Laptot, Signare.

The Dictionnaire wolof-français et français-wolof by Jean-Léopold DIOUF says (via GB) that lapto and its variant làppatoo mean ‘interpreter’ (as a verb, ‘to serve as an interpreter’). Bi is the most common of Wolof’s ten or so definite articles; they are postpositive and canonically joined to their nouns with a hyphen. The grave on a is a purely conventional and normally redundant marker that a geminated consonant follows.

Wolof is unusual for putting its TAM markers on personal pronouns, not on the verb.

“Wolof is unusual for putting its TAM markers on personal pronouns, not on the verb.”

Hausa is the same.

But Hausa is Afroasiatic and Wolof is Niger-Congo. Somebody wandered from a sprachbund? Not that I even know what a TAM marker is. Ask me where I put my TAM markers and I’m likely to say the middle room in the basement.

Certainly much of West Africa is a Sprachbund, but the core Hausa-speaking areas are pretty remote from Senegal.

However, it’s very common in West Africa for tense/aspect/mood to be marked primarily by clitic particles intervening between subject and verb, from where it’s not too difficult to get the particles cliticising to pronoun subjects rather than the verb; subsequent sound changes can then give rise to portmanteau forms of pronouns which mark TAM. This seems to be the accepted hypothesis for Hausa, anyhow, in which a good many of the pronoun forms remain fairly easily segmentable, particularly in some dialects.

I was thinking that this would develop more readly in an isolating language, with little or no pre-existing semantic load on variation of the verb. Wikipedia kindly confirms this for Wolof. But what about inherited Niger-Congo traits that might have prevented it? Did the branch that would eventually produce Wolof lose all PNC noun class morphology on the verb, or replace it with post-positive determiners, ot did it split off before the prefigating Niger-Congo system was fully developed?

What about other isolating languages? English has some verbal inflection left, but clitics ranging from well-established “-ll” through the accepted colloquialism “-guna” to deprecated “-ma” do show the development, How is Chinese?

The Irish inflected prepositions must be the same thing but with prepositions and not pronouns happening to be in front of the clitics. Another parallel is that Wolof has Initial mutations, and I think that helps explain some of the pronominal forms. (The pronominal paradigm looks like a fun exercise in internal reconstruction.)

Having incautiously invoked Dogon, I must forthwith admit that Dogon verbs do agree with subjects in person and number …

There’s a fair bit of Niger-Congo verb morphology which is presumed to be inherited, in the form of suffixes conveying things like causative and applicative senses; the literature uses the somewhat nonstandard term “verbal extensions” for these. A lot of the work seems to be very Bantu-centric, as such extensions are not only very prominent in many Bantu languages but formed so productively as to be quasi-flexional. The supposed “Atlantic” group to which Wolof and Fulfulde both belong tends to star in such accounts too for similar reasons. However, there are a lot of difficulties correlating form and function across subfamilies of Niger-Congo. A number of ‘extensions’ may, in addition, be areal phenomena, turning up even in Chadic and Nilo-Saharan. I read a recent review paper which only quoted one source for all of Gur, a grammar of Moore which in the relevant sections has pretty certainly incorrectly segmented many of the verb stems in question. Still at least it seems that proto-Niger-Congo (so far as one can talk of such an animal) had a fair bit of derivational suffixal morphology in verbs.

The morphological features usually prayed in aid of the existence of Niger-Congo as an actual genetic group (as opposed to a huge Sprachbund) are the noun class system, which is very much a feature of nominals rather than verbs, along with these verbal extensions, which are a quite separate thing. There is a bit of fairly convincing correlation between form and function across subgroups with the noun classes, like the human-plural ba identifiable in Kusaal as a noun suffix (and pronoun) and in Xhosa as a prefix.

*h₁és-i

(Well, *h₁és-si on the morphological level, but long consonants weren’t allowed. The ending *-si is ancestral to the Polish -ś.)

Trond, Hat, Marie-Lucie: What’s even funnier is that Sarah Rose did her M.A. and PhD. at Memorial University, i.e. at the very University where both John Hewson and Derek Nurse work (Both are now Emeriti professors), so that her using her own terminology cannot be blamed on her background/academic training.

It makes sense, in a twisted sort of way…if doctors make the worst patients, then it stands to reason that linguists have more trouble communicating than most, and it thus elegantly, indeed almost inevitably, follows that communication involving multiple linguists must be even more difficult.

(Insert the “I don’t understand” interruption from a linguist somewhere here, followed by the laugh track).

I think they do deserve brownie points, however, for being explicit about their different terminological choices: all too often these differences are NOT stated explicitly, yielding a great deal of frustration for readers.

For instance, a scholar working on pidgin and creole languages observed in print once that scholars studying pidgins and creoles had real difficulty understanding one another because of different terminological choices and scholarly philosophies, and that from this point of view there was an amusing contrast between the creators/users of pidgin languages, who created and used a new language to successfully communicate across a language barrier, and the scholars who study these languages and their speakers, who cannot even make their meaning clear to other scholars working on pidgins, including some they actually share an L1 with.

To a degree, of course, this happens to any field of study over time: Stanislaw Lem, in his wonderful novel SOLARIS (About a vast intelligent planet-spawning Ocean-like being which humans seek to communicate with), made his (imaginary) history of Solaristics very believable by making it splinter into various squabbling academic sects over time, leading to the protagonist’s mentor making the very same observation to a group of Solarists: how can you hope to communicate with the Ocean when you cannot communicate among yourselves?

Hmm, if anybody out there wants an original research project, here’s my suggestion: a comparative study of A) The time and conditions required for a single language to turn into mutually unintelligible languages, and of B) The time and conditions required for a single academic field of study to turn into multiple subfields, with mutually unintelligible specialized vocabulary and incompatible goals and presuppositions…There might be an interesting parallel to make between the acceleration of linguistic differentiation as a result of a desire to highlight a separate social identity, on the one hand, and the acceleration of the differentiation of a field into separate subfields as a result of grant money being showered upon anything which can market itself as “new, bold and paradigm-shattering”…

There’s an academic ‘principle of plenitude’, that between any two specialties one may interpose a third. Paradigms may break, but they more commonly interfoliate.