Peter Dizikes writes for PhysOrg:
It is a deep question, from deep in our history: when did human language as we know it emerge? A new survey of genomic evidence suggests our unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago.
Our species, Homo sapiens, is about 230,000 years old. Estimates of when language originated vary widely, based on different forms of evidence, from fossils to cultural artifacts. The authors of the new analysis took a different approach. They reasoned that since all human languages likely have a common origin—as the researchers strongly think—the key question is how far back in time regional groups began spreading around the world.
“The logic is very simple,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper summarizing the results. “Every population branching across the globe has human language, and all languages are related.” Based on what the genomics data indicate about the geographic divergence of early human populations, he adds, “I think we can say with a fair amount of certainty that the first split occurred about 135,000 years ago, so human language capacity must have been present by then, or before.”
The paper, “Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago,” appears in Frontiers in Psychology.
All told, the data from these studies suggest an initial regional branching of humans about 135,000 years ago. That is, after the emergence of Homo sapiens, groups of people subsequently moved apart geographically, and some resulting genetic variations have developed, over time, among the different regional subpopulations. The amount of genetic variation shown in the studies allows researchers to estimate the point in time at which Homo sapiens was still one regionally undivided group. Miyagawa says the studies collectively provide increasingly converging evidence about when these geographic splits started taking place.
Anyone who has followed LH for any stretch of time will not be surprised that I have the gravest doubts about all this (the logic of MIT is not the Hat’s logic), and Bathrobe, who sent me the link, also feels uncomfortable about it, but I figured I’d put it out there and see what y’all have to say.
They had me at “The logic is very simple.”
This is not simple, even though they pretend to make it so in ca. 2000 words. It is not logical, because they ignore cross-lineage transfer: what if speech genes developed in only one post–135 kybp lineage, and were transferred later to others? What if some non-speaking late lineages existed but did not survive (possibly by the very disadvantage of having no language?)
And, the links between language and symbolic behavior, as inferred from archaeology, are bold-italic-underlined *all* speculative, no matter how many papers have tried to squint hard so as to see some evidence for such.
I propose another scenario: long before man could use language, he could wave his hands and arms in a convincing manner.
(I personally think that language is much older than 135 ky, but I wouldn’t write a paper about it.)
Miyagawa has apparently decided that all languages are related because he believes in Chomskyan UG, and believes the Chomsky story that UG must have a genetic basis. This has absolutely nothing to do with actual scientific historical linguistics, and is a quite extraordinary petitio principii. As far as I can see, he has no expertise in comparative work at all.
In fact, his premises do not actually entail that all human languages even are all related, in the sense (the sole acceptable one) that the term is used in real comparative work. If humans are genetically equipped with UG, there is no reason in principle why several groups might not have developed language separately. Miyagawa presumably does not consider this possibility, because he takes for granted the Chomskyan origin story that the “language organ” arose all at once by a mutation in one lucky individual somewhere.
It is conceivable that his arguments might still hold water without the daft statement that “all languages are related”, which (to be fair) he probably does not even intend to be interpreted in its normal linguistic sense.
However, he does not seem to be an expert in genetics either. He does seem to be a genuine expert in Japanese linguistics (and all credit to him) and in the Chomskyan Major Arcana.
And if he is assuming a single mutation as the “origin of language” then all this labour is pointless.
Dude has surprisingly weak critical thinking skills.
Language does not arise in a vacuum. In order for a new sign language to develop you need to have several deaf kids – otherwise you get home sign, which is not as versatile.
The genes for language could have spread pretty far before one or more groups had enough language capable kids at the same time to start chattering to each other.
OK: I’ve read the paper.
Boils down to: all known modern human groups have language, and all known languages have quite a bit in common typologically. (This is true, up to a point, as far as we know: at least, all known human languages share many features which are at most marginally present in other animal communication systems. This is emphatically not well expressed as “all human languages are related”, and Miyagawa should be more careful in his word choices.)
Therefore, language probably goes back at least to the emergence of anatomically modern humans. There then follows a lot about “Khoisan” speakers as being the most genetically divergent groups of modern humans, and how far back this divergence should be projected.
There are some potentially questionable assumptions involved in all this, but frankly it seems both plausible and – unsurprising. I can’t say I’ve ever gone for the once-popular idea that human language only arose about fifty thousand years ago.
This is conceived, reasonably, as just a lower limit for the age of language. It has no bearing on whether, say Neanderthals had language; that just comes back to all the old assumptions about language and symbolic culture going together. If anthing, this paper would undermine any such facile linkage, because it seems to project the origin of modern-style language back to well before the “Upper Palaeolithic Revolution.”
There’s an actual geneticist on board in the paper. No comparativists, but comparative linguistics is actually not relevant to what they’re trying to do anyway. Despite Miyagawa’s careless talk.
I think that’s still not the argument. As I understand it, DNA analyses reviewed by the authors suggest that the first split of humanity into largely separate populations—between the ancestors of the Khoisan ethnic groups and the rest—occurred about 135,000 years ago. Both the Khoisan populations and the rest [slight edit there] have languages, so the genetic basis of language ability must have been present in humanity before the split (though possibly long after the emergence of anatomically modern humans). The authors ignore the possibility raised by Y that language ability might have appeared on the language-incapable side of the split by post-split genetic introgression from the language-capable side. (I have no idea how likely the DNA evidence makes that.)
The authors then note that some archeological phenomena such as burial and various kinds of decorations become widespread around 100,000 years ago. They suggest that those phenomena might have spread due to an emergence of language around that time or a little earlier.
Irrelevant prescriptivism: I agree with those who say that “genetic” has to do with genes, so studies that cover all the DNA of a species are DNA studies, not genetic studies.
Yes; it also confuses the issue that linguists say languages are “genetically related” to mean that they “descend” (metaphorically) from a common “ancestor” (also metaphorical.)
You’d hope that the domains involved are so disjoint that confusion would not arise in practice, but experience teaches us otherwise. Alas.
possibly long after the emergence of anatomically modern humans
Yes, I was being careless in saying “anatomically modern humans” rather than something like “last common ancestors of all contemporary humans.” Though, personally, I find it very unlikely that modern-style language – more or less – doesn’t go at least as far back as anatomical modernity. And that makes their conclusions in the paper even less astonishing. (And even so, they still seem to me to involve some circular logic.)
When I saw the headline I thought it would be about this paper:
Yoko Tajima et al: A humanized NOVA1 splicing factor alters mouse vocal communications ,Nature Communications 16 2025:
It’s no revolution, just another small piece in the puzzle. Not much time to digest, so I’ll just throw in a couple of paragraphs more:
Chomsky hisownself seems to have seized on the supposed Upper Palaeolithic Revolution as supporting his own monogene fantasy about the origin of recursion/Merge/UG/whatever.
I wonder to what extent the far-from-obvious linkage between “behavioural modernity” and language has actually been imported into the discussion either by actual Chomskyites, or by the (sadly not few) archaeologists and geneticists who are under the impression that Chomsky’s views are actually the universally accepted wisdom on all matters linguistic?
Who is to say the chimpanzee line didn’t also have speech, until giving up on it when they realized the conversation had grown stilted and they didn’t have that much to say to each other.
I’m not following why language “social use” wouldn’t have started immediately there was language capacity. (At this time-depth, by ‘immediately’ I mean within a handful of generations.) Or if not vocal-tract language, symbolic communication through hand-waving, facial expressions, …, the whole concept of pointing ‘at’/’to’ something.
I’d’a thought (social) language use would be a precondition for _population_ dispersal. One individual wandering off into the bush doesn’t make a “group”/doesn’t make a viable vector for “spreading”. If you’re going to take a whole (extended) family/tribe, you need to plan/agree what to take and where to go/send scouts in advance.
I’m wondering if this “social use” demarcation is a hallucination from Dizikes? I can’t see in the paper any such demarcation, especially:
I’ve extended the quote there to demonstrate the Chomsky-inspired bollocks. ‘mental representations’ surely precede language. ‘combining them’ happens organically, because the world is organic. I’d be pretty sure gorillas and dolphins/whales survive by complex representations/combinations.
The genomic basis for 135kya is informative. The surrounding speculation is arm-waving metaphysics.
(Sabine Hossenfelder recently put out a video suggesting the main purpose for funding academic research is to employ academics. She was chiefly talking about particle-colliders, but mutatis mutandis …)
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Fox reports grapes sour anyway!
the main purpose for funding academic research is to employ academics
POSIWID!
Chomsky-inspired bollocks
Yeah, that was my immediate thought. Naturally, people with Language would spend tens of thousands of years Just Thinking with it before it occurred to anyone that it might help with communication. What could be more plausible than that?
[Chomsky concocted this as an epicycle to “explain” away one of the many frankly impossible features of his language-mutation scenario, as I imagine all Hatters know.]
Before we had AI, children, we had to pollute the noosphere manually!
Language does not arise in a vacuum
Now that is the absolute key observation. Language, as everybody once knew when linguistics was a branch of anthropology (rightly), is inextricably entwined with culture.
Just as the sole interesting fact about LLMs is that they prove that many things we thought needed intelligence can in fact be carried out by stochastic parrots, the key discovery of Chomskyism is that you can get a remarkably long way in grammar without taking actual human relationships into account. And just as AI has no actual intelligence at all, so Chomskyanism can never be the basis of an adequate account of Language.
To be fair, while Chomsky is referenced several times, it is either in a neutral context (abrupt vs. gradual emergence of human language), or they are arguing against his argument for a younger date.
Not quite speaking of which, I checked G. Scholar for 2024 and 2025 papers referencing Greenberg’s LIA. None of them are about genetics or archaeology. Most seem to be substantial linguistic papers (presumably saying that “Greenberg included […] within his […] sub-phylum, but no one believes that anymore.”) A few are about automatic searches for long-distance connections. It seems like LIA may have finally obsolesced.
On, comrades, to The Languages of Africa!
Magna est veritas, et praevalebit!
(In fairness, LOA is less wrong than LIA.)
I agree that the paper, though retailing Chomskyan tropes as truisms in an irritating way, is not actually logically dependent on specifically ANCish doctrines.
The linguistic side of it is really typology: it wouldn’t be possible to project Language back to the ancestors of modern humans prior to our current (minimal) state of genetic diversity, if contemporary Language itself did not display some sort of unity.
However, the more actual typologists discover about even contemporary language, the more it begins to look as if the only real thing that unites all human languages over against other animal communication systems is that humans are constrained by human physical capacities.
So the grand conclusion of the paper boils down to humans speak Human, and Human is spoken by humans.
I propose another scenario: long before man could use language, he could wave his hands and arms in a convincing manner.
The article demonstrates that hand-waving is still an essential part of serious discourse.
It’s not trivial. A limp wrist conveys so much information. And its absence is even more promising.
Now I remember — one of the recent LIA references is in this paper by Johanna Nichols. She attempts to reconstruct typology far past where comparative linguistics would go. She probably knows this, but There There Be Dragons.
It’s hard to believe a paper that short can be that awkward. They never bother to define language. Dizikes felt the need and provided them with a (vague) definition in his review, but it’s not in the paper.
Their stirring final conclusion is a sentence of ridiculousness— “we have pinpointed approximately 135kya as the moment at which some linguistic capacity must have been present in the human population.”
Approximately ain’t a pinpoint, boys. And it isn’t “the moment” either since you left open the possibility of an earlier date. So it’s “a moment”. And “some language capacity”? WTF? Chimps have “some language capacity”. You’ve basically concluded nothing at all.
Limp-wristed and yet bold as brass. I think “campy” is a fair description.
“we have pinpointed approximately 135kya …”
IIRC, the best the genomics can measure is the number of generations. There’s then an averaging/guessing game of mapping generations to years-per-generation to time-displacement. Was the (average) age a woman gave birth consistent over that span of time? Wouldn’t it be more honest to give a figure in terms of generations, with an acknowledged probabilistic mapping to years?
a paper that short can be that awkward.
Easily explained: they did no original research at all. This is a highly derivative literature review.
This is the sort of statistical leger-de-main that gets genomics a bad name. So all too easy for you-know-who in Another Place to rail against “speculative, statistically derived results”. And although I of course defend to the death @DM’s right to object, I’m keeping my head down on that one.
On the “vocal tract” paper – that would allow a scenario where language in the sense of using sounds to convey meaning had already arisen and having a more versatile vocal tract would be of social advantage, which would further the spread of that mutation.
She attempts to reconstruct typology far past where comparative linguistics would go.
Yet again. It seems to be her signature tune now (a pity, given that she long since showed that she can do excellent proper linguistics. Couldn’t well-wishers stage some sort of intervention to rescue her?)
There’s so much wrong with that paper it’s hard to know where to start. Though I notice lexical tone is one of her typological features that she thinks can substitute for actual comparative work. In Africa, the distribution of lexical tone happily crosses over not only real language family divisions, but even Greenberg’s. Et sic de similibus.
When her methodology can actually be checked against known family relationships, it doesn’t work. There is consequently no reason to trust it in cases like these where the only checks are hypothesised “Pleistocene time windows” for the peopling of the Americas.
Academics live off funding for academic research, except the lucky few who got tenure or another kind of permanent position.
It’s just bad writing. They concluded that 135 ka ago, give or take a thousand or three, is a terminus post quem – it’s the last possible date when “some linguistic capacity” must have been present in the human population. I’d say “some linguistic capacity” is narrower than “some language capacity” – they still should have come out and simply said “language”, but probably a reviewer didn’t let them.
Yes, but a Conclusions section should be aimed at a wider audience.
She’s painted herself into a corner. She argued against the Moscow School’s “North Caucasian” family by arguing that the Comparative Method simply cannot go that far because it has some silly time limit like 10,000 years. So when she wanted to go further (without arriving at “North Caucasian”, which must be wrong because it comes from the Moscow School…), she had to try to convince herself that some other method could go there.
Not just there. Latvian is a proper (register-)tone language: the phonemic tones are not limited to the stressed syllable, and stress is not phonemic.
Yeah, examples abound. Athabaskan, Sino-Tibetan … Scandinavian …
It’s nothing short of astonishing that anyone could even consider typology a safe guide to genetic relatedness …
Yoruba is quite certainly “genetically” related to Swahili. I can’t say that I’ve ever really been struck by their typological similarity.
Goemai (largely monosyllabic words, almost entirely isolating in its morphosyntax) is related to Amharic (somewhat less monosyllabic and isolating.)
Welsh is really quite closely related to Lithuanian … (much shallower time-depth than Kusaal and Zulu, anyhow. Or Goemai and Amharic.)
Quechua is very reminiscent of Turkish typologically (if you ask me, which nobody did.)
I think the idea is that if you stir together enough typological features and do some statistics, all the nonsense will sublime and you will be left with Truth.
That can be defined away as “merely” pitch accent, like Central Franconian, Lithuanian and western South Slavic. (Or Shanghainese.) But Latvian can’t.
That might even work if you can find enough typological features that are independent from each other and not too easily borrowed. I don’t think anybody has yet.
the only real thing that unites all human languages over against other animal communication systems is that humans are constrained by human physical capacities.
If I had to pick one, it would be: all human languages, and (for what little it’s worth) no known animal language, provide a way to negate a statement.
David Marjanović: There’s recent suggestions that South Slavic is not even a thing? (as in Slovenian is not more closely related to FYLOSC that it is to, say, Czech?). Slovenian being a separate branch of Slavic. And the phonological common innovations Bulgarian has with FYLOSC are areal features which occurred dys-synchronically.
David E.: However, the more actual typologists discover about even contemporary language, the more it begins to look as if the only real thing that unites all human languages over against other animal communication systems is that humans are constrained by human physical capacities.
I didn’t plan to pick up on this, hyperbole and all, but now that we do discuss it: Surely there’s something — or else you could drop a human into a community of communicating animals, and the human would become able to translate it into Human, and you could drop another human, and the two would agree on the translation.
Apart from that, I agree. The more we learn of animal behavior, the more of what we thought was uniquely human will turn out to be shared with other species. Even language. When we crack that, we’ll also know what sets human language apart.
Not even recent; I was just being sloppy. I don’t know of any South Slavic shared innovations either.
all human languages, and (for what little it’s worth) no known animal language, provide a way to negate a statement.
Used as a plot device (one of about a million) in The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.
AntC: I think “social use” was just bad writing, and Dizikes just meant use of language as distinct from an unused capacity.
I don’t agree that language is necessary for population dispersal. Many other species are capable of long-distance dispersal, some quite dramatically, such as some invasive species.
Naturally, people with Language would spend tens of thousands of years Just Thinking with it before it occurred to anyone that it might help with communication. What could be more plausible than that?
It sounds plausible to me. Isn’t the problem with the origin of language that you can only acquire a language from someone who speaks or signs it? So how does it bootstrap itself?
C Baker mentioned home signing, which I didn’t know about. But I’m wondering whether that only happens because the deaf child’s caregivers interpret the initial signs as language and respond to them, and are then in a position to interpret linguistically structured combinations of signs and give the child the desired result.
For comparison, I imagine that all that’s needed for writing is language and manual dexterity, and maybe the invention of drawing, yet writing wasn’t invented for at least tens thousands of years after the preconditions existed. And then, I think, it was only in certain kinds of cultures, when certain needs arose.
Is Chomsky’s or whoever’s picture that people were thinking in something like language before they realized that they could use it to communicate? I’d have imagined that there was no language till it was used for communication.
Maybe there’s evidence from deaf children or some such source that people can learn to use language without contact with any language users, but if not, I don’t see how this could be settled without the Really Forbidden Experiment of raising a large group of children without exposure to language, and if necessary, keeping their descendants isolated from language too.
I don’t agree that language is necessary for population dispersal.
I’m talking about social species that need ‘infrastructure’/support mechanisms for a viable population. Does any other species than humans have young that are entirely unable to fend for themselves for months/years after birth?
Other species don’t have such stringent demands; but I suspect have means of sophisticated communication. The language is an ‘enhanced feature’ for what’s already happening. Dolphins/orca moving through Wellington harbour this week.
i don’t think there’s any reason to distinguish home sign from any other kind of lect, whether visual or sonic – it’s just a lect with a very small population of users, most of whom usually have at least one other lect that they use with other people. like any other such lect – which will usually be a deliberately-created one (family-based conlangs come to mind) – it’ll likely owe a lot of its structure to those overlapping lects, but that may change if it survives for more than one cohort of speakers.
but most importantly, they’re created out of use, in their specific social context, using whatever gestural/expressive materials are available, to enable whatever kinds of communication their users collectively think are necessary or pleasurable. their usual limits are about the decisions the users have made about what those forms of communication are, generally affected by the fantasy that deafness means stupidity. but those are arbitrary, not structural; if a family of mathematicians with a live-in cook developed it, a home sign could have extensive resources for communicating about set theory, but might lack any vocabulary for the kitchen.
martha’s vineyard sign is probably the classic example of how a local sign, presumably with one or more “home sign” origin points, can become a long-lasting lect extending well beyond its geographic and social origin point, without the kind of institutional context and pidginization/creolization process that gave rise to nicaraguan sign.
From this discussion on Reddit I learned of the cute-and-a-half term “tonoexodus”, with a link to a good survey by Martha Ratliff. The loss of tone (or pitch accent) in at least some varieties of Lithuanian, Croatian, Swedish, and Slovenian is reported by native speakers.
When relying on a linguistic feature to be stable, as a probe of the past, one needs to consider both how likely it is to be created de novo, and how likely it is to be lost. The two probabilities are not necessarily the same. I am not saying tone is or isn’t useless the way Nichols uses it, but that the temporal stability of any feature should be looked at with more nuance than it has been.
I don’t know of any South Slavic shared innovations either
I guess you mean “that are limited to South Slavic”? Otherwise there is TorT > TraT (which is shared with Czech and Slovac).
@Jerr Friedman: primates are using sounds for communication; it makes much more sense to me to assume that language evolved step by step from that and became grammatically more complicated in use with other people, and that whatever genetic features that might be involved in linguistic ability evolved along with this, as linguistic versatility became a social advantage, than to assume that suddenly some genes mutated into a Universal Grammar ability and that people spent millennia brooding about what to do with that ability.
If Miyagawa’s intention was to garner widespread attention, he’s been successful in at least one popular science outlet.
In a quick perusal of the article, I can’t identify what the headlined “crucial feature of human language” is supposed to be.
I am not saying tone is or isn’t useless the way Nichols uses it, but that the temporal stability of any feature should be looked at with more nuance than it has been
The paper just says “Presence versus absence of contrastive tone oppositions. These are coded as tones, whether or not they also involve phonation properties such as creak, glottalization, and so forth.”
This is particularly bad: not only does it make no distinction between pitch-accent (e.g. Japanese), register systems (e.g. Kusaal, Hausa, most of Bantu), and contour systems (e.g, Mandarin, Vietnamese), but it lumps in glottalisation (associated with tone in e.g. Mandarin and Vietnamese but completely orthogonal to tone in e.g. Kusaal and Dinka) and does not specify whether the tone oppositions are lexical or syntactic (Kulango, for example, has no lexical tone distinctions, but uses tone extensively in syntax; in Buli and Nawdm, only nouns have lexical tone, not verbs, which use tone exclusively as a flexional device.)
To code all this as a binary opposition is rather like having a tickbox for “has rhotics” – only much worse.
Some of the distinctions I’m talking about pretty certainly have diachronic implications. The Mandarin-Vietnamese type is often known to have arisen from non-tonal segmental oppositions, for example (and is also particularly likely to make glottalisation part of the tone system.) It also seems particularly unlikely to be lost once gained. Register systems are AFAIK never known to have originated from previous segmental features (though Chadic must have created such systems somehow) and they are more prone to simplification and loss (e.g. Kulango, Swahili, Timbuktu and Gao Songhay.) Pitch-accent systems are also quite often lost, or transmuted into stress contrasts which Nichols would classify as “not tone.”
hyperbole and all
Actually, it wasn’t meant as hyperbole (well, maybe just a little.)
But I had my fingers crossed, in that in “human physical capacities” I was mentally including the physical capacities of the human brain, including such things as contraints on short-term memory and processing and perceptive abilities. I suppose that a sufficiently vague understanding of “language organ” might even be taken as a collective label for such relevant capacities and constraints; but there is no conceivable way that they can all be due to a “single gene”, or have evolved relatively suddenly all together at some time that could ever be “pinpointed.”
(Actually, even Chomsky himself effectively holds this view now: everything about Language apart from the mystical “Merge” is now attributed to the multifarious constraints imposed by our general physical and cognitive capacities along with der logische Aufbau der Welt.)
English, of course, has “contrastive tone oppositions.” They play a vital role in focus marking, for example, and in distinguishing statements from questions (features marked in other languages by segmental particles.)
I have frequently lamented the ambiguity that results in written English from the failure of the standard orthography to mark tone systematically.
What sorts of typologies-etc. are *possible* in human language is obviously constrained by the processing/parsing/comprehending capacities of the human mind.* Whether those relevant capacities can all be usefully labeled as “physical” seems to me a potentially difficult question that should perhaps be evaded if possible.
*It does not follow from this that the full range of typologies etc. actually found in extant human languages necessarily exhausts the range of what would be possible, of course, due to chance and historical contingency.
It does not follow from this that the full range of typologies etc. actually found in extant human languages necessarily exhausts the range of what would be possible, of course, due to chance and historical contingency
Absolutely. To pick a famous example, we wouldn’t know that OVS and OSV default clause constituent orders were even possible in natural human languages if nobody had ever investigated the smaller indigenous languages of Amazonia. It seems very likely that there are many typological possibilities for human languages whose absence in even our most extensive surveys is due to nothing but pure chance; and vastly more languages must have disappeared without trace in human history than the few thousand which are still extant, of course.
Whether those relevant capacities can all be usefully labeled as “physical” seems to me a potentially difficult question that should perhaps be evaded if possible
Personally, I’m happy with doing so, despite being a dyed-in-the-wool supernaturalist; but I take your point. These are deep ontological waters … (even if you’re not a supernaturalist.)
Happy to concede that I was cheating. A bit.
(Actually, even Chomsky himself effectively holds this view now: everything about Language apart from the mystical “Merge” is now attributed to the multifarious constraints imposed by our general physical and cognitive capacities along with der logische Aufbau der Welt.)
Please give trigger warnings in future before bringing up “logical positivism”. It makes my head hurt like crazy.
When Carnap was asked how he felt
By a fervent Salvationist Celt,
He replied “It’s not sin
That is wearing me thin,
But Der logische Aufbau der Welt.”
(This moving verse was composed by E L Mascall.)
AntC: I’m talking about social species that need ‘infrastructure’/support mechanisms for a viable population. Does any other species than humans have young that are entirely unable to fend for themselves for months/years after birth?
You made me look it up. “Chimpanzee mothers typically are in close contact with their offspring for several years, carrying them almost continuously for two years and nursing until they are four to six years old. [Other pages say offspring are weaned at 3 to 5 years.] The close relationship between the mother and offspring continues for several years after weaning, and is one of the most important relationships in chimpanzee life.” Source
For comparison: “Among the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, babies are carried everywhere in a small pouch on the back of the mother for the first one or two years of life. Between ages two and four, children are carried on the shoulders by their mothers. From the third year onwards, however, children increasingly spend time separated from their mothers in the camp, looked after by others while the mother is out. Up to age six or seven, children are partly carried by their fathers and partly walk some of the way (Lee 1972: 331).” Source
To me that doesn't look like the kind of difference that would require the difference between chimp communication and language.
Also, spreading 5000 km (Kenya to South Africa) in 100,000 years (first modern humans to the Khoisan-Rest split) would mean an average of 50 m per year. Maybe a split would have to arise from something more dramatic—to take one example, a band or part of a band forces another to flee, which might not involve planning on the refugees' part. But I still don't see a necessity for more than chimp-level communication. People go somewhere and take their families with them. Hunters and gatherers would already be familiar with areas nea where they live and have some some idea where they wanted to go.
One problem I have on this topic is imagining communication that's more sophisticated than what chimps have but less so than human language.
One problem I have on this topic is imagining communication that’s more sophisticated than what chimps have but less so than human language.
One problem I see here is that you apparently believe these things must be positioned on a linear scale of sophistication. Linearity is not always your friend. Dogs and drag queens can exhibit sophisticated behavior, but I don’t know how I would compare their sophistries on a scale of 1 to 10. I wouldn’t even try.
Our dog Sparky loves bitches but not bitchiness. That’s pretty cool, I think.
Yes.
The register split of the four “tones” of Early Middle Chinese into the eight tones of Late Middle Chinese is due to voiced initial consonants. (In Standard Mandarin, the obvious remnant of this is the contrast of the first/level tone vs. the second/rising tone.) Likewise in Vietnamese.
And very similarly in Panjabi, which started with no tones and turned the voiced aspirates into plain voiceless + low tone.
The most spectacular example must be the secondarily toneless island in the center* of Central Franconian: the pitch accent has turned into a vowel quality distinction. This happened in a vowel system that was already on the large side, so now there are 14 short and 14 long monophthongs in stressed syllables, plus a number of diphthongs that further contrast with a few sequences of vowel + /j/ and vowel + /β/. Iä! Iä!
* Also on the language boundary with French, because the Central-Franconian-speaking area wraps around a French-speaking corner.
register split
Yeah, that happens in Bantu as well. Complications on top of an inherited tone system engendered by segmental features (typically the nature of preceding consonants, as in the Chinese languages.)
“Register” was not precisely what I meant, on reflection; I was thinking of systems like the proto-Bantu one where there is no diachronic explanation of where tone came from in the first place. Such systems seem to be typically “register” type, but not always: some of the Grassfields languages can give any south Asian tone language a run for its money when it comes to contour tones, for example. And Lhasa Tibetan or Navajo have pretty simple tone systems despite their well-known segmental origins.
In hindsight, saying that the systems I had in mind are not known to have originated from segmental contrasts is pretty circular.
I think there is a deep-seated contrast lurking under all the surface transmogrifications, though, even though I can’t think of a good name for it.
Proto-Oti-Volta and proto-Bantu tones, despite a lot of difficulties, correlate enough that one can be pretty sure the basics of the system go all the way back to proto-Volta-Congo, with not a trace of any prior segmental origin as far as I can see. And the same is true of several other African language families.
Be that as it may, what all this does illustrate, of course, is just how much having “contrastive tone oppositions” is a really bad candidate for being conserved over longer periods than the comparative method can encompass.
(I picked tone because it’s interesting, not because it’s a notably worse candidate than Nichols’ other picks, incidentally. None of them is any good far her purposes.)
tonoexodus
This should, of course, by properly Atticised to tonuxodus; this should be carefully distinguished from tuxenodus, which derives from the Greek for “putting on a dinner jacket.”
The most spectacular example must be the secondarily toneless island in the center of Central Franconian
Sounds lovely! Reference?
I wonder if the latest pebble thrown in the pool will have any implications for either Chomsky’s or Miyagawa’s ponderings:
Genetic study reveals hidden chapter in human evolution
In a nutshell: “Using advanced analysis based on full genome sequences, researchers from the University of Cambridge have found evidence that modern humans are the result of a genetic mixing event between two ancient populations that diverged around 1.5 million years ago. About 300,000 years ago, these groups came back together, with one group contributing 80% of the genetic makeup of modern humans and the other contributing 20%.”
Did either (or both) have the “language gene”?
@Y:
Nice article by Martha Ratliff – thanks! Just got round to looking at it.
Very informative. Nitpicks (naturally) …
Not sure about this, for example:
(My emphasis.)
Only root syllables in Western Oti-Volta languages (which carry the default word stress, and are also the only syllables with a full range of vowel quality distinctions) can have all possible tone contrasts, and indeed there are only three fully distinct overall tone patterns for uncompounded words, though one of these has subtypes due to historical segment losses, and prefixes have an independent two-way distinction. Anyhow, root syllables are unequivocally “privileged” tonally.
However, given that the languages also operate complex systems of tone sandhi and tone overlays, and that never-stressed clitic particles also make a two-way tone contrast, it’s quite impossible to analyse them as “pitch-accent” (I have actually tried … it can’t work, at least unless you abstract away so far from actual descriptive reality that it becomes frankly silly.)
Also not taken with the tonoexedus theory that she cites (she’s just the messenger here) that this is driven in Niger-Congo verbs by tone spreading from affixes.
Cross-linguistically, verbs very often make fewer lexical suprasegmental distinctions than nouns, in ways which are impossible to attribute to tone spreading: cf Greek and Vedic Sanskrit, but there are very many examples. (I don’t actually know of a language in which it’s the other way round, though of course there are plenty where nouns and verbs don’t actually differ in suprasegmental possibilities.)
Kusaal has only two overall verb tone patterns (compared with three-plus in nouns) and its closeish relatives Buli, Konni and Nawdm have no lexical tone in verbs at all: but this is all verbs, including the underived CV and CVC root-stems which are much the commonest verbs. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that they have lost lexical tone by analogy with longer derived stems.
I think this idea does work for much of Bantu, sure, with its often heavily agglutinative verb flexion and very productive derivation; but to generalise this to “Niger-Congo” is yet another case of the Bantu tail wagging the Niger-Congo dog.
(And I think there is no reason to think that the no-tone parts of “Atlantic” ever had tones.)
However, I think there is mileage in the idea that word-internal tone spreading (which is very common in African tone systems) contributes to overall loss of lexical tone. Niggli’s Farefare dictionary seems* to show a collapse of the three basic noun tone patterns into two as a result of a tone spreading process also seen in several other WOV languages: all it would have taken to neutralise the patterns was loss of word-final tone downsteps. (Dagbani, which has undergone a very similar process, still has these downsteps.)
* “Seems”, because the forms used in compounds (which are freely formed and constantly in use in WOV languages) ought to have remained distinct, but unfortunately Niggli only marks tone in headwords. The corresponding patterns have also fallen together in Kusaal in the citation forms of bimoraic-stem nouns, but even those nouns remain tonally distinct in many other contexts, due to the wonders of Kusaal external sandhi.
One problem I have on this topic …
“If a
lionchimp mother could talk, we would not understand [her].”researchers from the University of Cambridge have found evidence that modern humans are the result of a genetic mixing event between two ancient populations that diverged around 1.5 million years ago. About 300,000 years ago, these groups came back together, with one group contributing 80% of the genetic makeup of modern humans and the other contributing 20%.
They break up, then they make up. That’s really romantic ! But is it rocket science ?
In a nutshell: “Using advanced analysis based on full genome sequences, researchers from the University of Cambridge have found evidence that modern humans are the result of a genetic mixing event between two ancient populations that diverged around 1.5 million years ago. About 300,000 years ago, these groups came back together, with one group contributing 80% of the genetic makeup of modern humans and the other contributing 20%.”
Did either (or both) have the “language gene”?
I’m on the verge of a breakthrough. Language capacity reached its present form when the groups combined! Hybrid vigor! And this would explain why body language is 80% of communication, as I just read in multiple sites on the Internet!
@Hans: primates are using sounds for communication; it makes much more sense to me to assume that language evolved step by step from that and became grammatically more complicated in use with other people, and that whatever genetic features that might be involved in linguistic ability evolved along with this, as linguistic versatility became a social advantage, than to assume that suddenly some genes mutated into a Universal Grammar ability and that people spent millennia brooding about what to do with that ability.
Yes, that Really Forbidden Experiment would start from zero, whereas as you say, it probably happened in stages. (Probably, but not necessarily. We could imagine that other changes were selected for because they improved cognition in other ways, and only the last change put those to work in improving communication.) There’s still a bootstrapping problem, though. If people in a population have an ability to communicate better than they’ve been doing, why does it occur to them to try, given that they’d been communicating just fine (they thought), and how do others recognize that that’s what they’re doing, given that they’ve never heard the new communication before? If the new aspect of communication isn’t part of their childhood environment, how do they acquire the use of it?
But again I have the problem of not being able to imagine what those intermediate stages might have been like.
I don’t know where you got “brooding”. As in my example of writing, people can have communication abilities that they don’t use and don’t know about, much less think about.
Language capacity reached its present form when the groups combined!
One group had the lexicon, and the other had the grammar.
The Form and the Meaning.
(or at least so a good language creation myth would state)
@Jerry F.: Now we go into full blown speculation, but let’s assume ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis for language as well:
1. Many intelligent animals, including primates, have (learned) sound signals that are associated with specific events or behaviors (e.g., the appearance of a specific kind of predator)
2. Primates are also able to use them without them being an immediate, instinctive reaction (e.g., using the “predator” signal in order to scare others in the group off in order to enjoy food without having to share)
3. From that it’s only a step to use these signals to indicate things, signalling that you see or want them, and when that catches on, to introduce sounds for more things
4. Like children, you progress from one-word to two-word sentences, and then the grammar gets progressively more complicated.
The advantage to be had from this is increased coordination and planning abilities, which would contribute to language abilities to evolve.
As for writing, the use of symbols to convey information seems to be much older than encoding written language; the latter probably became sufficiently useful only when human society achieved a certain complexity.
(As for the “brooding”, that was a snarky rewording of (I think) DE’s summary of Chomsky’s position. Sorry!)
Is lovely. I’ll dig it up.
Yo! Welcome back, drasvi!
@JF:
You don’t need language to think (as many Hatters testified from personal experience when this hardy perennial came up before.)
On the other hand, many of the capacities needed to think non-verbally are necessary for language to be possible.
Like most unChomskyites, I don’t believe that there is any “language organ”: rather, there are a whole lot of different human capacities involved in language, most (if not all) of which are also used in non-linguistic cognition.
So there is nothing to prevent the step-by-step emergence of these capacities, each in turn capable of adding its own refinements to human communication.
Hockett’s famous list of characteristics supposedly specifically characteristic of human Language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett%27s_design_features
contains several logically independent items: there seems to be no reason for them necessarily always to have been bundled together.
(This is also how the list remains significant despite some of the items turning out not to be necessary or sufficient to dististinguish Language from other animal communication systems.)
Jerry F.: Language capacity reached its present form when the groups combined!
David E.: One group had the lexicon, and the other had the grammar.
drasvi The Form and the Meaning.
The Kikis and the Boubas.
As a non-linguist, non-expert, I have a problem with Unversal Grammar because I cannot conceive of how a language could function if it didn’t follow Unversal Grammar more or less. Has anyone ever invented an artificial language that is inconsistent with Unversal Grammar? It seems to me that, nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions *must* be consistent with Unversal Grammar, so we don’t need any exotic explanations of how things came to be the way are. The only exception I can think of concerns pronouns, and we can interpret algebra in terms of pronouns: we can define h as “the height of the house” so that we can use h a hundred times in an article with repeating “the height of the house” a hundred times. However, we can define h any way we like, and it doesn’t have to have the same meaning in different articles. I can imagine a human language that worked like that: one starts by defining “I” as the speaker, “you” as the listener, etc. and then uses those definitions consistently throughout a conversation, but in another conversation one could define “they” as the speaker, and “I” as the listener, and so on. That sort of thing works perfectly well in algebra, so it probably could work in language, however peculiar it looks.
Lots of languages don’t have adjectives; or prepositions. And Japanese has ditched most of its original personal pronouns.
The question is really “what do absolutely all natural human languages actually have in common?” (so calling it “Universal Grammar” can end up rather tautologous.)
Chomsky’s latest answer boils down to “not a lot.”
“Universal” is over-the-top and non-evidentiary. A universe can’t qualify – unless it is part of a bigger universe.
I’ve given up on Chomsky. He’s only interested in finding abstract formalisms that can somehow “generate” language. These formalisms are then claimed to encapsulate the workings of the human mind. Pretty hard to prove when they are so abstract. And (perhaps fortunately— just imagine the pretty pickle we’d be in if they actually worked) totally useless when called upon to do any real-world work on language. Unfortunately his genetics appears to have endowed him with extraordinary longevity—96 and still pushing the same bullshit. His passing would hopefully allow the whole human edifice that his existence is holding up to collapse. What would the acolytes do without the master there to pontificate?
I’ve heard that he’s none too well of late.
Pronouns are interesting. Latin grammar, I have been led to understand, draws a distinction between “demonstratives”, which refer to things you can “point to” in the real world, and “relatives”, which refer to an antecedent in the context. Mongolian, from what I can see, blurs the distinction in third person usage. The third-person pronouns are demonstratives. The word for “he/she” is “that”. (I won’t discuss Japanese — it’s complex — but “pro-drop” could conceivably be a mistaken concept. English might just as well be a “pro-inserting” language. Just a thought.) At any rate, concluding that pronouns are universal could easily be a Eurocentric bias. (Sorry for the half-cocked comment; I’m just becoming sceptical of claims of “universality”.)
Even the grammar of “wanting” is complex. “Wanting to do something” and “wanting someone to do something”, as expressed in English, is far from universal. Japanese (unlike Chinese) doesn’t work like English at all. And Google translate makes a complete hash with Mongolian, which doesn’t have a language-wide means of expressing the concept (dialects differ). I find it curious that there doesn’t appear to be a lot of linguistic work done on this. I find it far more interesting than reflexives — you might recall that one Norbert went to Japan to torture native speakers on the use of 自分 jibun “oneself” as an extension of Chomsky’s work on “-self” compounds.
“wanting”- and then “loving”)
I don’t think it was as simple as “commonalities in languages” = “language universals” = “Universal Grammar”. I imagine it’s always been assumed that some of those universals are emergent from something. Chomsky’s conceit was that one could cleverly test that black box and deduce what’s inside, much like chemists and particle physicists had been doing. After much work it all ended boiling down to
God Is LoveMove.Kusaal doesn’t do the English thing of using a non-finite clause after “want”:
M bɔɔd sa’ab.
“I want porridge.”
M bɔɔd ye fʋ kul.
I want that you go.home
“I want you to go home.”
M bɔɔd ye m kul.
I want that I go.home
“I want to go home.”
In fact, if you use a gerund as an object of bɔɔd, it means something else again:
M bɔɔd kulig.
I want home.going
“I’m about to go home.”
(Actually, apart from this, Kusaal doesn’t use gerunds as verb complements much at all: it’s quite different from English or Welsh or Hausa, where verbal nouns/gerunds/infinitives/whatever have infiltrated their way into the whole finite verb system.)
I imagine it’s always been assumed that some of those universals are emergent from something
True; though, as I understand it, the current wisdom is that, apart from Merge, all actual syntax arises more or less automatically from a combination of human processing constraints and sheer logical inevitability. All work prior to the Great Discovery of Recursion as the Key Insight has now been retconned as having shown exactly how the current details have emerged with stark inevitability from the Pure Pureness of Merge. It was true all along!
A major problem with the whole universal-hunting enterprise seems to me to be that it greatly underestimates the sheer arbitrariness and once-off nature of much of real language, including syntax. (I mean, the sort of thing that’s meat and drink to Construction Grammar fans.)
Arbitrariness in language is not just for lexical sign-signifier pairings …
Though I suppose you could square this with the Chomskyan view by saying something like: “Behold! All that is not forbidden unto you is permitted!” The failure to find substantive absolute universals proves that Chomsky’s concept of Universal Grammar is true …
I’d’a thought (social) language use would be a precondition for _population_ dispersal. One individual wandering off into the bush doesn’t make a “group”/doesn’t make a viable vector for “spreading”. If you’re going to take a whole (extended) family/tribe, you need to plan/agree what to take and where to go/send scouts in advance.
…This confuses me. Many animals (and plants, though it’s probably easier for those given their reproduction methods) seem to be spreading around the world just fine without much apparent use of language; indeed so did proto-humans (in particular, Homo erectus made it from Africa all the way to Java, apparently without the important vocal tract innovations).
Plausibly the kind of (relatively) rapid human population dispersal seen in the Late Pleistocene could have required social language, but 1) it mostly postdated the Khoisan split anyway, and 2) the earlier fossil evidence is sufficiently inconclusive and/or sparse that there isn’t (yet) any real way to say how rapid (or not) the other hominin population dispersals were.
Maybe there’s evidence from deaf children or some such source that people can learn to use language without contact with any language users
Nicaraguan Sign Language is the usually-bandied-about example, but AFAIK it’s not very clear whether the children in question have actually had sufficiently little contact with external language.
I meant “Merge”, not “Move”, but it doesn’t matter…
@JFoM:
There seems to be no firm evidence it’s ever happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experiments
It reminds me rather of the extremely upsetting story of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
which does not bear directly on this particular issue, but drives home the point that children raised in such circumstances, in the unlikely event that they survived at all, would be so severely damaged psychologically that nothing of linguistic value could really be concluded from studying them.
I think part of the trouble is the very notion that “language” can be cleanly separated from other aspects of human interaction; combined with the perennial obsession with genetics and the whole nature-nurture distinction, which is assuredly less of a true dichotomy for human beings than for any other animals.
I suspect this may have been the point of Salimbene’s criticism of Frederick II’s reported experiment, as recounted in an unfortunately not-fully-sourced snippet in WP:
In other words, the foster-mothers and nurses couldn’t not teach the children Language – in some sense, at any rate.
If some deaf childern invent much of their languages based not on direct input from adults but rather on their own talents and indirect influence of the environment, that’s still informative.
Also a child growing up in void (or raised by animals, or…) is one story, while two kids growing up like this is a very different story.
___
(Onse I considered a story about an Adam and Eve raised by computers after WWIII. But programs spoke:) )
Many sign languages are certainly created without external contact, e.g. Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (Margalit Fox’s popular book on the language is great.)
broken link
How’d that happen? The WP article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language
Whether or not one believes Bickerton’s bioprogram nonsense*, the fact that children have repeatedly proved able to create creoles (i.e. full-fledged proper languages) out of pidgins must surely say something about human innate linguistic potential.
Though by “innate”, I here mean “typical for humans in active contact and interaction with one another”, which is only tantamount to “human genetic endowment” in the sense that our genes predispose us to that kind of cooperation. (For all the sorry state of humanity, it’s a true fact that we are an almost uniquely cooperative species – for mammals, anyhow. For my money, that predates Language, and was an essential precondition of it. Chomsky, as ever, is exactly wrong. It’s a gift.)
* I am coyly not divulging my own view here.
For my money, that predates Language, and was an essential precondition of it
Why should I care what you mean by that gesture, anyway?
<* shrugs*>
the sheer arbitrariness and once-off nature of much of real language, including syntax.
Most of what we think of as grammar and syntax is driven by social signaling not for communicating literal information. Hence it’s „arbitrary“. Anyone who has spoken basic English to non-native speakers begins to realize how much extra baggage we use that isn’t strictly necessary for giving directions, or even telling a story. But it is vitally important in a social context that we use articles correctly, use „do“ as an auxiliary verb, match tenses correctly, use recursion, etc. to show we are „natives“ and belong. Do the Chomskyites address the social aspect of grammar and syntax?
Every one of us is an authority about our own thought processes; surely that’s obvious. I don’t need a certified expert to tell me how I think.
[N.b.: This is a response to a comment by V that he has since deleted.]
It is not at all obvious that anyone is an “authority” about their own thought processes. You might as well claim to be an authority about your own breathing and thus in no need of certified experts, but there is in fact an entire medical subspecialty devoted to understanding your breathing better than you do yourself, and in certain situations it might be imprudent for you not to seek the expertise of such a specialist. (There are likewise medical and quasi-medical subspecialties, perhaps a bit less rigorous, that offer diagnosis and therapeutic options to people whose thought processes seem to be functioning suboptimally, because such people cannot reasonably be expected to simply solve their own problems in that regard via perfect self-awareness and willpower.)
Fair enough, except that I don’t think thinking is quite in the same category as breathing.
Every one of us is an authority about our own thought processes; surely that’s obvious. I don’t need a certified expert to tell me how I think.
I’d say the opposite: Neither you nor any expert knows how anybody thinks. For the most relevant example, I’ve never heard of anyone who knows how the words and correctly formed phrases and clauses they say come to their conscious minds, though people do make conscious decisions among the alternatives. If we knew how that worked, there would be no competing theories of grammar.
Yes, yes — I wasn’t making a general statement, I was responding to a specific statement by V that he has since deleted and that I don’t feel comfortable quoting.
Judging from their blog posts, they’re quite active without mentioning his latest publications.
Like Latin, which doesn’t have proper 3rd-person personal pronouns and resorts to demonstrative ones (usually the weakest one) when 3rd-person and number marking on the verbs isn’t enough.
You can’t even want someone to do something in German – you have to open a whole new clause and want that someone do(es) something.
So far I’ve interpreted the Chinese method as the German one minus “that” (because omit needless).
That, on the other hand, is Balkan-style infinitive avoidance.
I’d rather say this is like an orthography: if you express the same things in the same content words in a way your audience isn’t used to, you slow everyone down unnecessarily.
Also, articles carry no information and are predictable except when they aren’t; mismatched tenses routinely produce confusion because the tenses do contain meaning (that other languages express in separate words or leave entirely to context); and so on.
articles carry no information
Compare “Mary hates men” to “Mary hates the men.”
That, on the other hand, is Balkan-style infinitive avoidance
Well, Kusaal hasn’t really got an infinitive to avoid … (it freely makes deverbal action/state nouns, but they aren’t really quite the same thing.)
However, although “I want to go home” in Kusaal is usually
M bɔɔd ye m kul.
I want that I go.home
you can actually say
M bɔɔdi kul.
I want.LINKER go.home
where the LINKER -i is not really part of the preceding word, but just represents the sandhi effect of a following particle, now realised as zero, that still actually turns up as n in older texts.
And if you ask a Mooré* speaker “What is the Mooré for ‘go home’?”, you’ll get the reply “N kuili“, rather than just “Kuili.” So there is something to be said for the idea that n + Verb in Western Oti-Volta is an “infinitive.” And you can make a case for this in Mooré syntax more generally.
I don’t think this works in Kusaal as she is now spoke, but it may have been a possible analysis historically: n as a de-finitiviser particle.
* This didn’t happen in Kusaal with my informants, either because they were sophisticated enough just to cite the actual verb, or because the historical n particle is now normally realised as zero anyway in Kusaal, despite leaving ghostly sandhi traces.
Ghostly Sandhi Traces was a now forgotten wisp-rock band of the ’90s.
“Compare “Mary hates men” to “Mary hates the men.””
And how likely are you to say this (instead of either “Mary hates those men” or “Mary hates the men who…”)?
They seldom tell something you don’t already know.
A Russian who reads but not speaks English fluently (there’s a plenty of such people) comfortably ignores them.
Sometimes she actually comes across something that can be understood more in one way, and then she stops, recalls what she was told about articles, thinks and finds that the article points at a specific reading (sometimes again, more than one:)).
But that happens very rarely – and turns her from a “fluent” reader to a not very fluent reader.
DE, that is, it is the citation form of the verb for the Mossi. Hm.
Or not?
Page 22 of the book linked here.
Direct link to the page… also, there are more diphthongs than I remembered, though the other phenomena occur in other Central Franconian dialects, e.g. the one of Maastricht in the southern drop of the Netherlands.
is, it is the citation form of the verb for the Mossi
Yes, effectively.
Though that raises the awkward question of just what “citation form” really means, and how far it’s even a helpful idea cross-linguistically. There are languages in which it’s just not grammatical to speak a bare noun form by itself as a complete utterance, for example. For a speaker of such a language, a bare noun is really just a sort of theoretical abstraction.
There are lots of languages in which you can cite a word in isolation, but the form then undergoes significant information-losing simplifications. Kusaal (inevitably) is one; Mandinka is another, as several tonal distinctions collapse before pause. Tunen (only consistently SOV Bantu language I know of) is the same. So they do have citation forms – they’re just not very useful citation forms.
(This is actually a real problem with Idelette Dugast’s works on Tunen: she seems to have had a horror of abstracting away from surface forms at all, which is all very praiseworthy, but means that her beautifully exact lexical materials don’t actually give you enough information to be able to construct a sentence properly using the words in question.)
@DM: thank you!
articles carry no information and are predictable except when they aren’t
As Roman Jakobson said: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.”
https://complit.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/COL1000H_Roman_Jakobson_LinguisticAspects.pdf
@DE, yup.
Citation form is a thing, I believe, wothy of study and of our interest. But there are problems with it.
One simple logical problem is:
‘the English word for “word” is “word”‘.
What is the citation form here, “word” (with quotemarks) or word (wihtout quotemarks)?
Perhaps some elements of spoken lnaguage function as those quotemarks even if they mean something else (and perhaps pausal forms or forms meant to make it an utterance can be interpreted same way).
And there is a different question of selecting one form out of many (e.g. nominative or whatever else).
On the other hand, there is a variety of ways a word can be borrowed into another language, some of them are actually based on “what they say when asked ‘how do you call this thing?'”
nominative or whatever else
Yeah: the citation form in several Nilotic languages is the accusative (effectively): they’re “marked nominative” languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marked_nominative_alignment
Kolyma Yukaghir has an actual predicative case, which I imagine would be a pretty natural choice for a noun cited as a complete utterance.
And really, although it’s not totally ungrammatical to speak a noun in isolation in many languages, it’s a pretty unnatural thing to do, even in those languages, except in the middle of a conversation, where it’s not unreasonable to think that all the surrounding matter has been ellipted because it can be supplied from context:
A: “What’s the English word for maison?”
B: “House.”
Finite verb forms, all the more so, unless you’re speaking a so-called “pro-drop” language in which a finite verb can be a complete clause by itself.
Vocatives and imperatives are exceptions, of course – but they are not usually what people have in mind when they talk about “citation forms”, either. They’re forms specially marked to be used as complete utterances in specialised contexts, not some sort of neutral forms.
There is also someone’s idea that “a” in Greek letter names comes from the Phoenician citation form (but I’m not sure if it is anyhow strange as a way of adapting names to Greek).
Compiling dictionaries is probably not a core part of human linguistic ability. It seems possible that there may be a degree of artificiality involved in the language usage conventions employed in dictionaries. Like newspaper headlines …
Linguists might well be among the last people to appreciate this point.
I imagine that dictionary-compiling didn’t actually exist before writing. Pāṇini’s grammar has appendices that it refers to, but I don’t think that they really qualify as “dictionaries”, and in any case the work is so remote from any actual normal spoken usages that he can hardly count as a counterexample to the the general point about artificiality. (Also, Pāṇini certainly knew about writing, even though his own work seems to be intended to be memorised in its entirety. He had been corrupted by literacy.)
In any case, the very idea of “citation forms” could probably be taken as an artefact of formal grammatical analysis, even in familiar languages in which the idea now seems natural and unproblematic to us.
I noticed in the vocabulary list which forms one of the appendixes to SIL’s interesting-yet-frustrating survey of Nõotre:
https://www.sil.org/resources/archives/9094
that many of the words given as translations of French infinitives look like deverbal action/state nouns rather than finite verb forms, and the same is true of Berthelette’s survey of Toende Kusaal in Burkina Faso. Natural enough, if you put yourself in the position of the informants.
But what you then get is not at all what linguists usually mean by “citation forms.” And many of the supposed verb forms are not even actually verbs at all.
Unfortunately, SIL seems to have given up on this sociolinguistic kind of work of late. Academia.edu presented me with a rant about this from Roger Blench the other day:
[WARNING: CLICK AND GET ACADEMIA.EDU SPAM FOREVER]
https://www.academia.edu/128318462/Mountain_view_Jos_Jos_Linguistic_Circle_19_th_March_2023
tl:dr; Anti-intellectual USians with too much money strike again …
But people do ask people about names of things and also people discuss words.
Particularly, very young people do that very often.
Perhaps (I don’t have experience with them…) illiterate people are less concerned with teaching thier children to speak, and their children do it less often – but I think some meta-discussions must happen among them as well.
I think that very little of the vocabulary acquisition of children, or even of adults, happens by direct enquiry of the kind where citation forms get involved.
Where it does happen (and agree that it does) it’s actually a learned quasi-academic schoolroom-influenced thing, quite unlike how most people in most places at most times have acquired new vocabulary.
Even sophisticated academic folk like ourselves are well aware that the best way to learn new vocabulary, whether in your own or in a foreign language, is in a context. SIngle-word “definitions” are only useful if you can’t find anything better. And even then, only as a start: you don’t really know what the word means until you’ve seen it in its free state in actual discourse.
[I was just thinking of a Greek colleague, who speaks practically perfect English – she is married to an Irishman, after all – who nevertheless says “this is an important correlation” when she actually means “this is a significant correlation.” A very good Greek-English dictionary might actually explain where English makes this distinction, which is absent in Greek (and also in Italian -she graduated in Italy. Her linguistic abilities dwarf mine.) But nobody would ever really learn such things from a dictionary.]
Yes, but I don’t mean that that’s how children (or L2 speakers) learn words.
Only that they do ask such questions and also comment on words. Artificial or not, but there is an oral tradition, not only a book tradition. Accordingly, we can study what forms (illiterate) speakers prefer for meta-discussion among adults, among children, for interaction with foreigners etc.
As for “schoolroom-influenced”… I’m not sure. Certainly, there is communication with foreigners. Rare here, frequent there. But Russian pre-school children discuss words so often, that it is difficult to believe that this all is influence of school culture. (Of course I can’t be sure in anything, because I haven’t ever talked to a child of illiterate people)
Some of such conversations indeed arise from insecurity of adults, but others do not.
Yes, yes — I wasn’t making a general statement,
OK, never mind.
A.edu would love to send you a lot of spam but will let you opt out of it. I haven’t received anything from them in a long time.
Even sophisticated academic folk like ourselves are well aware that the best way to learn new vocabulary, whether in your own or in a foreign language, is in a context. SIngle-word “definitions” are only useful if you can’t find anything better. And even then, only as a start: you don’t really know what the word means until you’ve seen it in its free state in actual discourse.
Bound state, actually, in accordance with what you just wrote.
Dictionaries contain sounds that have been ripped out of their sockets. Dictionaries are compendia of frog legs. You can galvanize and deep-fry them, but that doesn’t help you croak in company.
Well, good dictionaries do cite words in actual contexts.
Yeah, but contexts are always detached from other context. It all depends on what you know already – more context !
To a certain extent my Spanish is not bad at all, both spoken and written, yet RAE definitions are often too elegant and concise for this country boy. ¿Enredo? [I can guess] ¿Maraña? [no idea] They make me feel like this.
To learn anything, it is necessary to be open-minded and transactional. Like the Whore of Babylon, whose background was clearly not restricted to Jack and Jill context:
#
I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her prostitution, and on her forehead was written a name, a mystery: “Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations.” And I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the witnesses to Jesus.
#
True.
I’ve occasionally wondered what is in that golden cup. Abominations are familiar and fine, but “impurities of her prostitution” ? Does that mean, like, used condoms ? Ick. Maybe it’s only telephone numbers scribbled on cocktail napkins.
No one would ever accuse Latin of being a marked-nominative-alignment language and the dictionary citation form of a noun is the nom. sg. (or at least that’s how they alphabetize, with gen. sg. mentioned but in second place). Which is why I have always found it interesting that when the case system collapsed, the surviving one-case-fits-all citation form of the noun in most Romance languages most of the time (lots of possible counterexamples and variations, of course) is not the direct descendent of the old Latin nominative but of something else. Some would say the old Latin accusative but at least in some instances multiple old cases had previously fused into an “oblique” which then outlived the nominative and arguing about the genealogy of the oblique may be unhelpful.
This may be parallel to (to use a diagnostic theme from some of David E.’s comments) the interesting fact that in English pronouns it can be idiomatic in various contexts to use oblique-case pronouns as stand-alone “bare” utterances when you can’t as easily do the same with nominative-case pronouns, so the oblique form is perhaps the unmarked one even if that’s not what we’re usually taught in school.
How far back does the tradition go to have the 1st singular present (active) form as the citation form for Greek and Latin verbs?
@JWB:
While the Latin nominative is not the marked case for alignment purposes, the nominative singular pretty much is the marked case morphologically: you can generally make all the other case and number forms out of any one of them just by swapping endings about, whereas with the nominative singular, you just have to know a lot of the time. So if you’re going to introduce some order into the chaos, it’ll be the nominative singular that gets regularised. Modern Greek, too, has done that a lot, despite keeping case: nom sg φύλακας “guard”, acc sg φύλακα.
And Italian generalised the nominative in first-declension plurals, on account of it being handily different from other forms even after the loss of final -s.
Welsh tended to generalise the nominative throughout, for similar reasons: when case collapsed from the loss of all final syllables, the reflexes of the old nominatives were usually the best candidates for rearranging the system into contrasting singular and plural pairs.
How far back does the tradition go to have the 1st singular present (active) form as the citation form for Greek and Latin verbs?
Already there in Dionysius Thrax:
https://el.wikisource.org/wiki/%CE%A4%CE%AD%CF%87%CE%BD%CE%B7_%CE%93%CF%81%CE%B1%CE%BC%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AE
3rd sg masculine Qal perfective for “citation forms” of verbs in Hebrew is another one that’s so familiar you can forget how odd it is. Presumably that goes back to the classical Arabic grammarians. Clever bods. And it does make sense for Semitic languages.
Akkadian dictionaries use deverbal nouns instead as headwords for verbs. So does the very nice SIL Nawdm dictionary. Modern dictionaries of polysynthetic languages seem to make up their conventions on a case-by-case basis, reasonably enough. One size doesn’t fit all.
Most dictionaries of Oti-Volta languages cite verbs under individual finite forms, usually one of the perfective aspects. In fact, they couldn’t stand as complete utterances in normal speech at all, except in the artificial kind of context where somebody speaking English might say
“The.”
in response to say “What is the English definite article?”
“But what you then get is not at all what linguists usually mean by “citation forms.” ”
And what do they usually mean?
It can mean the forms given (by linguists) in dictionaries.
But it is also applied to forms in spoken language, sometimes very loosely
e.g here (a link from Marked Nominative Alignment, the wp article).
I think, what is meant is not a reference to “the form we would use so”, but a reference to “the form speakers use so”. That makes more sense…
At least I mean this second thing here.
But more narrowly than in the link.
“the very idea of “citation forms” could probably be taken as an artefact of formal grammatical analysis”
No more than the idea of “utterances”. Or of “interjections”. Or any linguistic idea.
People DO choose a certain form when telling each other what is the word for this or that.
Donatus in his Ars Minor cites Latin verbs by 1st Sg present indicative, I see, too.
Also this: “…they are not usually what people have in mind when they talk about “citation forms”, either. They’re forms…”
When people talk about citation forms, they can only “have in mind” a form IFF this form is used as the citation form.
Latin, because it is so extensively infected, actually provides an example in which we do not need artificially constructed dictionaries to identify that the nominative case is the unmarked one. Latin (sometimes) declines proper names, but when proper names are given in isolation, something (almost?) all languages allow,* they are typically in the nominative. Compare that to English, which has so little remaining case structure (pretty much just pronouns) that speakers are unlikely to even notice that the nominative is marked.
* Yelling someone’s name to attract their attention is probably older than grammatical language.
In a spirit of scientific enquiry, I grepped through the Kusaal Bible to find one-word answers after lɛbis ye “replied …”
Leaving aside sentence-particles like Ɛɛn “Yes”, there were
Ka dau la bu’os o ye, “Fʋ yʋ’ʋrɛ?” Ka o lɛbis ye, “Jakob.”
‘The man asked him “What is your name?”, and he replied “Jacob.”‘
Ka Zugsɔb la lɛbis ye, “Bɔɔ bɛɛ fʋ nu’ugin la?” Ka o ye, “Dansaar.”
‘The LORD replied “What is there in your hand?” He replied “A staff.”‘
“Anɔ’ɔnɛ na dɔl mam ka ti keŋ Saul gbɛɛnb zin’igin la?” Ka Abisai da lɛbis ye, “Man!”
‘”Who will go with me to where Saul is camping?” Abishai replied “Me!”‘
Ka Naomi lɛbis ye, “Kem!”
‘Naomi replied. “Go!”‘
Ka sankpan’as la lɛbis ye, “Gɔsima!”
The servant replied “Look!”
Ka o lɛbis ye, “Bu’osim!”
‘He replied “Ask!”‘
Ka o lɛbis ye, “Yɛlim!”
‘She replied “Speak!”‘
Ka Zugsɔb la bu’osim ye, “Jeremia, fʋ nyɛ bɔ?” Ka m lɛbis ye, “Kekama.”
‘The LORD asked me, “Jeremiah, what do you see?” I replied “Figs.”‘
Ka ba lɛbis ye, “Barabbas.”
‘They replied “Barabbas.”‘
Ka ba lɛbis ye, “Ayɔpɔi.”
‘They replied “Seven.”‘
So verbs only if they’re imperatives in direct commands, but single nouns, quantifiers, and even personal pronouns, are quite cromulent.
(No vocatives, but they rarely consist of single words, and generally precede a clause of some kind.)
So it matches my impression that “citation form” is not a problematic idea in Kusaal with most unbound words, except for finite verb forms.
Actually, quite apart from the fact that Kusaal is not “pro-drop”, so you need a subject to go with finite verbs in most contexts, Kusaal finite verb forms have quite a few morphophonological similarities to the right-bound “combining forms” of nouns, and although they can appear phrase-finally, this is quite rare with verbs in main clauses. And there is some comparative evidence that the -m(a) flexional ending of main-clause imperatives may be a repurposed noun class suffix.
Dixon, in a book referenced in the wikipedian article on marked nominative in turn linked by DE above (Ergativity fns 9 and 31)
– says that the function of the nominative as the citation form is why it is called “nominative” in the first place (not sure if I understand what “naming” refers to and whether it is same as “citation”).
– cites a book from 19th century that says that English “I” is an affix, and “me” is an independent pronoun.
DE, how do you understand “citation form”: as a form convenient to linguists or the form used so by speakers?
That’s correct as the origin of the name “nominative”: it’s a Latin calque of the original Greek term ὀνομαστικὴ πτῶσις “naming case.”
You can’t really blame the Greeks and Romans for not realising that these things were language-dependent.
English “I” is an affix, and “me” is an independent pronoun
There is a school of thought (evident in some WP pages) that the right-bound proclitic subject pronouns common in West African languages are “really” prefixes (this is part of the regrettable tendency of some enthusiastic Niger-Congo comparativists to assume that proto-Bantu was really not much different from proto-Niger-Congo.)
They’re quite wrong. The proof is trivial for e.g. Kusaal (and works very much like a similar treatment of English “I” would.)
On the affix vs clitic thing, it’s always a pleasure to link once again to the mischievous
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/244421136_Cliticization_vs_Inflection_English_N'T
(In my Kusaal grammar, I wickedly deviate from the sensible demarcation principles they lay down there, because in Kusaal there is such a clear phonological difference between how suffixes and enlitics attach to preceding elements that it would be simply perverse not to use it as the deciding criterion.)
DE, how do you understand “citation form”: as a form convenient to linguists or the form used so by speakers?
I must admit that I had previously not really given this matter any thought.
Thinking about it now, I reckon “citation form” should be kept for the technical linguistic sense: and in that sense, it’s in principle arbitrary: you could pick anything convenient as your preferred “citation form”, even forms that cannot actually be spoken as they stand. It’s just a notational convenience. Dugast (for example) would have done better to pick citation forms which hadn’t lost tonal distinctions the way words spoken in isolation actually do in Tunen.
What speakers can actually accept as a minimal utterance will depend on a whole lot of factors to do with phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics and maybe even culture. It may well be very language dependent. I think it’s actively undesirable to have a single term for all that, because you’ll end up lumping all sorts of quite different constraints together if you try that.
Ideally, a humane linguist concerned for their readers’ mental health is likely to try to pick a definition of “citation form” that is not too distant from naive speakers’ natural usages, but how easy it is to do that certainly will be not only language-dependent but is also likely to be much harder for some “parts of speech” than others.
David Eddyshaw: some remarks on your replies to JWB (at 10:01 AM) above:
1-The unpredictable character of the Latin nominative is only true with (some!) third declension nouns: for the others the nominative is as predictable as any other case.
2-The Italian feminine plural in /e/ probably derives from the Latin accusative in /as/, NOT from the nominative-vocative in /ai/. Italian did not lose final /s/ in all contexts: rather, final /s/ was vocalized to /j/ (this is shown by well-established etymologies such as “poi” from Latin “post” (early simplified to *”pos”), and in turn this /j/ was lost or preserved in different contexts). For more details see-
https://www.amazon.ca/Linguistic-History-Italian-Martin-Maiden/dp/0582059283
-and references therein.
3-The generalization of the nominative singular and plural as the sole form of Welsh (+ Cornish and Breton) nouns has been shown to pre-date the loss of final syllables in Brythonic. See:
Koch, John.1983] “The Loss of Final Syllables and Loss of Declension in Brittonic”, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 30, 201–33.
Talking of nominatives that are hard to intuit, last week I learned viscus. Well, if asked to consider that viscera is a Latin nom.pl., I might have come up with the correct nom.sg., but it was still an aha moment.
(Mr. Gray liked to use this viscus as elegant variation for the proper name of an organ just mentioned).
Also paries/parietes; and omentum maius dredged a bit of Latin declension from the depths of memory whither it had sunk from disuse.
drasvi: “ And how likely are you to say this (instead of either “Mary hates those men” or “Mary hates the men who…”)?
They seldom tell something you don’t already know.”
The whole point is that they signal an assumption on the part of the speaker that the hearer knows (in some sense, article usage is tricky) what is being talked about. “Mary hates the men” is quite comprehensible without elaboration if the speaker and hearer are familiar with the background. Which is the whole point, notwithstanding Russian speakers’ dismissal of their usefulness when speaking English.
@Bathrobe, drasvi
There is also sometimes register. I would feel uncomfortable with saying “Mary hates those men”, if I were talking about men in audible or visual range (I think we talked about this in another thread). But I think I could say “Mary hates the men (across the road/ in Sales/who don’t let her get a word in)” without discomfort.
Given how many languages have gone to the trouble of creating definite articles, they must be good for something besides making things harder for Russians.
https://wals.info/feature/37A#1/87/148
All the modern Western Oti-Volta languages have a definite article, but they are of four quite different origins. I can only conclude that speakers of one WOV language discovered them in another and went “Neat! I wonder how we could do that too?”
Creoles seem to be keen on them, too.
and “wanting someone to do something”, as expressed in English, is far from universal.
You can’t even want someone to do something in German – you have to open a whole new clause and want that someone do(es) something.
So far I’ve interpreted the Chinese method as the German one minus “that” (because omit needless).
I want that I go.home
Thanks to DM for commenting on this.
The Chinese is actually 我要回家 wǒ yào huí jiā or 我想回家 wǒ xiǎng huí jiā. It’s literally “I want go home”, no repeated pronoun. “I want you to go home does require the pronoun, like English. 我要你回家 wǒ yào nǐ huí jiā “I want you go home”. “Xiǎng” can’t be used in this case.
The problem is Japanese. Japanese has a desiderative verb affix: -tai, which is adjectival in form. “I want go” is (私は)行きたい (Watashi wa) ikitai. It can’t be straightforwardly used for other persons since it is a straightforward expression of desire. “He wants to go” must be expressed as “Kare wa ikitai sō desu” (He says he wants to go), “Kare wa ikitagatte iru” (He’s showing signs/ indicating he wants to go), “Kare wa ikitasō ni shite imasu” (“He’s showing signs he wants to go”.
“I want you to go” uses a circumlocution with a converbial form of “itte”, followed by the adjective of wanting, hoshii, again with similar usage restrictions to “-tai”.
Clicking doesn’t give them your e-mail address; that comes when you try to download the PDF.
The idea is that it’s a regular sound shift: -[as] > *-[ah] > *-[aç] > *-[ɛç] > [ɛ].
If that was part of a chain shift, it could also explain why the -es words (already nom. = acc. pl. in Latin) have -i now.
(Compare Slavic *-[as] > *-[ah] > *-[əh] > Proto-Slavic *-[ə], which merged with ъ, a kind of STRUT vowel, in Common Slavic but with /ɛ/ in the Uncommon Slavic of Novgorod: 2-page conference “abstract” from July 2009; 26-page conference “handout” from September 2009; addenda corrigendaque from 2011 & 2014.)
…and in Japanese it’s ungrammatical to speculate what other people want.
ich will heimgehen
I want.1/3sg home-go:INF
“I want to go home”, no “to”, SVOV order (the second V is just “go” because the prefix heim- is separable).
(Also ich will nach Hause gehen, which is more widespread but much harder to gloss; it works the same way in the end.)
ich möchte heimgehen
I would.like.1/3sg home-go:INF
ich will, dass du heimgehst
I want that you home-go.2sg
Main clause “I want” in verb-second order, subordinate clause “that you go home” in verb-last order; no infinitives, no accusatives/direct objects.
It can’t be straightforwardly used for other persons since it is a straightforward expression of desire.
Interesting. If I understand it correctly (I don’t really have a shall/will distinction myself), desire is compulsory for other people in English, since ‘I will’ is merely deprecated, but ‘you shall’ is forbidden.
@dm
Your last sentence reads to me like something a parent would say to a child (or maybe a spouse to a partner), with the implication “there will be serious consequences if you do not”. If that is the case, are you sure the Japanese works like that?[EDIT: this is sort of what Jen said, but I won’t delete it]
@PP, but I asked about a different thing. “Mary hates the men.” Period. Without “across the road”.
Don’t “those men” sound better?
I used “Shop Across Road” (without artciles) as an ad hoc name proper many times in Russian… We also say “we with wife” (without “my”) in Russian and it means “my wife and me” (or “…and I” or “me and my wife” or whatever) and is immediately understood because if it were someone else’s wife, the speakers would name this someone.
Given how many languages have gone to the trouble of creating definite articles, they must be good for something besides making things harder for Russians.
[Many languages are good for nothing. They are a curse from God.]
The idea that every identifiable grammatical feature has to have a single well-defined purpose is in general not supported by evidence. It is thus perfectly possible that in addition to vexing Russians (which of course is a well-identified purpose) the (definite) articles are good for nothing in particular, but maybe useful for different purposes in different circumstances.
You might be talking about a social group of some sort, eg, a club. “Mary likes the women (in that club) but hates the men”. The point of using “the” is that it has some kind of context. “Those men” does, too, but it is much more demonstrative (pointing) in nature.
‘The man asked him “What is your name?”, and he replied “Jacob.”’
In Hawaiian:
And likewise in Māori :
Articles are pretty sticky some places.
In fact, the (Agolle) Kusaal Bible, ever since the 1976 New Testament, has for some reason stuck with a convention quite contrary to actual speech, in which all personal names, including foreign ones, are preceded by the particle A, e.g. A Yiisa “Jesus.” So really, it ought to be A Zeekʋb.
He gets to be A Zakɔɔb in the Toende Kusaal New Testament. As is only right and proper. His NT namesake James is of course A Zak.
I think the Agolle Kusaal Bible convention of using personal names “bare” is probably one of those canonised mistakes that turn up in Bible translation work: forever after, uncorrectable, because the faithful have got too used to it for anyone to alter it.
This A is a “personaliser pronoun” in Kusaal (and Mooré) rather than an article, but it’s probably cognate with the Dagaare definite article a; everybody else who speaks a Western Oti-Volta language went with postposed articles, but the Dagaaba just had to be different, and stick theirs in front of the noun. Perverse.
‘Those men’ could mean either ‘the men we were already discussing’ or ‘the men at a small distance from us’. Of course, in context it’s probably clear which is intended, but it still needs the invisible part in brackets just as much as ‘the men’ does.
Where I am it’s perfectly normal to say ‘I’m going to my bed’, which I’ve been laughed at for because of the implication that I might be going to someone else’s. But I expect those people still say ‘I’m putting on my shoes’ without mocking themselves. Maybe I will point that out to them the next time.
My discussion of Japanese was cut off by domestic circumstances. I’d just like to add that I don’t think it’s normal to extend the “paradigm” to “Kare wa itte hoshigatte iru” (“He wants you/me/him to go”.
In Mongolia, “I want to go” is Би явмаар байна, which originally referred to an inclination (implying something likely or prone to happen). It’s still used like that in Inner Mongolia — it doesn’t mean “I want to go”. To express that I think you would use something like “Би явах санаатай байна (“I have a mind or intention to go”). But I haven’t totally figured it out, to be honest.
@Jen — to my ear, “to bed” is a fixed directional adverb, so the possessive sounds like it’s specific for a reason. Likewise “home” and “work” — “I’m going to my home” is not neutral. But maybe it’s different for you.
For this L2 English person, “go to bed” means “intend to sleep” while “go to my bed” could mean that I will be reading there or whatever as well as maybe sleep.
yes, in Russian it is, of course, “I on-put shoes”
Kusaal is like English rather than French in the business of possessive pronouns on objects which are parts of the subject’s own body:
M pi’esi m nu’us.
I wash my hands
“I’ve washed my hands.” (neutral: it doesn’t mean “my own hands.”)
“Je me suis lavé les mains.”
Mind you, Kusaal has probably got there by a different route from English: personal pronoun possessors don’t automatically make the possessum definite, and m nu’us on some level is probably nearer “hands to me” than “hands of me” or “my hands.”
There is a difference between
O dʋgi ba diib.
she cook them food
“She’s cooked them food.” (tones: L LM H MM)
and
O dʋgi ba diib.
she cook their food
“She’s cooked their food.” (tones: L LH L MM)
but (as you can see) it’s a bit on the subtle side …
You generally can’t tell from written texts what the construction actually is; you can tell, if the pronoun is f “you (singular object)” vs fʋ “your”, and you can tell if the pronoun is m [m] “me” versus vocalic m [m̩] “my”, but only if the writer has got the word-division convention right, that vowelless enclitics are written solid with the preceding word. (Writers often make mistakes in this. Can’t say I blame them.)
If the object-or-possessor is a NP other than a personal pronoun the constructions are distinguishable by the tones on diib “food” instead:
O dʋg biig la diib.
“She’s cooked the child food.” (tones: LLMMMMM)
O dʋg biig la diib.
“She’s cooked the child’s food.” (tones: LLMMMHL)
Simple.
German: ich gehe ins Bett*, literally “I go into the bed”; ich ziehe mir die Schuhe an, literally (except for word order) “I pull on the shoes – for me”.
* Also ich gehe schlafen. And ich gehe zu Bett just like in mainstream English, but I’ve never heard that in the wild.
Yes, we learned that, “Ich gehe zu Bett,” was grammatical, but I’ve probably never heard it from a native German speaker either.
My apologies for the incomplete posts above. Apart from interruptions, inputting comments on a phone is time-consuming and error-prone. I’m glad to be at my computer again.
I haven’t exhausted the discussion on Japanese. Instead of itte hoshii ‘I want you to go’ it’s also possible to say itte moraitai, where morau refers to receiving something. It literally means ‘I want to receive your going’. And yes, with third person it is different. “He wants you to go” would need to be expressed as itte hoshii yō desu, itte moraitai yō desu (“He appears to want you to go”).
My Inner Mongolian dictionary gives “-маар” as meaning 行为的可能性 (the possibility of an action). Чамайг уавуулмаар байна means “I am planning to make you go = might make you go”. So -маар can indeed be used to mean “want to” but the hardening of meaning to this sense gives me the impression of being a fairly modern development.
At any rate, since this is not syntax pure and simple of the Chomskyan kind, which is interested mainly in purely syntactic phenomena like subject-raising, etc. (ad nauseam), and since it involves both culture and semantics, few linguists (particularly generativists) seem to have paid much attention to it. Their narrowness of focus is mind-numbing, stultifiying, and (frankly) boring. (The only paper I’ve ever seen about expressions of wanting was about native languages of Mexico….). Life is too short to have your horizons determined by such people.
@Bathrobe, I (the Russian speaker here before D.O. joined us) never said that articles are useless. And this is not what DM could conceivably mean either.
He said they don’t carry information, LH objected, I specified that they seldom carry information that the listener wouldn’t have known otherwise.
They do contain information in the sense: if all you have is a fragment of a conversation, then {“…hates the men”} tells you more than {“…hates [the?] men”}. Ot is easy to invent examples like LH’s, but they’re misleading, I believe.
If you read a normal English text without articles, you will understand it (understand what referents are being referred to). Perhpas a Russian speaker will read such text more comfortably.
Yes, “he does not hate all commenters here, he only hates [the?] men” can be understood both in the sense “male commenters here” and as a (somewhat clumsy) way to tell about his misandry.
“Clumsy” because a claim about “all commenters” would normally be contrasted to a claim about “some commenters” and not “all men”.
But in the wild, at least in texts, such examples are rare.
Your example, Yes, “he does not hate all commenters here, he only hates [the?] men” can be understood both in the sense “male commenters here” and as a (somewhat clumsy) way to tell about his misandry doesn’t make sense to me. “he only hates the men” means only that he hates the male commenters. It isn’t necessarily a reference (clumsy or otherwise) to misandry at all. “he only hates men”, on the other hand, definitely suggests a general dislike of men (misandry). I’m not sure how you can equate them.
Ot is easy to invent examples like LH’s, but they’re misleading, I believe.
If you read a normal English text without articles, you will understand it.
I’m sorry, but ignoring articles in English is on a par with ignoring singular/plural. Of course you can ignore them if you’re trawling through a text just to get the gist (certain styles of English, such as headlines and instructions, deliberately delete them), but the use of articles is pretty important in ordinary English communication.
To take a rather hackneyed example:
“Mary wants to marry a Norwegian” (two possible meanings, 1. any Norwegian will do, 2. A particular Norwegian, not known to the listener.)
“Mary wants to marry the Norwegian” (the listener is aware of the existence of the Norwegian suitor, or possibly even knows him).
“Mary wants to marry Norwegian” — almost sounds like gibberish.
The articles have definite meanings and functions. You can cut them out, just as you can progressively cut out more and more features of English and still be understood somehow, but that doesn’t make them “meaningless”. For instance, you can ignore past tense and just use the present tense for past events: “I go there yesterday”. It probably works most of the time, but definitely not all the time. For instance, “I go on Monday” cannot be used to mean “I went on Monday”.
You declare grammatical elements meaningless at your peril.
All natural languages feature considerable amounts of redundancy – stuff that people imagine could be left out without any loss. But in reality, this is a feature, not a bug. People provide as much information as they feel is necessary to avoid significant misunderstanding in the context of that specific communication event and all the problems of communicating over noisy channels. The “redundant” stuff is actually part of assuring that the message really will be received as intended.
Different languages use different redundancy strategies. Just because a language other than your own has a different strategy, you can’t conclude that nothing of value would be lost if that unfamiliar kind of redundancy was simply stripped out.*
Critics of all natural languages’ logical inadequacy, like Bertrand Russell, manage to generalise this error to human language as a whole. They are even wrongerer.
* Surely Russian doesn’t actually need all those cases? Bulgarian manages all right without them …
Your example, Yes, “he does not hate all commenters here, he only hates [the?] men” can be understood both in the sense “male commenters here” and as a (somewhat clumsy) way to tell about his misandry doesn’t make sense to me.
There’s a nice example of what I mean in Foley’s Yimas grammar, where he mentions a traditional story in which one of the props goes unmentioned for several pages and is then just referenced by a dual pronoun. Because Yimas has umpteen grammatical genders, the reference is perfectly clear. An actual noun would be … redundant.
(Who needs sixteen grammatical genders? Well, I’m glad you asked …)
DE, yes.
Again, I’m not telling that articles are “useless”. However, there are things reduntant sometimes and things redundant often.
Articles are almost always redundant, so I think the motivation for them is NOT that “sometimes they aren’t” but something else. Perhaps they increase the speed and decrease the listener’s efforts.
(there is a silly tradition, especially in English grammar, to motivate everything “logically”, and that is what I’m objecting to. Russian peevers do this with words rather with grammar. E.g. when objecting to people who say “about-put clothes” instead of saying “on-put clothes” and reserving “”about-put” for dressing people: “about-put a person”. Perhaps LH knows the mnemonic: надеть одежду – одеть Надежду.
For peevers the idea that a certain distinction which those who speak properly make is not made by those who speaks improperly means that the second usage is worse)
a) …in the wild such examples are rare
I simply don’t agree that such examples are rare “in the wild”. They are only “rare” if you have a habit of ignoring or glossing over them. They are not cute examples cooked up to prove that they’re important. They are rife in English. If you have decided to filter them out, that only demonstrates that you have your own particular approach to the exegesis of English.
(b) this particular example still has a preferred reading: “the men”. Because it it is “all men”, it becomes clumsier.
This particular example doesn’t have a “preferred meaning”. It refers to a specific set of men, no more, no less. It doesn’t refer to “all men” in this case. Of course, article use is a tricky area of English, and you could argue that sentences like “The dog is a quadruped” or “the corner of the house” (which corner?) disprove the validity of the concept of definiteness, but that doesn’t mean that “the men” ipso facto means “all men”. It doesn’t.
there is a silly tradition, especially in English grammar, to motivate everything “logically”, and that is what I’m objecting to.
“Logic” is often mistakenly applied to language. You are free to object to this tradition but dismissing aspects of English grammar because you personally don’t think they matter (leading to curious assertions like “the men” can mean “all men”) is a different kettle of fish.
I mentioned that creoles seem to like articles. The comeback to this might be that the better-known creoles have lexifier languages that have articles, so this could be regarded as just a sort of carry-over (though the Haitian article just happens to look like one of the French articles, and is not actually of the same origin at all. It also happens to look exactly like the Kusaal article, and actually shares the same position with it, after the noun.)
But anyhow, that doesn’t explain why the creoles have kept articles, when they felt no need to retain redundant features like – all of morphology, including number and tense marking.
So articles may be more useful and practical in everyday communication than they seem to be to a speaker of a language which manages to do without them.
Articles are of course intimately bound up with the whole business of focus and topicalisation, which is (a) vital for discourse cohesion and real-life communication (b) poorly understood and very inadequately treated by much of traditional linguistics.
Languages which have the misfortune to lack articles manage focus and topicalisation and discourse cohesion differently. That does not make strategies in which articles play a key part inferior or invalid.
And the idea that focus and topicalisation are mere details, of little importance in everyday language, is simple ignorance, encouraged by the grave deficiencies of traditional grammar teaching in this area.
Even a pure recital of facts in a natural language is never simply a series of logical propositions. Language does not work like that. If you “strip out all the redundancy” to turn a text into a series of logical propostions, what you’ve actually done is transpose it into something that is not actually human Language at all. And the very limitations of your method and outlook will prevent you from even seeing that you have lost information in the process.
Bathrobe, perhaps reading an English text without articles will be difficult for you.
Not for me.
And I’m not confident about plurals. Perhpas examples like “he has child[ren]” where the number is the reader’s only way to learn how many children “he” has are more common.
It’s not difficult for me to read an English text without articles but it certainly detracts from clarity. It’s a limping kind of English that at times forces you to try and figure out what the writer is saying. Are you sure it’s not easy for you because you are transposing the English into Russian as you interpret it? If they’re not necessary in Russian, of course you can interpret them as you would Russian.
If I’m reading Chinese, Japanese, or, heaven forbid, Mongolian (which is a whole different ball game), I don’t filter out the features (like cases, particles, reflexives, etc.) that are “redundant” in English. They are important in understanding the message.
Hans:
@Jerry F.: Now we go into full blown speculation, but let’s assume ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis for language as well:
1. Many intelligent animals, including primates, have (learned) sound signals that are associated with specific events or behaviors (e.g., the appearance of a specific kind of predator)
2. Primates are also able to use them without them being an immediate, instinctive reaction (e.g., using the “predator” signal in order to scare others in the group off in order to enjoy food without having to share)
3. From that it’s only a step to use these signals to indicate things, signalling that you see or want them, and when that catches on, to introduce sounds for more things
4. Like children, you progress from one-word to two-word sentences, and then the grammar gets progressively more complicated.
The advantage to be had from this is increased coordination and planning abilities, which would contribute to language abilities to evolve.
As for writing, the use of symbols to convey information seems to be much older than encoding written language; the latter probably became sufficiently useful only when human society achieved a certain complexity.
(As for the “brooding”, that was a snarky rewording of (I think) DE’s summary of Chomsky’s position. Sorry!)
Let me focus on “then the grammar gets progressively more complicated”. I suppose children take a year or two to go from two-word phrases to most of the resources of the language they hear (as they hear it, not necessarily in belles-lettres). But that’s because the adults they interact with provide models and understand the children when they follow the models or come close. What happens when instead of “poverty of the stimulus”* the stimulus is flat broke? If for one person, one order of words (for example) has a different meaning from a different order, why would another person understand that and adopt it? As David Eddyshaw asked above, “Why should I care what you mean by that gesture, anyway?”
January First-of-May, rozele, and Y mentioned spontaneously developed sign languages, but as they said, all of them started in environments where languages were spoken. Maybe the deaf children’s parents were responding to their children’s gestures and even using their conscious or unconscious linguistic knowledge to interpret them—and even if they misinterpreted them, the child would learn what combinations produced desired results.
Or maybe not. And maybe, once the capacity for language was widespread among our ancestors, language became widespread in a generation or two. But I don’t see that the answer is clear.
*I’ve seen the phrase, but I know about Chomsky’s ideas only at the most superficial level.
David E.:
Like most unChomskyites, I don’t believe that there is any “language organ”: rather, there are a whole lot of different human capacities involved in language, most (if not all) of which are also used in non-linguistic cognition.
So there is nothing to prevent the step-by-step emergence of these capacities, each in turn capable of adding its own refinements to human communication.
What prevents the application to communication, I think, is the bootstrap problem. In fact it seems impossible to get communication started. Of course it happened, but my first thought from my physics background is that things that seem impossible take a long time (see “selection rules”). My second thought is that my first thought could be completely wrong, but I don’t think we know.
[I drastically edited the above.]
It’s actly nt all tht hrd t rd an Englsh txt in whch th vwl symbls ar only wrttn in wrd-intl pstn …
Shd w thrfr cncld tht wrtng nn-intl vwls is smply a pc of frppry? Rdndnt? Sms an unwrrntd ddctn t m …
It’s not difficult for me to read an English text without articles but it certainly detracts from clarity.
Man Bites Dog. Foot Heads Arms Body. Party Leaders Split on Platform. Etc.
@ Y:
I mentioned the special style of headlinese and instructions (“insert screw into hole”) above.
In fact it seems impossible to get communication started
Why? Communication is not an all-or-nothing thing. And even our great-ape cousins assuredly already communicate with one another, despite not ticking any (or many, anyhow) of Hockett’s boxes.
Each distinct new human cognitive capacity would potentially add new possibilities for human communication. Communication itself doesn’t need to be bootstrapped. We had it already from our non-human ancestors.
Your objection seems to assume that it’s not communication at all if it’s not pretty much all of what we now mean by Language.
In principle, I can imagine that human beings might in future develop some new cognitive capacity that we currently lack, and perhaps currently cannot even imagine. If so, I would think that human communication might acquire from this a new dimension altogether, that is as yet absent. A future Hockett might incorporate this into his Design Features for Future-Human Language, and conclude (logically enough) that we, his ancestors, has not yet developed Language, but had only a sophisticated kind of Great-Ape communication ability.
You do a pretty good job of imagining what cannot even be imagined !
If for one person, one order of words (for example) has a different meaning from a different order, why would another person understand that and adopt it? As David Eddyshaw asked above, “Why should I care what you mean by that gesture, anyway?”
Because people generally care about what those close to them do and want? So they will put in some effort to find out what they mean, if they don’t understand. I think I am with DE here, language didn’t go from two-word sentences to fully formed grammatical complexity in one go, it got gradually more complicated; OTOH, I don’t think it took as long getting from two-word to three-word sentences as long as it took getting from one-word to two-word. Complexity of human behavior seems to grow in a non-linear manner.
Fair.
Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language is a very good and very accessible attempt to explain this.
I said they don’t contain information except when they do. They do sometimes; and that information is often very hard to express in languages without articles.
I’m reminded of the kolinahr fallacy (the idea that scientists shouldn’t have emotions). Kolinahr is the Vulcan ritual* of purging all remaining emotions. What Roddenberry or whoever overlooked there is the rather obvious fact that somebody with no emotions has no motivation, no reason, to do anything at all whatsoever. Human behavior, language included and reflexes** excluded, is really nothing but emotion.
* Somehow, the most logical beings in the galaxy seem to have more mumbo-jumbo than everybody else.
** Hard-wired cause & effect like a computer.
Recommended.
What David wrote was “articles carry no information and are predictable except when they aren’t”; “they aren’t” only agrees with the second clause, so Languagehat thought the “except” applied only to that one.
@DM, sorry.
Your exact words are: “articles carry no information and are predictable except when they aren’t”.
If this reservation is important for your thought (other than by turning it into a more precise statement), then I perhaps misunderstood you.
Nevertheless, I too say that sometimes they do carry information that the listener wouldn’t have known otherwise (“would not have known otherwise” is how I specified your idea). But I also say that that happens very rarely and I don’t think (though I’m not of course confident) it is why articles arise in languages.
(and other times they aren’t predictable in some other ways, e.g. “the Ukraine” and “Ukraine”).
As for information which is “often” hard to convey without them, I’m not sure what do you mean and I can’t think of an example:/ (which does not mean this is not true)
“Primates ….
… using the “predator” signal in order to scare others in the group off in order to enjoy food without having to share”
Not only primates.
Birds do it too (I’m thinking of [great and other] tits in particular, but I’m not sure I’m not confusing them with someone else).
“Are you sure it’s not easy for you because you are transposing the English into Russian as you interpret it?”
@Bathrobe, but where did I say “that it’s not easy for [me] because [I’m] transposing the English into Russian”?
I don’t think it is “transposing” (not in the sense of inserting Russian words instead of English words) but I definitely mean that my Russian experience helps….
It is easy to think of examples of languages which didn’t have articles innovating them (typically by repurposing things that already had in their lexicons doing slightly different things). Such innovation suggests some sort of functionality for the new addition to the language’s repertoire. Are there examples of languages which had articles abandoning them, sort of going all-headlinese all-the-time?
It is nice to see drasvi commenting again.
EDITED TO ADD: There are some information-theory-based accounts of human language which argue that various features objected to as unnecessary-because-not-adding-additional-information do in fact add value, because built-in redundancy, up to a point, is affirmatively useful in a world where we are often trying to decode/parse the utterances of others under less-than-perfect conditions.
Latin (sometimes) declines proper names, but when proper names are given in isolation, something (almost?) all languages allow,* they are typically in the nominative.
* Yelling someone’s name to attract their attention is probably older than grammatical language.
Latin declines proper names wherever any other noun would be declined.
And when yelling someone’s name to attract their attention, Latin uses the vocative. Which, to be sure, is only distinct from the nominative in masculine o-stems.
Or have I missed your point?
…oh. Yes. My error.
There are examples of languages going in the other direction and completing the circle that way: using definite articles for more and more purposes till they become obligatory noun affixes so that bare nouns don’t occur anymore. The obligatory circumfix of feminine nouns in the Berber languages (t-…-t) is an example.
The Aramaic “absolute” suffix went from being a definite article to the default ending of nouns; there have been similar developments in Mandinka.
In the Oti-Volta languages which have compulsory noun-class prefixes as well as suffixes, the prefixes have developed from old proclitic articles. In Akaselem, which has deleted almost all original final syllables in polysyllabic words, the circle is complete, and the language now simply inflects nouns by prefixes instead of suffixes:
Akaselem ùnyìì “person” pl bìnyìì;
Gulmancema nìlō pl niba “person” (o nilo “the person”, bi niba “the people.”)
The Uto-Aztecan absolutive, too.
I can’t think of a prefixing example of the sort. If there is one, and if like certain UA languages the prefix has multiple forms, it would be interesting to know how lexicographers handle it.
Although it’s not quite the same, loanwords from Arabic and French in West African languages very often incorporate the definite article as part of the stem, e.g. Kusaal lampɔ “tax” from l’impôt*, labaar “news” from Arabic الأخبار al-akhbār. But both French and Arabic use the definite article a lot more than English.
Dyula has divɛn “wine” from du vin. Which kinda makes sense, actually.
* Extremely widespread loanword regionally; found even in Dagbani. Anyone might think that the colonialists were in some way exploitative.
French words in Chinook Jargon also routinely keep their articles on.
I’m not sure if the aggregate receipts over time from lampɔ in the various sub-Saharan African bits of the French Empire were quite enough to break even on all the expenses incurred in the noble mission of bestowing the supposed blessings of Francophonie on the benighted indigenes. Denmark sold off the last African bits of its empire in the 1860’s because they were losing money and that seemed to them like a good enough reason to stop. The Danish lexicon must lack an analogue to the French “gloire” which would have served as an adequate incentive to keep losing money.
Some (many? most?) French-lexifier creoles do that same thing with the French article. E.g. in Seychellois/Seselwa the word for “world” is (relying on internet sources here rather than memory of a long-ago visit) “lemonn” whereas “sky” is “lesyel.” There are others with a word-initial “z” which seems to be a relic of Fr. “les.” (And, perhaps significantly, still others where the French word appears to have been taken without an article fused to it; phonotactics may be involved.) English of course has a certain number of Arabic-origin loanwords beginning “al-” but generally mediated through another language rather than borrowed directly.
(Sorry, I meant “Emphatic” suffix in Aramaic, not “Absolute.” Basically, the “Emphatic State” replaced the “Absolute State” in all but a few contexts.)
Zydeco! (sont pas salés.)
phonotactics may be involved
The Kusaal ones mostly involve words which would otherwise have ended up as vowel-initial, but not always. Arazana “sky”, for example. is ultimately from Arabic الجنة al-jannah “the garden”, via “Eden” > “Paradise” > “Heaven(s).”
1860 is before the race for Africa.
P.S. the conversation reminded me of North African words like qaṭṭūs “cat” and fallūs “chick”, from Romance NOM.
@drasvi: Yes, although I don’t have the impression that the streets of Copenhagen a few decades later were full of nationalists unhappy that they hadn’t stuck it out long enough to get to participate in the scramble by expanding inland from their former coastal trading/slaving spots.
FWIW this is a published-last-year paper that disputes (based on a new analysis of different data) the claim in the apparently standardly-cited 1984 study that France lost money on its empire. Of course, there could be considerable variation and they could have perhaps had a profit for Algeria but a loss for Cameroon, or the other way around, and the study lumps together a bunch of different economic phenomena in a way that I suspect some may find unhelpful. https://www.aehnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/AEHN_78.pdf
Waama is said to infix the definite article m between a noun stem and its noun-class suffix, but I have no access to the only full-scale grammar of the language, and neither the example sentences in the SIL dictionary nor the New Testament translation bear this out. I think it must be based on a misunderstanding.
Kusaal has quite a few doublets where one nominal stem has a final -m- suffix and the other lacks it, but with no detectable meaning difference. It seems to be particularly common with adjectives, for some reason. If there really was an old proto-Oti-Volta infixed article m it would help to explain all this, but it all seems very dubious.
Konni actually replaces the singular noun class suffix of a noun with -ŋ to create an indefinite form. That could be derived from -m historically, but none of this really helps.
I have no access to the only full-scale grammar of the language
Author/title?
https://www.sudoc.abes.fr/cbs/DB=2.1//SRCH?IKT=12&TRM=10720858X
@JWB:
Interesting paper, thanks.
It seems clear that as far as colonialism is concerned, the main drain on the French exchequer was actually the military expense involved in maintaining control …
Certainly, the accepted wisdom regarding the economics of Brit rule in the Gold Coast is that it was a continual unsuccessful struggle to make the whole enterprise so much as break even. Actual profit was a pipe-dream.
Still, ludicrously unsuccessful exploitation is still exploitation …
English of course has a certain number of Arabic-origin loanwords beginning “al-” but generally mediated through another language rather than borrowed directly.
Other than those, does English have any words where it attached an article other than “alligator”?
There are also “alarm” and “alert”, which contain a preposition+article. And “gardyloo”, I guess. And the words where something got lost because it was interpreted as part of an article, such as “apron”.
@DE: well, different people may use the same words with somewhat different scopes or nuances. The usual rhetoric condemning “exploitation” has I would say a strong implicature that the exploiter is doing well for himself in financial terms out of the process, albeit is wicked for doing so. I might prefer “victimization” for situations in which the “victim” is made worse off w/o the victimizer being made better off other than perhaps via perverse psychological enjoyment. There are of course situations in which the exploiter/victimizer certainly believes he’s getting rich out of the process but may be misinformed, because he is overlooking non-obvious costs he is incurring, non-obvious savings he would enjoy if he pursued a less wicked alternative, and/or more lucrative opportunities he is passing up by not redeploying his capital to certain less-wicked-but-more-profitable lines of business.
And of course when it comes to things that occurred over a long period of time there’s always the “as compared to what” question, and what sort of economic growth or other sorts of “progress” would or wouldn’t have occurred in north-of-the-Transvaal sub-Saharan Africa between 1880 and 1960 absent the colonialism/imperialism that happened in our actual timeline is difficult to know yet probably easy to fantasize about without all fantasizers converging on a single scenario.
We must also remember that “the exploiter” makes no sense in any practical terms — it is purely an ideological punching bag. Each situation is the product of a huge number of decisions by a huge number of people, many of them at cross-purposes, and it is almost always the case that certain people and entities profit hugely while others take a loss. I’m not sure what the point is in trying to add up a profit-and-loss balance sheet for some hypothetical Exploiting Unit.
And we must also remember that financial/practical considerations are not the only ones. Lenin & Co. did not want to spread Bolshevism across the world to make a profit on it.
@Bathrobe, I exactly think that articles are less informative than declension (which you do take in account when reading in a foreign language). I’m not saying that everything that you find in one but not other language doesn’t carry information, which you otherwise wouldn’t have known. But some things (e.g. gender) don’t carry much of it.
I also think that many L2 users of Russian simply don’t understand our word order. I love it, I don’t think it is “useless”, but I think many L2 users don’t understand it.
“It’s not difficult for me to read an English text without articles” – more difficult than it is for a fluent Russian-speaking reader (but i’m not entirely sure). E.g. if I omit “the” in “I have no access to the only…” you’ll be tempted to interpret “only” not as an adjective, but as something else. Perhaps, for a Russian this temptation won’t be so strong.
@JWB:
I don’t think one can deny that a man like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Guggisberg
was motivated by genuine concern for the governed, or maintain that he did not succeed in making things better for them in significant areas.
Not every colonialist was a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Lugard,_1st_Baron_Lugard
and even Lugard was no Leopold.
I agree that playing “what if” is pointless. But I am content to point out that there was no moral justification for the Scramble for Africa, and if good may sometimes have come from it, that does not retrospectively justify the invasions.
I’d forgotten that Adam Smith himself had already pointed out the fatuity of empire-building in strictly economic terms. The “hard-headed” and “practical” reasons for the adventure were actually objectively the weakest. One feels that this lesson may be a topical one.
@Rodger C: I hedged about the declination of proper names in Latin, since I am not fluent in the language, and I have heard that in some (late?) Latin, the proper nouns are not declined even when that might be “correct.” On the other hand, there are definitely examples in Latin speeches where men’s names are used as single grammatical utterances. (Isn’t there an example from Cicero along the lines of, “And who is this man? Lucius Sergius Catilina!”?) The existence of Latin vocative utterances of a single name is separate, which is why I made it a footnote.
@David E.: it sometimes happens in the course of human affairs both a) that justified and well-intentioned actions inadvertently cause quite considerable collateral harm; and b) that unjustified and unjustifiable actions cause comparatively minimal lasting harm. I do not claim that’s what happened here, only that you cannot automatically infer substantial lasting harm from the unjustifiability of the conduct, especially in a historical situation where there will almost inevitably have been some mix of positive and negative effects and one is seeking a net/aggregate assessment, which may of course be the wrong framing.
When dealing with individual wrongdoers in the immediate past and in a context with a well-functioning legal system to hand we can handle the latter (category b) sort of situation via, e.g., a fairly short jail sentence (now that we have abolished flogging …) but no financial compensation for the victim. Harder to know what to do when dealing with the misconduct of not just individuals but entire societies (or at least certain segments of them) several generations ago.
I agree, in fact.
But I also think that a bit of leaning-over-backwards on these issues is not unreasonable in a world which increasingly amplifies the voices of those who see our imperial past as one long Glorious Episode, and a cause for untroubled self-congratulation. Such fantasies besmirch the memory of my forebears, let alone anyone else’s. They weren’t no thin red ‘eroes.
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_tommy.htm
German thumbs its nose at this by outsourcing a lot of declension (and number marking) to the articles…
Interesting that our scans as two syllables the first time but as one the second. (Fires as one.)
Seems to be one syllable both times for me.
For me as well.
It depends where you put the stress on ‘sometimes’, I think – ‘if someTIMES our CONduck’ versus ‘if SOMEtimes OU-er CONduck’.
Oh. I had no idea sometimes could ever had final stress.
“Are you sure it’s not easy for you because you are transposing the English into Russian as you interpret it?”
@Bathrobe, but where did I say “that it’s not easy for [me] because [I’m] transposing the English into Russian”?
It’s not always important to parse English correctly, except when it is.
My question can be rephrased as: “Are you sure it’s not the case that it’s easy for you because you are transposing the English into Russian as you interpret it?” In other words, I wasn’t saying it’s not easy for you; I was suggesting that it’s easy for you precisely because you are transposing English into Russian and interpreting it in a Russian grammatical framework — supplying cases, etc, as would be considered necessary for the Russian speaker.
DE made a similar point about articles. You can muddle through and ignore them because, for you, they don’t carry much meaning — until they do. In particular, you seem to be referring to reading. That is different from live conversation where “the” can have a very clear meaning. For instance:
“People came today and asked me to reduce the price.”
“The people came today and asked me to reduce the price.”
The second one has a very different pragmatic meaning from the first. The first means that some people — some random people — came today. The second means “those people, you know, the ones we’d been talking about previously, came today”. I can assure you that if you use them wrongly it can be very confusing for the listener. (And your comeback, of course, is “Why not just use ‘those’?” But people don’t use “this”, “that”, and “those” all the time. They use articles, which have a particular function in English. They don’t have a lexical meaning, but they do have a pragmatic function. If you don’t avail yourself of them because you don’t think they have any meaning (from your vantage point as a Russian speaker) and cause misunderstanding, then the problem doesn’t lie with the listener.)
sometimes could ever had final stress.
[Two quotes from Snark in two days!]
There is actually a parallel with my previous comment about the identity of demonstratives and third person pronouns in Mongolian.
In English, the demonstratives “this” and “that” can be roughly understood as referring to some item that is visible or immediately accessible in the physical context, or perhaps (with a certain emphasis) to a subject of conversation. The “that” and “those” of which drasvi is speaking are also demonstratives — essentially pointing to something with a certain emphasis.
“It”, on the other hand, is mainly accessible from the previous conversational context, or, at times, from a larger human context. (I say “mainly” because English grammar is not always so simple that it can be summed up in a single formulation). “It” is a little like a personal pronoun containing an understood “the”.
If you mix them up it can be confusing. My Mongolian wife does mix them up. We can be talking about a particular subject (say the TV) when she suddenly says “Throw it in the rubbish bin”. After a moment of confusion (“Why should I throw the TV in the rubbish bin?”), I realise that she is actually holding out some object that needs to be thrown away. In this case, “it” is inappropriate since it should be referring to our subject of conversation (the TV). “This”, not “it”, is the correct form for referring to some object in the physical environment.
drasvi appears to be suggesting that “the” has little meaning because we could just as easily use “those”. I don’t agree, and the reason is that English doesn’t work that way. Demonstratives are demonstratives, articles are articles (possibly “grammaticalised demonstratives”, but at any rate they don’t work the same way). The fact that the Russian grammatical system doesn’t have an equivalent form to the English articles is poor grounds for concluding they have little meaning.
@ drasvi (again)
articles are less informative than declension
Sure. But that is not to say they have little meaning.
Declension is a fine Russian thing, I’m sure, but in reading Mongolian you need to take account of more than declension. Another thing to look out for is reflexives — endings on oblique-case nouns indicating that the noun in question “belongs” to the subject of the sentence. For example:
Ter eejtei (n’) garsan. He went outside with his (=someone’s) mother.
Ter eejtei-gee garsan. He went outside with his (own) mother.
Bi eejtei (n’) garsan. I went outside with his (someone’s) mother.
Bi eejtei-gee garsan. I went outside with my (own) mother.
Get it wrong and things get confusing. Unlike the English articles, which could be substituted in certain circumstances with ‘those’, you can’t substitute an ordinary personal pronoun (eg minii ‘my’) for the reflexive.
You could object to the importance or significance of the reflexive (and I’ve heard people do so) by pointing out that it can also refer to a feature of a room that one is in, even if it’s not your own house:
Haalg-aa haagaad ögööch. Please close the door of (this) room.
Ok. Its use extends beyond the core meaning of indicating that something “belongs” to the sentence subject. And perhaps it doesn’t correspond to anything in Russian or English. But that certainly doesn’t mean the reflexive has little meaning.
In English, the demonstratives “this” and “that” can be roughly understood as referring to some item that is visible or immediately accessible in the physical context, or perhaps (with a certain emphasis) to a subject of conversation.
Kusaal actually distinguishes these: dau kaŋa “this/that man” for look-at-where-I’m-pointing spatial demonstrative (you can also specify dau kaŋa nwa “this man”, dau kaŋa la “that man”) but you say dau kan “that man” for “the one we were just talking about.”
In 2 Samuel 12:7, where Nathan the prophet has ambushed King David into condemning himself out of his own mouth by telling him an apparently irrelevant story about a bad guy abusing his power, his punch line “Thou art the man!” is rendered in Kusaal as
Fʋnɛ an dau kan la!
you.LINKER be man that the
And none of these demonstratives is equivalent to the Kusaal definite article la.
Other than those, does English have any words where it attached an article other than “alligator”?
There’s “lariat”.
@Keith: Ah, yes!
@David E. Kusaal actually distinguishes these: dau kaŋa “this/that man” for look-at-where-I’m-pointing spatial demonstrative (you can also specify dau kaŋa nwa “this man”, dau kaŋa la “that man”) but you say dau kan “that man” for “the one we were just talking about.”
English “(the) said man”? (I have a friend who actually uses “said” that way in conversation.)
That’s a reasonable translation, though Kusaal kan (and its various other forms, which vary by number, gender and dependency) is not so emphatic. It’s really just demonstrative “that” when you don’t mean it in terms of actual physical location. It’s also used to mark the antecedent in one type of relative clause:
dau kan ka m sa nyɛ la
man that and I TENSE see the
“the man who I saw yesterday”
dau kanɛ sa nyɛɛm la
man that.NOMINALISER TENSE see.me the
“the man who saw me yesterday”
Over the past fifty years the language has actually innovated a series of relative pronouns kanɛ etc, based on reanalysis of the latter construction (which is actually internally-headed: though the orthography disguises the fact, kan is a bound form, and dau kan is really a single compound noun. Relative clauses are a work in progress in Western Oti-Volta languages: there are even some slight differences in this between the two Kusaal dialects, which otherwise they seem to have identical syntax.
You use these demonstratives for “which?” in content questions, too, like
M sa nyɛ dau kanɛ?
“Which man did I see yesterday?”