I don’t know enough to even begin to evaluate Mena B. Lafkioui’s Rif Berber: From Senhaja to Iznasen. A qualitative and quantitative approach to classification (Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 28 [2020]: 117-156), but there are those who do (hi, Lameen!), and it looks very interesting, so I’m posting it. Here’s the Abstract:
By combining qualitative (synchronic and diachronic) and quantitative (algorithmic) approaches, this study examines the nature, structure, and dynamics of the linguistic variation attested in Berber of the Rif area (North, Northwest, and Northeast Morocco). Based on a cross-level corpus of data obtained from the Atlas linguistique des varieties berbères du Rif (Lafkioui 2007) and from numerous linguistic, sociolinguistic, and ethnographic fieldwork investigations in the area since 1992, this study shows that these Berber varieties form a language continuum with the following five stable core aggregates, which cut across administrative and political borders: Western Rif Berber, West-Central Rif Berber, Central Rif Berber, East-Central Rif Berber, and Eastern Rif Berber. Furthermore, data mining studies made it possible to objectively identify the principal aggregate discriminators of the Rif Berber continuum, which are dealt with in the study. A special focus in the article is put on the interplay be-tween system-internal and system-external parameters for the selection, diffusion, and transformation of variants in Rif Berber.
(Hat tip to John Emerson for the link.)
Hi!
Useful context for this one is Kossmann 2017, La place du parler des Senhaja de Sraïr dans la dialectologie berbère. There is some debate on the place within Berber of the so-called “Senhaja de Sraïr” dialects spoken around Ketama: are they dialects of Rif Berber (Tarifiyt), as Lafkioui argues using purely synchronic data mining methods, or the partly assimilated remnants of a separate Berber variety more closely related to Tamazight and Tashelhiyt further southwest, as Kossmann argues using more traditional historical linguistic methods? (The two positions are of course strictly speaking perfectly compatible – Senhaja’s recent history may well be one of convergence towards Tarifit, rather like that of Tasahlit to Kabyle.) Being mainly interested in the historical development – and generally considering that the notion of Berber being a dialect continuum has been greatly exaggerated in the literature, and we would all benefit from thinking in terms of trees more often – I personally find Kossmann’s argument more helpful in understanding what’s going on with that set of dialects. However, so far data on the varieties in question has been rather sparse, limited largely to a practically oriented colonial-era Spanish dictionary and to Lafkioui’s own questionnaire results (they were even falsely reported as extinct for several years by Ethnologue). Fortunately, Jenia Gutova will (at long last) be defending her thesis on Ketama Berber in a couple of weeks, after which one may hope the situation will be clearer. (Fieldwork around Ketama is uniquely challenging, since the region is reputedly the hub of Morocco’s still-technically-illegal marijuana industry.)
I’m not well versed in quantitative dialectology, but the main thing I wonder about when I read papers of that kind is feature weighting. Obviously not all features should be given equal weight; how much does the choice of relative weight affect the results? And how do we guarantee that the features chosen are representative?
I almost forgot to mention: Lafkioui’s landmark dialect atlas of Rif Berber is also freely and legally downloadable, at Atlas linguistique des variétés berbères du Rif. So any interested person can have a look at the patterns and see for themselves which isoglosses look more significant.
Very cool! What times we live in…
I met a couple of friends of a friend with Moroccan Berber backgrounds during a night out in Singapore when I visited a few years ago, and when they discovered their shared background they started comparing the varieties of Berber they spoke (I might have been partly responsible for steering the conversation this way). It was mostly comparing words and expressions and noting the similarities and differences, conducted in French for the benefit of the rest of us. I don’t remember if they mentioned their exact backgrounds though, so I don’t know just how far apart their respective varieties were.
Not quite – page 15 is immediately followed by page 92, page 239 is immediately followed by page 274, and I expect there are more such Google-Books-like phenomena.
brb, flying to Singapore lah
Gute Reise, bon retour!
Win na ta’asif!
Also interesting:
In French except for what I quoted.
page 15 is immediately followed by page 92, page 239 is immediately followed by page 274
try HAL
I am an old friend of Mr. Languagehat’s. Most of what you folks talk about regarding languages is way beyond me, but I happen to know a lot about statistics, data mining, cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, and so forth. I skimmed the pdf for things that made sense to me. I did not find a description of the methods used for data analysis. Perhaps that is in one of the other 37 pdfs? But I can make some comments based on the names of things. Of course, names and their meanings change.
K-means clustering is useful for summarizing data. It is usually not appropriate for scientific analyses.
Classical MDS is 1950s technology. Much better algorithms have been available for 50 years. But perhaps it is adequate for these data.
Levenshtein distance is a crude measure. But perhaps it is adequate for these data.
Lameen asked, “Obviously not all features should be given equal weight; how much does the choice of relative weight affect the results?”
Good question. Answer: Potentially enormously.
Warren: Thank you for providing a different perspective on this. Is there any resource you’d recommend for learning more about the strengths and limitations of methods like these?
“The other 37 pdfs” are academia.edu’s attempt to get you to pay them, to have their algorithm find “similar papers” in their collection. Their algorithm is terrible, and chances are many of those 37 papers have nothing to do with historical linguistics or with statistics or with Berber.
Obviously not all features should be given equal weight; how much does the choice of relative weight affect the results?
From what I can tell she does separately run the experiment in several separate domains
Gutova (mentioned above by Lameen) and Meouak recently published something absolutely unexpected for me: a text in Ghomara from 16th century.
That sounds cool. Can someone tell me more about the existence of ancient Berber texts. Is the new 16th century text (a single sentence in an Arabic paragraph) quite early for Ghomara, for Rif Berber or for all Berber?
That’s probably discussed in the Gutova study, but it’s paywalled for me. Academia.edu shows p. 1 out of 4 pages, which offers slightly different details than the summary that drasvi linked, including a footnote thanking Lameen.
Ryan, perhaps Lameen can point at a good overview of existing manuscripts (they deserve it, because I don’t think many people know that there are old texts in Berber). I only can quote Kossmaan 2012, The Arabic Influence on Northern Berber (my aquitance with Berber began from this book):
refs in the order of appearance:
Gutova, Evgenia. 2011. The Sanusi Creed in Kabyle Berber: Manuscript KA 21 from the Lmuhub Ulahbib Library (Béjaïa, Algeria). MA Thesis. Leiden University.
Brugnatelli Vermondo. 2011a. Some grammatical features of Ancient Eastern Berber (the language of the Mudawwana). In: Luca Busetto, Roberto Sottile, Livia Tonelli & Mauro Tosco, eds. He Bitaney Lagge. Studies on Language and African Linguistics in Honour of Marcello Lamberti. Milan: Qu.A.S.A.R. s.r.l. 29–40.
Bossoutrot, A. 1900. Vocabulaire berbère ancien (dialecte du djebel Nefoussa). Revue Tunisienne 7. 489–507.
Ould-Braham, Ouahmi. 2008. Sur un nouveau manuscrit ibâḍite-berbère: La Mudawwana
d’Abû Ġânim al-Ḫurâsânî, traduite en berbère au Moyen Âge. Études et Documents Berbères 27. 47–72.
Boogert, Nico van den. 1997. The Berber Literary Tradition of the Sous. Leiden: NINO.
Boogert, Nico van den. 2000. Medieval Berber orthography. In: Salem Chaker & Andrzej Zaborski, eds. Études berbères et chamito-sémitiques. Mélanges offerts à Karl-G. Prasse. Paris & Louvain: Peeters. 357–377.
Norris, Harry Thirlwall. 1982. The Berbers in Arabic Literature.
Elghamis, Ramada. 2011. Le tifinagh au Niger contemporain: Étude sur l’écriture indigène des Touaregs. PhD Thesis. Universiteit Leiden.
Kossmann, Maarten & Ramada Elghamis. fc. Preliminary notes on Tuareg in Arabic script from Niger. In: Meikal Mumin & Kees Versteegh, eds. The Arabic Script in Africa: Studies on the Usage of a Writing System. Leiden
_____
Finding Ghomara in 16th cenutry is suprising for me because I read its grammar (quite amazing in how it incorporates chunks of Arabic grammar) and know it as a Berber-speaking enclave (which likely wasn’t an enclave in past) in the north of Morocco, similar to Senhaja (in turn adjacent and similar to Riffian) whose polylectal grammar Gutova wrote.
I expect new findings, but I would not expect exactly Ghomara.
I think it is “old for Riffian”.
PS. Yes, paywalled (though the journal is not particully evil: I think after a couple of years the articles are free)
For Morocco, the state of the art is Umar Afa’s الدليل الجدادي للمخطوطات والوثائق الأمازيغية, including a fragment of a 16th c. Quran translation. For Kabyle, I may take the liberty of linking my own open-access chapter: Kabyle in Arabic Script: A History without Standardisation. For the Eastern Berber mss tradition, I would start by looking through Vermondo Brugnatelli’s publication list, but much remains to be done.
“In at least two regions during the pre-colonial era, such writing went beyond the sporadic quoting of words or poems…” – @Lameen, is there something like a catalogue for material of this kind: words and poems?
Meouak’s La langue berbère au Maghreb médiéval comes closest, offhand; van den Boogert’s The Berber Literary Tradition of the Sous also addresses this to some extent.
@Lameen, thanks!
I discovered La langue berbère au Maghreb médiéval not too long ago and was in utter shock: how come that I never heard about the book before? Is it because of relative isolation of English and French literatures?
But probably for the same reason (I’m less fluent in French) I did not read it back then and…. Forgot about it:(
It’s frustrating to read about Berber (or any language) as a school subject. My associations are:
– Belorussian. Taught as a subject, but only a small percent of schools offer instruction in it (because of low demand). Nearly disappeared after Belarusian independence.
– minority languages of Russia, taught as subject and… many protest. They don’t want it. Because to get to a university you need to take a Russian exam.
No, nothing bad about such school subjects, but given the above such news never improve my mood.
Making Welsh compulsory in the lower years of (English-medium) schools here has resulted, alas, in (a) widespread resentment of the subject by di-Gymraeg pupils and (b) amazingly low standards. I don’t think it achieves anything. The Welsh-medium schools (probably) do help, though.
@DE, in Indian boarding schools they just study in English, from the very beginning.
And when my freind went to Germany for half a year, I think her children immediately went to a school with instruction in German. (A couple of months later some idiot in a bus was annoyed by their accent and criticised my freind for not teaching them to speak German Properly:)))))))
But here it is simple. Everyone has to graduate form an university. Add Klingon to your entrance exam and use Vulcan as the instruction language in universities – and the demand for Klingon and Vulcan teachers will be high.
I read Lameen’s paper linked above and one note is tempting to make:
– “Mouloud Feraoun (1960, 10–11) bears eloquent witness at once to Boulifa’s success in appealing to a Kabyle audience…” (…Il est “le Livre”, l’unique livre des jeunes Kabyles. On le trouve dans les villages….)
– “At no point has any one writer’s or school’s Arabic-script work been sufficiently widely read to be imitated”
I don’t know if it is interesting or not, and also I’m not sure that Boulifa’s book was more influential than modern textbooks – but in the above context the idea to use Boulifa for a case study occurs very naturally. In absence of information I assume that Boulifa’s book is much less popular and influential now than when Feraoun wrote that (not necessary but quite plausible).
Then there is simply no available data to test any hypotheses of its orthogrpahical influences: the only book from the requred period in the table is another collection of poetry (Udifella).
They coincide in two variably represented phonemes (/g/ and /ḡ/ as ڨ and /ts/ as plain ت), for two others (č, Cʷ), that table has ? for Udifella, for two others (đ̣ ḇ) Boulifa has ض and ب and Udifella has ظ, ض and پ, ب (that is overlaps with Boulifa in one of two variants). They differ in one point: ـــَـ for schwa (Udifella) and no vowel diacritics for Boulifa.
In other words it is impossible to tell from the table if one was influenced by the other.
Olga Yokoyama published an archive of Russian peasant letters from 19th century. (Йокояма Ольга Борисовна Письма русских крестьян: тексты и контексты. Тт. 1, 2). I really, really wish there was such material for Berber and even Arabic.
Along those lines, I just saw a recent paper, “Developing a standard in lower-class Scottish writing: pauper petitions as a source for nineteenth-century lower-class Scottish language” (OA), in the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, which publishes a lot of interesting papers of this sort. Unfortunately, almost all are about European languages (interesting though — “Language maintenance and shift in a Swiss community on the Black Sea”, that is Shabo in Ukraine. Who knew?)
“Swiss” – I think I can guess the author. If i’m correct, in some other thread I posted a link to her page. Found her because someone mentioned Albanian in Zaporizhzhia there (she published something about them) – and posted it because of her interests.
Then there is simply no available data to test any hypotheses of its orthogrpahical influences:
That is basically a fair point. I would love to redo this work with a proper archive of personal letters and the like, but for that one I really took what I could get. The limited overlap between Boulifa and Udifella looks to me like just what you’d expect based on Arabic conventions in the same period, rather than anything that could clearly indicate influence, but that doesn’t entirely rule out the possibility.
Boulifa is pretty much forgotten now; for anthologies, I guess Mammeri supplanted him.
Yes. The contrast between your words and the impressive characteristic by Feraoun is funny, so it was tempting as I said.
Practically one interesting question is how a pre-colonial tradition (as opposed to simply “natural” choice) can be identified, if there was such a tradition.
Faraoun also mentions people who can’t read (Ajami – I wonder if the speakers in question are literate in Arabic proper) or can read well only when they already know the poem.
Neither is new (such accounts are really numerous*), but apparently there is something importnat about literacy that I’m missing. If we believe such accounts (possibly these speakers never seriously tried), they are easy to explain: fluency comes with experience.
Your brain should learn to perform search for items of internal vocabulary that can in principle match this graphic sequence, and if you want to read it comfortably rather than “decipher” texts slowly, this search must be very fast: it works together with analysis of the syntax (which at once excludes some of possible grammatical forms and in this sense has “words” as its output – and can’t work at all without “words” in its input) and semantics. Well, same with speaking.
So we arrive to “decipher a few texts and you can read, read a few books and you’re fluent”. Cool. We have a theory.
And then why Safaitic? Why Touareg? Why all the documents like one written by a Nubi “in a mixture of Luganda and Runyoro” (mentioned by Nakao)?
* I complained already at how many people who write about Latin and Arabic script for Baluchi note that its speakers can’t read Baluchi in Arabic script “because it is not Semitic”… while noting that same speakers read in Urdu.
An Indo-European langauge.
Your brain should learn to perform search for items of internal vocabulary that can in principle match this graphic sequence, and if you want to read it comfortably rather than “decipher” texts slowly, this search must be very fast: it works together with analysis of the syntax (which at once excludes some of possible grammatical forms and in this sense has “words” as its output – and can’t work at all without “words” in its input) and semantics. Well, same with speaking.
That’s how generative AI works. It’s the reason why its output is almost indistinguishable from what people produce. The notion of intelligence is irrelevant here – primarily because intelligence is ascribed by the consumer of the output. It’s a polite fiction to designate it as a feature of the producer.
That’s how I learned to understand spoken English overnight.
All varieties of English ? At a blogsite there’s no way to demonstrate or verify that someone understands spoken English.
I meant to write “English speech” but I’m not sure it changes anything. I mean, to understand what I hear rather than what I read.
At some point when I was 22 maybe I began reading more in English than in Russian. I defintiely was a fluent reader (when it comes to texts like Wikipedia, scientific articles etc.).
But I could only understand about the half of what they say on BBC. Same with songs. More when I’m drunk.
It was a mystery, because my performance with some romance languages I don’t know is comparable.
When I was 34 it was still the same – even though I was much more fluent and also frequently wrote and occasionaly conversed (not not native speakers) in broken English.
Reading a foreign language is always easier than participating fluently in natural conversation. You can pause or rewind at will in a written text, and skip back and forth to get the context. Also, written language tends to be much more structured and generally simpler syntactically than spoken (the widespread myths to the contrary are based on inadequate analyses of real spontaneous spoken language,)
In conversation, to get to be competent in real time, you just have to have put in the practice at some point. Same as a sport or playing a musical instrument.
DE, yes, but listening to newscasters when you know every word they use is supposed to be must easier that listening to random romance speakers:)
About “simple written langauge” – perhaps.
There not many things easier than a scientific article (in a discipline you’re familiar with, especially when the vocabulary is shared). Yes the lanaguage can be HEAVY. But not complex.
Fiction (even its varieties which are considered less sophisticated, particularly because they are far from the literary register) is definitely more complex.
So a related idiotic misconception is when a langauge school presents CEFR table (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 – where C is “advanced”) explaining that C1 is “can read and understand scholarly publications”, “understand lectures” etc. I do understand their thinking: “Here is street youth. They understand wanna and fuck and do not understand university textbooks. They are unsophisticated. And here is Jack. He wears a suit. He publishes his works in Greek, Latin and Classical Hebrew. He is sophisticated.”
If only you know HOW happy hordes of exceptionally talented young Iranian speakers of broken Enlgish who want to do their PhD in a Western university would be if IELTS and TOEFL score was determined based on ability to understand scientific publications and lectures. Or even better on ability to write them. (I know one young lady who is very obviously bright, but English is a very serious obstacle for her. The situation is truly idiotic: it is the only obstacle, but so serious that you can waste years dreaming of how one day you learn English (not only dreaming but actually fighting with it wihtout much success, because being good at engineering does not mean you know how to study English in Iran) and get the required IELTS score).
“how to study English in Iran” that is, obviously: a country where no one is good at English and whose local languages are not very compatible even with the bookish register linguistically and culturally (as opposed to European languages). Same is true for European learners of Persian: seems easy when you’re taught to maintain “basic conversation” and then scary and difficult.
Quite right about technical articles in a subject you know about: my comprehension of German medical articles is much better than my wife’s, for example, despite the fact that she knows German much better than I do. (She is qualified to teach it at A-Level, in fact, though unfortunately rarely called upon to do so in these degenerate Latter Days of the Law.)
And I have a fair number of linguistics texts and grammars in German which I understand just fine, though I struggle to read a German novel. (It’s less of a thing nowadays: linguistic stuff that would have been written in fine academic German a generation ago now tends to be in very good but not-quite-right English instead. Brill seem to have no mother-tongue-English proof readers … always assuming that they have any proof readers at all, that is.)
And I can’t speak Spanish at all, but I had no trouble at all understanding a ophthalmologist’s referral letter and case report in Spanish that one of my Hispanic relatives asked me about.
Back to my story. It is a good story and I believe I typed it here three times – but I think each time something distracted me and I did not send the post.
___
What happened when I was 35 is an absolutely mad conversation with my (actual and close) friend. In English, native to neither of us, and Skype chat. We discussed something extremely interesting to both, so it began on… Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, and continued on Wednesday, then Thursday and Friday.
We both were typing like mad, barely reading what the other wrote, ignoring all typos and grammar.
I actually CAN talk with a freind for 48 hours in a row (it is normal for me: short but frequent phone calls drive me mad, but I understand in long conversations) – but never ever I did anything that epic and I’m not sure I ever typed that fast.
On Friday I was… Tired. So before going to bed I considered watching English al-Jazeera, opened it in youtube and immediately paused it. I simply couldn’t listen, couldn’t watch, I could only sleep and that’s all. In the morning I saw a dream: someone is speaking in English and I can understand everything she says. I woke up and to my surprise someone was speaking in English in my room. “Can I still understand her?” yes I could. At that moment I opened my eyes and jumped (quite literally: what do you do when an unknown person is speaking a foreign langauge in your room?).
The explanation was simple: it was my computer. What I did not know is that youtube back then refreshed its pages (those with streams) once in a several hours. So it was optimistic al-Jazeera English, then a third-world channel with 5 wars and 3 refugee crises each time.
And yet I still could understand everything. It felt at least indistinguishable from perfect 100%. I could even understand words whose pronunciation I did not know.
It was worse with interviewed native speakers (especially farmers).
Also on Saturday and Sunday I felt totally sick of English (don’t know how top explain. Just sick. A strong sensation). And when on Sunday a Russian-speaking freind visited me, I found that…
Well, you know, sometimes in a foreign language you have to rephrase everything, because it does not have some noun which you need. So what I was doing is relying on English vocabulary when speaking Russian, and stumbling all the time because I structured everything in such a way that I could use some English word which simply does not have a Russian translation.
____
I checked two months later (when my brain was back in its Russian mode) if anything changed.
Now it felt (I’m speaking of how it felt) like 98%, not 100.
And annoyingly still required some concentration, I was getting tired with time.
With “interviewed native speakers” the results were worse too.
On the other hand, “feels like 98%” is FAR from “feels like 50%”, so most of the effect was retained.
Such things are why I never try to seriously study or polish or whatever my English (other than figuring out indivial items and usages).
The idea of hiring a teacher is tempting – not because I need a teacher, but because I’m curious about how people teach langauges (and often have to explain Russian to its learners), but with English I won’t do that.
It is fantastically interesting how it changes/evolves on its own.
(Stu complains at my English sometimes – but definitely the reason to do nothing to it is not due to lack of interest)
PS.
“(quite literally: what do you do when an unknown person is speaking a foreign langauge in your room?).” – I realised that it is WEIRD after asking myself if I can still understand it – and before opening my eyes.
Yes: the most intensively studied language in the history of the world, and there are still vast unexplained areas in the grammar. (One of the many virtues of CGEL is that it captures this provisional aspect of grammatical description very well. “This is our best explanation so far …”)
@DE: I wouldn’t say vast unexplained areas, just vastly many of them. An archipelago, not a continent.
What I described above suggests some parallel between organisation of one’s brain (mine in this case) a a PC. Namely the distinction between its “memory” and the “hard drive”.
I think I managed to “load” my already existing English to some part of my brain where search could be performed MUCH faster.
Note that by then I was a very fluent reader: well acquinted with almost all words used in news (and also aquainted with English phonemes – speaking of those words whose pronunciation I did not know). My (weird) problem could only be about matching/searching and doing it fast enough.
(cf. what Stu quoted above where I say “same with speaking”)
just vastly many of them
Mony a little maks a mickle, as the English say.
Or an elephant touched at multiple points. I don’t think our langauge thoery already includes all potentially interesting aspects (phonology/morphology/syntax/semantics/pragmatics and information structure…) of lnaguage.
the most intensively studied language in the history of the world, and there are still vast unexplained areas in the grammar.
It almost makes one think that languages perversely evolve to defy description; to confound any simpleton/arrogant so-and-so trying to make finite rules of grammar, no matter how abstract.
I’ve been recently enjoying Stephen Levinson’s grammar of Yélî Dnye. One rapidly comes to the conclusion that the good people of Rossel Island, having heard of Navajo, felt that it was a good effort, but altogether too simple and regular to be truly interesting from a linguistic standpoint. They were determined to show how it should be done …
(And all without even being a tone language, The key is to make everything suppletive. And also, of course, to invent dozens of coarticulated consonants that nobody else in the whole world had ever thought up. This is not language, it is art …)
“The key is to make everything suppletive” – if we have English where same form can be an adverb, adjective, noun or verb – a content word in other words – someone must go in the reverse direction:)
(also speakers of such a language can confidently call English (and maybe other European languages) a “creole” language).
Yélî Dnye (IPA: [jelɯ ʈɳʲɛ]), if anyone else was wondering.
From the same article: “As a form of women’s speech, women avoid certain words, especially those related to the sea.”
To give an idea of what I mean: “eat” in Yélî Dnye is ma when transitive, but kmaapi when intransitive. The transitive remote past of “eat” is ntîî, and the continuous aspect is pîpî. This verb is not exceptional in Yélî Dnye, but typical.
Grammatical categories are expressed by hundreds of clitics, which are also highly suppletive. In isolation, many are ambiguous, and the ambiguity can only be resolved by considering the (suppletive) form of the head word and other associated ambiguous suppletive clitics.
Nouns inflect for definiteness. That is often suppletive too. Apart from that, there’s not a lot of morphology, in the strict sense. Who needs it?
Naturally, it has ergative alignment and (despite the lack of morphology) highly productive noun incorporation. Of course it does. Noun incorporation is subject to some restrictions. It’s just that it’s difficult to see exactly what they are. It may depend on what the speaker has had for breakfast, or something.
The language is a sort of perfect anticreole.
“anticreole”
Well, my suggestgion is (a) picking it as the point of origin (b) transferring all English (and possibly Romance etc.) departments of all universities to “Creole Studies”.
“That is often suppletive too”
Suppletive definiteness is something truly brutal.
Levinson’s grammar is freely downloadable, incidentally:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110733853/html
Respect!
“transferring … to “Creole Studies”.” – Generativists too.
WTF? It’s an *island*!. And a small island at that: by my reckoning nowhere’s more than an hour’s walk to the sea.
How do you (say) give anybody directions? you can walk ‘mountainwards’ or ‘not-mountainwards’, I suppose. ‘Mountain-on-the-right-hand’ or ‘mountain-on-the-left-hand’. You can eat ‘land-food’ or ‘not-land-food’.
I await Comrade Eddyshaw’s clitics and suppletives for that lot. D’uh of course female speech has a whole bunch of suppletives different to male’s.
@DE, Do you know Pawley’s introduction to Kalam?
…
Yes (I think it came up on LH before.)
I’ve got the Croom Helm grammar of its relative Kobon somewhere. (Unfortunately, like all the rest of that thoroughly misconceived series, it’s in a format that tries to force everything into one uniform mould, and is nearly unusable for that reason. Nearly as bad as anything with tagmemics. A whole series of missed opportunities.)
Y, in other words: their system of derivation of verbs is different. Ours:
a: complicate roots with affixes (or those weird English things whose function is identical to affixes).
where do we take roots:
b: transfer roots/stems from nouns, adjectives (perhaps onomatopoeias)
c: borrow them
d: coin them (or perhaps onomatopoeias are here).
Big science publishers do have copyeditors (who make the proofs that the authors then have to proofread)… in India. They do things like change “III” in a cited author’s name to “I. I. I.”.
Palatalized retroflexes! That’s dedication.
(…also… labio-palatalized labials. They’ve gone full Proto-West-Caucasian.)
The table in the Wikipedia article shows men and women simply use different words for certain sea-related concepts; the women’s terms generally look longer and more complex, so they may be established circumlocutions but still function as unremarkable lexical items.
“…that big wet place we sail boats on…”
“In particular, Levinson’s grammar makes clear precisely to what extent and in what ways the language’s morphology is complex beyond even what most studies on morphologically complex languages envisage.”