That’s the title of a new Open Access paper by Damián E. Blasi, Joseph Henrich, Evangelia Adamou, David Kemmerer, and Asifa Majid whose Highlights section reads:
The cognitive sciences have been dominated by English-speaking researchers studying other English speakers. We review studies examining language and cognition, contrasting English to other languages, by focusing on differences in modality, form-meaning mappings, vocabulary, morphosyntax, and usage rules.
Critically, the language one speaks or signs can have downstream effects on ostensibly nonlinguistic cognitive domains, ranging from memory, to social cognition, perception, decision-making, and more. The over-reliance on English in the cognitive sciences has led to an underestimation of the centrality of language to cognition at large.
To live up to its mission of understanding the representational and computational capacities of the human mind, cognitive science needs to broaden the linguistic diversity represented in its participants and researchers.
The opening section includes this passage:
English has become the lingua franca in most spheres of international interactions, including science, and English-speaking countries are dominant global actors. The cognitive sciences are no exception. This state of affairs has resulted in a homogenous Anglocentric setup: English-speaking scientists explore the nature of the human mind by studying other English-speaking individuals in English-speaking countries (Box 1). In addition, while English itself is constituted of a number of distinct varieties around the world, including regional dialects, vernaculars, and Creoles, it is only a narrow set of these that participate in this near monopoly, most prominently Standard American English and British English.
Needless to say, the idea appeals to me, but I don’t know how reliable their methods and conclusions are. (Thanks, Bathrobe!)
The Moral seems sound enough, but the actual paper seems to have been constructed by going on a trawl for unfamiliar (to an English speaker) language features and slinging as many into the stew as possible, regardless of how, or whether, they illustrate any particular point particularly.
The figures based on WALS seem – uncontributory, even as such things go.
(But then, I am notoriously WALS-sceptic.)
A number of individual assertions, in the few cases where I am in a position to check, look a bit off, e.g.
The handwaving overgeneralisation* of “other West African” is naturally highly irritating to me; moreover, this (which is partly true, in certain respects, sometimes, in some places) is to do with culture, not language. While I would be the first so say that the two are intimately linked, attributing vagueness to the languages specifically is pretty sloppy.
On the other hand, their conclusions are fine …
* I think one can confidently say that anybody who cites Yoruba alone as representing “West African languages” actually knows no actual West African languages at all, probably not even Yoruba. I’ve seen all too much of this sort of thing, including in papers by actual (non-Africanist) linguists, syntacticians and typologists, who really, really ought to know better. Secondary sources get cited by secondary sources, and nobody in the discussion is actually familiar with the primary material. What’s the html markup for RANT, again?
You don’t need HTML for SHOUTING IN UPPERCASE!
THE ROMANS DID IT ON ALL THEIR MONUMENTS SO PEOPLE WOULD PAY ATTENTION INNIT!
HTML GET OFF MY LAWN!
THE ROMANS DID IT ON ALL THEIR MONUMENTS SO PEOPLE WOULD PAY ATTENTION INNIT!
HOC EXPLICAT OMNIA! GRATIAS MAXIMAS TIBI, O PORSENA!
One of the papers mentioned in the linked piece attracted a series of largely-critical Language Log posts back when it was new. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3756 (and follow-up posts linked at the bottom thereof)
To say that norms in the society that uses a given language about how to use and not use that language in various sorts of contexts/settings are not in some sense part of the language seems debatable. They’re things you need to learn if you want to learn the language and understand what people are saying in it, just like morphosyntax and phonology. In languages with a T/V distinction in 2d person pronouns, are the “rules” (or patterns or loose tendencies) as to which gets used by whom when facts about the language or facts about something else?
To say that norms in the society that uses a given language about how to use and not use that language in various sorts of contexts/settings are not in some sense part of the language seems debatable
Sure, very much so: that’s why I said language specifically; I don’t myself think you can study language adequately divorced from culture at all. Still, I think the way they put it is a feature of an overall somewhat scattershot approach in the paper.
The indirection thing is quite striking to a European new to West Africa, though of course it turns up when people speak to you in English or French just as much as in Twi or Kusaal or Hausa. And to say it’s a “central part of conversation” is wildly overstating the case (in fact, it’s a distinctly Eurocentric judgment …)
In my crossness on behalf of West Africa, I missed the fact that they cite the deeply silly Chen paper as if it reflected actual fact. I see they also claim that gender in language is linked to attitudes favouring female inequality. This doubtless explains why women in cultures where the main languages are Niger-Congo have so much higher status than those where it is Afroasiatic, and why Tuareg women are so downtrodden compared with Songhay women, and French women so much more oppressed than Turkish. All these are classics of junk science.
Bad arguments for a true conclusion are still bad arguments; indeed, they are worse than useless, because they create the impression that there may be no good arguments for the conclusion.
it’s a distinctly Eurocentric judgment
That can be true, and at the same time it can be true that excessive concentration on English hinders you from noticing things of that nature.
True; and, as I say, I think their conclusions are perfectly correct.
They might have taken rather more care in the way they arrived at them, though.
Niger-Congo languages often exhibit the world’s most elaborate systems of grammatical gender. That Africanists unhelpfully call these “noun classes” instead of “genders” just obfuscates things. That said, I’m not sure that the paper’s model even tries to predict what attitudes toward female equality possession of a dozen or more grammatical genders in ones L1 ought to, as it were, engender.
I guess one question is whether studying cognitive differences between speakers of pairs of languages that are structurally quite different yet spoken in culturally similar and geographically neighboring societies (Hungarian versus Slovak, Marathi v. Kannada, etc.) would be a more straightforward way to investigate the sort of things this paper is concerned with?
That’s not “gender” in the sense that they mean: Niger-Congo languages don’t distinguish male from female in the the grammatical gender system (though they very often distinguish human from non-human.) I don’t actually know of any exceptions to this statement, though perhaps there are some out there somewhere …
I see what you mean with your Hungarian vs Slovak etc; though how would you ever be able to tell with pairwise comparisons of that kind that it was specifically grammatical gender that accounted for any different status of Hungarian and Slovak women, given the great number of other language and cultural differences, except by assuming your pretended conclusion?
I mean, maybe agglutinating men treat their women worse than inflecting men do. This would, of course, account for the attitude memorialised by Sapir:
https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Sapir/Sapir_1921/Sapir_1921_06.html
Thinking that “gender” in a morphosyntactic sense presumptively means systems that distinguish masc. from fem. is a sign of ignorance of the considerably variability of the world’s languages in this regard.
Here’s an unpaywalled copy of the paper (although without the appendices that would make it more easily understandable to me) that purports to find that:
“[M]arried female immigrants [in the U.S.] speaking a language with sex-based distinctions in its grammar are less likely to participate in the labor market. This is true even after controlling for observable characteristics such as traditional household measures, husband characteristics, and bargaining power measures, as well as when controlling for a vast set of unobservable cultural forces through country of origin fixed effects. When we empirically decompose the relationship between gender in language and gendered behavior in this manner, it suggests that roughly two thirds of this relationship can be explained by correlated cultural factors, with about one third potentially explained by language having a causal impact.”
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/77637/1/MPRA_paper_77637.pdf
But I agree with the point that the Blasi et al. paper alludes to a truly random-seeming grab-bag of studies (of perhaps different levels of plausibility), some of which get into topics (like rates of exchange of labor for cash by married women) farther afield from what I take to be the core domain of cognitive science than others.
“Right-branching phrase structure [in the research subject’s language] is associated with better recall of the last (vs. initial) item in non-linguistic sequences” by contrast sounds like an empirical claim that ought to be testable and where it ought to be easier to control for cultural factors.
Welsh used not to have a future tense, but now does; this explains our relatively high rate of “obesity, smoking, drinking, debt, and poor pension provision” compared with the English (English, of course, has no future.)
If only we had known! No doubt it seemed like a useful innovation at the time …
There may very well be correlations between whether your L1 has sex-associated grammatical gender and your employment prospects as a married female immigrant to the US. Spanish-speakers from rural Mexico conceivably might be less successful, on average, than Finns, for example, and no doubt it would be easy to prove with sufficiently sophisticated mathematical techniques that this was in a large part due to Spanish gender marking.
@ DE,
xlnt Sapir citation, kudos!
I am sympathetic to the general conclusion, but would they all step off their helicopter and check things on the ground? WALS and typology are fine, but how about asking some actual translators or bilingual writers to confirm or elaborate on what the typological questionnaire implies?
Blasi et al.’s method reminds me of those of Everett, Blasi, and Roberts (2014), who concluded that cold, dry climates suppress the existence of lexical tone through difficulties in phonation; or of Blasi et al. (2019), who concluded that [f] and [v] arose, right up to the present, through changes in subsistence leading to changes in jaw geometry. In both cases, the statistical methods were modern and computation-intensive; the diagrams were clear and colorful; but the authors never thought to collaborate with an actual speech therapist.
In absolute numbers the U.S. has a LOT more employed female immigrants from Mexico than employed female immigrants from Finland. The latter may earn more on average and/or have more “prestigious” jobs (to the extent “prestigious” still means something independent of “earning more”), but that’s not what the study is claiming. The U.S. still has plenty of low-paying jobs for folks with limited formal education and limited command of English! In any event, I don’t think the study is distinguishing the formally-employed from those seeking employment but failing to find it as opposed to from those who defy the dictates of neo-liberalism and goosing the GDP stats by deliberately living (on an individual basis, not even a household basis) outside the cash economy and specializing in household production, to use the proper economists’ jargon.
I was once told by a Bengali-American friend that the propensity of Bengali-American married women to work in the cash economy was strongly correlated with whether their family was Muslim or non-Muslim, with both subsets of course having the same non-English L1. I have not tried to verify this independently. Bengali apparently has less grammatical gender than Hindi and many other Indic languages, but I don’t have time to increase my knowledge of exactly how much less.
Bengali apparently has less grammatical gender than Hindi and many other Indic languages
Indeed; very much less …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_grammar#Personal_pronouns
the actual paper seems to have been constructed by going on a trawl for unfamiliar language features and slinging as many into the stew as possible, regardless of how, or whether, they illustrate any particular point particularly
You confirm what I felt. And they do manage to allude to a lot of suspect hypotheses, verging on pseudoscience. The lack/presence of future tense was once said to be correlated with the propensity to save, which seems to have been debunked.
Of course, Chomskyanism gets off scott-free in this, despite the huge claims it makes as a correct characterisation of the human ability to use language, because it’s only concerned with syntax in an extremely narrow sense, even though its vision of syntax is heavily influenced by English.
I agree with you on WALS. Even between authors there is disagreement on fundamental points (which has no doubt been exacerbated by the fact that the online version can be easily updated in a way the book couldn’t).
I see that the future tense issue had already been alluded to by JWB.
On gender, I think Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things deserves a mention.
Must read that again some time (I vaguely remember it being hard going and not as persuasive as I expected, but vaguely is the operative word.)
It’s an interesting question in its own right, the interaction between meaning and grammatical gender. Although there seem to be few if any examples of systems with no correlation whatsoever, the details seem to vary so greatly from language family to language family that it looks to me like a mug’s game to seek much in the way of universal principles behind it all. Soap, porridge and war … as the Kusaasi say …
There’s quite a cottage industry of papers trying to do this for various Bantu systems, typically pushing the various undoubted real correlations much farther than any actual facts seem to warrant. It is mandatory to mention Wittgenstein at some point in such papers. The most exciting ones are by L1 speakers appealing to their native intuitions.
it’s pretty ridiculous – and a sad comment on linguistics as a field – that “grammatical gender” is anything but a tired punchline in the 21st century. among other things, because it makes it a lot harder to understand how noun class systems work in the very european languages taken as ‘standard’ when you refer to the entire set of systems by one idiosyncratic feature of one subset of such structures.
the only function of using “grammatical gender” to describe noun classes is to pretend that the norm for human language is defined by a small number of european languages (whose outsized current political and academic importance is the direct result of colonialism).
it’s like calling verb conjugation systems “grammatical age” because standard average european does an age-linked differentiation in the 2nd person.
the persistence of this phlogiston crap is, of course, an example of the fundamentally correct conclusion of the paper, whatever critiques we can make of its arguments (i’d’ve ended the title with “cognition”, myself).
Grammatical gender systems based on biological sex are common, not just in Europe (see here).
I should perhaps first note that it’s hard to dispute the high-level claim of the paper — although maybe focusing on not drawing cog sci conclusions exclusively from the WEIRD subset of humans will by itself lead to more linguistic diversity in the humans from which conclusions are drawn? (Although of course these days Anglophony is not an exclusively WEIRD trait although it tends to correlate with checking at least some of those five boxes.) And the stuff in the paper re leaning to read in a Latin-scripted language written left-to-right having a non-random impact on other sorts of cognition/perception that would not be the same for humans who became literate in other sorts of writing systems seemed at least superficially plausible.
But separately, I wonder if rozele has the arrow of causation backwards here. Sort of stepping back in time and panning out in space, the broadest-scope core meaning of “gender” is something like type, kind, class. An etymological doublet of genus and genre, with originally similar semantics. It would then be the fortuitous fact that grammatical gender in the languages with which Anglophones tended to be familiar involved a masc./fem. or masc./fem./neut. schema, rather than any of the other ways of organizing grammatical gender found cross-linguistically, that enabled (firstly) “gender” to become a somewhat prissy euphemism for “sex” in English and then (secondly, over the last few generations) to become a word that could be used for talking about a bundle of characteristics that correlated heavily with sex but which it was thought analytically useful (first in academic circles and then in the broader culture) to distinguish from quote unquote biological sex because they were culturally variable and/or “socially constructed” and/or did not in fact correlate with quote unquote biological sex in 100% of the population. It is I suppose possible that what we might call the sex-adjacent senses of “gender” have now become so dominant in English that the old “genus, genre” sense has been irretrievably lost or skunked and trying to hold on to it in specialized-jargon domains will just end up confusing The Young People.
Note also that the fairly impoverished use of grammatical gender in English can perhaps ironically make it feel more quasi-essentialist, what with inanimate objects (modulo the use of “she/her” for ships and balky mechanical thing-a-ma-bobs etc.) being uniformly neuter. Even within pretty English-adjacent languages with stronger gender systems, once you know that e.g. tables are masculine in German but feminine in French it becomes harder to take the conventional labels of the “noun classes” quite so literally.
Writing system influence on cognitive function can be readily researched on Jews, some of whom made an aliya and others remained in galut. Obviously, almost all second and further generation Ashkenazim who ended up in Israel can write left to right as well, but if the effect is robust enough, it should be detectable.
I am not sure why everyone is sold out on the main thesis of the article, in principle. Obviously, if someone wants to research cognitive patterns of humans in general, selection of English speakers is too narrow. But the paper is focused on a more specific claim “The over-reliance on English in the cognitive sciences has led to an underestimation of the centrality of language to cognition at large” is not obvious at all. As authors themselves purport to show, this over-reliance led to a situation where differences in language and in broader culture are not sufficiently separated from each other, which leads to all sort of idiotic claims of “no word for X” type. It might very well be, that popular notion of language shaping mind leaks into more scientific investigations and prevents researchers from seing clearly what depends on what.
Grammatical gender systems based on biological sex are common, not just in Europe
Indeed: it’s the norm rather than the exception.
If fact, all the examples I can think of of grammatical gender systems which do not pay any attention to biological sex are either secondary cases where originally distinct “masculine” and “feminine” genders have fallen together, or belong to just two language famiies: Niger-Congo (which for rhetorical purposes I will here pretend is a real thing) and Algonquian.* The opposite is found all over: Northwest Caucasian, Arawa, Lavukaleve, Yimas, Afroasiatic, Gunwinyguan, Eastern Nilotic …
Even accepting the fact that there is a tendency for sex-indifferent systems to be taken as classifier systems rather than gender systems (and the distinction is not absolutely clear-cut) the general trend is clear. You’d think people were obsessed with sex, or something.
* And, come to think of it, PIE itself in its earliest incarnations. Ironically …
In Papua New Guinea, Austronesian languages almost never distinguish ‘he’ from ‘she’ in their 3rd person pronominals, but many Papuan (= non-Austronesian) languages do, so the influence of non-Austronesian neighbors explains those few that do. Papuan languages, for their part, rarely distinguish inclusive (we and you) from exclusive (we not you) pronominals, so Tok Pisin speakers in the Highlands often use mipela (me plural) in place of yumi (you and me), as naive English-speakers would be inclined to do.
On one long stretch of coastline whose languages I researched, there are no Austronesian languages nowadays, but every subgroup of Papuan languages along that coast has innovative inclusive vs. exclusive distinctions in their pronouns, some even in their subject-marking enclitics. Those innovations, along with many Austronesian words (including for ‘canoe’ and ‘sibling of the opposite sex’) that can be reconstructed at the highest level of that subfamily, suggests that the present dwellers along that coast once had Austronesian-speaking neighbors.
Interesting …
It doesn’t look like Proto-Volta-Congo distinguished inclusive/exclusive “we”, but quite a lot of individual Volta-Congo languages do. It seems a pretty borrowable feature, contrary to Johanna Nichols’ claims.
Do you know of any Papuan languages that have grammatical gender not distinguishing male/female? (I’d have guessed that there must be some, PNG being World Linguistic Diversity Central and all …)
Nichols seems to have changed her mind later. In an article with Bickell on clusivity, they admit that the concept of inclusive vs. exclusive ‘we’ is easy to understand and create. In the Binanderean languages I examined, the inclusive forms were innovated, mostly from emphatic forms, but in one case from the equivalent of yumi. (In moribund Rabaul German Creole, uns served as exclusive and wir served as inclusive.)
I’ll have to look into Papuan gender/noun classes a bit more, but there is a moribund Oceanic language in West New Britain, Bebeli, that has gone crazy with male/female distinctions in its pronouns, adding male vs. female articles for its nouns, distinguishing male and female even for 3rd person plurals. Marital status also affects gendered pronoun usage! Unique among Austronesian languages as far as I am aware.
@DE: Gender/noun classes are pretty common in Papuan languages, but less so in the most widespread Trans-New Guinea family. There are a few TNG languages with gender in the Bird’s Head region (western end of New Guinea island). Sound at all similar to Niger-Congo noun classes?
Mian (Ok subfamily): “Masculine nouns include most male animates and, in the case of inanimates, nouns that are singular or small in size or quantity. Feminine nouns include female animates, some animals that are round and squat in shape (e. g. turtles, crabs) and in the case of inanimates, nouns that are plural or large in size or quantity. There is concord for gender between a head noun and its adjuncts.
“In Marind (Drabbe 1955) four genders are distinguished by the final vowel of the noun stem. One class consists of male humans, which if singular are usually marked by the vowel e. A second class consists of female humans and animals, which if singular are marked by u. When the noun is plural both genders are marked by i. A third class, marked by e, a or o, consists mainly of trees and other plants. A fourth, residual class includes clothing and decorations, body-parts and some plants. Modifiers agree with the gender of the head noun, agreement being marked by ablaut of the last vowel of the adjective, making the vowels the same as the final vowel of the noun.”
Those sound like the usual sort, where biological sex is a major part of the grammatical gender system.
I must admit I hadn’t really given much thought to the relative cross-linguistic oddity of Niger-Congo noun class systems in this particular regard, probably on account of being so used to them. I do remember that Greenberg thought that such systems were so peculiar that mere possession of something like that more or less guaranteed genetic cognacy (this was pretty much the sum total of his evidence for adding Kordofanian to the mix); I don’t remember whether the sexlessness was an important part of that in his view. (In any case, it seems an odd view for Mr Typology himself to have held, and anyway there seem to be fairly clear instances of such systems having demonstrably been borrowed.)
PNG is one of the few places outside Africa where you can find (in only one area that I know of) coarticulated kp, gb unit phonemes (in the Papuan (TNG) Kâte). I read quite a bit of the Africanist lit in the 1970s while wrestling with verb serialization and word order change (SVO to SVOV to SOVV) in PNG. PNG Austronesian verb serialization is halfway between African-style (IIRC) same-subject across the verbs, and Papuan-style switch-reference constructions (where O1 = S2, as in ‘I chopped the tree toppled’).
I believe there are some typologically Central African languages (Gbaya, Mangbetu) that mark both ends of their postposed relative clauses, a pattern widespread among PNG Austronesian languages, the first marker typical of Oceanic languages with N + RC word order and the final one presumably to help mark the ends of the NPs as they moved toward SOV word order. Lots of the SOV languages have proliferated sg/pl pronominal enclitics to mark the ends of NPs of all types.
‘I chopped the tree toppled’
‘the tree’ is actually shared between two clauses, as different arguments?
(Shades of “If I had some ham, I’d have a ham-and-cheese sandwich, if I had some cheese.”)
A bunch of Papuan languages around PNG have k͡p and/or g͡b, including Nen (which also has ᶰɡ͡b) and a number of TNG languages, as does the Austronesian Toqabaqita, of Malaita in the Solomons.
African-style (IIRC) same-subject across the verbs
Yes, that’s the norm.
Kusaal actually can do both same-subject and different-subject, though strictly speaking the relevant construction is not proper verb serialisation (according to Alexandra Aikhenvald’s criteria, anyhow), though it’s always been wrongly identified as such in descriptions of the language other than my own.
The different-subject type actually can be predicative in Kusaal too, e.g.
M daa pʋ nyɛ dau la ka o an na’aba.
I TENSE NEGATIVE see man the and he be chief.NEGATIVE
“I didn’t see the man as a chief.”
where, despite my gloss “and”, the particle ka is actually subordinating, and is the different-subject counterpart of the same-subject linker n, as in
M daa kuos lɔri tis na’ab la.
I TENSE sell car.N give chief the
“I sold a car to the chief.”
where the pattern is very like the familiar canonical serial verb construction. (It isn’t, though; there is an explicit linker particle, and you can put adjunct NPs and even other subordinate clauses before the linker particle; moreover, the main clause can actually be non-verbal, so there is no way that “serial verb construction” can be a correct description of what’s really going on.)
Kusaal relative clauses are internally headed and can occur anywhere NPs do within clauses: they aren’t of that extraposed adjoined type. (The Senoufo language Supyire has that, though.) The Kusaal construction must be a relatively recent development though; it’s not reconstructable even to Proto-Western Oti-Volta. I suspect it began life as a repurposing of the (pseudo) serial verb construction, with which it shares some tantalising formal similarities.
@Y: I think the canonical version is, “If we had some ham, we’d have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.” (See here for some discussion of the logical structure.)
gendered categorization of humans into various noun classes has the exact same relationship to noun class systems in general as the age-based categorization of human actors into different verb conjugations does to verb conjugation systems. the fact that they both mark socially significant categorizations does not change that. each is at most one part of some languages’ versions of those systems*.
more to the point, even the noun class systems of languages whose noun class systems do include that feature cannot be understood based on it as a starting point. if someone wants to try to give it a try, may i suggest using the seven noun classes that uriel weinreich identified in yiddish as a test case (or even just the four he saw as active in NE yiddish)? please! tell me how you get from the specific gendered social system of eastern european jewry (or even the surrounding christian/roman gender system) to פֿוס falling in what weinreich** calls the “intermediate” noun class, or to a set of parameters for the words that fall in his “mass” noun class***! i’ll be over here laughing.
this is week one of linguistics 101 stuff, people! (and one of the first moments when linguistics as a field intrudes on french, spanish, german, etc language classes for anglophones – generally on day one) y’know, the part where the embarassed professor makes incoherent excuses for still calling it “grammatical gender”, while pointing out at length that you can’t understand a noun class system if you’re thinking about it as being in some way based on human social categorization! (i recall niko besnier being particularly snide that day, but his overall snarkiness was part of his appeal.)
.
* the number and distribution of the languages involved doesn’t matter to this linguistic point in any way. it does matter to the historical reason why linguistics as a field is still talking about phlogiston: that’s because the colonial european languages have this feature, and the field was made by people who based their ideas about what language-as-such is on those languages. this is about as controversial a historical point as victoria having married albert.
** who said: “the very imperfect correlation of the four genders [of NE yiddish; also: sic] with formal or semantic features appears to be typical of most gender systems [sic] in the world.” this is of course true as stated, of the social category of gender – but does also apply, as cousin uriel intended, to noun classes. and what it amounts to is a remarkably polite way of saying that you can’t understand these linguistic categories based on social categories (though there might be some insights to be gleaned the other way around: it may illuminate the social category of פֿרויען to know that a מײדל takes דאָס and not די – or it may not, given that all yiddish diminutives do****!).
*** pertinently, weinreich identified the most fundamental distinction among NE yiddish noun classes “based on the morphophonemics of the article” as the one between the mass class and the other three noun classes.
**** except in the dialects where they don’t.
this is week one of linguistics 101 stuff, people!
It’s really not.
Most languages with noun class systems do in fact show highly significant correlations between noun class and biological sex. Quite often sex is the only feature which has much value in predicting the class membership of a noun. That may be regrettable, but it is true nevertheless. European languages are not exceptional in this regard. They are typical.
It is perfectly true that sex alone cannot explain any grammatical gender system: by definition, true. A system which can be so explained is not grammatical gender. It’s “natural” gender.
It does not by any means follow that biological sex is irrelevant to grammatical gender. Systems in which it is completely irrelevant are the exception, not the rule, though the count is slightly confused by the fact that there are (happily) a lot of Niger-Congo languages, which do collectively constitute a grand exception.
You can make a case that the word “gender” should be eliminated from linguistics (in which it originated) because it has now acquired other meanings which make the linguistic use confusing; but that is quite a distinct question from the actual facts of how noun class systems actually are in the world’s languages, and the cause is not advanced by misrepresenting this.
I wanted to note that genus, genre and “gender” did not originally refer to the skirt-pants-beard-boobs complex (it is a relatively recent idea) and that in Russian it is still род “kind”.
And also that studies in English may be focus on WEIRD cultures rather than just English.
But JWB made both points.
I can say about myself: it is tempting for me to look at African classes as a system similar to our рода.
And as a Russian school graduate I think of our рода as an element of the declension system.
“table m, window n.” rather than “girl f. boy m.”.
But of course birch trees and mice in Russian fairy tales are going to be female (indepndently of school, just because they are “she”).
Back in the day (it was, may the Lord bless and keep us, the 1980’s …) I went to a university so sophisticated that what other places might call Linguistics 101 was Linguistics 110a — nine notches further up the pecking order! Somewhat regrettably, and probably due to the lingering effects of Chomskyanism, I don’t think we got very much into non-English (much less non-IE) gender/noun-class systems in that first class. It took another few semesters before we were having rambling conversations about how things supposedly worked in Dyirbal and Basque and whatnot, and it’s possible that the wacky gender/noun-class systems of the Bantu languages escaped my attention until a different class one semester past the one I was just adverting to.
It is probably simultaneously true that linguists of certain prior generations started out with an insufficiently examined tacit assumption that Standard Average European defaults might well be universal defaults, but also true that they presumably learned their lesson and course-corrected sooner as to structural aspects of language where they didn’t have to get all the way to Algonquin-or-Niger-Congo to be contradicted by the empirical evidence.
“…the very imperfect correlation of the four genders [of NE yiddish; also: sic] with formal or semantic features appears to be typical of most gender systems [sic] in the world.” this is of course true as stated, of the social category of gender…”
Oh. It did not occur to me to apply the distinction “form vs meaning” to people:)
(not making any point, just appreciating a funny comparison)
The first English attestation of gender in the grammatical sense specifically mentions masculine and feminine. That it was borrowed from a French term which came from a Latin term with a neutral meaning is not germane. Gender is not used in current English to mean ‘kind’ or ‘type’ generically.
In Hebrew, מִין min signifies alike ‘grammatical gender’, ‘biological sex’ (plus ‘sex’ as in ‘sex’), ‘species’ (in the biological sense) and ‘variety, type’, as in אַרְבַּעַת הַמִּינִים arba’at haminim ‘the four species’, four plants used ritually in the holiday of Sukkot. But even then, when you speak of מִין in the context of grammar, the association (at least to me) is with ‘biological sex’, not with ‘species/variety’. (The two genders of Hebrew are called male and female, and prototypically attach to the biological sex.)
I’m saying that calling on the etymological fallacy doesn’t work to address rozele’s argument, whether you agree with it or not. I agree with her to a point, that the term encourages conforming to a particular model of nominal classification (however common). But it’s not as bad as other examples of forcing languages to look like Latin, etc.
BTW, Modern Hebrew has a separate word, מִגְדָּר migdar, referring to social or personal gender, distinct from biological sex. That’s one of those clever innovated words, made to resemble a well-known foreign word, but with a perfectly good native derivation (from גדר gdr, ‘border, limit, fence’ etc., as e.g. לְהַגְדִּיר lehagdir ‘to define’).
Back in the 1970s I attended a visiting scholar lecture by Charles Hockett (!) titled “F stops and cereal diet” in which he argued that people who ate pap (esp. rice) tended to have labiodental /f/ phonemes while those who ate firmer starches tended to have bilabials, being less weak-jawed. Well, I was then cutting my teeth on Yapese, whose principal starch consisted of hard, fibrous swamp taro (you can almost feel it hit bottom when you swallow) and who consume copious quantities of betelnut (in husk) between meals. Yapese has not only /f/ but also ejective /f’/ (along with other ejectives /p’/ /t’/, /k’/, and even /m’/, /n’/, /w’/ etc.). People listened politely, but none of the Austronesianists present were buying it, and I don’t think anyone else was either.
I never ate swamp taro. I’m surprised it’s not prepared, like other difficult/tough/poisonous foods, in a way that would make it pleasant to eat.
” Gender is not used in current English to mean ‘kind’ or ‘type’ generically.”
Of course it does not, but
– the terminology for IE/AA “genders” and Bantu “classes” is shared by several European langauges. Not just English.
– linguistics is older than modern gender studies.
Do you mean that there is a certain English-specific (as opposed to European linguistics) bias in analysis of gender systems?
I do expect such a bias, but more because English does not have genders. Yes, the term and its modern use also must contribute. But then we maybe should state more clearly what point we are making.
(I was not really making any, just noted that we should keep in mind that gender did not mean boys-girls originally)
@Y: There are many reasons to consider serial constructions like ‘I chopped tree toppled’ to be one clause in many PNG languages: scope of TAM, negation, adverbs, etc. In languages that have migrated their word order from SVOV to SOVV, you can find clauses that parse etymologically to ‘I pig spear-killed’ (same S, same O for each verb) and ‘I pig spear-died’ (speared-O = S-died). Most of the SOVV languages have relegated their manner-verb (V1) to the status of a ‘classifying prefix’ indicating the manner in which the result (V2) was achieved: ‘by hitting’, ‘by stabbing’, ‘by handling’, ‘by kicking’, etc. Meanwhile, the languages that have remained SVO have turned the second V into a class of very productive Resultatives (SVOR): ‘broken’, ‘dead’, ‘split’, ‘failed’, etc. That kind of summarizes one chapter of my dissertation.
drasvi:
gender did not mean boys-girls originally
The earliest usage of the word gender in English, per the OED, is Hire name, þat was femynyn / Of gendre, heo turned in to masculyn. That from the 14th century story of St. Theodora (here), where Theodora, disguised in male clothing, is asked for her name, and says “Theodorus” (because future saints don’t lie, only fib).
@Y, I think each subsequent generation of Europeans used this word just because authors of their grammar books did. The first attestation in English is not an interesting point in this respect: the first English speaker to use it only used it because French and Latin authors did. She just code-switched.
I don’t know the history of its appearance in Greek (γένος) and Latin (pl. genera) but I suspect the person who coined it was thinking of “kinds”. I am not sure.
What it means: we can’t say “this form is used in English because of the sex-gender association”. It is used because it is used….
It specialised and became distinct from the doublets (or triplets?) “genre” and “genus” which mean something else in English. It seems this specialisation was motivated by its grammatical rather than social meaning. On the other hand, it expanded to cover boys and girls. Yet this expansion went in the direction grammar > sex rather than sex > grammar, and I think the grammatical meaning remained the core meaning for grammarians.
But I agree that likely, at any stage (including the starting point in Classical languages), the grammatical cathegory and sex interacted in heads of its users, just because of how gender works in those languages.
Even if the person who coined the word not mean it, likely she thought about it or felt it.
And this interaction must be stronger in modern English, because
– gender is more abstract to English speakers. They don’t know how Greek gender feels from inside. (Neither Greek speakers fully understand Semitic or Bantu systems, of course)
– a word now is strongly associated with skirts and kilts.
I am not sure whether I am merely repeating one of drasvi’s points, but it seems to me that that Theodora/Theodorus quote doesn’t prove anything. The word gender there is used as a term for grammatical gender of Theodora/us name, not person. Interestingly, OED also cites a 1398 text (admittedly full 8 years after 1390) with Byshinynge & liȝt ben diuers as species and gendir; for eueryche bischinynge is liȝt, but not aȝenwarde. which is not in a language known to me, but OED doesn’t classify it either under grammatical gender or biological sex which makes me to conclude that they (who apparently know what “bischinynge” means) think this usage of gendir means kind.
Right, my point was that gender meant grammatical gender in the earliest usages, not ‘kind’ as with Latin genus.
Byshinynge: see here.
The meanings ‘grammatical gender’ and ‘kind’ came to be simultaneously, see examples here.
Well, thank you. But isn’t it the whole point that grammatical gender always meant “kind” not “sex”, which in appropriate cases and by an obvious synecdoche were named after most prominent representatives, women and men, whenever the words associated with them happened to be a part of that particular kind.
FWIW, both boy/girl and masc/fem (in other languages) are called køn in Danish. In ON and as late as 1918 it could just mean ‘sort’, and I suspect that the grammatical use is a loan translation.
Danish itself, otherwise quite standardly European, only has grammatical gender for nouns: intetkøn ‘neuter’ and fælleskøn ‘commune’. High-animacy pronouns are biologically gendered (han/hun) and it is pragmatically wrong to coordinate one of those with a neuter noun. (This since 1200 or 1400 or some such). All of Scandinavian too, except for some dialects and at least some of Nynorsk I believe, but I don’t know the timing there.
I was thinking about possible synonyms for “m./f. [sex, gender, what?]”, e.g. kind – it occured to me that “half” can be used. Rather poetically.
But…… This exact word (its Russian translation, pol) is used in Russian. It just does not feel as “half” anymore and honestly it sounds bad. If pol for me is just cold and official, while a phrase voprosy pola is mildly disgusting, the adjective polovoj (unlike pol used to hint on relationships between men and women, especially sex) and all phrases that include it are strongly disgusting. I don’t know if other Russian speakers feel the same.
Fortunately, there is a word “fuck”… Unfortunately, some people dislike it too.
that they (who apparently know what “bischinynge” means)
Shining, I think. Shiningness? Every shiningness is light, but not vice versa – although I have no idea what the distinction is supposed to be.
It’s the kind of Middle English that you can half figure out by looking at it in Scots, but that’s not the same as knowing what they were trying to say!
weinreich identified the most fundamental distinction among NE yiddish noun classes “based on the morphophonemics of the article” as the one between the mass class and the other three noun classes
Interesting.
Part of the reason why I am sceptical about noun class systems “proving” the genetic unity of “Niger-Congo” is that for this to work you evidently need not only for the classes to exist and, to a significant extent, correspond, but for the actual class affixes to be plausibly cognate. In fact, once you get outside Volta-Congo, the only cases that really look like more than wishful thinking* are the “human” class, at least in the plural (ba or the like) and the “liquids” class (in ma), exactly the classes with the most evident semantic associations of the whole lot, and thus the very classes where borrowing would be most plausible as an explanation of the similarities.
In fact, even within Volta-Congo, where the protolanguage must undoubtedly have had noun classes more or less of the Bantu type, there is only one other noun class apart from the “human” and “liquid” classes which is absolutely and unequivocally reconstructable for the whole family: lɪ singular, ŋa plural (though another one with ŋʊ singular, ŋɪ plural also looks hopeful.)
It works the other way too: the “liquid” class is very robust when it comes to resisting simplification of the inherited system. Mampruli, which has abandoned agreement by noun class, still has a three-way distinction of animate, inanimate, and liquid, and even in Kusaal, which has given up agreement altogether as a bad job and has a “natural” animate/inanimate system in its pronouns, some speakers still require agreement from adjectives modifying a noun referring to a liquid.
* With morphemes of the form CV or V, a fairly restricted range of possibilities for both C and V, and a huge number of potential classes in each branch to pick and choose from (Nateni has twelve noun classes with grammatical agreement, nine of them with singular and plural suffixes), if you can’t find some lookalikes you just haven’t been trying hard enough. And one paper I saw purporting to show that the Kordofanian systems were cognate to Volta-Congo unblushingly shows bu and gu as “cognates.” You can prove whatever you like that way.
Shining, I think. Shiningness?
Y’s MED link says “Radiation of light; illumination.”
The good Anglo-Saxon descended word “kind” is in fact a cognate-cousin of the borrowed-from-Italic-via-French word “gender.”
If you look into the etymologies of e.g. Latin “sexus” or German “Geschlecht” it feels as if the Euphemism Treadmill has been around for millennia and perhaps all IE words referring to the boy-girl-etc. distinction were generated by it.
drasvi, I wouldn’t say that “voprosy pola” is disusting to me, but the word “pol” as applied to sex feels very dated and very formal.
@D.O. maybe “midldly disgusting” is imprecise. What I mean is: already unpleasant, not just “formal”.
But половой is worse. (Except in МПХ and половые органы which I find more or less neutral when in plural )
but the word “pol” as applied to sex feels very dated and very formal.
I meant specifically the adjective. If женский пол is just female gender, then phrases with половой refer to anything from dating to genitals. Maybe as a child I processed them as “adults mean sex, and see it as central to relationships but they also think it is obscene, so they use a medical word that does not mean sex”. Which is of course not the actual reason why these phrase were invented, but may be something like that was in the contexts where these phrases appeared.
МПХ is (ironical) мужской половой хуй.
A formal name of penis where the word “member” is replaced with the colloquial and highly obscene word for penis (thus preserving the worst of both words….)
Lit. “male sexual dick”.
It’s good to avoid ambiguity.
* And, come to think of it, PIE itself in its earliest incarnations.
There are an awful lot of languages and families with animate/inanimate (aka human/non-human, rational/irrational, socially active/inactive, etc.): Basque, Elamite, Georgian, Mapudungun, Sumerian, Vietnamese; Algic, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Siouan, Uto-Aztecan.
(I note that in Ojibwe, the word for ‘raspberry’ is animate, but the word for ‘strawberry’ is inanimate. Then again, in Lojban, semantics is 100% irrelevant to gender: there are 18 genders, for words in b-, c-, d-, f-, g-, j-, k-, l-, m-, n-, p-, r-, s-, t-, v-, x-, z-, plus one for foreign words beginning with a vowel, which don’t have a coreferential pronoun.)
“If we had some ham, we’d have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.”
“If the dog would catch a rabbit, we’d have rabbit stew for dinner — if we had a dog.”
Is that an actual saying? I can find no trace of it.
half: moiety if it’s not tied to sex.
There are an awful lot of languages and families with animate/inanimate (aka human/non-human, rational/irrational, socially active/inactive, etc.)
Sure: but (except for the Algonquian part of Algic) those are natural gender systems, i.e. the sort where you can accurately predict class membership from the nature of the referent alone. Kusaal in its present-day incarnation actually has such a system, with an animate/inanimate gender system; trees are animate, which is odd from a SAE viewpoint, but is clearly for cultural rather than synchronically-unmotivated purely grammatical reasons.
One mark of such systems is that synonyms can’t differ in gender/noun class, for example, although the same noun may have a different gender from usual if it’s being used metaphorically. (In the Kusaal version of 1 Corinthians 12:15, where body parts are represented as speaking, they are construed as animate gender, for example.)
I was trying to think of grammatical gender systems (i.e. those where you can’t predict class membership, in the general case, from the semantics of the noun involved) where biological sex is irrelevant; PIE had such a system before the feminine (grammatical gender) developed (as in Hittite.) As I was saying, such systems are a minority cross-linguistically (or at least, they would be, if there weren’t so many Niger-Congo languages to tip the scales.)
I must admit this is a cline rather than an absolute dichotomy. I’ve seen efforts (implausible, IMHO, but not stupid) to make out that in Algonquian, some inanimate objects are treated as grammatically animate for cultural reasons. (Actual L1 speakers seem keen on this interpretation.)
And there are a good many Women-Fire-and-Dangerous-Things-inspired efforts to make out that various Bantu systems can be more or less “explained” completely via semantics; they don’t work, at the end of the day, but the reason people keep on trying is because the system is very far from completely arbitrary semantically.
I was reading some time ago about a gender/noun-class system where assignment apparently is pretty much completely arbitrary from a semantic POV; the author flagged this up specifically as a linguistic wonder of the language. Unfortunately, I can’t for the life of me remember what language it was … (it wasn’t Lojban, it was a real language [runs for cover])
If I drink [colour]-N, then I drink [violet] wine.
If I drink [colour]-F, then I drink [violet] vodka.
Substantivated neuter “red” is commonly used to refer to red wine, and diminutive of substantivated feminine “white” is a nickname for vodka. Gender allows one to imply/hint at a noun.
Similarly, both in Latin, Greek and Russian the neuter gender can mean “some sfuff with this property”.
Also the neuter gender has a grammatical function in Russian. For one thing, “it” (as in “it’s cold today”) is third person and neuter. сегодня холодно – today cold-N.
Gender allows one to imply/hint at a noun
It can do much more than that, if your gender system is less impoverished than in poor old Indo-European: in his grammar of Yimas (ten genders, plus six more comprising one noun each) William Foley reports that in a Yimas creation legend an important prop is introduced, ignored for about three pages, and then reintroduced purely though a verb agreement prefix.
Niger-Congo genders/classes often have secondary uses marking particular grammatical functions, like your Russian example. In Kusaal, the old “liquid” agreement suffix -m is used with many adjective stems to make adverbs of manner (paalig “new”, paalim “recently”), and Swahili uses the singular class prefix ki- to make manner adverbs (mtoto “child”, kitoto “childishly”); presumably this is historically the reason why language names are ki-class too (“I speak Frenchly.”)
Come to that, in Bantu languages, “locative” is usually a gender/class, taking verb agreement just like any other class. Nahuatl has something a bit like that, too.
Yes. But what I meant here: Latin-Greek-Russian neuter seems to have something like a meaning of its own. And use of epithets (as with vodka) is a step in this direction.
P.S. I wrote this before you updated your comment.
“Niger-Congo genders/classes often have secondary uses marking particular grammatical functions, like your Russian example.” – I didn’t know, thank you!
You could argue that “feminine with count number” is a sort of time adverb in Spanish: a la una/a las dos. I would be very surprised if historically it’s not just the word hora(s) that’s being assumed. The point being, would Kusaal paalim historically have been agreeing with some word meaning ‘manner’ that happened to be in that suffix class and has since been economized away?
I don’t think so.
The -m class, which I have called “liquid” for convenience, comprises liquids (ku’om “water”, daam ‘beer”), “substances” (yaarim “salt”, bugum ‘fire”) and abstractions (sʋ’ʋlim “property”, dama’am “deception”); the handful of exceptions are historically refugees from defunct obsolete noun classes, e.g. piim “arrow”, which was originally a member of a u/i “long thin things” class which is no more in Western Oti-Volta, though alive and well elsewhere in the family (Nawdm fiimu “arrow”, fiimi “arrows.”)
The primary effect of sticking the -m class suffix on an adjective stem is to create a derived abstract noun, e.g. pielig “white”, pielim “whiteness.” But Kusaal manner adverbs are basically a subset of nouns syntactically, so the further extension of meaning is natural enough in-language.
“I speak Frenchly.”
This seems to be a common idea: cf. Latine loquor ‘I speak Latinly’, where there is no question of an elided noun.
Same in Eskimo languages: one speaks “like a (real) human”, “like a Greenlander” (Kalaallisut, with the equalis case.)
The m-class-as-adverbial sense probably explains why most Oti-Volta language names belong to that class, in fact: Yom, Nawdm, Mbelime, Waama, Gulmancema … the -lɪ “language” class seen in Kusaal, Mampruli, Buli etc seems to be a Western-Oti-Volta/Buli-Konni innovation, though it is eerily reminiscent of Luganda, Lingala etc. at the other end of Volta-Congo.
Though I suppose you could argue that a “language” is an abstraction, after all (even without going Full Chomsky.)
@DE, yes, in another thread I suggested that prototypically a langauge is what you refer to in a “Do you speak …. ?” question.
I speak Frenchly
I speak Frenk-sh.
The Hittite genders have been called “common”/”neuter” and “animate”/”inanimate”; semantically, “common”/”inanimate” would perhaps be best, because while all animates have common gender, so does a large random sample of inanimates, while conversely all grammatical inanimates really are semantically inanimate.
To me, in German, it feels nothing short of grammatically wrong to, say, use V forms and first names together. (…Even though there are regions where that’s a common combination.)
“I must be Frank.”
– Emperor “Frank” Palpatine
English, of course, has no future.
Indeed, it will soon be replaced worldwide by some of the other branches of KONGO.
The primary effect of sticking the -m class suffix on an adjective stem is to create a derived abstract noun
You interest me strangely. Songhay has a limited number of abstract nouns in -mi, for example Gao dey-mi “purchase” (dey “buy”), key-mi “weaving” (key “weave”), Zarma fàrí-mì “cultivation” (fàrù “cultivate”). I’ve sometimes wondered about the possibility of this coming from Gur; is the usage of this -m comparable?
Looking at a grammar of Kasim that happens to be on my shelf, it looks like it might be: gʊm “action of killing” (gʊ “kill”), ñɔm “action of drinking” (ñɔ̀ “drink”). But for some reason I haven’t read closely enough to understand, Bonvini interprets this as /-n+I/? I probably ought to immerse myself in Gur grammars at some point and get to grips with this stuff.
I’m not well up on Grusi languages at all, but it seems that some Kasem plural forms alternate between final -m and final -nɩ, and that some such plural forms appear in mass nouns. I imagine that Bonvini is describing forms in which there was originally a derivational -m- suffix before a plural/mass class suffix (the latter perhaps cognate with Oti-Volta *dɪ. which is commonly a plural suffix but is very often also mass/abstract (cf Kusaal siinf “bee”, siind “honey.”)
In Oti-Volta the class suffix -mV is strongly associated with liquids, substances and abstracts; in fact, in Kusaal, the only exceptions are semantic developments from abstracts (e.g. dàalím “male genitalia” (cf dàalìm “masculinity”) except for piim “arrow”, where the -m is historically stem-final, and the word is a refugee from a u/i “long thin things” class which is defunct in Western Oti-Volta (cf Nawdm fiimu “arrow”, plural fiimi.)
There are a number of Kusaal m-class words which are presumably ancient deverbals, like kum “death” (cf kpi “die”, kʋ “kill.”) These may actually be m-stems, derived with -m- and then inflected in the -m noun class (Original CVm-stems have fallen together with CV-stems in the m-class.)
Synchronically, the only Kusaal deverbal nouns in the m-class come either from the imperfective-only minor conjugation (mɔr “have”, gerund mɔrim) or from the imperfective form of variable-aspect verbs. Variable-aspect verbs usually form their gerunds from the perfective, the noun class being determined chiefly by stem length; two-mora stems regularly make their gerunds in the other mass/abstract class, with the class suffix -b(ʋ): dʋg “cook”, gerund dʋgʋb.
However, other Oti-Volta branches have different noun-class assignment rules for gerunds. Nawdm uses -b for “pluractional” verbs and -m for “monactional” (in Jacques Nicole’s terminology): fidb “enfiler plusieurs choses”, fidm “enfiler une chose.” Mbelime uses the corresponding mɛ class for many deverbal “noms d’action”, e.g. deemɛ from dee “manger”, but mostly uses the plural-or-mass -te that I mentioned above, e.g. yããte from yã “boire.” Kusaal has a fair number of forms like this too, with -d(ɩ) instead of the usual -b(ʋ), e.g. ziid from zi “carry on the head.”
The use of the m-class for abstracts derived from nominals is seen throughout Oti-Volta. Mbelime is like Kusaal in using the class for manner-adverbs as well, e.g. saamɛ “bien” from saa “être bon”. Several of the Eastern languages have two separate classes, *ma and *mʊ, both mass; I’m not sure if this is an innovation or a retention from Proto-Oti-Volta.
The mV “liquid” noun class is certainly reconstructable to Proto-Volta-Congo. In Bantu it’s fallen together formally with the plural of the lɪ/ŋa class, as in Swahili maji “water”, mafuta “oil” (cf macho “eyes”, singular jicho.)
In Soldier of the Mist and sequels, Gene Wolfe uses ‘speak as the Hellenes do’ to translate Latro’s (I assume) Græce loqui.
The detail probably goes unremarked to readers with no Latin, but are there any Wolfe readers like that?
That should be “(Proto-)Oti-Volta *tɪ” not “Oti-Volta *dɪ”, sorry. [The voicing in Kusaal -d(ɩ) is secondary.]
Thank you! That rather solidifies my suspicions. Now if only I could show that some of the rare verbs that take this suffix were Gur loanwords too…
What would this suffix’s form have been in Proto-Oti-Volta?
The noun class suffix in Proto-Oti-Volta was either -ma, -mɪ or -mʊ.
There are two rather different reasons for the uncertainty about the vowel.
None of the branches preserves a distinction between ɪ and ʊ as non-root vowels after labial consonants. For simplicity I’ll just use *mɪ below.
Western Oti-Volta, Yom-Nawdm, and Buli/Konni show reflexes of *mɪ.
Gurma shows reflexes of *ma.
Of the Eastern languages, Byali goes with *mɪ, Waama with *ma, but Ditammari, Nateni and Mbelime with both: they have a “fire” *mɪ class separate from the “water” *ma class. It’s not clear (as I say) if this is a survival or an innovation. The classes are semantically much the same (both include abstract nouns), and there are other Oti-Volta class suffixes which also show an unexplained alternation between *ɪ and *a vowels between the different branches: e.g the WOV *fɪ “animal” class matches Eastern *fa. I don’t know whether this was originally based on some sort of sandhi phenomenon; if it was, it might explain why some branches have generalised one form, some the other, and some both.
Alternatively, the various non-Eastern branches may just have simplified an inherited system with both suffixes in different ways, of course.
The wider Volta-Congo evidence is in favour of *ma. There seems ittle reason to suppose that there were two *mV classes anywhere else than Oti-Volta, but to say the least, More Research is Needed.
Looks good.
The last thing I ought to be doing is taking on extra projects, but I am now very tempted to check if any of the -mi-taking verbs are themselves plausibly from Gur… After a quick look at the grammars, here are the available examples:
Widespread:
dáỳ “buy”
kày “weave”
fàrù “cultivate”
béerí “cut”
Less widely attested:
zóorú “clear (land)”
tóorú “tear”
féerí “close” (sic?)
gòrò “sit”
(with -ar-mi, in Zarma)
zànjì (*zàngì) “break”
bágú “break”
(with -mɛy, in TSK)
hùnà “live”
kàarù “go up”
hɛ̀ɛ (*hègè) “harvest”
(Actually, if you might be interested in collaborating on a potential article, a good answer to this question would be worth publishing. Let me know 🙂
Kusaal da’ “buy” goes back to Proto-Oti-Volta; the Kusaal has low tone, which goes back to POV high.
Mooré tõoge “tear” is from the root tõo, also seen with a different derivational suffix in Kusaal tɔɔns “tear”; WOV low tone, again representing POV high (though I can’t think of any non-WOV cognates.)
Apart from that, nothing leaps out at me. POV “sit” was *kàʎ- (probably /kal-/), but that seems pretty remote from gòrò. (WOV has replaced the inherited root with *ɟḭ̃-.)
“Buy” certainly seems like a good word to be borrowed areally… Similar forms for “cultivate” are also pretty widespread IIRC. Shame “weave” doesn’t work.
It sounds to me as if what’s needed to match the Songhay forms would be not so much the class suffix -mV, which is a flexion (dropped in composition, including before modifying adjectives, in accordance with the Way of the Oti-Volta), but the Oti-Volta derivational suffix -m-.
There is indeed such a suffix (as I imagine there is in most languages that have derivational suffixes at all) but it’s not associated with any straightforward meaning (this is pretty typical for Volta-Congo in general, in which derivational suffixes often seem to have several meanings, very often unhelpfully overlapping with the meanings of other quite different suffixes.)
I haven’t made any very profound study of derivational morphology in Oti-Volta so far, but I can say something about the situation in Kusaal.
In the derivation of verbs it doesn’t occur much at all. It turns up in nɛɛm “grind”, from the stem of nɛɛr “millstone”, and in a number of verbs where it seems to have a sort of “middle” sense, like kɔnsim “cough”; it also occurs as part of the complex suffix -lim- “become/make/act like”, and that’s more or less it.
It’s quite often seen in nominals. With adjective stems it seems to have no particular meaning, some forms showing it and others not; there are even some deverbal adjectives which optionally drop it in some forms, like kpiillʋŋ *kpiilʊngʊ “dead”, plural kpiilima, for which some speakers have an alternative singular kpiillʋg.
The are a handful of deverbal noun formations with -m- which are rather like agent nouns, like zɔɔm “refugee, fugitive” from zɔ “run” and kpi’im “corpse” from kpi “die.”
Added to noun-type stems it seems to have two quite different roles, either forming human-reference nouns, like bi’em “enemy” (from the stem of bi’a “bad”), or forming abstract nouns, which themselves belong to the -m flexional noun class. It can be hard to recognise these because of the sandhi between stem-final -m and the initial m- of the class suffix, and the situation is further complicated by analogical remodelling. You can only be certain that a m-class word in an m-stem if it always keeps the -m- in composition, and/or if there are giveaway tonal markers (one Kusaal tone class has different surface tones in three-mora and four-mora stems.) An isolated formation is bi’isim “milk”, an m-stem from bi’isir “breast”; this one is pan-Oti-Volta.
Quite a few synchronically unanalysable noun stems seem to include a derivational m, like gbigim “lion.” A fun one is yʋgʋm “camel”, which is actually a very old loanword (as you won’t need me to tell you.)
“Buy” certainly seems like a good word to be borrowed areally…
Yes indeed. And the Western Oti-Volta verb for “sell”, seen in Kusaal kùos, looks like it’s been borrowed in Moba kùàd̀ (where the low tones are the opposite of what you’d expect for a cognate of WOV low, and the -d- is the regular form that non-initial /s/ takes in loans, as with mudg “cat”, Hausa mussa) and in Waama kɔɔsi.
Is there any relation between the gender suffix and the derivational suffix? From your description it sounds like the similarity between the two is probably coincidental, but given the NC propensity for mixing derivational and inflectional uses of gender suffixes one wonders…
Of all these functions, only the abstract noun one has an obvious Songhay parallel (though I should probably have a closer look at the Zarma dictionary.)
Is there any relation between the gender suffix and the derivational suffix?
I don’t think so. It’s part of a larger question about the origin of Volta-Congo derivational suffixes in general, I suppose. But even the VC languages that have their class affixes prefixed use derivational suffixes, not prefixes: derivation by noun-class change is best thought of as a kind of (stem) zero-derivation, I reckon.
[Now I think of it, the positional mismatch in Bantu etc between nominal derivatiomal affixes and flexional affixes is remarkable. Maybe I can parley that into support for my contention that class markers in Proto-VC were not actually flexions, properly speaking, at all.]
There are sporadic cases in Oti-Volta where a second class suffix has been added after a first historically.* “Hand”, for example, is a member of the “long thin things” u/i class in languages where that still exists, eg Gulmancema sg nuu pl nii; but in WOV, where that class is no more, the ga/se class suffixes have been added to what is historically the old singular: Kusaal nu’ug, pl nu’us. And the -d- element of what is synchronically simply the WOV imperfective flexion -da seems to have historically been a derivational suffix before the actual imperfective flexion -a. But these are not really cases of derivational suffixes derived from flexions: that doesn’t seem to happen.
* Some Bantu languages can stack two class prefixes together, too.
I really want you guys to do that paper so I can see LH mentioned in the credits.
Well, I’ve drawn up some reasonably detailed notes on the Songhay side of things here. I don’t know your email, but if you’re up for this, DE, I’d be happy to add edit rights for you and we can see how it goes.
I notice that Koromfe has fɛr- “cultivate”, v.n. fɛram, which would suit my purposes nicely…
Happy to do what I can, though I don’t actually know much more at this point than I’ve put in the comments above … But I can expand a bit on that and put it rather more lucidly.
I can have a more systematic look through what I’ve got on derivational morphology in non-WOV Oti-Volta languages, too, I should be doing something along those lines anyway for my comparative-Oti-Volta Grand Plan. (Probably won’t have a lot of time over the next few days, though.)
AFAIK pretty much all the existing comparative work on Oti-Volta morphology is on noun flexion, a lot of which is fairly low-hanging fruit.
Would you be able to forward my email address to Lameen, Hat?
Done!
M pʋ’ʋsya bɛdegʋ!
It’s amazing to watch a paper in historical-comparative linguistics being written live on Google Docs!
If there’s no such thing as “Gur”, then how can the thesis of the paper be rephrased?
Indeed, I don’t believe in “Gur.” I’d be inclined to say “borrowing from Volta-Congo” rather than “borrowing from Gur” in the title of the paper, and then explain upfront why we’re actually using predominantly Oti-Volta data (sheer availability is not a disreputable reason, after all.)
In saying “I don’t believe in Gur”, I don’t mean that the “Gur” languages are not related to one another: they certainly are, in that they all belong to Volta-Congo, and are also very probably more closely related to one another than e.g. Oti-Volta is to Bantu or to “Kwa.”
In denying that “Gur” is a valid node, I’m not being all that controversial. The more peripheral parts, llke Senoufo, have long since been separated off; although the consensus is still mostly that the Grusi languages (e.g. Kasem and Kabiye) form a “Central Gur” entity along with Oti-Volta, as long ago as 1996 Ulrich Kleinewillinghöfer presented evidence that some parts of Greenberg’s “Adamawa” are closer to Grusi, specifically, than to Oti-Volta. More modern approaches tend to lump “Gur” together with (most of) Adamawa as a “Savannas” branch of Volta-Congo, though they still (illogically, in my view) tend to make “Central Gur” a node. Be that as it may, the relationship of the Grusi languages to Oti-Volta is much more distant than the internal relationships within Oti-Volta,
For the purposes of this particular paper, the immediate practical consequence is that I don’t actually know much about “Gur” languages which aren’t Oti-Volta; however, the problem is less that than the fact that existing comparative work of “Gur” concentrates on lexicon, nominal flexion, and verbal derivation, and that even what has been done on verbal derivational morphology is often unreliable.
This reflects, above all, a lack of primary data: although there are now many more high-quality lexical and grammatical studies of Gur languages than in Manessy’s day, they tend to be pretty sketchy on nominal stem derivation (as opposed to derivation by manipulating the noun class that complete noun stems are inflected in.)
And if one is speculating about borrowing of derivational suffixes into Songhay from any Volta-Congo languages, Oti-Volta seems at least a reasonable starting point. Also, it gives me a motive for seeing what I can find out about derivational morphology in Grusi languages (I’ve got three goodish grammars of such languages that I can trawl through.) Moreover, although the Grusi-Oti-Volta relationship is not very close, there do seem to be a fair number of parallels in the general morphological modus operandi even when the actual forms are probably not cognate.
Thought you might like to know that a paper resulting from this comment thread – A Morphological Borrowing from Central Gur into Songhay – has now been published, and is freely downloadable. Here’s the abstract:
The paper has a very nice acknowledgment of LH.
Very nice.
Is the Gurma lexeme ultimately from Proto-Songhay *gùrmá “right bank of the Niger; south”? If so, is there a corresponding term for “left bank, north”? And if so, does this also have an ethno-linguistic meaning?
(I also wanted to ask if Mooré is from Songhay *móorù “be far away”, but then I remembered the ethnonym Mossi).
“Left bank, north” is *háwsá, which has indeed been suggested as the origin for the name of the Hausa. In both cases I wonder whether the ethnonym came first or the geographic term, but I’d guess probably the geographic term…
Very nice indeed!
I’m proper chuffed!
“The authors” here are Lameen and David Eddyshaw. It’s a joint paper.
@Lameen: Thanks! Thinking more about it, I’d expect words meaning “downriver, east” and “upriver, west”*. If there are such words, do they too have an ethnographic meaning? Or if there aren’t, or they don’t, might it be reconstructed?
* We’ve discussed similar worldviews before, but apparently not applied to the Niger.
Is the Gurma lexeme ultimately from Proto-Songhay *gùrmá?
The only Oti-Volta self-designating ethnonym with a transparent meaning for the speakers (as far as I know) is “Batammariba” (the speakers of Ditammari), which means “builders.” Otherwise the names are all etymologically opaque, so they could as well be loans as anything else. There don’t seem to be any traditions deriving ethnonyms from the names of mythical ancestors (and personal names, like placenames, almost all are etymologically transparent.)
In Gulmacema itself, “Gurma country” is Gulma or Gulmu, and an individual Gulmancema speaker is Gulmancoa, so the place name seems to be primary, which is unusual for Oti-Volta, where the name of the place that a people live in is usually derived from the name of the people. So that would support the idea. The tones also match. Of course, the Songhay itself may be a loan.
The original self-designation of the Gurmanche may have been Benba, which is also used in Gulmancema for “Gurmanche people”; it’s presumably the same etymon as Moba Bènm̀, the self-designation one of the major Moba subgroups. (In Kusaal, all Moba are called Bim [bɪ̀m]: an informant specifically told me that the term applied to all Moba, not just the Bemba moiety.) The Gulmancema and Moba languages are very closely related, though this is partly concealed by the rather quirky standard Moba orthography; they probably form a northern subgroup within Gurma.
(I also wanted to ask if Mooré is from Songhay *móorù “be far away”, but then I remembered the ethnonym Mossi)
Yeah, the -ré is from the proto-Oti-Volta noun class suffix *-lɪ, used only for names of languages. It’s reconstructable to POV, but most Oti-Volta languages instead have forms from *-ma, the “water” class, used in its very common abstract-non-count sense: so Kusaal, Mampruli, Buli, Byali but Nawdm, Yom, Gulmancema, Mbelime, Waama etc.
A locally popular folk etymology for “Kusaasi” etc derives it from Hausa kusa “near”, which seems to be without any foundation but does at least seem more plausible as a self-designation than “far.”
“Mossi” is sometimes ascribed (by non-Mossi) to the root which appears in Kusaal as mɔɔg “grass; bush”, implying that that the Mossi are “bush people”, but this is certainly wrong: Kusaal mɔɔg “grass” is mid tone, whereas Mɔɔg “Mossi country” is low, and in these languages a tone difference of this kind is as important as an underlying vowel difference in SAE. I think the folk etymology is really a sort of insulting pun.
There actually aren’t a huge number of definite identifiable Songhay loans in Oti-Volta in absolute terms, though some are very widespread, like the Burkina “noble, free person” one. Incidentally, that must have been borrowed into WOV at stage when Mampruli and Dagbani still had /r/ as a distinct phoneme; only Mooré, Talni and Agolle Kusaal within WOV still have that.
Downstream is dendi, which also refers to the southeasternmost Songhay groups and their dialects. Upstream (danga in Zarma) has no ethnolinguistic meaning that I know of; perhaps there are just too many ethnic groups in the inland delta?
Yes, or perhaps there’s been so much migration and realignment in that area that no single group or constellation is considered to be the natives (and thereby to have a special relationship with the earth?).
Or, perhaps, instead of “Upstream”, the direction was called “Swamp”? Mali!?
(The link is a lie. The comment is about rice. and the following thread doesn’t go there either. But it’s not that far off.)
perhaps there’s been so much migration and realignment in that area that no single group or constellation is considered to be the natives
Gulmancema itself is spoken over a comparatively large area, suggesting a relatively recent expansion (as with Mooré; the eastern part of Burkina Faso shows much less linguistic diversity than the western.) And as I mentioned, its southern neighbour Moba is a close relation. So a story of migration and realignment is pretty plausible there.
Further upriver, the Songhay seem to have displaced/absorbed many Bozo, the original Niger fisher peoples, whose own languages are Mande. But Lameen will know much more about this than me.
I think that the actual name “Gurma” may be of Bozo origin, but again, Lameen will know.
And thoroughly well-deserved!
I was wondering if there are other examples of noun class affix borrowing. AfBo lists three cases, one of them African, viz. Ndunga-le borrowing class affixes from Lingala. There must be many more.
Roger Blench hypothesises that some of the (Nigerian) Plateau languages have borrowed class prefixes from their neighbours, but it’s all very speculative in the absence of any systematic reconstructions of the various relevant protolanguages.
Mba’a may be a kinda-example, but it’s not at all clear what’s really going on there historically:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbugu_language
I think there are more cases of intra-Bantu borrowing of class prefixes out there, but again it can be very difficult to be certain that borrowing was the actual mechanism involved. Although Bantu comparative study as a whole is the jewel in the crown of African comparative linguistics, genetic subgrouping within Bantu is often very unclear. The Guthrie classification is simply geographic, and doesn’t pretend to represent genetic subgroups, and it seems to be widely accepted that there has been a great deal of borrowing within regions, further confusing the issues.
For my money, the really odd thing about the Songhay-Gur borrowings is that the affixes involved are flexions in Gur, but have been adopted as derivational in Songhay. However, on the Gur side itself, the class suffixes are very often used in a derivational way, as with Kusaal Kʋsaal, the language of the Kʋsaas “Kusaasi” and Mɔɔl, the language of the Mɔɔs “Mossi”, where the noun stems in each case are identical but inflected in different classes.
This sort of thing is pervasive in Oti-Volta: thus also with e.g. trees and their fruits, “honey” and “bee” and many others. It’s also (relevently for our paper) the usual way of forming deverbal action nouns: you just treat a verb stem as a noun and inflect it in a suitable noun class. (Bantu is just the same in this.)
Moreover, the *-mV class suffixes have a particularly clear set of meanings associated with them, so they are better placed to be reinterpreted as derivational than most.
In Oti-Volta, there are also a good many cases of class suffixes having been reinterpreted as belonging to the stem, with a second class suffix added after that. (Bantu, similarly, shows many instances of nouns that have ended up with two stacked class prefixes.)
Munyakare!
Quite so.
it’s like calling verb conjugation systems “grammatical age” because standard average european does an age-linked differentiation in the 2nd person.
Very vaguely so. Mongolian is a much better example of age-based gender (the T form is used people younger than the speaker, the V form to older ones, period).
belong to just two language families: Niger-Congo (which for rhetorical purposes I will here pretend is a real thing) and Algonquian
WALS lists a few additional cases, but doesn’t/can’t say whether they are familial or sporadic: Ju|’hoan, (Khoisan), Mundari and Nicobarese (Austroasiatic), Wardaman (non-Pama-Nyungan), Hixkaryana and Macushi (Carib), Lealao Chinantec (Oto-Manguean).
“F stops and cereal diet”
Did Hockett draw any connection with the shape of the sound-holes in their musical instruments?
Part of the reason why I am sceptical about noun class systems “proving” the genetic unity of “Niger-Congo” is that for this to work you evidently need not only for the classes to exist and, to a significant extent, correspond, but for the actual class affixes to be plausibly cognate.
I don’t know about that. I grant that the mere concept of noun classes is not enough, but if the same concepts reliably belong to the same classes without a strong semantic correlation backing it up, that is pretty suggestive. As an analogy, if something is suppletive in one language, it is often suppletive in a related language or an earlier stage of the same language even though the suppletive forms are unrelated (e.g. OE ēode, ModE went).
Thought you might like to know that a paper resulting from this comment thread – A Morphological Borrowing from Central Gur into Songhay – has now been published, and is freely downloadable.
Is it normal nowadays for a paper to go from ideation to publication in 29 days? That seems remarkably quick to me, especially over the winter break. No anonymous peer reviewers are thanked; if there were none, that would speed things up.
I’d guess probably the geographic term [came first]
That’s certainly the case for the Romance languages, other than the peripheral ones whose names are < ‘Roman’ or ‘Latin’.
Is it normal nowadays for a paper to go from ideation to publication in 29 days?
This is an illusion engendered by Africana Linguistica‘s dating quirks: the 2023 edition has actually just been published.
but if the same concepts reliably belong to the same classes without a strong semantic correlation backing it up, that is pretty suggestive
That seems to me to be really just a special case of form and meaning correlating (the very thing I am insisting on.) Many Volta-Congo formal noun classes are grab-bags of several semantic groups with no very obvious common factors: especially the commonest classes; the “human” and “liquid” classes are exceptional in this regard, not typical. So there is inevitably going to be some slippage in comparison.
In fact, I do concede this sort of thing as evidence of cognacy in the proto-Oti-Volta/proto-Bantu comparison section of Proto-Pog is Way Cool, Dude!
Nouns referring to trees in Bantu, for example, usually go in the Bleek/Meinhof 3/4 “gender”, which corresponds formally to the proto-Oti-Volta “rope” gender, which (as this prototypical example suggests) usually contains names of “long thin things” (ropes, fingers, roads, rivers) but not trees, which had a separate POV gender of their own. However, there are clear instances within Oti-Volta itself of whole semantic groups of nouns being transferred from one formal gender to another: as it happens, this has happened with tree names in Western Oti-Volta, where they have all been transferred to the “child” gender, leaving behind only deverbal action nouns, along with “war/bow” and “porridge”, which for quite opaque reasons belong to the “tree” gender throughout Oti-Volta.
[Annoyingly, the “tree” gender is reconstructed by lumper enthusiasts to their proto-Niger-Congo, with “Niger-Congo” here even including Kordofanian; in reality, not only do the initials of the proposed class affixes not correspond via any principled sound correspondences (they unblushingly equate bu and gu without any other supporting comparisons, for example), but the proto-Bantu and “Gur” classes they equate are actually demonstrably not cognate to each other, as I pointed out above. Comparative work at this level needs to be thoroughly purged of lookalike false comparisons and crappy data. It pretty much needs to be burnt down and started again from scratch.]
That’s certainly the case for the Romance languages
Not for Oti-Volta though. That’s why the fact that it seems to be the case for Gurma may be significant.
Place names in that area seem to be relatively recent creations on the whole, going with the fact that, unlike ethnonyms, they usually have transparent meanings.
along with “war/bow” and “porridge”, which for quite opaque reasons belong to the “tree” gender throughout Oti-Volta
“Bow” makes a certain sense, compare Greek dory “spear” from the PIE root for “wood”. “Porridge” makes me assume that POV porridge can’t have been very tasty…
“war/bow”
Is the colexification ‘bow’/’war’ common in West Africa? (Asking in relation to Arabic حرب ḥarb ‘war’ beside Hebrew חֶרֶב ḥéreḇ ‘sword’; see SED *ḥarb-.)
“porridge”
Does the broader Oti-Volta ‘tree’ gender also typically include objects made of wood like bowls, besides bows?
Is the colexification ‘bow’/’war’ common in West Africa?
And beyond: it’s actually there in the proto-Bantu cognate *-tá as well, so it’s reasonable to project it back to proto-Volta-Congo, even.
Does the broader Oti-Volta ‘tree’ gender also typically include objects made of wood like bowls, besides bows?
No, not at all. It does, however, include deverbal action nouns: in many languages this is the regular way of forming them: you just inflect the verb stem as a “tree” gender noun.
This may in fact be the key: although such nouns are normally abstract, there are a few where the sense has drifted to concrete. Nouns which share stems with simple verbs can represent products of the action or instruments; usually they don’t belong to the “tree” gender, so you have, for example Kusaal dʋk, plural dʋgʋd “cooking pot” (“leaf” gender) from dʋg “cook”, beside dʋgʋb “action of cooking.” However, there are a few exceptions: a pan-OV word of this kind is *dɪ-bʊ “food” from the very ancient root *dɪ “eat”; in Gurma it’s undergone a further semantic shift, to “millet.”
In the case of “bow/war”, although the proto-Bantu *-tá looks both both venerable and unanalysable, the proto-Oti-Volta root was *tǎ̰β-, and there was also a POV verb *tǎ̰β- “shoot with a bow.” From an Oti-Volta-internal standpoint these are unarguably the same stem, and in such cases in Oti-Volta the verb is nearly always primary (though there are a handful of pairs where the noun is a body part, like “foot/tread on” and “nose/blow the nose.”) So as far as Oti-Volta is concerned, “bow” is straightforwardly “thing to shoot with” and “war” is “shooting with arrows.”
Even I tend to get browbeaten into taking proto-Bantu forms as representing the default starting point for proto-Volta-Congo, but it is in fact pretty clear that proto-Bantu itself has simplified the phonology of proto-VC quite a bit, and there is other evidence for loss of root-final *β (or whatever the underlying pVC consonant was), e.g. pB *-tʊ́ “ear” beside POV *tʊ̂β-. In fact, it seems most likely that Bantu has simply lost the original “shoot with arrows” verb, and that the POV “bow/war” is actually an old deverbal noun that has struck out on its own but preserves the normal gender assignment for such words, like *dɪ-bʊ “food” does.
The “porridge” word is problematic within Oti-Volta. It always belongs to the “tree” gender, but the actual stems are impossible (I think) to reconstruct to a single POV form, despite looking tantalisingly as if they ought to be. Most branches suggest POV *ʃǎk-bʊ, but all of Eastern Oti-Volta instead suggest a stem *cḛ̂-. Be that as it may, although the Mbelime for “porridge” is cīɛ̄bù, it has a verb cɔ̀kī “prepare porridge” which looks like a cognate of the “porridge” words seen elsewhere: even though this is the only evidence for an underlying verb that I can find, it suggests that “porridge”, too, may be an escaped deverbal noun.
The way deverbal action nouns are plonked in the “tree” gender in Oti-Volta is odd: OV genders are not coherent single entities semantically, but even so this is a bit much. There is some suggestion that the class suffixes involved were originally distinct and have fallen together secondarily (specifically, the suffixes may have been different in tone.)
The “bow/war” and “porridge” words always stay with the deverbal action nouns in the cases where words meaning “tree” have been transferred en bloc to other classes, as they have in WOV (excepting Nõõtre), Moba, Konni and Byali.
POV porridge can’t have been very tasty…
In Ghanaian English, millet porridge is called “TZ”, from the Hausa tuon zafi “hot porridge.” It’s the sort of thing that foreigners boast of having once eaten, like haggis or frogs’ legs. It looks like two-day-old snow slush, and tastes like nothing in particular.
There is a term, reconstructable all the way to POV, for “yesterday’s leftover porridge, fried up.” That’s for teh hardcorez; we have the same custom in Glasgow, though.
Does millet have any taste in general, come to that? It looks quite boring. (Though budgies seem to like it).
Millet beer is quite nice. (And also reconstructable to POV. Vintage …)
No anonymous peer reviewers are thanked; if there were none, that would speed things up.
There were, and I should have thanked them; in case they’re reading this, thank you! And yes, the publication process took about a year – we first submitted on 23 January last year, and it came out a few days ago.
There is a term, reconstructable all the way to POV, for “yesterday’s leftover porridge, fried up.” That’s for teh hardcorez; we have the same custom in Glasgow, though.
Across the Water we speak of grit cakes, although they are made from that other cereal grain beginning with M. (“We is da representatives of a soitin awganization what used to begin wit M.”) For the record, the difference between grits and polenta is that grits are made from dent maize (aka field corn), which is soft in the middle of the kernel surface, whereas polenta is made from flint maize (aka Indian corn), which is uniformly hard-surfaced. They are also ground differently and (because dent corn is starchier) cook slightly differently.
This is an illusion engendered by Africana Linguistica‘s dating quirks:
Actually, it was engendered by my misreading the date on Lameen’s original proposal as 2023 rather than 2022. It’s a wise article that knows its own birth date.
Trees in the rainforest are basically sticks, while trees on the savanna spread out.
Just so.
Yes, if a subtler one than maize. Do cook it with salt, though, because otherwise (as with rice) the flavor dissolves in the water and evaporates with it.
David E: the colexification ‘bow’/’war’ … it’s actually there in the proto-Bantu cognate *-tá as well, so it’s reasonable to project it back to proto-Volta-Congo, even.
I wondered if this colexification was shown in CLICS: bow, war. Disappointingly, it isn’t, even though their database includes Proto-Bantu as a language, and the word *-ta meaning both ‘bow’ and ‘war’. They have only two other languages showing identical words for the two concepts, Asu G.22 and Bemba M.42. What are they missing? I can’t tell if they have any Oti-Volta languages; if they do, I couldn’t find them.
They seem (as is typical of these sort of databases) to be pretty light on African data altogether.
No Oti-Volta languages as far as I can see (but that does not surprise me.)
The various Oti-Volta forms are listed in the Appendix to Proto-Pog is Way Cool, Dude, if you want to see them (listed under “shoot.”)
https://www.academia.edu/102500245/Proto_Oti_Volta
Warning: you’ll get spam forever from academia.edu: you might prefer the slightly older version at Zenodo.
Not all languages have both meanings, and a few have split the forms into two separate derivatives of the same root.
This
https://www.africamuseum.be/en/research/discover/human_sciences/culture_society/blr/results_main?English=&Index=&Francais=arc&Tone=&T11=&T12=&T21=&T22=&T3=&T4=&RestT=&Word=&C1=&V11=&V12=&C2=&V21=&V22=&C3=&V3=&C4=&V4=&Rest=&Gram=&SumRegNum=&SumReg=&SumZonNum=&SumZon=&NClass=&cur_page=2
is the definitive online database for proto-Bantu (as you probably know already.) It doesn’t give actual examples from the modern languages, unfortunately.
Swahili has (vi)ta “war” (a formal plural) and (u)ta “bow.”
The Zenodo link is
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7979828
(I update it on the first of the month.)
Akoose has è’lɛ́ “bow”, which, by the wonders of Northwestern Bantu historical phonology, is the regular outcome of proto-Bantu *bʊ-ta, in Bleek/Meinhof Class 14. That matches the Swahili uta, and interestingly enough, also shows the selfsame class affix which turns up as a suffix in the Oti-Volta cognates; in both Oti-Volta and Bantu this class often contains deverbal action nouns (see above) … anybody might think that these language families were related in some way …