KathTheDragon wrote:
Your observation that verbal ablaut is more readily retained (and indeed, modern English has vestigial ablaut in its verbal system) is interesting, and definitely deserving of an answer. Sadly, I don't have it.
I thought about this and came up with an educated guess (read: speculation pulled directly out of my ass). First of all, one of my PIE textbooks makes mention of the supposed fact that cross-linguistically verbs are prosodically weaker than other elements of the sentence. It doesn't source this claim however.
My main guess is probably more pseudo-linguistic. I can't help but notice that nouns in general are less "fluid" in meaning in languages. In contrast, verbs often have very fluid meanings in language--just look at how many meanings "work" has in English, from "do a job" to "function correctly". In addition, I've noticed that verbs often undergo drift of meaning but nouns are more resistant. PIE's nouns, for instance, often have almost identical meanings across many of the IE languages, yet its verbs often have dramatically changed meaning across the families.
gʰe(n)dʰ- "sieze"'s reflexes include everything from "imagine" (Sanskrit), "begin" (English), and "grasp" (Latin). Even in English, it underlies "begin" AND "forget".
I think this has to do with the fact that verbs inherently describe actions which don't "exist" in the same way that nouns do. Yes, nouns often denote non-corporeal things, but they always refer to
things. In the meanwhile, concepts like "run", "see", "grab", "fly", etc. are not actual things but descriptions of actions taken by things in reality (I'm not sure how to explain it better). The line between "tree" and "dirt" is extremely obvious--but what's the line between "run" and "walk"? The ways in which a hand-glider, a bird, a plane, and a bullet "fly" are all quite different, yet us English speakers use the same verb for them.
I've also seen that non-native speakers of English usually screw up verbs more often than nouns. They're not going to say "dog" when they're talking about a cat, but they might use a verb in the wrong way or use the wrong verb.
To go outside of PIE, the Japanese words
otoko and
onna mean "man" and "woman" and that's that. But while
yurusu is translated as "forgive", it has such a different cultural context and depth of meaning from "forgive" that it truly can't be translated without notes/liberal rewriting. Even the most unusually complex words in a language can be translated into a phrase at worst, whereas many times fully explaining the complexity of a verb's particular meaning can take an entire paragraph of elaboration.
So perhaps verbal ablaut is more commonly retained in the IE languages because verbs are already inherent "fluid", so the fluidity of the ablaut is not as striking, whereas nouns are more "concrete" so ablaut of them is less common. This also explains why suppletion cross-linguistically is common in at least a few verbs in many languages, yet suppletion in nominal paradigms is extremely rare and almost always disposed of as soon as possible. I can't think of a single Sanskrit, Latin, or Greek noun right now that has even one suppletive form.
This might also explain why verbs cross-linguistically are inflected for far, far more categories than nouns. Nouns have case, number, definiteness and...not much else. But verbs can distinguish an incredible amount of moods, aspects, tenses, and other things like evidentiality, transitivity, voice, focus, etc. And once again, these categories are far more fluid than nominal categories. We can safely say that the Accusative in every language that has it encodes the direct object, with only a few unusual cases, and also state that the plural means 2 or more (or 3 or more if there's a dual) of the noun. But the Greek Aorist has subtle differences in meaning from the English preterite, even though both are "past tenses".
Hell, this is why we even inflect verbs for TAM. The concept of a "past" or "future" noun is nonsensical. And yes there are languages which can inflect nouns for tense, but doing inherently adds a verbal meaning regardless: "a [noun] that
was a [noun]"
Of course, this is veering into pseudo-linguistics territory, and there are many things that go against this theory. For instance, adjectives are like verbs in that they describe things that don't actually "exist", but they are often nominal in many languages; granted, they often are also verbal as well, and adjectives are more commonly suppletive than nouns. Also, English and many other Germanic languages retain ablaut of nouns for encoding plurality.
Who knows. This is just what I've noticed, though I'm not very good at explaining myself.
