My personal favorite from the NYT magazine article, that Mark Liberman has already puzzled over (first here, and then here) was the following simply wonderful non sequitur:
"For example, because of the Kawesqar's nomadic past, they rarely use the future tense; given the contingency of moving constantly by canoe, it was all but unnecessary."
It has often puzzled me why modern Germanic languages lack future tenses, and instead make do with an impoverished selection of auxiliaries of indeterminate meaning. The Indo-Europeans (famous, coincidentally, for their smug stay-at-home complacency) had a great tense system, which they obviously used to great effect in order to speculate on the outcome of tomorrow's game, whether it was really worth going out when it was almost certain to rain, and whether tomorrow would be the same as today and the day before and the day before that.
The loss of the future tense presumably occurred in Gothic times. "Goth" is thought to relate to the Gothic gutans = "pour"+ppl, as in "keep pouring", and I had taken this to show that the love of liquor was a matter of identity for the Goths. This naturally led me to suppose that it was Gothic substance abuse that eventually eroded the future tense. But now I stand corrected. It was not in fact their heavy drinking, but the Goth's peripatetic lifestyle that produced the famous IE tense leveling: every time those Gothic warriors jumped in a boat, they threw out all but the strictly necessary morphemes in favor of an extra round of sandwiches and a couple of clubs.
Posted by David Beaver at March 2, 2004 04:17 AM