In the course of reading The Last Jews in Baghdad (see this LH post), I encountered references to “the Arabic spoken by Jews” and wondered what that was all about: was there really a separate dialect, not just regular Iraqi Arabic with a few Hebrew words tossed in? A little googling turned up a thread at WordReference Forums on this very topic, started by Nun-Translator’s question:
I am reading an autobiographical novel written in Hebrew by Eli Amir that takes place in Baghdad in the 1940s. He frequently refers to “Jewish Arabic” and “Muslim Arabic”. I’m not clear if he is talking about accents or dialects… Are you aware of “Jewish Arabic”? Is it an accent or a dialect? (The way Amir uses the term, it sounds more like a dialect.) Does it still exist? And one more question: Is there a distinctive “Christian Arabic” in Iraq or elsewhere?
The answer turns out to be that there are two major dialects in Iraq, a northern and a southern, conventionally distinguished by their pronunciation of the letter qaf as /q/ (hence “qeltu” for قلت) and /g/ (“gilit”) respectively, and the distinction accidentally became a religious one in Baghdad, as explained by a commenter who goes by the handle smooha:
This happens to be a subject of great interest to me. I had the privilege of having read several books on the subject, most notably Haim Blanc’s Communal Dialects of Baghdad.
As clevermizo noted, the Mesopotamian (Iraq and eastern Syria) varieties of Arabic can be divided into qeltu and gilit types. The gilit type is overwhelmingly of Bedouin origin, from the tribes to the south and west of the rivers. If my memory serves me correctly, virtually all Baghdadis (Muslims, Christians, and Jews) spoke in a qeltu variety, from the Abassid era until the late 19th c (?), which saw an unprecedented process of urbanization, with a vast number of Bedouin tribesmen (previously nomadic) became the majority. The original urban Baghdadi Muslims assimilated with the new majority, while the Christian and Jewish communities maintained their respective dialects (which, though to a significant extent mutually intelligible, contained numerous differences in lexicon).
The dialects were maintained as the language of the home/family, while the Muslim variety was used as a sort of lingua franca in the public sphere. As far as I know, Christian Baghdadis still speak their dialect in their homes, though it seems to me that Christians have tended to assimilate a bit more, because of political and social considerations (anti-Christian sentiment as well as inter-marriage between Christians of different regions)…
An interesting note: the Jewish dialect was 100% mutually intelligible and virtually identical in every non-Kurdish town in Iraq (i.e. a Jew from the northern city of Mosul could communicate fluently with a Jew from Basra, Baghdad, etc.).
It is quite easy to find samples of Muslim Baghdadi speech. If you’re interested in hearing the difference, go to this site.
It’s a comprehensive resource for samples of the (mostly minority) dialects of Arabic… Also, be aware that since most of the Jewish speakers now live in Israel, there are some Hebrew words here and there that are not a part of the original Jewish Baghdadi dialect.
A search for more information on the qaf divide led me to A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East by Yasir Suleiman, which discusses it on pp. 99-100:
The function of (Q) as a group boundary-setter is exhibited in various speech communities in the modern period. This is attested in a large number of studies… Blanc (1964) reports that the communal dialects of Baghdad are marked by the prestigious variant [g] in the speech of the Muslims and by the stigmatized [q] in that of the Christians and Jews… This pattern of communally based linguistic variation is found in Bahrain. Holes (1983) reports that the prestigious variant [g] is a marker of the speech of the Sunnis in Bahrain, while the stigmatized variant [q] characterizes the speech of the Shi’ites. In Tunis, the prestigious variant [q] is a marker of urban speech, while the stigmatized variant [g] is a marker of the rural or semi-nomadic communities… These, and the other studies listed above, generate four observations:
(1) The variable (Q) serves as a marker of group membership. These groups may be communally defined, as in Baghdad and Bahrain, or ecologically designated, as in Tunisia and in Ibn Khaldun’s study.
(2) The prestige or stigma associated with a variable is contextually defined. Thus while [g] is the prestige variant in Baghdad and Bahrain, it is not in Tunis.
(3) The prestige of a particular variant may change in time. Ibn Khaldun’s observation about the variant [g] exemplifies this phenomenon.
(4) Whenever dialect shift takes place it tends to move in the direction of the prestigious variant in a speech community.
I was going to discuss a recent Jabal al-Lughat thread that involved Iraqi Arabic, but this is quite long enough already, so I’ll save it for its own post!
Blanc found that both Christian and Jewish Baghdadis spoke a qeltu dialect, but the Christian dialect resembled northern Iraqi dialect, showing that the Christians had moved to Baghdad from the north when the city’s population began to recover. The Jewish dialect was not related to any other Arabic dialect, so Blanc concluded that the Jews were the only people who continued to live in Baghdad after its destruction by the Mongols.
By the way, I believe the title of Blanc’s fascinating book is “Communal Dialects in Baghdad,” not “of Baghdad.”
If I recall correctly, the Christian Baghdadi dialect makes its r’s uvular, whereas the Jewish one doesn’t.
If I recall correctly, the Christian Baghdadi dialect makes its r’s uvular, whereas the Jewish one doesn’t.
Actually, it’s the other way around. In Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic, r > ġ, i.e. M(uslim)C(hristian) bir, but J biġ “well”, MC arbaʿ, but J aġbaʿ “four” etc.
I believe I’ve already mentione hered Jacob Mansour’s The Jewish Baghdadi Dialect which is a more detailed description of Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic with a lot of texts recorded by native informants.
And one should also mention the rich literature written in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic which includes not only translations of portions of the Bible, targum and various aggadic materials, but also original compositions, mostly legends and alike. For the past few months I’ve been working on a fully-vocalized translation (šarḥ)of targum to Song of Songs, mostly trying to figure out the relation between the language of the šarḥ (which has a lot of strange features, mostly grammaticalizations of earlier hypo- and hypercorrections like the negative marker ליס < Classical Arabic ليس) and the actual spoken language as recorded by Blanc and Mansour. Fascinating stuff.
I remember reading (in Blau?) that Judeo-Arabic literature was legible throughout a larger area in part because the vowelless script disguised dialect features. Of course, English clearly demonstrates that it also works to write the vowels in a way that no one has pronounced them for centuries.
MMcM,
that certainly applies to what Hary calls “Classical Judeo-Arabic”. But starting with the 15th century, the dialect differences really started to show, especially in the off-center areas like North Africa. There might have been purely linguistic reasons for that, but most agree that it was also motivated by a change in the social structure (the rise of the ghetto). Translations and original compositions written in the Maghribi Judeo-Arabic, whether vocalized or not, would have been largely unintelligible to speakers of Judeo-Arabic in Egypt and Iraq and vice versa. To what extent precisely, that’s difficult to tell, because even though most of those who wrote in Judeo-Arabic no longer tried to emulate Classical Arabic, a large number of them still tried to emulate Classical Judeo-Arabic which in turn emulated Classical Arabic. So in any late (post 15th century) Judeo-Arabic, you are bound to find a mixture of pure colloquial, grammaticalized hypo- and hypercorrections, fusha and what was perceived as standard Judeo-Arabic. And in a high number of cases, some of these categories overlap. No wonder Hary chose to describe it as multiglossia…
Over the past year Eli Timan (a speaker of Iraqi Judeo-Arabic who lives in London) and I have been engaged in a project based at SOAS and funded by the British Academy to document personal history narratives in Iraqi Judeo-Arabic with members of the diaspora community in London, Canada and Israel. Eli has collected hours of wonderful text material and has been transcribing and translating it into English. We plan to work with David Nathan of the Endangered Languages Archive to publish some samples on the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages project website (http://www.hrelp.org). We may also develop a small multimedia product presenting the recordings, transcriptions and photographs that Eli has taken.
You know, “qeltu” sounds kinda like “ghetto”…
A uvular r? That needs to be mentioned in Wikipedia! Trill or fricative?
(David, I wrote back to you about French and German uvulars in The Sound of Home, just before it was closed).
Concerning the uvulars, do you have Skype? We both seem to be underestimating the variation within German, and only acoustic evidence can help at this point.
In lard rôti, I agree that most speakers use a sound here that is mostly or entirely fricative — and at least partially devoiced. That’s because it’s word-final. The same speakers (those that I’ve heard) use a one-contact trill intervocalically.
See now Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic: An Introductory Textbook, by Assaf Bar-Moshe (UCL Press, 2024) — open access!
‘Accent or dialect?’ is a question that can only be asked in English:) And I don’t understand what’s meant:(
To me it sounds like a mixture of two scales:
‘phonology or grammar and lexicon as a whole?’ (but I think that variation in phonology is going to be accompanied by some variation in other dimensions)
and
‘minor or major variation?’ (in terminology where ‘dialects’ are ‘what they have in Germany and Italy’, that is ‘major variation’).
if languages are what has armies and navies, perhaps dialects are what has militias or guerrillas, and accents are generally unarmed?
This is where the phrase “a disarming accent” comes from.
Ha!
@drasvi:
I think Anglophones use “accent” for variation confined to phonology. If I say “I amna fou sae muckle as tired – deid dune”, a rude Englishperson would tell me that I am speaking dialect, but if I said “I’m not so much drunk, as tired – dead beat” they would tell me that I have a Scottish accent, on the basis that several of my vowels differ from theirs and my speech is rhotic.
The dividing line is blurred by the fact that most people know little if anything about phonology, so the distinction tends to become a bit more folkloric than scientific. In principle, they probably mean by “accent” a different realisation of individual phonemes rather than a different set of phonemes altogether, but because they tend to think in terms of spelling, they wouldn’t recognise a rhotic phonemic system as being actually incompatible with their own.
I think the “accent/dialect” thing is a consequence of the fact that many people whose forbears spoke actual dialect now actually speak “standard English” with the phoneme system of the erstwhile dialect, (or at least with a lot of influence from it.) That’s pretty much how educated middle-class Scots do speak, in fact.* On the internet, nobody can tell you’re a Scot.
* This is not vitiated by the fact that it’s common to sling in the occasional loan from actual Scots. And if you ask people, they will (if you can get them to understand the question) admit that these are marked items, and that they are consciously aware of the fact.
“Variation confined to phonology” is (as you imply) an awkward concept, though.
It’s actually not a bad characterisation of the difference between Agolle and Toende Kusaal (contrary to what some accounts state); there are only a handful of lexical differences, almost no (underlying) morphological differences, and only one clearcut syntactic one (to do with a certain kind of relative clause.) But the phonological differences are quite profound, and in particular make some of the nut-and-bolts function words and particles appear quite different, despite being “underlyingly” the same.
You’d have to be really ingenious to devise a spelling system that worked for both Agolle and Toende Kusaal, and it would end up being gratuitously difficult to learn for speakers of either. (Apparently some of the more regrettable features of the 2016 orthography actually were supposed to be a step toward a unified pan-Kusaal system.)
“Tunis” – more precisely:
Preference for q is associated with specific places in Tunisia. Some of them hold prestige, namely the Sahel (“the coast”, Sousse, Monastir and Mahdia) in the east and Tunis at the NE corner. Sfax to the south of Mahdia, Bizerte arond the corner from Tunis (WP says, at the northernmost point of Africa – I didn’t know that) and Kairouan too mostly have q.
But that doesn’t mean we should call an Andalusian from Testour a villager:-)
These q and g are [semi-]phonemical and stick to certain words (or to different meanings of similar words). “Moon” is gamṛa, some other words can be pronounced by different speakers of same dialect with different sounds (or by same speaker), in others g is unlikely in a dialect with q or vice versa.
___
g also can be contrasted to the literary q. Like g in Hussein’s speeches or q in literary loans in a bedouin dialect.
@DE, a certain lady complained to me that she’s compiling a Mooré-Russian phrasebook and is overwhelmed by variation and underwhelmed by the (linguistic) literature. I would advise her to talk to you, but I thought likely you don’t know what to think about eticality of phrasebooks and other institutionalised Russo-Mooré contacts in this political context.
The Burkinabé (like many Sahelians) seem to have rather gone off institutional contacts with Russia lately. But I have no ethical scruples about trying to improve communication.
Niggli’s Mooré-French-English dictionary is pretty good, but she’ll already know about that. That’s almost it when it comes to wholehearted recommendations: otherwise, it’s mostly a matter of making the best of a bad job, unfortunately.
To say that Mooré has millions of speakers and is the largest of all “Gur” languages by a wide margin, the linguistic literature on it is indeed underwhelming. There’s no decent reference grammar. Gaston Canu’s is dreadful: woefully inaccurate and really badly organised. It gets cited as a source for “Gur” in some papers I’ve seen; it really, really shouldn’t be. It’s just not a reliable source for anything. Where I can check his work, it’s just plain wrong to an astonishing extent.
There’s a set of Peace Corps lessons which is pretty perfunctory (and doesn’t mark tone, always a sign of a superficial treatment); and a quite nice thing by Bernard Zongo from l’Harmattan called Parlons Mooré which is interesting (and has quite a bit of interesting cultural stuff) but doesn’t go into anything grammatical in great depth, and doesn’t mark tone either, alas.
The best set of lessons I know of is at
https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/fsi-more-course/
which includes quite a few handy phrases. (Some of the links weren’t working for me just now, but they have in the past. There is audio too.)
There is a surprising amount of “AI” slop relating to Mooré on the intertubes, like this utterly valueless site:
https://worldschoolbooks.com/moore-language-an-in-depth-guide/
Presumably sites like this are there to harvest your details and/or infect your computer: you don’t even need to know any Mooré to see in minutes that it is utterly worthless.
I suspect that your friend has already tracked down what there is of value out there.
There’s a nice technical paper on tone in Mooré nouns, by George Akanlig-Pare and Michael Kenstowicz, helpfully entitled “Tone in Buli” (Studies in African Linguistics, Volume 31, Numbers 1/2) but I doubt whether that would help your friend’s kind of enterprise at all.
Variation within Mooré is pretty noticeable. The dialects that I mostly came across myself were different enough from Ouagadougou Mooré that I found it quite striking; and the only time I’ve heard the Yatenga dialect is in the (really excellent) film Yaaba, and that was very different. My Mooré-speaking colleagues didn’t seem to find it too hard to communicate across the dialects, though. AFAIK there’s nothing much published on Mooré dialect variation.
In the event that any Hatters are actually aware of good sources on Mooré, I’d very much like to hear about them myself!
…I’ve noticed linguists going off on tangents in their papers (usually, but by no means only, in pages-long footnotes)… is this an extreme case of that?
No, I was being a bit mischievous. It is about tone in Buli, but goes quite a lot into Mooré in the process, in trying to arrive at a historical explanation of the Buli system.
https://journals.flvc.org/sal/article/view/107349
Western Oti-Volta, Buli/Konni and Yom/Nawdm all share a tone merger which has left them with just three basic word tone patterns; the actual instantiations differ in the three branches, but they line up pretty well. (This is part of the evidence that they are all part of one branch of proto-Oti-Volta, which is not the traditional view, but which I think is pretty much a certainty.)
Akanlig-Pare and Kenstowicz’s theory about the prehistory of all this is basically right, I think, but invokes a three-way contrast of H tone versus L versus unmarked which is unnecessarily complicated. You just need H versus L/unmarked.
There is an alternative theory of Western Oti-Volta tone patterns by Arto Anttila and Adams Bodomo that fails as soon as you look at the comparative evidence. (Or even at verbs in Western Oti-Volta, come to that.) Too into Optimality Theory and not enough into looking at the actual data.
https://roa.rutgers.edu/files/169-1296/169-1296-ANTTILA-0-0.PDF
Such linguists should try Scheherazade’s structure.
O mighty Shahryar, I shall now proceed to tell thee of the wondrous tonal system of Gulimancema … tomorrow night …
I usually first go to Glottolog to find sources about languages. This is their Mòoré page (they explicitly mark the low tone.) Click twice on the Year column header to see the most recent publications. Anything new to you, DE?
That’s where I go when I don’t know the language and literature about it. When I know or have read something about it, I often forget to go there (because of those articles and books I have spotted in references in some article or book that I read, which I wanted to find and read and haven’t found or read).
Number (4) quoted in LH’s post – that speakers shift to the prestigeous dialect – is something I often see in articles about Arabic sociolinguistics and find very funny.
It’s said in the context of the expectation that when preferences wrt an isogloss change, people will shift to what is found in Fus·ha (speakers of “bedouin” dialects will shift from /g/ to /q/, others will shift from līl(a) or lēl(e) to layl(a) – where /g/ and diphtongs mark “bedouin” dialects, layl(a) is “night” in Fus·ha). But Tunisians instead shift to /q/ and līl as in the Sahel and elsewhere people shift to what’s spoken in the capital. Thus “prestigeous dialect” (instead of Fus·ha).
Is it tautology? Is “the prestigeous dialect” one to which speakers shift? The Sahel holds some economical prestige, what about Palestinian /ʔ/ in Amman? And if there’s a koine, of course it has levelling influence on dialect speech, and of course people who move to the capital are likely to shift to the koine, but are koinai “prestigeous” or “based on prestige dialects”?
It seems that “the prestigeous dialect” is something intuitive, but I don’t know what it is. That’s why I think the label is funny. But it’s better to know that (and be able to tell that) if you want to theorise about its attractiveness.
Anything new to you, DE?
Actually, I’ve not seen Raphaël Kaboré’s grammar. I’ll take a look at it. (It has to be better than Canu’s.)
(Rattray’s is a quaint thing. The interesting thing is that he tried. He has a colonial-Gold-Coast take on Mooré as the language of low-status migrant workers in the south of Ghana. It’s oddly disorientating to someone like me used to thinking of Mooré as the language of the dominant people of Burkina Faso, whose language is gobbling up some minority languages and is a major source of loanwords in others. But Rattray would have loved LanguageHat.)
Rattray’s wonderfully named Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland has a footnote:
From which we learn that the standard required of Brit colonial officers in indigenous languages was … not high. (Also, that Rattray didn’t know very much about Kusaal, though the book has a couple of interesting chapters on the Kusaasi, whom he seems to have got on well with.)
That’s hilarious.
Why moLe? Is it an allophone or what?
(perhaps I agree with the examiners: isn’t it reasonable to expect from someone who has learned Kusaal that he will also learn Mooré when needed? And all those people who are taught literary Arabic and can’t understand locals in an Arab country: the expectation of both locals and teachers too is that they will “pick” the dialect somehow)
Why moLe? Is it an allophone or what?
No, it’s actual variation. In Western Oti-Volta (and some other Oti-Volta branches*), names of languages are formed from ethnonyms by adding the noun-class suffix *-lɪ, as in Kusaal Kʋ̄sâal, language of the Kʋ̄sâas, Mɔ̀ɔl “Mooré”, language of the Mɔ̀ɔs “Mossi.”
But this class suffix *-lɪ isn’t used for anything else, and after stems ending in a consonant it often ends up assimilated in exactly the same way as *-rɪ, which is the single commonest singular noun-class suffix: e.g. Dagban (< *Dagbanlɪ) "Dagbani", the language of the Dagbam (< *Dagbamba) "Dagomba": compare kugur (< *kugrɪ) "stone", plural kuga beside kpan (< *kpanrɪ) "spear", plural kpana.
Even in Kusaal, *-rɪ has, by analogy, encroached on *-lɪ for glottonyms with stems ending in a consonant, e.g. Kambʋnir “Twi”, the language of the Kambʋmis “Ashanti” (but still e.g. Nwampuril “Mampruli”, the language of the Nwampuris “Mamprussi.”)
The main Mooré dialects have just gone one step further, and replaced *-lɪ with *-rɪ throughout.
* The other languages beside Western Oti-Volta that use *-lɪ or *-rɪ are Buli, Konni, Nateni, Ditammari and Byali. The languages that don’t use *-lɪ all use the “abstracts/liquids/substances” noun-class suffix *-ma/*-mʊ: hence e.g. Nawdm, Yom, Mbelime, Gulimancema, Akaselem, Waama. The variation cuts right across some major divisions within Oti-Volta.
isn’t it reasonable to expect from someone who has learned Kusaal that he will also learn Mooré when needed?
It’s certainly easier to learn Mooré if you know Kusaal than if you didn’t know any Western Oti-Volta language at all previously, but the languages are really not all that close. Perhaps about the level of French and Spanish. Within Western Oti-Volta, Kusaal is much closer to Mampruli than to Mooré genetically (though Kusaal and Mampruli are definitely not mutually comprehensible, even so.) Kusaal has been influenced quite a bit by Mooré, though, which confuses the issue a bit.
Genesis 1:1-4 in Mooré:
Sɩngr wẽndẽ, Wẽnnaam naana yĩngr la tẽnga. La tẽngã rag n ka tar yalẽ ye, a rag n yaa vɩʋʋgo. La likã rag n luda zĩ-zulumsã. La Wẽnnaam Sɩɩgã rag n laanda koomã zugu. Dẽ, Wẽnnaam yeelame: «Bɩ vẽenem zĩndi.» La vẽenem zĩndame. Wẽnnaam yãame tɩ vẽenemã yaa sõama. La bãmb welga vẽenemã ne likã toore.
And in Kusaal:
Pin’ilʋgʋn la Wina’am da maal agɔl nɛ teŋ. Si’el da ka’ teŋ la nii, ka zin’ig la wʋsa da an yɔɔg-yɔɔg, lik ma’aa da pɛ’ɛl, ka Wina’am Siig da laannɛ giligid ku’om la zug. Ka Wina’am yɛl ye, “Kɛl ka li an nyain.” Ka li sid nie nyain. Ka Wina’am nyɛ ka nɛɛsim la an sʋm ka o bak nɛɛsim la ka kɛ lik.
Somewhat different translation strategies, which tends to exaggerate the difference between the languages; but even so …
many people whose forbears spoke actual dialect now actually speak “standard English” with the phoneme system of the erstwhile dialect, (or at least with a lot of influence from it.)
Seems to me this is also true to an increasing extent in Austria as well. A lot of younger people claiming to speak „dialect” use standard German vocabulary with a local phoneme system and a few (as DE notes) „marked” vocabulary items, as well as grammatical deviations that are often common across spoken German variants anyway (avoidance of the genitive, compound past tense, no Konjunktiv II, etc.).
You’re describing Viennese mesolect – and committing the very, very Viennese mistake of conflating Vienna with Austria. 🙂
Another open-access PDF of possible relevance:
Arabic and its Alternatives: Religious Minorities and their Languages in the Emerging Nation States of the Middle East (1920-1950)
As a possibly amusing note, when I first tried to download it, I got a page demanding to check my humanity. The challenge, as it so happened, was to choose from a grid of nine images, all of the , , , hats.
🎩👒🧢
You’re describing Viennese mesolect
No, it’s an increasingly common phenomenon outside Vienna. I noticed the other day watching a video of a woman Graz claiming to be „speaking Mundart” but it was actually just a mesolect – German with a Styrian accent. People will also say a group like Attwenger sings in „Upper Austrian dialect”. Take away the phonetic changes though and this is just German:
„ is oft so weit danebm
so weit danebm vom lebm
wia da mond
ana alla ged a weng auf die schtrossn
weu er mecht wen besuchn
owa es is
kana daham olle fort kana do
olle weg oba wo
es is so es is
kana daham olle weg kana do”
I’m not claiming all dialects are dead, I am claiming that Austrians (and other German speakers) without a linguistic background will pretty much accept that German spoken with a strong local accent and a few local words is actually „Mundart”.
It’s never as low as nine. It was actually 16.
Besuchen is very much a Standard word, but ein wenig really is dialect – within the standard it’s limited to higher registers, but in the dialects it’s so common and basic it has irregularly lost its last vowel.
If the article in auf die Straße really still has its vowel, that’s a Standard feature I haven’t encountered in dialect so far (unless the consonant situation around it is even more complex).
And then, the example is a freshly composed song. There’s little to no model for this (the tradition of singing is located in Carinthia), so already the Classical Viennese song scene (1970s) borrowed very heavily from Standard German, mainly to make the meter work; there are things in Classical Viennese songs that haven’t even made it into Viennese mesolect. In the present case, this may have motivated besuchen, because er möchte zu wem auf Besuch would be way longer.
It is, absolutely, true that the dialects have been borrowing from each other and from the standard, so that I don’t speak exactly like my urban, well-educated grandmother; but still I think you’ve overestimated the phenomenon.
The song Vanya quotes reminds me very much of the Kölsche songs of BAP – the basic vocabulary is Kölsch, but lots of loans from Standard German, and, most importantly, the syntax and the phrases would work as well if transposed to Standard German one-to-one. I am not sure whether this is caused by the genre as DM seems to imply or whether it rather indicates that Standard German ways of wording and construing speech have taken over the minds of dialect speakers.
Oh. In that same line, I overlooked a feature so Viennese I have to blame it on the transcriber.
The monophthongizing area – including Vienna, and apparently all of Lower Austria and the northern Burgenland – distinguishes “new ei” + eu from eil as [ɛ̞] vs. [ɶ̝], and the latter sound is what Viennese mesolect employs for eu. This is the only conceivable reason why weil is transcribed as weu here. Just a bit farther west, e.g. in Linz, the distinction is lost, it’s all [ɛ̞ɪ̯], and a transcription with eu wouldn’t occur to anybody. Indeed, the whole phenomenon was alien enough to me that it took me a long time to figure out; there are comments here where I explain it wrong.
Syntax-wise this line is unremarkable in dia- and Viennese mesolect; the standard would use denn instead of weil with a verb-second clause.
This appears to lack a wie; did someone mishear [ʋɪɐ̯s] as [ɛs]?
@dm
I think the lyric does not intend “es ist so wie es ist-keiner daheim” rather “es ist so–es ist–keiner daheim”
https://genius.com/Attwenger-kana-daham-lyrics
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dqLCHdW82Rw
~0.40
Plenty of Viennese-style monophthongs, but weil is not rounded, so the transcriber is as Viennese as the whole transcription looks.
The unreduced die is real; a syllable was desperately needed.
I do hear [ʋɪɐ̯s], though it’s not clear the first few times.
…where Besuch is still an obvious loan, just an actually existing integrated one, not a nonce phenomenon. The whole clause could be replaced with er ist bei wem eingeladen, but that would turn the whole thing into prose.
@dm
Thanks. I took “kana daham” as “niemand zu Hause” (there was another thread with “house” v “home” in English).
It is; keiner daheim. But it can be used as a complete clipped sentence; I don’t think it’s meant to be part of the preceding sentence, and I hear the wie at least once.
This reminds me of a Language Log thread where Victor Mair referred to Cantonese singers singing in Modern Standard Mandarin with Cantonese pronunciation, and J. Random Hacker and I had some fun with the Marseillaise.
Heh. That is fun – but it’s not easily comparable to the above. German dialects, at the very least those alluded to above, have no higher register; reading a Standard text in the completely unmodified sound system of a dialect hasn’t been done in centuries, reading it by substituting real or imagined cognates for every word has probably never been done because the alphabetic writing system discourages it; and the differences are generally just less. Syntax in particular is amazingly uniform across German. You’d expect a lot more variation concerning the verb-second and verb-last word orders of The Awful German Language – but no. The example above, that dialects which lack denn (which goes with verb-second) expand weil (which goes with verb-last) to both word orders, is the only such example; no other conjunction allows both or takes a different one than in the standard. There is some variation in whether, in verb-last order, the finite verb really goes last after a pile of infinitives and participles, but that variation is within the standard (and between dialects). The only other word-order variation I can think of right now occurs within clitic chains that many dialects have (the standard goes out of its way to avoid having clitics at all).
The example above, that dialects which lack denn (which goes with verb-second) expand weil (which goes with verb-last) to both word orders, is the only such example; no other conjunction allows both or takes a different one than in the standard.
And even that is a arguably a feature of colloquial Standard German; weil with V2 (or rather V3 if you count the conjunction) is quite usual in spoken German even for speakers without other overt dialect features and frequently makes its way into non-high-register written German as well.
@DM: I agree that what you’re talking about in German, what Victor Mair and others were talking about in Chinese topolects, and my and J. R. H.’s drollery in French and Spanish are different things. But the business about using the grammar and vocabulary of one variety and the pronunciation of another seemed to be shared.
Well, no. In the quote above there’s one case of distinctively Standard and one case of distinctively dialectal vocabulary (though the latter also happens to work in the standard in registers well above that of the… rap it is, I guess). The grammar is not distinguishable anywhere in the quote, except for the syntax of weil as mentioned; the differences that do exist (extra tenses and cases in the standard, fun with clitics and the occasional gender reassignment surgery in the dialects) happen not to apply.
Sorry if I was unclear. My “what you’re talking about in German” wasn’t supposed to be limited to the Carinthian song. It includes what Hans said about “the Kölsche songs of BAP” and Vanya’s “A lot of younger people claiming to speak „dialect” use standard German vocabulary with a local phoneme system and a few (as DE notes) „marked” vocabulary items, as well as grammatical deviations that are often common across spoken German variants anyway”, which you said described Viennese mesolect.
The original video that triggered me was an interview with a woman in her late 30s who says at one point something to effect of “but of course I am speaking Graz dialect”, but she most certainly was not. She was speaking Graz mesolect.
I can’t find that, but I did find a discussion of “Burgenländisch” that might be worse. I don’t think any of the examples the speaker gives are specific to Burgenland. It all sounds like Viennese mesolect to me.
https://youtu.be/6OCen-xuxLg?is=8noLBSR_NxTXKxu6
@Hans, I remember reading a text in Belarusian, form 50s, and thinking that I could date it very precisely, because it was the language of Russian journalists from 50s with Belarusian words.
I also see it in Ukrainian texts.
Note 1: we speak of diversity, but when precisely those aspects of langauge that can be linked to the culture (your “construing speech”, also semantics) undergo levelling and stuff described by school grammars does not, is that diversity?:-(
Same for similar levelling within Russian or Ukrainian or language shift – but dialects also undergo phonological and lexical levelling.
Note 2: lignuistics doesn’t seem to study these “aspects” or dimensions of language and we have to speak vaguely about “wording” or “construing speech”.
@DE (Mooré), thank you!
“Friend” – I noticed a week ago that there are many Russian Africanist channels in Telegram and in one of them named “Africa through the eyes of a linguist” I saw a comment by someone whose channel is named “nasaara in valenki”*. Both names (and many posts there) reminded me about you and I mentioned you, in nasara’s channel in comments to her post about the word nasaara. To which she told what I retold above.
She spoke specifically about sceintific literature, so I think even if she is not a linguist (?) she is willing to read something technical.
TG channels is what we now have instead of blogs, the main means of communication.
“scruples” – I have some, if I were to write a phrasebook, I’d wonder how many of the readers will be soldiers and could decide not to write it. What I normally think about phrasebooks is that they are toys. A fun way to learn to write more serious things, and also about the book market.
*Африка глазами лингвиста, насара в валенках
“Dagbanlɪ”
It wants to be translated from a Turkic language:)
I also see it in Ukrainian texts.
I think it was true to some extent everywhere in the USSR. I remember Kazakhs in the 1990s complaining to me that bureaucratic Kazakh in government documents just read like a direct calque from the Soviet Russian.
@Vanya: yes, I can confirm that. The word order is different, but you could still see the same phrases and constructions. And from what I see, it’s not very different today; most official texts are drafted in Russian and then translated into Kazakh without much effort to make the translation idiomatic.
@DE, how do Kusaasi call Algerians? Nasaara?
It wants to be translated from a Turkic language
There actually is some (mostly ATR) vowel harmony in various Western Oti-Volta languages, to a varying extent; minimal in Kusaal, significant in Mooré and Farefare, and quite exuberant in Dagaare.
None in Dagbani, though: the Mampruli-Dagbani-Kamara-Hanga subgroup has simplified the vowel system to such a degree that there’s no real scope for ATR harmony any more, even supposing that there was any there to begin with.
how do Kusaasi call Algerians? Nasaara?
I don’t think the matter comes up enough for there to be a straightforward answer. If the point was their actual nationality, you’d say Alijeeriya teŋ dim, and if you meant “Muslims” specifically you’d say Mɔɔm (plural of Mɔr.)
Nasaara has certainly lost any association with Christianity, though, and a Sri Lankan colleague of mine in Ghana used to get annoyed at the fact that he was consistently referred to as a Nasaara too. So I’m pretty sure that any anonymous Algerian wandering around in Kusaal-speaking territory would find that the children called him Nasaara.
You can say nimpielis “white people” (which would certainly include Algerians from a Kusaasi standpoint.) However, like ninsabilis “black people, Africans”, I strongly suspect these terms of being calqued on English or French.
People are naturally black, of course: a story I’ve quoted before features some ruffians in the bush seeing something in the distance that’s sabilli wʋʋ nid nɛ “black, like a person.”
Several groups in the Kusaasi neighbourhood call Europeans “Fulɓe”: Farefare has Sʋlmi-pɛɛlsɩ, literally “White Fulɓe.”
It occurred to me a while back that the mysterious Western Oti-Volta exonym for the Fulɓe, which surfaces as e.g. Mooré Silmiisi, Kusaal Simiis, might actually ultimately derive from “Muslim.” Which would mean that some Western Oti-Volta speakers call Europeans “Christians” and some call them “Muslims.” Etymologically …
It reminds me of calling black Africans, many of them Muslims, “kaffirs.”
No surprise there. The map shown early in the video doesn’t line up with anything linguistic. The dialects there are mostly extensions of what’s just east of them, so the northern part sounds like Lower Austria and Vienna (the general gonsonand lenition even extends into the local version of Romani), while the southern ones are reportedly more Styrian, except to some extent heanzisch, spoken by people whose ancestors came from much farther west a… number of centuries ago). The very first example word claimed to be local is in my active dialect vocabulary; I stopped the video there.
There’s only one sentence in dialect, his introduction, and that contains spreche which probably doesn’t exist in the dialect (although Mr. Buchinger unremarkably nativized it); it doesn’t exist in mine. Part of the reason for the nonce import is, however, that there’s no 1 : 1 equivalent. The usual way to say you speak a language is that you “can” the language; that doesn’t fit here, because here the idea isn’t that he can speak it, but that he’s speaking it right now. I’d go for rede “am talking”, but that’s far enough away it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him when he translated the sentence he was no doubt given.
This is what happens when languages suddenly need a whole register they didn’t have before: they calque it.
This contains two more misunderstandings I should have cleared up. 🙂
The song is not Carinthian, it’s from north of the Alps. I mentioned Carinthia because that’s the nearest place where singing is in the culture. Reportedly, if three randos there meet, they can sing in three voices. Farther north, one will claim to be altogether unable to sing, and another will try if pressed but will turn out to be unable to hold a tune and/or to have a vocal range that would barely allow them to speak English, intonation-wise.
Viennese mesolect speakers do not claim they’re speaking dialect; and they obviously aren’t – there’s a pretty wide gap in between (unlike in southwestern Germany or large parts of Italy for example). They believe they’re speaking Standard German, just the colloquial register of it – which Standard German didn’t have anywhere in Austria before Viennese mesolect (was) developed. There is very little awareness that the mesolect is a distinguishable entity.
Yes!
Greetings to the contributors to Language Hat! My first contribution: David Marjanović mentions “The only other word-order variation I can think of right now occurs within clitic chains that many dialects have (the standard goes out of its way to avoid having clitics at all).” Where can I find out more about these clitic chains? I work on them in Slavic languages, and some years ago I noticed that Burgenland Croatian in eastern Austria has different clitic chains as compared with standard Croatian in Croatia (and Bosnian, and Serbian, and Montenegrin). Burgenland Croatian, over the last 500 years, has been in contact with Hungarian, standard German, and local Austrian German dialects. Hungarian doesn’t have clitics, standard German (as David M. says) doesn’t have clitics, local German dialects apparently do have clitics and so might possibly have influenced Burgenland Croatian but I have found it difficult to learn about the ordering and placement of clitics in the dialects.
Incidentally, standard Ukrainian is like standard German in that it did not accept clitics, although many dialects do have them. The only exception is the more-or-less standard colloquial expression Як ся маєш? (Jak sja máješ?) ‘how do you have yourself’, i.e. ‘how are you?’
Unless you go to the old age homes, there are no dialects left in Denmark either. What we have we call regionally coloured varieties, not mesolects, but that’s just a convention. A bit of lexicon and some phonotactics.
I once read a memoir by someone whose parents moved from one village in Jutland to another, maybe no more than 20km away. He was mercilessly teased for saying [t͡ʃʏ] for ‘cow’, when the other boys said [ʃʏ]. (Or vice versa). (Reportedly it was kōʀ in East Norse [West Norse kýr, PG kōz]. It’s ko, plural køer in Zealand dialects. The e is silent and slightly optional).
If I got to pick one, I think I’d rather be called a Moor than a Nazarene. (Not that I have anything against Nazarenes – fine folks, and named for a lovely town to boot – but it seems rather like calling a Welshman Inglizi…)
I learned recently that Lebanese are called Zarmanuusu in Gao Songhay – after one of the earliest Lebanese to migrate to the region, the Germanos family.
That’s wonderful (and a good example of how etymology is sometimes impossible for lack of the necessary historical knowledge).
Re singing being in the culture, this is what my go to example:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230304010222/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fl8Jiis5q8
Just been looking at Raphaël Kaboré’s grammar of Mooré, which is indeed greatly superior to Canu’s. (Though it wouldn’t lend itself particularly well to someone composing a phrase book.)
Not a lot that I hadn’t worked out for myself in the morphology and syntax, but a good account of the phonology particularly (which the standard orthography doesn’t reflect very well in some cases.)
And I was gratified to confirm that Niggli’s dictionary marks the tones of paga “woman” incorrectly, as I thought. The matter has been niggliing at me for a while.
[Also finally discovered the tones of Wàogd́gò “Ouagadougou.”]
From p3 of Kaboré:
This leads to an endnote of several pages, listing specific errors in Canu’s work, ending
It’s not just me, then …
I’ve seen Canu’s work referred to as a source for verb-deriving suffixes (called “extensions” by the Bantuists) in “Gur.” I’ve been through his examples myself, and I think most of them are simply fabricated.
Comparativists are not always good at assessing the reliability of their sources …
Peterson’s thesis is freely available, BTW:
https://linguistics.ucla.edu/images/stories/Peterson.1971.pdf
It’s rather a product of its time, but still full of useful stuff (though again, not for phrase books.)
@DM: The song is not Carinthian, it’s from north of the Alps.
Thanks, now I see what I misunderstood.
If three strangers can typically sing a song (already known to them) in three-part harmony, I find that amazing. And if I’d been from Carinthia, I’d have had to leave the state.
Viennese mesolect speakers do not claim they’re speaking dialect; and they obviously aren’t – there’s a pretty wide gap in between (unlike in southwestern Germany or large parts of Italy for example). They believe they’re speaking Standard German, just the colloquial register of it – which Standard German didn’t have anywhere in Austria before Viennese mesolect (was) developed. There is very little awareness that the mesolect is a distinguishable entity.
Here I don’t see what you think I misunderstood. I said nothing about what people think about the variety they speak. I was, I now see, assuming there’s a Viennese basilect that does differ from the standard in vocabulary and grammar, so that mesolect speakers use pronunciation something like the basilect but standard vocabulary and grammar. And Vanya said people from other parts of Austria do something similar. That reminded me of Cantonese singers using Cantonese pronunciation but MSM vocabulary and grammar—with no other comparison implied between the situations.
I see from Peterson’s thesis that the Mooré word for “Dogon person” is Kíbgà, which looks uncomfortably as if its stem might be connected with that of kìbrí “flea, louse.” Different tone though.
I wonder if there is some Dogon subgroup whose autonym is anything like “Kib-“? Nothing comes to mind.
Is that [wàōgə̄də́gò]?
[wɔ̀ɣə̀də́gò], in fact, in the dialect of Ouagadougou itself.
Though the written ao is apparently an actual [aw] in the dialect north of Ouagadougou, and it does derive from *aw historically sometimes (more often, it’s due to rounding umlaut, as it is in this case.) Kusaal has contrastive length in diphthongs as well as in “pure” vowels (a fairly rare thing cross-linguistically), and so, presumably, do some Mooré dialects, though you can finesse this away in the Ouagadougou dialect with a bit of cheating.
Mooré has just two tones, along with emic downsteps, which is usual for Western Oti-Volta; Kusaal is unusual within WOV in having developed an actual three-tone system.
The convention for Mooré tone marking adopted by Niggli (and used by Kaboré too) is that a tone mark extends over all following unmarked morae; if an acute follows another acute, it represents a downstepped high tone, so Niggli’s náafó “cow” actually represents [ná:ꜜfó].
This rather neat convention goes back at least to Christaller’s Twi grammar; I think he may have invented it.
Tried to find any of Mooré dictionaries listed on Glottolog online (Anna’s archive and other places). Found nothing. Not only dictionaries: nothing on Mooré.
Is Niggli’s (not listed by Glottolog:)) the ONLY one?
@drasvi
https://www.webonary.org/moore/files/Dictionnaire-Moore-fran%C3%A7ais-English.pdf
Don’t know if this is what you want.
@de
—
kibgi [ì] nominal: kibgri. Plural: kibi.
Verbe. dresser, bâtir; to erect,
build, construct, put up. A kibg
zãnde. Il a bâti un hangar. He
built a shed.
kibi [ì] Nom. puce rouge sur les
paupières des nourrissons; red
flea on the eyelid of babies.
Category: Disease.
—
Instead of puce rouge for Dogon, why not “builder”?
PP, oops. That’s what DE calls Niggli’s dictionary. It took some time for me to figure that out, and I even mentioned it in my comment, but then forgot to insert that nore as I was rearranging it:(
why not “builder”
That would be kíbda, with a derivational suffix -d (and high tone throughout.)
In Western Oti-Volta, nouns formed by just adding noun-class suffixes to a verb stem are either gerunds (the only regular pattern), or express the result of the verb action, or an instrument, or a place where the action occurs. (It’s different in some Eastern Oti-Volta languages, where if you put an unmodified verb stem as a noun stem in the “human” noun-class pairing, you do indeed get an agent noun.)
“Builder” is actually the meaning of the only Oti-Volta endonym that I know of which has a transparent meaning, that of the Batammariba (= Kusaal tammɛɛdib “builders.”) [Incidentally, the -r- in “Batammariba” is not cognate with the Kusaal agent-noun formant -d: it represents a proto-Oti-Volta consonant which became /j/ in proto-WOV, with a subsequent change of *maj to *mɛɛ. The Ditammari agent-noun formant is -t: it is present only in the singular, and dropped in the plural.]
I don’t think the Mossi actually do hear their “Dogon” word as “fleas”; a tonal difference is as significant in Oti-Volta languages as a vowel difference. A case in point is Mooré Mòogó “Mossi realm” versus móogo “bush, uncivilised area.” (Outsiders do sometimes claim that the words are connected, but that’s really a sort of malicious pun.)
Unfortunately, the Mossi are the only speakers of an Oti-Volta language who are actually in contact with any Dogon (AFAIK), so there are no other Oti-Volta words for “Dogon” to compare.
Oti-Volta names for non-Oti-Volta ethnic groups are often of mysterious origin. I mentioned Mooré Sìlmíisi “Fulɓe” above; there’s also e.g. Kusaal Kambʋmis “Ashanti” and Zaŋgbɛɛd “Hausa”, both with cognates throughout Western Oti-Volta. None of these has any obvious meaning, apart from being an ethnonym. The word structure suggests loanwords, but actually, so does the word structure of many WOV endonyms, too. A mystery.
I just want to draw everyone’s attention to Wayles Browne’s comment from a few days ago (June 14, 2026 at 9:01 pm), which I had to rescue from limbo, and his question about clitic chains, which surely someone here can help with.
I have no idea; I’m just a na(t)ive speaker and not familiar with the dialectology literature. My general impression is that Bavarian-Austrian dialects seem to be generally underresearched (notably compared to Swiss ones), or maybe the dialectology literature is insular enough that only the dialectologists in question know it exists, while e.g. comparative-historical Indo-Europeanists or even specialists in Germanic don’t.
However, I have now read your 2010 paper! Your endnote 11 is indeed part of what I was thinking of, and the clitic-order templates fit something else. Generally, the issues are difficult to compare. As elsewhere in German, the auxiliary verbs don’t count as clitics but as finite verbs and therefore have to be in the second or the last position; the chain of pronominal clitics attaches to the end of the second position in V2 clauses (as in your endnote 11), but to the end of the first position in verb-last clauses (…which shows that the clitics can’t be considered verb affixes, unlike in French or the mentioned Hungarian), and they don’t necessarily have the same (preferred) orders in these two places. Also, some clitic-ordering rules have phonological reasons*, others don’t, and I haven’t fully figured out which are which. I’ll try to come up with detailed comparisons and enough examples once this headache weather is over, and will post them here. 🙂
* Some clitics consist of a single consonant phoneme. Some of the resulting consonant clusters are broken up by epenthetic vowels, but those can’t be placed everywhere, so some clusters are avoided by reordering the clitics.
Assaf Bar-Moshe’s The Arabic Dialect of the Jews of Baghdad has
1 texts.
2.audio for the texts (http://www.semarch.uni-hd.de/)
The link doesn’t work for me (with or without VPN), but I post it here nevertheless, maybe some curious Semitophone will be able to defeat it (a new address? archive?).
Suspiciously similar to Polish jak się masz. And now I wonder if it’s tolerated in the standard because it’s so very unlike the Russian equivalent.
SemArch moved to
https://semarch.ub.uni-heidelberg.de
Lots of good stuff there, in many languages, including Bar-Moshe’s sound files for the book. Many Arabic and Aramaic varieties, and some South Arabian.
OK: I hereby withdraw my statement above that there’s no decent reference grammar of Mooré. Kaboré’s book is not perfect (it’s oddly organised, for one thing), but it’s comfortably more than decent. Getting on for Worthy.
Kaboré himself says he doesn’t treat tone, but he assiduously marks tone throughout, including in example sentences, and most of what he doesn’t give is actually in the freely-available Peterson thesis.
I really should have chased Kaboré’s grammar down before.
He’s got a good treatment of verb final vowels, which is difficult to get a handle on in Mooré because in most contexts verbs are followed by particles which overwrite those vowels. I’m not surprised I was mystified by it: it’s bloody complicated. In one case, the vowel which appears varies depending on verb tone, which is just Not Fair.
the vowel which appears varies depending on verb tone, which is just Not Fair
Non-tone phonology conditioned by tone is not just not fair. It’s a bigfoot and a sea serpent. Almost.
Yeah, I wondered whether this was some kind of misanalysis, but it looks pukka, at least as stated by Kaboré.
I suspect that this is yet another manifestation of the Mooré specialty of adding enclitic particles to verb forms. There are sort-of parallels in Kusaal:
O gaadya.
“He’s gone past.”
O da gaadya.
“He went past.” (remote past)
O daa gaad.
“He went past.” (less-remote past.)
Ka o gaad.
“And he went past.”
This looks inscrutable as written, but it turns out that the particle ya is added to clause-final perfectives if and only if the verb carries a particular tone overlay, which is absent after the tense marker daa, and in all clauses introduced by ka “and.” (Also absent in all negative or unrealised forms and in all subordinate clauses except content clauses.)
The Mooré puzzle turns up with imperfective verb forms, which end in underlying -da in most Western Oti-Volta languages; however, there is evidence for another ending -dɪ alongside this in Mooré, Farefare and Nõotre. Probably the -da form originally only appeared in clauses of the kind that show this tone overlay in Kusaal, and -dɪ elsewhere (this can be paralleled in Nawdm), but if so, Mooré and Farefare have altered the original system quite a bit, and their current distribution of these forms is different not only from Nõotre but from each other.
This may be because both languages lack the tone overlay in question, and this may have led to reanalysis. Kusaal seems unlikely to have innovated this overlay, so its absence in those languages must represent a loss of an inherited feature. Kropp Dakubu’s account of Bolgatanga Farefare states that finite verbs have no lexical tone, which is at variance with accounts of other dialects. If Kropp Dakubu was correct (and she was a very competent linguist) this may mean that Bolgatanga Farefare levelled the overlay to all finite verb forms, while the other dialects just dropped the overlay.
Unfortunately there are no good accounts of clause-level tone in Kusaal’s closer relatives, like Mampruli and Dagbani, but what there is on Dagbani tone suggests that it possesses the overlay, and both languages show the same distribution as in Kusaal of the enclitic particle ya.
Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu. She does seem impressive; you can read some reminiscences here, including this pleasing paragraph:
Looking forward to hearing more about clitics in Bavarian dialects. And I have a broader question in mind: about reflexive pronouns vs. non-reflexive pronouns in German. In Slavic languages, reflexives sound different from non-reflexives, and they also go in a different place as compared with non-reflexives. In standard Croatian, for example, the reflexive is se for all persons and all numbers, while the accusative/genitive clitic is:
me 1sg
te 2sg
ga (masc/neut), je/ju (fem.) 3sg
nas 1pl
vas 2pl
ih 3pl.
If these two co-occur, me/te/ga… comes first and se comes afterward.
In Slovenian it is just the reverse.
In standard German, if I’m not mistaken, the reflexive pronoun (accusative) is
mich
dich
sich
uns
euch
sich
whereas the non-reflexive is
mich
dich
ihn (masc/neut), sie (fem)
uns
euch
sie.
(There are also reflexive and non-reflexive datives, such as mir.)
So Ich wasche mich. contains a reflexive, while Du wäschst mich. contains a non-reflexive. In this simple example, mich seems to be in the same position in both sentences. But are there ever examples where reflexive mich or mir would be in a different place in the sentence as compared with non-reflexive mich or mir?
John Turl, who maintains a website of Ghanaian toponyms
https://sites.google.com/site/ghanaplacenames/visitors
told me that he found Prof Kropp Dakubu gracious, very helpful and deeply learned.
DE, is your Kaboré paper, free electronic or paid electronic copy? (I don’t think I’ll buy anything unless I decide to learn Mooré, but I’m trying to figure out of it is available in Russia).
Paper. I don’t think there’s an e-version at all, unfortunately. Nothing at Anna’s Archive. (Not that I would know, of course. I just feel it in my bones.)
Thanks. I wonder why French speakers are so different from Russian and English speakers (or English readers?) in this respect.
Yes, I’m very glad I chose to immerse myself in Russian, where just about everything I want to read is available online. For most languages, you still have to go to paper archives.
@WB, as a native speaker of Danish which has much the same system as German, I can tell you that a “reflexive” mig behaves just like a non-“reflexive” one as regards word order. At least I can’t think of counterexamples. And it will be very hard to get a reading of a 1st or 2nd person accusative pronoun as non-“reflexive,” at least if the verb can have a reflexive reading without the “middle” -s — but in the 3rd person it’s totally fine as in Han slog ham where the two pronouns aren’t coïndexed. (Han slog sig is a sort of phrasal verb = ‘he hurt himself,’ while you need to say han slog sig selv to express ‘he hit himself’).
(And if the middle exists, it will be weird to have a reflexive direct object. Vi mødes = ‘we meet each other,’ but vi møder os would have to include some kind of cloning or time travel. German doesn’t have that, I think.
Conundrum: in I see me in the mirror, is it “really” a reflexive? Can you even say that or does it have to be myself?)
You can’t say it in normal English, only in the linguistic-seminar atmosphere that breeds things like “colorless green ideas.”
but viennese does: treff’ ma si uma viere for the standard treffen wir uns (not: sich) um vier
Conundrum: in I see me in the mirror, is it “really” a reflexive? Can you even say that or does it have to be myself?)
I can say it, so long as I stress “me.” I might say it in response to “Who can you see in the mirror just now?”, for example.
Whether you call it “reflexive” or not seems to be pretty arbitrary to me, but I’d say that “reflexive” in English really only applies to the “self” pronoun forms. There aren’t any “reflexive verbs” as such.
Kusaal works much like English in this, with mɛŋ corresponding pretty well to “self”:
Fʋ nyɛɛm.
“You’ve seen me.”
*M nyɛɛm.
unacceptable
M nyɛɛ m mɛŋ.
“I’ve seen myself.”
The “stressed” form of “me” is segmentally distinct in Kusaal: man. I don’t know if you can say
M nyɛ man.
“I’ve seen me.”
I thought for a moment I’d found an example in the Bible translation:
Zaansʋŋin la ka m nyɛ man zi’e Susa tempʋʋgin
“In the dream, I saw myself standing in Susa-town”
but that’s not contrastive man “me”, it’s “I” fused with the clause nominaliser n: “I saw my-standing-in-Susa.”
I can say it, so long as I stress “me.” I might say it in response to “Who can you see in the mirror just now?”, for example.
I guess I can see that, but it sounds more like something a child might say. Myself, I would say “myself.”
@Wayles Browne: As a native speaker of German, I can confirm that there is no difference in position between normal personal pronouns and reflexive pronouns in Standard German or the Northern regiolects I know.
Distinguishing between reflexive and non-reflexive uses of 1st and 2nd person pronouns is one of the difficulties for Germans learning languages that do so, like English or many (all?) Slavic languages, precisely because there is no distinction between the uses in German, even in word order.
NB that this may be different in Southern varieties, DM will know more.
@tb, I meant that German doesn’t have what I call “middle” verb forms. If I said “reflexive,” it is a misnomer. (The -s of the “middle” actually is a fossilized clitic deriving from a reflexive pronoun, but that was a millennium ago. In early usage it was -mk in 1ps and so on, but it got levelled to -sk in all number and persons. But -z after dental stops or so. I don’t think I ever saw the old plural forms outside of 3p, come to think of it).
(“Middle” in scare quotes because some times it’s a bona fide passive, and things like børnene skal hentes inden klokken fem are totally unmarked. Using it in finite verb forms is valid sometimes, like Her sælges brød, but it’s kind of a sign-writer’s formula. Her bliver der solgt brød with a synthetic passive is probably what most people would say).
I didn’t say Bigfoot and the Great Sea Serpent didn’t exist…
I should say, the real impossibility (two-headed Bigfoot?) is directly phonetic conditioning of segmental phonology by tonal phonology. Nuh-uh. But reanalysis simulating such an effect? Sure. Merely a rare Giant Squid.
“middle” verb forms
Something rather different, but in the same ballpark (passives without any morphological marking at all):
https://www.academia.edu/167693980/Towards_a_typology_of_passive_lability
This is common in West Africa, but by no means only found there.
Merely a rare Giant Squid
Nateni (Eastern Oti-Volta) has a rule that in verbs (but not nouns) long vowels become short unless the two morae carry different tones.
I can only conclude that the Natemba had heard that Dagbani regularly shortens long vowels in open syllables, and thought to themselves: “Those Dagomba? Amateurs!”
That makes phonetic sense, actually: a contour tone is harder than a level one to fit in one mora.
No it doesn’t, because why wouldn’t that apply to nouns as well? Albino giant squid.
@Lars: I see, very interesting! I was somehow reminded of the question about clitics along the Germanic-Slavic contact zone – a Czech origin of the viennese construction (which is heavily working-class, and I believe actually geographically pretty much restricted to Vienna) would make a lot of sense to me
Y, what about the Mandarin third tone (which a certain lady I know uses for Arabic ع 🙂 )?
Oh sure, languages can have contour tones in a single mora. But it’s a reasonable argument (anyway by the usual standard of arguments for phonetic motivations for sound change) that where vowel length exists, long vowels would be more accommodating of complex tones.
In Anywa and various other West Nilotic languages, applicative derivation shortens the root vowel if and only if the root tone is high.
Pretty sure I remember Mary Pearce arguing that in Kera low tone conditions voicing of the previous consonant, rather than vice versa, but it was a long time ago and I haven’t checked…
The weather has already improved, but I’m now correcting the proofs of my latest article, and… they were copyedited by Artificial Idiocy. *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* At this rate this is going to take till Sunday or something. What a massive misinvestment by the publisher. I bet it’s what has caused the… remarkably high publication fee instead of making everything cheaper as was presumably intended.
Ket has two vowel phonemes that come out as [e o] in the high-and-level tone but as [ɛ ɔ] in the other three. I’m sure scarier things happen in languages with larger vowel phoneme inventories.
This definitely does not happen in simple examples like this, for the simple reason that the finite-verb-second and finite-verb-last rules* are absolute throughout German As I Know It.
* wenn ich mich wasche; wenn du mich wäschst
Dialects, Munich through Eisenstadt:
/ˌʋɒnɪmɪˈʋɒʃ/; /ˌʋɒnstmɪˈʋɒʃst/
Indeed not.
…well, in Vienna and occasionally elsewhere, this is faked in the 1pl by replacing reflexive uns with sich. (I see tb has fallen for it 🙂 ) This is generally and credibly blamed on Czech, as is its spread to verbs that aren’t reflexive elsewhere in the first place (Czech has more reflexive verbs than German). However, unlike in Czech of course, this is strictly limited to the first person plural.
This is one place where Navajo is uncharacteristically simple: short vowels can have high or low tone, long ones can be high, low, rising or falling, so you can interpret the long vowels as sequences of two short ones that bear separate high or low tones; that’s what the spelling system does.
In Mandarin, in contrast, syllables with rising or falling tones are phonetically shorter than syllables with high-level or dipping tones, and the latter two seem to have the same length.
Wouldn’t surprise me at all if that exists.
@Y, I think we are talking about the interface between tones and segments, and I meant that the third tone is accompanied by certain colouring of the vowel that an Arabic teacher (and speaker) finds a sufficiently good imitation of an Arabic phoneme to praise his (beginner) student.
I’d rather say that the dipping (3rd) tone sounds like the two syllables that [ʕ] sometimes separates, and/or [ʕ] has a low pitch that sounds like the bottom of the dipping tone.
Thinking about it, certain kinds of interaction between tone and segments are pretty familiar, like the effect of initial consonants on tone; and vowel length could almost be regarded as an honorary suprasegmental anyway. And there are all those clever treatments of nasalisation as word-level suprasegmentals in Tucano, or fronting and rounding as suprasegmentals in Chadic.
And no speaker of Russian or English could doubt that the suprasegmental feature of stress interacts with vowel quality …
Kaboré’s example is a bit more radical, though. What he says is that a clause-final verb “dans la relation de concomitance”, which seems to mean imperfective aspect, linked to the preceding clause by là “and” if there’s a change of subject, n if it’s the same subject, ends in -à if the preceding stem ends in high tone, but -ɩ̃́ if it ends in low tone:
à bée á pʋʋgɩ̃́ n koodà
“il est dans son champ en train de cultiver”
(Kusaal: o bɛɛ o pɔɔgʋn n kuod.)
à bée róogɩ̃́ n dɩ̀ttɩ̃́
“il est dans la case en train de manger”
(Kusaal: o bɛ dɔɔgʋn n dit.)
This -ɩ̃́ certainly has to be an enclitic particle in origin (proto-Western Oti-Volta only had contrastive nasalisation on root vowels.) It’s still a mystery why it only appears after verbs ending in low tone; if I was feeling a bit more spry mentally perhaps I could come up with a just-so story involving analogical developments following the loss of a tone overlay like the Kusaal one (which imposes low tones throughout, regardless of the verb’s lexical tone, but is still distinctive even on intrinsically low-tone verbs because it also alters the following tone sandhi.)
[The passage in Kaboré is also interesting because one of his other examples with this -ɩ̃́ ending is an imperfective “stance” verb with no morphological imperfective flexion. Kusaal has about seventy verbs of this minor conjugation with imperfective-only forms which don’t have the imperfective flexion: I’ve never been sure if their apparent paucity in other WOV languages is real or just due to poor description. This looks like a potential diagnostic for identifying them in Mooré, hitherto a problem because the citation forms in Niggli’s dictionary look exactly the same as regular verb perfectives.]
@drasvi: That is an example of reanalysis (kind of like phonological back-formation), and that’s reasonable, even if it simulates direct conditioning of segments by tones.
@DE: And no speaker of Russian or English could doubt that the suprasegmental feature of stress interacts with vowel quality …
OK, that’s getting somewhere, maybe. In tonal languages which have a so-called neutral tone, is it associated with qualities like those of lack of stress in non-tonal languages, such as vowel centralization, shorter duration, and languor in general?
Kusaal stress is predictable from word structure, though in a way that means it could theoretically be contrastive, though I’ve never found an actual example and it would be quite difficult to contrive one. Basically, stress falls on roots, but quite a lot of nominals have unstressed prefixes, and there is a lot of stress dissimilation sandhi; and some enclitics move the stress of a preceding word to its final syllable.
Kusaal has some unstressed syllables which lack both vowel quality distinctions and independent tone: the two lacks always correlate.
Stress in Kusaal also affects the realisation of high tones: in certain tonal environments, a high tone before stress becomes a mid tone followed by downstep. (Historically, this is a kind of atavism: the current Kusaal mid tone continues the old high tone, and the current Kusaal high tone arose from an original high tone followed by downstep.)
When it comes to the contemporary realisation of Kusaal tones, my rather subjective impression is actually that it’s the mid tone which is the least langorous. (Both high and low tones become falling before pause, but mid remains level.)
And there’s no correlation between tone and vowel quality, except in the case of the toneless syllables I mentioned, which effectively have schwa vowels (they are actually realised “tonetically” as either mid or low, depending on the tone of the preceding syllable. They’re never high.) You could make a case that these vowels are kinda ghostlike, and not really there at all, except that they do have effects on stress sandhi phenomena.
Mandarin has correlations between lack of stress and lack of tone. DM will know about that.
The third vowel length of Estonian and some Low German dialects (Hamburg?) is generally interpreted as suprasegmental.
But I’d say this is simply something where languages differ: in some, length is suprasegmental, in others it’s a property of specific segments. Creaky voice is part of the tone system in Vietnamese and Burmese, but not in Kusaal…
Northern/Standard Mandarin, yes: liǎo > le (change-of-state particle; with [ɤ], the most basic vowel in the inventory), dī > de (particle that turns everything preceding into an attribute – replaces “of” and relative pronouns). Less unstressed 3rd (dipping) tones are often realized as just low. And then there are phenomena like the rising tone being replaced by low pitch in zìxíngchē “bike” (“self-walk-wagon”), but I don’t know to what extent this should be considered stress-related (the high-level tone at the end sure sounds like stress to me, but…) or a matter of underdocumented tone sandhi (rising being interpreted as automatic between falling and high and therefore underarticulated; Mandarin has much less tone sandhi than the rest of Sinitic, but it’s not zero).
The third vowel length of Estonian and some Low German dialects (Hamburg?) is generally interpreted as suprasegmental.
Besides having a contrast between short and long diphthongs (itself fairly unusual), Kusaal also has three-mora diphthongs, but (almost) exclusively in clause-final position at the end of polar questions and of statements containing a negation:
O anɛ nua.
“It’s a hen.”
O ka’ nuaa.
“It’s not a hen.”
If you had an unreasoning aversion to three-mora diphthongs, you could certainly pretend that this was all some kind of prosodic or suprasegmental thing, though this wouldn’t fit well into the general pattern of how clause-final words behave in such contexts:
Ba anɛ diga.
“They are dwarfs.”
Ba ka’ digaa.
“They are not dwarfs.”
O anɛ digir.
“He’s a dwarf.”
O ka’ digirɛ.
“He’s not a dwarf.”
Curiously, Kusaal does not have three-mora monophthongs (you just get ordinary two-mora long vowels in the environments where you might have expected them.)
O anɛ baa.
“It’s a dog.”
O ka’ baa.
“It’s not a dog.”
[There’s a single exception: ma’aa “only”; it probably snuck under the wire as having still been maɣaa as late as the 1960s. But e.g. da’a “market” never becomes *da’aa.]
I can say it, so long as I stress “me.”
A real world example: “I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me”
Whether, to LH’s point, those lyrics are childish, I’ll let others judge.
That lyric always struck me as… I don’t know if “childish” is the word, but quite silly.
I think the “me” in that deeply irritating lyric is sort of quoted, or at least shifted metaphorically into a role where it’s not just parsable as a pronoun any more. It’s supposed to represent “my essential nature.” Or something. Much as the “the Me generation.” “Learn to be at home with the Me” … you know the sort of thing.
This would not be the intended sense of my “I can see me” in response to a question about what I can see in the mirror (or a photo, or the like.)
Further thoughts about that mysterious Mooré -ɩ̃́ (don’t mind me, talk among yourselves. I’m quite happy mumbling to myself here in the corner.)
This is actually a context where Kusaal specifically does not have the tone overlay I was talking about, making it something of a stretch to try to bring it in to an explanation. But there is another potentially relevant tone overlay: Western Oti-Volta imperfective forms always have a final high tone (= Kusaal mid), unless the stem ends in a high tone (mid, whatever.)
This tone is odd in two ways: unlike a high tone on a noun-class suffix, it does not trigger the change of a preceding all-low stem to all high tones; and it applies even to imperfectives which consist of a bare root with no flexion, like Kusaal bɛ(ɛ) “exist.” So it’s best regarded as an overlay, not as a tone associated with a particular segment. (This tone-overlay-as-verb-flexion thing happens a lot in the languages most closely related to WOV, viz Buli, Konni, Yom and Nawdm, so it’s not implausible on first principles.)
I still can’t really leverage this into an explanation of the Mooré Giant Squid, but it seems likely to be more relevant. The -ɩ̃́ clitic as a kind of allomorph of the imperfective final-high-tone overlay.
(To confuse the issue, Mooré also has another enclitic -ɩ̃ attached to verbs, usually with a hypothetical/counterfactual meaning; but that one is obviously cognate with the Kusaal enclitic -n, which has the same meaning. It’s not confined to imperfectives or to low-tone stems, and it also moonlights as a recent-past marker, like its Kusaal cognate.)
Northern/Standard Mandarin, yes: liǎo > le (change-of-state particle; with [ɤ], the most basic vowel in the inventory), dī > de (particle that turns everything preceding into an attribute – replaces “of” and relative pronouns).
One thing I’ve always found remarkable about Mandarin de 的 is that its Old Chinese equivalent as an attributive marker, zhī 之, was pronounced something like /*tə/ in Old Chinese, basically the same as modern de with basically the same use. Surely a coincidence, but a strange one.
And as for “I can see me” or “I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me” – the song lyric this reminds me of is:
I think I’ve heard that that’s a quote from someone talking in a Warhol movie or similar, but I’m not sure if that’s correct.
Don’t forget to water the Eddyshaw in the corner before going home for the night…
Appreciated …
It’s just occurred to me that the WOV “insubordinate” tone overlay associated with the postverbal enclitic ya actually has exactly the same final outcome as the overlay which imposes a final high tone on the imperfective of verbs with low-tone stems. I have no idea what (if anything) follows from this revelation …
But probably more scope for reanalysis in a language like Mooré, which has abandoned the first kind of overlay. Imperfectives from low-tone stems sound like main-clause forms even though they’re subordinate … so they might need additional marking for subordination which is not necessary in the case of high-tone verbs … and then everything goes to pot as the “insubordinate” overlay is abandoned, leaving all this as a relic with no obvious motivation any more. Yes, that might do it.
Keep that water coming …
Actually, this is quite exciting (at least if you’re me.)
Assuming that Kaboré has his facts right (and he’s an L1 speaker, after all, and gives a general impression of reliability), what he describes is a major weirdness, as Y pointed out. It cries out for explanation.
I think my hypothesis probably is the simplest that covers the facts; the excitement would be that (running it backwards) it’s evidence that Mooré used to have the “insubordinate” tone overlay; similarly, the mismatch between Kropp Dakubu’s description of Bolgatanga Farefare verb tone and everybody else’s descriptions of other Farefare dialects is evidence that Farefare used to have it too. (Still does, in a way. It’s just got out of control in Bolgatanga.)
So the “insubordination” tone overlay can be projected to proto-Western Oti-Volta. (Which would make sense too, as it would be a weird thing for Kusaal and its closer relatives to have just gone and innovated. Much more likely to be an inherited survival of a much more elaborate set of tone-overlays-as-verb-flexion, as still seen in groups close to WOV.)
It would also mean that the loss of the overlay happened independently in Mooré and Farefare; again, that would make sense, as (contrary to popular belief) there isn’t a lot of evidence that Dagaare, Farefare and and Mooré form an actual subgroup within WOV. (Manessy’s Southwestern Oti-Volta is a thing; his Northwestern Oti-Volta is a chimera. Just some WOV languages that don’t happen to belong to Southwestern.)
(There are other features shared by Mooré and Farefare which are demonstrably independent innovations, too: like the simplification of labial-velars to plain velars.)
Sounds publishable.