Martin Haspelmath has been working on a project he’s now put online:
The Grammaticon: Linking grammatical comparative concepts to typological databases
This blogpost introduces a new resource for general-comparative linguistics: the Grammaticon, a collection of hundreds of grammatical comparative concept terms (Haspelmath & Englisch 2026). Version 1.0 has just gone online:
Many of these terms are linked to typological features represented in database collections such as WALS, Grambank, or APiCS. Grammatical terminology is quite variable (and often somewhat confusing), so the Grammaticon offers some guidance: Each term has a standard definition, and definitions are typically linked to other terminological resources (such as Wikipedia), and for many of the typological features, the Grammaticon explains how their technical terms relate to the definitions in the Grammaticon.
The Grammaticon was first conceived of in 2017, and the idea was presented at the ALT conference in Canberra (Haspelmath & Forkel 2017). Version 1.0 is now public, and it is hoped that it will be extended and improved greatly over the coming months and years.
Click through for the FAQs; a sample:
The Grammaticon definitions use ordinary language (no abbreviations or other notational devices) and recognize that some terms cannot be defined – they are treated as “primitives”. Is it an accident that this approach is similar to Anna Wierzbicka‘s NSM approach (Natural Semantic Metalanguage, Wierzbicka 1996)?
It is not an accident – the Grammaticon has been inspired by Igor Mel‘čuk‘s approach to definitions of linguistic terms (e.g. Mel‘čuk 1982), and Mel‘čuk in turn inspired Wierzbicka in the 1960s. For the meanings of ordinary words, Wierzbicka‘s approach is compelling and almost without rivals, and it seems to me that technical terms of grammar are best treated in a similar way.
“It is true that the reality is often continuous (as Democritus famously noted)”
Eh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus#Atomism
Heraclitus, maybe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus#Unity_of_opposites_and_flux
The website is certainly a good idea in principle. Haspelmath kinda putting his money where his mouth is.
Hiphilangsci has a podcast with him which is well worth listening to BTW:
https://hiphilangsci.net/2025/11/01/podcast-episode-51/
(I see that the most recent one is actually with Anna Wierzbicka, but I haven’t heard it yet.)
(I have to say that I’m with Heraclitus rather than Democritus when it comes to alleged linguistic primitives, though: πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει.)
Yay.
I’m so excited.
He’s been on this for more than a decade now and with every year his decisions and arguments get weirder and weirder. That one time, on academia.edu, I had to *shudders* take the side of a Minimalist to argue against Haspelmath’s redefinition of existentials.
I had to *shudders* take the side of a Minimalist
Fas est et ab hoste doceri.
No relation to the Necronomicon?
I think the notion of linguistic primitives is heuristically useful and so doesn’t necessarily suffer from the notion that continuous rules the roost. If anyone can deal with the conflict it might be Haspelmath, one of the premier morphologists of our time.
I think that these supposed grammatical primitives are not absolute universals, but more in the nature of important statistical tendencies among human languages.
That does not at all preclude their being very useful, and inquiry into just why they are so common, and exactly how, and to what degree, they are based on abstraction away from the actual data, is likely to lead to genuine theoretical insights.
But such “primitives” are not, themselves, fundamentals of Language: that is to mistake means for ends, and to short-circuit genuine research.
“Grammatical primitives” are fine by me so long as they don’t mistake their place as useful aids in research and description and start giving themselves ontological airs.
No relation to the Necronomicon?
with every year his decisions and arguments get weirder and weirder
That will be the endpoint. Indeed, the Endpoint of many things …
The Grammaticon of the Mad Linguist Hasb al-Math will reveal All. Iä! Iä!*
* Linguists will go mad from the revelation that iä is a suppletive rugose verb. Of appalling, mind-destroying primitivity … Man was not meant to see such a Conjugation …
Haspelmath has his approach and keeps going with it mit deutscher Gründlichkeit to see where it takes us. Some shall go mad from the revelation. We’re going to see if that includes him.
@DE: it’s usually the grammatical civilizeds that cause the problems, innit?
Until now …
My feeling is that Haspelmath got stuck with an imperfect idea. His intention is clearly good: there should be clarity on concepts like “word” and “verb” if you are going to compare their properties and behaviors between different languages. However, creating axiomatic definitions doesn’t work. Grammars leak. Edge cases are everywhere, and the closer you look the more you’ll find. No single definition is going to work, and Haspelmath himself is forced to wiggle to explain edge cases, like abstract nouns. That is not to say that comparative linguistics and typology are impossible. Rather, each study needs to define its comparanda precisely. The definition of a “verb” in a comparative semantic study need not be the same as in a study of tense marking or alignment, and so on.
Maybe on further reflection Haspelmath’s project should actually be the Grammatinomicon (Grammatikinomicon?), just to get some νομικός in there.
This prompted me to notice that the pseudonym of the main character in This Immortal means “bold counsel about the law.”
@DE Yes, primitive as a heuristic needn’t imply ontological airs, but I do like the way you’ve framed it. So to push the ontology – primitive might refer to the linguistics/psychology dichotomy, in which the psychologists claim that any linguistic primitives are recruited from extant psychological processes and primitives.
I just listened to the hiphilangsci podcast with Anna Wierzbicka, and I must say that I am no nearer to finding her views on meaning at all persuasive. I rather got the impression that James McElvenny felt the same way, but that may be projection …
But then, as a devotee of St Ludwig, I am probably not a great candidate for Wierzbicka fandom. Others may well differ.
Interesting to hear about her time at MIT. So very much not impressed by Chomsky (but also not very taken with the Generative Semantics crowd active at MIT at that time.)
She discusses at one point Matthew 10:28: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul”, and comes up with a historically and exegetically highly dubious account of what Jesus “meant” by this, which also involves an attempt at analysing “soul” in terms of her semantic primes; while conceding (as anyone surely must) that terms like this vary enormously in “meaning” between languages and cultures, she seemed (unless I misheard) to be saying that in all cases the equivalent “word” entailed something that could not be seen, and that was inside a person.
The half-verse in question in the Kusaal version goes:
Da zɔti dabiem nɛ banɛ kʋʋd niŋgbina, ka kʋ nyaŋi kʋ siig la.
“Do not fear those who kill a body, but cannot kill a siig”
In a Kusaasi story, a man hides his siig in the thatch of his hut (so much for it being “inside” him.) His neighbour (a witch) tricks the silly fellow into letting him help in rethatching the hut, sees the siig and runs off with it (hidden in his underwear) …
It might reasonably be objected that siig is a mistranslation, and the translators would have done better to go with win “personal spiritual individuality”, which means something like the Latin genius. But that is not regarded as living inside a person either, or indeed, “living” at all: it just isn’t the kind of thing that can be alive or dead.
Wierzbicka does not have an adequate sample of languages to address even this question, much less to set up any system of supposedly universal semantic primes.
@DE, those are not “grammatical primitives” (primitives of the grammar in the sense of the object of study)! They are descriptive primitives: “productivity”, “deictic visibility”
Inside? Like the 19th-century attempts to identify the soul with the pineal gland? FWIW, I used to imagine the soul on the outside of the body, more like an aura.
@drasvi:
Yes: but I was putting the boot in to semantic primes because Haspelmath explicitly likens his project to come up with cross-linguistically valid grammatical primitives to what Wierzbicka has claimed to have achieved regarding (lexical) semantic primes.
It’s just not good enough to try to shut down further questioning about your supposed fundamental terms by invoking a sort of atomicity and claiming that human thought just cannot go any further, as Wierzbicka does repeatedly in the podcast in response to perfectly reasonable questions from McElvenny.
Doing that is assuming your conclusions as postulates. Apart from the fact that this makes a highly questionable assumption about how languages “mean” (reminiscent of the untenable “picture theory”), you need to demonstrate that your semantic “atoms” correspond exactly one-to-one across (all) languages, and this can’t be done by ad hoc “analyses” of actual concepts which arbitrarily treat all the awkward residues of the analyses as insignificant.
Even if these supposed atoms were real, you’re left with the great difficulty of coming up with an adequate theory of how their meanings combine. This cannot be just some sort of mere juxtaposition. Again, McElvenney implicitly raises this very point in the podcast, in suggesting that the MIT Generative Semantics people were perhaps lukewarm about Wierzbicka’s ideas because their focus was more with the link between meaning and syntax, whereas hers was primarily on meaning and the lexicon. He gets a pretty perfunctory reply (I would say.)
I’ve been reading a bit about Construction Grammar lately, and noticing how the question of just how constructions combine is very much an open one (in fact, differing ideas about exactly how this could work have led to several different schools of Construction Grammar.)
Again, I’d be interested in what other Hatters think of the podcast. I am quite possibly being unfair, as being biased against Wierzbicka’s whole approach.
The Grammatonomicon tells me that a noun is (by definition) “the head of a nominal phrase – that is, referring phrase – that denotes an object”; that a verb is (by definition) “the head of a verbal clause – that is, a clause that denotes an action”, and that a subordinate clause is (by definition) “a clause that is not pragmatically asserted.”
I think I’m missing some fundamental metapoint here. What are these definitions for? They are certainly of no use in writing (or reading) descriptive grammars.
I used to imagine the soul on the outside of the body, more like an aura.
A forgivable childish error. Science has by now shown the soul is composed of ectoplasm, which can occupy the same physical space as ordinary matter, e.g. bodies when alive, walls when ghostly.
Presumably these are meant as prototypical examples of “noun” and “verb” (I’m not sure quite what the deal is with the strange one of “subordinate clause”); that would certainly work. But that is a very peculiar use of “definition.” And it depends on a complex and sophisticated notion of class membership of a Lakoffian or Wittgensteinian kind to get back to anything approaching normal linguistic usage of the terms, while giving no clue as to why on earth, for example, I might want to do that whole family-resemblance thing in order to be able to claim (rightly) that gim in the Kusaal
O gim.
“He is short.”
is an unequivocal verb, and neither an adjective, nor a noun used in a zero-copula construction.
I just can’t see the point of this.
But Haspelmath is neither stupid nor ignorant. What am I missing?
those Grammatonomicon definitions seem to me either entirely circular (“a verb heads a… phrase [headed by a verb]”) and thus pretty useless or identical to far-from-rigorous elementary school definitions (a verbal phrase “denotes an action”) that fall apart as soon as an example like “o gim” rears its low-altitude head.
i’m not sure what i think about the aspiration to standardize definitions, to be honest. i think there’s some merit in (explicitly!) working with shared terminology that doesn’t pretend to that level of rigor, since the ways that “the ‘same’ parts of speech” function in different languages can be very meaningfully different. it seems both more honest and more useful to me to use “verb” (for example) as that kind of term of convenience, without either putting it on a pedestal as an undefineable “primitive” or epicycling until a misleading or unhelpful “standard definition” emerges.
but regardless, anything aspiring to be a standard definition should at least not be circular, and able to see beyond anglophone “common sense”.
I think Haspelmath’s project can be salvaged by relaxing its attitude somewhat. For example:
1. Languages generally have different word classes, distinguishable by their morphological or syntactic distributions.
2. Usually there are words of different classes for describing “things”, like ‘dog’ or ‘rock’, than for describing “actions”, like ‘walk’ or ‘eat’. When there are, we call the one class “nouns”, the other “verbs”.
3. (Clarify noun roots versus inflected nouns vs. noun phrases, etc., if you will.)
So, you can start with a semantically-defined prototype, but move as quickly as you can to a distributional definition, which will take care of the semantic difficulties of abstract nouns or stative verbs or what have you. You’ll still have some things that won’t fit easily — so maybe you shouldn’t include them in your cross-linguistic comparison.
A similar approach works in phonology, if you want to universally define consonants and vowels. A purely phonetic or a purely phonological definition won’t work, but you can have a phonological definition riding on top of a phonetically defined prototype.
I think Haspelmath’s project can be salvaged by relaxing its attitude somewhat.
That’s pretty much my take, but he seems to be an unrelaxing sort of dude.
He comes over as a nice sensible bloke in the hiphilangsci podcast.
I’m mystified by how he’s gone from a fine anarchist belief that e.g. there is no cross-linguistic definition of even “word” that really works*, to a view that seems to be almost Chomskyite in its indifference to real deep-seated incompatibilities between the systems of different languages. As I’ve been saying, it seems so odd that I can’t help but feel I’ve somehow missed what he’s driving at.
* True: but who actually needs one?
When prowling the hiphilangsci site to catch up, I noticed this
https://hiphilangsci.net/2026/04/02/manfred-bierwisch-linguistics-in-germany/
which (among other points of interest) goes into how at one point in the DDR, deviation from the tenets of (linguistic) Structuralism was regarded as extremely suspect politically. I had no idea.
“I think I’m missing some fundamental metapoint here.”
@DE, you are reading the column titled “Croft’s comparative concepts”!!!
(“The Grammaticon links to William Croft’s comparative concepts (Croft 2022), which is a very similar enterprise…“)
(I’m not telling that H’s metapoints are more accessible than Croft’s:))
I’d be interested in what other Hatters think of the podcast.
I’m trying to catch up. Only listened to the Haspelmath podcast so far. I agree he seems a ‘nice chap’. My overriding impression is he just waffled, going round in circles, even contradicting himself. Reminded me strongly of someone who used to run the Deutsche Institut in a University city I lived in: incapable of bringing any sentence to a firm conclusion, for fear of offending someone.
He talks about SVO seeming to be an areal feature in S.E. Asia languages. Before you get that far, don’t you have to establish that for each language: constituent order is semantically significant; there is a default or unmarked constituent order. How do you do that without some cross-linguistic notions of nouniness and verbiness?
The Grammatonomicon tells me that a noun is (by definition) “the head of a nominal phrase – that is, referring phrase – that denotes an object”; that a verb is (by definition) “the head of a verbal clause – that is, a clause that denotes an action”, …
@rozele identical to far-from-rigorous elementary school definitions
Yes that was my immediate reaction. That seems to fall into the trap warned against in Ling 1.01 (and by e.g. Pullum) of confusing formal structure with meaning. What is it for some component of an utterance to ‘denote’ anything? Max Cresswell is (was) admirably clear: the unit of meaning is the sentence, because that can be true or false. Trying to attribute meaning to anything less-than-sentence is going to be hand-waving and/or end in tears. He used sentence-frames binding scoped variables into the positions needed to build a sentence/proposition.
If we can’t identify a ‘nominal phrase’ (at least, maybe not so far as it having a ‘head’) in every language of study, and m.m. a ‘verbal clause’, I don’t see how to establish S and O are similarish constituents; V is a differentish constituent. OTOH I remember a lecture where Dan Everett dismissed these sort of abstract philosophical objections as never encountered by a field linguist. (Specifically wrt Quine’s grue and bleen.)
@Y classes for describing “things”, like ‘dog’ or ‘rock’, than for describing “actions”, like ‘walk’ or ‘eat’.
Hmm. English is famous for nouning verbs and verbing nouns. ‘dog’, ‘rock’ are both. ‘walk’ is both. Even ‘eat’ can be nouned. What kind of a “thing” is wonder? What kind of “action” is disappointment?
podcast with Anna Wierzbicka, and I must say that I am no nearer to finding her views on meaning at all persuasive. I rather got the impression that James McElvenny felt the same way, but that may be projection …
ditto and ditto. I kept wanting to send her away to study ‘How to Do Things with Words’. At the stage of child language acquisition, there might be ‘meaning’ in the background as declarative statements, but that’s a superimposition/interpretation from adults. Miw! (plus gesticulating) is sufficient. And is language in the sense of arbitrariness of the sign.
If ‘soul’ is a linguistic universal, I’m afraid its denotation has evaded me. I know it only as a term of art used in some religions. Even from the little I know about other cultures and practices, I greatly doubt it’s a universal.
If you reduce meaning to lexicon, how do you explain the difference between ‘the cat sat on the dog’ vs ‘the dog sat on the cat’? [I see @DE has already made this point.]
@AntC
I understood the statement about Southeast Asian languages to mean something like
1. We are excluding some languages (e.g., Tagalog)
2. The other languages, by and large, all have coherent classes corresponding to S,O, V and “declarative sentence”.
3. Although not related, the other languages show a preference for a SVO ordering in declarative sentences, in the sense that other orderings are non-declarative or marked (e.g., to focus on the S or O).
Regarding disappoint/wonder, I think the action for disappoint is “deceive when the deceived person has reason not to expect to be deceived by the deceiver”. For wonder, I associate a facial/gestural expression, but maybe I am influenced by religious painting and drama.
I’ve been reading a bit about Construction Grammar lately, and noticing how the question of just how constructions combine is very much an open one …
The approach that makes most sense to me is the line from Montague grammar to Kripke to Cresswell (see above). It’s all couched in philosophical logic, so I’m not sure there’s a Linguist-friendly intro. taster here. Stanford E of P also has an article ‘Compositionality’ that cites Cresswell without any direct discussion.
In the lecture I attended, he was much preoccupied with sentences like ‘three of the cats sat on the mat, and one sat on the dog.’ Wherein, ‘and’ cannot simply be a conjunction of two propositions. Rather, ‘three’ and ‘one’ are _not_ semantically tucked away inside a NP, but quantify at widest scope. The overall sentence carries a presupposition the universe of discourse includes at least four cats. ‘The’, ‘a’, ‘some’, … similarly cannot be sub-components of a NP, but rather scope across both the NP and predicate/verbal clause.
@PP, yes thanks that’s a reasonable summary of the SOV ‘finding’.
The question is how do we point to evidence of which S.E. Asian languages follow the pattern? What is it about Tagalog for which the claim doesn’t hold? Does it have S, O and V but not in SVO order? Or (for example) do its NPs (supposing it has them) carry no differentiation of S vs O? We need some prior notions of NP, S, O, V before we can meaningfully investigate.
other orderings are non-declarative or marked (e.g., to focus on …
So ‘non-declarative’ is a linguistic universal, not limited to IE languages? I think there’s less hope of defining ‘marked’ or ‘focus’ in a universal way.
To be clear: I’m not disputing the finding. I’m looking for evidence that would support concepts like NP, S, O, V applying cross-linguistically.
Shamelessly seizing on “wonder” as a link to something quite unrelated, in order to consult the wisdom of the Hatters …
English has four main-clause types, which differ structurally (I’m not talking about Gricean things like “It’s cold with that window wide open”):
Statements: I like syntax.
Questions: Do you like syntax? Who likes syntax?
Commands: Avoid the works of Noam Chomsky!
Exclamatives: How very misguided is the notion of Universal Grammar! What a chimera it is!
The first three of these are probably universal (I certainly have never come across a language that lacks any of them, though logically a language without a structurally distinct “command” type seems quite possible.)
But Kusaal lacks the “exclamative” type altogether, and it’s not alone: even very in-depth studies of the syntax of e.g. Hausa make no mention of such a thing, and nor do Jeffrey Heath’s many grammars of West African languages, nor Kofi Yakpo’s very detailed grammar of Pichi. (But it’s an understudied topic, so I suppose one should beware of an argumentum ex silentio.)
On the other hand, the exclamative use of interrogative words and structures seems to be extremely common cross-linguistically. It’s not just SAE, but e.g. Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin, and at least one Bantu language:
https://williemyers.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/mull-jan-31-exclamatives.pdf
So, my question to Hatters: do you know a language which lacks the exclamative clause type? (What I’m wondering about is whether the presence or absence of this clause type is an areal thing, as it seems it might be in West Africa.)
Welsh, now I think of it, doesn’t use interrogatives for this: it uses mor, a marker of the equative form of the adjective (Welsh has four degrees of comparison, not a mere three):
Mor weddaidd ar y mynyddoedd yw traed yr hwn sydd yn efengylu
“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings”
where mor weddaidd is “equally as comely.”
The Kusaal version just recasts it as a statement:
Banɛ mɔr labasʋŋʋ yit zuoya ni na la, ba ken malisi ti sʋnf pamm!
“Those who bring good news out of the mountains, they walk making our heart very glad.”
@AntC: If ‘soul’ is a linguistic universal, I’m afraid its denotation has evaded me. I know it only as a term of art used in some religions. Even from the little I know about other cultures and practices, I greatly doubt it’s a universal.
Rabbi Zvi Yehuda, the only real Jewish scholar I’ve known, used to say that there was no Hebrew word for “soul”. On the other hand, I wonder whether he was thinking of a Christian or pop-Christian meaning, not of the full range of meanings of the English word.
I greatly doubt it’s a universal
I’m perfectly sure that it isn’t.
Wierzbicka actually doubles down on this near the end of the podcast, though in a fairly informal aside. Even so, it seems quite astonishing. There is abundant ethnographic research on all this, confirming that she’s just wrong. Perhaps her actual view is more nuanced (I hope so.)
She seems to be very involved with trying to explain Christian doctrines in terms of her semantic primes. (E.g. Wierzbicka, Anna. 2025. The Nicene Creed in Minimal English: Why Christianity Needs Universal Human Concepts. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.) She has maybe succumbed to wishful thinking about its feasability.
AntC,
I agree he seems a ‘nice chap’.
He seems, doesn’t he? So quiet, reserved, reasonable…
He is not. I’ve had a few run-ins with him (mostly online) and I have the receipts. He was cuckoo bananas even before Covid, but Covid turned him into MAGA light.
@David,
I’d be interested in what other Hatters think of the podcast.
H has a podcast? Will the madness never cease???
Covid turned him into MAGA light
How very unfortunate.
(It was the Wierzbicka podcast on hiphilangsci that I was wondering what others thought about, rather than the Haspelmath one. AntC, at least, seems to share my view.)
@drasvi,
(I’m not telling that H’s metapoints are more accessible than Croft’s:))
But Construction Grammar actually makes sense for the description morphosyntax.
@AntC,
Max Cresswell is (was) admirably clear: the unit of meaning is the sentence, because that can be true or false.
I wonder which of the 140 or so definitions of ‘sentence’ he had in mind… I am very skeptical about any claims about language made by a logician, unless they clearly and unambiguously disavow the concept of “logical predicate” and cite von der Gabelentz on the first page.
@rozele,
those Grammatonomicon definitions seem to me either entirely circular … and thus pretty useless
That was precisely my reaction and I said so in a recent paper. Haspelmath read it and responded to it and it’s … something. I will write it up on my blog later this week once this deadline looming over me is over.
@David,
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2025. The Nicene Creed in Minimal English
Good Lord Jesus (no pun intended)… Of all things to apply semantic primes to, this is possibly the worst one, with it layers of answers to controversies.
And sure enough, the thing is not anywhere near what it says on the cover. A case in point, the section “I Believe in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” from p. 97:
The very first line is wrong in terms of theology. And the rest is… How is this *Minimal* English when it has to rely on other evidence (Paul here, the Church Fathers elsewhere)?
Or this, from p. 100, same section:
Yeah, no. None of that is accurate, not even the last line.
Sounds as bad as I feared.
She seems to have entirely misunderstood where the difficulties of cross-cultural communication actually lie. I suppose that’s what happens when you don’t understand the intimate connection between language and culture. It’s not a matter of superficial icing on the cake: it’s something that pervades languages deeply.
There is a whole literature about this from sensible missionaries (and Bible translators) who have actually learnt something from the church’s many grave failures in this area.
I will write it up on my blog later this week once this deadline looming over me is over.
Please link it here!
@AntC: English is famous for nouning verbs and verbing nouns. ‘dog’, ‘rock’ are both. ‘walk’ is both. Even ‘eat’ can be nouned. What kind of a “thing” is wonder? What kind of “action” is disappointment?
I meant dog the animal, not dog the word, and likewise ‘walk’, the thing one does with dog the animal.
So once you establish the distributional nature of words like dog — they can be pluralized, be possessed, serve as verbal arguments, etc. — you jettison the semantics and call every word with those distributional characteristics a noun, without worrying about their meaning.
@DE, are your “exclamatives” the same as rhetorical questions?
Rhetorical questions do seem to shade continuously into exclamatives.
I should note that “disappointment” is of course a noun and thus must be an “object” rather than an “action.” Except of course come to think of it “action” is itself a noun and thus itself an “object.”
are your “exclamatives” the same as rhetorical questions?
No. Exclamatives differ structurally from questions, despite containing interrogative words. They differ in word order and in intonation, and there a quite a few other differences too.
“How pointless is Universal Grammar?”
Question; quite possibly rhetorical here on LH.
“How pointless Universal Grammar is!”
Exclamative.
CGEL treats this on pp 918 ff.
Section 2.3.1 in this oldish paper discusses them briefly too.
https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/speech-act-distinctions.pdf
Different languages use different strategies for this, though interrogative words seem to be often shangaied for the process cross-linguistically. English only uses “what” and “how”, as in
“What a fruitless hypothesis Universal Grammar has turned out to be!”
I’ve found that there is quite a literature on this, though it seems to be underresearched overall.
The Myers paper on Kirundi that I linked to is interesting, inasmuch as the exclamative construction can use an interrogative particle, but doesn’t use the interrogative verb form, so (as in Engish) the construction has similarities to a question but is still formally distinct from a question.
This is quite a separate issue from Austin-style illocutionary force and Gricean implicatures, though historically some of these exclamatives may have originated from such things.
The question has been nagging at me for a while in relation to Kusaal, which seems just to lack anything like exclamatives. Trawling through grammars of West African languages, I get the impression that Kusaal is probably typical of the region in this, but few grammars go into the kind of detail that means one can be sure that any exclamative-type constructions haven’t just been overlooked. So it may be an illusion.
They don’t seem to be rare cross-linguistically in general, nor one of those things that SAE has just copied from Latin or Greek.
And English has verbless exclamatives that can’t be interrogative:
“What a fruitless hypothesis!”
“How different, how very different from the home life of our own dear Queen!”
(Also verbless questions that can’t be exclamative. “Why a duck?”)
I think the action for disappoint is “deceive when the deceived person has reason not to expect to be deceived by the deceiver”
“Disappoint” doesn’t suggest deception to me. If I’m told that the weather during the solar eclipse may be clear or cloudy, and it’s cloudy, I’ll be disappointed, and I may even say that the weather disappointed me.
Not in German, where they have finite-verb-last order because they’re arguably “subordinate” clauses whose “main” clauses have gone missing, nor in Old English, where they had finite-verb-last order even more often than subordinate clauses.
Still happens in modern English – how unusual this is!
In German it’s etymologically even the opposite: täuschen “deceive”, enttäuschen “disappoint” – literally “de-deceive”, like “disillusion”.
Like Spanish desilusión. (Ilusión can be a hope or dream.) But I think the German etymology as “undeceive” agrees with pp’s picture, whereas the Spanish one is like mine in not presupposing that there was any deception before the disappointment.
The Creed of course nowhere mentions bishops or priests,* although maybe a text that only explicates the actual words of the Creed as built up from a limited set of so-called primitives wouldn’t be long enough to package as a book? The actual word in the Creed usually Englished as “church” is (in its sing. nom. lemma form) ἐκκλησία, and how hard can it be to define ἐκκλησία as a pseudo-mathematically-described combination of various members of the ancient-Greek list of semantic primitives? (Maybe arbitrarily hard, I assume the critics of the approach will say.)
*Not because they weren’t thought important but because their existence was not particularly controversial at the time and thus was not perceived as needing clarification or defense.
It’s a pretty odd paraphrase all round.
I wonder what she does with “Holy Spirit”?
The current Kusaal Bible version says Siig Kasi, where siig means (at least in traditional culture) “life force”, not “spirit”, for which Kusaasi culture has no good equivalent.
Kasi is an ideophone borrowed from Mampruli: its core meaning is “clean.” The nearest real match for “holy” would probably be kisug “tabu, forbidden”, though one can see why that wouldn’t do in this case. Using “clean” for “holy” is just pure translationese, though. It matches nothing in traditional culture – or, indeed in Christianity, really.
The construction Siig Kasi is not really grammatical: like most “quality” ideophones, kasi can only be predicative, not attributive, and for “holy people” you have to say
nimbanɛ an kasi
person.who.Pl be holy
“people who are holy”
Siig Kasi is the sole exception.
The neologism was apparently controversial, though apparently this was more because kasi was felt to be “foreign” rather than because of the ungrammaticality. Previous Bible versions used Sisʋŋ “good life force.” As a translation, this is obviously hopeless, though Kusaasi who are already Christian and have acquired the Christian concept through actual teaching about it presumably are happy to use it as a handy label regardless of its actual etymology.
The idea that you can short-circuit the complex process of conveying an alien concept to speakers unfamiliar with its whole cultural background by One Weird Trick of expressing the idea in putatively human-universal atom concepts is frankly ludicrous.
Unfortunately, the traditional Christian approach has usually been to supplant the local culture in order to transplant the foreign concept into the resulting imposed Western culture, rather than to translate into the indigenous culture in any meaningful sense. I suspect Wierzbicka’s motive is the noble and praiseworthy one of trying to facilitate a kind of real refactoring of Christian concepts into exotic cultures; it’s a pity that her method is so flawed.
Is Such a nice guy! an exclamative? If not, what is the difference to What a nice guy!?
CGEL classifies clauses like that as “non-exclamative exclamations” (p923), giving examples like
Such strange people inhabit these parts.
She hated it so.
It was such a disaster.
It separates them from “exclamatives” on the grounds that “so” and “such” are not markers of a particular clause type, but can occur in any kind of major clause type.
I may have spoken too soon about the complete absence of exclamatives in Kusaal, incidentally. I’ve found a couple of examples in the Bible translation with a focusing deictic within a question, which look like candidates. e.g. Romans 7:24:
Oi, bɔ sʋnsa’aŋʋ nwa ka m nyɛta!
oh what sorrow.LINKER this and I see.IMPERFECTIVE.CONTENT-QUESTION
which is literally “this is what sorrow that I am seeing?”
I’m not sure that these are formally distinguishable from questions, though; you can embed deictics like these in ordinary questions too:
Fʋ maal bɔɔ la tis mam?
“What is this that you have done to me?”
@dm, jf
I thought AntC wanted an action, and for me the removal of the illusion is an effect (of deception), rather than a primary act (but maybe I am overthinking this). Also for me, deception can also mean betrayal, which may be the point of issue, i.e., in jf’s case, he may also feel the weather has betrayed him. Both betrayal and deception can be and maybe are by default unconscious, i.e. the weather and Marlene Dietrich in “the Blue Angel” are just doing what they do and not trying to deceive or betray anyone. Maybe in those cases the removal of illusion is the primary act, but only from the point of view of La Dietrich or the weather. I also do not know if enttäuschen is semantically close to betrügen in German.
@Y I meant dog the animal, not dog the word, and likewise ‘walk’, the thing one does with dog the animal.
So once you establish the distributional nature of words like dog — they can be pluralized, be possessed, serve as verbal arguments, etc. — you jettison the semantics and call every word with those distributional characteristics a noun, without worrying about their meaning.
But, but you’re presuming the conclusion! How do you tell the appearances of the word ‘dog’-as-noun from the appearances of ‘dog’-as-verb? If in English it was only a few words that appear in both roles, you could establish the rules by avoiding the ‘dog’ example, then come back to it later as an exception. But in case of English, you’d have to conclude well more than half of common words are exceptions.
That’s why I’m also questioning the universality of ‘unmarked’ or ‘default’ constituent order.
Or you establish the rules by avoiding Anglo-Saxon vocab altogether, and studying Latinate/abstract/Greek vocab.
@JWB I should note that “disappointment” is of course a noun and thus must be an “object” rather than an “action.” Except of course come to think of it “action” is itself a noun and thus itself an “object.”
Fair point, and I thought that as I wrote it. But English doesn’t really do pro-verbing. Also using an abstract noun meant I could be neutral between the disappointer vs the disappointee. (I agree there’s not necessarily any
deceptiondeceiving going on.) So at risk of tortured English, I’ll try againWhat kind of doing is disappointing, or being disappointed. (Gerunds still grammatically nouns.)
@JF the only real Jewish scholar I’ve known, used to say that there was no Hebrew word for “soul”. On the other hand, I wonder whether he was thinking of a Christian or pop-Christian meaning, not of the full range of meanings of the English word.
That seems bizarre. I thought Christian ‘soul’ came from (translations of) the OT(?). A quick search finds
Yeah, re full range of meanings: I had visions of a passenger flight having to declare Mayday. The emergency services on the ground always ask how many souls on board? Whilst the pilot wrestles with the controls to land the plane, I imagine the co-pilot wrestling with the passenger list: how many Atheists on board? Do Confucians/Taoists have souls? Are there any comfort animals on board? Do pet octopuses have souls?
Assume arguendo you could correctly analyze a given Greek word in let’s say the Creed or perhaps in the Gospels as some objectively-describable combination of semantic primitives that exist in all languages. But all that would let you do at first is confirm the vague impression that a given let’s say West African language does not at present possess a lexeme corresponding to that chemical formula. It either needs a new lexeme or some sort of agreement to use an existing lexeme in a new and different sense. So you’re not much better than before in guidance as to how to do a translation, other than perhaps proving that good translation may not be possible into the given language as it currently stands.* The chemical formula for the semantics does not tell you what that needed new-or-adapted lexeme should be – the connection between signifier and signified remains largely arbitrary even if you have standardized ways of describing signifieds, so there’s no mechanical way of generating a new signifier that transparently carries the needed meaning.
*The sort of people who tend to do initial Bible translations into languages without the lexical and cultural resources to understand what the Bible is going on about are perhaps prone to resisting the conclusion that their intended goal is impossible. This resistance may lead to weird and unfortunate results when they nonetheless persist in their work.
But, but you’re presuming the conclusion! How do you tell the appearances of the word ‘dog’-as-noun from the appearances of ‘dog’-as-verb? If in English it was only a few words that appear in both roles, you could establish the rules by avoiding the ‘dog’ example, then come back to it later as an exception. But in case of English, you’d have to conclude well more than half of common words are exceptions.
“The dog”, noun, and so other words with “the”. “It dogged him”, verb, and so other words which can do “It X-ed him”. Likewise “I put it in a bag (n.)” and “I bag (v.) it”, etc.
Or, if you will, think of words whose form appears in only one word class, like son or eat.
I suppose the German one assumes that wishful thinking is self-deception.
No; betrügen is “defraud” and “cheat on”.
Yes and no; what the terms mean in different books of the Bible is not always straightforward, and then there’s the whole issue that Paul’s letters introduce the distinction between soul and spirit without explaining it – I like the idea that it’s a reaction to Epicureanism that has gotten way out of hand.
I cannot speak about the whole Hebrew Bible, but it does seem that nefeš which is literally “breath” means “living force” and sometimes person as an individual (something like “living soul”), but not individuality. This concept is most readily expressed as lev (heart, same as in any number of languages (I remember that in Kusaal it is gold bladder, tyvm)). In Leviticus it is explained that this life force (remember, it is breath) is located in the blood. Quite literally, this is why consumption of blood is prohibited. Unless ancient Jews wised up about oxygen, I cannot understand how they imagined it exactly.
Re the OT Hebrew word that Jerry F.’s informant says absolutely definitely doesn’t mean “soul,” here’s one reasonably standard-reference summary: ‘נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh) occurs roughly seven hundred fifty-four times, encompassing the whole range of human and creaturely life: the living being itself, the animating life-force, the inner self with its thoughts, emotions, and desires, and even the life that may be forfeited in death. Context, rather than a single English equivalent, determines whether translators render it as “soul,” “life,” “person,” “creature,” “appetite,” or related ideas.’
That said, the LXX translators (themselves Jews, and not Christians) pretty consistently rendered nephesh as psyche (ψυχή). Which itself when used in the NT is often, but certainly not always, translated as “soul.” The distinction in some places in the NT between ψυχή and πνεῦμα has indeed occasioned a vast literature.
The vigorous dogmatic explication by the 16th-century English reformers of “originall or birth sinne” focuses on a flesh/spirit dichotomy that leaves the soul-as-such out of it, and is especially noteworthy for noting the complexity of translation, viz. “And this infection of nature doth remayne, yea in them that are regenerated, whereby the luste of the fleshe called in Greke fronema sarkos (whiche some do expounde, the wisedome, some sensualitie, some
the desyre of the fleshe) is not subject to the lawe of God.” (That’s φρόνημα σαρκὸς, for those who like their “Greke” untransliterated.)
Kusaal nyɔvʋr, a transparent compound of nyɔɔr “nose” and the adjective vʋr “living”, always means simply “life” as opposed to “death”, and never has any sense of “soul” or “spirit.”
Nyɔɔr by itself can mean “life”, too, as in the proverb
Kɔdiŋ ye, Nyɔɔri an gɛl.
francolin that nose.LINKER be egg
“Francolin says, Life is an egg.”
(Implying that life is the prerequisite for anything else, so “Abi gezunt.”)
and (perhaps needless to say) the concepts of “neshome”, “lev”, etc and other words that could be argued to correspond to “soul” in the Tanakh don’t map directly onto the members of different jewish communities’ varied understandings of those words.
i can’t remember offhand what term is used in the early modern accounts of dibukem (which in some ways act differently in yiddish, sefardi, and mizrahi contexts), but in some of them an individual’s personal essence can not only possess another person’s body (cohabiting with their own essence or temporarily submerging it), but also can get stuck in certain kinds of bodies of water until a suitable human (or iirc non-human) host happens by. and of course in the lurianic tradition parts of the personal essence of past figures can inhere in contemporary people through a kind of kaleidoscopic metempsychosis. neither of those kinds of mobility seem to me to cohere all that well with christian concepts of “soul” – i’m not sure that there’s a common core there that’s more specific than “personal essence”/”distinctness from other people”, which doesn’t seem all that helpful as a semantic prime.
There are three common terms: רוּחַ rûaḥ, נֶפֶשׁ nep̄eš, and נְשָׁמָה nəšāmâ. In later exegesis and especially in the Kabbalah their meanings have been demarcated in detail, and they progress in that order from the merely physical to the spiritual. I don’t know how much the meanings overlap in Biblical Hebrew. Much has been written on this by many, none of which has been read by me.
Add: rûaḥ is lit. ‘wind’. nep̄eš is, I presume, metathesized from the root nšp̄: i.e. ‘exhalation’. nəšāmâ is from nšm, i.e. ‘breath’ or ‘inhalation’.
“Francolin says, Life is an egg.”
Am I to be lectured by a chicken?
Fas est et a pullo doceri.
Note btw that the Wierzbicka notion of semantic primitives does not actually match up with a Swadesh-list sort of concept. .The latter will include “water,” but not “hydrogen” and “oxygen.”
Closer to a peacock than to a chicken, but still…
The Swadesh list was a reasonable guess at which words are the most stable diachronically; it has nothing directly to do with “primitive” or “atomic” meanings.
The “[animal] says” frame is quite common in Kusaal proverbs, and apparently in Africa in general. It’s not always apparent why that particular animal has got nominated.
Another Kusaal one is
Nwaaŋ ye, dikanɛ bɛɛ o nɔɔrin la aan o din.
“Monkey says, the food in his mouth is his.”
(Possession is nine points of the law.)
I suppose this reflects something of the same mindset as underlies Aesop’s fables. (Kusaasi folktales often involve talking animals too, including, of course, the trickster hare Asumbul. One story in my collection features a Hajji hyena, because why not?)
But it’s probably a pan-human thing. Are there any cultures that don’t have stories with talking animals?
Am I to be lectured by a chicken?
Don’t quail at the thought, and don’t grouse about it.
i didn’t realize that nefesh and neshome were that kind of pair! that’s really neat, and i’m sure much has been made of it in the mystical literature. i’ll have to keep my eye out for it in yiddish poetry!
@bulbul He seems, doesn’t he? So quiet, reserved, reasonable…
He is not. I’ve had a few run-ins with him …
Yes I was aware of that, hence the scare quotes.
I am very skeptical about any claims about language made by a logician, unless they clearly and unambiguously disavow the concept of “logical predicate” and cite von der Gabelentz on the first page.
Cresswell is a Philosopher/Logician. He doesn’t make “claims about language”; and certainly not linguistic universals. He is trying to find an underpinning for semantics, particularly how to form the meaning of the whole from the parts. Did you read at the link I provided?
Are you sure it’s not you adopting confrontational positions? As I come across (some of) your previous posts on Gabelentz at the Hattery, they seem rather … curmudgeonly (to use Hat’s term) [**]. What’s wrong with “logical predicate” for a Logician to use in a logic?
(And he doesn’t try to define ‘sentence’: that’s Linguistics’ job.)
Answer when you’ve cleared your deadlines. Or is there a paper you can point to?
[**] I plead guilty to the epithet myself.
The “[animal] says” frame is quite common in Kusaal proverbs, and apparently in Africa in general.
There are pages of them in Mammeri’s Poèmes kabyles anciens, motivated primarily by rhyme, e.g.
(Yes, they are pretty much all this negative. Early 20th century Algeria was by all accounts not a happy place.)
@lameen
I do not view these as negative. The man with the bad wife and the (other or maybe the same) man with the bad children are making the best of what life has served up to them (it should not be ignored that he feels, possibly incorrectly, that the son is his).
The man with wealth is ensuring that his children will not be corrupted by that wealth and/or will be motivated to acquire their own wealth.
Cresswell
I’m actually the proud owner of the work on modal logic he wrote with G E Hughes. Who doesn’t like a good Kripke frame now and again?
The issues he is concerned with are quite different from what I was alluding to.
In Construction Grammar, it’s Constructions (form-meaning pairings) all the way down (and up); lexical form-meaning pairings are not regarded as different in kind from syntactic form-meaning pairings.
But leaves you with an issue about how constructions combine. A naive idea would be that you kind of slot lexical-type constructions into appropriate positions in your syntactic-style constructions, but pretty much the whole point of Construction Grammar is that It’s Not That Simple, and the more you think through the implications, the more knotty the problems get.
Different schools of Construction Grammar have different approaches to this. “Creative Construction Grammar”, for example, asserts that this all happens by “conceptual blending”, a rather unhelpful technical term for what are taken to be a range of human powers of analogy and synthesis not linked exclusively to Language.
I don’t know a lot about this, but it seems to suffer from what quite a lot of Construction Grammar does: it’s very probably right in principle, but applying it in practice rapidly because very hard and you readily get lost in the weeds.
But then, you’d surely expect any adequate theory of human communication to be very complex. Minimalism is for insects …
“Negative” is maybe too vague a word; “pessimistic” is closer.
(I like your optimism, but the man with wealth there is definitely neglecting his kids; all three of them are supposed to be bad examples that you should avoid becoming.)
Here’s another sample:
Thank you, AntC, David M., J.W. Brewer, rozele, and Y for interesting comments on Hebrew words and “soul”.
Note FWIW that the Chabad folks (as well as many other current Anglophone Jewish sources) are happy to treat this traditional prayer as one for the “soul” of the decedent and to use “soul” in the English translation of the Hebrew. That said, this specific prayer in these specific words is apparently not attested before the 17th century (CE). As rozele noted, it’s not like Jewish understandings of the referent of specific Hebrew words have all been entirely stable and uniform across space and time.
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/367837/jewish/Kel-Maleh-Rachamim.htm
Elegant variation on 子曰 “Confucius says”.
Five outdated 1-£ coins say the Pirahã don’t.
@AntC,
Yes I was aware of that, hence the scare quotes.
Ah, my apologies.
Cresswell is a Philosopher/Logician.
I’m assuming the capitals are significant, though not sure what they signify.
He doesn’t make “claims about language”; and certainly not linguistic universals. He is trying to find an underpinning for semantics
Which is, for lack of a better word, a component of language.
Are you sure it’s not you adopting confrontational positions?
I’m sorry, was anything I said insulting? If so, I apologize.
But to answer your question, yes, I am pretty sure I am adopting confrontational positions, aka disagreeing or critiqung.
What’s wrong with “logical predicate” for a Logician to use in a logic?
Absolutely nothing. The problem begins when they try to apply it to language.
(And he doesn’t try to define ‘sentence’: that’s Linguistics’ job.)
So he works with the concepts of “semantics” and “sentence” and you still insist he makes no claims about language? Also I said “had in mind”, not “define”. He might have been happy outsourcing the definition to linguistics, but he still had to use one.
I love von der Gabelentz, it’s just a shame that his work did not gain much traction in linguistics. Same goes for Anton Marty who is perhaps even more relevant to this discussion.
J.W.Brewer, Jews starting from pre AD times (some) until now (almost all, of a traditional kind) beleive in something like afterlife, world to come etc. There must be then something of a person that inhabits those spaces. Because body is in the ground it cannot be the body. Then whatever it is can be named “soul” in translation to “Christian languages”.
The calim is that there was no such concept in (proto) Judaism before composition of the very late books of the Bible and therefore backreading into, say, Pentateuch the concept of soul under any word is suspect. But to quote Y, “much has been written on this by many, none of which has been read by me.”
There must be then something of a person that inhabits those spaces
Orthodox Christians and Muslims believe that the physical body will be resurrected, so a belief in an afterlife does not necessarily imply belief in disembodied souls.
However, (most) mainstream Christians do actually believe in this; the dissenting position is sometimes rather poetically called “the sleep of the soul”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_mortalism
There are differing views on this within Islam, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_view_of_death
Buddhists, of course, officially disbelieve in souls altogether. (Maybe: it’s complicated …)
@jwb, d.o
Whosoever destroys one soul, it is as though he had destroyed an entire world. And whosoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved an entire world.”[30]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder
—
[30] = Jerusalem Talmud Sanhedrin 4:9
לפיכך נברא האדם יחידי בעולם ללמד שכל המאבד נפש אחת מעלין עליו כאילו איבד עולם מלא.
וכל המקיים נפש אחת מעלין עליו כאילו קיים עולם מלא.
—
This indicates to me that even in “late” usage, nifsh is not exclusively “immaterial soul” but also “life” as a unit incorporating body and soul. But maybe this is an artefact of this particular translation.
@David E.: Some largeish subset of “traditional” (in a modern context) Jews also believe that there will be a physical resurrection of physical bodies when the Messiah comes – this is said to be the or at least a motivation for traditional hostility to cremation etc. I don’t know if there’s a well-developed view on what may go on in the interim. I am reminded of an interesting quirk in the Book of Job. The Hebrew text that we have from the Masoretes eventually ends “So Job died, being old and full of days.” But the LXX Greek goes on to say (and I don’t think this is standardly claimed to be a later Christian interpolation as opposed to a variant Jewish text?) “and it is written that he will rise again with those whom the Lord raises up.”* In the Byzantine lectionary there are various readings from Job during Holy Week, and that one comes up at vespers on Good Friday.
*γέγραπται δὲ αὐτὸν πάλιν ἀναστήσεσθαι μεθ᾽ ὧν ὁ κύριος ἀνίστησιν.
@Lsmeen: Is tlata a loan or are Berber numerals so close to Semitic?
Because body is in the ground it cannot be the body.
within the very varied field of past and present jewish ideas about the afterlife or lack thereof, there is a longstanding tradition (currently held by, among others, ChaBaD) that the body is indeed present in it. that’s the basis of the german-jewish (ashkenazi, in its proper sense) minhag’s rejection of tattooing* and other body modifications. the problem of burial has been considered, and solved in the simplest way possible: those buried in the holy land arise directly from their graves; those buried elsewhere roll through underground tunnels to jerusalem to re-emerge from the earth there. here’s a longer explanation, complete with a subway map.
.
* which is decidedly a minority position among jewish traditions, though it has become hegemonic through the colonial efforts of the Alliance Isréalite Universelle [sic] and ChaBaD.
As usual for this kind of matter, TDOT has extensive articles on nep̄eš, rûaḥ, and nəšāmâ in the Old Testament, discussing etymology, semantics, and theological significance, among the Hebrews and among neighboring people.
rozele, I was under the impression that tattooing was universally prohibited, following Leviticus 19:28 and its later interpreters (the Mishna, Maimonides, etc.)
@bulbul But to answer your question, yes, I am pretty sure I am adopting confrontational positions, aka disagreeing or critiqung.
We’ve not interacted much at the Hattery. I await your write-up of the contretemps with Haspelmath. So far, on very thin evidence:
* Haspelmath is “nice, sensible” [DE], floundering [AntC, Y]
* Wierzbicka is misguided and downright wrong in places [all]
* bulbul is confrontational [bulbul] and citation-lite [AntC]
I’m all for disagreeing or critiquing; do plenty of it myself; always with supporting evidence. So far on this topic all you’ve provided is your own opinions.
What I said in re Haspelmath was “He comes over as a nice sensible bloke in the hiphilangsci podcast.” As to his intrinsic nicitude and sensibiliousness I have no information. I would be inclined to trust bulbul’s opinion on this, and indeed on many other matters.
Conversely, Anna Wierzbicka may very well not have done herself justice on the podcast (she is 88.) I can think of at least one very well-informed Hatter who has a high opinion of her work.
We can disagree on such points; at least we all share a disdain for Noam Chomsky. It is enough.
I gave some pretty detailed constructive criticism about where I differ with Haspelmath’s program. I have no personal opinions about him.
@Y: yes, that’s the commonly circulated account, but it’s very much a provincial european interpretation (and perhaps even an ashkenazi- or ashkenazi-and-yiddish*-specific one), like many things that are presented as pan-jewish.
maghrebi, kurdish, ethiopian, and other communities have longstanding tattoooing traditions (including facial tattoos), generally shared with their non-jewish neighbors. i don’t know for sure about the communities of eastern north africa, the mashreq, and the arabian peninsula, but there are strong regional tattooing traditions there (egypt, for instance), and i’d assume they’re shared by the jewish communities where they appear. (and i know even less about the various communities of the caucasus-to-central-and-south-asia zone, or the wider sefardi diaspora**)
.
* there isn’t a simpler handle, unfortunately, since the communities east of ashkenaz that are neither sefardi nor karaite don’t adhere to a single minhag (there’s polin, estraykh, and ha-ari (a/k/a sefardi, just to confuse matters))
** including whether maghrebi sefardi communities have shared the region’s tattooing practices, or distinguished themselves from the pre-1492 communities by not adopting them.
Facial, specifically forehead, tattoos are a thing in Ethiopian/Eritrean culture for extremely respectable church-going ladies. Which is a bit initially disconcerting from an American POV where you may be used to normal outlaw-biker tattoos on a variety of surfaces of the body but forehead tattoos go beyond normal limits into full Manson-Family territory. But these are indeed upon closer inspection very respectable churchgoing ladies, including in diaspora in North America. I have a vague suspicion that esp. in Eritrea which is roughly 50/50 Christian/Muslim having a cross tattooed on your forehead may be a socially acceptable passive-aggressive way to signal “no I’m not a Muslim.” But I don’t know if the historical timeline would validate that. The Ethopian/Eritrean churches are of course historically connected with the Copts, who have their own robust tattooing tradition (if you make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, you often get a commemorative tattoo) that AFAIK tends to avoid the face/forehead.
(FWIW my late first wife had a tattoo, or perhaps palimpsest of tattoos, but no one stopped her from being buried in a Jewish cemetery. Although this may perhaps have not been disclosed to the bureaucratic gatekeepers and I wasn’t the one interfacing with them and for all I know whoever was doing so may have been strategically evasive on the subject based on their own views of what was proper under the circumstances.)
As to his [Haspelmath’s] intrinsic nicitude and sensibiliousness I have no information. I would be inclined to trust bulbul’s opinion on this,
Haspelmath has posted occasionally at the Log. Those also seemed sensible and reasoned. That does not mean I agree. Reasonable people can reasonably disagree with reasonable reasons. (As @Y has done.)
I’m being especially cautious on this topic, because as a Philosophical Skeptic, I have an immediate suspicion of grandiose schemes like Universal Anything. I’m trying to correct for that bias.
I have no ‘history’ with bulbul, as I pointed out. So I have no basis to trust anything. So far the posts here come across as just another over-opinionated blowhard on the intertubes. In the interests of reason I suggested clearing those current deadlines; coming back with evidence.
I should say that accusing a respected academic of “cuckoo bananas”, “madness” plays exactly into ‘over-opinionated blowhard’. So I have already raised the bar for evidence by several notches.
Apparently “you can’t get buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have tattoos” is an urban myth. Even though tattoos are technically forbidden, in general there are no consequences for them (maybe among some Haredis you’d be shunned? I don’t know.) In fact, quite a few publicly heavily tattooed Israelis are getting religion these days.In my mind, the stereotype be right-wing rapper (m.) and influencer (f.) types.
JWB: I’ve now read of Ethiopian Jews, likewise tattooed with a cross in order to blend in with potentially hostile Christians.
So far the posts here come across as just another over-opinionated blowhard on the intertubes.
I wish you would get out of the habit of talking like that. It’s no way to win friends and influence people. (I know, I know, you don’t want friends, you’re just talking straight from the shoulder, you call them as you see them, you don’t take any guff, you take your liquor straight and your coffee black.)
He was cuckoo bananas even before Covid, …
H has a podcast? Will the madness never cease???
And yet you don’t call out that language? Is it merely because H doesn’t participate here? For all we know he might have read bulbul’s posts and decided he won’t show up to wrestle with the pig. In which case we’ve all lost out.
I call double standards. And I’ve by no means cited all the arrogant, presumptuous language bulbul has used on this thread. If you won’t call it out, I do.
Is tlata a loan or are Berber numerals so close to Semitic?
Kabyle, like most Berber varieties, has borrowed all numbers from 3 up from Arabic. (Those that have kept the older system use forms like kraḍ for 3.)
Do any of the original Berber numerals have plausible cognate candidates elsewhere in Afro-Asiatic?
“Two” (sin, sǝn etc) connects neatly with Semitic and Egyptian. 5-9 (sǝmmus, sḍis, sa, tam, tẓa) look rather Semitic, and are suspected of being an older layer of pre-Punic loanwords. “One” (yiwǝn etc) might speculatively be linked to, say, Egyptian w`, but there’s not much to go on.
There are three common terms: רוּחַ rûaḥ, נֶפֶשׁ nep̄eš, and נְשָׁמָה nəšāmâ.
rûaḥ is lit. ‘wind’. nep̄eš is, I presume, metathesized from the root nšp̄: i.e. ‘exhalation’. nəšāmâ is from nšm, i.e. ‘breath’ or ‘inhalation’.
Yes, neat!
Genesis 2:7 KJV
Other versions put ‘being’ instead of ‘soul’.
According to this 18:30 on, early Judaism didn’t believe in a ‘soul’ in the sense of something persisting beyond your last breath. No afterlife; no resurrection; no eternal damnation; no torturing of ‘souls’; no lake of fire.
There are three common terms: רוּחַ rûaḥ, נֶפֶשׁ nep̄eš, and נְשָׁמָה nəšāmâ.
All with Arabic cognates: rūḥ, nafs, nasamah. The first two are both highly productive; nafs forms reflexives in Classical Arabic (like English “self”) as well as meaning something closer to “soul”, while rūḥ forms reflexives in many dialects, and also shows up in formulae like rūḥ al-qudus “Holy Spirit, rūḥānī “spiritual” (or, in Algerian dialect, “ghost”). nasamah shows up in much more limited contexts, like measuring populations – and for “breeze”.
nep̄eš is, I presume, metathesized from the root nšp̄: i.e. ‘exhalation’.
Arabic has tanaffasa “breathe”.
There’s quite a little family of breath-related roots there, now I think about it: nps, nsp, nsm – to which we could add *npx (Arabic nafaxa “blow, inflate”), *npḥ “waft”, and apparently even *nsb and *npṭ “blow one’s nose”. Vaguely tempting to link the np- to *ʔanp- “nose”, but probably not. This is what makes biliteralism so frustrating: any biliteral etymology for one subset of these will inevitably exclude another.
So yeah: all these Semitic soul-words come down to air – invisible stuff that moves, and that moves within you for as long as you’re alive, and leaves you with your last breath.
Kusaal vʋ’ʋs “breathe” is surely from the same root as vʋe “be alive” and vʋ’ʋg “make/come alive”, and similarly throughout Oti-Volta.
The -s suffix of vʋ’ʋs is pluractional. The verb also means “rest”, as in vʋ’ʋsʋm daar “day of rest.”
No overlap at all with souls, though. Nor, come to think of it, with “wind”, which is expressed by a quite different family of words, which are also used for things like blowing a musical instrument.
rūḥānī “spiritual”
Adopted into Persian, also meaning “cleric” and as the surname Rouhani or Rohani, like the former president of Iran Hassan Rouhani, for anyone else who’s trying to remember where they heard that (though I’m sure many Hatters knew the surname’s origin the the first time they heard it).
No, he was on someone else’s podcast once.
Da haben sich zwei gefunden – you two are actually quite alike and maybe deserve each other, eh? I prefer to sit back, relax, and wait for the full presentation of what Haspelmath is supposedly like. Once I’ve read that, I might know enough to form an opinion.
“Clark”, then.
There’s also Hebrew שׁאף šʔp ‘inhale’. It is also, remarkably, ‘aspire’. The meanings ‘breathe in’ and ‘desire’ of the Hebrew are both attested in the OT, and both meanings of aspīrō are Classical Latin.
The hiphilangsci podcast with Nick Enfield is also about how words actually end up meaning anything:
https://hiphilangsci.net/2026/03/01/podcast-episode-56/
Interesting idea that the signifier/signified link is a kind of hypothesis on the part of the language user, based on how people behave in relation to the word(s) in question. (Don’t worry, he doesn’t go full-on behaviourist on us.)
[In relation to Anna Wierzbicka et al’s analyses in terms of semantic primes, he says something like “that’s kinda like their best guess at the meaning.”]
[Rouhani]
“Clark”, then.
I hadn’t thought of that. It has hyponyms “Deacon”, “Priest”, and “Bishop”.
It seems “Hassan Rouhani” is “Beauclerk“.
Da./Norw. geistlig “prelate” < Ger. geistlich “(lit.) spiritual”. Not a surname, though.
Geistlicher “cleric”; not any particular rank, though.
The Semitic ‘breathing’ words seem to often change meaning between ‘inhale’, ‘exhale, blow’, and just ‘breathe’.
*npš is pan-Semitic, including Akkadian. So if *npš < *nšp, as I suggested, that would be old.
Also, do *nšp, *npḫ work as onomatopoeias without the *p fricativizing to [f] as in later Hebrew and in Arabic? Evidently they do, but to my ear more as ‘blow’ than ‘exhale’.
Obsolete English “ghostly father”, confessor.
—Charles, duc d’Orléans (who by the end of his 25 years as a prisoner of war in England spoke English better than French, it’s said)
Text from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50409/confession-of-a-stolen-kiss
“rhetorical”
In Russian context I’d rather think of something adults often say to kids (and sometimes to other adults):
Look, quel(le) [beautiful, large, …] [girl, bird, …]!
(however, it can be a borrowed construction)
So is Russian seks “sex” a verb for H.?
(and why it is “roots” rather than “words” or “[verbal, etc.] stems” that he calls so?)
Kabyle, like most Berber varieties, has borrowed all numbers from 3 up from Arabic.
Despite abundant evidence that even small numbers can be borrowed (and often have been), the words for “three” and “four” still feature in lists of supposed cognates between Volta-Congo and Dogon and (parts) of Atlantic, and even Mande.
(They’re shared by Bangime, which even Roger Blench thinks is an isolate.)
Hausa seems to have borrowed its word for “two.” An interesting start for a people now famous in West Africa for their awesome mercantile powers. But then, wouldn’t a long-distance merchant be exactly the sort of person most likely to adopt foreign words for numbers?
Hi everyone, many thanks for discussing my “Grammaticon” project! I don’t know how exactly this blog works, but let me try to respond to one thoughtful comment in particular (posted by Y on April 24th):
My feeling is that Haspelmath got stuck with an imperfect idea. His intention is clearly good: there should be clarity on concepts like “word” and “verb” if you are going to compare their properties and behaviors between different languages. However, creating axiomatic definitions doesn’t work. Grammars leak. Edge cases are everywhere, and the closer you look the more you’ll find. No single definition is going to work, and Haspelmath himself is forced to wiggle to explain edge cases, like abstract nouns. That is not to say that comparative linguistics and typology are impossible. Rather, each study needs to define its comparanda precisely. The definition of a “verb” in a comparative semantic study need not be the same as in a study of tense marking or alignment, and so on.
Indeed, “grammars leak”, but we cannot compare them without “axiomatic definitions” of the type used in the Grammaticon (though I don’t call them “axiomatic”). For a long time, I thought much like Y: “No single definition is going to work”. But then I pondered what exactly is meant by “work” – because strictly speaking, any definition *works* as long as it can be applied consistently. Y’s comment about “each study needing to define its comparanda precisely” is right on target, and this is what linguists who engage in broad comparisons do on a regular basis. HOWEVER: In order to define their project-specific comparative concepts, they typically make use of a wide range of other terms that are generally thought to be understood uniformly across the discipline. We are aware of problems here and there, but we do not think of terms such as “copula”, “demonstrative” or “ablative” as requiring project-specific definitions. So the Grammaticon definitions can be thought of as providing a default if someone does not want to invest much into providing their own definition using more basic terms. In many cases, it does not really matter which definition is chosen “in a study of tense marking or alignment”, because researchers mostly focus on uncontroversial core cases anyway (“canonical cases”, as Corbett would call them). So it seems to me that most of my definitions can be adopted wholesale without any issues, though a minority will of course raise questions (or even meet with bewilderment) among my colleagues.
(And as for the Covid discussions, I recommend going back to John Ioannidis’s article from March 2020: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/. This comes from traditional scientific skepticism and has absolutely nothing to do with “MAGA”. Ioannidis is a leading researcher in the science reform movement – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-016-0021 – which I have long sympathized with; see also my comments in a recent issue of “Linguistic Typology”, where I cite Ioannidis (2005): https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingty-2025-0037/html)
That introduced me to HARKing (“hypothesizing after the results are known”); I knew it as “the Texas sharpshooter fallacy”, illustrated as shooting at a barn and painting a bullseye around the bullet hole.
John Ioannidis used to be a leading figure in a certain kind of scientific research. However, I think that even then, calling what he was involved with “the science reform movement” was rather tendentious. In any case, he proved himself to be an self-important crank when it came to Covid, as Orac clearly showed.
Martin: I changed the quoted paragraph in your comment to italics for clarity; I hope you don’t mind.
I don’t know how exactly this blog works, …
Welcome here Martin. I haven’t figured it out either, as evidenced by my not infrequently getting black marks from our host.
Let me first respond on the question of levels of (scientific) evidence.
Nobody has claimed Ioannidis 2020 was somehow actively contributing to a MAGA viewpoint. What happened was people who already wanted to see COVID as a conspiracy seized upon I’s piece as evidence for their prejudices. If I is going to weigh in to heated public discourse, he should as a minimum have ‘read the room’ better. To the extent some people took his piece as support for
continuing tonot going out of their way to avoid spread the virus at its most virulent and unvaccinable phase [**], he has deaths on his hands. He has also in my view retrospectively trashed the reputation he had built up for “a certain kind of scientific research”. (Like Brett I’m dubious this amounted to “science reform”.) I suggest you stop citing I’s 2005 papers: it’ll have the effect of undermining your claims/make you seem to be following uncritical groupthink. [***]is damning for anybody whose reputation is built on scientific probity.
I note I is not qualified in Public Health. He should have just shut the fuck up. In Public Health, you need to consider not only the costs of action, but also the costs of inaction. As such the evidentiary testing is for ‘balance of probability’, not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. You don’t have the luxury of ‘scientific skepticism’.
Ioannidis has to a limited extent walked back that 2020 piece. Too little too late. He above all should know the dangers of hubris in in sticking to poorly supported scientific claims. What would somewhat rehabilitate his reputation is to acknowledge poor methodology and his unjustifiable language (“fiasco”).
[**] I’m afraid the revision of early 2020 history is well under way. Now that the virus has morphed to be less lethal, and vaccination has achieved ‘herd immunity’ in at least some countries, politicians (even some who were there at the time) have started criticising the response as an over-reaction/as too much of a stress on the economy/as producing nothing but inflation (yes it did, but not “nothing but”).
[***] I also don’t see how the double-blind placebo-controlled experimental methodology that I’s 2005 papers are talking about has any bearing on research in Language Typology. As if we could concoct or go find a language just like this one but lacking ablatives.
… as Orac clearly showed.
@Brett’s reference — see the Who is Orac? link (presumably, and not the Jana at cite 48 here).
It’s true that we cannot test typological hypotheses in the way we can test hypotheses in biology or medicine (by randomized controlled trials), but the science reform movement is just as relevant for claims about cross-linguistic patterns. Linguists are very prone to overgeneralize – not only Chomskyans, who have often generalized from a few languages (or just one) to all languages, but also anti-Chomskyans. Sadly, the only typological paper ever to have been published in “Nature” made strong claims on the basis of just four language families: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09923. Fourteen years later, the authors asked similar questions again, but this time used a much larger database, reversing their earlier overall conclusion: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02325-z. (Interestingly, the new results are more in line with what typologists such as Greenberg and Dryer have been saying for decades), When making inferences from observational data, one is inherently limited because causality cannot be established with any certainty, but there are still big differences between conservative approaches (of the Ioannidis type) and approaches that draw strong conclusions on the basis of limited evidence.
Martin, thanks for your reply. The explanation of the purpose of the Grammaticon (a default definition, for comparative studies) makes it clearer, but still: take for example “A noun is a root that denotes an object.” Why not flesh it out a bit, so one doesn’t need to think too much about whether “vacuum” or “possibility” or even “George” denote objects?
I think my idea of a syntactic/distributional definition riding on clear semantically-defined prototypes would answer nicely, but maybe therre are others which would do as well.
Yes, “a syntactic/distributional definition riding on clear semantically-defined prototypes” is what has been used for syntactic functions (A, S, and P, as discussed in my 2011 paper), but it doesn’t work for noun/verb/adjective, because the syntactic/distributional properties are too diverse. In contrast, A, S and P can be defined in terms of flagging and indexing, which occur quite regularly across languages. And indeed, one wonders whether “vacuum” or “possibility” denote objects. However, given the notion of “shared-core definition” (see §5 of my 2021 paper: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005489), we can work with comparative-concept definitions where the English words “vacuum” and “possibility” ARE NOT nouns in the comparative sense (= in the Grammaticon sense). They are English Nouns, but not nouns for general linguistics. This is unintuitive, but only because we have the mistaken intuition that language-particular categories should map straightforwardly onto general concepts.
Linguists are very prone to overgeneralize …
My take on the discussion here so far is that everyone is being cautious about generalising even a little bit. A Linguist I am not, but my intuition is that trying to apply ‘noun’ cross-linguistically is already over-generalising — that is, unless the definition is circular or so vacuous as to allow that in English nearly all ‘content’ words are/can be nouns.
conservative approaches (of the Ioannidis type)
Here’s the rub. Go back and read the 2005 paper more critically. Ioannidis is _not_ conservative at all. He does not claim merely Findings go beyond the claimed statistics. He claims they are _False_ [**]. That is, he claims the statistics contradict the Findings. I had hoped the “false” was inserted gratuitously by his publicist, trying to ‘ginger up’ the subject. (“Most Research Findings are not proven” would be pretty feeble, after all. And that would be the generous interpretation of its appearance in the Abstract, that you quote in your 2025 piece.) Alas, “false” appears so frequently, it must be attributed as deliberate.
Why “Why Most Published Research Findings are False”
is Falseis not epistemologically conservative.[**] A jury finding the accused ‘not guilty’ is not at all the same thing as declaring the accused ‘innocent’. It means merely the prosecution has not made its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
I completely agree that saying that “Why Most Published Research Findings are False” is not conservative. What I meant was that it’s good to be conservative in not assuming that a research finding is correct just because one is persuaded by the evidence for it. Too many scientists (including generative linguists) build new theories on top of old theories which are built on top of assumptions plus very little evidence. I also think that it’s a big problem that nowadays a lot of speculation by credentialed experts feeds into politics, in a way reminiscent of credentialed astrology feeding into politics in earlier centuries. But I don’t want to discuss politics further on this site (I now deciphered the pseudonym “bulbul”, and I recall some very unpleasant interactions with him a few years ago).
Martin, I don’t think I understand you. If, within a given language, the word designating ‘possibility’ has the same distributional properties as the word designating the object ‘tooth’, why shouldn’t the two be equally serviceable for cross-linguistic comparison regarding “nouns”? Why can’t your definition be amended to something like “A noun is a root that denotes an object (or a root that distributes like one)”?
English words “vacuum” and “possibility” ARE NOT nouns in the comparative sense (= in the Grammaticon sense). They are English Nouns, but not nouns for general linguistics
Is there any human language in which all nouns refer to physical objects?
Does (to pick at random) Kusaal have an equivalent for “vacuum” or ‘nothingness’/’emptiness’/’absence of stuff’ or similar? Is it a noun — to the extent ‘noun’ can be applied to Kusaal vocab?
I can see treating “possibility” as a noun cross-linguistically would be problematic. There’s an abstract -ible (adjective in English) hiding right inside it. But then posse isn’t English. (Arguably the whole structure is a foreign imposter.) ‘Maybeness’ is alleged to be a word, but seems jocular to me. [all of wikti’s quotes are very recent]
I feel this methodology is like Archimedes asking for a place to stand and a solid fulcrum so that he can move the earth with a long lever. Comparative Linguistics is all out of independent places to stand.
Does (to pick at random) Kusaal have an equivalent for “vacuum” or ‘nothingness’/’emptiness’/’absence of stuff’ or similar? Is it a noun — to the extent ‘noun’ can be applied to Kusaal vocab?
Yep. Ka’alim “nonexistence.” (An unequivocal noun.)
Almost any verb can make a gerund, a noun expressing the action or process or state that the verb describes.
Random non-gerund abstract nouns from the same noun class: daalim “masculinity”, biilim “childhood”, tiraannim “neighbourliness.” Others: nɔŋ “poverty”, gɛɛnmis “madness”, sʋnsa’aŋ “sorrow.”
There’s a robust morphological distinction between nominals and verbs in Kusaal, and the associated semantics are in no way unusual; they differ in some respects from English, so you have quality verbs like gim “be short”, and what would be adverbs in English are a subtype of noun in Kusaal syntactically. But neither phenomenon is particularly unusual cross-linguistically, and certainly it would do grave damage to the clarity of any grammatical description to declare that only nouns referring to physical objects were “really” nouns at all. To do that would be every bit as valuable in Kusaal as in English or Nahuatl or Mandarin: i.e. not in the least.
I have mentioned before that linzug “therefore” can be a verb subject in Kusaal, as in e.g. (from the Bible translation)
Ka linzugʋ da kɛ ka o lieb buudi bɛdegʋ yaab.
“Therefore he became the ancestor of many nations.”
(Literally, “And ‘therefore’ made that he became the ancestor of many nations.”)
But language-internally, this isn’t odd at all. Linzug certainly does mean “therefore”, but Kusaal construes it as a clause-level adverb, not a clause linker, and (as I was saying) adverbs are a subtype of noun in Kusaal. No reason why they can’t be verb subjects if the semantics permit.
(Linzug is analysable: it’s lin “this” with the postposition zug “on, onto, on account of.” The postposition, in turn, is a specialised use of the unequivocally nouny noun zug “head.”)
My question wasn’t totally rhetorical. I don’t actually know of any language in which all nouns refer to physical objects (certainly not Kusaal, nor any Oti-Volta language.) But maybe there is some weird exception out there somewhere which justifies decreeing that a real cross-linguistic definition of “noun” should exclude anything which doesn’t refer to a physical object.
There certainly seem to be weirder languages out there than Kusaal (though perhaps this is partly in the ear of the listener.)
I can well imagine that there may be languages that don’t have a “word” for “death”, for example, but need instead to use some sort of periphrasis involving the word (verb?) for “die.” It occurs to me that this sort of project (to set up a sort of “universal grammar”, in which every word for “death” would be declared to be a kind of abbreviation for such a periphrasis) seems to have a lot in common conceptually with Anna Wierzbicka’s attempts at reducing everything to semantic primes.
“(Physical) object” is a culture-bound notion, incidentally. It’s not an intuitively obvious universal human given.
Is a Kusaasi person’s siig an “object”, for example? If not, why not? Because Western linguists don’t think it is?
I feel this methodology is like Archimedes asking for a place to stand and a solid fulcrum so that he can move the earth with a long lever.
I like that analogy.
I can see treating “possibility” as a noun cross-linguistically would be problematic. There’s an abstract -ible (adjective in English) hiding right inside it.
That’s a different issue. “Luck”, then.
it’s good to be conservative in not assuming that a research finding is correct just because one is persuaded by the evidence for it
well, that kinda rejects the entire scientific method, in favor of, um, what exactly?
the basic alternatives to being persuaded by evidence, historically, are (1) assertions of divine revelation (whether framed explicitly as such or as an insistence that evidence contradicting an axiomatically true theory cannot possibly be accepted), (2) handwaving, or what’s now talked about as “vibes”* (which is similar, but lacks an articulated underlying structure), (3) sleight of hand, usually involving changing the definition of “evidence”, “a research finding”, or “persuaded”.
(the straw-man sentence that follows the line i quoted is, i think, an example of (3), since it substitutes “theories which are built on top of assumptions plus very little evidence” for being “persuaded by the evidence”; the chomskyites it refers to, however, are firmly committed to (1).)
me, i’ll stick with evidence, thanks.
.
* which philosopher-of-popular-music robin james has been theorizing in some brilliant ways for a forthcoming book, with a lot of material on her blog.
Sorry for butting in but I was also struk by “it’s good to be conservative in not assuming that a research finding is correct just because one is persuaded by the evidence for it”. Either someone thinks that the research finding is correct or that it is incorrect, or they are not sure. But in any case, if that someone is persuaded it means that they think that the finding is correct. I mean, there is probably some evidence out there that now is the month of October. However, there is also an overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It’s not true that every piece of evidence has to be definitive either way.
If I understand Martin Haspelmath correctly, his definitions are not additive, but subtractive. For example, the definition of “noun” doesn’t try to identify every noun in every language. If someone wants to argue that luck or siig are nouns in their respective languages, let them. But cross-linguistically only objects are included in the core definition of “noun”. This raises some questions: 1) does each of 6000-7000 languages have a grammatical category to which most words for objects belong and 2) are there any objects the words for which belong to such a class in any language. If the answers are “yes” and “yes” than it is a meaningful definition. If not, then, well, maybe not.
Y asked:
“If, within a given language, the word designating ‘possibility’ has the same distributional properties as the word designating the object ‘tooth’, why shouldn’t the two be equally serviceable for cross-linguistic comparison regarding “nouns”? Why can’t your definition be amended to something like “A noun is a root that denotes an object (or a root that distributes like one)”?”
The answer is that “distributes” is not defined uniformly across languages, so this does not work cross-linguistically. In language-particular descriptions, we do of course typically operate in this way. But the reason why linguists often disagree on the cross-linguistic identification of categories is that they use different criteria for different languages – in a cherry-picking way. (Croft called this “methodological opportunism”.) This does not make it possible to compare languages in a rigorous way.
D.O. said:
“If I understand Martin Haspelmath correctly, his definitions are not additive, but subtractive. For example, the definition of “noun” doesn’t try to identify every noun in every language. If someone wants to argue that luck or siig are nouns in their respective languages, let them. But cross-linguistically only objects are included in the core definition of “noun”.”
Yes, exactly.
However, which “categories” a language has is not strictly speaking relevant to cross-linguistic research. We compare languages based on our comparative concepts, not on the basis of “categories” matching across languages. Since all languages have roots denoting objects, we can compare these roots, regardless of what the categories of a language are. (For more discussion, see my 2023 paper on word class universals: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005899
But if you compare, say, noun cases or argument ordering across languages, what harm should come from using “luck” or “vacuum” in your examples?
“But if you compare, say, noun cases or argument ordering across languages, what harm should come from using “luck” or “vacuum” in your examples?”
Probably none – but it’s better to avoid such cases, because we might end up comparing phenomena that are not comparable (because the don’t fall under the same comparative concept). For example, what about English -ing-nominalizations? They are noun-like, too, but if we include them in a general theory of nounhood (e.g. if we claim that they bear a UG feature [+N]), we may end up with some strange claims that are hardly testable. It seems to me that a lot of the misunderstandings (and even “theory divides”) within linguistics derive from attempts to compare things that are not comparable.
On the other hand, if we narrow down what we consider a noun, we might miss some counterexamples to a generalization based only on concrete nouns, or miss some interesting cross-linguistic tendencies.
As an example, a quick search finds a paper by Ji and Liang, “An animacy hierarchy within inanimate nouns: English corpus evidence from a prototypical perspective”, Lingua 205, 71, 2018 (I have only read the abstract.) They posit an animacy hierarchy in English for inanimate nouns, including abstract ones. Animacy hierarchy universals abound in cross-linguistic typology. How could a study such as this be generalized without considering abstract nouns?
The -ing nominalizations you mention bring up another example: if you want to do cross-linguistic study of verbal nouns, how can you define them except distributionally?
all languages have roots denoting objects, we can compare these roots, regardless of what the categories of a language are.
I can sorta see why you’ve switched the discussion to use “roots”: not in every language is ‘word’ an applicable concept (so I’ve heard). The more you retreat into theory-laden terminology, it seems to me the more you’re committing the sin you’ve warned of: of bringing pre-conceptions from the smattering (relatively) of languages the researcher has experience of. The advantage of ‘word’ is there’s a chance your native-speaker informant might understand what you’re asking about. ‘root’ or ‘stem’ you’ll have to explain in advance, so poisoning the well.
What is to be the ‘stem’ of “possibility”? Are we allowed to strip off the -ity; and then the -ible; as productive suffixes?
Does every language have a structure recognisable as ‘phrase’? Does every such ‘phrase’ have a ‘head’? I ask because that seems exactly the sort of distributional criteria @Y is suggesting.
_And_ because, from the Grammaticon:
So ‘noun’ isn’t merely defined as a root/stem that denotes an object. Rather, it’s the phrase that does the denoting(?)
_And_ because in English we could treat ‘luck’ as a stem of both a noun and a verb as in “I lucked out”; likewise “vacuum the carpet”.
Could I suggest that if we did this Archimedes-with-his-lever from first principles as a synchronic study of English, not predisposed to look for its IE pedigree, we’d find ‘noun’, ‘verb’ just aren’t a good fit. (They are etymologically foreign words denoting foreign concepts, after all.)
I wouldn’t even try to do an intra-lingual study of verbal nouns, they are a mess 😉
living =
(1) Anglican clerical position (bog-standard noun)
(2) what one does with one’s life, sometimes interchangeable with life
(3) fixed phrases: living quarters, living wage (these superficially resemble adjectives but are not–quarters/wage FOR living)
Category (3) is just noun/nominal used as classifier, not specific to verbal nouns: vacuum energy.
The ambiguity of the relationship between the stem verb and the head noun is also not specific to verbal nouns: toilet cleaner — somebody/something who/that cleans toilets; vacuum cleaner — a machine that cleans (something) using a vacuum. Pop-up toaster; crumpet toaster. Parking meter; parking robot.
This observation is something of a straw man. I won’t try to summarise the ensuing discussion, but by Section 5
I apologise for being too stupid to be able to follow the justification. What I perceive is that these are “universals”
After all the talk of Ioannidis and avoiding researchers’ bias, all I’m getting is that noun, verb, adjective are “universals” because Linguists (of a Language Typology bent) approach every language on the basis that’s what they’ll find.
This circular reasoning is then deployed circularly in Section 7 to castigate ‘Heterosemous root sets’ (English hammer appearing as noun, verb and adjective) as “weird”/”janus-like”.
Having rejected anything that doesn’t fit the pre-ordained glass slipper of “universals” we find … ta-dah .. the “universals” are universal.
Oh for a Dan Everett.
@D.O., @Y, you might want to look at Section 5 exhibit (26) and the following discussion.
Note (12) is re ‘distributional analysis’, but I’m not sure if this is an error for note (15): Lyons (eminently sensibly) talking about categorising beauty.
And so the methodology excludes examples which aren’t going to turn out to fit these “universals” that are to be ‘discovered’. The Procrustean Bed.
So ‘noun’ isn’t merely defined as a root/stem that denotes an object. Rather, it’s the phrase that does the denoting(?)
No, it’s the head of the phrase.
Descriptive linguists discover “parts of speech” on the basis of patterns of occurrence, substitutability etc within the language that they are studying. This can be done in any language, and even though all grammars leak, you never end up with a system which is all leaks. The leaks are exceptions (unless you’re a very incompetent descriptive linguist.)
In principle, you could use entirely arbitrary ad-hoc labels for your parts of speech. (Some misguided souls have actually done this.) I could say, for example, that Kusaal nid “person”, dʋk “pot”, bu’osʋg “question”, Kʋsaal “Kusaal”, siig “life force”, ka’alim “nonexistence” were Category A words, and kpi “die”, kʋ “kill”, ma’ “lie”, tis “give”, na’as “give respect to”, bɛ “exist”, ka’ “not exist”, aen “be something/somehow”*, bʋgʋs “be soft” were Category B words.
But it’s obviously going to be more helpful if I leverage the fact that many, many other languages have a Category, established by language-internal criteria, which like my Kusaal Category A, contains a core group of words referring to physical objects. Noting that such groups are often called “nouns” in the grammars of such languages, I may be emboldened to declare that nid etc are nouns. And similarly for verbs.
That’s where the semantics comes in. However, in no language is the semantic core coextensive with the actual word Category. (I’d say that this mismatch is itself a highly significant linguistic universal.)
I can see that the semantic dodge is useful for aligning terminology when comparing languages. But to declare that this heuristic is ontologically prior to what actually happens in the individual languages, which seems to be the game here, is surely putting the cart before the horse. It’s mistaking a protractor for the angle which is being measured, or the Index for the contents of the book.
* The copula is a verb in Kusaal. There are lots of languages which don’t have a copula verb; that is of no importance at all in determining whether Kusaal has a copula verb, and no reason for claiming that it’s not a “real” verb in Kusaal.
@languagehat: There’s an ambiguity regarding “it’s” there. What I think AntC meant that it isn’t the noun that does the denoting; rather, it’s the phrase (headed by the noun) that does the denoting. The point is that this suggests, confusingly, that a noun doesn’t even have to denote anything by itself.
Which is why we should be careful about dummy “it”.
David Eddyshaw said:
“I can see that the semantic dodge is useful for aligning terminology when comparing languages. But to declare that this heuristic is ontologically prior to what actually happens in the individual languages, which seems to be the game here, is surely putting the cart before the horse.”
No, that’s not the game – the game is to provide definitions for “aligning terminology when comparing languages”, and not more than that. There is no “ontological” or “priority” claim. Clearly, particular languages (and their description) have “priority” over language comparison (and general linguistics) in some sense. But many of us happen to be interested in general linguistics too, not just in particular languages – and then it’s very important to separate the two conceptually (separate p-linguistics from g-linguistics: https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2561).
Fair enough. As I said above, “grammatical primitives” are fine by me so long as they don’t mistake their place as useful aids in research and description and start giving themselves ontological airs.
Then the question boils down to how useful your proposals are in practice?
I am still disquieted by a definition for (say) “noun” which is so abstract that no single language I know of actually works on the basis of such a category.
I suspect my confusion is due to not being quite clear what your terminology is for, exactly. How should linguists actually be employing it in descriptive or comparative work?
David Eddyshaw wrote:
“I suspect my confusion is due to not being quite clear what your terminology is for, exactly. How should linguists actually be employing it in descriptive or comparative work?”
Yes, that’s a good question – maybe these definitions are primarily for myself? I have said in a blogpost that I don’t think that they are necessarily useful for typology (https://dlc.hypotheses.org/3975), and for descriptive work, typology has only limited usefulness (as I explained in my 2020 paper in ALAL: https://benjamins.com/catalog/alal.20032.has).
So I should probably emphasize more clearly that I intend them as contributions to the discussion – and as pushing the view that in principle, grammatical terms could have standard denotations, just like our IPA characters (see https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1000). But this idea will become more acceptable only once it is recognized more widely that descriptive categories of p-linguistics are distinct from the comparative concepts of g-linguistics. As we will continue to use the same terms for both kinds of entities, the confusion will probably persist for a long time.
I’m obliquely reminded of a work that I am rather fond of: E O Ashton’s Swahili Grammar, from the far-off year of 1944.
The book is much more sensitive than most grammars of that epoch to the way languages can differ in the whole way that they bundle reality. After pointing out that a typical Swahili lexeme corresponds to several English lexemes*, so that the Anglophone student must be aware that the “same” Swahili word may seem (to the student) to have quite different meanings in differing contexts, Ashton immediately pivots to noting how Swahili morphosyntax routinely makes semantic distinctions ignored in English. Her guiding principle is to try to explain Swahili grammar via what she calls “ideas”, by which she seems to mean general semantic concepts not tied to any particular language (in particular, not closely tied to English grammatical concepts.)
She doesn’t always bring it off satisfactorily (this was 1944), but she is at least well aware of what the important issues are.
* Seems like a banal point, but it’s one I’ve rarely seen mentioned upfront in even quite sophisticated language descriptions.
“Correct”, too, is doing a lot of work there. To me, the whole thing reads like a plea for quite ordinary science theory: don’t fall in love with your hypotheses; evidence isn’t proof – nothing is proof; metaphysical certainty is not available; apportion the strength of your belief to the strength of the evidence, don’t treat “persuaded” as binary.
Apparently, scary numbers of biomedical researchers aren’t familiar with basic science theory. I haven’t noticed anything similar in my own field, so the cited Ioannidis papers read to me as preaching to the choir.
@Brett [responding to @Hat] What I think AntC meant that it isn’t the noun that does the denoting; rather, it’s the phrase (headed by the noun) that does the denoting. The point is that this suggests, confusingly, that a noun doesn’t even have to denote anything by itself.
Yes indeed. I was trying to remember a point from Cresswell, that has come back to me after sleeping on it.
It’s usual to say a noun phrase qualifies the meaning of the head noun: red roses are a subset of all roses[**]; the red roses in the vase are a subset of those. But consider: paste diamond, steel wool, a china pig.
‘paste diamond’ doesn’t denote a subset of diamonds — unless you’re going to expand what ‘diamond’ denotes so much as to be useless. (‘Ice diamond’ might denote a subset of diamonds, or might denote a subset of things shaped in ice. I kinda want to say in the latter case, ‘ice’ is the head, despite it not appearing in the usual head distributional position for English — you can perhaps hear that in how it’s stressed.)
Presumably that definition of ‘noun’ I quoted does allow that ‘nominal phrase’ might consist of no more than the ‘head’ (??as ‘stem’ plus possible inflexions/affixes??). So the noun would have to denote something by itself.
I see Martin has now reduced the claim to
Well then as a pragmatic matter does ‘noun’ or ‘nominal phrase’ when comparing English to Swahili encompass piled-up classifiers/compounds? Or must we use a different term from this terminology to describe Swahili? I just don’t see anything usefully describable as “universal”.
@Martin the game is to provide definitions for “aligning terminology when comparing languages”, and not more than that. There is no “ontological” or “priority” claim.
I found, and still find that weakened claim inconsistent with the frequent use of “universal” in that 2023 paper.
Thank you for your clear and closely-reasoned responses throughout this thread. I think I now understand your position. We’ll see whether The Grammaticon is of practical use for Linguists in the field. I remain skeptical about any claims for Language Universals — poisoned by too much Chomsky at an impressionable age; let’s leave it at that.
Apparently, scary numbers of biomedical researchers aren’t familiar with basic science theory.
I’m pretty sure it’s their big-pharma employers who don’t give a damn about any kind of theory, but want to get FDA approval to put the drug on the market. Scraping above the requisite p-value is just another compliance cost.
Yup. As someone who had to copyedit pharma ads for a living, I can assure you they want very badly to put everything out with the wildest claims they can get away with, and we were the last lines of defense, pathetic as that is.
Well then as a pragmatic matter does ‘noun’ or ‘nominal phrase’ when comparing English to Swahili encompass piled-up classifiers/compounds? Or must we use a different term from this terminology to describe Swahili?
There may (or may not) be languages for which “noun phrase” is not a useful concept (perhaps some of the more flamboyantly polysynthetic ones), but Swahili is not one of them. Swahili is much like English in that a noun phrase consists of a head and any dependents (which are not always modifiers, but might be determiners), or can be built up from components by coordination instead of subordination. The actual way this is all marked formally is quite different from English, but the analytic categories you need are nothing very exotic.
The “paste diamond” thing is not really a matter of syntax: it’s like “guinea pig”, which is neither a pig nor from Guinea: nevertheless, it’s still a noun phrase, and “pig” is still the head. The whole thing is a metaphor, of a kind that natural languages abound in. It just means that the semantics of the whole phrase can’t be determined by simple composition of semantics of the parts: but that doesn’t affect the syntactic structure of the phrase itself.
Kusaal is the same, pretty much. The actual mechanics of how a noun phrase is constructed are very different from English (for example, adjectives and demonstratives form compounds with the head noun, and inflect for number in place of the head, which loses its own number marking) but you don’t need to do any great mental gymnastics to recognise -piel- as an “adjective” despite the fact the language does this:
fuug “shirt”
fuud “shirts”
fupielig “white shirt”
fupielis “white shirts”
fupielkaŋa “this white shirt”
fupielbamma “these white shirts”
fupielsi’a “some white shirt”
fupielsieba “some white shirts”
[This compounding is compulsory: you do see cases where the head noun seems to have kept its number flexion, so the phrase just looks like noun + adjective à la française, but in such cases the tones reveal that what is actually going on is that the noun combining form has been segmentally remodelled after the singular, but it’s still got the combining-form tones.]
The mental rearrangement needed to apply the familiar terms usefully to this unfamiliar language is merely on a level with that needed to understand general relativity, not quantum mechanics …
Like “paste diamond”: kʋntzɛn’ug, literally “red iron”, which actually means “copper”, and not any kind of iron at all. But the structure of the compound is just the same as fupielig “white shirt.” It’s just that the compound/noun phrase has got lexicalised – same as in “guinea pig.”
Of course, just because Swahili and Kusaal are not radically different from English in this particular respect, it doesn’t mean that they might not be radically different from English in some other respect which might test a would-be universalising framework to destruction; nor that there might not be languages a lot less like English when it comes to noun phrases than Swahili or Kusaal.
I believe that this has indeed been suggested with some polysynthetic head-marking languages, the idea being that the various parts of what one is tempted to take as a noun phrase are all in fact democratically on a level and equally attached to the relevant subject or object marker on the verb. This would account for the way that the alleged noun phrases can end up discontinuous, with bits scattered on either side of the verb. But the devil is in the detail: it seems quite often to turn out that when you look carefully enough into the structure, constraints turn up limiting the kinds of “noun phrase constituent” that you can do this to, so the apparent democracy is an illusion.
I think Jeffrey Heath’s (sadly user-unfriendly, but wonderful) grammar of Nunggubuyu has an analysis like that, though. Those non-Pama-Nyungan Australian languages up in the north are some of the best candidates for not having Noun Phrases As We Know Them, anyhow.
The “paste diamond” thing is not really a matter of syntax: it’s like “guinea pig”, which is neither a pig nor from Guinea: nevertheless, it’s still a noun phrase, and “pig” is still the head. The whole thing is a metaphor, of a kind that natural languages abound in. It just means that the semantics of the whole phrase can’t be determined by simple composition of semantics of the parts: but that doesn’t affect the syntactic structure of the phrase itself.
I agree it’s not a matter of syntax. The Haspelmath 2023 (to the extent I understand it) is saying we must start with semantics, in order to recognise cross-linguistic categories, in order to _then_ compare syntax.
But I think
HaspelmathThe Grammaticon’s definitions are playing fast-and-loose here: “guineau pig” is a nominal phrase that denotes an object. Suppose we’d just encountered English in the deepest jungle. How would we know ‘pig’ is the head there, given that each stem appears stand-alone in nominal phrases? The “ice diamond” vs “ice diamond” example[**]. And if we can’t identify a head **on semantic grounds** how can we say this fits the (allegedly universal) definition of noun-as-head?Any competent describer of languages is going to complain I’m arguing about angels dancing on pinheads. Which I am. But then any competent describer of languages isn’t going to need The Grammaticon. So I can only repeat your enquiry as to what the thing’s useful for.
[**] If you’re not giving tones in your kusaal, I’m not giving stress in my English.
If you’re not giving tones in your kusaal, I’m not giving stress in my English.
Oh, very well …
kʋ̄nt “iron”, zɛ̀n’ug “red”, kʋ̀ntzɛ̀n’ug “copper.”
(This example does actually illustrate my point about tone. The combining form of “iron” in Plato’s Republic would actually be *kʋ̀nd-, not kʋ̀nt-. The form which is actually used has the final t of the free form kʋ̄nt, where it arose by the sandhi change *dd > t, the second d there coming from a plural noun-class suffix. The word is formally plural but used with a singular meaning: the original singular survives only in the common personal name Akudug(u) “Iron.” But despite having the segmental form of the plural-used-as-singular, the actually used combining form nevertheless still has the proper tone for the combining form.)
David E said:
What’s an example of that being culture-bound? Are there languages where “object” can’t be cleanly translated?
I don’t know, does it take up space? (first criterion that came to mind) And how would you ask that question in Kusaal?
Huzza for E O Ashton!* Those are wonderful books and while the example sentences are often very funny I take it that was unintentional because she was an earnest lady not consciously striving for comic effect.
*Described rather bureaucratically in one online reference as “ASHTON, Ethel Ostell, Mrs.”
does it take up space?
Yes, but not a lot, apparently.
From the story I mentioned (the witch is altruistically helping his neighbour rethatch the hut where the neighbour’s wife had hidden his siig):
ti paae dau la siig la n be si’el la, n gban’e suu o ben-biigin.
“until he got to where the man’s siig was, grabbed it and put it in his penis-sheath.”
The verb su means “put something into a narrow container” (e.g. arrows in a quiver.)
To translate “object” into Kusaal, you’d need to think about just what you meant by the English word. Depending on that, you might say e.g. bʋnnyɛtir “visible thing” (nyɛ “see.”) Bʋn “thing” itself, like the English word, is non-committal as to whether you are talking about a physical object. The Bible translation has Paul call love a bʋnbɔɔdim “desirable thing”, while a book of riddles about animals calls a sheep a bʋnbɔɔdir “desirable thing” (this would be the Welsh substratum.)
The “paste diamond” thing is not really a matter of syntax: it’s like “guinea pig”, which is neither a pig nor from Guinea
Not relevant to your point, but paste diamonds really are made of paste.
Paste, meaning the type of flint glass used to make costume jewelry, always struck me as a very weird extended usage. The OED entry doesn’t really offer any insight into how that particular sense arose. Maybe it feels more natural in French?
The Wikiparticle on rhinestones says, “Paste is glass, made by grinding lead glass to a paste, packing it in a mould, and firing it.” (Sic on the first comma.) The citation is to a company that sells vintage costume jewelry.
https://www.gadelles.com/articles/paste-glass-crystal-what-s-the-difference/
I had no idea, just as I now have no idea what that procedure accomplishes. ETA: Why can’t you just pour the original glass into that same mold? Too viscous to work well with faceted shapes?
In a bit more looking, I can’t confirm that story of grinding up lead glass. It’s not mentioned in the 1911 Britannica s.v. “paste” or in this encyclopedia, for instance. But I need to get back to grading finals.
AntC wrote:
“Any competent describer of languages is going to complain I’m arguing about angels dancing on pinheads. Which I am. But then any competent describer of languages isn’t going to need The Grammaticon. So I can only repeat your enquiry as to what the thing’s useful for.”
Indeed, language describers do not need the Grammaticon, and they do not need typological linguistics (as I explained in my 2020 paper in ALAL on the uniqueness of languages). Language describers typically want to describe languages transparently, using familiar terminology, but they don’t need the definitions provided in the Grammaticon.
So what is the Grammaticon useful for? The main purpose is to show to my colleagues that it is often possible to use existing terms in a rigorous way, i.e. with a clear (and simple) definition that is not circular – in other words, that (what I call) retro-definitions are often possible. (Not always; for example, I have no definition of “finite verb”.) Linguists typically act as if our traditional terms have a clear meaning, and maybe if pressed they would retreat to saying that the meaning is vague. However, technical terms should not have vague meanings – the whole point of technical terms is precision, without which there is (almost) no reproducibility.
In actual practice, linguists usually learn the meanings of their grammatical terms from salient examples, i.e. just as they learn the meanings of everyday words. But for everyday words, precision is not necessary (and maybe too much precision is sometimes harmful). For technical terms of linguistic science, we need to be precise. One might say that we should not try to use the traditional terms for precision, but in broad cross-linguistic projects (e.g. Grambank: https://grambank.clld.org/), there is really little choice – we cannot invent completely new terms. And in fact, the plan for the Grammaticon arose from my involvement in the Grambank project.
I wonder if the bracketing leading to these definitions was done with sufficient deliberation to make them maximally rigorous.
Martin, I see an inconsistency within the approach taken by the Grammaticon to several concepts. Contrast the definition of ‘noun’, which we discussed, with that of ‘transitive clause’: “A transitive clause is a clause which contains two arguments that are coded in the same way as the arguments of physical-effect verbs (‘kill’, ‘break’).” That is the approach which I suggested for concepts like ‘noun’ or ‘verb’, which you define purely semantically.
And then, ‘object (argument)’ is defined “An object argument of a clause is its P-argument when the clause is transitive, and its T-argument or its R-argument when the clause is ditransitive.” Ditransitives aside, a ‘P-argument’ is defined, “A P-argument is the patient argument of a physical-effect verb (‘kill’, ‘break’).” So, do we exclude non-patient objects (e.g. of verba sentiendi) from typological discussion, as the default?
Another point, which I didn’t bring up is that the semantic terms “object” and “action” are ill defined, and make a weak foundation for the definitions of ‘noun’ and ‘verb’. I am no philosopher of language, but I can see how one can argue for and against ‘vacuum’ being an object, and ‘to forget’ being an action.
Y makes good points.
That would explain things; my field is indeed untainted by lucre, filthy or otherwise…
Here’s a link to, and a little bit of discussion of, Heath’s paper on Nunggubuyu being non-configurational in the strictest sense of the word and how that entails not having – indeed not being able to have – noun phrases.
Admittedly not many others.
As I said, some shall go mad from the revelation once it comes; we’ll see who.
Interestingly, there is some evidence for NPs even in Nunggubuyu, as the paper notes (though certainly nothing like as elaborate as in English or Swahili or Kusaal.)
These issues tend to be more subtle than they initially appear, too. It’s not only Chomskyite ideologues who sometimes discover that blanket denials that a language has (say) noun phrases* in any shape or form have to be reconsidered in the light of further evidence.
Nicholas Evans’ superb grammar of Bininj Gun-wok (which is Very Polysynthetic Indeed) has a whole chapter called “The Nominal Group”, which goes into great detail about how the language doesn’t have anything much like English noun phrases. On the other hand, he finds a lot to say about what it does have, and leaves the door open for the idea that the language has “functional NPs” (as they might be called in Lexical Functional Grammar) even if it doesn’t have nice Chomskyan X-bar-y things. There’s more to semantics than that kind of syntactic approach can deal with.
One of the best Salishan grammars that I’ve seen is Wayne Suttles’ one of Musqueam Halkomelem. An interesting point is that he reckons that the language does too distinguish nouns from verbs (a thing often disputed with Salishan languages), though certainly the differences are much less apparent than in English. Or Swahili, or Kusaal. Or almost any language …
* Or recursion. [Ducks and runs for cover.]
there is some evidence for NPs even in …
blanket denials that a language has (say) noun phrases* in any shape or form have to be reconsidered …
doesn’t have anything much like English noun phrases. … leaves the door open for the idea that the language has “functional NPs”
Does the Grammaticon’s definition of NP admit those diverse forms?
(Elsewhere, as we’ve discussed, ‘head’ of NP =df ‘noun’, which was carefully worded to avoid suggesting the bare ‘noun’ necessarily denoted anything. So this skein of definitions manages to be both circular and self-contradictory.)
Or could the Grammaticon’s definition be patched up? — and in such a way to avoid including all sorts of things that aren’t NPs in other languages?
Or perhaps @DE’s outliers are from what we’d want to call the “leaky” parts of those grammars?
(‘Leak/y’ not defined.)
This all feels too Stewart-Housman-Weil.
Re Y’s comments:
“Martin, I see an inconsistency within the approach taken by the Grammaticon to several concepts. Contrast the definition of ‘noun’, which we discussed, with that of ‘transitive clause’: “A transitive clause is a clause which contains two arguments that are coded in the same way as the arguments of physical-effect verbs (‘kill’, ‘break’).” That is the approach which I suggested for concepts like ‘noun’ or ‘verb’, which you define purely semantically.”
Yes, there is an “inconsistency” in that the definitions work differently, but this is because “coded in the same way” is definable uniformly for verbal core arguments, but not for nouns/verbs/adjectives. Arguments are coded by flagging and indexing, which is comparable across languages. But word classes are treated differently across languages for quite different reasons – the arguments for word class distinctions tend to be quite disparate. (For example, Dixon 2004 says that Korean had an adjective/verb distinction mainly on the basis that reduplication has different meanings with verbs and adjectives.) – I do recognize that these decisions are somewhat arbitrary, but I do not deny the arbitrariness; I think it’s a necessary feature of comparative concepts in general (I learned this from Gilbert Lazard’s 2005 book). The retro-definitions cannot be “consistent” in the sense that they apply the same strategy for defining traditional terms. They aim to be coherent and non-circular, but not “consistent”.
Y continues:
“And then, ‘object (argument)’ is defined “An object argument of a clause is its P-argument when the clause is transitive, and its T-argument or its R-argument when the clause is ditransitive.” Ditransitives aside, a ‘P-argument’ is defined, “A P-argument is the patient argument of a physical-effect verb (‘kill’, ‘break’).” So, do we exclude non-patient objects (e.g. of verba sentiendi) from typological discussion, as the default?”
Yes, non-patient “objects” behave in very diverse ways across languages, and they cannot easily be included in the definitions. They are excluded here, pending further research on how a uniform definition could be achieved. However, note that this is not necessarily a goal: Not everything in languages can be compared – comparative concepts don’t have to be exhaustive. (This is crucially different in description: Our descriptions must be exhaustive.)
Y continues:
“Another point, which I didn’t bring up is that the semantic terms “object” and “action” are ill defined, and make a weak foundation for the definitions of ‘noun’ and ‘verb’. I am no philosopher of language, but I can see how one can argue for and against ‘vacuum’ being an object, and ‘to forget’ being an action.”
Yes, these concepts are not defined properly, but this is made clear by saying that they are primitives. Any definitional system must have such primitives (this is what I learned from Anna Wierzbicka), and here I treat these as primitives, though the spirit of the definitions follows Croft (1991; 2000; 2022).
i’d love a persuasive argument based on evidence that i’m wrong, but doesn’t that just lead back into circularity, in a center-everywhere-circumference-nowhere kind of way? yes, a rigorous system needs primitives. but when those primitives presuppose the existence of a specific set of universals, you can’t use them to demonstrate the universality of that same set.
The primitives don’t presuppose any universals.
I want to thank MH for patiently entering the bearpit.
@AntC
What I wanted to get at with the “living” examples is that even inside English, verbal noun is sort of a “junk” category where things with a participial form end up being reapplied semi-arbitrarily, i.e., a living doll is a living thing that resembles a doll, whereas living quarters are not living things that resemble quarters. There are many bizarre constraints, you can use “living” as an adjective but not “ending”, you have to say “final” or use a noun phrase or compound noun with end, whereas dying is almost only valid as an adjective, unless you are a poet.
‘to forget’ being an action
Dumb comment, probably: Well, some familiar languages express this with a so-called “middle voice” (obliviscor).
Just as there is no language in which all “nouns” refer to physical objects, so too there is no language in which all “verbs” refer to actions.
“Refer to” is a can of worms in itself. Have to take it as a primitive, I suppose. It doesn’t seem to figure on the list, though.
(Of the verbs in the English sentences in this comment, none actually refers to an action. “Take” can, but it doesn’t actually do so in the sense in which it is used here. The only nouns referring to physical objects are “can”, “worms” and “objects”, of which the first two occur only in a metaphor, where they do not in fact refer to any physical object.)
Well, some familiar languages express [‘to forget’] with a so-called “middle voice” (obliviscor).
There’s the perennially puzzling-to-me se me olvidó [only in this past tense, ¿right?]. Or even it escapes me at the moment.
Neither of these is an example of “middle voice”. More like a don’t-blame-me voice.
Even more common in present, and existing in other tense-aspect thingies in indicative and subjunctive, but not in future.
Indicatives and present subjunctive
Afterthought: past subjunctives
“It slipped my mind.” Past exculpatory voice.
A number of languages (like the Salishan languages) clearly grammaticalise control, specifically, so verb like “fall” or “sneeze” or “forget” is marked differently in the morphology from verbs like “crouch down” or “sing” or “think.”
Indo-European middle deponents sometimes seem to have the minus-control nuance, though only as one of several possibilities, others being things like “thing you do to your own body.”
Minus-control is also one of the more identifiable meanings of the Western Oti-Volta verb-deriving suffix -m, as in e.g. tɛnsim “sneeze”, kɔnsim “cough”, ya’am “yawn”, zaansim “dream.”
(“Forget” in Kusaal is tam, but that’s probably just coincidence. But the -m is underlyingly -mm-, as appears in the imperfective tammid, so it’s conceivable that that verb stem contains a derivational -m too.)
mir hat geträumt
(largely obsolete)
Whereas мне приснилось is perfectly normal.
It may also be significant that tɛnsim “sneeze” (= Mooré tĩsimdi), kɔnsim “cough” are ya’am “yawn” are all obviously phonaesthetic … (just like “sneeze”. “cough” and “yawn”, in fact.)
Moba cíínd̀ “sneeze” doesn’t look terrribly onomatopoeic now, but it goes back perfectly regularly to *cisimd-. Ah-chissee!
Yeah, ‘snilo mi se’/’snilo mu se’ etc. is very poetic/archaic in Serbian.
I think “mir hat geträumt” and “se me olvidó” are signs of a way of thinking that considered certain subjective experience as due to immaterial external influences (originally mediated by gods, demons, imps, fairies). In English, there is a famous “Hymn to Mary” with “me reweth” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50400/now-goeth-sun-under-wood) and in German, you have reflexive ich ärgere/freue mich, and enthusiasm has the spirit in the word Begeisterung. In Irish sorrow, surprise, joy are impersonally placed on the recipient (cuireann sé X orm).
I just googled reute es ihn and found it from Luther all the way to the Unity Translation version of 2016. It has very much retreated to that register, though, as the other translations on that page show.
David E said:
OK, that sounds like an object — although, my cultural preconceptions drive me to ask, is hiding your siig in the thatch of your hut something just anyone can do, without special preparation or abilities? Or would your siig first need to be imbued or poured into an object, like water into a sponge or a can? Like the folktale motif of the wizard whose life is hidden in an egg.
I was assuming the meaning of “object” that’s used in Haspelmath’s definition of “noun”. If you translated that definition of “noun” into Kusaal, would you use bʋnnyɛtir? Are there languages where it would be hard to translate that definition?
I don’t know any such tale; can you direct me to one?
is hiding your siig in the thatch of your hut something just anyone can do, without special preparation or abilities?
No, his wife (also a witch) did it, specifically to keep her husband’s siig safe from the witch neighbour. Witches can see and handle siis, but muggles can’t.
Pretty much everyone in the story is a witch, apart from the hapless husband himself. Witches are more like our vampires than traditional Eurowitches, and a witch is not necessarily a bad person. The wife, when she outs herself as a witch to her husband later in the story, is careful to explain that she has never killed anyone and has no desire to do so at all.
I was assuming the meaning of “object” that’s used in Haspelmath’s definition of “noun”. If you translated that definition of “noun” into Kusaal, would you use bʋnnyɛtir?
Well, that definition seems to be (unless I’ve missed something) “the head of a nominal phrase – that is, referring phrase – that denotes an object”, and my point was that “object” is actually a quite technical and deeply culture-bound expression. It’s also remarkably slippery even within our culture. Is “air” a physical object? Is *wind”? How about “light”? How about “day” and “night”? “Voice”? And are photons physical objects? How about when they are regarded as waves rather than particles? And is the physical-object character of a photon really instantiated in our actual grammar? Evidently “object” can’t simply be defined in terms of what it means in familiar everyday physics.
So what actually counts as an “object”? It seems to be that the idea that “object” can be a wholly unproblematic axiomatic notion is an illusion based on the familiarity of the word “object” in English (and its near-synonyms in other SAE languages from the same culture.) At the very least, the attempted definition needs to be extended with a list of what actually count as objects for the purposes of the definition (e.g. body parts, individual plants or animals, pebbles … hills, perhaps, but presumably not e.g. “Africa” or “England.”)
What about proper nouns, referring to people or places? Are they not really nouns at all? I’d actually go for that (at least as far as the semantics is concerned, though obviously not the syntax); the way that names refer is, after all, quite different from the way a word like “pebble” or “finger” refers to an “object.”
(Kusaal nouns referring to people, as opposed to names of people, actually behave like adjectives in many ways.)
David M: A famous example of “wizard whose life is hidden in an external object” is Koshchei the Immortal in Russian folktales. TVTropes has this under Soul Jar. I may have personally first seen it in the Chronicles of Prydain.
Like the folktale motif of the wizard whose life is hidden in an egg.
I don’t know any such tale; can you direct me to one?
I believe this is most likely referring to Koshchei the Deathless, whose death [sic] was hidden in a needle that was hidden in an egg. Offhand I’m not aware of any other similar tales, though I can’t rule out that they exist.
Koschei turns up (as the actual creator of our* entire universe) in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurgen:_A_Comedy_of_Justice
Jurgen is quite entertaining, though a little of Cabell goes a very long way.
* There are others. In another novel from the far-too-long Poictesme sequence, the creator of a different universe describes him as “brisk little Koschei.” Burn …
Or would your siig first need to be imbued or poured into an object, like water into a sponge or a can?
As in that classic existential drama All of Me (“Backinbowl… Backinbowl…”).
Koshchei at LH.
@DM,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koshchei
https://www.maerchenlexikon.de/at-lexikon/at302.htm
(strange. I thought I refreshed the page before posting this, but didn’t see ktschwarz’s comment and those below.)
@LH, PP, I don’t know if мне приснилось is a good example, because
мне приснилось, что… ([it] dreamt [it]self to me, that… – neuter corresponds to “it”)
мне приснилось платье (dress dreamt itself to me – neuter “dress”)
мне приснилась девушка (girl dreamt herself to me – feminine “girl”)
Who will say that the dream-girl and dream-dress didn’t do that to me and can’t be agents?:)
However, мне не спится, мне не работается and pairs
я люблю – мне нравится (often but not always translated with “love” and “like”)
я хочу – мне хочется (I want – to.me wants-self) are about control to varying extent.
Academia.edu just presented me with Eugene Nida’s A Synopsis of English Syntax, which dates from 1963, and is based on his 1943 doctoral thesis, so it’s hardly state-of-the-art, and is moreover influenced by the ghastly Pikean system of tagmemics, at that time the Way of the SIL. However, I was struck by
I suppose the Haspelmathic rejoinder (if I may be forgiven for putting words in his mouth) would be that “secondary in importance” does not at all imply “of no importance at all.” (And also, how important it is, depends on what your particular area of study is actually meant to be achieving.)
A very apposite quote, thanks!
the folktale motif of the wizard whose life is hidden in an egg.
Note: Thanks to the folks who publish Dungeons and Dragons, the only word for the place where a wizard keeps their soul is “phylactery”, and the only extant meaning of “phylactery” is the place where a wizard keeps their soul. Your compliance is appreciated.
Jurgen is quite entertaining, though a little of Cabell goes a very long way.
And after you read Jurgen and maybe something else set in Poictesme, you can read The Cream of the Jest, which I like quite a bit. Also, as I’ve remarked elsewhere, Pale Fire is eerily reminiscent of it.
Morda* placing his life force in a bone sliver in Taran Wanderer (book four of The Chronicles of Prydain mentioned by ktschwarz above) was, according to LLoyd Alexander, explicitly modeled on the story of Koshchei the Deathless.
@David Eddyshaw: I wanted to like Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice more than I ended up doing. You’re definitely right, that “a little of Cabell goes a very long way.” Maybe I wasn’t in the right emotional frame of mind when I read it. I might try it again, but I will have to wait a while, since I only finished Jurgen last year.
@Jerry Friedman: The Monster Manual description of the lich just makes passing reference to a “phylactery,” alongside “certain conjurations [and] enchantments.” Dave Trampier’s illustration shows what might either be gem on the lich’s crown or a traditional (box-type) phylactery. The formalization of the meaning of phylactery in Dungeons & Dragons didn’t come until the 1979 Dragon article by Len Lakofka, “Blueprint for a Lich,” which I personally think represented a rather poor conception of how lich-dom should work.
* The denouement of the episode with Morda rubs me the wrong way, in a way nothing else in The Chronicles does. Taran refuses to trade Morda’s stolen amulet to Ordu, Orwen, and Orguch for the knowledge he seeks—rightfully feeling that it is not his property to trade away. However, he just lets the Fair Folk take it back without apparently ever considering that he does know perfectly well who the amulet rightfully belongs to: Eilonwy!
@DM: I’m quite certain that in my childhood I read a German fairy tale featuring a wizard or a witch hiding their heart in some object for safekeeping. But I’m not sure whether that collection of fairy tales is at my place or at my mother’s place or even whether it’s still in the possession of my family, and I would have to travel to Germany to check.
@hans, dm
Der Mann ohne Herz?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Mann_ohne_Herz
The things I learn.
The canon of fairytales has shrunk a lot since Grimm. I did know what a D&D-inspired lich is, but not that the motif is so much older and has a tradition right here.
David Eddyshaw said:
Thanks! That’s as I guessed, but it sounds like witches *don’t* need to put them into a container or sponge first, they can just pick them up with their hands?
Not surprising if some languages don’t need a word that corresponds closely to “object”, since as far as I know English didn’t until it was borrowed from Latin.
I’m confident that none of those are objects — are there English speakers who disagree? They don’t have boundaries. At least, that was the first reason that came to mind for saying no, and hey, Wikipedia:Physical object agrees.
Anyway, we agree that “object” isn’t an unproblematic axiomatic notion and shouldn’t just be assumed when defining “noun”, and starting from a list of examples sounds like a good idea.
David E in a slightly earlier comment:
No natural language used by adults, but could it be an early stage of child language acquisition? (Just guessing, I don’t know much about child language acquisition.)
Nor do I, but I seem to recall that all my children acquired the verb “want” pretty early. (Negative polarity before positive …)
it sounds like witches *don’t* need to put them into a container or sponge first, they can just pick them up with their hands?
Yes.
They don’t have boundaries.
Nor does “water.” Or, if you object that specific examples of water do have (externally-imposed) boundaries, how about “sky” and “earth”? Or “fire”?
Non-count nouns in general strike me as difficult to fit into the “physical object” scheme. “Gold”, for example, is not the same as a specific gold object. Is it a kind of abstraction from all the gold physical objects?
Kusaal treats “material” nouns as referential: one of my informants corrected
salima la’ad nɛ bʋtiis
gold items with cups
intended as “gold [items and cups]” to
salima la’ad nɛ o bʋtiis
gold items and its cups
(O is actually the animate pronoun: “his/her”; speakers often use animate pronouns for inanimate when they’re not thinking about it specifically.)
Whether a photon can have a boundary depends on what precisely one means by “photon.” It is perfectly reasonable to say that Hanbury Brown* and Twiss measured the lateral sizes of photons from distant stars—finding that they were many meters across.
* “Hanbury Brown” is a double-barreled, but not hyphenated, surname.
It’s easy to come up with examples to shoot down any proposed definition of “noun” based on semantics, which would suggest that the tried-and-true method of (as Y put it) syntactic/distributional definition is the only one that makes sense.
On the other hand, there certainly is something to the idea that the distributional classes which contain words for shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings have significant and far from trivial cross-linguistic similarities; though I would myself say that the really interesting thing is precisely that such classes are never limited to such referents. What is it about human cognition that means that we all* speak of intangibles and abstractions in the same way that we speak of pebbles and kneecaps?
* Probably all: I have never encountered a counterexample, though such statements are of course tempting fate. It’s certainly true, at any rate, that languages vary in the extent to which they do this. And I can at least imagine a language in which there is no “noun” for “fire”, for example but only a verb, “burn.” Tlön, Uqbar, Urbis Tertius …
From WP:
I used to share a flat with someone like that. It is good for one’s spiritual development to be exposed to people who are just unequivocally better than oneself.
WP gripe: the article on Maxwell’s equations seems not to link to the article on James Clerk Maxwell himself at all. Poor show. (He was associated with not one but three universities all honoured by the presence of my own family, and was also the greatest physicist of the nineteenth century*, despite being a Scot.)
* Don’t cavil. Deep down, you know it’s true.
this article has lovely illustrations of koshchei’s hidden death (though in the version where it’s buried in the roots of the tree, not at its topmost branch).
and i’d forgotten about that decidedly …odd… D&D use of “phylactery”, which (in its usual meaning) has always struck me as one of the least useful words in the english language, since a vanishingly small number of people who encounter the word have not encountered the word “tefillin” – generally in the same phrase, which could just as easily stick to the emic term.
Not surprising if some languages don’t need a word that corresponds closely to “object”, since as far as I know English didn’t until it was borrowed from Latin.
Thing acquired the sense “concrete inanimate object; that which exists by itself; entity, being, creature;” [etymonline] by late Modern English. (Previously meaning “meeting, assembly”, preserved in the second element of hustings.) So then we have to cast back what was the word before thing?
There’s a PIE *reh-i- “wealth, goods” (source also of Sanskrit rayi- “property, goods,” Avestan raii-i- “wealth”), giving Latin res [etymonline again].
I’d be surprised if any language lacks a word that corresponds at least loosely to “object”.
Makes sense, parents are always asking children “Do you want …?”
Aren’t all (non-proper) nouns abstractions? “Tooth” is an abstraction over my individual teeth (they’re all different), and your teeth, and the dog’s teeth, and so on. Children have to experiment with their abstractions and sometimes over-generalize — I may have mentioned the child I saw using “moon” for all round things.
OK, it was an oversimplification to say photons don’t have boundaries; it might be better to say they’re like hills, tapering off gradually.
@LH, @all,
Most comparisons we make are based on semantics, or translation, if you like. “Identify unit(s) in L1 with the function similar to that of a unit in L2. Compare the units” (not *identify the meaning(s) (function(s) in L1 of the unit with the form similar to that of a unit in L2. Compare the meanings).
That makes meaning “marked” in the pair “form and meaning” (with respect to our comparisons).
Does’t mean we can’t choose form as the basis: we do it in phonology.
The point of all the discussion about “object” was that it’s much narrower than “thing”, although DE has been saying that it’s not trivial to define precisely how much narrower. You can say “X is a thing but not an object” for a lot of X, e.g. fire, justice, and humanity (examples from J.W. Brewer in a very similar discussion here a couple of years ago).
(AntC, you meant to type “by late Old English”, not “Modern”, but anyway etymonline got that wrong: the “entity of any kind” use goes back as far as King Alfred, which is *early* Old English.)
There’s no known word in Old English like “object”, i.e. including tooth and dog while excluding fire, luck, and justice, according to the Historical Thesaurus of English: it only has “thing” (broader in sense) and “body” (does have a sense very similar to “object”, but not until Middle English).
Latin rēs, like “thing”, isn’t limited to material objects. DE indicated above that Kusaal bʋn is also general like “thing”, and a more specific compound bʋnnyɛtir “visible thing” could be formed if needed, but if I understand correctly, there’s no prefabricated word that’s limited to material objects.
bʋnnyɛtir
You could also perfectly well say e.g. bʋnwʋmmir “audible thing” or bʋnbabinnir “manually palpable thing.” A lot of the idea behind “object” in the sense intended in the attempted “noun” definition does seem to be “thing perceptible by sight, hearing or touch.” (“Hearing”, perhaps not. And is something you can only taste or smell an “object”?) Kusaal just makes you specify what you actually mean, instead of using a prebaked technical term which begs the question.
Aren’t all (non-proper) nouns abstractions?
Yes indeed. “Refer” is also a word whose meaning cannot simply be taken as a given. In the sentence “David Eddyshaw is an ophthalmologist” both noun phrases “refer” to “objects” (in the sense intended) but they do so in a quite different way. Pronouns refer in yet another way. Nor are these complications merely a quirk of English. They are part of how all Language works.
On common nouns as abstractions:
As I mentioned in passing above, Kusaal common nouns referring to people which do not describe relationships (like ma “mother” or bier “elder sibling of the same sex) have morphological and syntactic features in common with adjectives.
This is most obvious with “agent nouns”, which actually have the same stem as the deverbal adjectives of the type seen in bʋnnyɛtir “visible object”, but are inflected in the old “human” gender/noun-class: nyɛt “see-er”, plural nyɛtib.
But it’s also true of other nouns which essentially describe roles: dau “man” has this same relationship to daʋg “male”, and pu’a “woman” to the adjective puak “female.”
And you can use role-nouns of that kind as adjectives, so long as the head has human reference. Thus, beside the noun saan “stranger”, there is an adjective with the same stem, saaŋ “strange”:
bisaaŋ “strange child” (biig “child”)
bʋsaaŋ “strange goat” (bʋʋg “goat”)
You can also say bisaan “strange child” but not *bʋsaan “strange goat.”
So too bidau or bidaʋg “male child”, but only bʋdaʋg “male goat.”
In other words, Kusaal common nouns referring to people either describe relationships or are substantivised adjectives. A knee is just a knee, a stone is just a stone, and a cow is just a cow, but a woman is a female human being.
(In the closely related language Buli, the word for “woman” actually is nipok, which corresponds exactly etymologically to Kusaal ninpuak “female person”, and “man” is likewise nidoa “male person.”)
I read some Branch Cabell in the later 60s, in the Ballantine editions that were part of that company’s attempt to repeat their Tolkien success by reprinting everything that could be called fantasy from the past hundred years. Most of it landed with a clunk because, well, it wasn’t Tolkien or anything like. Cabell I recall as a considerable writer at least, but his 1920s-style smart-set cynical snobbery/snobbish cynicism rubbed me the wrong way. (I now know he made the expensive mistake of producing a deluxe set of his works that appeared in 1930, when not only could few afford it, but literary tastes had changed as fast as the economy.)
On the other hand, I’m currently rereading (not for the first time) my 1968 Ballantine editions of the Gormenghast books.
Yes indeed. Mervyn Peake is a much superior writer to Cabell. It’s a great pity that his sad and cruel mental decline prevented him from finishing the Gormenghast series.
Heh. I was just reading a review of Dixon’s Basic Grammatical Theory Vol 3 (which I’ve never read), and came across this:
https://www.academia.edu/19594107/Dixon_R_M_W_2012_Basic_Linguistic_Theory_Volume_3_Further_Grammatical_Topics
(Other opinions of the not-underopinionated Dixon that I cherish: Niger-Congo is not a demonstrated genetic group*, and tagmemics is an “opaque formalism.”)
[The reviewer reckons it’s pretty good as a guide for novice descriptive linguists in the field, which is indeed its stated primary objective, but is not overwhelmed by the implied typological claims the work makes.]
* But then, neither is Afroasiatic, apud Dixon. Nor (famously) is Pama-Nyungan, though he may be on better ground there (for all I know.)
Just to prove that this thread is one with itself, Cabell’s name for his fictionalized Richmond, Va., was Lichfield.
@Brett: Thanks for the history. I see that though I only encountered the D&D “phylactery” in this century, it existed before I ever played D&D (not counting something that doesn’t count). By the way, I remember the Monster Manual‘s description of a lich’s garments, “most often rotting, but most rich”. I think there was another memorable phrase in that book, but I don’t remember it.
@rozele: I agree about “phylactery” (and cf. “frontlet”), with the cavil that I suspect the usual meaning is now the D&D one. It may depend on what corpus (sorry) you look at.
Is there an English work for mezuzuah?
Talking of linguists with Opinions, I also just discovered this delightful specimen of Geoffrey Pullum putting a well-deserved boot into Chomsky (and one or two other linguistic MITniks)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4176349
(He also describes Dixon’s 1963 Linguistic Science and Logic as “a rather strange book.” I found a copy and will see …)
@Jerry Friedman: I don’t know another English word for mezuzuah, and a quick Web search doesn’t turn one up either. A mezuzuah is a more ordinary object than are tefillin, although I have no intuition about whether it is logical that there is only the Semitic word for the former, while the latter have names in both Semitic and Greek.
Until now, I had always assumed that Lichfield had a transparent etymology—meaning “graveyard.” However, it seems like the modern name is an eggcorn. The Latin name for the ancient settlement close to the modern city in Staffordshire was Letocetum—from a Brittonic word meaning “gray wood” (which the Web informs me was Luitcoyt in sub-Roman Old Welsh). The old name was eroded and “field” appended to it to make the modern toponym.
Sorry about my typo “mezuzuah”, recte “mezuzah”, which you seem to have copied.
I certainly assumed “Lichfield” was “graveyard”, and I’ll bet Cabell did too, but I’m glad you pointed out that’s not the etymology of the original one. I’d forgotten that Samuel Johnson was born there, and I wonder whether Cabell had that in mind. (Note additional Pale Fire connection.)
Re Cabell/Peake, I was long ago as a teenager encouraged (if only by publishers with paperback reprints to sell) to check out a certain (although not vast) number of other by-then-deceased authors on the “if you like Tolkien, you’ll dig this too” premise, which was usually overly reductionist. And of course another name on that list I haven’t thought of in some years was that of E.R. Eddison. Whose surname bears a Highly Suspicious Resemblance to “Eddyshaw,” if you ask me.
Separately, it has been so long since my D&D days that I had clean forgotten the existence of “phylacteries” in that context, and I can’t say I feel any guilt for having forgotten. I don’t know that a mezuzah is all that more ordinary than tefillin, but maybe there’s a relevant difference in terms of being more public and visible-in-passing to those not deep into the relevant [sub]culture?
delightful specimen of Geoffrey Pullum
Qualified thanks for that. It was depressing reading, and not just the Chomsky part. It made me think I’m glad I’ve never had to study that nasty tedium, and it made me wonder how much better it would have been if Hale had spent all his time doing what he did so well, and not wasted any of it on being an MIT linguist.
Here’s a non-paywalled copy of that specimen of Pullum: https://web.archive.org/web/20211220011733/https://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/NostalgicViews.pdf
Lots of Jews, including many secular ones, have mezuzahs on the door posts of their houses. Tefillin are a much less common appurtenance, used only by a small population of Orthodox Jewish men.
Peake has come up a few times before. (Mostly, I bring him up, it appears.) Eddison also has gotten occasional mentions.
Luitcoyt
Indeed: Llwydgoed.
Llwyd can be “brown”, which sounds a bit less depressing than “Greywood.” Also “holy”, which might be what the original toponym was actually about. We Britons love our Nameless Rites, after all. (I haven’t been at a human sacrifice for weeks.)
So calling it Lichfield just restores its True Name?
@PP: Yes, that’s the tale, from Bechstein’s collection. Thanks for digging into this!
Its successor, in a different paddock outside Narrabri along with several other telescopes,
goeswent by the much pronounceable SUSI. I have fond memories of calling my now wife when she worked there one summer as a student.I looked up Narrabri and discovered it’s /ˈnærəbraɪ/ (NARR-ə-bry). I would not have guessed that.
i think relative presence / awareness of mezuzas and tefillin is entirely contextual. the zones of u.s. white evangelical christianity who are very obsessed with jews as a source of vicarious religious authenticity seem to have tefillin as a central part of their image of jewish ritual practice, but i’m not sure if i’ve seen mezuzas turn up in my (admittedly very limited) exposure to their media. by contrast, a lot of nyc apartments in neighborhoods that are no longer particulary jewish still have (fossilized) mezuzas on their doors, and at least some residents know enough to call them by their names.
@de
Re llwyd “holy”, the Irish líath is only “grey”. I thought your word might be a homonym borrowed from or related to L. laus. But I think e.g., laudatus might have a different form if borrowed in Welsh (although is cauda > cwt possible?). The native Irish luaigh “mention” would have the right shape, but the older meaning is “move” (this is also a modern sense, the Dublin trams are called Luas). Luaigh is not supposed cognate to laus, I suppose because of the semantics and the vowel, e.g., aurum = ór, although the modern language has e.g údar (O.Ir augtar; Welsh has retained aw here).
is cauda > cwt possible?
I don’t think so. Both the vowel and the final consonant are wrong. GPC thinks cwt (in that sense) may be from English “scut” (presumably from pre-modern English.)
I think laudatus would turn up in Welsh as something like lleuddod or perhaps lloddod.
The Latin loan “gold” in Welsh is aur [aɨr] rather than awr [aur]. There is a form awr, but it’s unusual and its origin seems to be unclear. GPC thinks it may just have started as an error. (Awr normally represents Latin hora; it can also mean “prayer”, which is actually of the same origin, as in horae canonicae.)
I wonder if it was reborrowed, an update similar to what happened to paradise in German (16th century: Paradeis; modern Paradies, with Paradeiser regionally surviving for “tomato(es)”) or Basque (older baradizu and newer paradisu both survive, AFAIK).
It’s difficult to think of a time period when that might have happened, though. It would have to be a time when Latin au was still [au] (it can hardly date from the period of the newfangled restored “classical” pronunciation now taught in schools.)
I’m drawing a blank on Welsh loans from Latin of that period that render it as (modern) aw. I don’t think that Awst “August” is an example: that one is presumably from the colloquial Latin agustus, with the usual Welsh change of postvocalic g > Old Welsh ɣ > Middle/Modern Welsh zero.
Welsh aw is generally from /a:/, in both native and borrowed vocabulary; as in e.g. caws “cheese” from cāseus.That probably also creates timing issues.
It didn’t occur to me that there’s not much of a reason to think au was pronounced as [au] in medieval Latin in Britain…
I’m not sure if I’d go with “fossilized,” but there is in fact a mezzuzah on the doorframe of my own house, even though none of the current full-time residents (my older kids having ventured out into the wider world) are in any sense Jewish. My personal experience with tefillin is perhaps sort of backhanded, i.e. never actually having been asked point-blank by Lubavitchers if I’d put on tefillin that morning after truthfully answering “no” to the set-up question re whether I was Jewish, but knowing from the accounts of others that that would in fact have been the next question in the script/flowchart had I falsely answered “yes” to the set-up. (Although once as a change of pace since it was Sukkos the follow-up was apparently going to be whether I’d waved a lulav that day and if not whether I’d like to.)
BTW, there is no dagesh in מְזוּזָה, and hence it’s transliterated with no double z’s: mezuzah. (Also, it is well-known that the parchment inside says, “Help! I’m being held prisoner in a mezuzah factory.”)
I had one less z in my earlier use of the word, although I’m skeptical about a claim that any given Hebrew word has only one available transliteration. (For Yiddish words I’m skeptical that any given word has only two or three.)
It’s traditional not to take down a mezuzah when moving away. You leave it for the next residents, if they want it.
never actually having been asked point-blank by Lubavitchers if I’d put on tefillin that morning after truthfully answering “no” to the set-up question re whether I was Jewish, but knowing from the accounts of others that that would in fact have been the next question in the script/flowchart had I falsely answered “yes” to the set-up.
What an odd choice of mitzvah to start with. I’d have said what Brett did about the rarity of tefillin. Shortly before my bar mitzvah, the rabbi showed me how to lay tefillin, and that was my one experience with them. But I suppose the Lubavitchers’ marketing people know what they’re doing.
(My one experience with the Lubavitchers is that they mailed me homentashen till I told them not to bother.)
the zones of u.s. white evangelical christianity who are very obsessed with jews as a source of vicarious religious authenticity seem to have tefillin as a central part of their image of jewish ritual practice,
Another odd choice, but I have little experience of those zones and am hoping to keep it that way.
ChaBaDniks go for the most immediately available piece of commanded ritual in their missionizing efforts. so on rosh hashone they send out the worst shofar-blowers i’ve ever heard (on average, they’re lucky if they achieve garroted goat levels of musicality) to make sure people fulfilling the mitsve of hearing one blown can take no aesthetic pleasure in the experience. during sukkos, it’s lulavs to shake; during khanike it’s menorahs to take home; during peysekh, matzo. but when it’s not a holiday, those targeted as women get pitched about lighting candles for shabes at sundown, while those targeted as men can be approached on any day at any time to lay tefillin – it’s the most all-purpose option in their repertoire. i believe the undead last rebbe* had an extended theological explanation for tefillin-laying containing all other mitzves, but i can’t recall anything about the reasoning.
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* one of whose hasidim kindly put me and some friends in direct touch with him a few years ago (and 30 years after his death) via bibliomancy, for a nominal sum of money. one of the perks of living near 770.
I had no idea what they get up to. Learn something every day.
If I wanted to get non-religious Jews to get religion one mitzvah at a time, I’d start with “Have you said a broche today?” But as I said, they undoubtedly have their reasons, though maybe it’s more that argument that you mentioned.
Speaking of arguments, the one about why you’re allowed to communicate with a dead person, despite what looks like very clear prohibition in the Bible, must be a doozy. If I get curious enough I’ll try to find it.
Speaking of New York, one might compare “the city” and “the train” to “the Rebbe”, lehavdel (sp?).
@Jerry F.: rozele said they were communicating with an undead person, which taken at face value certainly sounds like a big loophole-or-exception to me
@J.W.B.: I understood rozele’s use of “undead” as what I’d mean if I used it in that context, which is that a person who has died but can communicate is by definition undead. Furthermore, I rather think that the distinction between “dead” and “undead” is not recognized in halakhah. However, I may be wrong on both counts.
@Jerry: I am not a halakhic lawyer, so don’t take halakhic legal advice from me! I suspect there may be some significant range of opinion in Lubavitcher circles about the Rebbe’s current ontological status even if there is an “official” line. Perhaps none of them feel any parallel, but mainstream Shiites are said to believe that the 12th Imam is currently in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occultation_(Islam), which I suspect is incompatible with being dead. (I would think occultation would mean won’t-right-now-respond-to-messages-even-via-bibliomancy but one can imagine popular piety taking a less austere view.)
I have long noticed the parallel between the Rebbe and the Hidden Imam. Religion is fascinating stuff, even/especially if you don’t believe in it.
Like the best sentence in all of Russian literature?
there may be some significant range of opinion in Lubavitcher circles
Specifics omitted as unnecessary. There’s even a proverb.
For one Lubavitcher opinion, see https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/5605572/jewish/Is-Cleromancy-and-Divination-Kosher.htm
It says bibliomancy is allowed, though some restrictions are advised or required. It says nothing about communication with the differently existent.
(It also mentions the sweetest method of divination I’ve heard of–ask a schoolchild what verses they just studied.)
It occurred to me that part of Chabad proselytizers using the laying of tefillin as a signifier of Jewishness, is that it’s publicly visible and striking. If they just had you stand and recite a prayer with them, passers-by might not take notice.
In Israel, at least, this has the desired (to them) possible effect of normalizing Orthodox Rabbinical ritual in secular public spaces, such as the streets of Tel Aviv, or the airport.
the differently existent
Ding ding ding!
i doubt anyone on either side of the split in ChaBaD would use “undead” about scheerson – i use it because it gives me joy. and the split is indeed deep and active. i definitely think occultation is a closer fit for how the messianist faction talks about schneerson. but/and i think there are multiple schools of thought within the faction, from a denial of his death to a belief in his return from death to various understandings of him as having died and nonetheless being a living presence. i know nothing about the halakhic details (but i think that in this realm, pace soloveitchik, within each faction and subfaction halakha follows minhag rather than driving it. it’s all gotten steadily weirder over the 20ish years i’ve lived within earshot of 770.
Have I told my bibliomancy story here before? It was 1973, the Sunday after Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, and my church student group decided to try it. Someone pulled open a Bible with their eyes closed, and I put my finger down, ditto, on Ecclesiastes 10:
4 If the spirit of the ruler rise up against thee, leave not thy place; for yielding pacifieth great offences.
5 There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, as an error which proceedeth from the ruler:
6 Folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place.
7 I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth.
8 He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it; and whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him.
Verse 8 is very similar to Prov. 26:27. I first heard that “diggeth a pit” phrasing via https://genius.com/Bob-marley-and-the-wailers-small-axe-aka-more-axe-lyrics, as part of a broader pattern whereby my primary access to the words and cadences of the KJV as a teenager (my parents having by that point both given up on any sort of normal Protestant churchgoing) was via reggae records.* We assumed the guys must be totally cool due to the massive amounts of dope they reputedly smoked which somehow made us open-minded about all the Old Testament stuff that we might have otherwise resisted.
*Also sometimes via obvious allusions in poetry/novels etc. that I did not always reliably at the time actually recognize as Biblical allusions.
in yiddishland, Small Axe’s cousin song is Utsu Eytsa, which sets a third iteration of the trope, from Isaiah 8:10. i think the melody i know comes from the bobover hasidic tradition; as you might expect, it’s a purim song.
Actually that same proverbial pit pops up again in Ecclesiastus/Sirach 27:26: “Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that setteth a trap shall be taken therein.” The first part (for those who wish not to rely on newer translations) is ὁ ὀρύσσων βόθρον εἰς αὐτὸν ἐμπεσεῖται.
The Arabic proverbial version is less ambiguous:
Man ḥafara ḥufratan li-‘axīhi waqa`a fīh
“He who digs a pit for his brother falls into it.”
Wer ander[e]n eine Grube gräbt, fällt selbst hinein.
“Whoever digs a pit for other [people to fall into] falls into it themself.”
On the subject of metaphorically digging one’s own grave when another’s is intended, there’s the aphorism, attributed to Confucius but not actually by him: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves”; or the song “Five Brothers,” written by Tompall Glaser* and famously first recorded by Marty Robbins.
* That’s a musician I haven’t thought about in a very, very long time.
Thomas Paul “Tompall” Glaser. Huh. That’s an odd moniker. Not very outlaw, if’n you ask me.
We non-superstitious Christians prefer the sortes Vergilianae when it comes to bibliomancy.
(Welsh fferyll “chemist, alchemist” is from that poet’s name.)
I just got a belated birthday present of Simon Rodway’s An Old Welsh Reader, previously mentioned by Hat. I’ll report back in due course.
[My wife unchivalrously remarked that I am an old Welsh reader.]
One should endeavor to think of Tompall Glaser at least three or four times a year, I should think. If you don’t like thinking of him as a less-famous hanger-on to Waylon & Willie in the Seventies, his earlier work as a songwriter behind hits for others is a good angle, as Brett suggested. I recommend any of a number of versions of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_Baltimore.
I was introduced to that fine song by The Flying Burrito Brothers, and that is the version that will always play in my head.
The Old Welsh Reader tells me that the most extensive grammar of Old Welsh is actually in Russian* (I Did Not Know This), by Alexander Falileyev. Happily, I see that there is a Welsh translation freely available on the website of the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol …
https://www.porth.ac.uk/en/collection/llawlyfr-hen-gymraeg-alexander-falileyev
* And why wouldn’t it be? Eh?
One can also think of Tompall Glaser as not the Tom Glazer who wrote the lyrics of and sang “On Top of Spaghetti”.
Den som graver en grav for andre, faller selv i den.
“The one who digs a grave for others, falls -self in it.”
I don’t know the saying in any other wording (except jocular alterations) or a less literary Bokmål register. That’s strange when it’s a common saying and not a famous line attributed to an historical person or an accurate quote from the Bible.
You can’t beat the punchy sonorousness of the Hebrew:
@rozele: I’ll defer to your much greater knowledge of the Lubavitchers. (In fact I just learned that there’s a yod after the L.) My guess about chabad.org is that its under the control of the non-messianic faction but they’re trying to be fair.
Then I wondered how the “n” got into “messianic”. The OED says it’s from the Latin suffix -anus.
Of course it should be “messiachic”, like “Noachian”, “Noachide”, etc.
Then I wondered how the “n” got into “messianic”
Interesting!
There is an account in the TLFi here:
I wonder how that account has held up. (I have to go to sleep now.)
i doubt anyone on either side of the split in ChaBaD would use “undead” about scheerson… it’s all gotten steadily weirder over the 20ish years i’ve lived within earshot of 770.
Rozele! This just reminded me to thank you for all your informed and incisive comments over the years! Please keep it up! Biz hundert un tsvantsik!
And so say all of us!
i’m profoundly honored!
and back at all of you, in spades!
—
My guess about chabad.org is that its under the control of the non-messianic faction but they’re trying to be fair.
the institutional navigation of the split is part of what’s so weird! as in: last i heard, at the headquarters building, the messianists control the basement prayer hall, but the anti-messianists control the one upstairs, while both consider themselves the true inheritors of schneerson’s legacy.
i haven’t heard anything for sure about chabad.org, but i think you’re right, JF. though i think it’s less about fairness than trying not to air the drama in public (which works better when the members of the other faction aren’t popping out of sidewalk grates* after brawling with the NYPD, and when your faction’s paramilitary isn’t going to court for attacking yeshiva students from the other faction). the messianists tend to be more visible as such in the neighborhood, but that’s mainly because they have a clear identifying symbol (a yellow flag with a crown), which the other side doesn’t seem to need.
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* i can’t seem to find the photo, but it was amazing, and led to all kinds of teenage mutant ninja hasid memeray.
@Xerîb:
The OED says s.v. “messianic”:
“Probably < messian- (in German messianisch (1755) < post-classical Latin Messianus (1645 or earlier; < Messias Messiah n. + ‑anus ‑an suffix) + German ‑isch ‑ish suffix1) + ‑ic suffix."
So it doesn't believe the word was created by Wronski. Thanks for the link to him, by the way—an interesting character. I'd heard of his best-known contribution to math, the Wronskian.
@rozele: Thanks for the additional insight. YouTube video of young Hasid emerging. I hope it doesn’t get any weirder than you can enjoy.
Now I am mildly miffed that that intro survey on 19th century philosophy I took in fall ’84 completely ignored the existence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_philosophy_in_Poland#Polish_Messianism (including Wronski, but many others as well). Why were we wasting time on Fichte or Schopenhauer or whoever* when we could have been digging that?
*I’m a little vague now on who was in the syllabus after Hegel but before we got to Kiekegaard. Short readings moved through quickly. Was Marx’s “Zur Judenfrage” in there somewhere?
I think I vaguely thought that Wronski the famous crackpot may have been a different person from Wronski the mathematician. Is there a word for a polymath who doesn’t actually know anything outside one narrow sub-field?
I find it odd that, whenever I see the Wronskian discussed online, the focus is mostly on using it to distinguish linearly dependent and linearly independent collections of functions. However, I don’t think that’s very interesting, and that certainly isn’t where the Wronskian has been of practical use to me. The 2 × 2 Wronskian has a powerful application in the theory of second-order linear differential equations. Such equations are ubiquitous in physics and engineering, and for a few important cases (homogeneous with constant coefficients or Euler-Cauchy type) we have complete theories for how to solve them. Otherwise, they can get tricky and, even if they are relatively well behaved, often can only be solved with infinite series, not in closed form. However, if you can find one solution to a second-order linear equation, you can use the Wronskian to get the second linearly independent solution automatically! To do this, you need to solve multiple first-order linear differential equations, but the first-order equations, unlike their second-order cousins are completely solvable in terms of quadratures; that is, the solution can be written out explicitly using nothing more difficult that definite integrals.* This is really useful when, for example, you can find one solution using a Maclaurin series, but the second linearly independent solution blows up at x = 0 and so doesn’t have a power series expansion there.
* I tell my students, when teaching them senior- or graduate-level electrodynamics, that their is a hierarchy of mathematical difficulties. Lots of real problems involve solving partial differential equations. It is almost always easier if we can replace a partial differential equation by multiple ordinary differential equations. (Separation of variables is a way of doing this, but it doesn’t always work.) In turn, it is easier to replace an ordinary differential equation by any number of integrals (the case where the Wronskian is useful), and easier to replace any number of integrals with derivatives.
On Turkish TV, with Super Mario music before the narration sets in!
“Whoever digs a pit for other [people to fall into] falls into it themself.”
Same in Russian, modulo minor(ish) grammatical differences: (Не) рой другому яму, сам в неё попадёшь. [I’m not very confident of the possible initial negative.]
You can’t beat the punchy sonorousness of the Hebrew
Add Psalms 7:16,
Sirach 27.26 probably was sonorous as well, but survives only in Greek translation:
Muraoka adds: “To view ‘theoretically possible’ as one of the values of the future tense applies here very well, for certainty of some future event is obviously not intended here.”
Ed.: I see Sirach was brought up already.
Oh, is it rozele’s birthday? Let’s say it is anyway. Biz hundert un tsvantsik! from me too.
Is there a word for a polymath who doesn’t actually know anything outside one narrow sub-field?—a Swiss Army hammer
I see that the French edition of Alexander Falileyev’s Old Welsh grammar is also freely downloadable (if there are any Hatters so unfortunate as to be unable to read Welsh):
https://shop.verlag.uni-potsdam.de/en/shop/le-vieux-gallois/
The depressing thing is that there is so very little source material altogether to provide a basis for analysis. Not at all like Old Irish. The Rodway book does say that the absolute/conjunct verb thing (so familiar in Old Irish) not only was alive and well in Old Welsh (though only distinguished in the third person) but quite a bit later in poetical styles. Tyfid maban, ni thyf ei gadachan …
Oh, is it rozele’s birthday? Let’s say it is anyway
Bareka nɛ fʋ du’am daar di’ema, Arɔzilɛ!
Not to pour water on anything, but I suspect “Biz hundert un tsvantsik!” was simply Xerîb’s response to rozele’s reference to “the 20ish years i’ve lived within earshot of 770” rather than a literal birthday wish. But rozele will know the facts in the case.
it’s just about a month past my birthday, so let’s call it timely!
(and i certainly hope to be able to stay in my neighborhood for another century!)
Now I’m idly wondering why there aren’t more people who pedantically insist on a more Authentic Transliteration like “Seirakh” in lieu of Sirach.
FWIW modern MS discoveries have turned up multiple fragments of what appears to be the Hebrew original of that book and all the fragments added up maybe give you roughly 2/3 of the total? There are published editions, but I don’t know (not that I’ve looked too hard) whether the Hebrew text is conveniently online or even where to find a conveniently online guide telling you which chapters/verses there is Hebrew for and which there isn’t. Although for all I know Y is conversant w/ all of this and thus might be in a position to know that we don’t have a Hebrew fragment corresponding to 27:26 (if that’s the case)?
Well, there’s this:
And The Book of Ben Sira in Hebrew is online as a pdf.
@Brett: I find it odd that, whenever I see the Wronskian discussed online, the focus is mostly on using it to distinguish linearly dependent and linearly independent collections of functions.
For an exception see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronskian
Thanks to hat to the link to the pdf of the volume edited by the impressively-named PANANCRATIUS C. BEENTJES! On a quick skim it looks like may indeed be currently stuck with just the Greek (and maybe with MS variation of Greek text?) for 27:26.
@Jerry Friedman: The Wikipedia page gives the topics comparable space, but that’s about the best it ever seems to get.
I think I vaguely thought that Wronski the famous crackpot may have been a different person from Wronski the mathematician.
And on looking him up I find the following farrago:
But his father was Antoni Höhne — why on earth do the French use the bizarre spelling Hoëné, leading to the bizarre pronunciation [ɔɛne]??
Should have gone with “Hoêné”, pronounced “1A.”
I feel like “farrago” has been used here multiple times in the last few days. Which is fine – it’s an admirable word. But it seems inevitably a bit pejorative, which is why I was struck by a seemingly non-pejorative use I saw the other day, although it admittedly may be a bit jocular? The writer is a distinguished-if-eccentric rock musician, and after describing the two opening acts for a forthcoming gig he says “Then they both join me for a farrago – nay, an avalanche – of psych’n’roll jangle-festing.” (FWIW I find that last NP after the “of” morphologically and semantically transparent, and perfectly cromulent even if I might not write it myself. YMMV.)
As I was writing that, I actually wondered if I used “farrago” too much, but I was seduced by alliteration into throwing it once more into the breach.
Well, I had intended to post that example after one of your recent prior usages but forgot to, so I am happy to have another opening for it.
By sheer tradition of misreading. In addition to Citroën, see also Mme de Staël and
the great state ofGroënland (though recently -œ- seems to have taken over for that one, finally).It’s actually not a diaresis but a corresis, indicating that the two vowels shall be pronounced as one. It’s quite obvious once you see that the two dots have switched places.
Any French words or French-spelled names with two or more trémas?