There’s something romantic about language isolates. The most famous is Basque (subject of much crackpottery); others are Ainu and the Siberian languages Ket and Nivkh (also known as Gilyak). In and around the Hunza Valley of northern Pakistan, almost 90,000 people speak a language called Burushaski; I’ve known about it for over 30 years, ever since I read W.B. Lockwood’s A Panorama of Indo-European Languages
In the western part of the Karakorum an isolated language, Burushaski, survives in two enclaves: an eastern form found in Hunza and Nagar, a western form in Yasin, where it is termed Werchikwar. To the north there is contact with Wakhi, in Yasin also with Khowar, otherwise with Shina, a language which has advanced in the Gilgit area at the expense of Burushaski… Dumaki forms a diminutive Indo-European enclave within the Burushaski of Hunza and Nagar. To all intents and purposes, Burushaski is a purely oral medium.
Well, in a comment to this post, David Marjanović linked to an online version of a book containing a compact grammatical description of the language, Dick Grune‘s Burushaski − An Extraordinary Language in the Karakoram Mountains (pdf, HTML cache), whose very first words told me I’d been pronouncing the name wrong all these years: “Burúshaski (stress on the second syllable)…” The book is very clearly and enjoyably written, an unusual pleasure in this kind of text (“The bad news is that Burushaski has perhaps as many paradigms as Latin, but the good news is that they are much more regular”). Grune discusses the possible relationships of the language:
Although Burushaski has been compared to almost any language on earth, no fully convincing relationships have yet been established. Modern taxonomic methods are, however, beginning to yield results. Ruhlen (1989) [lit.ref. 7] still classified Burushaski as a language isolate: ‘its genetic affiliation remains a complete mystery’ (p. 126), but Ruhlen (1992) [lit.ref. 7] reports on a possible classification of Burushaski as a separate branch of a newly proposed Dené-Caucasian superstock. More recently, Blažek and Bengtson (1995) [lit.ref. 8] list tens of etymologies relating Burushaski to the Yeniseian languages, spoken by a hundred people along the Yenisei river in Siberia. Where appropriate, we have included these etymolgies in this survey.
(I’m not sure what the “lit.ref.” numbers refer to; the list of references at the end is not numbered and has only one entry for Ruhlen, his Guide to the World’s Languages: Volume 1 [1987; 1991].) He begins his description of the language with this summary:
For all its romantic and exotic associations, Burushaski is not much weirder than Latin, Turkish or Finnish; of these three it is most reminiscent of Turkish in its structure. It has two or three cases for the nouns (see below) and a small number of locative suffixes; it has essentially one conjugation for the verb, plus a number of composite conjugations; and its sentence structure is similar to that of Turkish but much simpler. Its most remarkable features are that it has four genders for the nouns and that the indications of the object of the verb are the same as those for possession on the noun: ‘I hit him’ is expressed roughly as ‘I do his hitting’, as in many Amerind languages.
The four genders (I know you’re wondering) are human males (which he abbreviates hm), human females (hf), animals and countable objects (x), and materials and abstracta (y). Another interesting feature is the consecutive, “which has no counterpart in English. It has the meaning of ‘after having done so and so’ or ‘when such and such state had arisen’; it is a kind of adverbial past participle and it is used very, very frequently in Burushaski.” The higher numbers are vigesimal: 20 is áltar, 30 áltar tórum ‘twenty ten,’ 40 altó-áltar ‘two-twenty,’ 50 altó-áltar tórum, and so on. I greatly enjoy this kind of compendious description; it gives me the sense of getting a handle on a language without having to do any real work. Thanks, David!
This is very interesting. I haven’t read much about this language, but from your description the “consecutive” reminds me of an aspect/tense I built into a conlang (constructed language)I created for a race of spirits. I think I’ll do a little research on Burushaski and see exactly what the consecutive does.
I’ve been working on bringing up Burushaski crackpottery to the Basque level. But I can always use help (hint, hint)!
The lit.ref. numbers do look to be in the order given, so perhaps it’s just the two editions of Ruhlen that are being contrasted, with some confusion about dates.
Evidently it was actually Mrs. Lorimer who did the grunt field work.
What leapt at me was the description of Partawi Shah (Dr. Hunzai) as “the 1st poet of Burushaski language.” From what I can tell, the claim is that he was the first person to write poetry in Burushaski. Fortunately, Burushaski does not seem to be a language devoid of poetry, because some more scrounging turned up this page of flute music from Hunza Valley where a person who goes by the handle ‘shugulo’ says:
As I am at work I can’t check out the music, but it promises to be very interesting.
A page on the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation site has this to say on the subject of Burushaski literature:
Finally, here’s an interesting tidbit google turned up in the Chinese wikipedia entry on Burushaski:
I had never heard of the Bön religion before. Suddenly I feel like a character in a story by Jorge Luis Borges.
Why is the Chinese wikipedia entry in English??
The Chinese version is plainly a clone of the English version, or rather an earlier state of it.
I too always said Burusháski, which is yet more evidence that the default stress in English is on the penultimate (the large number of inherited Germanic words conceal this).
By all means, more knowledge about Burùshaski and the other languages mentioned would be all to the good.
About larger classifications: Ruhlen is not reliable, as he tends to accept any new proposal (see a comment to that effect by Bill Poser some time ago). Bengtson is not reliable either. Although there seems to be mounting evidence for a Dene-Yenisei relationship, Dene-Caucasian is another matter. Finally, lately the meaning of the word “etymology” seems to have changed from “items on the accepted family tree of a particular word” (as in Eng head, Old English heafod, [related to] German Haupt, Latin caput) to “group of words presumed to be related”, often on the basis of superficial resemblances – not the same thing at all. This second meaning is the one in the quote in LH’s message.
An example of Ruhlen’s unreliability:
Look up Zuni (should have a tilde on the n) and you might read that it has sometimes been linked to the “Penutian superstock” of Western North America, although the latter group (proposed by Edward Sapir) is not generally accepted, because of the diversity of the 15-odd language families (not just single languages) included in it. Ruhlen has written somewhere that “Zuni is obviously Penutian” (on what basis, he does not say), and that only old diehards stuck in the mud (or words to that effect) are unwilling to accept the connection. Actually, the connection is based on a single article published in 1965 in the International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL, a journal dedicated to Native languages) by the well-known American linguist (now deceased) Stanley Newman, but there was for a long time a persistent rumor among Americanists that it might have been a hoax. It turns out that this was indeed the case, and the evidence (based on interviews with several linguists who were in on it, some of whom I know personally) was published in 2002, unfortunately in an article about Southwestern native agriculture that few persons interested in language are likely to read. I know about it because I know the author personally, the very respected linguist and anthropologist Jane Hill, who showed me a copy of her article.
The reason behind the hoax was that many linguists thought that the editor of the IJAL at that time, Carl Voegelin, was very lax about the standard of the articles he accepted, and the Zuni paper was meant as a test of whether or not he would swallow the bait. He did, and the article, which contains only rather unsystematic resemblances of vocabulary, was published. Apparently Newman was embarrassed about it, but did not want to embarrass Voegelin in turn by revealing the true state of affairs.
As for any language being “obviously Penutian” as Ruhlen says, I myself have been doing research in this group for a number of years, and the overall resemblances between the 15 or so language families included by Sapir (as opposed to the languages within the families) are far from obvious (and, in case you think that Newman could have been right anyway, Zuni definitely does NOT fit the group). More recently, Greenberg included an even larger number of languages and families, including Zuni, under the umbrella term “Penutian”, a part of his so-called “Amerind”, largely on the basis of yet other proposals which have never been accepted. (Greenberg’s method, upheld by Ruhlen: accept the proposal, then look for words which might fit it – rather than the “old-fashioned” method: look for resemblances in structure as well as vocabulary, determine their systematicity, and propose groupings accordingly).
Wow, what a fascinating story about the IJAL hoax!
I can honestly (and carefully) say that I have never pronounced “Burushaski” incorrectly. Not even once.
Well. The chaotic noun plurals remind me of German — you can guess the right one in maybe 40 % of the cases.
The consecutive is cool, though…
Now, I agree that Ruhlen’s method — a phenetic method that counts similarities instead of shared innovations — is fair enough for generating hypotheses, but bad at testing them. Also, if you write books about all languages in the world, mistakes are bound to creep in. But Bengtson? Please explain.
On German Haupt, please note that its meaning “head” is nowadays entirely poetic and is completely unknown in at least my dialect. Most of the time it’s not a word, but a prefix that means “main”.
So you have never pronounced it?
I stressed it on the 3rd syllable before I found the German Wikipedia article on it. Maybe the default stress in non-compounds in German is on the penultimate, too… I’m not sure if I ever said the word aloud, though. :o)
BTW, the paragraph from the Chinese Wikipedia article is still in the English one.
I had a tiny epiphany when I realized that “hauptman” meant “captain” and that “hetman” was a derivative.
Well, the OED says “Believed to be derived from Ger. hauptmann,” but as beliefs go, that’s a reasonably reasonable one.
Curses! What’s the HTML entity for a quick, smoke bomb-assisted getaway?
Re “hetman”: not all -man are IE men. Wiki: “Dragoman designates the official title of a person who would function as an interpreter, translator and official guide between Turkish, Arabic, and Persian-speaking countries and polities of the Middle East and European embassies, consulates, vice-consulates and trading posts.” That word has roots extending to Akkadian “targumannu”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I found that “hetman” is a loan from a Turkish word which looks like a calque on an Arabic word.
“Turkomen” is also pure Turkish, but “men” is a kind of collective suffix.
I thought for awhile that “hetman” might be of Turkish derivation, from the Tatars to the Cossacks, but at this point it doesn’t seem so.
According to the dictionaries, ‘talisman’ is also unrelated to ‘man’.
Interesting — the OED says (or said, a century ago) only that talisman “appears to be a corrupt or mistaken form of some Arabic, Persian, or Turkish spoken word, imperfectly caught by early travellers,” but Merriam-Webster confidently traces it back to “Arabic tilsam, from Middle Greek telesma, from Greek, consecration, from telein to initiate into the mysteries, complete, from telos end.”
Hmm, Hat, the online OED (I happened to have the window open) has two entries for “talisman”, and the one in the relevant sense (talisman²) says:
The bit with “appears to be a corrupt or mistaken form” &c. is in talisman¹, “A name formerly applied to a Turk learned in divinity and law, a Mullah; sometimes to a lower priest of Islam, a religious minister, a muezzin.”
Ataman looks pretty Turkic, doesn’t it?
Coincidentally I have spent the last three weeks researching the Bru-sha and related Zhang Zhung scripts found in Bön texts. I’ll be blogging on them in a couple of days, but if you want a sneak preview of what the putative Bru-sha script looks like its letters are shown here.
The script is quite similar to Lantsa, and it is highly unlikely that it is anywhere near as ancient as is claimed or that it derives from Bru-sha (whether or not the identification with Burushaski is accepted). The claim that it is ancestral to the Tibetan script (specifically the cursive dbu-med style favoured by Bönpos) is, in my opinion, totally without foundation.
Great — please leave a link to your post when it appears!
I am also speaker Burushaki Language . i am happy to read this article it will be very useful for thesis.
Belatedly:
Meanwhile I think what’s going on is that (in German, English and likely others) any word of four or more syllables is presumed to be a compound, a compound that has four syllables is likely to consist of two parts with two syllables each, and each part is (still) stressed on its first syllable by default, which means there’s at least some stress on the third syllable of the compound.
Why there isn’t even more stress on the first is less clear to me, but German placenames with a hyphen in them are stressed on the last element.
There is a rhythmic element to it, but that can’t be the whole story in English. Consider infinitesimal, which has antepenultimate stress. The first syllable is unreduced, which gives it a sense of secondary stress which matches the antepenultimate stress on infinite. But the same is true of antepenultimate itself, where the first three syllables are neither a word nor even two morphemes (penultimate is monomorphemic in English, just as peninsula is).
English productively uses the Latin rule of stress on the antepenultimate on Classical loans – after putting them in English form; some even apply it to nomenclature.
German instead usually stresses the syllable that is stressed in the original language (when there is one and the word wasn’t composed from Classical roots later), which is often now the last. No doubt this was helped along by French – whereas French, strangely, has had no effect on English in this respect. Natur, Universität, stabil, Physik… are all stressed on the last syllable. (Instabil is stressed on the first, but I think that’s contrastive stress which has gone lexical in this instance.)
Raja Mehboob Ali Khan of Nagar is the first poet of Burushaski language. He has composed a book (Diwan) in Burushaski Poetry. His family members may have this book.
(Instabil is stressed on the first, but I think that’s contrastive stress which has gone lexical in this instance.)
Maybe it’s different in Austria, but normally all words prefixed with negative in- are stressed on the first syllable, perhaps indeed due to contrastive stress or perhaps due to analogy with the native prefix un-.
…You’re right, in- is always stressed.
On Nivkh – this article (PDF) claims that it’s not an isolate, but related to Algic, which would make it the third pre-Columbian language family relationship between the Old and the New world (besides Eskimo-Aleut and Dene-Yenisean). Maybe someone who knows more on the language families involved can judge how good the reconstruction and offered cognates are.
Algic is apparently what we now say instead of Algonquian, for those as out of it as I am.
Looks weak, I’m sorry to say, from brief inspection. No grammar at all (unlike Dené-Yeniseian, which started off with comparing verbal morphology.) Spot checking the proposed etyma finds a lot of weak etymologies of the kind Campbell wrote so much about: one-syllable matches, procrustean semantics, items of wider distribution. Quite a few segments are not consistent with the given table of sound correspondences.
‘Algic’ is not a substitute for ‘Algonquian’, it’s just a larger family which also includes the two Californian sister languages of Algonquian.
Thanks, I was shooting from the hip as usual.
I’ll need to read the whole thing; I’m surprised by the conclusion (in the abstract) that there’s no particular relationship between Nivkh and Chukchi-Kamchatkan, because a good argument for their being sister-groups was presented in this paywalled paper.
…The paper I linked to is actually cited. Will be interesting to read what Nikolaev has to say about that.
Best passage so far (2nd page):
Footnote 2: “Greenberg (1987) included Sapir’s Algonkin–Wakashan (denoted as ‘Almosan’) into the ‘Almosan–Keresiouan’ phylum along with the Caddoan, Iroquoian, Keresan, and Siouan–Catawban families. This hypothesis presumes an exclusive distant relationship and has not been properly supported with standard methods of comparative linguistics.”
Greenberg admitted that he arrived at his supergroups mostly by putting together language groups proposed by others, whether generally accepted or simply suggested, together with a few additional groupings of his own. His method was “mass comparison” of lexical items, something fraught with many pitfalls (elsewhere itemized by Campbell as “the methods”) in the absence of serious morphological analysis (which many people forget was basic to the beginning of serious historical linguistics). Although some of Greenberg’s criticisms of the practices of some scholars of Native American languages are valid, his own contributions to this particular area of scholarship cannot be taken seriously.
Nivkh and Chukchi-Kamchatkan
I have not read the paper, but the author, Michael Fortescue, has at least worked on Chukchi-Kamchatkan for years.
Fortescue’s paper is available here.
From September 2:
I’ve now read the paper and skimmed Fortescue (2011) again. The latter paper is actually weaker than I remembered; the vocabulary is not very basic, it and the grammar often needs to invoke special phonetic developments (irregular contractions or assimilations), and with grammatical elements one-syllable matches are often inevitable.
Nikolayev (2015) has some of the same issues. It’s stated to be the first in a series of papers, and the table of sound correspondences is explicitly stated to be simplified, with positional developments saved for a later paper, which unfortunately means that the sound correspondences in the compared vocabulary are a bit hard to judge. One-syllable matches are plentiful, because Nikolayev tried to fill in all of Starostin’s 110-item word list (Swadesh’s 100-item word list plus 10 that Starostin thought were also useful). Even so, however, this means that Nikolayev compares a lot of basic vocabulary. The assumed changes in semantics seem rather harmless to me on the whole.
Nikolayev explicitly takes Nivkh out of Nostratic, where it never fit quite comfortably. The personal pronouns make more sense now. Instead of beginning with *m-, “I” in Nivkh is *nʲi; a sound change [mi] > [mʲi] > [mnʲi] > [nʲi] isn’t impossible or unknown (as Fortescue explained at some length), but the corresponding forms in Proto-Salishan, Proto-Wakashan and Proto-Algic all have *n- (there’s *l- in Chimakuan); that’s an easier correspondence. “You (sg.)” is *cʰi in Nivkh; it isn’t hard in principle to derive that from *t-, but somewhat easier (and, says Nikolayev, regular) correspondents are found in Proto-Chimakuan *ki-, Proto-Algic *ke- and, more distantly, Proto-Salishan *kʷə-. Proto-Wakashan, though, is different, showing unexpected *suː- (with the same vowel as in 1sg and 1pl). For “we”, Nivkh has both *me- and *nʲɨ-. Of course *m- is all over Nostratic, but interestingly it’s also in Proto-Chimakuan, and there’s a *-m- in Proto-Salishan *n-ʔim-. The only Nostratic *n- form appears to be PIE *ne-¹; on the other side, *n- is found in Proto-Wakashan and Proto-Algic (with the same vowels as in the singular, though).
Comparative morphology is relegated to footnote 10 – which is quite interesting:
Beware the one-syllable matches, then; but having such things as inalienable nouns or plural infixes is in itself unusual enough on a global scale to count for something, and suppletion is always good.
¹ Dravidian isn’t in Table 6. Probably, Nikolayev follows the rest of the Moscow School in now restricting the term “Nostratic” to its supposed northern branch (similar but not identical to Greenberg’s Euroasiatic), excluding Dravidian and Afroasiatic which are thought to be more distantly related. Unnecessary confusion like the two meanings of “Indo-European”, I would say.
BTW, does anybody know why Nikolayev reconstructs the oblique stem of PIE “I” as h₁me-? Is there any evidence for the laryngeal? It can’t be from supposed external evidence, because it corresponds to nothing in the other cited Nostratic forms.
Unfortunately, I understand quite well why Nikolayev cites PIE “tongue” as *dlengʲʰw-, and I’m not happy about it. PIE “night” as *nok(t)- isn’t good either. Fortunately neither of them matters for the arguments in the paper…
I mean both the vocabulary and the grammar often need to…
BTW, does anybody know why Nikolayev reconstructs the oblique stem of PIE “I” as h₁me-?
Probably because of Greek ἐμοῦ, ἐμοί, ἐμέ; Armenian forms with Initial im-; Hittite oblique amm-; one can find that reconstruction with initial laryngeal in a lot of the modern IEanist literature, especially from the Leiden school.
Ah. That was a genuine gap in my knowledge, then.
Anybody who likes the idea that IE is an M/T (“Mitian”) language may analyse the extra *h₁(e)- as a deictic element (“me here”), perhaps identical with the verbal augment. In the languages that use the augment, imperfects and aorists without it serve as “injunctives” (expressing pure aspect, unmarked for tense). Note that the so-called “primary” endings (active -mi, -si, -ti and their middle counterparts) already contain a tense marker (*-i or -r), and so they don’t take an augment. My tentative guess is that the augment was an adverbial pronoun meaning, more or less, ‘here, then, at this point in time’ (in telling a story).
Or, of course, everyone but IE could have simplified the consonant cluster; no comparable clusters and no glottal stops or similar phonemes are currently reconstructed for the other M/T protolanguages.
But I knew next to nothing about the augment, so thanks 🙂
…I just remembered Greenberg’s interpretation of the PIE “I” word, which he reconstructed as some kind of *eghom, as *e-gho-m “this-is-me”.
(I’m aware that current reconstructions and interpretations, including those by Moscow School Nostraticists, are different.)
David: Greenberg’s interpretation of the PIE “I” word, which he reconstructed as some kind of *eghom, as *e-gho-m “this-is-me”.
I wonder what qualified Greenberg to reconstruct anything in PIE (or to analyze an accepted reconstruction – I think I have seen *eghom before).
The nominative of the 1sg. pronoun is strange — suppletive and clearly changing its structure between PIE proper and the common ancestor of the crown group (the Anatolian and Tocharian forms are different). Its ending does look conjugational — especially the variants *-om ~ *-ō, as in thematic aorists and presents, respectively (as if we were dealing with a perfective and an imperfective personal pronoun). Perhaps it was somehow assimilated to 1sg. verbs, or indeed involved an obscured finite verb, but a verb like *h₁eǵ(h₂)- seems to be otherwise unknown. I’m not sure if the evidence of Vedic is sufficient to reconstruct the second laryngeal, but supposing that the *h₁e- part is a proclitic deictic pronoun, *-ǵh₂- could be the residue of a reduced verb root. Still, *ǵeh₂- doesn’t ring a bell either.
OMG, there should be an “edit” button somewhere:
a perfective and a perfective –> a perfective and an imperfective
Sorry for this mess.
I am happy to serve as your edit button.
I am happy to serve as your edit button.
For which I am immensely grateful. Still, I should spend more time thinking before I post. For example, I should not have said this:
…the variants *-om ~ *-ō, as in thematic aorists and presents, respectively (as if we were dealing with a perfective and an imperfective personal pronoun).
The variant *-om is in fact aspect-independent; the aorist and the imperfect shared it, so the contrast here is actually between non-present (whether perfective or imperfective) and present (obligatorily imperfective) inflections.
I’ve spent half a day rereading this:
Бабаев К.В. Ностратический личный показатель *q. Orientalia et Classica XIX. Труды Института восточных культур и античности. Аспекты компаративистики 3. Москва: РГГУ, 2008. С. 473-498.
The pdf must have been on starling.rinet.ru at some point, or else I wouldn’t have it. It’s no longer there or anywhere else known to Google. I copied the citation from here, because – apart from its page numbers – the pdf gives no indication of belonging to any particular book or journal. (A “Chapter 1” is mentioned, but Babaev’s chapter isn’t numbered itself.)
There is an English abstract, but it doesn’t contain any spoilers except for the hypothesis developed at the very end. So I’ll try to paraphrase the paper (in greatly shortened form and not entirely in the original order, because Babaev reviews a lot of literature):
First Babaev takes the IE “I” word apart and lists all the problems with reconstructing it:
– There are reflexes with *-m and reflexes without. In the latter there’s *-o-, which has been explained as the thematic vowel. As Piotr said, this looks like the thematic and athematic verb conjugations. However, while there are languages that have “proverbs” instead of pronouns, it’s strange that there’s no other trace of such a verb anywhere in IE. Alternatively, this *-m could be cognate with the possessive suffix (apparently 1sg; Babaev doesn’t say) that nouns get in the Anatolian languages. Either way, whether noun or verb, the word must have been independent in PIE, not some kind of clitic or affix.
– Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic (how?) seem to point to *gʲʰ; Germanic, Latin and Greek point to *gʲ instead. Babaev agrees with some earlier works that these can be reconciled as *gʲH, a cluster with a laryngeal. (Bizarrely, and without further explanation, Babaev assumes that PIE only had a single laryngeal, which he writes *H. He mentions the “multi-laryngeal hypothesis” once, and that’s it. Fortunately, every *H in the paper seems to be *h₂, except for one or two in the explanation of a hypothesis he ends up not agreeing with.)
– The other vowel was *e according to Greek, Latin and Germanic, but Lithuanian and Hittite instead point to *o (…or, I suppose, *a), and the Slavic reflex *azъ “demonstrates” *ō or *ā. These could all be the same thing with ablaut, though the meaning of this is “absolutely unclear” in this case; anyway, the function of this element was “probably” emphasis.
– It is impossible to tell whether there was *h₁ at the very beginning of the word (except, Babaev doesn’t say, if you assume that PIE didn’t allow words to begin with a vowel).
This leaves us with *e/o-gʲ-H-(m/oH). Of these four elements, *gʲ and *H are “stably reconstructed” and can be considered the root. One of these might be the actual person marker, and the other have some kind of auxiliary meaning (e.g. emphasis); or both might be person markers that have “contaminated each other”. During a page of literature review, Babaev finds Kortlandt’s idea that *gʲ indeed represents an emphatic particle, which survived elsewhere in IE:
– Greek ἐμέ-γε (Aeolian -γα) “me” (acc.);
– Germanic *mi-k “me” (acc.);
– Armenian ինձ inʣ “to me” (dat.);
– the Venetic oblique form meχo, “if not by analogy with eχo ‘I'”, a comment that should also belong to the Germanic form;
– Hittite ammu-k compared to Luwian amu (meanings not given);
– the Tocharian 1sg feminine emphatic particle -k (Toch. A, as in ñuk), -k(e) (Toch. B), though Babaev cites three alternative explanations for this;
– Vasmer added to these the Slavic emphatic word že, Lithuanian betai-ga “but” and Old Prussian anga “if”. But Babaev doesn’t mention that these point to *g or gʷ, not to *gʲ!
If we accept that this *gʲ had an emphatic function, things get interesting:
Turkic has a “close parallel” in the Proto-Turkic word *ok “self”, which occurs as an independent word or as an enclitic in different languages:
– Old Turkic bän ök “I (and nobody else)”, öz-üm ök “I myself”;
– Kirgiz öz-um oq “I myself, only I”;
– Yakut -oχ “self”;
– Altai ol oq “he (emphasis)”.
There’s a Mongolic emphatic particle *kü/gü.
Uralic suggestions include Northern Mansi am-ki “I myself”.
South Yukaghir adds emphasis to met “I” by turning it into mete-k̔, except I have no idea what the inverse apostrophe is meant to mean; the Yukaghir languages are not supposed to have aspirates or ejectives or anything.
Bomhard has up the Kartvelian demonstrative pronouns ege “that”, igi “that one farther away”; Babaev does not comment on the fact that this fits – unless I’ve missed something big – neither Bomhard’s nor the Moscow School’s regular sound correspondences between IE and Kartvelian.
There are “insufficiently clear” Dravidian forms in -k-: Kurux and Malto have eŋ-g- < *eṉ-k- “I”, Pengo has naŋ-g- < *naṉ-k- “I”. Apparently such forms are especially common in the dative, which makes sense, says Babaev, citing a source and not explaining further.
In the Proto-Afro-Asiatic *(ʔan-)ʔaku, finally, both *ʔan- and -ku seem to be affixes, at least the former demonstrative.
Thus, Babaev suggests that the *gʲ in *egʲHom was an emphatic particle and goes back to a Proto-Nostratic *k. The *H, then, should be the actual person marker; it would regularly come from Proto-Nostratic *q.
PIE *H is indeed found in the 1sg endings of:
– the stative (“perfect”), *Ha;
– the “thematic” conjugation of the present, *oH;
– the middle voice, *-H-;
– the Anatolian ḫi-conjugation, -ḫi/-ḫa.
But wait: in the stative, the *H isn’t a person marker, it’s the aspect marker:
1sg *-H-o/e
2sg *-t-H-o/e
3sg *(-H)-o/e
But that’s a strange paradigm for IE standards. Not marking the 1st person is strange, and putting the aspect marker behind the person marker (in the 2nd person) is strange, too. Perhaps, then, *H started as a person marker, was reinterpreted as an aspect marker (see below on why that would be fairly easy) and then trickled down the paradigm.
In the ḫi-conjugation, the form -ḫa is widely acknowledged as older. It can then relatively effortlessly be derived from the “perfect”.
The middle and the “perfect” are also somehow connected; among other things, the “perfect” doesn’t itself have a middle voice.
The thematic ending evidently contains the thematic vowel *o/e, also found in other forms of non-perfect verbs.
Summarizing a page and a half of literature review on what all this means, Babaev concludes “that the person marker with IE *H unites forms with meanings of stativity, inactivity, perfectivity and intransitivity – that is, it largely repeats the semantics of the […] personal pronoun *egʲHom.” That this word had such meanings in IE is not demonstrated further. Instead, Babaev looks outside IE for first-person verb markers that could be derived from Nostratic *q:
In Uralic, there’s the Hungarian 1sg marker -k in the indefinite conjugation; with a definite object, -m is used instead. Several hypotheses have been proposed on where this -k could come from, all requiring rather strange reanalyses. The Samoyedic Selkup language uses -k (and -m) apparently the same way as Hungarian (qoŋa-k “I know (myself/us)”) and also forms “predicative nouns” with -k (kum-ak “I am a person”). As a verb ending it further occurs (as -g) in the Permic languages, apparently with the same meaning again. Further, in the 3rd person, the definite conjugation takes an ending, and the indefinite one does not; this is typologically common for stative verbs, giving the impression that this *-k once had a stative meaning.
In Turkic there’s a 1st-person marker -k in the “preterit”/”aorist”. Babaev cites a reference for considering it common Turkic despite its absence in Old Turkic texts and Siberian “dialects” and then spends over a page on reviewing hypotheses of its origin, concluding it’s ancient as a 1pl marker at least.
In Dravidian languages “a whole list of interesting but, unfortunately, so far underresearched elements” are found that resemble the Uralic and Turkic *-k. In Brahui, the oblique stem of the 1st-person pronouns is kan-, which is not found anywhere else in the family. Further, the clitic 1st-person possessive pronoun of Brahui is -ka. This k might or might not come from *y; the historical phonology of Brahui is not well understood. Anyway, a Proto-Dravidian 1sg present/future verb ending *-N-ku and a 1pl exclusive counterpart *-N-kum have been reconstructed.
Chukchi has a 1st-person ending -k for intransitive verbs. Interestingly, Babaev’s only source is from 1922.
Like Chukchi, the Eskimo-Aleut languages have ergative-absolutive alignment. They put the 1sg possessive suffix -ma on the agent (ergative) and -ka on the patient/experiencer (absolutive), and -ka apparently also goes on transitive verbs to mark the 1sg patient/experiencer. (I’m piecing this together from two widely separated paragraphs.) The Sirenik language has a 1pl patient/experiencer marker -ki.
Elamite had a 1pl exclusive pronoun nuku, “the morphemic status of which is unclear”. However, -k shows up in noun conjugation (…Elamite is one of about two languages that is known to conjugate nouns) as the 1sg suffix. From Middle to Achaemenid Elamite, this suffix spread from noun conjugation to verb conjugation in a perfective-preterite meaning; Babaev is reminded of Turkic.
The *k of Uralic, Altaic, Dravidian, Eskimo-Aleut and Chukchi-Kamchatkan represents a merger of Proto-Nostratic *k and *q (and, in some of these branches, yet other things). The litmus test are IE and Kartvelian: PN *k should give PIE *gʲ/g/gʷ and PK *k, while PN *q should yield PIE *H and PK *q or possibly *χ. Babaev spends over a page on discussing a possible Kartvelian candidate with *χ and concluding that it doesn’t fit. This leaves IE, and thus *q anyway.
This *q wasn’t simply a 1sg marker, but had “stative”, “intransitive”, “absolutive” meanings.
I should have mentioned that, in the same year, Babaev published a 300-page book on the origins of the IE person markers:
Бабаев К.В. Происхождение индоевропейских показателей лица. Москва – Калуга: «Эйдос». 2008. 298 с. ISBN 978-5-902948-30-8.
the “thematic” conjugation of the present, *oH
Almost everybody accepts it, but I have my doubts. Eugen Hill has recently (2012) come up with a pretty solid argument vindicating Warren Cowgill’s old hypothesis that 1sg. *-ō comes from *-ōi, which reflects the regular development of *-omi (or rather *-omj, with a non-syllabic glide) in this position (in the final syllable, preceded by a non-high vowel). It may seem a crazy idea, but it explains some otherwise mysterious phenomena in PIE morphology, and in my opinion should be taken seriously. It seems strange, anyway, for *h₂ to have spread to the active thematic present, leaving *-om alone in the parallel non-present 1sg. ending (especially in the imperfect, which is basically the very same thing as the present, modulo tense markers).
Thanks for the exhaustive and useful summary, David, and for the hat-tip to my erstwhile diss director, Piotr!
Oh yes – I read Hill’s paper on Google Books or somewhere at some point, but forgot all bibliographic information about it. For what that’s worth, I agree it’s a really good idea.
…and not just the bibliographic information, obviously!
Thus, Babaev suggests that the *gʲ in *egʲHom was an emphatic particle and goes back to a Proto-Nostratic *k. The *H, then, should be the actual person marker
Isn’t it a problem that, in all the cited comparanda both in and out of IE, the emphatic particle follows the person marker, while just in the PIE form it’s supposed to be preceding it?
What does conjugating nouns in Elamite mean, and is it Akkadian that is the only other language that does it? I’m thinking of šarr-āku ‘I am king’; the odd thing about the Akkadian construction is not that the copula is a clitic, but that (I think) this is only attested with unmodified nouns/adjectives, not with complex noun phrases. So is this also true for Elamite? (In the rest of Semitic what is called the “Perfect” is derived from this construction with some sort of participle, but the construction doesn’t otherwise survive.)
Elamite is one of about two languages that is known to conjugate nouns
I know next to nothing about Elamite except its name and the approximate region where it was spoken, but “conjugating nouns” suggests to me that nouns could be sentence predicates just like verbs, something that is not too unusual in languages which do without a “copula”.
Perhaps. But then, the other emphatic particle – *(h₁)e- – also precedes it.
Not Akkadian, but extant Nama; of the Wikipedias I’ve checked, only the Russian one describes it.
Elamite examples:
sunkik “I, the king”
sunkit “you, the king”
sunkir “(someone else,) the king”
sunkip “(others, the) kings”
u sunkik Ḫatamtik “I, king of Elam”
u untaš-GAL šak ḫumpanummenake sunkik anzanšušunka
I Untas-大 son Ḫ.-1sg king-1sg Anzan-Susa-1sg
“I, the Great Untas, son of Ḫ., king of Anshan and Susa”
Far out! I’m glad I asked.
I love seeing Sumerian gal ‘great’ turning up all over the Middle East, whatever the language, much as basic Arabic words have infiltrated the same region today. Ah, memories of grad-school LÚ.GAL GAL!
On the subject of the Indo-European first person singular nominative pronoun, I will admit I found Eric Hamp’s analysis very persuasive, not least because his analysis explains why it failed to survive in Celtic:
http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/8573/SCN%201_2011_Hamp.pdf?sequence=1
u untaš-GAL šak ḫumpanummenake sunkik anzanšušunka
I Untas-大 son Ḫ.-1sg king-1sg Anzan-Susa-1sg
“I, the Great Untas, son of Ḫ., king of Anshan and Susa”
Could this mean literally: I … son of H I am, king I am, (of) A and S I am ??
Well. Sumerograms stand around in non-Sumerian texts like kanji in Japanese texts; there’s often no telling if they stood for loanwords or for native words with the same meaning. The Hittite word for “bread” was apparently only discovered a few years ago because the Hittites just about always wrote it with a sumerogram.
That doesn’t work for u sunkik Ḫatamtik “I, king of Elam”.
The English Wikipedia has a bit more on this (also scroll down to “Language samples”).
The French Wikipedia, it turns out, has a much better explanation!
Cliticification of a conjugated copula does seem likely. How does tha Nama conjugation work?
Maybe related, it struck me that the repetitious use of the first person ending might be a matter of style or register. A royal proclamation was something that was shouted out from … wherever Elamite herolds went to shout.
Clitic copulas are possible in Polish (though rare these days in formal, standard language). They can still be used with adjectives, but in older Polish they could also be attached to nouns. Etymologically, they are reduced variants of the common Slavic conjugational forms of ‘to be’, but synchronically they are analysed as “mobile” verb endings. They used to behave in accordance with Wackernagel’s Law: like other “sentence particles”, they were placed after the first stressed word in a clause. In present-day Polish in most types of sentences they don’t leave the main verb.
Formal: Jesteś głupi ‘you_are-2SG. stupid’.
Colloquial (or dated formal): Głupiś ‘stupid-2SG.’ (from Old Polish głup(i) jeś).
Henry the Eighth I am!
“The lugal Eannatum is come! Let all leave this land or yield them up!” It gave the enemy more thought if the heralds used that name.
At the link above, the Russian Wikipedia says that person, gender and marker are expressed in a single element that is usually called a clitic and goes between the root and the case marker. Then it presents the table of these so-called clitics. And then it gives three examples, one of which fits the table; another fits almost, and the third just doesn’t. ~:-|
I’m now reading Hamp’s paper. “So far as I can see, there is one approach — the correct approach — that has not yet been seriously considered.” 😀 Something tells me this paper wasn’t peer-reviewed!
The paper does seem to solve a bunch of riddles. But I wonder what would have happened to *egʲH in the branches where Hamp reconstructs just *egʲ. Are there even any other cases of word-final clusters of plosive + laryngeal? And concerning specifically Germanic, what about the early round of apocope that e.g. robbed the vocative of its ending? – I’ll need to see how much of Ringe (1996) Google Books lets me read this time. Usually it’s not much.
Are there even any other cases of word-final clusters of plosive + laryngeal?
One particularly good case is the athematic adjective meaning ‘big’, whose reconstructed neuter form is *meǵh₂ (Gk. μεγά, Ved. máhi, OHitt. mēk). Unfortunately the original stem has been replaced by a more complex thematic derivarive in Germanic (*mek-ila- ≈ Gk. μεγάλος), and Celtic *magjo- may not even be the same root.
2006 of course.
This at least fits ūk “I” (the vowel of which, Hamp thinks, is somehow copied from tū).
This at least fits ūk “I” (the vowel of which, Hamp thinks, is somehow copied from tū).
Kloekhorst, pp. 135-143, esp. 139 ff., argues against that idea. Based on an analysis of the Anatolian forms against what is attested in Rest-IE, he reconstructs this System for PIE:
1. Sg. Nom. H1ég’H-, obl. H1mn-; 2. Sg. Nom. tiH1, obl. tu-
The reason for the (from a conventional IEanist view) strange 2Sg. Nom. are the Anatolian forms (Hittite zik, something like ti or ti: in the other Anatolian languages). Kloekhorst generally (and not really controversially) assumes a clear split between Anatolian and Non-Anatolian PIE, and he here assumes that the Anatolian forms are archaic, while Rest-IE has imported the /u/ from the oblique cases into the nominative. Hittite, OTOH, has first imported the /u/ from the 2 sg. oblique into the 1st sg. oblique, and from there it wandered into the 1st. sg. Nom. I find his reconstruction quite appealing.
That was supposed to be “Kloekhorst, p. 135-143” and “Hittite”. Sorry!
David Marjanović: If you will contact me via e-mail I will put you in touch with something you will like.
It’s no longer there or anywhere else known to Google
Babaev’s paper (in fact the entire volume) is still accessible online [linked from the website of the Институт восточных культур и античности]
I will put you in touch with something you will like
I think you mean “you will hear something to your advantage”.
In the linked article, Eric Hamp sometimes tries to eat the cake and have it too. He wants the pronoun to end in *ǵ, he is convinced in advance that the “North European” branches preserved the bare nom.sg. without any extensions; therefore inconvenient forms like Slavic *jazъ have to be explained away. An Iranian loan? — the 1sg personal pronoun, really? Anything can be borrowed, but this is one of the least borrowable items cross-linguistically, so one has a right to demand extraordinarily solid evidence. The Slavic long vowel reflex, to begin with, is not really explained: there’s no independent support for the ad hoc suggestion that the fronted *a in Pontic Steppe Iranian sounded longisch to a Slavic ear (which is supposed to be why *ě ~ ja was substituted for it). Where are independent examples of such an outcome in Slavic? And what about Elder Runic eka, ika beside ek, ik? The final vowel in emphatic forms may even have been long in PGmc. (it survives e.g. in OHG ihha and West Frisian ikke). Hamp should at least have mentioned such complications.
…Thanks for the links; I shall never be bored again. *wide-eyed look*
Nonetheless, I’ve sent the e-mail. 🙂
I can see borrowing the 1sg personal pronoun for extreme emphasis; English has sort of jokingly done it with moi. …But I do agree that establishing the mere theoretical possibility isn’t the same as showing that this is what happened.
On this detail he could have been right for the wrong reason: if the quality of *ě was [æ], then it may well have been an exact match for that of Iranian short *a (indeed, a and ā are [æ] and [ɒ(ː)] in modern Persian in Iran today; vowel length is being lost).
…Oh.
*pretends being able to raise one eyebrow*
Fascinating.
This -e is also part of the stereotype about the accent of Berlin. I’m not sure if I’ve personally heard it (I have heard [ʔɪk] often), but…
On this detail he could have been right for the wrong reason: if the quality of *ě was [æ], then it may well have been an exact match for that of Iranian short *a (indeed, a and ā are [æ] and [ɒ(ː)] in modern Persian in Iran today; vowel length is being lost).
Well, there are fairly long lists of suspected Iranicisms in Slavic, and of course many of them have short *a on the Iranian side. The Slavic counterpart is almost invariably *o (which was phonetically [a] in Proto-Slavic, in all likelihood), but sometimes also *ъ, possibly depending on the stress pattern.
If we start with *h₁eǵ(h₂)om, however, we get *(j)azъ as the expected regular reflex (with length due to Winter’s Law). The variant *ja can be explained as the outcome of apocope — a trivial thing to happen in a personal pronoun (function words are hotspots of phonetic reduction). The Runic forms are usually explained as stressed *ek-a(n) vs. weak *ik (with very early apocope — practically the same thing as in Slavic), with some mutual contamination leading to “mixed” variants. A heavier suffix (*ek-ō?) is posited by Ringe to account for some of the Germanic reflexes, but we need *ek-a(n) anyway to explain e-breaking in East Scandinavian (Old Swedish iak, etc.). All this is completely straightforward and requires no special pleading.
borrowing the 1st singular pronoun
It is true that personal pronouns are rarely borrowed, but in the cases considered here the “personal pronoun” is an independent word or even phrase while (what seem to me to be) the true pronouns are the pronominal affixes.
A speaker often feels the need to stress their own participation or responsibility in the act or situation described in their utterances, hence the frequent occurrence of an emphatic independent pronoun such as French moi often duplicating the reference shown by the personal affix on the verb. On the other hand, politeness or diplomacy often causes the speaker to try to avoid attracting too much attention to their own participation, so it should not be surprising that there are often circumlocutions (and possibly eventually replacements) for the 1st sg morpheme, which may become “pronouns” if the old morpheme is lost (eg Fr obligatory je from Latin emphatic ego, itself apparently from a PIE phrase).
Circumlocutions often treat the speaker as a 3rd person, as in English this writer, yours truly, your humble servant and others. In French you can refer to yourself as moi qui vous parle (often used in recounting an anecdote from the past which the hearer might not believe, usually one that involves the speaker as participant or witness in the same way as others who were in the same situation then, who are not present now) or in relatively formal writing l’auteur de ces lignes. Another case for which I don’t know examples in other languages is the very colloquial self-reference using the apparent name or nickname Bibi (with 3rd person agreement as with other names). It seems to me that I have heard it only or mostly in the context of complaining of unfair treatment which should have been shared by a group: for instance, if you and your friends were together at a restaurant and the others disappeared before paying their due so you were left to take care of the entire bill: Qui est-ce qui a payé? Bibi! “Who was it who paid? – Bibi!. Similarly if your group scatters at the sight of the police arriving and you are the only one arrested.
I don’t know where Bibi comes from. (It is much older than the current Israeli president).
(It is much older than the current Israeli president)
Older by far: http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/bibi
*lightbulb moment*
Also, I think this is a “how stupid of me not to have thought of this myself” moment.
Aw. I was hoping for an obscurum per obscurius connection with biloute (explained in Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis as “ch’est le churnom à tout l’monde”)
Piotr, merci!
According to the TLFI (the source of your link), the citations for “Bibi = moi” are late 19C. One of Daudet’s characters uses it, and the author feels obliged to explain that this character likes to “call himself” by that name (it is not a name that others call him). This suggests that it was a recent innovation. Alternately, since Daudet was a Southerner, probably bilingual in French and Occitan since most of the South spoke Occitan at the time, it is possible that he only encountered the usage after living among “Parisians” (= Northerners). (“Bibi” as the nickname of an actual person in Marseille two centuries before seems to be a coincidence).
I don’t know where Bibi comes from. (It is much older than the current Israeli president).
Benjamin Netanyahu is the current Israeli prime minister.
PO, sorry for the error, thanks for the correction.
Way above I wrote:
Perhaps surprisingly, Ringe (2006: 124) agrees on the equation of at least the Germanic and the Greek forms:
l’auteur de ces lignes
English the present author, a curious metaphor (says Frye) because from the reader’s point of view the author is in fact absent.
Qui est-ce qui a payé? Bibi!
I would say this as “And who got stuck with the check? Yours truly!” The use of this standard closing phrase to a letter as a jocular first person pronoun is decidedly strange: the OED’s first recorded use is by Dickens in 1833. But there it is.
Less strange if you consider its predecessors as closing phrases to letters, like your humble servant.
I’ve always understood this present as referring to time.
Yeah, but when someone writes a book in 1848 and calls himself “the present author”, he is present neither in time nor in space when I read the book today. “The present book” makes perfectly good sense, on the other hand; perhaps the word was transferred from that expression.
Updates 3 years in the making…
The reason seems to be that the Moscow School regards every laryngeal that isn’t spelled out in Anatolian as belonging to internal reconstruction of PIE, thus not a part of PIE proper. This is arguably true of some of them, but certainly not all.
If the superscript should be a subscript, we’re looking at [q] in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.
Specifically, -ḫi is considered a contraction of -ḫa-i.
The Wikipedia article already linked to presents examples that do suggest clitics (“sunki Hatamti-p (or, sometimes, sunki-p Hatamti-p) = ‘the kings of Elam'”; “temti riša-r = ‘great lord’ (lit. ‘lord great’)”), but it’s also clear that noun (phrase) conjugation was grammaticalized and was used with together with rather than instead of verbs: “I, name, son [of] name-1sg, king-1sg place place-1sg, bricks molded-1sg and throne_hall-acc [of] name god-3sg I-3sg-acc ?with? made-1sg-loc?”.
A few years ago I heard a little girl in Berlin insist aber ich! – as [ʔabaʔɪçːɵː]. Spurious final vowels like that, added just for prosodic purposes, are found in French, but hardly in German.
In sum, it looks like the stressed PGmc form was *eką, straight from *h₁eǵh₂om; maybe there was also an *ekō from *h₁eǵoh₂ without the third IE emphatic particle *-m.
==========
Finally, Hill’s paper on the thematic 1sg *-ō and other things is here.
Is this K V Babaev the same bod as the praiseworthy Africanist Kirill? He seems to have made a fairly radical change in his interests since then if so (but I think Kirill B is off to SE Asia nowadays, come to that, so maybe he just gets bored after a bit and moves on.)
Nahuatl conjugates nouns, of course, not only in that nouns take verbal morphology instead of appearing with a copula, but in that nouns are always marked for the person of the referent. (Michel Launey called this “omnipredicativity”, and wrote a book about it.) I sort-of assumed Nahuatl was the other one of the “about two.”
According to The Elamite Language, by Erica Reiner (Brill 1966), Elamite does this with animate-reference nouns: sunkik “I, the king”, sunkir “he, the king”, sunkime “kingdom.”
But as marie-lucie pointed out a few years back in this thread, regularly marking person-reference nouns for the person of the referent even when they’re arguments and not predicates isn’t unparalleled by any means. Iroquoian languages do it, for example.
Yes.
The Wikipedia article on Nahuatl only offers this:
That’s not very similar to Elamite.
I haven’t found any hint yet in the Wikipedia grammars of Iroquoian languages, but all of them are very short.
That’s not very similar to Elamite.
Launey’s Nahuatl grammar has (26.2) “Noms à la 1e et 2e personne”, examples like
Tlein ticcuāzquê in ticnōtlācâ
“Qu’allons-nous manger, nous pauvres gens?”
where the ti- “1pl” appears on the verb and the subject. It looks pretty like the Elamite to me.
The particle in doesn’t seem to me to be fully explained, but it certainly isn’t any sort of relative marker, as it appears all the time with bare nouns with 3rd person reference in their citation forms; unless you assume (as Launey actually does) that Nahuatl 3rd-person-reference-noun bare citation forms actually are predicates by default.
Arthur Anderson (the other major modern grammarian of Nahuatl) really goes a bundle on this business of all Nahuatl nouns being predicates by default, to the point where he writes it in to every single gloss, including glosses of single inanimate nouns in isolation. After a while, you end up going “OK! I get it! All Nahuatl nouns are sentences. Stop! Just stop already!”
Surely the Elamite facts lend themselves to just the same interpretation?
I think you mean that Nahuatl lacks a distinction between nouns and verbs? Elamite has a pretty strong one. Case suffixes and (at least from Middle Elamite onward) possessive suffixes, which are different from the person-marking suffixes, go on nouns but not on verbs. Verbs can take TAM markers and can be nominalized; one set of TAM is marked by person endings different from those of nouns (and the others are periphrastic, involving participles that conjugate as nouns). Nouns are not marked for TAM. Word order is pretty strict, very much unlike Nahuatl, and personal pronouns are used all the time despite the presence of person markers on half the words in any sentence! (The “resumptive pronouns” in front of the conjugated verb remind me of Yeniseian.) In short, Elamite nouns are not verbs, and yet they’re conjugated.
What I can find on Iroquoian grammars on Wikipedia doesn’t tell if nouns are predicates. There is a robust noun-verb distinction, however, even though free-standing nouns aren’t used much; the word order seems to be “new information first”.
Nahuatl doesn’t lack a distinction between nouns and verbs at all; they are morphologically very clearly distinct. What is unusual about it is precisely that nouns and verbs are both freely used both as predicates and as arguments.
From Montgomery-Anderson’s Cherokee grammar: human-reference nouns include a prefix for the person of the referent: jisgaya “I’m a man”, hisgaya, “you’re a man”, asgaya “man” or “he’s a man.” I can’t see from his account whether you can do the Nahuatl thing of having a 1sg-marked noun as subject along with a 1sg-subjetc verb; I think part of the difficulty is that for pragmatic reasons it’s likely to be uncommon in any case.
This looks apropos, and discusses some of the relevant issues:
http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/HPSG/2014/hahn.pdf
That’s widespread; türküm “I am a Turk”. But, as far as I can see, Elamite didn’t stop there. “I, the king-1sg, did-1sg stuff” apparently cannot be parsed as “I am the king and did stuff”, because there’s a word for “and” that is used just like in SAE in the one clear example on the Wikipedia article and is not used in this construction. (Unexpectedly, the generally more detailed German version doesn’t elaborate.)
In Elamite it was obligatory, and then people piled a pronoun on top of that.
It seems likely to me that given the rarity of compulsory marking for person of the referent on nouns that when it turns up it’s likely to be a manifestation of “omnipredicativity”, but I must admit the notions are logically separable.
I rather like the idea of conflating person and gender. This is actually quite a tempting move in a number of Niger-Congo languages. In Kusaal, although I followed the crowd in labelling the gender distinction as animate/inanimate, as a matter of fact “animate” 3rd person pronouns are used precisely in those cases where it’s possible to conceive of 1st or 2nd person pronouns being applied: “animate” should really be “potential participant in a conversation” (which isn’t identical in the Kusaasi Weltanschauung to what it would be in SAE.) In the related languages which still preserve lots of different “inanimate” genders with separate pronouns, you could often quite easily and naturally have a supercategory in which “second person” is a gender, and from a morphological point of view have it all work out very neatly. But it would come at the cost of “animate”-reference nouns varying between three “genders” promiscuously, so you’d just be sweeping the complexity under the carpet.
It’s definitely interesting, I’ll read it in detail at… some point. 🙁
That’s widespread; türküm “I am a Turk”.
Sure. But is Türk. by itself, the normal way to say “He is a Turk.” (as opposed to replying to a question like “What nationality is he?”, where ellipsis comes into play?) Otherwise, there seems to be no reason to suppose that Türk when used as an argument is anything more exotic than “Turk” as an argument in English, and no reason to suppose that there’s any compulsory person-marking of nouns in Turkish. Admittedly the fact that asgaya means both “man” and “he’s a man” doesn’t prove that Cherokee has that either; but it seems a sine qua non for it to be possible. To prove the point, as you rightly imply, you’d need to find cases of coreference between person-marked subject nouns and verbs. I think that is likely to be a highly marked and uncommon situation with 1st persons outside of the particular genre of royal self-laudatory inscriptions. (One of Launey’s other examples is actually In NiMotēuczōma, ca Mexìco nitlàtoāni, “Moi, Moctezuma, je sui rois de Mexico”, from a person with the same mindset as the Elamite author …)
Anyhow, if Launey and Anderson are correct, person-marking on nouns for the person of the referent is compulsory in Nahuatl, just as (apparently) in Elamite.
In the deutero-canonical book of 2 Esdras (4 Esdras to the Catholics and 3 Esdras to the Orthodox, both of whom call the books of Ezra and Nehemiah “1 Esdras” and “2 Esdras”), the opening of book 3 is (in the Common English Bible of 2008-11) “In the thirtieth year after our city [Jerusalem] was destroyed, I, Salathiel, who am also Ezra, was in Babylon.” That “who am” is decidedly weird, but a number of translations use it. The Latin recension, which is the oldest we have (but internal evidence shows that there were Hebrew and Greek versions, as 2 Esdras 3-14 are a Jewish apocalypse), reads “Anno tricesimo ruinae civitatis eram in Babylone, ego Salathihel qui et Ezras”. How weird that is in Latin I can’t say.
You corrected yourself to 1 Esdras back in 2012.
Surely it’s no weirder than the familiar “Our Father, who art in heaven”?
Don’t know if that’s a Latinism in the English, but person agreement of the relative is standard Latin. No verb there at all in the Greek, of course.
The omission of the copula altogether in the Esdras bit seems a pretty peculiar Latin usage to me, but my Latin Sprachgefühl isn’t what it was a couple of thousand years ago. I blame Barbarians.
Addendum: idly googling, I found pretty much straight away Acts 13:9
Saulus autem qui et Paulus repletus Spiritu Sancto intuens in eum
… so what do I know? It’s probably standard Latin for AKA.
Quoth Ren (6m36): “They think I’m crazy. But I know better… it is not I who am crazy; it is I who AM MAD!”
I don’t know what we have in Elamite other than royal self-laudatory inscriptions, prayers and bureaucracy.
That’s interesting, especially because in is… apparently some kind of demonstrative, in any case not a personal pronoun.
…To my surprise, that seems to be possible. Another option, mentioned only in the “vowel harmony” section of the “Turkish language” article, appears to be a copula clitic: türkdür… though maybe that implies definiteness.
Omission of the copula is unusual in Latin, but found, e.g. et in Arcadia ego.
Looking at Lewis’ Turkish grammar, he says that the copula is suffixed -dir “in writing and in formal speech” but zero in informal speech in A = B sentences like Kızın adı Fatma “The girl’s name is Fatima.” But he says that if the subject is omitted, even the colloquial uses -dir: yaman bir adam-dır “he is a remarkable man”; or that you use the 3rd sg pronoun, as in o, yaman bir adam or yaman bir adam, o.
However, this is from the 1967 edition. Turkish might have got all omnipredicative since then for all I know.
What struck me as odd was not the omission of the copula in Latin as such, but its omission in a relative clause. But I seem to have been wrong about that anyway.
I’m not altogether sold on what seems to be the consensus view of Nahuatl being omnipredicative (but my knowledge is minuscule compared with that of Launey, Anderson etc etc.) Still, FWIW, it doesn’t really seem to be the case that you would actually say (say) Cuahuitl, just like that, for “It’s a tree”; you’d need to say Ca cuahuitl, where ca marks something as a predicate, though it clearly isn’t itself a copula. There doesn’t seem to be any similar restriction against saying (say) Tzàtzi in pilli “The child is shouting”, although you can say Ca tzàtzi in pilli You could maybe argue that this isn’t a world away from the situation in Turkish.
It seems about analogous to the (different) question of whether there are languages which make no grammatical distinction between nouns and verbs; the candidates seem to melt away under close examination, but nevertheless it’s pretty clear that there really are languages where the distinction is at very least a whole lot more subtle than in SAE.
In other words, it looks more like the position in Nahuatl is not that nouns and verbs are really syntactically equivalent, but that while both nouns and verbs can be used (remarkably) freely as predicates or as arguments, nouns still default to being arguments and verbs to being predicates. (Duh.)
Which is in principle orthogonal to the question of whether Nahuatl nouns are obligatorily marked for the person of the referent; it looks like it, but the constructions that might decide the issue are pretty marked and peculiar pragmatically*, to the extent that a less outré analysis might even be more parsimonious. (Anderson gets pretty shirty about this, implying that any such attempts must be ipso facto mere glottocentricism if not positively racist. It’s a point of view …)
*I mean, how often do you really say: “I, the X, do thus”? Unless you’re the God-Emperor of Mankind and like to keep reminding the peasantry of the fact on the off-chance that they might have forgotten.
No, 2 Esdras it is. I added a correction to the miscorrection at the other post. 1 Esdras is basically a separate recension of Ezra.
Quoth Ren
Oh, that Ren.
(Well, it could have been Kylo. I can picture it.)
I took a look at Andrews, Introduction to Classical Nahuatl, and Bierhorst, A Nahuatl-English dictionary and concordance to the Cantares Mexicanos. That in particle is, roughly, a demonstrative. Molina, the first Nahuatl grammarian, called it an “adornment”. Andrews sees it as an optional honorific. Bierhorst draws a parallel with Richard II: “This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars…” Bierhorst’s grammatical supplement, in general, makes for delightful reading. He’s constantly thinking of the grammar from the translator’s point of view.
Another example in Bierhorst: quinõyacuili ynin tepoztopili ixpayolme, freely translated as ‘this one has taken the lance from the Spaniards’, literally ‘this one has taken it from them, it is lance, they are Spaniards.’ This kind of construction reminds me of the syntax of some sign languages (if you agree with his analysis.)
Paging Magnus Pharao Hansen…
Whatever else it does, in marks the word it’s attached to as an argument, rather than a predicate. It can’t just be that, because it’s not mandatory with arguments, but even so, that seems to be the single clearest thing about it. It’s the opposite (in that sense) of ca, which flags up the next word as a predicate instead of an argument. The fact that there even are such words in Nahuatl shows there’s a lot more going on than just all words being predicates. And Bierhorst’s rendering of quinõyacuili ynin tepoztopili ixpayolme “literally” is frankly just silly. I’d say it shows major conceptual confusion (happily, this is not at all a barrier to sensitive understanding of the actual language in practice.)
The whole area of usage of these and similar words in Classical Nahuatl was evidently tied up with all kinds of issues of focus and backgrounding and textual cohesion which are the devil to pin down even in a language where you’ve got real live informants to share their intuitions with you. Even in English, the most intensively studied language of all time, we don’t understand them at all well. Doing it in a dead language ranges from difficult to impossible; but people make progress anyhow (the heroes of Egyptian grammatical study have done near-miracles with even more unpromising materials.)
If we are going to get into fictional characters named “Ren,” the most linguistically interesting is probably the prince of Octopon from The Pirates of Dark Water. The show was notable for its time for being a cartoon with an actual progressing plot arc, as well as for its meticulous world building, including a whole range of fictional profanity.
If we are going to get into fictional characters named “Ren”
Yes, please. Also, who does not like fictional profanity? Examples?
@David Eddyshaw: The entire series can be found online, but here’s a brief video featuring the show’s two most common expletives.
Et in Arcadia ego seven years ago.
Loglan and Lojban are of course truly omnipredicative, and have an optional premarker of the predicate, ga in the first, cu /ʃu/ in the second. This is required to separate consecutive predicate words which would otherwise create a noun-noun (verb-verb) compound. Thus in Lojban le zdani blanu is a bare NP, literally ‘that-which-is house-blue’, roughly speaking something which is blue in the way that a house is (whatever that means), but le zdani cu blanu is a sentence, literally ‘that-which-is-a house is-blue.
Thus in Lojban le zdani blanu is a bare NP, literally ‘that-which-is house-blue’, roughly speaking something which is blue in the way that a house is (whatever that means)
Now I wonder what the Lojban for “school bus yellow” is… though, come to think of it, does Lojban even have a word for “school bus”? It has to be a pretty parochial concept.
Sure: ckule karce pelxu. Karce is etymologically car + Mandarin 車 chē ‘wheeled vehicle’, but its semantics is in between: it means ‘motorized wheeled vehicle (car, bus, truck, van, etc.)’ Etymologically related words are carce ‘cart (unmotorized)’ and marce ‘vehicle in general’.
However, it’s also possible that ckule karce could mean something like ‘motorized vehicle used as a mobile school’, as the semantics of compounding in Lojban is deliberately not precisely defined. One could make a neoclassical-style (stump) compound kulkarce (the rules for doing this are precise) and define it to mean precisely ‘school bus’, if this seems useful enough. You could also add more parts to the compound to try to denote ‘school bus’ specifically, but each additional word-joint brings in more possible semantic ambiguity. “The price of infinite precision is infinite verbosity.”
Lojban is left-grouping and modifier-head, so ckule karce pelxu is ‘school-bus yellow’, as opposed to ckule karce bo pelxu or ckule ke karce pelxu, both meaning ‘school bus-yellow’, whatever that may be. You can think of bo as a hyphen and ke as a left parenthesis. Lojban letters are IPA, except c for /ʃ/, j for /ʒ/, y for /ə/, ‘ for /h/ (used only intervocalically); h q w are not used.
😮
As if extracted from *karce-marce “a car or something”!
In fact marce owes its /m/ to Russian mashin and Arabic markaba. The etymologies file attributes the /c/ in carce to a Spanish form char-, but I can’t find any such word; French char would seem more probable, but French words were not used in etymologies.
French words were not used in etymologies.
How very odd! Why not?
Sheer spite. It’s because everyone knows that French is the logical language. Everyone French, anyhow.
The six numerically largest languages of the world were used in accordance with a figure-of-merit algorithm that weighted the languages according to their numbers of speakers and the candidate words according to the match between their phonemes and the source phonemes when Lojbanized, deaffricated, and stripped of affixes. At the time, those were Mandarin, English, Spanish, Hindi/Urdu, Russian, and Arabic. Adding more languages, given the tight phonotactic constraints (all primitive words are CVCCV or CCVCV), just created too many ties between different possibilities. For the most part, Chinese and English dominate anyway, though dakfu ‘knife’ owes only its /d/ to Chinese and its /f/ to English.
Some words, the metric prefixes, scientific units, a few religious terms, technical terms of Lojban grammar, and words for significant world cultures/languages, were exempt from the algorithm; these all end in -o (e.g. brazo ‘Brazilian’). O is the rarest vowel in Lojban because it does not exist in Chinese (written o, wo, uo is really /wɘ/ and could just as well be we, ue). Near the end, we got a little whimsical: the word for ‘Antarctican’ is dzipo, a portmanteau for (ca)dzu cipni ‘walking bird’.
In some cases there were also human errors: thus the source forms in the six languages (in the above order) for ‘broken’ are po, brokn, tut, rot, sloman, kasar, for which spotu was the best candidate (figure of merit 55.66), but by mistake spofu (figure of merit only 37.00) became the actual Lojban word. These errors were never fixed, because the whole idea of the algorithm is to create words that are faintly reminiscent of their meanings to a good many people, but not so reminiscent that their actual semantics is swallowed up by their semantics in the source language(s).
David E: It’s because everyone knows that French is the logical language. Everyone French, anyhow.
Count me out, I am a linguist.
Sure, but phonetically it’s [(w)ɔɑ̯] or thereabouts, making o quite reasonable.
The consecutive aspect is very familiar to anyone studying Japanese (“-te”). It is also similar to the frequent use in Ancient Greek narration of the aorist participle for every clause but the final clause of a sentence (especially but not limited to when it is a single actor doing all the actions). I read about a language of New Guinea that employs the same construction too, but I forgot what its name is.
Omitted copulas: no further than literary German up to the early 20th century, where the periphrastic past and pluperfect in subordinate clauses were often expressed by the past participle and a personal pronoun alone, without the clause-final auxiliary verb. There are 18th-century works where the auxiliary verbs are never used in this situation.
Was die Mode streng geteilt.
There’s another one in Schiller’s next stanza too. And, as David Marjanović suggests, there isn’t any place in the text where that kind of auxiliary is actually present. (I had to verify online that that was true for the last stanza, since it is not part of Beethoven’s setting and so is far less familiar to me.)
Heh, I always thought that was a 3s present, but of course the ge- should have clued me in. (My formal German was one lesson per week from 7th to 9th grade, so 45 years later it’s sort of a seat-of-the-pants thing).
Swedish has a similar feature, which I should not wonder if they had copied from literary German. It’s a literary register thing, but I got away with using it in speech because I though it was fun.
(There is the difference that Swedish has generalized the form hade as the auxiliary in those tenses, but uses a ‘supine’ derived but different (except for a-stem verbs) from the neuter passive participle of the main verb. So even though the auxiliary is not clause-final, when it is omitted in a subordinate clause it’s usually clear that it’s a compound tense).
Om han kommit, hade jag hälsat. (Danish: Hvis han var kommet, havde jeg hilst).
Whether an auxiliary verb is in fact a copula, even in languages where they are formally the same verb, is something reasonable people can disagree about.
Lars M.: Swedish has a similar feature, which I should not wonder if they had copied from literary German. It’s a literary register thing, but I got away with using it in speech because I though it was fun.
Many years ago I pointed out the construction in a Swedish language Usenet group. As I remember it, the reaction was first incredulity, then dismissal, and finally acceptance that it does exist “in some debased variety”. It was not the reaction I expected.
debased — strange. I’m pretty sure I learned it from the best sources, maybe it was even in the Swedish grammar for Danes I started out by reading before moving to Stockholm. But then οἵ πολλοί are notoriously badly informed about their native language (for any given language).
“It’s not thou hast, it’s thee has, thou ignorant idiot!”
@Lars: Yes, it was strange. I too had the feeling that it was more literary or “high” than dialectal or “broad”. But the discussion of language in that group was generally based on a prescriptive understanding, more so than the Danish and Norwegian groups I read at the same time, and it could be difficult to get a good description of actual facts on the ground. I think now that the couple of people that replied to me didn’t have it in their acquired “correct grammar”, and that the final admission came as a response on my insistence. Or maybe I was just very bad at explaining the observation.
Just to be sure I wasn’t imagining things, I spent 30 seconds on Google:
(Of course this relative clause abbreviates som har avlidit — I was only thinking of the pluperfect when I said it’s always hade. Sequence of tenses constraints will guide the competent reader to know which was meant. You could also, without prejudice to the writer’s competence (as if) say that the construction allows them to ignore sequence of tenses constraints).
This also illustrates the fancification of prose by using the old masculine weak adjective form avlidne (= ‘deceased’). Very stuffy lawyers may knowingly contrast avlidne and avlidna when writing about a will, but otherwise the form is dead. Or deceased. (I’ve nattered on about it here, but several years ago I think).
Here you go (2017).
Thanks. If it wasn’t clear, using a form with explicitly male reference is wrong in the context (which is about procedures for handling deceased patients) — but for the writer it clearly did not have that sense. (At a guess, this specific word form has been used in obituaries long after the distinction was lost in general (for men only, at least initially, but then most were in the past), and that’s why it shambles on zombie-like in current usage).
Here you go (2017).
And here as well.
Oh, and I missed your grammar quote back then, sorry. So it’s alive in the South and the West of Sweden — I’m not sure where the borders between areas are, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in Stockholm. (As witness its nominal use for a person of unknown gender).
Omission of har
Notice that the auxiliary verb har may be omitted in subordinate clauses.
See 5.2.14.3(b).
Då jag inte (har) fått svar på mitt förra brev, skriver jag en
gång till.
As I haven’t had a reply to my previous letter, I am writing again.
Vi ska ha fest, eftersom vi inte (har) haft roligt på ett tag.
We’re going to have a party as we haven’t had fun for a while.
5262
This time Google Books let me read a lot — the link from 2017 failed to show me anything now. 5.2.14.3(b) turns out to describe the equivalent situation for hade, if anybody is curious.
(The book is Swedish: A comprehensive grammar, Brian Holmes and Ian Hinchcliffe, 3rd ed, 2013, from the Routledge Comprehensive Grammars series. Only £51.19 in paperback right now, 20% off!)
Over 5 years ago:
Interestingly, ek was more, not less, stressed than eka, says p. 32 in this paper.
…and p. 34 quotes:
ek erilaz sa wilagaz hateka
with ek as the independent pronoun and -eka as the clitic in the same sentence: “I’m the runemaster, the wiley one am I called”.
ek erilaz sa wilagaz hateka
I need a shirt with that.
Isn’t the first bit just “My Name is Earl”?
That’s what I thought, but the paper consistently says “the runemaster”…
One of these days I’m going to write a Tampermonkey unit to click out of all the academia.edu prompts to pay them money and JUST DOWNLOAD THE FUCKER DAMMIT!
(Or maybe just grab the DL link and do the deed, then close the page. Clicking things can be tricky).
Well, if people called the guy The wily runemaster, and the word for ‘runemaster’ is strictly cognate to E earl — then his name is Earl.
Danish: Jeg hedder Jarl den vælige. But actually not, the current vælig is cognate to E well, not wile; borrowed from LG it is mostly used of stallions, ‘powerful’ or ‘fit’.
whose very first words told me I’d been pronouncing the name wrong all these years: “Burúshaski (stress on the second syllable)…”
John McWhorter commits the same mistakes in his Language Families of the World.
He also pronounces Magyar with a hard G sound (BTW, there was a visiting dentist at my school whose name was Рида Магиаровна /Rida Magiarovna), and the Finnish translation of the A live fish is swimming under water sentence comes out as Elaevae kala ui den alla. den should be veden.
However, a much graver blunder of his was to say that sekiz/segiz means ‘seven (7)’ (The episode on the Turkic languages). (As no doubt everyone in these parts knows perfectly well, sekiz means “eight (8)’.)
*shakes head sadly*
As no doubt everyone in these parts knows perfectly well
This reminds me of Primo Levi’s anecdote about the schoolboy whose essay on insects began with the useful etymology that they are called insette because they have seven (sette) legs. When Levi pointed out that in fact they had six, the boy replied airily that the difference between six and seven is small.
That boy has a future.
Well it was hardly the boy’s fault that his ancestors collapsed both /pt/ and /kt/ onto /tt/.
Apparently. Just yesterday a native speaker complained you need four words to say “that’s a book” in German, and you need to keep track of their agreement, while in Turkish you just use one word: Kitap.