This one-and-a-half-minute video by Khalid Al Ameri will give you a brief introduction to some of the languages of India, as well as a good laugh. (Via Language Log.)
This one-and-a-half-minute video by Khalid Al Ameri will give you a brief introduction to some of the languages of India, as well as a good laugh. (Via Language Log.)
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They all sound like Bengali to me.
That is such a Khaliji video. I can practically feel the air conditioning.
I have never been in any of Gulf countries and nothing in advertisments of Dubai seems attractive. I feel at home at home and in the forest, I can enjoy walkign city streets and some other things, but if I come to large shopping malls, that happens when someone has pulled me there by the hand*. Dubai from advertisments is a different reality.
However the two realities clashed in my mind when some Russians moved to there in 2022. I wonder what they do and see there, is it “tower-1 (appartments) > car > tower2 (office) > car > tower3 (entertainment for children) > car > tower-1 (appartments)”?
Locals must know some other things to do (more understandable to me personally), but Russians aren’t locals.
*Not that I dislike what I see there: they’re surrealistic. And… recognisable. I think I saw the first of them in a video-game (Space Quest IV, I haven’t figured how to solve some puzzle in a shopping mall on a space station, so this mall is all I remember from the game series).
My brother, by playing the game on a much faster computer than it was intended for, managed to get more than the “maximum” number of points in Space Quest IV. (For those who might remember, his trick involved picking up and setting down the unstable ordinance more than once.)
Not entirely unlike the guy who managed to play Tetris to the end that it isn’t supposed to have.
In the new King of the Hill series a character who has become a shut-in claims to have „finished Netflix“.
That reminded me of this ancient web site; it’s a marvel that it still exists a quarter-century after I first came across it.
@drasvi: as coincidence willed it, I moved to Dubai three weeks ago, for work-related reasons. Right now, during the summer, it’s very uncomfortable to spend more than 10-15 minutes outside during the day due to the heat and humidity, and even at night it’s like walking through a sauna, but at least the sun doesn’t burn you. So people try to spend as much time as possible in climatized spaces. That includes the locals.
@Hans, thx!
This is not how I imagine “exploring a European city” (even an African city):/
Do you have the impression that Dubai is worth a trip (for you rather than an abstract “lover of such things”) or that half a year there wouldn’t bore you? And if yes, why?
“summer” – I forgot about it:/
“locals” – what I mean (apart of being more accustomed to what is beyond “horrible” to Muscovites) is that there are many things locals do which won’t even occur to a refugee (even rich one, with a good job). Even Arab lover of hiking who came to Moscow will need to overcome some barrier I think to explore Russian forests the way I would do. Or more if it is skiing. Ideally she’ll need Russian freinds. And there are things Russians do which even I find dubious:)
____
I was offered an advertisment of “Coolcola” (I’m not a poet:/ I wouldn’t be able to come up with a name THAT stupid, if asked*) with the flavour of “Dubai chocolate” which I never heard of:)
“Hamouda was pregnant, and through her food cravings she came to imagine a combination of chocolate, pistachio, tahini, and knafeh, a Middle Eastern dessert made of kadayif, syrup and a soft cheese”
*They also offer “Street” and “Fancy”:) The Ochakovo brewery. One fo the first huge breweries in Russia. I do not recommend their beer.
@drasvi: I am currently still at the stage where I find my way in the city and explore in order to organize my daily life – at which places can I get X,Y or Z? What to do on weekends besides shopping and eating out? So maybe I’ll report back when I know more about the place.
Is it worth a trip? If what you are looking for is quaint old cities and historic monuments, then no. If you are interested in modern architecture, skyscrapers, and daring buildings that were built simply because someone decided to, then yes. Some impressions for the moment:
– From previous visits and from what I heard, I had thought that it’s one of those places where a car is obligatory. But the area I currently live in has good sidewalks, shops and eateries in walking distance, and the public transport is clean, reasonably frequent, cheap and climatized. Colleagues tell me that this is the case only on the main transport axis and the quarters along the way, but this is where I mostly spend my time for the moment.
– I have enough to do working and settling in that I didn’t have time to get bored. The free time I have I can fill with reading, Netflix and other entertainment available on the internet. I am waiting for my wife to come here to go exploring whatever culture or other attractions the city has. So again, maybe more later; but generally we both are able to keep ourselves occupied inside our own four walls with our own projects, so living in an interesting city is a bonus, not a necessity to fight boredom. And we both are at an age where the urge to go out and find what’s happening is much reduced. What we mostly will work on is building a circle of friends to talk with over coffee or a meal.
– From what I hear, the real locals (Emirati Arabs) are people you rarely meet. Most of your contacts will be other expats, European, non-Khaliji Arab, Asian, living expat lives – going out for coffee, beer or dinner, frequenting night clubs, doing sports (mostly indoors due to the heat), visiting pools and beaches, sometimes doing dune rides and BBQs in the desert, etc. In other places where I lived there indeed was an expat life separate from a much richer and more peculiar local life, and I tried to jump the barrier and live the local life as much as I could, but due to the fact that almost everybody is an expatriate here, I doubt that it will be possible in Dubai.
From previous visits and from what I heard, I had thought that it’s one of those places where a car is obligatory. But the area I currently live in has good sidewalks, shops and eateries in walking distance, and the public transport is clean, reasonably frequent, cheap and climatized.
Very interesting — I too would have guessed it was one of those places where a car is obligatory. Thanks for the description!
From what I hear, the real locals (Emirati Arabs) are people you rarely meet.
They’re also, what, 15% of the population in Dubai? A little more representative of the city than Quakers are of modern Philadelphia, but not by that much.
I saw something about beaches somewhere in the UAE (Dubai?), well-lit in the late evening (like 11 p.m.), for the multitudes going there when it’s cool enough to go to the beach.
@Lameen: You mostly meet the locals at the upper echelons of management (not people I have a lot to do with at the moment) and in public administration, which is not very conducive to forming casual acquaintances.
@Y: Sounds like Dubai, but I myself am not much of a beach lover, so I haven’t checked that out yet.
Dubai chocolate has been an enormous marketing success. There are even warnings about off-brand versions full of pesticides or microplastic or whatever.
I’ve never tried it, it’s expensive…
On beaches:
Russians sunbathe. Honestly, the most important reason why we love to travel to southern countries and undress there is that we need sun. Tired of winter coats and there is not much sun in winter too.
Tunisians can do it too (my friend once even spotted a topless (or naked?) lady. My friend from Mahdia, so “once” means “once in 30 years of frequenting beaches”) or… they make a tent (find a [large] beach parasol, supply it with curtains). I think they’re more comfortable this way, but maybe they hide from sun too: attitudes to tan vary wildly and the sun can be too hot.
Nothing of this makes sense in the night, so when I try to imagine what Y describes, I fail. “they come to the beach and… [??????]”.
Look up “night beaches Dubai”. People sit in beach chairs, or swim in the ocean, etc. All the usual things, except get a tan. If it’s 30°C out, it makes more sense, even if it’s night time.
Exactly. Yesterday it was 36°C at 11PM and still humid. You don’t want a burning sun on top of that if you have any sense. Which some Russian tourists don’t seem to have; this week I saw three white girls red with sunburn on the bus, and as expected they spoke Russian.
How do they keep the mosquitoes down? Or because no fresh water no mosquitoes?
As long as the freshwater stays in the air, no mosquitoes.
I haven’t checked, but I think both the natural and the artificial bodies of water in the city are saltwater, so there are no breeding grounds for mosquitoes. I haven’t seen or heard any up to now.
@Hans, I explained everything about Russians:)
(I once used this video when explaining it)
Tell a girl and boy (mutually attractive together on an island for a few months) not to flirt. Tell them about pregnancy. Tell a Russian not to undress in summer. That’s the whole point of going to hotter countries:)
But we are known for our modesty and put on underwear when there are too many people around.
I haven’t checked, but I think both the natural and the artificial bodies of water in the city are saltwater, so there are no breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
Do not rely on this assumption on the warm coasts of the Americas where Aedes taeniorhynchus is found. For example, if you happen to be canoeing in Florida Bay and think a close look at the mangroves around a key-let would be interesting. I’m over the trauma now, though.
@Hans, wown. Thank you for the detailed answer!
I’m all for “daring buildings”… when they are not too large (the pyramids:-)). And when they are not зеркальные (“mirror ADJ”). So advertisments of Dubai tell me “you won’t like it”.
But what I like and what is made to satisfy my taste are two different stories. Things surprise me, I may like something unexpectedly. Also I don’t think I’ll like advertisments of Russia or Tunisia (hotels?:/).
Most of things I like, people in particular are not therein advertisments.
And I think your personal impression is much better than any attempt to measure Dubai based on my “taste”.
Boredom: I have been, basically, a hermit for several years, while normally in Moscow I come tomy friends (to their homes), or with them to parks and also may be to some seminars. And walk city streets on my way to there and back or (again, usually, with someone) randomly. That’s how I use Moscow: not “entertainments” unless teaching math counts. I understand that you won’t feel bored. But some cities are pleasant and others aren’t and in some cities you will be glad that you’re working there and not elsewhere.
(LH disabled commenting in the other thread, and I’ll ask here
to: https://languagehat.com/jaynes-and-weird-minds/#comment-4663356)
@Lameen, I met “Arabs” in literature, but not in the wild and, in literature, not about people of something like Siwa. Did he mean all people of Siwa or specific people he knows in person?
And how do you think, is it marked and in what way? I’m asking because it pleasantly recembles “folks”, but who knows, maybe the emotion and style are very different.
Strangely, I’m not aware of an article (or any work) about this word in this meaning.
Quite a few ethnonyms seem to have fluctuated quite a bit in specificity historically. Words etymologically meaning “Christian” have quite often ended up just meaning “person” in Europe; then there are Türk “peasant” in Ottoman Turkish, and (IIRC) rumân “peasant” in older Romanian. And of course, all those groups who turn it round and just use “People” as their own distinctive endonym. To say nothing of premodern Greeks using “Hellene” for “heathen” (and Syriac using “Aramaean” for “heathen”, too.)
The Gurma languages may have repurposed the original word for “friend” to mean “man”, though I’m not certain of this: it might be just a weird sporadic sound change in proto-Gurma, of *da- to *ɟa-. There are cases of such things in Gurma, like Moba jūn̄ “bite” beside e.g. Kusaal dum, where the original *d can be confirmed all the way back to proto-Volta-Congo (cf proto-Bantu *dʊ́m-.)
Reflective?
German would resort to a verb: wenn sie nicht spiegeln.
And of course, all those groups who turn it round and just use “People” as their own distinctive endonym.
I’m now wondering how many instances commonly cited as this are actually instances of the other one.
That’s a thought. Never occurred to me before.
There’s nèg “man” in Haitian Creole, too. (Reminds me of a Kusaal story in which three people wandering in the bush see something standing in the distance sabilli wʋʋ nid nɛ “black, like a person.”)
there are Türk “peasant” in Ottoman Turkish, and (IIRC) rumân “peasant” in older Romanian.
`ṛubiyya عروبية means something like “bumpkins, boors” in Morocco and Algeria…
Did he mean all people of Siwa or specific people he knows in person?
More generic than the latter, I think, but not quite as broad as the former – acquaintances, let’s say. Hard to be sure exactly who he had in mind. But the intended reference definitely included Siwis.
There’s nèg “man” in Haitian Creole, too.
I may be able to beat that – Thok Reel (descended from Nuer) has nueer not only for “man” but for “body”.
The Gurma languages may have repurposed the original word for “friend” to mean “man”
Korandje has extended the word for “human” to mean “friend” (but only with a possessor).
Thok Reel seems to be one of the scarier languages out there.
Yes. Like its closest relatives. The difficulty of one of those has been memorably expressed in the age-old Africanist proverb: “Dinka … is a stinka.”
Tonal sandhi–scary. For plain tonal-scary, I think Iau has an edge.
Reel also has three vowel quantities. A very nice survey of such “ternary quantity” languages and their historical development, by Kuznetsova, was recently published in Linguistic Typology (OA). It mentions four Nilotic languages, including Reel, though it concentrates on Dinka.
Iau is heavily tonal, with 11 tones on nouns and 19 simple and compound tones on verbs.
Respect!
…and all those verbal tones mark aspectual morphology!
From the dissertation DM linked to:
I like “are happy to be known by”; it has a pleasingly old-fashioned air.
…and all those verbal tones mark aspectual morphology!
This seems to be, if not a universal, pretty close: if a language shows different numbers of lexical tone patterns (or similar suprasegmentals) between nouns and verbs, verbs have fewer than nouns (but very often compensate by using tone/suprasegmentals as a flexional device.)
It works for Classical Greek and Vedic Sanskrit, and (needless to say) for all the Oti-Volta languages (Kusaal, for example, has only two distinct overall tone patterns in verbs, versus three-and-a-bit in nouns, and Buli, Konni and Nawdm have three basic patterns in nouns but no lexical tone at all in verbs, which use tone extensively in flexion instead.)
Bantu languages often have much less lexical tone variety in verbs than nouns too, but often employ tone extensively to mark distinctions in verb flexion.
I haven’t yet found a counterexample, though there must surely be some, Language being what it is. I don’t recall ever seeing this proposed as a conditional universal in discussions of such things, though. Maybe the tendency would disappear if I knew more about tone languages outside Niger-Congo.
This seems to be, if not a universal, pretty close: if a language shows different numbers of lexical tone patterns (or similar suprasegmentals) between nouns and verbs, verbs have fewer than nouns
But isn’t Iau a counterexample?
No: it has no lexical tone distictions in verbs at all. It actually illustrates the “universal” quite nicely.
Nawdm is the same: three basic distinct tone patterns in nouns (fairly easy to line up with those of Kusaal structurally), but verbs have no lexical tone: verb tones are completely predictable from the flexional category, but the actual number of possible resulting surface patterns is greater than that of nouns (Nawdm has pretty complex verb flexion, especially for a language with in which verbs don’t agree by number or person with any arguments at all.)
Kusaal is a bit simpler: three basic lexical tone patterns in nouns (with a fourth group which is fairly small), versus only two in verbs. Verbs actually do display all three of the noun patterns, but the distinction between two of them is determined by the verb mood: they fall together in one lexical group in verbs.
On top of that, Kusaal verbs often display a syntactically determined tone overlay pattern, unlike anything found in nouns: so the number of possible surface tone patterns is greater in verbs, ever though the number of lexical patterns in verbs is smaller.
No, because its verbs don’t have inherent tones at all – their extravagant tone inventory is purely grammatical.
Well, the tone languages of (South)east Asia are rather isolating… I’d recommend looking into the Kiranti languages (which, warning, have ablaut turned up to 11, the small number of tones included).
I know nothing about Oto-Manguean beyond “lots of tones and three vowel lengths”.
Thanks to both of you! Tone patterns confuse me…
My “universal” works for (Tokyo) Japanese pitch-accent (with inflected adjectives counting as verbs, of course.)
It works in Hausa (though the tone rules associated with the various verb “grades” are quite complicated, they’re predictable.)
It works in Bora too (a Witotoan language of Peru and Colombia, with over 300 classifiers, which collectively account for about 40% of all words appearing in texts, and are used for all sorts of quasipronominal reference-tracking roles and in derivation.)
It works in Creek, I think. Not many nouns have unpredictable stress or tone, but some do; although tone distinctions are more prominent in verbs, they are a feature of the verb “grades”, which are rather like the similarly named Hausa feature (or Semitic binyanim.)
Ingush is interesting: a lot of grammatical morphemes associated with verbs have contrastive tone, but there seems to be no lexical tone as far as full words are concerned: so it’s a bit like Iau or Nawdm, but without any lexical tone …
Kulango is a very clear example or that: nouns all have a completely predictable fixed tone pattern, while verbs have numerous different patterns, but they all mark different grammatical roles of the same lexeme: verbs no more have their own lexical tones than nouns do.
But a proper survey would be a major task. Something for the WALS guys …
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is at least a mostly valid universaloid, I suppose what it might mean is that in a lot of languages, conjugation is not quite the same kind of flexion as declension structurally, but is closer in nature to derivation in some ways. (There are segmental differences between the two kinds of flexion in many Oti-Volta languages, but that may just reflect the relatively “loose” attachment of noun class suffixes to stems, owing to the historical origins of noun flexion in the group.) The relative paucity of verb lexical tone distinctions would then be a consequence of tones being more often screwed up by conjugational affixes etc than by declensional affixes, which are less prone to trample on the tones of the stem they attach to.
(This probably works for Kusaal, in which there is evidence, from things like unexpected irregular tones in some gerunds, that there has been a historical simplification from a three-way basic set of lexical tone contrasts, as in nouns, to the current two as found in verbs.)
Korandje has extended the word for “human” to mean “friend” (but only with a possessor).
Reminiscent of my man in colloquial English.
DE, what is meant by “categories” of Nawdm verbs (from which tones can be predicted)?
Primarily aspect, but complicated by the fact that the aspects have different forms for different syntactic uses. Nominals derived from verbs also have fixed tone patterns.
Jacques Nicole’s grammar is available for download if you want the grisly details:
https://www.sil.org/resources/archives/76076
It’s pretty good, as grammars of Oti-Volta languages go. A bit sketchy on tone, which is unfortunately par for the course.
Possibly the most distinctive thing about the Nawdm verb system is that it incorporates a pervasive binary distinction between monactional and pluractional verbs. It was a while before I realised that Western Oti-Volta shows abundant traces of having had this too, though it’s not carried out nearly as systematically in any of the modern WOV languages as in Nawdm. Proto-WOV must also have had a verb derivation system very like that preserved in Nawdm, but it’s now disguised by the fact that two of the derivational suffixes have become zero through regular historical sound changes, and by strict restrictions on total stem length, which cause widespread suffix deletions.
It’s one of the many things that demonstrates that Nawdm is quite close to WOV within Oti-Volta (contrary to the received wisdom, still based on Gabriel Manessy’s work.) Nawdm is quite aberrant lexically, which has confused the issue.
More than once I wanted to say “names” meaning Latin nomina (nouns and adjectives) but did not because was not sure I’ll be understood in the 21st century.
“Nominals”! (Still I think not everyone will understand me if I use “nominals”.
Especially, you know, in the 18th, 19th or 20th centuries)DE, thanks. I wondered whether those categories (and distinctions between them) are in any way “lexical”.
From what you said, I understand they’re derived or otherwise formed from same root.
These aspectual and syntax-determined categories are definitely flexional in Nawdm.* The either/or monactional/pluractional opposition is lexical; the way it works is that nearly all root-stem verbs are pluractional (with a handful of exceptions, like kuu- “die”) and then verb stems with derivational suffixes are either monactional or pluractional depending on their last derivational suffix.
Nawdm is a bit of a standout within Oti-Volta in that it’s not unusual for a single verb stem to have several derivational suffixes. At one stage, I wondered if this was a Nawdm innovation, but I’m fairly sure now that it’s (mostly) a conservative feature: there’s good evidence that phonologically-driven simplifications have obscured the original picture in languages which don’t now share this exuberance of derivational suffixes.
In Nawdm, the derivational monactional/pluractional distinction is independent of the flexional perfective/imperfective distinction, but in Western Oti-Volta there are some verbs where the perfective stem was historically monactional, while the imperfective stem is from an old pluractional.
* This is something that varies within Oti-Volta. While Western Oti-Volta has innovated a pleasingly simple and regular way of inflecting verbs for aspect, and Nawdm is more complex but still mostly regular, most of Oti-Volta has much messier systems where you pretty much need to learn the different aspect forms verb by verb. It’s as bad as Russian, and is similar too in often involving formations which seem more derivational than flexional.
Korandje has extended the word for “human” to mean “friend” (but only with a possessor). / Reminiscent of my man in colloquial English.
and, more recently, “my person” – though that specifically extends the “my romantic partner” use of “my man” (not the broader “buddy”/”pal” use), and in some usages restricts it further to “my soulmate / future spouse” (“i’m dating a lot, but only until i find my person”).
my person […] my soulmate / future spouse
That’s cool! I’ve never heard that. How recent is it?
Is it roughly equivalent (pragmatically/poetically) to “the one”?
it can be, but in a much lower register, in my experience. to me, it feels like a way of invoking the idea of “the one”, but with a certain amount of distancing disavowal / deflation / irony built in. i also hear it used more in the sense of “significant other”/”partner” (and occasionally in less-weighted ways, more like “date”) – “o, you met leslie at dinner last week – y’know, eli’s person”.
and i think it’s pretty recent – maybe a decade old?
DE, the means of derivation described by you are not unlike those in Russian.
The underived form is usually imperfective, often used in iterative and continuous meanings (and some others).
An affix makes it perfective.
If you’re intersted in the semantics of the affix in imperfective, you need another (specialised) affix.
The excepton (kupit’ “buy (perfective)” pokupat’ “buy (imperfective)” is interesting: we don’t notice that it’s strange.
Yes, learning Moba aspects reminded me of long-ago grief with Russian aspect formation in school. (I never got very far with Russian, to my later regret.)
In Oti-Volta languages it’s the perfectives which are usually morphologically simpler though. That actually goes with the semantics, too: unlike in Russian, the perfective is the “default” unmarked aspect, and it can be present tense. That’s common in West African languages, and the fact that aspect was first really identified as a thing in Slavonic languages has led to some persistent misinterpretations of the subtly different West African systems.
@rozele, is it more likely to be used by women than men?
(I thought about its Russian translation. I don’t know why I expect women to be more willing to use it: chelovek is grammatically masculine, men and women speak about love differently and there can be any number of other reasons. But you call it an extension of my man too)
@DE, but note: the analogy to Russian derivation here is Oti-Volta derivation, not the aspect!
(and the iterative meaning of the imperfective extends the similarity in the roles of affixes into semantics)
@drasvi: i’m not sure! i’ll try to attend to the distribution. but i talk to a lot fewer men than other kinds of people, so my results will inevitably be skewed. my vague (and certainly skewed) off-the-cuff guess is that it’s more likely to be used by women (and other non-men), and by people whose romantic partners cover a range of genders.
So, somewhere on the spectrum between “the one” and your “plus one”…
@drasvi:
Yes, aspect in Russian is more mixed up with the monactional/pluractional distinction, which is entirely derivational in its formation in Oti-Volta. Mind you, even in Oti-Volta, Nawdm (and its closest relative, Yom) are unusual in keeping aspect and the monactional/pluractional distinction strictly separate from aspect; the other groups which preserve clear monactional marking (Western Oti-Volta and Waama) have a good few verbs which pair a monactional perfective with a pluractional imperfective.
Kusaal, for example (where the monactional suffix is -g), has verbs like tɛɛg “pull” (perfective) beside the imperfective tɛɛd, which shows the imperfective flexion -d added to the root, tɛ(ɛ)-. So that is quite Russian-like.
The Kusaal dictionaries partly conceal what’s going on here by listing perfective and imperfective forms which are actually either very uncommon or completely unattested, like *tɛɛgid. Some of these forms are truly becoming real, as the strict monactional/pluractional distinction is breaking down in Western Oti-Volta.
I believe that some other Slavonic languages make more of these kinds of distinctions than Russian.
@rozele, thank you!
I think in Russia (or among my friends (when they weren’t raising children)) it is usually girls who talk about “dating”. Boys say “she’s my girl” (or some “sleep” with her and others “love” her, but love is obscene:)).
Such differences are more than those of “genderlect” (but genderlect too), they come with different cultures and either different understanding or different roles in romance.
The colloquial word for it (I don’t think there is a literary word for dating) is “to meet [each other]”.
I thought about formulating my question differently, given that not everyone you know is either ‘man’ or ‘woman’. But then the question about the number of genderlects arises…
(and more: while I’m friendly to what Russians are mostly not freindly to, the idea of blurring the dichotomy [and even have a personal impression that Russian ‘male and female’ and Maghrebi ‘male and female’ are different], I don’t know anyone who won’t agree to be either ‘man’ or ‘women’.
Language that recognises that there are others would have been fully and uncomfortably abstract for me.
This, and weirdness of playing two genders in Russian and many in English: not hypocricy but what is this? So I decided I’ll speak here in terms of men and women.
I do not mean anything by this.)
Well, I don’t know what are personal opinions of most Russians.
Most accept the system of values which is NOT personal.
And this system made the reaction to “Western” experiments with gender its symbol and banner.
In Oti-Volta languages it’s the perfectives which are usually morphologically simpler though. That actually goes with the semantics, too: unlike in Russian, the perfective is the “default” unmarked aspect, and it can be present tense.
The Russian situation is actually a bit more complicated – if the derivation of the second aspect pair element is done by prefix, then the base form is usually imperfective (with the exception of kupit’ – pokupat’ mentioned by drasvi); but if the derivation is done by suffix, the base form is usually perfective. (Which aspect is the unmarked one as grammatical category was still somewhat debated when I studied Slavistics, and I haven’t kept up. IIRC, imperfective was held to be unmarked in general, but there were linguists who maintained that it depended on the interplay with other categories and that perfective was e.g. the unmarked aspect for the imperative.)
Thanks, Hans. As I say, my Russian never amounted to much (and now amounts to even less.)
Must plough through Bernard Comrie’s book on Aspect again. (It’s one of those books that rapidly teaches you that the subject matter is beyond your comprehension.)
@Hans, could you name an example or two?
“interplay”
I’m not sure if we can speak of other-than-formal (like the Semitic feminine) “markedness” of aspects.
But of course markedness WILL interact with various categories.
E.g. baby talk is unmarked for some children.
For what? Suffixation? Otvetit’ – otvechat’ , snyat’ – snimat’, ubit’ – ubivat’… in each case the imperfective stem is an extension of the perfective stem, sometimes with other morphological changes on top, like the change in the stem vowel in snimat’ (historically a lengthening).
“tɛɛd”
DE, is it a derivation?
@Hans, thanks!
Brief bit about pluractionality in Slavonic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluractionality#In_Slavic_languages
It doesn’t leave me much the wiser, unfortunately. I expect there has been a good bit published on such things in Slavonic. I haven’t really looked much at the literature on monactional/pluractional verb distinctions. Languages which mark such things by more or less regular derivational mechanisms applying to large numbers of verbs (as opposed to limited, often suppletive, sets of things like position or movement verbs) seem to be fairly uncommon.
…huh. Of course it doesn’t have to work in Slovak as it does in Russian; but in Russian, we were taught, идти and ехать are goal-directed (…telic?), ходить and ездить are not (…atelic?), this is orthogonal to aspect (so you have up to four forms to choose the right one from in each situation), and no other verbs have this.
About markedness, note that the Russian scheme is not “imperfective -> perfective”. It is
imperfective -> perfective on
............... perfective up ->> imperfective up
............... perfective out ->> imperfective out
............... perfective off ->> imperfective off
............... overperfective->> overimperfective
............... underperfective->> underimperfective
............... re-perfective->> re-imperfective
............... ...
The question “which of the two is unmarked?” about this scheme makes no sense to me.
“tɛɛd”
DE, is it a derivation?
Synchronically (at any rate) definitely not: the -d is unequivocally flexional.
There’s only one conjugation of verbs inflecting for aspect in Western Oti-Volta languages, and all the languages use an imperfective ending cognate to this Kusaal -d(a).
WOV verb flexion almost gets the prize for Simplest In Family (beaten out by Buli, which cheats by not having any verb flexion.)
Historically it’s actually a very interesting question. There is nothing like this formation elsewhere in Oti-Volta, so it pretty much has to be a WOV innovation. It’s striking that the imperfective stem is in the great majority of verbs identical to the stem of the agent noun and of the imperfective deverbal adjective, e.g.
kʋ (perfective) “kill”
kʋʋd (imperfective) “kill”
ninkʋʋd (where nin- is the combining form of nid “person”) “murderer” (“person-killer.”)
pu’akʋʋdir “woman (pu’a) liable to kill (or be killed.)”
Now, Oti-Volta adjectives have associated quality verbs to express the predicative sense of the adjective, usually with the same stem:
kɔlzuluŋ “deep river” (kɔlig “river”; zuluŋ, plural zulima “deep.”)
But
Kɔlig la zulim.
river the be.deep
“The river is deep.”
WOV deverbal adjectives don’t do this: but if they did, the results would be segmentally identical (in most cases) to the contemporary finite imperfective form. (Where the forms differ, this is pretty certainly because there has been a lot of levelling in WOV verb flexion, resulting in its present-day delightful simplicity.)
So it looks likely enough that the WOV finite imperfective is historically derived from the predicative form of the deverbal imperfective adjective. And although there is nothing like the WOV imperfective in -da elsewhere in Oti-Volta, there is a cognate suffix which forms agent nouns/deverbal adjectives, so the formation was there in proto-Oti-Volta, all ready to provide a new simplified finite imperfective formation for people too lazy to learn their Principal Parts of the Verb properly.
There are a lot of parallels for such a development cross-linguistically.
A gotcha in this is that from a morphophonemic standpoint, the derivation of nominals from verbs in Oti-Volta languages to a great extent resembles flexion rather than derivation (and in Western Oti-Volta, it differs from verb-stem derivation in still being productive too: it’s a bit like the difference in English between the -er in “singer” and the -en in “sweeten.”)
In particular, suffixes which derive nominals from verbs are attached to verb stems rather than roots. I’ve just been working out the consequences of this in WOV for derivatives based on roots which originally ended in glides: the sandhi with derivational suffixes can differ depending on whether the suffix is deriving a verb from a root or a nominal from a verb.)
In Eastern Oti-Volta, suffixes which derive nominals from verbs can follow verb aspect suffixes, and in Nawdm both gerunds and agent nouns are always formed from the specifically imperfective form of a verb – despite the perfective being the “base” form in verb flexion.
I was just looking at Stefan Elders’ Kulango grammar: it has several different pluractional derivational suffixes but no monactional suffix.
Come to think of it, that seems to be the usual way in languages that mark such things morphologically: monactional by default, with derived pluractionals.
Oti-Volta is the other way about: in not only Nawdm, but WOV and Waama, root-stem verbs are normally pluractional. There is a special pluractional suffix, but it’s distinctly less common than the monactional one. Mooré has lots of pairs like sẽbe “ceindre, attacher autour, attacher (plusieurs choses)” beside sẽbge “ceindre, attacher autour (une chose.)”
That does seem to be cross-linguistically quite unusual.
I wonder if this is actually something morphological, with an old pluractional suffix lost by historical sound changes? At least one proto-Oti-Volta suffix (the separative/reversive) has actually done that in WOV. Maybe these aren’t actually root-stems verbs at all …
Nah, that can’t be right. Have to look at actual text examples to see whether these verbs are really pluractional. And there is a particular pluractional suffix which can be added to roots. It would be meaningless if they were all pluractional by default.
Seems more likely that most root-stems default (or defaulted) just to being unmarked for this distinction (like verbs in most languages.) Perhaps the very existence of a monactional derivative without a corresponding pluractional derivative constrained a root-stem to being interpreted as pluractional.
Further research is needed …
“meaningless”
I dunno, the first Moroccan Arabic word I learned (bzzfbzzfbzzfbzzfbzzfbzzf) is not meaningless.
But is it pluractional?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/بالزاف
So, Yes, then. OK.
Well, I meant that humans have no difficulty with finding reasons to repeat something. There are triple diminutives.
Interesting:
→ Central Atlas Tamazight: ⴱⵣⵣⴰⴼ (bzzaf)
→ French: bézef, bésef, besef, bezef
→ Italian: bizzeffe
@drasvi:
As a Construction Grammar fellow-traveller, I believe in Adele Goldberg’s Principle of No Synonymy* (except on Thursdays)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371292475_No_equivalence_A_new_principle_of_no_synonymy
so if e.g. Mooré pãre means “split”, and pãrge means “split once”, and pãrse means “split several times” (which they do), either the root-stem pãre can’t be distinctively pluractional, or s can’t just be a pluractional suffix.
Actually, I suspect that Jacques Nicole, in his Nawdm grammar, has fallen into the ever-popular trap of confusing form and function. His monactional/pluractional dichotomy leans hard on the (supposed) fact that all verbs with gerunds in -b are pluractional, and all with gerunds in -m are monactional; almost all root-stems have gerunds in -b, but looking at the example sentences in the (very good) Nawdm dictionary by Babakima and Nicole, I’m not at all convinced that all root-stems really are pluractional, though the rule does work for verbs with derivational suffixes – except for stative verbs, which get to be “monactional” for Nicole. (Hmm.)
[There’s something odd going on with all this in Oti-Volta, even so.]
* Happily, you can pretty nearly always make this principle work, with enough imagination. Except on Thursdays, obvs.
@LH, yes, interesting! I didn’t know them. I can’t say that the French and Berber forms are unexpected: it is my first Moroccan word and I picked it from hearing, it must be borrowable. But I know little about Arabo-Iralian contacts.
I also wonder where the Persian word comes from.
And bilzaf (transliteration, not transcription): the idea is that if l in biljuzaaf (or the first ž in bižžuzaaf?) belonged to the root (or else if instead of z it was a “moon letter”), we would have belzaf (or belMaf) and not bezzaf. I wonder if this is true.
The context where I first heard it is quite guessable: a female speaker saying to a female speaker that she [verb] her very, very, very, very, very, very much.
Or I was told that this is what she said: I was amuzed both by the word and the fact that I can discern every sound (and that in the exotic and very guttural Arabic, its dialect most exotic to Arabs, when I couldn’t do that in English) and asked.
But – I believe Moroccans that their language is very sonorous and is full of vowels which we Russians don’t hear because they speak really fast – it seems I wasn’t able to discern some sounds, namely the vowels, any:)))
but in Russian, we were taught, идти and ехать are goal-directed (…telic?), ходить and ездить are not (…atelic?), this is orthogonal to aspect (so you have up to four forms to choose the right one from in each situation), and no other verbs have this.
Small correction – several movement verbs have that (besides the one you mentioned: letet’ /letat’ “fly”, plyt’ / plavat’ “float, swim”, vesti / vodit’ “lead”).
I can somehow see how to get from the Russian system to the Slovak system. In any case, the heading of the WP paragraph is misleading; the system described is not typical for all Slavic languages; e.g., besides Russian also Polish doesn’t work like that (the Polish system is very similar to the Russian).
polztí, pólzat’ (crawl), bezhát’, bégat’ (run), nésti, nosít’ (bear, carry), veztí vozít’ (carry in a vehicle), gnat’ gonyát’
(drive (enemy or a horse, not a car))
@drasvi: Thanks for completing the list!
…yeah, we did learn some of those, but maybe as perfective vs. imperfective – I forgot.
nestí, though, right?
Right.
@DM, sorry, a typo. I was thinking about forms like nesyót, nósit “bears, carries” and tried (and typed, with this exact verb) a different citation form (the imperative nesí, nosí) and my subconscious took control of my fingers:)
@Hans, из спортивного интереса I didn’t check grammar books and I’m not confident there are not more.
All but one form a part of my most active vocabulary. “Crawl” logically is “active” rather than “most active” vocabulary, but I mentioned it when talking about Russian with learners (to crawl по-пластунски), so it was easy to remember.
[remembered one more!!!]*
…But I wouldn’t have thought about gnat’ (drive) if I weren’t thinking about expressive replacements of “walk, go” and whether they can form poydú and sxožu perfectives. We say popizdyuxáli (pizda “cunt”. Or popizdováli from the joke about a German alpinist) but not *spizdyuxáli. We, nevertheless say both pognáli and sgonyát’ (like: “давай я по-быстрому сгоняю за пивом?”) – and here I remembered that this verb too has two forms.
*The “one more” is brestí, brodít’.
Interestingly, in English different verbs are used for these two meanings. (Wiktionary: бродить 1. to wander, to roam, to ramble 2. to stroll брести 1. to plod, to lag 2. to stroll)
Is the dualism of idu and xožu linked to the dualism of poydú and sxožú in Russian courses?
Yes. If I hadn’t shamefully forgotten the last form, I’d have mentioned all four.
That’s an interesting way to look at it.
I don’t mean “not practiced in Russia” I don’t know. I mean: I look differently
1) I go to school (I attend it) – xožú
2) I’m going to (walking towards) the beach – idú
3) I’ll go to the beach, meet me there – poydú
4) I’ll go to the beach (round trip) – sxožú
Formal similarity. And then we note that in
5) “I’m going in circles”, “I’m jogging”, “I walked in the forest for three hours”
verbs are in forms similar to xožú (those found in habitul meanings like going to school).
Ya xožú krugámi – I’m going in circles
Ya xožú v shkólu – I go to school
Ya idú v shkólu – I’m going to the school
And from this you move on to similarity in trajectory: is not the “plan to go to the beach, take a sunbath there, come home happy from the beach” (the meaning behind sxožú) similar to the loop you make when jogging?
My father owned a chocolate factory. For a number of years, he sold ice cream coatings to Saudi Arabia. Not for the locals, mind, but for the many foreigners who worked there. It had to have a different melting point than ordinary, Western chocolate.
If the coating has reached 40 degrees Celsius I would have thought the cream inside is not very ice…
“Not for the locals” – I don’t know if Arabs [or Malayalis:)] love ice cream, but given that, being a Russian, I eat it in winters (ate it. when those were winters) I think I wouldn’t if I were one:).
I don’t know if Arabs [or Malayalis:)] love ice cream
Next time I go to the mall, I’ll have a look who the patrons at the ice cream parlors are 🙂
but given that, being a Russian, I eat it in winters
I have a good German friends who can’t pass by an ice cream stand or parlor without buying some ice cream, whatever the weather and the temperature. It’s something I never understood, but de gustibus…
“never understood” – when you won’t eat it, hot summers or cold winters?
Soviet ice cream is fatty, sweet and (metaphorically) “heavy”. This is something you want in winter.
Flavoured coloured balls in cafés are different. They are lighter and edible in cafés.
And still exotic for me:) (The real advantage of havign grown up in USSR is that the whole world is exotic and attractive*)
Also I think when it is really hot, I woudn’t mind swallowing somethign frozen, but I would prefer frozen juice to anything too sweet and thick and certainly not thick and sweet warm liquid, which again means the café ice cream is better (you can take with your spoon frozen ice cream without ahving to deal with the molten part). Wafer cups won’t work.
* You’re like a man who was given a spaceship and meets bored aliens all over the universe. “Why can’t they understand that they are aliens?” when they complain what a shithole Betelgeuse is.
(I’ll use imperatives** idí, xodí or even stems id, xod, šed* as citation forms)
@DM, the link between idí, xodí and pojdí, sxodí makes sense etymologically. Of course:)
And derivationally. I’m willing to form pojdi-perfectives but not sxodi-perfectives from colloquial expressive verbs with the meaning of idi.
But I don’t feel that the difference in meanings of pojdí, sxodí reflects the difference in meanings of idí and xodí. I perceive these differences… differently.
Perfective is an action in a box. Single, whole, indivisible.
To illustrate this idea, when you say “I won’t to write a story”, does it mean the process (you’ll be writting it)? Yes. Does it mean the result (you’ll have it written)? Yes.
It means: “I’m writing it, I’m writing it, God, I’m still writing it, I’m writing it, hurrah I have it written!”.
You may be more interested in the result (writing is easy and uninteresting for you, but you want to win a contest) or the effort and pleasure of the process (whatever the result be). But both times you know you will spent some effort on writing and both times you mean writing a full story and not a part. And when you say “I want to write a story”, “write” (the process and result) is “one thing” for you. In Russian you say I want napisát’ a story, perfective. But when you say it in English you, I belive, mean same “meaning”.
Some perfectives are very quick (puctual) actions. Blinking. Jumping.
Some mean change of state (punctual too).
Some mean a whole story in a box, like “I sxodil to the cinema” (I went there, I enjoyed the film, I went home).
Some emphasise success or the result or even the product of your action.
Pojdí is change of state (from not moving to moving). I’m not surprised that it is formed based on the id-stem.
When you want to respond to “what are you doing” VERY literally, you can (jokingly) say: ya idú. Means: walking and not “standing” and not “raising my shoulder”.
You won’t use xožú in such a responce (or if you do, it won’t be excessively literal jokular responce).
Sxodí is what I called a whole story in a box (with perhaps some emphasis on success).
I understand it as:
“Make it so you can say ‘I have done it’ “. The change from haven’t to have done.
Which makes me think of such uses of IMperfective as:
“Did you read LotR?” (have you EVER read it?)
“Yesterday we went to the cinema!” (or: “yesterday I piloted a plane!!!”) – boasting with how you and your friends spent time yesterday.
In both we have imperfectives, and specifically xodi-imperfectives. Is that what is called “experiential”?
Anyway, that’s the usage I find parallel to the meaning for the root in sxodí.
*Šed is found in participles of idí. In “walked” it is š: šël, šla, šlo, šli – m, f, n, pl
**Imperatives is what Russian-based pidgins borrow, and are – or rather were – used in some other interesting ways which make me think of them as “native citation form”. I do think they would have been the citation form if not Latin.
Yes, this pair uses the two different stems.
But this pair is those two perfectives that cna be translated with English “go”.
There are many other perfectives from “go”.
pridi is perfective “come!”.
prixodi is … imperfective “come!”.
sojdí, sxodí is perfective and imperfective “go down!” (yes, same as perfective sxodí, in a different meaning)
Here the two stems are used too, but for something quite different.
Going through the Nawdm material, it looks like my guess was right. Where there is a monactional derivative from a root-stem verb, the dictionary examples actually do bear out the contrast pretty consistently, but otherwise, root-stem verbs, despite being classified by Nicole as “pluractional” because they make their gerunds with the noun class suffix -b, are not, in reality, specifically pluractional.
For example, the root-stem verb luur- “fall”, despite its gerund luurb, is clearly not “pluractional” in
Ĥà famtg tand n luurm ɦà nuɦu t kaɦd.
“Il a heurté un caillou, il est tombé et il s’est cassé le bras.”
It actually has a pluractional derivative lotr-:
Ĥà lotr tiibn lˋ kpaa kaalb.
“Il est tombé de l’arbre bien des fois.”
In Kusaal, root-stem verbs (and no others) regularly make their gerunds with the -b noun class suffix, regardless of their meanings. Though, as it happens, the cognate of luur- is an exception: li (or lu) “fall”, gerund liig.
About 20% of Kusaal root-stem verbs break the general rule for gerund formation. I hadn’t thought of looking to see if it correlates with a default monactional sense. But it would be a bit to easy to read that into the data whether it’s really there or not, I think.
I haven’t seen the term “monactional” before. It’s handy. I won’t narc to the language-mixing police, who might knit their brow in an alarmingly discomfiting manner.
I adapted it from Nicole’s monactionnel. “Semelfactive”, the obvious purist alternative, doesn’t mean quite the same thing. “Unpluractional” would actually be more accurate (as I said, Nicole classifies Nawdm stative verbs as monactionnel), but even more liable to offend the Terminology Police.
Not many languages seem to have an actual specific monactional derivation process, which probably explains why there isn’t an approved name for the thing.
It’s a clearcut feature in Yom/Nawdm, Western Oti-Volta and Waama, but not in the rest of Oti-Volta. I think this is because the dedicated monactional suffix got vaporised by historical sound changes in the other Oti-Volta branches, but it’s all rather speculative.
WOV and Yom/Nawdm form part of a subgroup within Oti-Volta, and it’s possible that Waama is a remoter member of that subgroup too, so a shared innovation is not out of the question.
And how do you say “Nawdm” ?:(
The dictionary linked in the Wikipedian page says [nàwdḿ] and notes that /m/ is different from French /m/.
But it also says b, d, f, r, t are like the French sounds (what, r too?). And there are [nàwd̀ɡḿ], [nàwdr̀b́], [nàwlɡḿ]…
@drasvi
I find it interesting that some of your perfective “going” are seen in English as perfective “being (physically present)”, e.g.,
Poshli/poekhali = we’re out of here
Mama prishla/priekhala = Mama’s here
@drasvi:
[naudəm].
The orthography doesn’t write epenthetic [ə], which actually appears in most written consonant clusters, except mb nd nt; y w after a vowel mark diphthongs rather than behaving as consonants phonetically, though they pattern as consonants in the morphophonemics. You get [ə] after written word-final consonants other than m too. This explains all the tone marks you see written over consonants in the dictionary entries: the tones are actually on the [ə].
Written r is an alveolar flap. It’s not like French at all.
Nicole’s grammar has a much better account of Nawdm phonology (though still not brilliant.)
Moba orthography is very similar in its conventions. The Mooré orthography doesn’t write epenthetic vowels in open syllables either, though the results generally don’t end up looking quite as jaw-breaking as with Nawdm and Moba: kʋ́lgá “river” is actually [kʋ́lʋ́gá], for example:
https://www.webonary.org/moore/g33e30469-332a-417e-bf8c-ae084985bab8/#g636921608285777103k%CA%8Blga
Much be a French thing.
Kusaal orthography writes the epenthetic vowels (kɔlig [kɔlɪg] “river”), but that is pretty much inevitable, because Kusaal epenthetic vowels have secondarily acquired some vowel contrasts. The Bimoba dialect of Moba, which is spoken in Ghana, uses Kusaal-like orthographic conventions, which makes it look less like Togolese Moba than it really is.
some of your perfective “going” are seen in English as perfective “being (physically present)”
In Kusaal, to announce to your host that you’re off home now, you say
M kulya
I go.home
where the verb is perfective aspect. Usually, with activity verbs, a present-tense perfective has a meaning like an English present perfect:
Saa niya.
sky rain
“It has rained.” (The ground is still wet.)
but you can use the perfective for present events conceived of as simultaneous with the moment of utterance, where English uses a “simple” present instead of the “continuous” present: “I promise you that …”
Fʋ nyɛ nu’ubibis ala?
you see fingers how.many
“How many fingers do you see?”
M nyɛ nu’ubibis atan’.
I see fingers three
where “see” appears as the perfective nyɛ, not imperfective nyɛt.
“never understood” – when you won’t eat it, hot summers or cold winters?
In winter, even if it’s not very cold – for me, the temperature needs to be 25°C or higher and the sun has to be out to trigger a craving for ice cream (and that includes Soviet style ice cream, which I had this July in a very hot and sunny Almaty for a first time again after many years.)
@PP, could you describe the context for to be “out of here” in some more detail?
(I don’t know (a) the colloqial register (b) vocabulary people use when talking about shopping, bathrooms etc. What you learn when you share a room with a speaker and what Wikipedia won’t tell you:)
I rarely watch films and while I use it in offline communication, it is usually speakers less proficient than me (when it is not a mixture of languages).*)
pošlí (when it is not the 2sg imperative “[could you please be so kind to] say vulgarities or obscenities”, the unused but amusing homonym) is used as 1pl (let’s) imperative when urging your friend to move. Say
– it’s cold, your friend is stading trying to find something in his pockets, you wait for 20 seconds and say : пошли, а то я замёрз.
– when the goal is specified: “пошли в кино!”, not too different from “давай сходим в кино?” (“а давай!”)
As in one of the first questions from Russian learners I heard (or rather: read), “what’s the difference between пойдём в кино and пошли в кино?” (a Vietnamese girl). I don’t know how to answer it:)
As for announcing to your host (DE), yes, my pošlí is used, but normally not as the first announcement (and maybe it won’t be too polite as the first announcement).
Usually you have already announced your intent, and say my pošlí to inform the host that you will actually change your state to “are walking” within a few seconds (unless she realises that she wants to put on shoes and go with you).
As you know, once these forms were participles and otherwise were used with “am, are, is” (and then “is” for all persons and then nothing).
This makes sense with those ‘experiential imperfectives’ I spoke about above. If “I read LotR” is “experiential”, of course. I am one-who-[has]-read-LotR, and with perfectives too.
*Of course I can do something about it, but as I told: I’m too fascinated with how my English changes (often quickly and profoundly) when I do something with it I didn’t do before. I decided not to “study” it systematically. I think Stu find this decision impolite, but the reason is curiousity and not anything else, and curiousity for me is a higher priority than even my notions of politeness.
Gagarin’s pojéxali! is a literal reference to change of state too. That of his rocket.
This exclamation is our symbol of [Soviet] space flights.
An, in turn, it is what you shout to the coach of your carriage, and is symbolic and linked to certain “Russian” emotion (spoken about at length by Gogol:)).
@DE, Russian Wikipedia calls it наудм, which will be pronounced nah oodm and is horrifying:)
The English practice of keeping Latin-script names unchanged and (what I’m afraid* is) Russian practice of mindless unadapted borrowing from English together lead to horrors.
*borrowings from English were different in 90s, usually meaningful and adapted.
But this has changed and they look as if someone read in English and were tasked with posting content in Russian and doesn’t want (or unable to) change her English reading habits. Bilingualism-style borrowings. I think that’s exactly what is happening.
I recently learned that Iraqw is pronounced, well, /iraqʷ/.
“from English”
From ɦiŋglism.
PS speaking of foreign versions of glottonyms, I like the Vietnamese word for Russia: Nga.
Y, unexpected:-/
Or not. Unlike “Nawdm” it can be a transcription (meant to sound like what it looks like).
@drasvi
For me, “We are out of here” means we are leaving right away for urgent reasons, so it fits the case where you are outside in the cold looking for a dropped coin, and your hands are frozen. When taking leave of a host (unless we are both in the army), I think “I’m off/away now” would be better than “I’m out of here”. If you say “I’m out of here” it might be taken to mean you are leaving to avoid starting or continuing an argument.
@drasvi
The Vietnamese name for Russia is the Vietnamese reading of 俄, the first character in 俄罗斯 (俄羅斯) Èluósī (Chinese for ‘Russia’). There is an explanation of this under “Tên tiếng Việt” at Nga (Wikipedia).
@PP, thanks! Then it translates ya poshyol (my poshli) rather well.
(poshli without subject is 1pl imperative).
@Bathrobe, wow, so nga stands for the prothetic o in oros!
Reminds me Slavic v “in”
(Mandarin Éyǔ “Russian language”, where yǔ is “language” is beautifully laconic too. Do they shorten all glottonyms to one syllable? zh.WP for Kusaal is titled 库萨尔语… but maybe anyone who talks about Kusaal often enough will switch to simple kùyǔ?*)
*thinking of it, they could also try to match the tones.
I agree with PP: “I’m out of here” is definitely marked for ‘leaving a bad situation.’ “Enough of this shit — I’m outta here.”
Ah, no, my poshli is not marked for anything.
But it informs everyone that you will do it within seconds (which is not what you want to tell your host, unless you have already told something more polite and then exchanged everything both sides found necessary to exchange, and it is expected)
The Vietnamese nga story is even better.
WAry has the following story about 俄羅斯, Mandarin èluósī. It sounds credible but is unfortunately unreferenced, and there are some gaps which I do not fully understand:
— Slavic русь > Kipchak orus, “with vowel-harmonic prothesis o- avoiding initial liquid r-”, with a similar development shown in Armeno-Kipchak.
— Thence to Middle Mongol oros, > Classical Mongolian oros, > Manchu oros.
— The Chinese, it says, is a Qing-era transliteration of the Manchu. Per the WAry entry for 俄, the Mandarin é [ˀɤ˧˥] is a regular reflex of Middle Chinese ŋa. The loss of initial ŋ- occurred early in the history of Mandarin, I think (I know nothing about Chinese historical phonology.)
— And finally Vietnamese, dropping all but the first syllable, borrowed the word as written into chữ Hán, the Chinese character–based script, and interpreting it by its phonetic value, nga [ŋaː˧˧]. Chữ Hán had already existed for centuries by the time the word for ‘Russia’ had reached Vietnam. The pronunciation of 俄 would have been based on some Chinese variety which kept the initial *ŋ, like e.g. one of the Min languages, presumably one with a relatively open vowel. Or 俄 might even have adopted into chữ Hán early, with its Middle Chinese–ish pronunciation.
What I like about this story is how it stretches so very thin the idea of etymological relatedness. The [a] of the Vietnamese is derived by what amounts to unintended back-formation and re-formation of the Mandarin [ɤ], which ultimately comes from the Kipchak prothetic [o], which harmonized with the [u] of rus’.
In “Hero of our Time”, an unfortunate tribesman refers to the protagonist as “orus yaman”.
@Bathrobe, Drasvi, Y: Fun. Thanks!
@Y, even better than what?
BTW, all varieties (except Mandarin) listed in Wiktionary have ng (or g at least).
Even the Burmese word for “to tilt” is ngai.
There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hằng_Nga_Guesthouse
Hằng Nga is the Moon goddess, but the author of the house, Đặng Việt Nga, could well be named with a nod to Russia.
@Hans, I hate molten ice cream. And the more sweet and sticky it is, the more I hate it.
Which mean, when it is so hot that I would like to drink something cold (for colling), it is so hot that my ice cream will melt and I won’t buy it.
I do like “lighter” versions of Soviet ice cream when it is 25 or not too much above, but the link here (between summer and ice cream) is purely aesthetical, not functional.
Meanwhile ice cream in winter is a different story. It tastes differnetly. And the taste is pleasant.
And in winter I may eat somethign “heavier”.
(It occured to me that we may understand “winter” differnetly. When it is 2 degrees and raining it is COLD. And that’s what are winters in Moscow since 2015.
When it is snowing it is not:))
@Hans, also all songs have the word habibi because all songs are addressed to him.
Somehow it did not occur to me.
It’s communication:)
Ana ba3rif. Or to her. But one frequently repeated word still sticks out when you don’t know the language too well.
(Not to her. That would be Habibti. Morning brain fart.)
@Hans, no brain fart. It can refer to both, but we’ll need a native speaker to describe the distribution of habibi and habibti with female referent.
And I think it “sticks out” even for native speakers:)
It is not true, of course that the song must have an addressee to have habibi in it. But I never thought about the diffence with Russian songs: they are rarely addressed to someone.
30 years ago, the Russians and the Finns ate the most ice cream per capita. This was widely blamed on the dark winters.
Finally I get it! “We’ve already left” has become “we’ve practically already left” = “we’re about to leave”!
In this regard, it’s similar to German Ich bin dann mal weg.
In this regard it’s similar to German Ich bin dann mal weg.
(Sorry, double post due to internet connection issues)
maybe it won’t be too polite as the first announcement
In Twi, you conventionally “ask for the road” from your host before saying you’re leaving (which you express by saying “I’ve gone home”, just as in Kusaal.) I’ve heard the idiom in Ghanaian English, too.
Kusaal suor “road” (like Twi ɔkwan) is also used to means “permission, opportunity”:
Nannanna, suor bɛ ye ti nu daam.
now road exist that we drink beer
“Now we can/may drink beer.”
So in Kusaal, you could say
M sɔsif suor ye m kul.
I beg.you road that I go.home
“I ask you for permission to go home.”
People don’t, though.
As an minor note, “molten” is more typically connotes something that is solid at typical temperatures that has been heated to the thousands of degrees necessary to melt it; usually some sort of mineral or metal, e.g, “molten basalt” or “molten glass” or “molten copper”. For something that is frozen and melts at typical temperatures, “melted” is the standard term. Melted ice cream; melted sherbet; melt water (meltwater) flooding creeks in the season of Spring.
There are exceptions, like “molten chocolate lava cake”. Or is it an exception? Chocolate melts at relatively low temperatures, but “molten” also connotes . . . continuity of temperature, I think. The chocolate is supposed to be melted and stay melted for the duration for the eating of the dessert?
I also remembered gallium, which melts at around 30C. Hm. “Melted gallium” brings up popular works, but “molten gallium” brings up scientific papers about experiments with the stuff. Again, I think continuity of temperature is supposed to be connoted – the metal will remain liquid for the duration of the experiment.
(Do I even know English, I sometimes wonder?)
Hm. Would it be better to translate that as “way” rather than “road”?
“Is there a way you could let me [X]?” is an indirect way of asking for permission to do [X].
Although now I am also reminded of the term “anyroad”; roughly equivalent to “anyway” in some dialects.
Would it be better to translate that as “way” rather than “road”?
There’s no doubt that the core sense of suor is still a physical path or road, despite the common metaphorical use.
English “way” started out like that, but the metaphorical sense is now the usual one, outside set expressions, street names and old toponyms.
And “way” doesn’t (in itself) usually have the deontic “permission” sense*, which is the commonest metaphorical use of suor:
Fʋ mɔr suor, ka fʋ gɛn’ tuŋ la kum yɛlaa?
you have road and you get.angry calabash the death about.POLAR-QUESTION
“Do you have any right to be angry about the death of the gourd?”
says God to Jonah. Jonah says
Ɛɛn m mɔr suor
yes I have road
“Yes, I do!”
It’s not whether Jonah can be angry, but whether he should be.
* No way!
In “molten chocolate lava cake,” surely “molten” is just tagging along with the lava metaphor, since literal lava is more of a molten thing than a melted thing.
This is exactly the kind of thing where I expect enormous geographic and even individual variation (plus sociolectal variation at the very least in England).
Edit: …or perhaps not. Hm.
Maybe molten : melted is adjective : participle, state : result, like dead : died or away : left (weg : weggegangen)?
For the “how hot is the melt point?” theory, note that “melted butter” is per the google books ngram viewer multiple orders of magnitude more common than the quite rare “molten butter.”* The internet tells me that butter melts between 90 and 95 degrees (or between 32 and 35 in Foreign). Molten lava by contrast tends to become solid when its temperature cools below approx. 1800 degrees (1000 Foreign).
EDITED TO ADD: wiktionary has a “usage note” saying “In contemporary English, molten is no longer said of things that melt at comparatively low temperatures, as in molten ice. This is a fairly recent development, however.” I don’t recall having personally noticed odd-seeming uses of low-temperature molten in older texts but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
*There are different sorts of solid chocolate with different proportions of ingredients and different melt points, but the low end of the range of melt points is comparable to or below that of butter.
NB that of what you might call the “old-fashioned” metals, meaning they have old English names that don’t end in -ium and probably also have some sort of glyph associated with them that any respectable alchemist would recognize, tin, lead, and zinc are the ones with notably lower melting points than the rest, at least if we exclude the rogue metal mercury from consideration. Someone could do some corpus investigation to see if the lower-melting-point metals exhibit different ratios of melted-to-molten than the higher-melting-point ones like copper, nickel, and iron.
بالزاف
→ Central Atlas Tamazight: ⴱⵣⵣⴰⴼ (bzzaf)
→ French: bézef, bésef, besef, bezef
→ Italian: bizzeffe
I also wonder where the Persian word comes from.
On the etymology of Persian گزاف guzāf , some notes assembled just now while I am only holiday away from the library (apologies for text capture and auto html tagging errors). Walter Henning (1937) ‘A List of Middle-Persian and Parthian Words’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 9/1, pp. 79–92, has the following entry:
The suffix -gʾr /-gār/ is ‘maker, doer; making, doing’, which leaves a wyzʾb- that would then mean something along the lines of ‘something playful, extravagant, excessive, careless or carefree’.
Harold Walter Bailey, ‘Arya Notes’, in Studia classica et orientalia Antonino Pagliaro oblata (1969), vol.1, speculates about the etymology of this wyzʾb- /wizāb-/ beginning on p. 139:
Bailey continues:
That last Russian cognate adduced should be заботиться, I think. For the Manichaean Middle Persian element wi- ‘apart, away, dis-’, the Wiktionary entry is good enough here. For the element -zāb-, discussion of the possible cognates adduced by Bailey in Vasmer here. Discussion of cognates in Kroonen here, bottom of page 280 under *kap(p)о̄n-. Old discussion of cognates in Pokorny here.
When even Pokorny says, ‘Alles ganz unsicher’….
As for other etymologies, Shapira, Dan D. Y. (2009), “Irano-Arabica: contamination and popular etymology. Notes on the Persian and Arabic lexicons (with references to Aramaic, Hebrew and Turkic)”, p. 160–191 in I. Kratschkowski Memorial Volume (Христианский Восток – Новая Серия 5 (XI), 2003-2008), available here, has an Aramaic etymology on page 165. He doesn’t discuss it in detail and I wonder if he got it from somewhere else. In any case, it is not semantically compelling to me. Even worse, the phonology only works for the New Persian form (and even there is it problematic), but not at all for the Manichaean Middle Persian form wyzʾb(gʾr), so it would require discarding the relationship between these two Persian forms.
In fact, Persian guzāf shows up in the Syriac dictionary of Bar Bahlul as ܓܙܦܐ gzāp̄ā ‘without number or measure’.
Maybe I can dig up something else later. I would like to get my hands on Chaim Rabin (1984) ‘On the probability of South-Arabian influence on the Arabic vocabulary’, Jerusalem Studies Arabic and Islam 4:125–134.
PS. In Turkish still today, I mostly hear güzâf in the fixed phrase lâfügüzâf ‘empty talk, irrelevant speech’ with lâf ‘talk, especially empty talk’ (as Bailey mentions), as in this hit pop song, for example.
The verb is actually a bit odd in German, too: schmelzen, schmolz, geschmolzen (no variation known to me), which is not only irregular by itself but also doesn’t agree with the noun Schmalz “lard”.
That reminds me: smelt is only ever regular, right?
@DM: not necessarily
Xerîb, wow, thanks!
Russ. zabóta ‘care’, zobati sja ‘to care for’
In literary Russian you can’t find anything but zabóta (understood as a derivation from otherwise unused root with a common abstract noun suffix: rab “slave” rabóta “work” (and, as we know, robot:))) and its derivatives like zabótit’sya, ozabóchennyj etc..
Vasmer mentions a dialect form zobát’sya with a different vowel without the suffix (more informative when cited with the (literary) zabóta then the (literary) verb derived from it).
It’s here on p. 322.
Ah, so Russian for “brillig” is зобед “feed given at noon” (from зоб “feed, fodder” and обед “midday meal”).
zabóta
I think this word means trouble, not care.
The verb shifted its meaning towards being attentive to needs of another person, towards an emotion.
And the word zabóta was reinterpreted. In the 20th century.
@Xerîb
The second article by W. B. Henning: https://www.jstor.org/stable/608588
On p 723 he rejects an idea of M. Benveniste (I wondered, who’s M. Benveniste… it is Monsieur Benveniste!).
Monsieur’s article is here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/608220, the similar Sogdian word is on p 502. Herr Henning rejects is because it does not have the long a.
wyzʾbgʾr
One interesting question, if it is a hapax, is what does it tell about a word.
We have diglossia or triglossia (say, with Sogdian) or more in a large area where many dialects are spoken.
Perhaps there are many words and roots used only once or twice or a few times but which then are found a bezzaffe (using the Italian derivative) in Persian (Muslim) classics? Which classics is in turn based on some variant of spoken koine.
The list of such words can tell something interesting.
A silly English question.
There are folk songs that repeat the addressee’s name in one line.
In Arabic it can be X yaa X :‘amara ya ‘amara “moon VOC moon, …”
(with variations: ya wardeti ya nediya “VOC my rose VOC wet”)
In Russian we don’t have anything like yaa and insert “you” and “my”.
Are there such songs in English?
examples:
‘amara ya ‘amara
ftayri ya ftayri (Tunisia)
ya wardeti (Kuwait)
(I understand of course that the English translation of the Arabic lines will be X o(h) X. And that the English translation of Russian lines will have those “my” and “you” even though their role is same here.
But I doubt X o(h) X is what this repetition normally looks like in actual folk songs.).
@drasvi
O Captain! My Captain!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Captain!_My_Captain!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Benveniste
Who is conflated in my subconscious with Emilio Bonvini, who was not the same person, even a little.
@DE, I know. It was “I know E. Benveniste, but who’s M. Benveniste?”:)
(retyped the comment, because when I edited it to “…know [monsieur] E. Benveniste…” it went to spam:/)
@drasvi: Do cities count? Galveston
If you search for things like “Mary oh Mary” and “Johnny, my Johnny” you’ll find plenty.