Last year I posted about Dr. Ester Salgarella’s work on Linear A, and people seemed intrigued; now Aeon has published Salgarella’s own explanation (for laypersons), and since it includes examples where the earlier piece was pretty generic, I thought it was worth its own post. I’ll skip the lengthy introduction about the history of the Cretan scripts and their discovery and proceed to the meat of it:
In this respect, because of the historical context of adaptation and use of the Linear writing tradition, it is legitimate to draw a comparison (of signs and words) between the known Linear B and the less well-known Linear A. Although the underlying languages are different, evidence suggests that those signs that have the same shape in both Linear A and Linear B (‘homomorphs’) can be read with the same, or at least approximate, phonetic value identified for Linear B (hence called ‘homophones’). There are, in fact, a number of sign-sequences (or words) that are the same in both Linear A and Linear B: mostly place names and personal names.
By way of example, the place names pa-i-to ‘Phaistos’ and se-to-i-ja (which has not survived) show the same spelling in both Linear A and B, as do a number of personal names such as ki-da-ro, da-i-pi-ta, pa-ra-ne. There are also morphological adaptations from Linear A personal names (di-de-ru, ka-sa-ru, a-ta-re) to Greek in Linear B (di-de-ro, ka-sa-ro, a-ta-ro). This comparison, whose legitimacy has been recently supported by Torsten Meissner and Pippa Steele, has allowed scholars to reconstruct a sketchy outline of Minoan phonology. Today, we are therefore able to ‘read’ Linear A texts – without gaining full access to the contents of the inscribed documents.
Moving away from the etymological method, scholars then focused on a script-internal analysis of Linear A, which has produced some good results. Among the most significant ones, Yves Duhoux demonstrated that the language behind Linear A makes heavy use of prefixes and suffixes for word-formation (that is, the individual syllables added at word-start or word-end to convey additional information, such as gender and number). John Younger carried out a contextual study of the Linear A documents to identify recurrent patterns in the position of words and numbers within the texts, which led to the identification of a number of ‘transaction words’ (such as and, or and so). Ilse Schoep worked on a classification of Linear A documents based on their alleged content (recognisable by the presence of picture-signs representing commodities) to narrow down semantic fields and identify further systematic patterns. The resulting systematisation allowed for further identifications of transaction words. These are used in isolation within a text and are most likely abbreviations, which means, unfortunately, that most of what we see of Linear A is stenographic writing – that is, shorthand.
Another significant step forward has recently been made possible by sophisticated statistical approaches to the data and by recent advances in the fast-growing field of digital humanities. An innovative statistical approach is currently being explored by the linguist Brent Davis. Davis has been conducting a system-internal analysis of words’ positions and sound constraints, both within Linear A and across other Bronze Age Aegean scripts, in order to evaluate the likelihood that any two of these scripts may encode the same language.
This approach is centred around the notion that, within a given language, only a definite number of sound associations are possible – what’s called a linguistic constraint. Since these are language-specific, identifying and comparing the typology and frequency of such constraints may therefore give us clues as to the level of linguistic similarity between the languages under investigation. In the case of the Aegean scripts, Davis’s work aims at understanding whether they notate the same language, or different languages of the same Aegean linguistic family, or even different languages belonging to different families.
To carry out statistical and comparative analyses of the Linear A corpus, new digital resources are also under development. A new resource is ‘SigLA: The Signs of Linear A: A Paleographical Database’, co-developed by Simon Castellan and myself. This is the first ever digital tool that allows users to carry out comparative and statistical analyses of Linear A signs in great detail. The project’s aim is ultimately to display the whole of Linear A in a unified digital space, thereby enabling the identification of meaningful recurrent structures and clusterings that may escape the human eye, and laying the foundations for further original research and interpretative frameworks. We are also exploring ways in which to apply computer vision techniques to the dataset with a view to identifying the number of individuals responsible for writing the Linear A inscriptions and, ultimately, assessing the overall level and spread of literacy in Bronze Age Crete.
She discusses the reasons why Linear A still resists decipherment (involving the quantity and quality of the evidence, as well as the lack of a bilingual inscription) and concludes:
If not for anything else, deciphering Linear A may well ultimately be an excellent exercise in human creativity, backed up by thoroughly sound and multidisciplinary research. Linear A is, after all, ‘partially deciphered’, inasmuch as we can read the texts in phonetic transcription with some approximation, understand some of the words (because of their contextual position within a text, we know the word ku-ro, which means ‘total’), and get a general idea of the documents’ contents. To arrive at a full decipherment, however, we still need to understand the linguistic nature of the Minoan language encoded in Linear A, as well as any potential linguistic affiliations. Without a Rosetta Stone-like inscription, that might be a long way off. But that’s OK: the journey of trying to understand the same kind of marks that so enchanted Sir Arthur Evans more than a century ago is well worth the effort in its own right. We are still out on the high seas – but at least we know where to head.
It’s exciting stuff, and I look forward to further developments. Thanks, Jack!
That’s a very informative article (and admirably careful to avoid any headline-grabbing dubious claims.)
Exactly — what a relief!
I recall years ago reading Cyrus Gordon’s own claim that he had demonstrated that Linear A was Semitic (based largely on ku-ro “total”, IIRC); he explicitly said that he was satisfied with having solved the problem and that it was now up to others to, as it were, flesh out the claim in detail. Early signs of what led later on to his more or less total loss of contact with the principles of real scholarship, I think …
Because nothing looks Semitic quite like biconsonantal ku-ro.
Oh, you can invent a third, word-final consonant, or a medial one if you’re willing to live with fewer choices (like… **kunru would work), and claim it just wasn’t written, as it wouldn’t have been in Linear B.
Because nothing looks Semitic quite like biconsonantal ku-ro
Well, I mean, it could be: dunno about the -o, but the rest of it would do for kull- “all” according to the conventions seen in Linear B, which doesn’t distinguish r/l or write syllable-final consonants.
This is actually an surprisingly widespread form in West Africa: even Kusaal has kulim “always”, found only with a negative, as “never”, which is presumably a loan from Hausa kullum “always”, which in turn is supposed to be from Arabic كل يوم “every day”; Moba has kul “all”, Fulfulde has kala “all”, and quite a few languages show words for “all” which look similar. On the other hand, words for “all” are strikingly not very stable in West Africa, with even quite closely related languages have forms which can’t be cognate. In Western Oti-Volta alone you can take your pick of zãã, wʊʊ and fãã. It’s far too naughty a word to deserve its place on the Swadesh lists.
But in any case, it’s by no stretch of the imagination enough for Gordon’s conclusions to be well-founded (I’m sure there must have been more “evidence” than that, but I don’t recall that there was anything very much, at that.)
Very good article. And promising in its emphasis on mutual effort rather than rivalry.
We discussed Brent Davis’s work on Linear A in 2019: Solving Linear A.
I’m sure there must have been more “evidence” than that
Initially it was ku-ro / kull- and some terms for vessels, to which Gordon later added a few others (see third page here). Of course vessel terms are easily borrowed (as many Greek ones are if I’m not mistaken). FWIW though, “heavy use of prefixes and suffixes for word-formation” does sound pretty Semitic.
heavy use of prefixes and suffixes for word-formation” does sound pretty Semitic
True. (That or Western Oti-Volta, anyhow. Maybe Bantu …)
heavy use of prefixes and suffixes for word-formation
…as opposed to?
Like, literally my first thought when I saw this description was “don’t all languages do that?”, and my next thought was “oh, right, Semitic is all about interfixes and transfixes instead”.
On further thought, of course, it’s not just Semitic but also (much of) IE that subscribes to the silly idea of changing root vowels for word formation. And a lot of SE Asian languages don’t really seem to bother with word formation at all.
Could we tell enough about the specific prefixes and suffixes to check for vowel harmony? If it’s present, some kind of Altaic (i.e. Turkic, Mongolic, or a more distant relative) looks intriguing. If it isn’t, I think we just ruled out most Eurasian language families one way or another.
And, as I like to mention, if the allophonic choices made by the script (in its Linear B version) were at all appropriate to the actual phonology of Linear A, it seems that the phonology of Linear A must have been very simple, and not very much unlike Japanese. Which rules out most Caucasian and (again) SE Asian options…
“Altaic” languages spring to mind as classic near-perfect examples of languages that don’t use prefixes in word formation, though.
I think it depends on what exactly one means by “word formation” here in discussing prefixes. If this principally means “word derivation” (which would be the natural sense) then Indo-European does lots of it with prefixes (as does Western Oti-Volta, though only in nominal derivation, not verbal.) If you mean flexion, that limits the field a lot more: it rules out all of Oti-Volta, for example (in fact, all of “Gur-Adamawa”), Mande, and pretty much all of Indo-European too. And even Basque. (Pity.) Not Bantu, Sumerian or Ainu, though, or (of course) the obvious candidate for Minoan, Algonquian.* (Nor Semitic, I must admit. Grudgingly. But obviously Chadic or even Berber would be way cooler.)
* I’m entering into the spirit of Gordon’s later researches here. Nahuatl is another contender, of course. But not Quechua. No llamas for Minos.
heavy use of prefixes and suffixes for word-formation
Sumerian has a lot of derivational prefixes and inflectional enclitics. I’m just sayin’…
@DavidE [from the Brent Davis thread] One thing this demonstrates, of course, is that basic word order isn’t particularly stable over time, and it’s not a good predictor of linguistic affiliation at all.
How does a language’s basic word order change? Or does that ipso facto mean it’s become not the same language?
How do speakers of the old form get along with speakers of the new? It’s not like introducing new vocab or gradual sliding of dialects/vowel shifts or gradual loss of inflections.
Whatever Latin’s ‘underlying’ word order, you could fairly freely re-order; but the hearer could generally follow because of the inflection. Moving from Latin to Romance daughters, word-order was shifting at the same time as losing inflections(?)
if the allophonic choices made by the script (in its Linear B version) were at all appropriate to the actual phonology of Linear A
I don’t think this can be taken at all for granted; in fact, the analogy of other scripts suggests pretty much the opposite.
Cuneiform seems to have been a pretty poor fit for the phonology of Sumerian (and for everything else, too.)
Come to that, hieroglyphic systematically omits some pretty significant phonemes whose existence it seems reasonable to posit nevertheless.
Chinese script is not known for reflecting either Shang or Zhou Chinese phonology well …
How does a language’s basic word order change?
I wish I knew. After getting my PhD thesis out of it, I’d publish it and grow rich on the proceeds. (Or not. As you may think.)
To give a more sensible answer: I think this happens by an order which is possible, but marked (for example, as focusing a particular clause element) losing its specific “additional” overtones as a marked construction and simply becoming the default construction. It doesn’t go through a period of incomprehensibility, only a time when children and their parents are unwittingly missing out on nuances in each others’ speech (as usual.)
The change from SOV-by-default to SVO-by-default in Latin/Romance specifically: this seems, broadly speaking, to antedate the loss of distinctive case flexions, and moreover there are in any case plenty of SOV languages which rely on word order, not flexion, to disambiguate (like the Mande languages, for example.) Come to that, clauses with both a subject and an object expressed by overt nouns (as opposed to pronouns) in fact don’t turn up very often in actual speech, so languages can tolerate quite a lot of potential ambiguity in such cases without it causing much practical difficulty. (Some languages don’t even permit such clauses at all.)
So although it’s tempting to link the word order changes with morphological simplification, I think that things cannot be so simple.
It might work better the other way round, with case marking that became redundant (because word order was fixed anyway) getting dropped. Mind you, case marking carries a very low functional load in Classical Arabic, and although Arabic did eventually lose noun case marking it took its sweet time over it. Many centuries of redundancy …
does that ipso facto mean it’s become not the same language?
Strikes me as a question of (fairly arbitrary) definition. Though I suppose you could try to answer it in the same way as the dialect vs language question: would the SOV speakers and the SVO speakers still have been able to understand each other? I think in the Latin case, everything else being equal, the answer would have been, Yes, why not? I can read the Vulgate without much trouble, which largely has Romance-like word order, despite only ever actually having been taught Proper Latin, which of course is SOV-by-default as God intended. The Vulgate word order, to Cicero, would have misleadingly suggested that there was some particular stress on the objects which led to them being placed after the verb, but I’m sure he would just have despised the barbarous style rather than actually struggled to understand what was being said.
Cuneiform seems to have been a pretty poor fit for the phonology of Sumerian (and for everything else, too.)
Cuneiform is definitely something of a panda’s thumb. How significant this is is hard to say, since we have so few independent inventions of writing to compare it to. A lot of time elapsed between the appearance of standardized logographic signs, somewhat standardized but largely ad hoc rebus spellings, and full-on standardized morphosyllabic spelling. Add to that the fact that something was going on with Sumerian syllabic codas (to the extent that most stops seem to have been subject to some kind of neutralization in coda position by the time that syllabic spelling reached its fullest scope) and you’ve got a lot of layers of language change and “inventing the idea of using visual stimuli to stand for words people say” interacting with each other in ways that are only starting to be understood—all conspiring to produce strings of signs that look like CV-CV-CV-CV etc. All in all, cuneiform might not be that much weirder (a 5/10 on the universal and objective scale of linguistic technology weirdness, let’s say) than only writing the consonants in your language.
TL:DR a 1:1 sign-to-language system seems to not have been a pressing need when writing was invented.
Of course, even if we knew for sure that ku-ro = Semitic kull- that wouldn’t be conclusive proof that the language was Semitic. Maybe the Minoans borrowed bookkeeping technology from Semitic speakers and some associated terms came with it. Total isn’t a Germanic word.
… would the SOV speakers and the SVO speakers still have been able to understand each other? I think in the Latin case, everything else being equal, the answer would have been, Yes, why not?
Why Latin in particular, since we’re talking why nots ? The phenomenon of wrong word order, in several languages I know, is all over the place when furriners are at bat. Provided it is systematically wrong, one quickly gets used to it and does not fail to understand.
There are many Turks in Germany with good German who don’t toe the line with word order in subordinate clauses. This presents not a problem of intelligibility, but one of propriety: would it be improper for me to correct their impropriety ?
Answer: take it or leave it.
a 1:1 sign-to-language system seems to not have been a pressing need when writing was invented.
Or later …
(It ill behoves someone writing in English to cast the first stone here …)
People actively dislike the idea, in fact (as I said elsewhere, most speakers of African tone languages are by no means keen on routine marking of tone, and the Russians still don’t mark stress even though it would be really helpful to us poor non-Russians if they did,)
and the Russians still don’t mark stress even though it would be really helpful to us poor non-Russians if they did,)
Exactly! When the ability to write is a marker of in-group status, transparency (especially for people with less-than-native proficiency) is a negative for a writing system. (He says as someone who paid for grad school with his knowledge of the difference between APA and CMoS hyphenation rules…)
still don’t mark stress even though it would be really helpful to […] poor non- English speakers.
(as I also said elsewhere.) Re ‘come by’, wiktionary distinguishes the two uses, but doesn’t tell that they’re stressed differently.
Sadly, Etymonline says ‘come’ is “remarkably productive with prepositions”, but doesn’t mention ‘come by’.
My venerable 1972 Chambers conflates the two. Web searches are the usual dross.
How would a furriner even know there’s differing stress?
I blame the Minoans: why didn’t they mark stress in Linear A?
Why Latin in particular, since we’re talking why nots ?
I asked because it’s a clear case of an SOV language morphing into SVO in its Romance daughters. Also moving from high-flexion to lower flexion — @DE observed that loss of flexion happened _after_ change of word order.
Contrast there seems to be debate as to underlying order in PIE; but agreement it was highly-flexioned.
there are in any case plenty of SOV languages which rely on word order, not flexion, to disambiguate
Sure. I wasn’t suggesting SOV is somehow more marked so needs support from flexion. If everybody uses/expects the same word order, don’t need no flexion. The flexion is a temporary prop while a language is ‘undergoing reconstruction’.
English has archaic phrases like “I thee wed”. Arguably in the case of ‘wed’, neither party is more Agent vs Patient/it’s more of a copula (ha!). So “Thou me wedst”, “Portia Ellen weds” would work as well? The choice of case for the pronouns (and flexion for the verb) is merely appears-first, appears-second.
The latest idea (i.e. since Baxter & Sagart 2014 at least) is that it started out as almost a syllabary (a few common syllables had several signs, a few rare ones had no separate sign and were written with the signs for similar syllables in more or less systematic ways) with determinatives like in cuneiform, except that the determinatives graphically fused with the syllable signs and became the “radicals”.
That may be why I’m not (for what that’s worth) aware of any evidence that synonyms were ever written with the same character*. Homonyms, yes, but not synonyms.
* Apart from recent cases of trying to write topolects that are neither Classical Chinese nor MSM and basically writing some morphemes in translation, like e.g. or i.e. or & in English.
I’m intrigued. What does that look like?
Only writing the consonants is, in Egyptian and Semitic, just a side effect of writing word roots without the grammar, which is what you expect of “pictographic” ~ “logographic” writing.
As I said in the other thread, I didn’t – after learning English for 30 years…
Perfection.
@dm
for me the come By vs COME by is like take OVER vs overTAKE (as you say, this is parallel to German insep/sep pairs). For some reason by+infinitive is not allowed in (modern) English (also rare in German, I think, Beistand/beistehen but not Beifall/*beifallen).
What does that look like?
You express something like “Janet loves John” with two clauses:
“This is Janet and she loves John.”
“There’s John: Janet loves him.”
The cost of doing this is a good bit less than you’d expect, because in narrative (for example) clauses with non-pronominal subjects and objects are actually comparatively uncommon.
I know I’ve encountered this in a real language, but unfortunately I can’t remember where at present.
I think it may be significant that the unusual word order in “I thee wed” is part of a larger reversal-for-focus-or-whatever.
Unmarked: “I wed thee with this ring.”
Marked (and actual): “With this ring I thee wed.”
I think the agent/patient distinction between “I” and “thee” may be clearer in the two following clauses in the full old-timey formulation, both of which follow the same inverted word order pattern, thus somewhat undercutting AntC’s hypothesis about why the word order is weird:
“with my body I thee worship;
and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”
the Russians still don’t mark stress even though it would be really helpful to us poor non-Russians if they did
Same reason they maintain different rail gauges (and used to produce deliberately incorrect maps). Keep the foreigner off balance and unable to get anywhere!
I blame the Minoans: why didn’t they mark stress in Linear A?
Maybe they did …
I hereby claim priority for this key insight: I leave to others the routine task of teasing out the full implications in detail and completing my decipherment (which is mine.)
How does a language’s basic word order change?
One scenario is a result of language contact:
Only writing the consonants is, in Egyptian and Semitic, just a side effect of writing word roots without the grammar
Not really, because consonants in affixes do get written.
You express something like “Janet loves John” with two clauses
What about cases of contrastive topic and focus: “Janet brought the wine and John brought the sandwiches“? (Of course those also aren’t too common outside of pragmatics papers.)
Dunno. I’ll try to remember where I found a description of languages that do this in Real Life.
When the ability to write is a marker of in-group status, transparency (especially for people with less-than-native proficiency) is a negative for a writing system.
Hmm, is this why Romanians seem to be fairly undisciplined about using diacritics in their correspondence (and even business memos)? I have also noticed that Romanians seem less enthusiastic about foreigners learning their language than other Central Europeans, but maybe that’s just me.
@TR:
Mention of focus here reminds me of a different but related phenomenon: in Kusaal you can embed a verbless clause within a verbal clause, as in
Fʋ maal bɔɔ la tis mam?
you make what [LINKER] that [LINKER] give me
“What is that that you have done to me?”
([LINKER] represents a perfectly real word which nevertheless lacks any segmental form in this context)
where Bɔɔ la? is a (potentially) self-standing clause meaning “What is that?”
Bloomfield’s The Menomini Language features a whole series of “predicative” forms of personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns and interrogative pronouns used with accompanying conjunctive verb forms, e.g.
wɛ⸳kiq kɛ⸳ta-mamɛ⸳yan?
“What-is-it you-want-to-buy?”
I say this is a related phenomenon to the one-full-NP-per-verb thing because it’s another instance of what would be a single clause in English (for example) getting rendered as two distinct but linked clauses in another language.
i thee wed, i thee worship, i thee endow
i’d’ve thought this structure was a calque from a latin SOV phrasing, especially since it’s so unproductive (and so marked as a reference to the wedding ritual when anything but these three* liturgical phrases turns up). but i don’t know the history of the english ritual text or its adoption, so that’s purely idle speculation.
.
* not being christian, i had to check that “with my body i thee worship” was in the ritual text, having assumed it was likely a reference/parody.
I don’t think there’s a Latin original; there aren’t any vows at mainland European weddings. The only word the bride & groom say as part of the ceremony is “yes”.
http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/Latin1560/Marriage&Confirmation_Latin1560.htm
I think the Latin is in fact misprinted at various points; for example, it should (I think) read
Linear A and B appear in the archaeological record virtually simultaneously. How strong is the evidence that Linear A is older than Linear B? Could instead B have been developed by the new Mycenean rulers of Crete inspired by Cretan Hieroglyphic, and A be an adaptation of B for use in palace administration in the Minoic language?
I should say (for those that can’t be bothered to click through) that the excerpt I gave is actually a (very early) Latin translation of the English Prayer Book, not a Latin original; apparently it is partly based on older Latin Missals (as, presumably, was the Prayer Book itself) but I haven’t had any luck in tracking them down. I doubt whether Cranmer simply invented the English formulae out of whole cloth, however.
Pre-Reformation wedding services in England were bilingual, with the priest’s part in Latin but the lines the bride and/or groom were to say in Middle-or-Early-Modern English, rather than having them be coached to utter some phonetic simulation of Latin words they didn’t understand. The late Sarum Rite English predecessor of the BCP language in question was (according to one 19th-century source that strikes me as probably reliable): “With this rynge I the wed, and this gold and silver I the geve; and with my body I the worshipe, and with all my wordely cathel I the endowe.” Whether any of that goes back to some very early imported Latin text that was vernacularized for pastoral reasons I do not know.
a calque from a latin SOV phrasing … Cranmer … the bride and/or groom were to say in Middle-or-Early-Modern English
SOV phrasing is as likely to be consciously-archaic Middle English(?) What was constituent order in the early Germanics? (Frustratingly, the wiki is happy to tell me about phonology and morphology, but not constituent order. Gothic had ‘free word order’ — but we have chiefly religious texts and they’re maybe over-influenced by Greek order.)
There is FWIW quite a vast literature (going into as much detail as you might want and quite possibly more) on how the early BCP services did and did not differ from their pre-Reformation Latin predecessors. I at one point in my life read up a fair amount about this but that was some decades ago. My general recollection FWIW is that the solemnization-of-matrimony service changed comparatively little except for perhaps slightly re-organizing it in a way that assumed integrating it with a nuptial mass was no longer expected or normative. The early C of E had no serious quarrel with the Vatican on the theology of marriage apart from the technical point of what tribunal had jurisdiction to determine whether a putative marriage supposedly entered into by the King was voidable or void, which is not a topic the marriage service itself implicitly takes sides on.
SOV phrasing is as likely to be consciously-archaic Middle English(?)
No, not unless the Middle English was itself calqued on Latin. Middle English was pretty much like Modern German in terms of word order, but (especially later) closer to Modern English in such matters than German is. It’s only SOV if you subscribe to the Chomskyite view that it’s really SOV, it’s just that somehow the object usually follows the verb in main clauses. We don’t hold with such perversions here in the Hattery.
Even Old English, though it shows greater freedom of word order than the later phases of the language, defaults to SVO in non-dependent clauses in prose; as in German, subordinate clauses are mostly verb-final (and various clause-initial adverbials trigger VS order.)
Gothic seems to show a stage where the verb-second order in non-dependent clauses seen in the rest of Germanic had not yet completely stabilised; even so, object nouns and pronouns usually follow the verb, and there are enough mismatches with Greek word order in general that the question of determining what the native Gothic order was is not as hopeless as you might think. (All plagiarised from Gary Miller’s Oxford Gothic Grammar.)
I at one point in my life read up a fair amount about this but that was some decades ago
I’ve wondered about that. If you recollect anything, I’d be interested to hear about it, for one.
On the other hand, personal pronoun objects quite often turn up before verbs even in otherwise perfectly respectable SVO languages (as in all of Eastern Oti-Volta, and – to pick an obscure example – Romance.) I seem to recall someone knowledgeable here (likely to be Etienne, on first principles) saying that the naive-but-natural idea that, in Romance, this represents a survival of the Latin SOV order, turns out to be historically untenable.
So ‘I thee wed’ is modelled on … Norman French (?) is modelled on ‘je t’aime’ — or however the Normans put it.
Rethinking Verb Second
Rebecca Woods and Sam Wolfe
Abstract
This volume provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property, which has been a central topic in formal syntax for decades. While Verb Second has traditionally been considered a feature primarily of the Germanic languages, this book shows that it is much more widely attested cross-linguistically than previously thought, and explores the multiple empirical, theoretical, and experimental puzzles that remain in developing an account of the phenomenon. Uniquely, formal theoretical work appears alongside studies of psycholinguistics, language production, and language acquisition. The range of languages investigated is also broader than in previous work: while novel issues are explored through the lens of the more familiar Germanic data, chapters also cover Verb Second effects in languages such as Armenian, Dinka, Tohono O’odham, and in the Celtic, Romance, and Slavonic families. The analyses have wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of the language faculty, and will be of interest to researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of syntax, historical linguistics, and language acquisition.
Keywords: Verb Second, empirical, theoretical, experimental, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, language faculty
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2020 Print ISBN-13: 9780198844303
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2020 DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198844303.001.0001
There’s a book that meticulously reconstructs the syntax of Proto-Germanic. It comes with a great Facebook video that says things like “they said it couldn’t be done… they were wrong”. It’s been mentioned here before… edit: yup, in its own post.
That explains the barbarous cum meo corpore – definitely composed by people who drank their wine unmixed!
Rethinking Verb Second
“Much more widely attested cross-linguistically” seems to be pushing it, based on the list of contents. (They’ve missed Ingush, though, which really does have an eerily Germanic-like clause constituent order.)
I imagine most of the non-Germanic stuff is buried within the “theoretical” treatments. Given the marked propensity of Chomskyans to forcibly discover that their victim languages are all beautiful examples of whatever theoretical point they are currently obsessing about, I hae ma doots.
David E.: A good popular account (maybe it’s dated, but maybe there’s not much more that has been learned?) is in the 400+* pages of Part II (“The Prayer Book Services: Their Sources and Rationale”, broken into chapters by service and/or other topic such as the calendar or lectionary) of the SPCK publication Liturgy and Worship (edited by W.K. Lowther Clarke, D.D. with the assistance of Charles Harris, D.D.). It dates to 1932; the copy on my shelves is from the 1964 reprinting and I apparently paid seven quid for it at a London used-book shop, probably at some point in the 1990’s.
*The Solemnization of Matrimony chapter, however, is only 14 pages long. It notes that the “gold and silver” phrasing I noted above carried over into the first BCP iteration of the service in 1549, but was subsequently omitted, it being apparently thought that the ring on its own was sufficient symbolic bride-price and other “tokens of spousage” were unnecessary. The Sarum Use had a priestly blessing of the ring before the groom put it on the bride’s finger, but the Reformers omitted that.
Vanya says
June 29, 2022 at 1:50 pm
Hmm, is this why Romanians seem to be fairly undisciplined about using diacritics in their correspondence (and even business memos)? I have also noticed that Romanians seem less enthusiastic about foreigners learning their language than other Central Europeans, but maybe that’s just me.
A very late reply but the reasons that Romanians are not really using diacritics is not about some ingroup thing. There are 2 connected reasons, one being that reading texts without them is not that confusing for native speakers most of the time. The second reason, and the most important one, is that there was no real software support for Romanian. As a poor country with very high rates of piracy, most people used Windows in English, so no diacritics available. When mobile phones and SMS appeared they were also without support. This started to change only around 2010 so most Romanians of the age to sent business memos are not used to write with diacritics. I remember having colleagues in University that had to pay somebody to write their dissertation paper with diacritics.
That makes sense; thanks for explaining.
Similarly, there are still people in France who don’t put accents on capital letters because that was impossible on typewriters and is still non-trivial on the French keyboard layout. (It may actually be easier on the German one.)
That’s also why legacy spellings like Electricité de France survive.
In standard typewritten German, were accents placed over capitals?
If you mean ä ö ü, yes, because these have their own keys, and the uppercase versions aren’t used for anything else.
Ironically, the typewriter may have established Ä Ö Ü. Up until the 1920s it was common not to print these uppercase letters and to resort to Ae Oe Ue instead. That’s the history behind ORF (Oesterreichischer Rundfunk: radio and later TV) vs. OeNB (Oesterreichische Nationalbank) vs. ÖNB (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek).
On the French keyboard layout, most accented letters give you numbers if you add Shift.
On the German layout, like on the Spanish one, ´ has its own key, so
´ egives me é, and´ Shift+egives me É (on a computer; not on a typewriter where the accent would go through the top stroke of the E). Further, the uppercase of ´ is `, soShift+´ emakes è, andShift+´ Shift+emakes È.At the other end of the top row is a key for ^, uppercase ° (the degree sign). That makes ê Ê possible. On typewriters I haven’t seen this key, but typing both accents formed ^ anyway, because they weren’t quite centered; that was clearly intentional.
^1234567890ß´[backspace]
°!”§$%&/()=?`[backspace]
(Yes, the parentheses are shifted compared to the English layout.)
The only French letters not composable on the German keyboard layout, as far as PCs or typewriters are concerned, are ë ï ç. I have to copy those in from the character map. On Macs even these can be written.
just today, at my dayjob, i got an email from someone in munich/münchen whose name-based email address used both “ue” and “ae” where their signature had ü and ä – those kinds of important functions tied to code using limited character sets seem like the diacriticless typewriters of this day & age.
@rozele: That used to be normal, as umlaut wasn’t available in e-mail adresses, but nowadays its doable. So this is probably a long-established adress; but the vowel + e spelling is sometimes also used to differentiate between two persons with the same first name – last name combination (examples for frequent last names with umlaut are Müller, Schröder, Bäcker).
Well, some last names actually have the two-letter spellings. The best is Mueller-Töwe.
I recently had occasion to exchange emails with a Swiss gentleman with the first name Ueli. I first assumed he was a respelled Üli but given that all other umlauted letters were given as such in the exchange, including one in his surname, I suspect that Ueli is in fact how how his name is spelt. The pronunciation is of course another matter, but I didn’t have the question front of mind (as the politicians say) when I heard Swiss people say it,
German Wikipedia says [ˈuəli]. Which makes sense, since it’s hypocoristic for Ulrich — no cause for umlaut there as far as I can see.
But whence the [ə]? Have they been hiding some sort of high german vowel breaking from me? (Or did I just not pay attention?)
It was a diphthong all along: OHG Uodalrich. It is the non-Swiss who have the explaining to do. Creeping monophthongisation, I calls it. It Won’t Do. You can never have too many diphthongs.
Indeed, Upper German didn’t pay attention when the New High German Monophthongization was going on and the MHG ie, io, uo, üe became /iː iː uː yː/. The retained diphthongs are traditionally spelled ie, ue, üe in Switzerland when they show up in dialect writing, including nicknames like this, and end in [ə̯] there.
Hence Müesli, which hopelessly confuses everyone else.
No cause for confusion. Duden has a Müesli lemma with [ˈmyə̯sli]. Müsli is mentioned there as a mere “verwandte Form“.
You can never have too many diphthongs, as David Eddyshaw rightly insists.
Nah, they were just being descriptivist when they last revised that entry – for many decades they’ve been painfully torn on whether they want to be de- or prescriptivist – and didn’t dare write “reinterpretation of Müesli by people who just couldn’t imagine it”.
That includes my fellow speakers of Other Upper German, BTW. The Bavarian dialects have also kept that diphthong a diphthong, but unrounded it: MHG ie, io, uo, üe come out as [ɪɐ̯ ɪɐ̯ ʊɐ̯ ɪɐ̯] – merged with ir, ur. When I explained the üe of Müesli to my sister, she spontaneously exclaimed [ˈmɪɐ̯slɪ]!
What fun!
OED (updated March 2003):
Apfelmus “applesauce”; Gemüse “vegetable(s)”, though native speakers tend not to know that’s related.
though native speakers tend not to know that’s related.
Confirmed. Instead one gets stares of disbelief and Mißtrauen. What else to expect from vegetarians (“vegans” ?) who like their raw carrots with sharp contours.
The country is not going to the dogs, but to the rabbits.
Creeping monophthongisation. I plead guilty on behalf of Danish. What’s the Greek combining form for zero?
Danish has inherited mos (kartoffel-, æble-), but /mysli/ however spelt (usually müsli). Of course no connection is perceived.
I see that Standard German has a short /u/ in Ulrich, and FWIW so does Danish in Ulrik — but both adel and odel have long first vowels, consistent with the MHG diphthong. (Both can be freestanding as well as combining).
Well, some last names actually have the two-letter spellings.
Yes. But rozele was referring to a case where the name was spelt with umlaut outside of the e-mail address and with viwel plus “e” im the e-mail address.
A spelling-pronunciation; the base word is long gone (and unrecognizable anyway), and the name is regional.
If you mean flexion [by prefix], that limits the field a lot more: it rules out all of Oti-Volta, for example (in fact, all of “Gur-Adamawa”), Mande, and pretty much all of Indo-European too.
Yes, which is why expressing the accusative case by a prefix is NOT boring.
I wish I knew. After getting my PhD thesis out of it, I’d publish it and grow rich on the proceeds. (Or not. As you may think.)
Tell me, Doctor Doctor Eddyshaw, how is it that in 400 words anent word order you manage not to so much as mention a language that (a) has changed word order in historic times, (b) has had a continuous written tradition throughout, and (c) is well-known to yourself? Indeed, it is not mentioned on this page at all.
It doesn’t go through a period of incomprehensibility, only a time when children and their parents are unwittingly missing out on nuances in each others’ speech (as usual.)
I think that’s basically right. My first exposure to strange word orders (well before Yodaese) was Delany’s Nova (1968), where it is part of a Sprachbund. The following conversation, set in “Istanbul, Earth, Draco” in 3164, is both biordered and (separately) bilingual:
“Hey, Mouse!” Leo hailed him from the red, rocking deck. Leo had built an awning over his boat, set up wooden tables, and placed barrels around for chairs. Black oil boiled in a vat, heated by an ancient generator caked with grease. Beside it, on a yellow slicker, was a heap of fish. The gills had been hooked around the lower jaws so that each fish had a crimson flower at its head. “Hey, Mouse, what you got?”
In better weather fishermen, dockworkers, and porters lunched here. The Mouse climbed over the rail as Leo threw in two fish. The oil erupted yellow foam.
“I got what … what you were talking about. I got it … I mean I think it’s the thing you told me about.” The words rushed, breathy, hesitant, breathy again.
Leo, whose name, hair, and chunky body had been given him by German grandparents (and whose speech pattern had been lent by his childhood on a fishing coast of a world [in the Pleiades Federation] whose nights held ten times as many stars as Earth’s), looked confused. Confusion became wonder as the Mouse held out the leather sack.
Leo took it with freckled hands. “You sure, are? Where you—”
Two workmen stepped on the boat. Leo saw alarm cross the Mouse’s face and switched from Turkish to Greek.” Where did you this find?” The sentence pattern stayed the same in all languages. [emphasis added]
“I stole it.” Even though the words came with gushes of air through ill-anchored vocal cords, at ten the orphaned gypsy spoke some half dozen of the languages bordering the Mediterranean much more facilely than people like Leo who had learned his tongues under a hypno-teacher.
The construction men, grimy from their power shovels (and hopefully limited to Turkish), sat down at the table, massaging their wrists and rubbing their spinal sockets on the smalls of their back where the great machines had been plugged into their bodies. They called for fish.
Leo bent and tossed. Silver flicked the air. The oil roared.
Leo leaned against the railing and opened the drawstring. “Yes.” He spoke slowly. “None on Earth, much less here, I didn’t know was. Where it from is?”
“I got it from the bazaar,” the Mouse explained.” If it can be found on Earth, it can be found in the Grand Bazaar.” He quoted the adage that had brought millions on millions to the Queen of Cities.
“So I’d heard,” Leo said. Then in Turkish again: “These gentlemen their lunch you give.”
This is totally readable, even though its non-strict OSV order is pretty alien to English. What I would difficult find, if not impossible, to speak it consistently would be.
how is it that in 400 words anent word order you manage not to so much as mention a language that (a) has changed word order in historic times, (b) has had a continuous written tradition throughout, and (c) is well-known to yourself?
I was in fact thinking of Welsh when I said “I think this happens by an order which is possible, but marked (for example, as focusing a particular clause element) losing its specific “additional” overtones as a marked construction and simply becoming the default construction.”
In fact, this seems to have happened twice in the history of Welsh (and then unhappened once): once (along with Irish) when VSO order replaced SOV in Insular Celtic (the evidence for this being that the clause-initial “absolute” verb forms of Insular Celtic seem to be derived by accretion of some sentence particle at the end, suggesting a focus construction, whereas the “conjunct” forms are what passes for normal development from PIE in Celtic), and then again when the so-called “Abnormal Order” became the pan-Brythonic normal order. The Abnormal Order looks, formally, (almost) exactly as if it was a construction focussing the element before the verb; the only problem is, that the element before the verb isn’t focussed.
I just noticed the other day that Stephen Williams’ Elfennau Gramadeg Cymraeg says that the Abnormal order remained normal in Literary Welsh right up into the twentieth century. It seems to have been killed off by an unholy alliance between ignorant prescriptive linguists who decided that it had been “ungrammatical” all along, and actual native speakers for whom the construction was (by then) indeed “abnormal.”
OHG; already merged in MHG as ie.
I think I’ve previously linked to this paper by the good and deserving Tom Güldemann:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/300471822_Proto-Bantu_and_Proto-Niger-Congo_Macro-areal_Typology_and_Linguistic_Reconstruction
but it has some interesting stuff on word order and information structure (Section 2.3); he reports that Bantoid languages frequently display both subject-verb-object and subject-auxiliary-object-verb orders, often tied to a difference in information structure, in that a preverbal object is extra-focal or at least less focal; this is especially relevant for pronominal objects, due to the “inherent activation status” (as he puts it) of their referents.
I found this of interest because the Eastern Oti-Volta languages are (like French) basically SVO but put all non-contrastive personal pronoun objects, direct and indirect, before the verb. On one level this is obviously an Atakora areal thing: the next-door-neighbour language to the east, Baatonum, is straightforwardly SOV, and the local Songhay is SOV(-ish) too. On the other hand, it would be weird just to borrow word order for pronouns, and it seems more likely that the Eastern languages are preserving an older proto-Oti-Volta feature.
Oti-Volta languages are Greenbergianly pretty thoroughly head-final syntactically in every respect except being SVO, so it would make sense if proto-Oti-Volta was, or had been, SOV, and the pronoun order was a survival of that. But Güldemann’s article suggests that this SVO/SOV thing may have been more complicated, and not an all-or-nothing matter, even way back in proto-Volta-Congo.
(There is even at least one proper Bantu language that is SOV: Tunen.)
Reminds me of German, where “verb-second” is short for “the finite verb goes in the second position, the infinite verb-or-part-thereof goes last”…
It would account for the object prefixes in the more familiar Bantu languages, which come at the end of the chain of preverbal agreement and tense-aspect prefixes, just before the verb stem. Güldemann’s idea is essentially that this chain of prefixes derives from a auxiliary verb complex historically. This seems quite plausible to me, but the idea has met with a lot of resistance from the Bantucentric crowd who like to project the classic Bantu heavily inflecting system right back to “proto-Niger-Congo”, which they seem to envisage as pretty similar to their idea of proto-Bantu.
Mind you, Güldemann’s idea doesn’t actually match what was probably the proto-Oti-Volta system, where pronoun objects, at least, seem to have preceded main verbs. He’s basically assuming that proto-Volta-Congo was SVO; which, to be honest, may well be right, in view of the fact that that order is much commoner overall.
More work on Bantoid and the weirder (and more interesting) Northwestern Bantu languages will probably shed more light on all this eventually.
You guys managed to revive the threads on Minoan script, Elamite and Linear A in the same day without saying a word about Minoan, Elamite or Linear A!
people like Leo who had learned his tongues under a hypno-teacher.
Is learning a language under hypno a thing? Does it work? (I’ve seen tapes advertised for learn you a language in your sleep. Always been rather sceptical.)
absolute […] conjunct
I always wondered where Mencken got his terms conjoint and absolute for the English possessives, my/mine, your/yours etc.
You guys managed to revive the threads on Minoan script, Elamite and Linear A in the same day without saying a word about Minoan, Elamite or Linear A!
Topic drift.
Is learning a language under hypno a thing? Does it work?
Not that I know of. But by the year 3164, who knows? (Ashton Clark [not to be confused with Klarkash-Ton] to me!)
“I always wondered where Mencken got his terms conjoint and absolute for the English possessives, my/mine, your/yours etc.”
The conjoint forms occur JOINTLY with a noun: This is my book.
The absolute forms occur alone: This book is mine. Cf. absolute verb ‘verb occurring without an object’, such as the second verb here: “They refused to say.”
…than what? Globally, SOV is the most common word order today (564 languages in the WALS), followed fairly closely by SVO (488). Then there’s a large gap to VSO (95).
Admittedly, “no dominant order” has a count of 189, so maybe enough of these can be interpreted as SVO to put SVO over the top.
Or is there evidence of sufficiently large sampling bias in the WALS?
No, but in the mid-late 20th century some people claimed it worked, and others thought it would probably work in the future.
BTW, that’s not allowed in German. Even “I don’t know.” is not grammatical there.
BTW, that’s not allowed in German. Even “I don’t know.” is not grammatical there.
Where is “there” ? Nothing wrong with ich weiß nicht or ich weiß in any context in which wissen is the appropriate word (instead of kennen). Only ich kenne nicht and ich kenne are disallowed.
It’s fair to say that “the object of” wissing must be already clear from the context, whereas “the object of” kenning has to be stated in the sentence where the kenning kens.
Is learning a language under hypno a thing? Does it work?
AFAIK hypnosis mostly works by breaking down inconfidence, which would theoretically help with learning languages, I guess… would be tricky to set up, though.
That said, to the best of my knowledge, science-fictional “hypno” learning is usually of the “listening to lesson tape during sleep” kind, which indeed AFAIK doesn’t work.
You’re right that ich weiß is fine in some registers. But ich weiß nicht, free-standing, is flat-out English.
ich weiß nicht, free-standing, is flat-out English.
ich weiß es nicht is OK?
Ah, thanks for the tip. I’ll try not to sound such a dork in future, then. (Since my default mode in German is not-knowingness.) And could someone tell GTranslate. Also DeepL offers first the form with es but also allows the “flat-out” wrong.
[commoner]…than what?
Sorry, nerdspeak. I meant “much commoner in Volta-Congo”, which it is. There are a few SOV (like Baatonum and Tunen) but they’re few and far between.
Of course, that doesn’t actually mean that proto-Volta-Congo had to be SVO. There aren’t many SOV Romance languages, either.
wissing
Witting.
But ich weiß nicht, free-standing, is flat-out English.
That claim is flat-out wrong as far as Germany goes. Anyone can listen to German dialog in the internet to convince themselves.
The expression is used to signify uncertainty, with many kinds of intonation and additives.
Kommst du denn doch mit?
Ich weiß nicht…
Ich weiß nicht so recht…
Ich weiß nicht, ich weiß nicht…
Ich weiß nicht!
Ich weiß nicht, verdammt noch mal!
Similarly, Ich weiß is used to acknowledge that you already know something. To your regret, or to your mild or intense annoyance at being reminded.
Du mußt bis 15 Uhr fertig sein.
Ich weiß…
Ich weiß schon…
Ich weiß, ich weiß…
Ich weiß!
Ich weiß, verdammt noch mal!
@DM “But ich weiß nicht, free-standing, is flat-out English.”
If someone asks you an information question (“What’s the population of….?, ‘When was so-and-so born?,” etc.) and you don’t know the answer, do you mean to say that “ich weiß nicht” would not be a grammatically (or pragmatically) correct response?
You can’t drop the object pronoun. Det ved jeg ikke. Not even in the positive: Det ved jeg godt!. (It flows better/is less aggressive with an adverb, semantically godt reinforces the positive meaning a little but can be omitted).
But det is not really deictic here, just a dummy, more like saying Ich weiß es than Dass weiß ich.
If someone asks you an information question (“What’s the population of….?, ‘When was so-and-so born?,” etc.) and you don’t know the answer, do you mean to say that “ich weiß nicht” would not be a grammatically (or pragmatically) correct response?
At least in the kinds of German I am familiar with, the pragmatically correct response would be (Ich habe) keine Ahnung “(I have) no idea”. The second option would be Das weiß ich nicht, more frequently reduced to weiß ich nicht or even weiß nicht. As Stu explained, ich weiß nicht is not a response to questions about facts, but a deliberative / doubtful reaction to statements or proposals. Ich weiß es nicht is something you say either when you have thought long and hard about an answer about a fact or about a solution to a problem and can’t come up with any (typically accompanied by a sigh and /or shaking your head) or when someone has asked you the same thing the umpteenth time (cue annoyed or slightly angry intonation). So ich weiß nicht certainly exists, it’s just not used in all the same ways like English I don’t know
Colloquially, you can, if it’s demonstrative: Das weiß ich nicht. > Weiß ich nicht. That’s because a verb-initial sentence that is not a question has, ipso facto, dropped a demonstrative pronoun from the first position.
Yes, further shortening to Weiß nicht. occurs in some places, but I don’t think it’s all that widespread.
All these are first clauses of much longer sentences, even if the rest goes unsaid. Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten…
You seem to be contradicting Hans, immediately above. Could this not be one of those things that differs by dialect?
Actually, no big contradictions here – the first part is what I said as well; we may very well have different experiences in how often we hear the shortening to weiß nicht; I’d say its use is rather a question of register / familiarity / (im)politeness than of dialect. The second part is a response on a different level of analysis – Stu and I explained how ich weiß nicht is used, DM diagnoses it as ellipsis. That is probably how it came about, but nowadays it’s a perfectly valid construction on its own.
The main goal for me was that people should not be mis-led by a claim that something is unacceptable hic et nunc, which is demonstrably accepted in the same volume of space-time. For whatever reasons. As for ellipsis of past content, illa nimis antiqua praetereo, as JWB might put it. Kenne mer nit, bruche mer nit, fott domet.
“That is probably how it came about”
One problem with diachronic interpretation of such analyses is that it presupposes a stage in a language where ti was not a construction on its own.
Kenne mer nit, bruche mer nit, fott domet
= Kennen wir nicht, brauchen wir nicht, fort [weg] damit. Never heard of it, don’t need it, chuck it.
One problem with diachronic interpretation of such analyses is that it presupposes a stage in a language where ti was not a construction on its own
Yes. But in a language like German with a big corpus going back for centuries, it may be a testable hypothesis; but I don’t have the time, the means or the inclination to test it. 🙂
i sometimes find it awkward to say, “Ich habe keine Ahnung,” because based on my English sprachgefühl, it feels too strong. In English, I have no idea, is a much stronger statement of ignorance than, I don’t know. That’s not so true in German, but it still niggles sometimes.
it feels too strong
Try just “keine Ahnung“. That’s probably the most widely used form as a response, and is equivalent to “no idea” as a response. You don’t walk up to someone and say, for no apparent reason, “keine Ahnung“, or even “ich habe keine Ahnung“. It’s not a self-initiated statement about your knowledge or lack of it, but a stroppy-colloquial response to a request to produce knowledge.
You could also say “hab’ keine Ahnung” to the same effect or, even cheekier, “Null Ahnung“. The less formality (no ich, and hab instead of habe), the easier it should come. It’s informal after all. Like “no idea” and “dunno”.
In Russian без понятия is an informal (among youth) way to say “I don’t know”. Perhaps it was meant to be stronger, but basically is used as I don’t know. Maybe a calque. The stronger version is “In [my] soul I don’t fuck [it]”.
PS compare biblical “to know”….
x
There’s also “bin ich Jesus?“.
In contrast, you can indeed go up to someone and say “I know what you did last summer”. Here it’s not the case that you say it “for no apparent reason”. All kinds of things spring to mind as to what you’re up to in saying it. In contrast to saying “keine Ahnung” out of the blue.
If someone walked up to me and said “keine Ahnung“, I might reply “so siehst du auch aus“.
– “No idea”
– “You look like it too”
Above, that should be “null Ahnung“, not “Null Ahnung“. The edit box short-changed me again.
hab instead of habe
Pronounced /hap/, not /hab/.
I feel like in colloquial German, when I picked it up,* if a stem ended in a stop and the declensional ending was dropped (like in, “Ich hab’s,” or many imperatives that used to end with -e), both voicing and fortition distinctions seemed to be neutralized.
* I also feel like have forgotten a sad amount of colloquial German. I just don’t have enough people to speak it to. I sometimes joke with my colleague Mattias in German, but that’s about it. I have never felt confident enough to discuss technical issues in physics in German, so I never got in the habit of speaking German with my other German departmental colleagues, who I am not as close to. (Moreover, speaking foreign languages at work is something that some people in the department have strong feelings about. Ralf and Steffen never speak German to each other at work, unless they momentarily can’t remember the English word for something. And several of the faculty members who are native Sinitic speakers have gotten indignant about the people from the former Soviet Union speaking Russian together.) However, I suspect all the fluency would come back to me if I just spent two weeks in Germany, without everyone around me switching to English whenever I was present.
Well, I belive that sometimes it is a good idea to invite others to join your conversation (and sometimes – but not always – it is a good idea to avoid discussing topics which make participation of the third person undesirable).
This definitely affects you choise of language, but it leaves some place for speaking Burushaski.
It is, though; whether it occurs differs between dialects, mesolects, and evidently regionally within the standard as well. That last part is my “TIL” for today.
A rare case of a movie title that was actually translated into German: Ich weiß, was du letzten Sommer getan hast.
Not when – where. All the varieties that have syllable-final fortition, i.e. most of them, apply it in such cases. Those that lack it, like mine, don’t – and as it happens they’re a subset of the ones that don’t have voiced obstruents at all.
In any case, however, the /aː/ of haben remains long, unless it’s too unstressed to maintain length under stress timing or the dialect in question (like mine) lacks phonemic length altogether.
in Kusaal you can embed a verbless clause within a verbal clause
I’ve just been refactoring my analysis of this in my Kusaal grammar: I now think that these “embedded” constructions actually represent the basic type, and clauses where the demonstratives seem to be predicators have undergone ellipsis of a preceding Li anɛ “It is ..”; this sort of ellipsis has plenty of parallels elsewhere in the language. The Maxim of Quantity strikes again …
The basic type is really a kind of focus construction, I think now. Interpreting it as biclausal with an embedded subordinate non-verbal clause is an artefact of translation, mistaking the grammar of the English translation for a guide to the structure of the Kusaal.
Mind you, predication and focus are joined at the hip anyway. As all Hatters will immediately recall, Kolyma Yukaghir uses the predicative case for focused subjects and objects. But then, up there on the Arctic Circle you have to make your own entertainment.
Kolyma Yukaghir and… French, mostly.
French has a predicative case?
Probably not, but I mean the use of moi, toi, lui… as dative suffixes and free-standing case-unmarked pronouns.
@David: moi, toi, lui as “Dative suffixes”? I am afraid you have lost me…
Donnez-moi une bière.
C’est bien ça.
I have come across languages in which the particles that are used to mark constituent focus look uncannily similar to the copula, though it would hardly be surprising if there were a diachronic development from clefting to focus in some languages.
Come to that, Mandarin has managed to make a copula out of a demonstrative.
Hmm: this (not altogether persuasive) PhD thesis maintains that that sort of thing (and the reverse too) is quite a thing cross-linguistically.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267638325_Cyclical_Grammaticalization_and_the_Cognitive_Link_Between_Pronoun_and_Copula
I’d forgotten about Hebrew.
Mandarin has managed to make a copula out of a demonstrative.
English literature provides an example of making two demonstratives copulate. “Me Tarzan, you Jane.”
Universal Grammar Lives!
David, Hat: “moi, toi, lui” and the other full pronouns cannot be called datives, inasmuch as the homophony between the full pronouns and the dative pronouns (after imperatives) is VERY partial: “moi” and “toi” can be accusatives (Regarde-moi! Regarde-toi!), and while in the singular “lui” can be both a full and a dative pronoun (“Lui, il parle trop/Parle-lui”), in many (most, I suspect) colloquial registers of French the dative will be realized as /i/ or /zi/, something which is impossible with “lui” as a full pronoun, making an analysis of “lui” alone as a unified dative/topic pronoun a bit dubious. In the third person plural the full pronoun “Eux/elles” on the one hand and the accusative (“les”) and dative (“leur”) pronouns on the other are quite separate -tellingly, I am not aware of any non-standard variety exhibiting any sort of syncretism between these third person plural forms forms.
Also, ‘donnez-moi un break,’ from noted francophile B. Johnson.
I remember “donnez-moi un break” from Let’s Parler Franglais!, a regular feature in latter-day Punch (q.v.)