Richard Wordingham wrote:For German,there was the Luther's translation of the Bible. That on its own is far more text than is available for Gothic!
I did not want to dismiss Luther's relevance for what is classified today (early) high German language, or his comprehensive linguistic work. My point was more that I suspect it were more the Grimm brothers than Luther using the term "deutsch" for means of "nation building". I suppose that Luther wanted to have a translation of the bible (from different languages) into "vernacular" (and used the term "Deudsch" for this means). The known succes of his printed work had then effects on the vernacular as a matter of course.
Two quotations of Wikipedia to understand my thought better:
"A famous Thai scholar argued that Thai (ไท) simply means "people" or "human being" since his investigation shows that in some rural areas the word "Thai" was used instead of the usual Thai word "khon" (คน) for people."
"The German endonym Deutschland derives from the Proto-Germanic root *theudo, meaning "people, race, nation", which was initially used as a blanket term referring to the 'common language' of Germanic people. In its beginnings, it did not specifically indicate the German language or people. In the first recorded instance of the word (late 8th century) it is used to cover the language of the Kingdom of Mercia, which was English."
Within the Holy Roman Empire (of theudo/Deudsch nation?) Luther did not fight for or against the concept of nation, rather, his problem was the definition of "Holy" within the "Empire". In contrast, the Grimm brothers wanted a "national" language according to my understanding. Both Luther and the Grimms made of course relevant linguistic work (and in essence both investigating "vernicular" of a region as their methods each).
Richard Wordingham wrote:However, I suspect the sort of 'comparative grammar' that emerges from the study of related languages is not very relevant to the topic at hand. A 'comparative syntax' might be, in so far as it pulls together characteristics that may pop up all over the world. An example is the noun-possessor syntax, which strongly reminds me of Welsh or Biblical Hebrew syntax. A second is the causative usage of ให้, which parallels Middle Egyptian. Another general observation is that adjectives are range across languages from verb-like to noun-like. Indo-European adjectives are very noun-like, while Thai 'adjectives' are generally so verb-like that I am not persuaded that most of them are not really verbs.
I fully agree with you - and it has to do with my question here, i.e. when เป็น can be omitted. Question: An investigation/study of comparative syntax, which finds out that ให้ parallels (highly likely unrelated) Middle Egyptian means generating an abstract grammar (terminology) fitting well for all human languages. Could such a work, or better "more than Indoeuropean based grammar", but also not pure national grammar, help Thai linguists?
