Tom Stevenson writes in the LRB (archived) about an ongoing project of decipherment:
Decipherments of ancient scripts are often attributed, and sometimes misattributed, to individual scholars: Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They were also endeavours tinged with madness. How else could anyone persist with such fiendishly difficult work? The 11th-century Arabic text on decipherment, The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowledge of Written Symbols, grasped something of this fact. Decipherment has attracted more than its fair share of formidable scholars, enthusiastic amateurs and crackpots, all seeking connection with a lost past, or the power to make obscure symbols speak. Who wouldn’t want to be woken in the middle of the night, as Simon Kimmins was by his flatmate Ventris, and asked whether they would like to be ‘the second person in four thousand years to read this script’?
In July 2022, the French scholar François Desset and a team of co-authors published what they claimed was proof of a decipherment of Linear Elamite, a writing system used on the Iranian plateau around four thousand years ago. The paper appeared in the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie, one of the leading Assyriology journals. Linear Elamite had eluded understanding ever since its discovery by archaeologists at the site of Susa in south-west Iran in 1903. It can’t match the significance of cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs, but it is one of the oldest known forms of writing in the world. Decades of sporadic efforts at decipherment had yielded little progress. Scholars had tried and some had contributed important work (Desset’s paper was dedicated to the ‘great pioneers who paved the way’). But before 2018, phonemic values had been proposed for just twelve signs. […]
Linear Elamite writing was used at least from the reign of King Puzur-Shushinak, shortly after the collapse of the Akkadian empire around 2150 bce, until the reign of Pala-ishan around 1880 bce. It appears carved into monuments, engraved on metal objects and, like cuneiform and the Proto-Elamite writing that appeared before it, inscribed on clay. Around half of all existing texts were discovered by French archaeologists after the creation in 1897 of the Délégation scientifique française en Perse. The geologist and colonial tin miner Jacques de Morgan led a fifteen-year excavation at Susa involving a thousand workers in search of the origins of civilisation. […]
The Mayanist Michael Coe used to say that three things are necessary to decipher ancient writing. You need lots of examples of the script. You need a good understanding of the cultural context of the writing system. And, most important, you need a bilingual, or better a trilingual, inscription of a known writing system – a Rosetta stone, Ganjnameh or Behistun inscription carved on the orders of a helpful long dead monarch. On first pass, Linear Elamite was lacking all of these conditions. The known corpus is made up of around forty inscriptions (compared with hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets). Knowledge of the history and culture of Elam, and of the Elamite language, is patchy at best. There are a small number of objects inscribed with both Linear Elamite and Akkadian cuneiform, but maddeningly the texts are not translations of one another. It is easy to see why François Desset, who began his attempts at deciphering Linear Elamite inscriptions in 2006, made no progress at all for eleven years.
I met Desset last year in his apartment in Angers, which is decorated with miniatures depicting scenes from the Shahnameh. He told me that he had never expected to decipher an ancient script, and that his discoveries had been a matter of chance as much as anything. Desset did his PhD in archaeology at the Sorbonne under Serge Cleuziou, one of the founding fathers of Arabian archaeology, and studied Akkadian under Dominique Charpin, now the chair of Mesopotamian studies at the Collège de France. At first, like most students of the ancient near east, he wanted to work on Mesopotamia. The 2003 invasion of Iraq put paid to that. At Cleuziou’s suggestion he turned instead to Iran and contacted Jean Perrot, the last head of the French excavations at Susa before the Iranian revolution. By then in his eighties, Perrot immediately arranged a place for him at a new excavation in Jiroft in eastern Iran. The 2006 season would be the beginning of more than a decade of work on Elam and ancient Iran. When not away on digs, or teaching in Tehran, he was trying – and failing – to decipher Linear Elamite.
It was in Tehran in the spring of 2017 that Desset finally made a breakthrough. But the key to the decipherment came not from Tehran, or even the Louvre. It came from a set of mysterious silver vessels in a private collection in London. In 2004, the Mahboubian family, descendants of an early Iranian excavator and inheritors of a sizeable collection of ancient art of dubious provenance, had published three photographs of silver beakers, known as kunanki, displaying Linear Elamite inscriptions. Like everyone else interested in the subject, Desset assumed that the objects were probably modern forgeries. Unlike other scholars, however, he wanted to see them for himself. In 2011 he gave a presentation in Cambridge on the lack of development in the decipherment of Linear Elamite. Afterwards, the keeper of the Middle East department at the British Museum, John Curtis, mentioned that he knew the Mahboubian family and could make an introduction. It took four years of cajoling but eventually the family agreed to withdraw the silver vessels from a safe deposit box for Desset to examine.
Desset is adamant that without the silver kunanki the decipherment would have been impossible. Photographs published by the Mahboubians in 2004 displayed only one side of each object, but the inscriptions wrap around the vessels. Seeing them in person, Desset had access to more Linear Elamite inscriptions than any previous scholar. Even then he wasn’t sure if the longer inscriptions would help, or whether the silver vessels were genuine. He took new photographs and returned to Iran. ‘In 2017, in my flat in Tehran, I was playing with the inscriptions and I noticed a specific sequence of four signs,’ he told me. ‘In each case the third and fourth signs were the same.’ The first sign in the sequence was believed by earlier scholars to be the sign for the syllable ‘Shi’. Desset hypothesised that if the repeating third and fourth sign were the syllable ‘Ha’, the sequence might be the name of the Elamite ruler Shilhaha. Within minutes, by fitting the signs for ‘Ha’ and the consonant L into other inscriptions, he was able to see the familiar names of gods and kings jumping out of the text. Napirisha. Eparti. Theonyms and royal anthroponyms are often the first steps in decipherment, as they were here. ‘I had been working on this for eleven years, and it was a very exciting moment,’ Desset said. ‘I think once you live that kind of moment, everything else can only be boring and tasteless.’ […]
Perhaps the most striking feature of the decipherment is that, if Desset is correct, Linear Elamite is a phonographic writing system, consisting entirely of signs representing phonemes. Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs started out as logogrammatic writing systems, in which the signs record words rather than sounds. Over time they acquired syllabic signs, but they retained logograms and determinatives, which help indicate the semantic class (gods, buildings, professions) to which polyvalent signs belong. Desset’s proposed interpretation of Linear Elamite signs includes five vowels, twelve consonants, sixty consonant-vowel (CV) syllables, and no logograms. He and his co-authors claim to have identified 72 of the 77 hypothesised signs of the writing system, which account for 96 per cent of the sign occurrences in the Linear Elamite corpus. Four signs, which may correspond to the gaps in Desset’s phonetic grid, remain to be deciphered, as do thirty or so hapax legomena (isolated instances), which he believes may be chronological or geographical variants. Remarkably, one Linear Elamite object, known as text M, appears to record a fragmentary copy of the phonetic grid, with vowels on one axis, consonants at the other, and CV syllables cross-referenced for scribes in training. […]
The vast majority of Linear Elamite signs can now be read, but understanding the text is a different matter. Elamite, like Sumerian, is a language isolate and, unlike Ancient Egyptian, it has no surviving descendant. The two main reference materials for the Elamite language are Friedrich Wilhelm König’s Die elamischen Königsinschriften (1965) and Walther Hinz and Heidemarie Koch’s Elamisches Wörterbuch (1987), which is based on Achaemenid inscriptions written in the Elamite language more than a thousand years after the Linear Elamite texts. To make matters worse, the Achaemenid inscriptions were written in cuneiform, which only records four vowels, equivalent to A, E, I and U, whereas the decipherment of Linear Elamite writing suggests that the Elamite language also included an O vowel. As a result, knowledge of the Elamite language remains imperfect. The inscriptions found in the east of Iran in particular are very difficult to understand. Linear Elamite is not, like Etruscan, a chantier linguistique, which can be pronounced yet not read, but there’s a lot about Elamite syntax, grammar and phonology that remains unknown. […]
Desset argues that one thing the Linear Elamite texts reveal is that the concept of ‘Elam’ was a Mesopotamian construct, similar to the European notion of ‘the Orient’. The ancient inhabitants of the Iranian plateau may have thought of themselves as belonging to an Elamite-speaking (or, as they would have had it, Hatamtite-speaking) cultural world, but not to a country called Elam. The city of Anshan, he believes, was called Anzan by the people who lived there. The Linear Elamite inscriptions also appear to extend the range of the Elamite-speaking world as far east as Kerman in south-east Iran. In addition, Desset believes he has discovered a new Elamite title, hatpak, meaning governor. At first, Puzur-Shushinak used the title Hatpak of Susa, then ‘Shepk’ of the people of Hatamti, and finally Zemt, or king, of Awan. It was previously thought that Awan was a place in Elam, but based on the Linear Elamite inscriptions Desset believes that ‘Awa’ was the word for mother and Awan may mean something like ‘motherland’.
There’s plenty more, including a long discussion of “the significance of geographic Iran to the history of writing” (Desset claims that Linear Elamite is the world’s earliest purely phonetic writing system) and a “stinging critique” by Jacob Dahl, professor of Assyriology at Oxford (I suspect he is the “scholar in the field” I quoted here a few years ago), but I think I’ve dangled enough bait to interest anyone who might be interested.
“The 11th-century Arabic text on decipherment, The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowlege of Written Symbols …”
Comment is superfluous. Indeed, probably unwise. Iä! Iä!
Unfortunately, the corpus of Linear Elamite sounds even more boring than the corpus of Linear B. But then, that’s not really the point, I suppose. In either case.
I imagine that a lot depends on the degree to which Cuneiform Elamite can shed light on the language of these few texts. It’d be nice to see more details about that. How close are they (or not)?
It’s the only language I know of apart from Nahuatl that compulsorily marks all nouns for the person of the referent. (Iroquoian languages do it a bit, but not so systematically.) This is bizarrely called a “noun class” system in WP.
I wish there was more accessible material about the language.
I forgot to mention that we discussed Knorozov in 2021.
It’s a bit off-putting that the article lead-in implies that a tinge of madness is an expected attribute of successful decipherers (I don’t think the evidence actually supports this claim, unless your definition of “madness” encompasses pretty much everything except pursuing a career in accountancy. I don’t think this accords with the latest edition of the DSM.)
A pre-emptive strike?
“Elamite, like Sumerian, is a language isolate and, unlike Ancient Egyptian, it has no surviving descendant.”
I doubt anyone interviewed for the story could possibly believe that there exist today languages descending from Ancient Egyptian. My guess is that reference was made by one of the experts interviewed to “ATTESTED descendent languages of Ancient Egyptian” (i.e. the various known varieties of Coptic) and that Tom Stevenson assumed that these “later languages” are spoken today.
Yes, I noticed that, and attributed it to journogarbling too. I thought the article was not bad of its kind, generally speaking, though. (Hat has rightly warned us against unrealistic expectations.) Close enough that you can mostly reconstruct the original …
compulsorily marks all nouns for the person of the referent
It isn’t clear to me what you mean. Something like Suffixaufnahme? Or Uto-Aztecan obligatory possessed nouns?
(I at first mistyped “possessed nuns”. I was tempted to leave it, but this is not a hypothetical ’60s/’70s horror movie blog.)
Depends on what you mean by “surviving.” No one currently alive is an L1 Coptic speaker, but I believe there are still monasteries where services are held in Coptic every day of the year. The monks may not chat in Coptic about other topics, but I imagine (with plenty of repetition and a lot of context) they mostly understand what they are reading or hearing.
Technically, there are one or two people raised by zealous revivalists who have a tenable claim to be L1 speakers of Coptic, even if their accent would surprise their remote ancestors.
The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowlege of Written Symbols …”
is (implausibly) traditionally attributed to Ibn Wahshiyyah, as Lovecraftian a character as early Arabic literature can offer – an enthusiastic sorcerer fascinated by ancient and (religiously) forbidden lore.
@Y::
No: that’s why I said “of the referent.”
In Classical Nahuatl (for example):
In niMoteuczoma ca Mexico nitlatoani.
IN 1Sg.Montezuma CA Mexico 1Sg.speaker
“I, Montezuma, am ruler in Mexico.”
Tlatoani “speaker” with a zero prefix can only be third person. It obligatorily takes a first-person prefix here because it refers to the speaker.
This example is from Launey, who explains it but doesn’t harp on it; Andrews’ grammar, on the other hand, makes it a really central feature of his whole presentation, and would parse nitlatoani as an embedded clause “I am a speaker.” Because marking like this really is mandatory in Nahuatl, he (logically if annoyingly) translates tlatoani not as “speaker” but as “(s)he is a speaker” and likewise e.g. xochitl not as “flower” but “it is a flower.”
This gets rather irritating, but as an analysis of how the language actually operates, it all works out very neatly. Launey doesn’t threep it doon yer thrapples in the same way in his grammar, but he agreed with the analysis: he described Nahuatl as “omnipredicative”, and wrote a whole treatise about the phenomenon.
I’m not myself convinced about the idea that all (Classical) Nahuatl nouns are really one-place predicates, but it’s all true about compulsory person-marking for the person of the noun referent itself. (Nahuatl inflects for person of possessors too, but that is a separate thing again.)
@DE: interesting. At first glance, my guess is that both Launey’s and Andrews’ analyses don’t explore the issue far enough, but I haven’t studied them (and Andrews is not easy reading). I see there’s a thesis by Sasaki, on this very subject, which even (p. 53) compares the Nahuatl construction to the Elamite one.
Interesting paper. Reassuring to see that an actual expert shares my misgivings about the “omnipredicative” analysis.
Andrews got distinctly crankier latterly. The second edition of his grammar is definitely worse than the first. More snide remarks about predecessors, and an even more idiosyncratic presentation. (All nouns are cited by default with two zero-morph prefixes …)
Having said that, Nahuatl really is unusual syntactically in a very interesting way (quite apart from being a poster child for polysynthesis, of course.)
Launey’s teaching grammar is much more straightforward to read than Andrews’. There’s an English translation, though it’s not always accurate; it misses out the Appendix on modern Nahuatl, but that’s probably not a great loss, TBH. Better accounts of the various modern languages elsewhere.
Andrews and Launey never cite each other at all (despite essentially similar views of the language itself.) Makes you wonder …
Noun conjugation. Links to previous discussion in the next comment after that; omnipredicativity is featured, along with the Cuneiform Elamite word for “king” which is hardly compatible with zemt, but that doesn’t need to mean much.
Well. To be able to discover anything new in science most generally, you must be able to consider it seriously possible that you are the first person ever to get something right and that everybody else, all the greatest minds and most knowledgeable scholars, has been wrong. If you overdo that just a little, you become a crackpot. If you underdo it, all you can do is write review papers that just present the consensus or lack thereof. (Or teach, but I really wouldn’t recommend that.)
To be able to discover anything new in science most generally, you must be able to consider it seriously possible that you are the first person ever to get something right and that everybody else, all the greatest minds and most knowledgeable scholars, has been wrong.
Or they haven’t considered the particular thing you’re considering, maybe because they didn’t know about it or they were busy with other things. Or somewhere in between.
If you overdo that just a little, you become a crackpot. If you underdo it, all you can do is write review papers that just present the consensus or lack thereof. (Or teach, but I really wouldn’t recommend that.)
It’s not that bad.
I can’t imagine thinking the corpus of Linear B is “boring”, but I’m a historian and not a linguist.
It’s not boring linguistically, of course, but the content is boring in literary terms (compared to, say, Gilgamesh).
the first person ever to get something right
When a brand new giant comes on the scene, hosts of normies can clamber onto his/her shoulders and puny Balboa can stout Cortez. Dirac said the 1920s was a time in physics when ‘when second-rate men did first-rate work’. Google Books made antedating OED2 a game the whole family can play.
I recall a aside in some Iris Murdoch novel about the melancholy realization that one is the world authority on this or that topic, that there is no longer anybody to ask, that it’s just you now… but now I can’t find it again.
Yes, but you can’t seriously countenance any of these possibilities if your imposter syndrome is too bad.
I did exaggerate in the other direction, somewhat: if you overdo it only a little, and you have tenure, and you’re “the only man capable of strutting while sitting down” like Henry Fairfield Osborn, then you become a celebrated authority nobody disagrees with as long as you live. Your works might not get cited much afterwards, though.
It’s not boring linguistically, of course, but the content is boring in literary terms (compared to, say, Gilgamesh).
The vast majority of the Linear B corpus sounds a lot like the (AFAIK actually also fairly representative of the plurality of the corresponding corpus) Novgorod birch bark letter #2: “at Foma 3 martens, at Mika 2 martens, in Gugmor a marten…”
Of course there’s a lot of birch bark letters that are actually personal letters and I’m not sure if there’s anything like that in the Linear B corpus. But there’s nothing in the birch bark letters remotely comparable to Gilgamesh (or indeed to Igor’s Campaign) either.
David E.: It’s the only language I know of apart from Nahuatl that compulsorily marks all nouns for the person of the referent. (Iroquoian languages do it a bit, but not so systematically.) This is bizarrely called a “noun class” system in WP.
Seeing the Elamite examples I wanted to call it a suffixed copula conjugated for the person of the referent. The logical consequence of that is that each constituent is its own verb phrase. I suppose that is what the Nahuatl description says too.
Classical Nahuatl sentences with nouns marked for first/second person are, for readily understandable pragmatic reasons, fairly uncommon, except where such nouns are in fact being used themselves as main clauses in their own right. And although it is possible to have e.g.
Nitlacatl.
1Sg.Person
“I am a person.”
in fact, this is usually expressed as
Ca nitlacatl.
where ca is not a verb but a kind of focus particle.
Now, the problem is that the third-person prefix is a zero morph, so “(s)he is a person” is
“Ca tlacatl.”
It’s reasonable to posit a zero morph here, because this necessarily contrasts with the forms needed for 1st or 2nd person reference.
Now you can interpret the single word
Tlacatl.
as a complete utterance “he/she/it is a person” but this seems really only to occur in unusual discourse contexts like dictionary entries (according to Launey.)
So it seems unparsimonious to interpret every instance of tlacatl where it is serving as the argument of a main verb as an embedded clause, especially as first- and second-person-marked nouns are quite uncommon in such contexts.
Doing so has the theoretical advantage of reducing all such dependency relationships to a single pattern; and because Nahuatl is polysynthetic, it readily lends itself to an analysis where the person markers in verb words are themselves the verb arguments, not agreement markers, so explicit subject or object nouns are actually in apposition to the verb person markers. So taking these nouns as being propositions in their own right which just share argument references with the main verb all works out very neatly. It’s easy to see why this analysis appealed to Andrews and Launey.
This is bolstered by the fact that deverbal nouns are often (but not always) formally identical to verbal clauses: tlatoani “speaker” is identical in form to “(s)he habitually speaks.” And verbs, too, normally follow the ca particle when used as independent propositions.
However, verbs and nouns are clearly formally distinct categories in Nahuatl: there isn’t the kind of demarcation problem you can get with e.g. Salishan languages. And although Andrews (but not Launey) obsessively glosses every single example of a 3rd-person noun as a clause, thus xochitl as “it is a flower”, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that this is a highly artificial habit, adopted because of fairly abstruse theoretical assumptions. Andrews insists that this kind of paraphrase is necessary to avoid actually misconstruing the Nahuatl, but for the life of me I don’t see why.
(There are other technical problems with this “omnipredicative” analysis, too, which the paper linked by Y goes into.)
Andrews’ view (forcefully expressed) is that any feeling that his omnipredicative analysis is “unnatural” or forced only arises from the fact that the system is exotic from a SAE standpoint, and the language needs to be analysed on its own terms. One takes his point, but I think the disquiet one feels is not just a kind of SAE bigotry.
Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that you can equally well say in Classical Nahuatl (in marks a constituent as subordinate and/or definite, cihuatl is “woman”, tzatzi is the 3rd Sg present of “shout”):
Ca tzatzi in cihuatl.
“The woman is shouting.”
Ca cihuatl in tzatzi.
“It’s a woman who’s shouting.”
(Examples from Launey.)
That’s changing constituent order for emphasis.
Alternative analysis: The “bare verb” is an agent noun. The particle ca is an activator, or an “empty verb”, turning the agent nouns into a participle.
Is shouting, the woman.
Is being a woman, the shouter.
I may just be turning Japanese around.
Polysynthesis: Why noun when you can verb?
Bureaucratic German: Why verbiage in the face of the possibility of nouns?
That’s changing constituent order for emphasis
No, that also happens, and works differently (from Launey again):
In tzatzi ca cihuatl.
“The one who is shouting is a woman.”
Ca is not compulsory, especially with verbs, but even with nouns used as complete clauses; and verbs (unlike nouns) inflect for tense; there is no real problem separating nouns and verbs morphologically (Andrews thought there was, in his later crankier phase, but there really isn’t.) And many verbs have subjects which are not agents (the language has nominative-accusative alignment, and, in that respect at least, works much like English as far as potential subject roles are concerned. It doesn’t do weird stuff like Siouan there.)
Some more elaborate examples of non-third-person nouns from Launey:
Tlein ticcuazquê in ticnotlaca?
“What are we (who are) poor wretches supposed to eat?”
Yalhua amo onimitzittac in tiPedro.
“Yesterday I didn’t see you (you who are) Pedro.”
(2nd Sg and 1st Pl have the same person prefix, t(i)-, but they are disambiguated by the plural marking – or lack of it – on the noun or verb they’re attached to.)
How does “omnipredicativity” work with marked TAM? That seems like an obvious test. If a plain noun, used to answer “What was that?”, does not takes a past marker, then it is not look like a predicate. In other words, “It is a X” doesn’t work.
I think part of this is the slipperiness of the notion of zero morphs. I mean, contrasting
Ca ticihuatl.
“You’re a woman.”
and
Ca cihuatl.
“She’s a woman.”
it seems reasonable enough to posit a zero-morph third-person prefix in the second case. But the omnipredicative idea entails that cihuatl has an invisible third-person prefix always, including in a sentence like
Oniquittac in cihuatl.
“I saw the woman.”
This seems less plausible given that a sentence like
Onimitzittac in ticihuatl.
“I saw you, the woman.”
is relatively uncommon, and seems marked (though that could be an artefact of translating it into English, admittedly – one would need better evidence that it’s marked in Nahuatl.)
Also, it’s less clear in cases like xochitl “flower”, which are (nearly) always third person, that a permanent zero-prefix is the inevitable consequence of the fact that a clause like
Ca xochitl,
“It’s a flower.”
is grammatical, even, at a pinch, without the ca.
After all, in Iroquoian languages, perpetual person-marking of nouns is a thing, but only with human-reference nouns.
How does “omnipredicativity” work with marked TAM?
Nouns don’t mark tense; not even ones that look like, and are derived from tensed verb forms, like tlatoani: those too are tenseless once converted into nouns. As I said, there is no real difficulty separating Nahuatl nouns and verbs morphologically (there are other criteria too, like inflecting for possession.)
But I don’t think that can be used as a criterion for predicativity as you suggest. Lots of languages (Arabic, Russian) have nominal sentences, where a noun is a predicate, which lack the capacity for full TAM, and have to be recast as verbal sentences if you want to do that. Even a language like Bininj Gunwok, which has nominal tense, and in which you can say
Gorrogo al-wanjdjuk bininj-ni.
before CLASS-emu person-PAST
“Previously, Emu was a human being”
only permits a very reduced subset of TAM markers on nouns.
I do agree that compulsory marking of nouns for the person of the referent (for which the evidence seems pretty solid in Nahuatl) does not in itself prove that the language is omnipredicative; they’re logically separate phenomena. I’m sure there are languages without compulsory person marking in which a bare noun can function as a nominal clause with an implied third-person subject. In fact, now I think of it, you can omit the subject of a nominal sentence in Kolyma Yukagir (which has an actual predicative case):
Almelek. “He is/was a shaman (alme).”
There is actually one systematic exception to compulsory person-marking in Nahuatl, which is a kind of exception-proves-the-rule case in a way: vocatives, which differ according to whether the speaker is male or female, but in any case do not take a second person prefix:
Cihuatlé! “Woman!” (man speaking.)
Cihuátl! “Woman!” (woman speaking)
I suppose this is analogous to the cross-linguistically very common dropping of 2nd person Sg pronouns or flexions in direct commands. (Nahuatl commands change the usual ti- prefix to xi-.)
I suppose that if your language compulsorily marks person-of-the-referent on nouns, it’s going to make it easier and more natural to have constructions in which a bare noun can function as a complete nominal sentence: just as, the fact that Kolyma Yukaghir has a distinctive predicative case makes it easier for a noun in the predicative case to function as a complete nominal sentence in that language. Whereas English “Woman” makes no sense as an isolated declarative utterance: it could only really appear as something like an elliptical response to “Did you see a man or a woman?” It doesn’t contain enough information to be a properly self-standing utterance.
In fact, neither do the Nahuatl nor the Yukaghir: they both need to be set up in some way by the context. In particular, the Nahuatl seems normally to need a preceding ca to flag up that it’s intended as a main clause, unless the particular context (like appearing in a dictionary definition) can do the job instead.
Inflected verbs, on the other hand, can be preceded by main-clause-flagging ca, but very often aren’t, because they can make sense quite happily even if they’re not, given the polysynthetic character of Nahuatl, which ensures that any finite verb form already contains all the morphemes needed to represent the subject and any objects.
Interesting piece!
This is a strange comment from Desset, though:
He thinks much of the criticism is a function of a more general phenomenon: the tendency of Mesopotamian scholarship to look down on Elam. ‘Jacob Dahl is an example of a kind of person I call a Mesopotamiologist. He thinks Mesopotamia is the centre of the world and everything else is just the periphery. But I want to de-Mesopotamianise the history of the Near East.’
The biases in question may all be real, of course, but surely that’s more or less irrelevant to the question at hand. If Dahl is biased against Elam, and Desset is (by his own admission) biased for it, and we’re supposed to just dismiss any argument if it aligns with someone’s biases, where does that leave us?
Eh, I know the feeling. The Bantuist Mafia have been derailing Niger-Congo comparative study for years with their underhand plotting. (They whisper about me in Swahili among themselves BUT I CAN HEAR THEM! Oh yes.)
Looking in more detail through the Sasaki paper:
I see he goes for the null-copula analysis of things like (ca) tlacatl “it’s a person” and (ca) nitlacatl “I’m a person”, which seems very reasonable to me too.
However, I’m not sure that his own arguments are altogether persuasive, and his preferred solution that this is all “semantic marking” seems to be a bit of a cop-out to me.
A lot of the impetus for disputing the “ominipredicative” analysis seems to be that this would make Classical Nahuatl very unusual typologically, and although that does mean that one should not adopt such an analysis lightly, it seems a bad idea to make it evidence about the proper analysis of Nahuatl. Some languages just really are typologically very unusual, and it is not good practice to try to force them into a more familiar pattern.
Interesting that although sentences with first/second-person-marked nouns in apparent dependent roles are commoner in poetry in Classical Nahuatl, they are evidently not confined to high style, and even appear in some modern Nahuatl. So I was probably wrong in suggesting that they were highly “marked.”
I initially thought that Sasaki was on to a clincher with expressions like cueitl huipilli, literally “skirt blouse”, which is a standing expression for “woman” (Nahuatl does that sort of thing a lot.) If you want to apply this to a second person, you duly say
Ticueitl tihuipilli.
and it does (as Sasaki points out) seem hard to take this as two clauses “you are a skirt, you are a blouse”, especially as neither referent is even human.
But he also gives this sentence from a text:
Nican tica in ticuautli in tocelotl auh ye tehuatl in ticueitl in tihuipilli,
here you.are IN you.eagle IN you.jaguar and here you IN you.skirt IN you.blouse
“Here you are an eagle and jaguar (i.e. warrior) and here you are a skirt and blouse (i.e. woman.)”
The thing that strikes me about this is that the article/subordinator in appears before each part of the two difrasismos, so one has to accept that the meaning composition could after all transcend the fact that the two components are marked as separate constituents. The metaphor is not bound by the syntax: so I don’t think the incromulence of ticueitl “you are a skirt” in isolation is actually evidence that such words are not themselves propositions.
There’s some interesting stuff about quantifiers, but quantifiers are cross-linguistically weird and prone to “floating” out of NPs, so I’m not convinced by that.
Very interesting paper, though. But I’m not sure that question can be reduced to pure “facts” – it’s all bound up with too many analytical presuppostions, however hard one tries to break free of them.
The “article/subordinator” thing makes me itchy. Does that mean that it’s hard to tell wnat in is doing in this context(s)? If not, why not call it one or the other?
(I’m truly curious, and could try and figure it out myself, but I don’t have the time at the moment. N.B., Launey’s ca. 1600-page dissertation, Catégories et opérations dans la grammaire nahuatl (1986), is here.)
Yeah. It’s pretty vague even in Launey (Andrews is not as good on syntax as Launey, because he’s handicapped by his doctrine that the only real syntactic relationship between full words is what he calls “suppletion.”)
It seems relatively clear that in is subordinating, in the sense that it appears only before arguments and not before full words used as predicates in their own right. In that sense it’s kinda the opposite of ca.
When it occurs before a verb form, what you end up with effectively translates as a relative clause.
My guess is that the “definite article” interpretation may arise from the way information is structured in discourse: new material is obviously more likely to end up as (or in) a main predication, whereas old information is more likely to end up in subordinate predications (or whatever they are.) So it may be something of a translation artefact. On the other hand, your get constructions with a verb and noun where neither has in, so there must be other factors in play (topicalisation?)
But I haven’t seen any very lucid account of all this.
This really makes it look a lot like Elamite noun conjugation. Examples from last time:
sunkik “I, the king”
sunkit “you, the king”
sunkir “(someone else,) the king”
sunkip “(others, the) kings”
u sunkik Ḫatamtik “I, king of Elam”
u untaš-GAL šak ḫumpanummenake sunkik anzanšušunka
I Untas-大 son Ḫ.-1sg king-1sg Anzan-Susa-1sg
“I, the Great Untas, son of Ḫ., king of Anshan and Susa”
also:
u šutruk-naḫḫunte šak ḫalluduš-inšušinakik sunkik anzanšušunka erientum tipuḫ ak ḫiyan inšušinak napir urime aḫan ḫaliḫma
I Š. son Ḫ.-1sg king-1sg Anzan-Susa-1sg bricks molded-1sg and throne_hall-acc I. god-3sg I-3sg-acc ?with? made-1sg-loc?
“I, Šutruk-Naḫḫunte, son of Ḫalluduš-Inšušinak, king of Anšan and Susa, molded bricks and made the throne hall of my god Inšušinak with them.”
Note:
– Suffixaufnahme: person marking spreads through the phrase, so you even end up with a 3rd-person marker on “I/my” (u-r-);
– the verbal 1sg marker (in some tenses/aspects), -ḫ, is different from the nominal one, -k;
– there is a very SAE-looking “and” in the sentence.
Launey’s thesis does in fact treat in in some detail (8.3.2.5): he regards it as a definite article, originating in the homophonous deictic particle in. He says it’s obligatory with first- or second-person marked nouns and with verbs used as arguments; it seems to be usual with proper names too. It certainly very often turns up with third-person nouns where English would not use “the”, and Launey draws frequent analogies with French usage.
And he has examples like:
Yohualnepantla onechtlachtequilique in ichtecque
midnight they.came.to.rob.me IN thieves
“At midnight, thieves came to rob me.” (p1447)
I wonder if his third-person argument nouns without in couldn’t really be divided into
(a) new-to-discourse material (Launey notes that such arguments most often precede the verb)
(b) “stripped” NPs in a sort of quasi-incorporated relationship with a preceding verb.
Eventually, Launey does rather have it both ways:
(p1450)
I would render this in English as “Frankly, it beats me.” Lots of interesting stuff in there, though.
u sunkik Ḫatamtik “I, king of Elam”
Nahuatl doesn’t do that:
Ca tinocihuauh.
CA you.my.woman.POSSESSED
“You are my wife.”
In intlaxcal ichichihuan noquich
IN their.tortilla.POSSESSED his.dog.POSSESSED-PLURAL my.man.POSSESSED
“the tortillas of my husband’s dogs”
There’s no Suffixaufnahme: the personal prefixes always apply (only) to the word they’re attached to.
the tortillas of my husband’s dogs
There’s so much to be learned from tourist phrase books !
It is useful to be fluent in Classical Nahuatl, so that (if need be) you can explain to your hosts that you will actually not feel particularly dishonoured if you are not sacrificed to the gods.
Aztecs are famously reasonable, and will readily accept that your exotic preference, though bizarre, should be respected.
Sure, laugh all you want…
“the tortillas of my husband’s dogs”
There’s so much to be learned from tourist phrase books !
I know this was meant as a joke but in my family we do, in fact, feed tortillas to our pet dogs. Until now I’ve never stopped to think if it was just us being too cheap and lazy to buy new pet food or if it is in fact a widespread and old custom. (I remember seeing relatives do this in Mexico and now that I think of it, we (the family) also fed tortillas to the pigs we raised there.)
Ah but you’ve said “our dogs.” I think it’s as much the dissociation of the spouse that makes it funny. Leaving you wondering whether the phrase began kindly or sinister, “I always put a little carne asada in” or “I’ve just put arsenic in…
Also, I gave our doodle our leftover tortillas just last night. But then maybe you’re saying these aren’t leftovers. They’re bought for the dogs.
Well, by “our pet dogs” they’re really my (first) cousin’s but that’s close enough especially since we live nearby and I do feed the dogs often.
The tortillas are taken from same stack of tortillas we eat ( and are a daily must have in any Mexican home ) so they’re not really leftovers but not bought for the dogs either. Not that the dogs are never bought dog food, but they’re also fed tortillas alongside or instead.
I’m reasonably certain that what the pigs got back in the day were stale leftovers ( I think.)
It’s actually a great idea. We’re not a Mexican household. I make enchiladas every couple weeks and use about half the tortillas and think “we should have a taco night” but it doesn’t happen and they go stale. Last night was a whim but it just became policy.
In intlaxcal ichichihuan noquich
So Tlaxcala is not just “bread land” as translated in Prescott, but more specifically “land of the tortillas”? And has the “dog” word anything to do with Chihuahuas?
Yeah, tlaxcalli mean “tortilla.” Though the place name may not actually be related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlaxcala#Name
“Dog” is in fact chichi. so it can’t be connected with “chihuahua.” (The -huan part in ichichihuan “his dogs” is the possessed-plural ending.)
The dogs are named for the state; the name of that is said to be from Nahuatl Xicuahua, supposedly “dry and arid place.”
“Chichimec” is often said to be from the “dog” word, but it isn’t:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichimeca
There are quite a few incorrect would-be Nahuatl etymologies out there. Andrews gets quite cross about it. Impossible readings of real Nahuatl names too. (My favourite is Cuauhtemoc, often said to mean “Fallen Eagle”: this prompted one silly historian to wonder why the man was given such an unlucky name. But, as Andrews points out, this reading is actually impossible; the real meaning is “Swoops like an Eagle”, a perfectly cromulent name for an Aztec emperor. His problems were not of an onomastic nature.)
Thanks!