 3pl. imperfect"?


Yes.


Gavril said:


> Maybe there is some validity to this idea, but it does not (by itself) show that _je_/_tu_/_il_/etc. are not also treated as affixes: e.g. _il parlait _could be represented as [3sg.masc.]-"speak"-[singular or 3pl. imperfect].


I never claimed it was. My example was a _coordinated_ structure (#37) where the subject pronoun doesn't have to be repeated.


Gavril said:


> The logic you applied to French -ai- can also be applied to languages typically described as agglutinative: e.g. the ending -_a_ in Finnish verb-forms such as _kannattaa _could be said to indicate "infinitive or 3sg. pres. indicative". Without context, _kannattaa_ can either mean "to support" or "s/he is supporting".


The logic can be applied to any morpheme with multiple uses, fusional or agglutinative.


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## francisgranada

Nino83 said:


> Agglutinative: each affix has only one meaning, different affixes can be attached to a word but each affix mantains its *exclusive* meaning.


I agree, of course, and I'd like to add the following:

1) More affixes can be added to a word, but only in a _fixed_/_defined _order. E.g. in Hungarian _háza-i-m-tól _(from/off my houses) is correct, but e.g. _*háza-tól-i-m_ is impossible (_ház_-house; _m-_possessive 1st pers.sg.; _i-_plural; _tól-_ablative).
(The hyphens serves only for better understandabily, the normal spelling is _házaimtól)._ 

2) No separate word can appear between the root and an affix, but another affix.


> So, the personal pronoun "je" it's not an affix, because you can say "je le dis et le *maintiens*"


Plus, according to what I've written before, not only _je_ and _le_ (plus the other pers. pronouns) should have to behave like affixes, but also the particle _ne _(and perhaps some other words, too), as we can say  "je ne le dis pas".

P.S. I don't speak Finnish, so I have a question: doesn't _talolta_ (post #53) mean "from/off the house" as -_lta _(-_tól _in Hung.) is an _ablative _marker?


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## Gavril

francisgranada said:


> P.S. I don't speak Finnish, so I have a question: doesn't _talolta_ (post #53) mean "from/off the house" as -_lta _(-_tól _in Hung.) is an _ablative _marker?



Yes.


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## Swatters

I feel there's been a fundamental misunderstanding during this whole discussion. The debate over the nature of the French pronoun is solely centered upon the everyday spoken vernacular, not formal written French. There's important differences in the syntax of both registers, and the behaviour of the weak pronouns is one of these. Formal French preserves rather well the syntax of 18th century French and there's no doubt the subjects pronouns are best analysed as clitics in that variety. I didn't want to go at length over it because it felt off-topic, but since it has taken over the discussion and French's current situation is a good example of a inflectional system in development (the scholarly debate isn't so much about whether the subject pronouns are transforming into agreement markers, but rather about how far along they are), let's review the arguments:

*Clitics or affixes*

In colloquial French:

- Subject pronoun-Verb inversion has almost totally been eliminated. Questions have the same structure as declarative sentences, plus a strong tendency toward right-detachment of the topic (i.e. Formal Es-tu déjà venu ici ? --> colloq. T'es d'jà venu ici, toi ?). This article's survey of linguistic corpora (p.100) mentions rates of inversion of 0.8 to 6.6% in partial interrogatives (The first number is closer to my experience than the second) and of 0 to 0.1% with yes/no interrogatives. Stylistic inversion after some adverbs (Peut-être y est-il déjà ? -Maybe there is-he already?) is rare enough to never be mentioned in the articles I'm looking at. (I'm not expecting these number to ever reach zero unless/until we stop learning formal French at school, there's always going to be some influence from other registers)

- Subject pronoun are systematically repeated over coordinated verbs. "Il mange du pain et bois du vin" is fine for formal writing but sounds incredibly stilted in casual speech. If I reduce _il _to /i/ as would normally be done in speech, it becomes outright ungrammatical to me. The overall rate of repetition in coordination in various corpora (same article, hereafter Culbertson 2010, page 102) hovers near the 98-99% mark again. This thesis analysing this thematic for Swiss French found only repeated pronouns over every verbs in coordination (pp 167-168). Object pronouns have to be repeated over each coordinated verbs, in formal as in colloquial French.

- "Ne" remains a problem, as I mentioned in my previous post, since it maintains itself before around 10% of negated verbs and is obviously a clitic (in _Il faut ne pas le faire_ it is separated from the pronoun-verb complex by an adverb, a construction that remains possible in colloquial French). Culbertson 2010 (p. 95) remarks however that retention rates are much higher when there is no subject pronoun than when there is (~6% with a subject pronoun; 14% with no subject; 84% with a lexical subject), which is evocative of an unwelcome intervening element that's being squeezed out from between two increasingly synthetic morphemes.

- The behaviour of the object pronouns in imperatives are a problem for an affixal analysis, as they remain able of movement. Positive _Donne-le-moi _>< Negative _me le donne pas_ is hard to explain away, although I've read a brave attempt based on allomorphy (prefix /mə/ and /lə/ opposed to suffix /mwa/ and /lœ/) and a negative conjugation alternating with a positive one (brief mention here). Another problem with the imperative is that the normative proscription of the unetymological liaison in donne-moi-z-en (/dɔnmwazɒ̃/, gimme some) has led to an alternation with donnes-en-moi, with an equally unetymological, but prescriptively licit, liaison (/dɔnzɒ̃mwa/). This, of course, messes with the purported template. (I'll note that Quebec French and some other dialects have erased the alternation and adopted negative _donne-le-moi pas_ but this sounds completely ungrammatical to me)

- There's a heavy amount of phonological reduction going on with the pronouns. A few from my idiolect are Je lui ai /ʒye/; tu l'as (/tla/); vous vous appelez (/vʊvzaple/). Fusion with the verbal stem is also possible (the famous je suis /ʃy/ and je sais /ʃe/, but this works for most /s/-initial verbs), as are idiosyncrasies with certain pronoun-verbs combinations (Je suis, tu es and c'est can reduce to /ʃ/, /t/ and /s(t)/ in unstressed position, which is problematic if the pronoun is an independent words, because where did the verb go then; Quebec French has [ætɛ] for _elle était _and m'as /mɔ/ instead of _je vais _as the 1PS go-future marker (from _je m'en vais _most likely); my _est_ alternates between /e/ and /ɛ/ when used with reflexive _s'_ depending on the subject pronoun (ça s'est /sasɛ/ but il s'est /ise/); c'était reduces to /stɛ/ but j'étais doesn't become /ʃtɛ/).

/s/-initial verbs have the most assimilation going on. If you look at the maximally reduced form of the conditional tense of _savoir_, rather than dictionary French, you get:

1PS Je saurais   /ʃɔʀɛ/
2PS Tu saurais /tsɔʀɛ/
3PS Il saurait - elle saurait - ça saurait /isɔʀɛ/ - /ɛ(l)sɔʀɛ/ - /sasɔʀɛ/
1PP On saurait /õsɔʀɛ/
2PP Vous sauriez /sːoʀje ~ soʀje/
3PP Ils sauraient - elle sauraient /isɔʀɛ:/ - /ɛ(l)sɔʀɛ:/

(Is there a way to create a table with this forum's software?)
*
Agreement or topicalisation*

That the pronouns have become more bound to the verb stem doesn't mean that they function as morphological markers of agreement. What led to that part of the debate is the frequency of topic-fronting constructions in Colloquial French, and left and right detachment.

Everyday speech is full of sentences like these, where a lexical argument is co-indexed by a pronoun bound to the verb:

- Je m'*y* connais *en informatique*. (I'm good with computers, lit. I-myself-in.it-know in computer science)
*- Sa voiture*, je *la *cherche toujours, à Marc. (I'm still looking for Marc's car, lit. His car, I-it-look for still, to Marc)
- Moi,* Khalid*, *il *m'en veut toujours (Khalid's still angry with me, lit. Me, Khalid, he-me-of.it-want still)
- Ta gamine, *ils *risquent de lui tirer dessus, *ces chasseurs* ! (These hunters might shoot at your kid, lit. Your kid, they-risk to to.her-shoot upon, these hunters)
- J'*en* rêvais *de partir en vacances là-bas *(I used to dream of going on holiday there)

The frequency of these type of sentences, the argument goes, led to the reinterpretation of the dislocated element as the true argument of the verb, and of the pronouns as agreement markers. The rate of cooccurrence of a lexical argument with a bound pronoun varies a lot with formality, but for subjects, the rates were around 60% for the portions of the semi-informal PFC Corpus looked at in Culbertson 2010 (p. 116), with a clear age difference (50% for the over-35, 67% for the under-35). Fonseca-Greber's thesis had 75% doubling in a more informal corpus. I can't find rates for objects, but they should be somewhat lower than that.

This leads to a lot of debate over the prosody of such sentences (this post is long enough, so I'll leave it at that) and the question of whether bad topics (like indefinites -nobody, someone, someone- and quantified phrases) can be doubled (they can, with some limitations).

You basically get a hierarchy of discourse accessibility, with doubling rates dropping as you go down it:

- First and second person strong pronouns: Always doubled (*À moi*, ça *me *plait)
- Third person strong pronouns: Almost categorically doubled (*Elle *elle devrait venir, non ?)
- Generic indefinite noun phrases: An outlier, with 78% doubling in the Fonseca-Greber corpus (subject only) (*Un chien*, *ça *mort - Dogs bite)
- Person's names: 74% doubling in the Fonseca-Greber corpus (*Elle *rentre quand, *Véro *? - When is Véro coming back)
- Definite noun phrases: 59% doubling in the Fonseca-Greber corpus (*Ce lit*, *il *grince énormément - This bed makes a lot of noise)
- Quantified and indefinite phrases: 20% doubling in the Fonseca-Greber corpus (Quand *quelqu'un il* parle, tu te tais - When somebody speaks, you shut up)
- Tout, rien and qui (everything, nothing, who): 0% doubling in the Fonseca-Greber corpus (**Tout il* va bien - Everything's going well) (Not grammatical for me)

Such a change doesn't happen overnight, and we're looking at colloquial French pants down in the middle of changing clothes, so there's a lot of argument for and against the affixal analysis to find. It makes sense that two competing types of morphosyntax to coexist for a long time until one marginalises then ousts the other. We're not there yet in this case, but it makes for an interesting study, I think.



Nino83 said:


> We have the words_ am*ì*, pet_*ì*_t_ (with a stress in the last syllable when in isolation) but into a sentence they become _l'*à*mi de Pi*è*rre | va avec la p*ə̀*tite f*ì*lle | au pet*ì*t caf*é*_. This is prosody, not grammar.



A nitpick, but you've got your secondary stress on a schwa in p*e*tite there, which cannot happen.


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## Nino83

francisgranada said:


> P.S. I don't speak Finnish, so I have a question: doesn't _talolta_ (post #53) mean "from/off the house" as -_lta _(-_tól _in Hung.) is an _ablative _marker?


Yes, Francis. I made a mistake in writing, copying the preposition used for the allative case.


Swatters said:


> A nitpick, but you've got your secondary stress on a schwa in p*e*tite there, which cannot happen.


petite fille
All four speakers put the accent on the first syllable. I mean that the syllable _tit_ is unstressed in _petite f*i*lle_, /ˌpətiˈfij ̴  ptiˈfij/ while it has second stress in _petite cuill*è*re_ /pəˌtitkwiˈjɛr  ̴  pˌtitkwiˈjɛr/.


Swatters said:


> The overall rate of repetition in coordination in various corpora (same article, hereafter Culbertson 2010, page 102) hovers near the 98-99% mark again.


Interesting.


Swatters said:


> The behaviour of the object pronouns in imperatives are a problem for an affixal analysis, as they remain able of movement.


But there is alternation also between _je *te le* dis_ and _je *le lui* dis, je *le leur* dis_. Is this alternation mantained in informal speech?


Swatters said:


> the dislocated element as the true argument of the verb, and of the pronouns as agreement markers.


Could you write the complete list? Moi je mange, toi tu manges, lui il mange, nous on mange, vous (?) mangez, leur ils mangent? Is it right?
It's interesting the fact that this doubling (stressed - unstressed subject pronoun) is common in Gallo-Italian languages and in Venetian. The stressed pronoun is facultative while the unstressed one is mandatory.
Romagnolo: (_ei) *a* magn, (ti) *t* magn, (lu) *e* magna/(lea) *la* magna, (nun) *a* magnen, (vu) *a* magned, (lor) *i* magna/(lorie) *li* magna_.
Italian: _(io) mangio, (tu) mangi, (egli/ella) mangia, (noi) mangiamo, (voi) mangiate, (essi) mangiano_.
But they are called _pronomi_, not affixes.


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## Swatters

Nino83 said:


> petite fille
> All four speakers put the accent on the first syllable. I mean that the syllable _tit_ is unstressed in _petite f*i*lle_, /ˌpətiˈfij ̴  ptiˈfij/ while it has second stress in _petite cuill*è*re_ /pəˌtitkwiˈjɛr  ̴  pˌtitkwiˈjɛr/.



You're right. That an artificial, for the microphone, production with a schwa in the initial syllable though. What bothered me in your example sentence, I think, was you putting secondary stress on a syllable whose nucleus I delete unless I concentrate hard on my production, even when reading aloud: [vaʒuwe avɛʔlaptɪ̥tfi:j]



Nino83 said:


> But there is alternation also between _je *te le* dis_ and _je *le lui* dis, je *le leur* dis_. Is this alternation mantained in informal speech?



Yes, with a caveat. Usually, the accusative 3rd person pronoun isn't expressed when used with a 3rd person dative: _Je leur dis_, _je lui dis _are complete sentences. They still licence topic fronting of the direct object, so they're still there, just unexpressed. (That is, _le cadeau, je t'ai donné_ sounds wrong or highly poetic, whereas _Le cadeau, je lui ai donné_ is perfectly fine). They can still appear, though, especially if the direct object is human (rare), or if it's important to mark it as feminine or plural for the sentence to be parsed correctly, so they've to be accounted for.

The template usually goes:

Gerund _en_ -> Nominative pronouns -> (ne ->) _me, te, se, nous, vous_ -> _le, la, les_ -> _lui, leur_ -> _y_ -> partitive _en -> _derivational prefixes (_re-, auto-, dé, _...) - stem - suffixes

Grouping together the pronouns that are syncretic in the accusative, dative and reflexive best predicts both which pronouns can appear at the same time and their ordering. (So long as you add a rule forbidding the third and fifth group to appear at the same time) Grouping them by case requires a much more complicated analysis and add some hard to account for movement.



Nino83 said:


> Could you write the complete list? Moi je mange, toi tu manges, lui il mange, nous on mange, vous (?) mangez, leur ils mangent? Is it right?



Moi je
Toi tu
Lui il
Elle elle
Ça ça
Nous on
Vous vous*
Eux ils  (from old French _els _from Latin _illos_)
Elles elles

*Yes, this does mean that _Et vous, vous vous vouvoyer entre vous ?_ is a valid French sentence.



Nino83 said:


> It's interesting the fact that this doubling (stressed - unstressed subject pronoun) is common in Gallo-Italian languages and in Venetian. The stressed pronoun is facultative while the unstressed one is mandatory.
> Romagnolo: (_ei) *a* magn, (ti) *t* magn, (lu) *e* magna/(lea) *la* magna, (nun) *a* magnen, (vu) *a* magned, (lor) *i* magna/(lorie) *li* magna_.
> Italian: _(io) mangio, (tu) mangi, (egli/ella) mangia, (noi) mangiamo, (voi) mangiate, (essi) mangiano_.
> But they are called _pronomi_, not affixes.



Oh, there are a lot of linguists that have called those affixes (much more consensually than for French). See e.g. this quote from this article.



> Com’è noto, la riflessione teorica condotta su alcune proprietà sintattiche considerate diagnostiche – quali la cooccorrenza di clitico e soggetto lessicale e la ripetizione obbligatoria del clitico soggetto nel caso di verbi coordinati, percitar ne solo un paio – ha portato studi sviluppati in ambito generativista (tra gli altri, Rizzi 1986; Bracco-Brandi-Cordin 1985; Burzio 1986: 119-135) ad attribuire status affissale ai clitici soggetto dei dialetti settentrionali; nella teoria trasformazionale più recente, i clitici soggetto sono realizzati come una testa funzionale indipendente (AgrS in Cardinaletti-Roberts 1991, D in Manzini-Savoia 2005a: 54-57) che lessicalizza una proprietà flessiva verbale. In questa prospettiva, i clitici soggetto verrebbero così ad arricchire ulteriormente la morfologia verbale dei dialetti settentrionali. Rimane tuttavia un principale controargomento all’interpretazione dei clitici quali morfemi di accordo: la loro presenza opzionale (cfr. Renzi-Vanelli 1983: 127-128; Berruto 1990: 17-21; Goria 2004: 59, 120-121 e passim (13); v. anche Regis 2006 per il caso di una varietà specifica) confligge infatti con l’obbligatorietà chedefinisce necessariamente ogni categoria flessionale.


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## Nino83

Swatters said:


> Oh, there are a lot of linguists that have called those affixes (much more consensually than for French).


Thank you, Swatters.
I've no problems to call the Romance unstressed object pronouns "affixes" and many linguists said that Romance verb conjugation has some agglutinative feature, in sentences like "me lo si dica subito" or "portaglielo" and so on.
I think the difference between French, Gallo-Italian languages and the other Romance languages (and English) about subject pronouns is that you can say "você e eu", "tú y yo", "tu ed io", "you and I" but you can't say "tu et je", but you have to use stressed pronouns like "toi et moi".


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## Hulalessar

Swatters said:


> I feel there's been a fundamental misunderstanding during this whole discussion. The debate over the nature of the French pronoun is solely centered upon the everyday spoken vernacular, not formal written French.



Pronouns have just been homed in on as an example. Like most languages which have a written standard, there is some degree of diglossia in French. Whilst there there may be some distance between formal and literary styles on the one hand and casual speech on the other, they are not two significantly different things; they are thought of as "high" and "low" varieties. In particular, there is a huge amount of overlapping between less formal writing and less casual speech; they are essentially the same thing. Anyway, the point which is being made is not that French is well on the way to being a language like Turkish, but that it is showing signs of confirming the theory that language development is cyclic.

Take verbs. In Latin person and number were clearly indicated by the ending. In French endings have, compared to Latin, fallen away. However, you still know the person and number because other things are going which did not necessarily go on in Latin, notably the obligatory use of subject pronouns. However you describe subject pronouns you still need them. The fact that they are required, that their positioning has some degree of flexibility and that the form may differ according to context is just as much a "complication" as "proper" inflections. What is today subject to variation and flexiblity may one day be subject to uniformity and inflexible rules - generally considered to be aspects of a classic agglutinating language.


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## Nino83

Hulalessar said:


> Take verbs. In Latin person and number were clearly indicated by the ending. In French endings have, compared to Latin, fallen away. However, you still know the person and number because other things are going which did not necessarily go on in Latin, notably the obligatory use of subject pronouns.


If we consider this change, null-subject > non-pro-drop, we can say that French changed from synthetic to analytic (like English).
The difference is that in French, the unstressed subject pronouns cannot appear in isolation ("you and I" vs. "tu et je"), so they can be considered (like the unstressed *object* pronouns in all Romance languages), affixes.
The difference is that verbs cannot appear without their subject pronoun ("je le dis et le fais") in colloquial spoken French, they are required, while object pronouns are not necessary, because you can say "l'ho fatto" or "ho fatto ciò/questo", "gli ho detto" or "ho detto a lui".
Anyway the unstressed object pronouns can be considered affixes because they cannot appear in isolation.


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## Nino83

Swatters said:


> This article's survey of linguistic corpora


I think in colloquial French (CF) not "all" unstressed subject pronouns work like inflections.
1) In CF there is a high rate of subject doubling with nouns (70% among < 35, 50% among > 35 and 80% in child-directed speech) but it's not mandatory, it's facultative. The author says that it could be due to the fact that speakers use both registers, colloquial and formal, but it is a passe-partout!
The simple fact is that it is not mandatory, differently from many Northern Italian languages (Bolognese, Trentino, Fiorentino, Venetian, Romagnolo and so on).
Verbal inflections, at least in Romance languages, are mandatory.
2) It is possible only with "definite" subjects. The author says that in CF these clitics indicate person and definiteness. It seems another passe-partout.
In French there would be no difference between _quelque fille chante_ and _quelques filles chantent_, _il chante_ and _ils chantent_, _elle chante_ and _elles chantent_. One could say that French are not interested in differentiating between 3p.s. and 3.p.pl. but this difference exists for verbs of other conjugations like _sortir, tenir, connaître, prendre_ and so on, and when a verb begins with a vowel, like in _il ouvre_ vs. _il_z_ouvrent_, but also in these cases subject doubling is not permitted.

In Bolognese and other Northern Italian languages subject doubling is mandatory (also with indefinite subjects) but it is impossible with the subject interrogative pronoun "qui" (who), but it is understandable. "Qui" can be used:
a) with the verb "to be", in this case verb inflections are not ambiguous, sòn, i, è, sèin, sí, ein
b) with other verbs: in this case, the subject can be only 3p.s. so there is no reason

In fact, in Northern Italian languages, clitic subject pronouns work like inflections, i.e they are mandatory when the verb form is not able to indicate person and number.
For example the verb _bater_ in Romagnolo: (a) bat, t bat, e/la bat, (a) batìn, (a) batìd, i/li bat.
In some Venetian and Ligurian dialects, sometimens one can omit clitic object pronouns because verb inflections are more clear, due to the fact that final unstressed vowel were not dropped, for example, Venetian: bato, te bati, el/la bate, batèmo, batì, i/le bate.

The fact that in colloquial French subject doubling is not mandatory and that it is not possible with indefinite nouns makes me think that French pronouns like _il, ils, elle, elles_ are not verbal inflections but they can be in the future.


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## Angelo di fuoco

ahvalj said:


> The most unusual in the Indo-European declension is the existence of three independent sets of markers for the Singular, Dual and Plural: I don't know any other family where not occasional case markers, but the entire system would be organized like this. True, we probably can trace the roots of some of these forms, e. g. the Acc. Pl. *-_ns_ looks like the Acc. Sg. *_-m_ with the pluralizing _-s,_ or the Instr. Pl. _*-bʰis,_ found in some groups, looks derived in the same manner from the Instr. S. *-_bʰi,_ present in Armenian (though in Mycenaean Greek the same ending serves for the Instr. Pl.), but overall the speakers of the earliest attested IE languages most probably didn't already perceive these case markers as related.



Some (a long) time ago I read that in at least some languages spoken by the Australian Aborigines there is no Plural, but there is Singular, Dual, Trial... maybe a special marker for four and five - but that's due to the circumstance that anything beyond, let's say, five, is just "much" or "many".


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## Angelo di fuoco

Nino83 said:


> But there is alternation also between _je *te le* dis_ and _je *le lui* dis, je *le leur* dis_. Is this alternation mantained in informal speech?



When I was learning French they taught us that there is a strict order for the clitic elements:
1) me, te, se, nous, vous
2) le, la, les
3) lui, leur
4) y
5) en



Nino83 said:


> Could you write the complete list? Moi je mange, toi tu manges, lui il mange, nous on mange, vous (?) mangez, leur ils mangent? Is it right?



The stressed 3rd person plural forms are _eux_ (cf. Italian essi) and _elles_: eux, ils mangent & elles, elles mangent. Also: vous, vous mangey. And there's the mandatory comma between the theme (tonic pronoun) and the rhema (rest of the sentence).


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## Nino83

Ciao Angelo. 


Angelo di fuoco said:


> When I was learning French they taught us that there is a strict order for the clitic elements


The fact is that in agglutinative languages a sufix has always the same position.
For example:
Hungarian
house-s-my-in-?
Ház-ai-m-ban-e
Finnish:
house-s-in-my-too-?-!
talo-i-ssa-ni-kin-ko-han
Turkish:
house-s-our-in-past tense-they are
ev-ler-imiz-de-ydi-ler
So, in Turkish the personal copular agreement comes *always* after plural, possessive, case and tense/aspect, while in French the position of the unstressed object pronoun change depending on the person, i.e it is not fixed, so it's difficult to consider them affixes.
It is true for unstressed suject pronouns (je, tu, il, elle, nous, vous, elles) but the fact that they are not mandatory when there is a noun, a full subject, like in _Marc va au cinema_, means that they are not person agreement markers.


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## Angelo di fuoco

I think the difference between Turkish and French in this case is that (from what I can infer from your examples) the order of the element depends on it function, while in French you have the *order*
1) direct/indirect/reflexive forms (i. e. "multifunctional" pronouns)
2) direct forms
3) indirect forms
4) & 5) "substitute particles" (my term)

The *position* of the clitic element in French depends not on the person, but on the verb form/ mode: either before or after the verb and on whether there's an infinite form in the sentence.
1) indicative & subjunctive
2) infinitive, gerund, participle present & participle perfect
3a) affirmative imperative
3b) negative imperative

Have I forgotten anything?

By the way, in the Turkish sentence the plural marker appears twice, first with a noun, then with a verb. Right?


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## Nino83

Angelo di fuoco said:


> By the way, in the Turkish sentence the plural marker appears twice, first with a noun, then with a verb. Right?


Yes, because the plural marker is equal to the third person plural form of the copula. If we change "they" with "you" (plural), there is no repetition.
house-s-our-in-past tense-you are
ev-ler-imiz-de-ydi-niz


Angelo di fuoco said:


> The *position* of the clitic element in French depends not on the person, but on the verb form/ mode


This is another element that makes me think they are not suffixes.


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> Finnish:
> house-s-in-my-too-?-!
> talo-i-ssa-ni-kin-ko-han



Just a small note: -_ni,_ -_kin_ -_ko_ and -_han_ are not suffixes (because agreement rules do not apply to them), they are enclitics, and as such they don't demonstrate much about the agglutinativity of Finnish.

Analogously, in Latin, I think you could say something like _in domuquene mea_? "In my house too??". The two enclitics -_que_ ("and") and -_ne_ (interrogative) are not seen as part of the morphological structure of the word that precedes them (the ablative sg. form _domu_).


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> -_ni,_ -_kin_ -_ko_ and -_han_ are not suffixes (because agreement rules do not apply to them)


In Turkish (but also in Hungarian) adjectives don't agree with the noun, for example "in the white house" is "beyaz ev-de", different from the Finnish "valkoise-ssa talo-ssa", but Turkish case particles are considered suffixes, not postpositions. Why? Because you have to repeat them, for example, when there is a coordinating conjunction, for example "in Italy and in England" is "Italiassa ja Englannissa" (Finnish), "Olaszországban és Angliában" (Hungarian), "İtalya'de ve İngiltere'de" (Turkish) while in Japanese, for example, you say "イタリア と イングランド *へ*" "Itaria to Ingurando * e*", i.e Italy and England *to*" or "ペン と 本 * を*", "pen to hon *o*", i.e "pen and book *(accusative particle)*".
So, it's true that _-kin,_ _-ko_ and _-han_ are present only one time in a sentence, but _-ni_, I think, is a suffix if you have to repeat it. For example, how do you say "with my and your car"? Auto-lla-ni ja auto-lla-si?


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## ahvalj

Nino83 said:


> In Turkish (but also in Hungarian) adjectives don't agree with the noun, for example "in the white house" is "beyaz ev-de", different from the Finnish "valkoise-ssa talo-ssa", but Turkish case particles are considered suffixes, not postposition. Why? Because you have to repeat them, for example, when there is coordinating conjunction, for example "in Italy and in England" is "Italiassa ja Englannissa" (Finnish), "Olaszországban és Angliában" (Hungarian), "İtalya'de ve İngiltere'de" (Turkish) while in Japanese, for example, you say "イタリア と イングランド *へ*" "Itaria to Ingurando * e*", i.e Italy and England *to*" or "ペン と 本 * を*", "pen to hon *o*", i.e "pen and book *(accusative particle)*".
> So, it's true that _-kin,_ _-ko_ and _-han_ can be repeated only one time in the sentence, but _-ni_, I think, is a suffix if you have to repeat it. For example, how do you say "with my and your car"? Auto-lla-ni ja auto-lla-si?


Such things can evolve into both directions. In archaic Indo-European languages, the conjunctions _-kʷe_ "and" and _-u̯e_ "or" could be attached to the end of every related word (_X-kʷe Y-kʷe Z-kʷe_ "X, Y and Z"). In Old East Slavic, the preposition had normally to be repeated before each governed noun (e. g. _from X and from Y, _not the modern_ from X and Y_); in modern Russian, this survives as an occasional poetic license (_по следам по его по горячим_ "hot on his heels", literally "on heels on his on hot")


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> So, it's true that _-kin,_ _-ko_ and _-han_ can be repeated only one time in the sentence, but _-ni_, I think, is a suffix if you have to repeat it. For example, how do you say "with my and your car"? Auto-lla-ni ja auto-lla-si?



Yes, you say _autollani ja autollasi_ -- but that example doesn't seem relevant to the issue of repeating clitics/suffixes, because the two cars have different owners.

If you wanted to say, e.g., _with her husband and children_, then normally you use the possessive marker twice: (_hänen_) _miehe*nsä* ja laste*nsa* kanssa._

But in many cases, the repetition of the possessive marker is necessary for clarity, especially when there is no preceding genitive pronoun like _hänen_ (which has to be omitted in some contexts). For example, _autolla ja polkupyörällään _(rather than _autolla*an* ja ..._) could be taken to mean "with a car, and his bicycle", i.e. the car might belong to someone else.


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## Nino83

Thanks for the info, Gavril!


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## Angelo di fuoco

Nino83 said:


> In Turkish (but also in Hungarian) adjectives don't agree with the noun, for example "in the white house" is "beyaz ev-de", different from the Finnish "valkoise-ssa talo-ssa", but Turkish case particles are considered suffixes, not postpositions. Why? Because you have to repeat them, for example, when there is a coordinating conjunction, for example "in Italy and in England" is "Italiassa ja Englannissa" (Finnish), "Olaszországban és Angliában" (Hungarian), "İtalya'de ve İngiltere'de" (Turkish) while in Japanese, for example, you say "イタリア と イングランド *へ*" "Itaria to Ingurando * e*", i.e Italy and England *to*" or "ペン と 本 * を*", "pen to hon *o*", i.e "pen and book *(accusative particle)*".
> So, it's true that _-kin,_ _-ko_ and _-han_ are present only one time in a sentence, but _-ni_, I think, is a suffix if you have to repeat it. For example, how do you say "with my and your car"? Auto-lla-ni ja auto-lla-si?


We already had the example of Spanish: when you have several "-mente" adverbs, only the last one receives this suffix: "tranquila, pacífica y calmamente". In Catalan, on the other hand, you have the reverse: "tranquil·lament, pacífica i calma".


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## francisgranada

Angelo di fuoco said:


> We already had the example of Spanish: when you have several "-mente" adverbs, only the last one receives this suffix: "tranquila, pacífica y calmamente". In Catalan, on the other hand, you have the reverse: "tranquil·lament, pacífica i calma".


This is interesting. From the etymological point of view, I can imagine also  _mente tranquila, pacífica y calma_ ....


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## ahvalj

francisgranada said:


> This is interesting. From the etymological point of view, I can imagine also  _mente tranquila, pacífica y calma_ ....


But this construction is the former Ablative Singular: _tranquillā mente_ "in a quiet manner", so to produce _mente tranquila _it should have been reinterpreted at some point.


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## muhahaa

Nino83 said:


> Agglutinative: each affix has only one meaning, different affixes can be attached to a word but each affix mantains its *exclusive* meaning.
> Finnish: talo (house) > talo*lta* (*to* *from* the house) > talo*i*lta (*to* *from* the house*s*). Talo (stem) - i (plural marker) - lta (ablative marker)



In Finnish each affix doesn't always maintain its exclusive meaning. E.g. possessive suffixes and some cases, such as the accusative:

kala-ni (first person/singular), kala-mme (first person/plural)
kala-si (second person/singular), kala-nne (second person/plural)

kala-n (accusative/singular), kala-t (accusative/plural)
kala-nne (accusative/singular/second person/plural)
kala-nne (accusative/plural/second person/plural)

Maybe the possessive suffixes swallowing some of the cases is one of the reasons of losing the possessive suffixes in colloquial language.

For example "I ate my fish":
Literary language: Söin kalani.
Colloquial language: Mä söin mun kalan.

"I ate my fishes"
Literary language: Söin kalani.
Colloquial language: Mä söin mun kalat.


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## Gavril

Gavril said:


> If you wanted to say, e.g., _with her husband and children_, then normally you use the possessive marker twice: (_hänen_) _miehe*nsä* ja laste*nsa* kanssa._



Also, while it may be normal to repeat the Finnish possessive enclitics, I don't think it's obligatory to do so in the way that it is for case suffixes.

For example, the phrase _vuotavassa veneessä_ "in a leaky boat" requires the locative suffix -_ssa_ on both words -- leaving it out is not an option. But, in the sentence _Toin vaimoni ja lapseni _"I brought my wife and children", I'm pretty sure (native speakers can correct me) that the first -_ni_ can be left off -- it just isn't normally left off because of the ambiguity this can create.

(A further indication of the optionality of possessive enclitics is that, as just mentioned, they are often left out entirely in the spoken language in favor of genitive pronouns.)


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## Forero

francisgranada said:


> ...
> An affix cannot be used only once for more independent members (nouns), but a postposition yes. The same principle is valid also for your example: _lassa*n* és nyugodta*n*_ (slow*ly* and calm*ly*)...


This would seem to make English "-'s" (apostrophe _s_) a postposition. Is it?


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## francisgranada

Forero said:


> This would seem to make English "-'s" (apostrophe _s_) a postposition. Is it?


If it is correct to say in English e.g. "my mother and father*'s* house" instead of "my mother*'s* and father*'s* house", then this *'s*  behaves similarly like the  postpositions (e.g. in Hungarian). Whether this is enough to call it _postposition_ - I don't know. (A "classical" postposition used to be a separate word, not "only" a marker).


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## Hulalessar

Forero said:


> This would seem to make English "-'s" (apostrophe _s_) a postposition. Is it?



It is a bit of an oddity because it can relate back to a phrase and not just the noun it immediately follows. In "the King of Spain's daughter" the daughter is not the daughter of Spain but the King. That makes it a bit difficult to describe as an inflection. If it is not regarded as a postposition in "The King's daughter" it is a bit difficult to justify calling it a postposition in "the King of Spain's daughter". I think the word "clitic" comes to the rescue.


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## Angelo di fuoco

I think it refers not to a phrase, but rather to a nominal syntagm.


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## Forero

Angelo di fuoco said:


> I think it refers not to a phrase, but rather to a nominal syntagm.


What difference do you see between a nominal syntagm and a noun phrase?


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## Hulalessar

Nominal syntagms live in universities whilst noun phrases live elsewhere.


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