Via Charles Bernstein’s Facebook post (which has images), I learn about an amazing example of private language creation:
Decades in the making, Javant Biarujia’s 1000+-page Taneraic dictionary has just been published in a private, bamboo-bound edition. I write about this work in “Poetics of the Americas” in My Way: Speeches and Poems (1999). Taneraic is an ideolect invented by Biarujia, a poet who lives in Australia. The monumental dictionary includes guides to pronunciation and grammar.
Biarujia (a Taneraic name) has a website, Tanerai, where he provides language materials as well as some background in the post Introduction to Taneraic:
Welcome to Taneraic (or tanerai — I coined the English cognate “Taneraic” as an assimilated form) on the Web! The first Website devoted to my private language, or langue close, as I prefer to call it, designed and set up by my very good friend, Charles. Just like the language itself, we are starting modestly, but I envisage the site will grow as I am able to supply material to Charles for him to put on the Net. The site will include translated works, original works, a step-by-step grammar and structure of Taneraic, a vocabulary (I have published a 200-page dictionary of Taneraic, so I’ll be looking at ways of putting it — or an expanded version of it — onto the site), and interactive activities from visitors to the site. (Eventually, I would like to invite interested Taneraicists, for that is what you are if you regularly visit this site, to help build vocabulary, using Taneraic affixes and compounding laws, leaving me with the radicals, or root-words.)
I describe Taneraic as a “hermetic” language after the style of Mallarmé or Stefan George: a private pact negotiated between the world at large and the world within me; public words simply could not guarantee me the private expression I sought. Taneraic was born of the unconscious (“The unconscious is structured like a language.” — Jacques Lacan); of an inchoate poetic personality; of conflict between artist and middle-class upbringing; of variant sexuality. English, my native tongue, would have submerged me in its long, magnificent yet etiolated history — and prejudices. I needed the immediacy of a marginal language, a creole, so to speak, arisen out of need, and adaptable yet of central importance. A language whose culture was that of a single individual.
You will doubtless have questions (e.g., “Why put a hermetic private language into the public arena?”), and many of them will be answered at the link, which I encourage you to investigate. The latest post, Nainougacyou by C R Strebor, is about “Nainougacyou, the Taneraic Dictionary,” and has a couple of images — to quote the post, “the binding is adorable and the cover is a lovely textured blue with gold printing on the spine.” I continue not to really understand the impulses behind the creation of artificial languages, but I have come to respect them and the people who give them such devotion (see this 2009 post).
I continue not to really understand the impulses behind the creation of artificial languages,
Me neither. And this Biarujia is in Australia where endangered languages are dying out at a terrifying rate.
I can’t be bothered to investigate: does this Tanerai draw on any native languages?
And this Biarujia is in Australia where endangered languages are dying out at a terrifying rate.
Quite so; it seems a pity to go for the artificial and neglect the endangered natural.
While I too do not share the impulse to this sort of thing, I take Hat’s point about the devotion involved.
The skill sets needed for documentation of underdescribed or hitherto undescribed languages are not all that common, and the actual opportunities to use them don’t often come people’s way, unless they are determined to seek them out (which may involve career and lifestyle choices naturally rebarbative to normal people.) I suspect that most people who are motivated to acquire the skills and look for the opportunities would be of a rather different personality type to most conlangers (though one can certainly think of exceptions.)
Most of the linguists involved with conlangs seem to be more interested in studying them (and their creators and the associated ecosystems) than in actually being conlangers. Perhaps it’s the age-old division between the artists and the critics … (“Call that a mammoth? I’ve never seen a mammoth that colour. And what are all these stick figures supposed to be doing?”)
The skill sets needed for documentation of underdescribed or hitherto undescribed languages are not all that common, …
Sure, but if you haven’t acquired those skills, what sort of conlang are you going to produce? Something that’s like the languages you know only talking funny (Polari)? Something with pervasive regularities like Esperanto — IOW not like any actual human language.
It seems Biarujia is reviving this language from their youth — something like a private language between twins? (Although there’s no mention of siblings.)
Instead of pumping money into swankily-produced ‘dictionaries’, put it towards supporting those impoverished language-recorders.
put it towards supporting those impoverished language-recorders.
I honestly don’t know if at present langusage documentation is limited by money or by people willing and able to do the documentation.
My guess (and I could be totally wrong) is that there is sufficient money but not enough people for short documentation projects (e.g. dissertation-size), but that there are people who would love to continue working for decades more on what they have started, and for them there is no money.
@AntC: I guess you’d also would have told Tolkien to spend more time on editing Old and Middle English texts than making up Elven languages and epic tales?
i think the inclinations (and skills) involved in the analytic observation/documentation of an existing language and in constructing a language are interestingly different. the former is about recognizing patterns and trying to understand how they fit together (and how they came to be that way). the latter is about exploring what can be built based on a chain of decisions with complicated and interconnected consequences. they’re not exactly mirror images of each other, but they work in opposite directions.
@Y: it’s almost the same problem as in theater: the absolute hardest thing is finding a way to get a second production of a new piece produced, even if the first run was quite successful and well-received. and that’s in a context where getting a first production is hard enough that in nyc’s “downtown”/”off-off[-off]-broadway” theater world an impressive proportion of it happens by pretending to be “in progress” (because that’s what venues can get funding for).
@Hans I guess you’d also would have told Tolkien to spend more time on editing Old and Middle English texts than making up Elven languages and epic tales?
Yes, exactly. I only finished reading ‘The Hobbit’ by grim determination; certainly couldn’t face anything longer. I might be the only person in New Zealand who’s seen only one of the movies — and that was ordeal enough.
Similarly, most Sci-Fi leaves me cold.
Please people my fiction with people — people writ large (like the Norse/Roman/Greek/Vedic gods), by all means, but still recognisably people — not pasteboard cut-outs.
I liked Peter Jackson a lot when he made funny gross-out movies for pocket change.
I kick ass for the Lord!
Clearly, that man is torn by opposite forces.
That has often, AFAIK, been a recipe for great or at least striking and famous art – paintings, poems, novels. Here it’s giving us a language.
I doubt this is the right personality type to document an already existing language.
In and around my field, research funding is entirely set up for dissertations. Once you have your doctorate, you’re still expected to immediately get one of the nonexistent tenured jobs and disappear from the grant world. The increasingly common alternative is to disappear from academia, and science, altogether.
Esperanto has a few regularities that are unlike any natural language, e.g. ending all nouns in -o and all adjectives in -a, but it also lacks some that are common in natural languages. For example, it’s got independent singular and plural personal pronouns. Chinese puts a plural-marking suffix on the singular ones. On average, Esperanto is not “unnaturally regular”.
The latter inclination exists, but does not produce conlangers with a single magnum opus; it produces proto-linguists and language engineers, who toy with multiple projects but rarely “completing” them; myself (formerly?) included for example. The magnum opus types tend to be rather more introvert; there’s a lot of deeply personal, kind of synaesthetic introspection going into their languages, and usually also not that many “technical” details (so most likely Tanerai has nothing in common with native Australian languages, unless the author actually has relevant native ancestry) If such projects are “exploring” anything, it may be something where the rest of us cannot follow. Once you know the type, it’s very clear already in the quote in OP.
FWIW I have seen sometimes also the opposite inclination: conlangers castigating linguists for not doing more for language preservation, despite having the openings and connections (but possibly overestimating their amount of time and resources).
And of course also, “we will not join your revolution if we cannot dance”.
@AntC: Who are you to tell somebody what they should do with their free time? Leave the conlangers alone. They are not doing any harm!
If we’re going to go all Myers-Briggs on the conlangers asses (OK, it was me who started it, I admit) we should distinguish those like Zamenhof whose principal aim was to create something useful (in particular, useful to other people) from those like Tolkien, who wanted to make something beautiful (and probably weren’t too bothered by others not sharing their vision at all.)
I mean, Zamenhof may have thought that Esperanto was beautiful* (for all I know), but it’s hard to believe that aesthetics as such played much role in his language design. And I don’t think Tolkien really envisaged Sindarin as a potential interlanguage …
From the outside of all this, I do actually find the practical questions raised by interlanguage design quite interesting linguistically (it intersects with the question of what exactly constitutes “simplicity” in language, that we were recently discussing.) On the other hand, I find it hard to be enthused by constructions like Sindarin: OK, it’s got initial consonant mutations, but aren’t the real-life ones in Welsh more interesting? You can be surprised by strange exceptions that cry out for explanation in Welsh … but not in Sindarin.
I think it aligns with my dislike of (nearly all) fantasy: it’s the constraints that make things interesting, the knowledge that you can’t just make stuff up at will (“a wizard did it”, as TV Tropes puts it.) If there’s no point in asking “Why does it have to work that way?” I find it difficult to play along. (I know that there exists fantasy which tries to avoid this.)
However, it is evident that my personal feelings on this matter are not universally shared. That’s OK …
* I suppose that, if the design had been a bit better, Esperanto might indeed have been beautiful, because of shark-like adaptation to its intended role. Like C, as opposed to Pascal.
Give Tolkien some credit. Reading his comments about Sindarin and Quenyan in the Appendixes got me interested in Welsh and Finnish (the models, more or less, for his fantasy languages), and historical linguistics in general. I don’t think I am at all alone in that – the new Amazon series even cast a Welsh speaker in the main role.
I suspect Tolkien was also bemused by people who preferred to learn Sindarin rather than Welsh. He never really attempted to finish any of his imaginary languages – they are just sketched out enough to give the “races” he creates additional dimensions by suggesting a deeper past and hidden relationships that are not explicit in the novels. I also get the impresssion that he was more interested in developing sketches of various languages than bothering to actually create a new one, just as one creates a set for a theater production, you don’t actually build a house or a real city street.
Yes, I agree, and that’s one reason Tolkien is a good novelist.
I’m into conlanging as well. When I’m learning languages, I get the impulse of sketching a language that works on similar lines; when I read some interesting new proposals for the reconstruction of PIE, I start sketching an IE language incorporating these proposals; when I like a text, I start translating bits of it into one of my conlangs. If I ever would do what AntC urges us to do, go do fieldwork on preserving some endangered language, I would most probably immediately start sketching a conlang based on that natlang.
People may find that pointless and a waste of time, but what human activity isn’t, in the end?
People may find that pointless and a waste of time, but what human activity isn’t, in the end?
Odin is here to help:
Deyr fé,
deyja frændr,
deyr sjalfr it sama,
ek veit einn,
at aldrei deyr:
dómr um dauðan hvern.
People may find that pointless and a waste of time, but what human activity isn’t, in the end?
Exactly. I’ve never understood the “why don’t they do something more useful?” attack — as if everything everyone else did was for maximum utility. If you feel that strongly, why are you commenting here instead of saving the earth?
(Hopefully, this isn’t just piling on.)
I’ve been a language inventor for several decades now, after a chance encounter with a Latin grammar in middle school which gave me some eccentric ideas. For most of my life, if anyone else learned of my hobby it was generally met with puzzlement, sometimes polite, or less polite dismissal. In recent years, with more conlangs appearing in entertainment, people can at least understand that I might have needed to practice a craft I’ve gotten paid for a few times.
But even with that, the idea of inventing a language always arouses irritation in some people, and the issue of endangered language is usually brought up as a counter. This is a serious and tragic issue, but I’m always puzzled by linking it to conlangers. While I have studied several natural languages in my life, modern and ancient, I have had exactly two formal linguistics courses: an intro survey, and a wonderful Diaspora Linguistics class with Ian Hancock (at UT Austin). I have no training in endangered language preservation. My ability to write a grammar for my creations has to do with a lot of time spent pouring through Smyth’s Greek Grammar, not any special training on language documentation.
For the overwhelming majority of language inventors, the choice is not invent a language or work on endangered languages, the choice is invent a language or watch TV, or play video games, or worry about your fantasy football league, or, if you have the temperament, between inventing a language and becoming an orchid loony. It’s always surprised me that when people find the conlang hobby irritating that the response is so often moralizing, telling us we need to be doing something improving with our time (though these days, monetizing a hobby seems the greater imperative). I’ve given talks locally about language invention (I suspect Game of Thrones had something to do with the popularity of the topic). And about every third talk someone is going to ask about endangered languages. It’s very puzzling. I have more than once had to gently explain why some indigenous group or other might not want their language in the mouths of TV aliens bent on exterminating humanity.
I think Wienersmith is lurking here. (As always, click the clicky).
@Wm Annis: I don’t get conlangs, but I sympathize with you. Studying Latin or Old English or Proto-IE can equally be condemned as a waste of linguistic talent which could be spent on working with endangered languages.
A true hardcore opposer of time-wasting would presumably be the first to say that working with endangered languages is wasting time.
We have no truck with such people here. Let them get on with their crafting of national education policies and leave the rest of us in peace, say I.
Zamenhof wrote poetry in Pre-Esperanto long before he had gotten Esperanto to the point that he considered it publishable. He gave Esperanto an enormous vocabulary full of near-synonyms and more or less accidental synonyms with the express purpose of enabling poetry and literature in Esperanto. And the sandhi phenomena he allowed he all justified with “euphony”.
Tolkien’s concept of what sounds beautiful seems to be far more widely shared, though.
Well, Z was an ophthalmologist. You can’t really expect a well-developed sense of linguistic beauty from such people. Too much time spent on reading the Transactions of the Ophthalmic Society of
the United KingdomBialystok. It ruins the literary module of the brain.And Esperanto almost certainly strikes you as more euphonious if you speak Polish than if your mother tongue is Swahili (or French.)
It’s always surprised me that when people find the conlang hobby irritating that the response is so often moralizing
A highly valid complaint. I hope that I may be let off with a caution, for merely having been patronising rather than moralising.
I good know-it-all will do both, adapting his shpiel to the interlocutor. <* coff *>. It’s hard to identify and wriggle out of. Throw in a little benevolence and you’re really hot.
I hope that I may be let off with a caution, for merely having been patronising rather than moralising.
Given the sorts of responses I’ve gotten over the years, I’m not issuing cautions for this. Mostly I’m curious why for some people endangered languages immediately leap to mind when invented languages come up.
I used to think the irritation was the result of unprocessed school trauma from hated foreign language classes, leaving people unable to imagine language learning could be fun, and viewing a created language as some form of masochism. But I’ve encountered people with more than one language in their back pocket who make the same leap, so now I don’t know.
I’m not sure I follow the specific critique based on endangered languages. I tend to think that pretty much all natural languages are just more interesting to learn or learn about than any conlang could ever be, because individual human beings and committees are not nearly as powerful creative forces as the long-term decentralized evolutionary processes with multiple participants (many not actively aware that they are innovating/transforming anything) that give rise to natural languages. But there are plenty of not-at-all-endangered natural languages with millions of L1 speakers that are going to be arbitrarily exotic-seeming and unknown wherever a particular person happens to live. If in North America, why not for example learn Guarani as a wacky hobby? Or Malagasy? Or Buryat? You’re really not gonna come up with anything better. Although I guess I agree with the point that it might be insulting to use an actually-extant natural language for the dialogue of fictional villainous space aliens if for some reason you have ended up being tasked with writing villainous-space-alien dialogue.
I suppose you could say that, technically, proto-languages are conlangs.
There may be more overlap of personality type between historical linguists and conlangers than between conlangers and hardcore off-the-veranda type field linguists. (Tolkien would fit the bill nicely …)
I was going to speculate about Chomskyans and their imaginary constructed Language, but I pulled back from the brink just in time.
it might be insulting to use an actually-extant natural language for the dialogue of fictional villainous space aliens
I rather like the idea of space aliens (though perhaps not villainous ones) speaking Kusaal. And it does begin with K…
http://jbr.me.uk/lingo.html#2
(lesson Three)
Ithkuil was designed to be more “complex” than any natural language (at least morphologically). Anyway, fine. It’s like fanfic or something.
To me one big thing that’s missing from conlangs is the culture and history associated with natural languages. Conlangs reflect, at most, the culture of modern Western geeks (plus a few utopianists), which doesn’t attract me.
There may be more overlap of personality type between historical linguists and conlangers than between conlangers and hardcore off-the-veranda type field linguists.
I differ, if I may. I am hard-pressed to think of any field linguist who didn’t drift off into historical linguistics, sometimes in a major way. Terrence Kaufman, RMW Dixon, David Eddyshaw, the list goes on.
Gabriel Manessy drifted off into historical linguistics, got bored, and then drifted off into creolistics.
Mind you, he was French.
Jeffrey Heath and his colleagues in his lean, mean, West-African-language-describing team seem not to have been bitten by the historical bug at all. Perhaps it’s just a matter of time …
I tend to think that pretty much all natural languages are just more interesting to learn or learn about than any conlang could ever be
Excepting Esperanto, which has its own agenda, the majority of people involved in conlanging are far more interested in creating their conlangs — for whatever reason — than they are in learning them. Most people don’t even bother to learn their own creations, because they’re interested more in the intellectual puzzle of creating something as complex as a language. Even hugely popular entertainment properties, like Star Trek, Avatar, Game of Thrones, etc., only attract a few dozens of serious students, if that, and those who stick with it long-term is fairly small. Personal language projects like Tanerai are very much in the minority of the hobby.
Apropos of “simplicity” in language, the latest podcast of
https://hiphilangsci.net/2022/08/01/podcast-episode-27/
features Peter Trudgill (no less) talking about that very thing: basically, he thinks that the default way for languages to change over time is to get more complex, and that it is simplicity that needs explaining (and that the current state of most familiar modern languages is contingent on political changes over just the past few millennia, and probably highly unrepresentative of the way languages have typically been since people first learnt to speak.)
Those who like me are podcast-phobes should be pleased to learn that the link in David E.’s comment includes a full transcript of the conversation so you don’t have to actually be so inefficient as to listen to it. Trudgill says a variety of interesting things, plus the rather funny “I’m not very happy about the philosophy of science. I’m a simple dialectologist, James.”
Heath’s homepage lists his research interests as “fieldwork and documentation”, followed by “historical and contact linguistics”, followed by four more.
The historical linguistics link has a list of sixteen “basic conclusions” about language change, which I will read and ponder. I like the “lost wax” and “hermit crab” metaphors, because they are pretty metaphors and because they are so original and insightful.
Ah. I hadn’t picked up on his youthful dallying with Uto-Aztecan. (Most of his other comparative stuff seems more to do with language contact than traditional historical-comparative reconstruction, but this is mere cavilling on my part. And it looks like he’s planning to work on comparative Dogon and Songhay. OK, Heath is another one …)
I strongly suspect the “hermit crab” phenomenon has gone on a lot in Volta-Congo; in particular, what even now seems to be the accepted wisdom about the complicated Bantu verbal prefix system, viz, that it is simply inherited from Proto-Volta-Congo, can hardly be right, on all sorts of grounds. This sort of drafting in of external replacements for “terminally eroded” affixes has probably been a major thing.
Also the creation de novo of flexional morphology:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/300471822_Proto-Bantu_and_Proto-Niger-Congo_Macro-areal_Typology_and_Linguistic_Reconstruction
I think I might yet claim Dixon as an example, though: his shtick seems to be largely claiming that historical reconstruction in Australia is impossible, so he’s an anti-historical linguist.
(OK, OK, so he’s done a bit of reconstruction of Proto-Arawan …. who hasn’t?)
To me one big thing that’s missing from conlangs is the culture and history associated with natural languages.
There’s a lot of conlangs out there which come with that. Tolkien created interwoven mythology, history and languages as a package; people create conworlds with concultures for their conlangs ( one example , but there is more on the interwebs). You may find that all shallow compared to the real world, which is fine; in the end, it’s not very different to people building a model railroad or creating their own world in the SIMs or Minecraft, which also isn’t everybody’s idea of time well spent.
As Wm Annis says, it’s based on an urge to create – like the teenager who hears a band they like and buy a guitar, I see languages or texts and want to create something similar.
Fair enough. I was thinking of the Esperantos and Lojbans of the world.
Well, there has been original poetry written in Esperanto, at any rate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1lm%C3%A1n_Kalocsay
mi rau cidjrsuci cu ponse ‘I have enough sushi.’
.i citka ri ca le nu ponytse ‘I eat it sitting Japanese-style.’
.i cortu le cidni ‘The pain in my knees’
noi na korcu di’i ‘which are not usually bent’
.i badri fe le nu mi ponsei ‘makes me sad that I am un-Japanese.’
(‘ = /h/, c = /ʃ/, j = /ʒ/, y = /ə/, r in cidjrsuci is syllabic, polysyllables have penultimate stress but y and syllabic liquids do not count, monosyllables may be stressed or unstressed indifferently.)
Other than the examples above, there’s Klingon. It’s not that far away – started out as a basic Evil Empire, then became a standard-issue Proud Warrior Race – but since then it has taken on a few interesting twists that are at least uncommon on Earth and certainly on Middle-Earth.
It’s probably telling, though, that the speakers of Klingon tend not to be the greatest Trekkies.
Just like John McWhorter.
…Oh, this part:
Esperanto and Lojban are in their own category: they’re (so-called) auxlangs – that is, languages explicitly designed for international communication. They aren’t supposed to come with a culture and history; they want to create their own, and/or to piggyback on the cultures and histories of the languages they’re based on.
Of course, in an opposite direction, having its own culture and history doesn’t mean you need to come up with a whole new language too. For most writing purposes you could usually get away with only doing a few words and/or phrases that happen to come up; you probably don’t need a whole (e.g.) Dothraki language if it only comes up to say that vo loshaki means “the guard is out”.
Auxlangers are those who care what an ostensibly fake marquis did in 1907, the rest are probably conlangers. IIRC, a huge drama about that was the proximate cause of the the CONLANG / AUXLANG LISTSERV split. (Also IIRC, both sides were happier after).
(This was before the WWW, and besides the wench is dead).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_de_Beaufront
“His personality was an unusual one.”
Fancy claiming to have an English grandmother!
“The unconscious is structured like a language.” – Jacques Lacan.
Mine isn’t. Am I abnormal, Doc?
I’m afraid so. Just lie down and let me put this on your head… try to relax… it may sting at first, but then you won’t notice a thing…
“everyone agreed that language contact leads to simplification” … “Well, we all know that language contact leads to complexification” – This did not occur to me until the recent discussion. Either I thought about it on my own or someone in that discussion with McWhorter used words “langauge contact leads to” and this generalisation made me think about certain complicated varieties…
I mean, for example, the proliferation of fancy (particularly Latin) noun plurals in English is clearly a case of complexification caused by language contact. There are probably other good examples but this seems to be a fairly clear one.
[EDIT: maybe an even better example is borrowed phonemes, but offhand I can’t think of any well-attested cases of borrowed phonemes in languages that English-speaking linguists would have heard of.]
The Nguni languages (Xhosa, Zulu, et al.)
Not on a level with clicks, but Kusaal /h/ is found only in loanwords; nevertheless it can hardly be regarded as marginal, because one such loanword is the exceptionally common hali “as far as, even, very.” (Come to that, English initial v-, as in “very”, exists only because of loans and dialect mixture.)
Mandinka has /p/, but only because of loanwords (this is true of /p/ in quite a few languages.)
@J1M, Khalid Mourigh’s grammar of Ghomara Berber has a short informal introduction that describes what I was thinking about rather well. Also I was thinking about Russian -ir- for verbs like programm-ir-ov-at’ from German -ieren form Romance. As for phonemes, /f/? Urdu borrowed /q/ from Arabic.
Berber borrowed a whole collection of those and phonologies of neighbouring A. and B. dialects sometimes converge. And the difference is that it borrows from dialects, it is not just learned borrowings.
The Northern Songhay languages, not content with one lot of morphology, have amalgamated two, from genetically completely unrelated sources (Songhay and Berber.) This is analogous to Kofi Yakpo’s point that the stress/tone systems of the English-lexifier Atlantic creoles are more complicated that those of the lexifiers, because different parts of the core vocabulary reflect different original systems, both of which have to be accommodated for an adequate account of the whole language.
Kusaal loanwords from English have high tones representing English word stress; these high tones don’t participate in normal tone sandhi. (If there were more English loanwords this would constitute a significant complication of the whole tone system; as it is, you can get away with just flagging them up individually as “exceptions.”)
Lambton’s Persian Grammar devotes getting on for a quarter of the book to Arabic morphology.
But Nichols speaks about grammatical categories. It is the next level of kung-fu….
All Kusaal conjunctions are loanwords or calques, including the words for “but”, “until”, “unless” and “because.” So the whole category is borrowed.
[Ka “and” (kinda, sometimes) and ye “that” are indigenous, but they pattern quite differently from conjunctions, and indeed occur alongside them (amaa ka “but and …”); I call them “clause linkers” in my grammar. Suggestions for a better name welcome …]
@DE, I thought about marking what was previously unmarked.
Ghomara has adjectives, but at the expence of stative…
We all here have diglossia I mean: there is literary European and and there are colloquial English and Russian. In this sense creoles include literary French and are more complex. But it is not a different compelxity. “I can say the same thing, just drier”. Yes, there are also grammatical borrowings from French which are “fine prose” for me and other borrowings that I use daily.
In this sense creoles include literary French
No, i don’t mean that. Even the most basilectal creoles include complications from at least two (typically completely unrelated) languages, whether the speaker knows the original lexifier or substrate languages or not. This is one of the reasons why the “creoles have the simplest grammars in the world” is such a questionable statement, especially when presented à la McWhorter as if it was practically axiomatic. (Simple in what respect?)
However, the whole question of code-switiching and of the variable degree to which bilingual speakers use different structures for different types of language use and different social contexts introduce yet further layers of complications which should be discussed in a proper grammatical treatment (Yakpo’s Pichi grammar is particularly good on this.) In their usual social setting, creole speakers routinely do much more of this height-adjustment stuff than even sophisticated polyglot speakers of European languages showing off their cosmopolitanism: it’s part of the very core competence of being a normal creole speaker.
By chance, Mark LIberman linked yesterday to a paper that he co-authored on the difficulty of predicting the correct stress of complex English noun + noun expressions:
https://aclanthology.org/P87-1020.pdf
(The extreme simplicity of English is, as John McWhorter reminds us, a result of its semicreolisation way back when …)
@DE, I mentioned diglossia, because replacing one category with another is not what Nichols meant and I have an example of “addition” right before my eyes: what Russian shares with literary European (more common in bookish language) versus uniquely Russian stuff. But if we count this as “complexity”, diglossic systems (Ferguson’s trio) are ahead of English and Russian – and it would be absurd NOT to include literary French in creole.
Regarding Songhay, yes, I thought about Tadaksahak and not only. Khalid mentions Romani, which must be impressive as well (and is dear to a Russian heart).
an example of “addition” right before my eyes
I’ve read somewhere that the Russian participle system is basically borrowed from Church Slavonic (as, of course, is a great deal of the more hifalutin Russian vocabulary.)
I’ve read somewhere that the present active participle is such a borrowing (and indeed its щ renders it suspect); the other three (present passive, past active, past passive) were implied to be native.
I never studied the history of Russian systematically, so what I heard:
-shch- replaced -ch- in present active (cf. adjective letuchij “flying”)
– otherwise forms are present in Old Russian, but I don’t know if they leaked from Slavonic
– also Old Russian has -l participles, particularly in perfect
– I know little about the history of the function, but it is plausible that Slavonic texts imposed it…
– currently, they are associated with the literary and technical registers.
Old Russian has -l participles
So does modern Russian, except you call them the past tense.
Так говорил Заратустра !
Thought for the day: in his essay Bilse und ich, Thomas Mann refers to Nietzsche as an Erkenntnis-Lyriker.
The participles themselves are inherited from Proto-Slavic, only (as drasvi said) the inherited present active participle had -ch-, which was replaced by -shch- under Church Slavonic influence. Much of the literary use of the participles also is due to Church Slavonic influence, which itself had probably expanded their use under Koine Greek influence.
@ JC: The l-formation doesn’t function as a participle anymore in modern Russian; except for some l-formations that have become adjectives, they cannot be used as attributes or predicatively, only for the formation of the past tense and conditional paradigms.
Of the other participles, outside of very literary language, the main function of the present passive participle is now as gerundivum and as adjective meaning “X-able”. The other three still do what it says on the tin.
Much of the literary use of the participles also is due to Church Slavonic influence
I think that is what I was confusedly trying to remember.
@DE, -ch- / -shch- thing is more famous.
As for “literary”, you easily can distinguish between very bookish English passive and very childish English passive. But can you easily tell when and where from each usage came?
Such facts about langauge are somewhat less famous.
У тебя охуелый вид…
It’s the beard. I grew it to inspire fear.
@JC, I meant it could be a participle rather than “just the Slavic perfect”.
But I am not sure.
Just found a paper (in Russian) with the very same hyphothesis (I expected professionals to know for sure…): https://arxiv.gaugn.ru/10.31857-s0373658x0009346-9/
@drasvi: So Old Russian was similar to Old Church Slavonic in that the l-participle still functioned as a participle.
The Russian past tense obviously derives from a participle: the agreement by gender and not by person is, by itself, pretty conclusive in the context of an Indo-European language. However, derivation (though interesting) cannot tell you what the form currently means: only synchronic analysis can do that. If it walks like a verb form and quacks like a verb form, it’s a verb form.
Western Oti-Volta verb imperfective forms probably originated as a sort of “participle” used predicatively; they are usually segmentally identical to the corresponding deverbal agent nouns, though verbal forms show extensive levelling absent in the nominal derivatives. Verb flexion in other Oti-Volta branches (apart from Buli, which has done away with it altogether) is much more complicated, so it does look like the system got radically revamped and simplified in WOV: just as Russian has developed an admirably simple past tense form, compared with (say) Old Church Slavonic.
” So Old Russian was similar to Old Church Slavonic in that the l-participle still functioned as a participle.”
@Hans, did it?
Sorry, my “also Old Russian has -l participles, particularly in [the] perfect” is a clumsy formulation, but I was a bit ох**вшим (here: tired, exhausted) when I typed it.
My “also” implies some difference between OR and OCS. I do intuitively suspect a certain difference (especially if OSC is understood specifically as the language of early religious books) but I don’t know both OR and OCS well enough.
The perfect is of course present in Slavonic books.
охуеть is when surprise, astonishment or shock, or agitation and urgency, or exhaustion make it difficult to think. The corresponding look is either when somoene’s jaw literally is dropped or when she runs in your room, her face red because she has been running for a while, her eyes looking wildly and yells : “where is my pair of gloves!? Where is my fan?!” or when someone is exhausted.
The point is that those participle are still productive with verbs that mean “to become something”. Maybe because such verbs themselves are close to nouns.
A stative verb means “to be X”. I big, you big, she bigs! What about “to become X”? Does not “I have become X” mean “I am X [with past history of being Y]”?
Fair enough.
Oh, fascinating.
The point is that those participle are still productive with verbs that mean “to become something”. Maybe because such verbs themselves are close to nouns.
A stative verb means “to be X”. I big, you big, she bigs! What about “to become X”? Does not “I have become X” mean “I am X [with past history of being Y]”?
The question is whether these are (1) productive (so you can form them from every verb in that class) and (2) whether they are true participles or just verb-based adjectives. I must admit that I had taken forms like охуелый, загорелый, бывалый, зрелый, спелый etc., as lexicalised remnants of the old participal use. As an example, I can find обалделый on the internet, but not e.g. офигелый; so is this just a productive type of adjective or a real participle, which should be formable from every verb? And (2) can you use it to form participal clauses like сидящего в тюрме вора обокрали / прочитавшему три книги профессору дали четвертую / построенное коллективом здание разрушил президент etc.?
I’m asking because that’s something that didn’t came up in the grammar lessons, and my exposure to Russian didn’t leave me with the impression that the l-forms are true participles.
my exposure to Russian didn’t leave me with the impression that the l-forms are true participles.
They’re not, of course; that’s just historical background.
Well, it looks like drasvi is arguing otherwise at least for a subset of them, if understand him correctly. That made me curious.
Yes, he seems to be, but I’m not sure if he’s just being contrarian or what his arguments are.
@LH, I think it is an empty question, what part of speech something “is”. In Berber they prefer not to intoroduce such a class at all and speak of verbs (like big-3sg) and nouns but Ghomara borrowed Arabic (and even some Spanish) adjectives, moved the few berber ones from a class marked for person and number to a class with gender and number – as the author prefers to use the term. But it is just for linguist’s convenience…They are handy labels that help us talk about langauge, but when we need to discuss reality, we soon need something more detailed.
I think the important detail is that such forms exist for a very special class of verbs “to become X” intimately related to what we usually designate by nouns or adjectives. Офонарелый works because офонареть contains a фонарь just as big-3sg contains reference to size/age.
уставать – я устал [- усталый вид, уставший человек] simply are not related to each other as
пить – я пил
(but compare perfective: я сегодня выпил, a circumlocution for “I am drunk, but you know, not as in “drunk”, I just met Vasya and then we сходили за второй and you know how it happens” and я выпимши (cf. the now dialectal plusquamperfect он был пришед for the usage. For the form -мши, I think it was in use in Moscow in past:))
And we don’t say *пивалый “someone experienced in drinking” (like бывалый) or *пилый.
As for history, we need examples. Without examples, reconstrcuting the Proto-Slavic meaning from their use in OCS and OR and modern Russian and Czech and the fact that they did not have case forms in OR time is hardly very trivial matter.
“Well, it looks like drasvi is arguing otherwise at least for a subset of them, if understand him correctly”
The article referenced above is a wonderful collection of my suspicions:) But I am indifferent to POS calssification as such. I just wanted to draw attention to офонарелый etc.
“contrarian”
I did not know that what I said is contrary to someone’s views:((((
It’s contrary to every other description of Russian, which calls the l-forms past tenses, not participles.
drasvi, “contrarian” means something like “taking a different position just to be different”. It implies that there is some “generally held position” from which the contrarian deviates without good reasons, or without making these clear.
It resembles the accusation “revisionist”, with deviation from an official dogma replaced by deviation from what people know who are generally accepted as being in the know.
It doesn’t necessarily mean there is a particular “someone” whose views you have opposed. Mainly it’s a supposedly polite way of saying “his/her arguments don’t make sense to me”. It stops just short of saying “he/she is crazy”.
All you McWhorter-skeptics out there may be interested to know that yesterday I decided to have lunch in the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, N.J. and while I was walking from the train station to the restaurant I noticed that McWhorter Street has recently been “co-named” (I think that’s the bureaucratic jargon when they add a new street sign without removing the old one) Dr. Carlos M. Campos Way. Maybe Dr. Campos has more congenial and nuanced views about creoles?
Unfortunately it appears after googling that his doctorate was merely in medicine rather than linguistics (he was a refugee from Communist Cuba who maintained a medical practice in the neighborhood for more than four decades), so perhaps not. And then it turns out that McWhorter St. itself may not have been named after the Creole theoretician but (with a variant spelling) an earlier fellow whose doctorate was an honorary one in divinity and whose connection if any to the creole-theorist is unknown to me, although I imagine he was solidly Calvinistic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_MacWhorter
@LH, no, I said that -l forms could function as participles in OR, but I’m not sure.
And I said that with certain verbs they* are still productive.
I did not express any opinion on how you should call what other than “хоть горшком назови”:(
P.S. aha, sorry. I said, “those participles” are still productive. I mean, there is still exchange between the verb as such and attributive forms like охуелый and not by means of derivation. Also they converge in the predicative position: you can’t really tell if я устал is based on *я усталый or on the verb уставать.
Anyway, the news here is: still are productive with a certain soft of verbs, and not any particular label for them.
“Productive” means “can be formed to any member of that class, no matter if you’ve ever even heard the resulting forms before”. Is that what you mean?
In Standard German, the present active participle is fully productive; in my dialect it’s limited to a handful of words that should be regarded as fully lexicalized adjectives…
@drasvi: I have no problem with accepting that the l-forms are productive as adjectives formed from a certain group of verbs. On the other hand, I care about labels, because calling something e.g. a participle says something about what kind of behaviour you can expect from them in a specific language.
I just meant, I wanted to share a modern form, and I am not interested in imposing any labels. Or arguing about them. If “every other description” calls охуелый “past tense”, it is LH’s problem.
For the level of detail that we need – and for a few levels above – parts of speech are too crude. But they are good for interlinear glosses (for telling someone how a phrase in some langauge is structured) and for naming chapters in your grammar:)
But parts of speech sometimes provoce arguments about what POS some word is. People waste a lot of time and energy without realising that the word shares some properties with this part of speech, some other properties with that part of speech and the whole argument is lacking any substance. This is why my frightened reaction and “хоть горшком назови, только в печку не ставь”.
I agree that it is convenient to understand labels in the same way.
охуелый
Nobody is proposing to call it a “past tense.” As far as I can make out, it’s a survival of a formerly adjectival use of a form which is now simply the current past tense in Russian. There would only be a classificatory difficulty if every Russian form of this shape was regularly used as a noun modifier (at most, with a few exceptions.) Calling охуелый “past” is not merely a quirky use of nonstandard terms: it’s outright wrong, because it labels things which are quite different as being the same. It’s an error whatever term you adopt: this is about correctly accounting for the facts of language usage, not about terminology.
The historical origin of a form can’t tell you what its grammar is in the modern language.
If “every other description” calls охуелый “past tense”, it is LH’s problem.
That’s not what I was saying. You seemed to be talking about the -l form in general, of which охуелый and the like are just an interesting offshoot. Or what DE said.
I agree that it is convenient to understand labels in the same way
Convenient ? It is necessary to use labels in the same way.
Otherwise people get confused and annoyed. “Understanding” is much farther down the road, and may not be reached before nightfall.
It is _necessary_ to _use_ labels in the same way.
Alas, in descriptive and comparative linguistics it is impossible to use labels in the same way. We need labels for comparative concepts, which have to have universal (if narrow) definitions so that we can compare languages. But we also need labels for descriptive concepts, which are necessarily language-specific to some extent, because Not Chomsky. And we do not have a whole extra vocabulary to spare.
Haspelmath capitalizes descriptive terms, so he can say things like this: In English, stative verbs express the present tense (comparative concept) with the Simple Present (descriptive concept), but other verbs express the present tense using the Present Progressive (another descriptive concept). In German, the present tense is expressed by the Present Tense, but so is the future tense, at least sometimes.
Haspelmath’s solution looks like a good approach to me.
@LH, I was making general claims only about Old Russian -l forms. Old Russian perfect is called “perfect” (because there were also aorist and imperfect) and the -l form is usually called “participle”.
WP:
Перфект обозначал прошедшее действие, сохраняющее актуальность на момент высказывания. Образовывался добавлением вспомогательного глагола ѥсмь (в нужном числе и лице) к краткому причастию на -л (согласованному с подлежащим в роде, числе и падеже).
I also made a claim about modern Russian form охуелый.
Ah, I didn’t realize you were only talking about Old Russian — thanks for the clarification.
Alas, in descriptive and comparative linguistics it is impossible to use labels in the same way.
You then immediately contradict yourself, by describing the way Haspelmath does it. Hans thinks that is “a good approach”, so he too is amenable to that same way.
# Haspelmath capitalizes descriptive terms, so he can say things like this: In English, stative verbs express the present tense (comparative concept) with the Simple Present (descriptive concept), but other verbs express the present tense using the Present Progressive (another descriptive concept). In German, the present tense is expressed by the Present Tense, but so is the future tense, at least sometimes. #
There is the Haspelmath way, and there are others.
After all, I did not claim that a “label” must always mean one thing, and always the same thing. I said they must always be used in the same way. In given contexts, natch. Different contexts, different ways.
In reasoned argument, you don’t convince by just throwing words around like Pollock threw paint. In fact he dribbled too, for variety.
Speaking about funny modern Russian participles.
Children massively form -t participles. Поломатая is the usual childish for поломанная (happens to sticks, toys…)
That’s really interesting. Aren’t they very rare otherwise?
On the other hand, I find it hard to be enthused by constructions like Sindarin: OK, it’s got initial consonant mutations, but aren’t the real-life ones in Welsh more interesting? You can be surprised by strange exceptions that cry out for explanation in Welsh … but not in Sindarin.
Well, hoom, hom, hoom, hom ….
I don’t have my copy of Gateway to Sindarin here, but the mutations (there are medial ones too) although Tolkien never explains anything about the initial consonant mutations, we have reconstructed that there are five and a half of them (soft, nasal, mixed, stop, liquid, and nasal-stop), which is more than any Celtic language has. We also know exactly what sound mutates to what with the exception of hw; however, there is known to be a chw in the language and this may be its soft mutation.
In any case, the initial mutations (there are medial ones too) are grammaticalized and exceptionless, but that is definitely not true of the five kinds of i-affection (umlaut to us Germanics), a-affection, and I think u-affection as well. For example, thint ‘short’ < Old Sindarin stʰentʰa by a-affection, but in the compound ann-thennath ‘name of an Elvish poetic mode, lit. long-shorts’ there is no affection visible. Why? Mistah Tolkien, he dead. (Unless I have made a balls of it here, but there is definitely an irregularity.)
Similarly, there is no explanation Salo can find for the varieties of Sindarin plurals: Adan, edain ‘Man, Men’ by i-affection — which is more interesting than Germanic umlaut because it alters every vowel in the singular form, and in particular treats the final syllable differently from the rest even though the stress is on the penultimate. Then we have the suffix plurals, none of which are so common as -au, and the singulatives, most of which end in -od (again for no known reason) but not all (ditto).
Lastly, there is the collective plural suffix -ath as in sg. perian, pl. periain, coll. pl. periannath (the OS form was *periand, which accounts for the -nn-), as well as the derogative collective plural -oth, as in orch ‘orc’, pl. yrch (y = /y/), derog. coll. pl. orchoth. You can tell how an Elf feels about the Dwarves by whether they say Nogothath or Nogothoth, no doubt, but the usual collective plural is Nogothrim, which means ‘Dwarf-host, a lot of Dwarves but less than all of them’, and likewise Onodrim ‘a lot of Ents’, though I suppose ‘a lot of Ents’ and ‘all the Ents there are left’ are pretty close to being the same group….
In short, Tolkien may have been making it up, but Salo and Fauskanger and Hostetter and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all are definitely doing historical linguistics, the point being that with Sindarin (and still more with Quenya, where there is a lot more data), there is linguistics to actually do.
the initial mutations (there are medial ones too) are grammaticalized and exceptionless
(My emphasis, as the saying goes.)
Exactly! A poor mutation system, that! Exceptionless, forsooth!
(Welsh has a mere four distinct sets of initial mutations, even if one also cheats by counting “mixed” as one.)
Your Tolcyn-leorning is vastly greater than mine, but the vowel affections, and plural formations in general, seem to be rather simpler than Welsh. In general it looks fairly evidently
copied frominspired by Welsh, not so much in general but in detail (e.g. ederyn “bird”, plural adar.)I concede that T was much better at this than most, though. But I agree with JWB above that the work of even an individual of glottopoeic genius cannot hold a candle to a (real, living) community effort when it comes to language creation.
@January First-of-May “[EDIT: maybe an even better example is borrowed phonemes, but offhand I can’t think of any well-attested cases of borrowed phonemes in languages that English-speaking linguists would have heard of.]”
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Is not English /ž/ as in beige and lingerie a phoneme borrowed from French? Or do you consider the borrowings to be French beige and lingerie and English /ž/ is merely the result of such borrowings?
(Of course,English / ž/ came about in other ways too, but I am concerned here with just /ž/ in English words the immediate etymons of which are French words having that phoneme.)
@DM, I never looked at it from this angle until yesterday:-/
But there are particples like понятый (and the whole family of -им-/-я- verbs like поднятый, нанятый, вынутый, занятый…) and also пить мыть вить мять тронуть переть молоть колоть etc.
Some of those are frequent.
And then there is a suffix in горбатый, волосатый etc (more or less the same as Latin -at- or -udo in barbudo). It is very noticeable. I don’t think about those forms as just forms which I can’t analyse as I speak, I notice the suffix and I associate certain emotions with this suffix. It is funny.
борода barba – бородат barbatus.
Maybe Spanish speakers feel the same about their suffixes.
Maybe it affects children too.
Without French borrowings it may have remained /zj/ on the phonemic level, I think.