[conlang_learners] IE vs non IE

[Jim Henry]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 7:03 PM, Arthaey Angosii<arthaey at gmail.com> wrote:

> What are the defining characteristics of an Indo-European language,
> con- or natlang? (Apart from shared vocabulary/etymology, of course.)
> What grammatical features make a language IE-like? Are those features
> found also in non-IE languages?

This isn't exactly the same thing you were asking about, but there was
a thread on the CONLANG list in April 2008 on "Standard Average
European" -- SAE being a sprachbund that includes most Western IE
languages and some non-IE languages whose grammar has apparently been
somewhat influenced by IE neighbors, like Maltese and Hungarian.
Someone linked the Wikipedia article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European

and most of the remainder of the thread was devoted to discussing said
article and its assertions.

As far as I know, the *defining* characteristic of an IE language is
purely and simply that it's descended from Proto-IE.   That is, most
of the similarities one can find between all the langs of the entire
family are lexical.  Morphologically and syntactically, there's a fair
bit of diversity within the family (somewhat less apparently within
the SAE sprachbund), but all the languages that retain any vestige of
the original IE case system, as far as I know, are accusative rather
than ergative or active or tripartite, and if they have other cases
left it's typically things like genitive, dative, instrumental --
without e.g. the kinds of fine-grained local cases you find in Finnish
or Tabassaran, or two distinct cases for alienable or inalienable
genitive, or other interesting things you find elsewhere...   There's
a variety of word orders within the family, VSO and SVO and SOV, but
no OVS or VOS or OSV langs (of course those are rare in nearly all
language families).  Having a copula verb is pretty common throughout
the IE family although in some languages (Russian, colloquial French)
it has become optional in some contexts, i.e. you can do
complete-sentence predication with just a noun and an adjective in
some registers or some tenses.

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/