Saturday, January 25, 2020

Making verbs from nouns as an illiterate Indo-European

I poke into the etymology a bit farther looking for the origination  of the Latin verb suffixes. It looks, so far to me, that the etymologists can derive an IE form of person and tense.  -o -e show up in the discussions of which I just now am beginning to understand.

So the Latins kind of standardized these endings and grouped them deliberately? into the er,ir,ar forms? It sounds that way. The er,ir,ar was all about simply grouping them so it was easier to match the proper IE suffix to a particular stem word. Was it purely a Latin grouping? Dunno.

But, reado and learno more. (I can see how Pig Latin was invented).

Phoenicians must have still had a large code book since they were weak on grammar. Is this true?

Latin scribes by grouping the stems according to the ar,ir,ar system could reduce the code book size without too much distortion from the vernacular. The Latin scribes were deliberate, likely bringing in native speakers from abroad and literally reorganizing their grammar to meet the widest use as a foreign language dictionary. They likely had conferences, university style lectures and debates, then literally voted on the proper form of parchment grammar.

It was never about Italian grammar, specifically, but about creating a commercial dictionary for running the empire over many dialects of IE. The scribes creating a general grammatical structure in which local vernacular could be inserted, almost by rule This would be almost a mandatory tool needed for a far flung empire. It was an evolving system when scribes translated inot their own language and corrected the dictionary. But all parties shared in the advantage of a complete grammar structure, all their code books shrank and they could get greater literary audiences.

You no longer needed the poet. If you were trading from Spain to Greece and wanted to explain the product, just insert the local stem word into the Latin, pick the proper ar,ir,er form. Then, at least, you had a pig Latin translator, but more likely the local stems had already merged and it was a case adding a slightly modified form. Latin grammar forcing a reverse path back into local IE vernacular.

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