From: wugi@brol.invalid   
      
   Op 10/08/2025 om 21:13 schreef Christian Weisgerber:   
   > On 2025-08-07, guido wugi  wrote:   
   >   
   >> Do we know when and how* German and Dutch acquired their V2 inversion   
   >> and verb-last-in-subclauses features?   
   >> Medieval examples (often) show unaltered order.   
   >> Scandinavian word order seems a mix of English and inverting order.   
   >>   
   >> * eg, standardising authority such as Bible translators?   
   > I don't think German and Dutch share much Bible translation history.   
      
   Some mutual influence source must have been there, for a largely   
   parallel standardised result in both languages. Opinions? (Folk speech   
   continuum, learned speech, church, ...?)   
      
   > Alas, I haven't yet read a history of German.  The closest I've   
   > come is   
   >   
   >    Damaris Nübling et al.   
   >    Historische Sprachwissenschaft des Deutschen:   
   >    Eine Einführung in die Prinzipien des Sprachwandels   
   >   
   > which explicitly does not cover the history of German, but merely   
   > picks some examples from there to illustrate general principles of   
   > language change.   
   >   
   > What I can glimpse from the chapter on syntactic change:   
   >   
   > PIE is thought to have had SOV order, so verb final position is   
   > simply conservative.   
   >   
   > Old High German word order was freer than today.  In main clauses,   
   > the verb could be initial, final, or in second position.  This was   
   > driven by pragmatics: when a new discourse referent is introduced,   
   > the verb moves to initial position.  (A relic of this is the   
   > verb-initial order frequently used in the opening lines of jokes:   
   > "Kommt ein Pferd in die Kneipe ...")  If the referent is already   
   > known, the verb moves into second position.   
   >   
   > Already in the 11th century, V2 is dominant.  In dependent clauses,   
   > three quarters are already verb-final; by the 14th century this is   
   > the norm; by the 18th verb-final position has become fixed.   
   >   
   > So in a slow process, over centuries, an originally optional word   
   > order became fixed.  The _why_ is a lot harder to explain, and   
   > adding more observations, e.g. a correlated increase in the number   
   > of subordinating conjunctions, does little to separate cause from   
   > effect.   
      
   V2 seems logical enough after all.   
   More enigmatic is the verb final order in dependent clauses. Hardly   
   though by way of inherited verb final order of PIE, don't you think?   
      
   --   
   guido wugi   
      
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