Re: OT: Two language change questions

On Oct 19, 2008, at 5:22 AM, Eugene Oh wrote:

> In reply to question 2, because I have never thought about question
> 1 and
> won't pretend to have:
> Yes, Japanese does allow a pronoun in that position. You can say
> "hanareta
> watashi", I who left, although "tabeta kare" would not normally be
> said as a
> phrase unto itself, and would be liable to misinterpretation as
> "tabeta
> kare:" which means "the curry that I ate". In this way Japanese is
> a little
> absolutive (and indeed I have wondered whether it might once have
> been an
> absolutive language, but as I don't have access to the necessary
> resources,
> nor do I know where to start even if I had...).
You might be interested in <http://phonetics.cornell.edu/
japanese_historical_linguistics/TEAL[1].05-Yanagida.pdf>. (I haven't
read it yet, but it's on my list.)

Thanks for the info.