Fascinating!
Thanks for the article.
FWIW, I am convinced that the first languages were probably signed languages. (A chapter of a book I co-edited made that very argument. It was co-authored by William Stokoe, the founder of sign language linguistics. I thought the chapter made a compelling case.) FWIW, American Sign Language (ASL) would also be SOV. (Does anyone here know any other sign languages?)
I will say that the article did oversimplify things slightly. ASL, for example, has an underlying SOV structure, but it is much freer than English is with regard to the order in which things are articulated. Latin is that way, too -- there is an underlying word order, but it is not necessary to stick to that order. In English, word order is very important: The dog chased the cat means something completely different than The cat chased the dog. But in Latin, Canis felim fugavit and Felim canis fugavit both mean The dog chased the cat. (Disclaimer: It has been nearly three decades since my last Latin class. I *think* I have that correct, but I might be off on the endings.) In Latin, it is the ending of the words, not the word order, that determines which noun is the subject and which is the direct object of the verb. For that matter, you could have any of the other four possible word orders for the same three Latin words, and the basic meaning of the sentence would remain unchanged. The different orders would change the style and the emphasis, but not the meaning. Sort of like the following sentences in English:
The dog chased the cat.
It was the dog that chased the cat.
As for the cat, the dog chased it.
The chasing of the cat was done by the dog.
What the dog chased was the cat.
This analogy is imperfect, since the written English example requires a lot of additional verbiage to put the focus on specific words. A better analogy would be saying the same words each time, but stressing specific words:
The DOG chased the cat.
The dog CHASED the cat.
The dog chased the CAT.
Unfortunately, that doesn't come across very well in written language.
I wish I had time to write more, but my break at work has already been too long.
Joy,
Lynn
