Anatoly Vorobey has a post (in Russian) that starts with an anecdote about East German students who complained that after six years of learning Russian at school, they went to the USSR and ten times in the first five minutes heard a word that they had never encountered: ладно ‘all right, okay.’ He says it’s an interesting topic: very common words from ordinary speech, not part of high style, that are missing from textbooks and lessons for beginners. He suggests that for Hebrew, a comparable word would be סבבה (sababa) ‘cool! great!’ (from Arabic صَبَابَة ṣabāba). He also brings up a different but analogous phenomenon, unexpected substitutes for expected verbal forms — in Hebrew, ‘to give’ is לתת (latet) and there is a perfectly good imperative תן (ten), but people don’t actually say ten li ‘give me,’ they say tavi li, literally ‘bring me.’ The thread is full of other examples; the first comment adduces the Russian word короче, literally ‘shorter’ but now in common use as an interjection meaning ‘right (signpost word to change the subject)’ or as a request to repeat a statement in layman’s terms, to shorten a speech drastically, or to end it immediately. I did not know that.
I somehow doubt that anecdote: the Bielfeldt dictionary, the standard Russian-German dictionary in the GDR, does include ладно as a headword (basically, the Bielfeldt dictionary looks like a German translation of the monolingual Ozhegov dictionary).
The point is not that the word was banned from dictionaries, it’s that it was not explicitly taught as a commonly used word. They may well have encountered ладно as a literary adverb without having any idea that it was in common colloquial use. Do you expect students of a foreign language to memorize every headword in the dictionary?
I mean, one could perfectly well be aware of круто as a literary word meaning ‘steeply’ without having the faintest idea of how it was used in speech.
Of the languages I was taught in school, I’ve never found much in the way of conversation partners for Latin or (classical) Greek, my German has (alas) never really got beyond my being able to read textbooks, and my Russian has long since almost completely evaporated from disuse (I know: sorry!)
Which just leaves French. I’m having some trouble thinking of a specific example, but I think that may be just an embarras de richesses (so to speak): yer actual spoken French is so different from what we were taught in school it’s hard to know where to start.
(I mean, school French was not useless in learning spoken French: it gave me a head start, much as classical Greek did with modern Greek …)
Yeah, all the boulot, dodo words were a surprise to me coming out of an excellent French education centered on the classics. I imagine they’re now taught in introductory classes, though. At least I hope so.
The colloquial use of avec at the end of a phrase
threw me when I was in working in Normandy. If it is used in normal French films or in Québec I must have not been paying attention, because it was new to me after several years of learning French.
The use of vale in Iberian Castellano to mean „ok“ is generally not taught in Spanish classes in North America.
Does ладно sound funny coming from the mouth of an obvious beginner in the language?
I was taught it in the first year.
Oh, now I’m wondering if that’s where the use of steil “steep(ly)” in 70s/80s youth slang came from…
I still have a set of the “A-L M” Russian textbooks (c) 1969, that I used in 1984–1986 in high school in the US. Ла́дно is introduced in Level 1, Unit 3.
Clearly showing the superiority of capitalist language materials!
I thought that ладно “all right, okay” is an obsolete use, attested already in Dahl (who also lists ладнушко, which would now be лады or ладушки), but Ngram shows that its use actually exploded after 2005.
@Craig: My German teacher in high school loved those books and went back to using them for his German and Russian classes in the 1990s. On the other hand, he admitted that “audio-lingual method” was terrible nomenclature. (Maybe “army method” had sounded too aggressive?)
but Ngram shows that its use actually exploded after 2005
Very strange. That’s not what Russian national corpus shows.
I’d always assumed that most of those who visit this site are extremely gifted in languages and can acquire them easily.
But for the rest of us, learning as (near) adult, and not resident in the country concerned, the East Germans’ experience is a typical initial impact phenomenon. When I first came to Germany, I also was amazed that the most common word I heard had never figured in my classes in England: i.e. “..gel?”. Strangely enough it’s almost completely disappeared from conversation nowadays.
Strangely enough it’s almost completely disappeared from conversation nowadays.
It’s a very regional word; I associate it mostly with places like Hessen or Franken. Maybe you are going to different regions now or the people you talk to are from other areas now?
If that isn’t the case, it may also be a generational thing; especially to people like me from other regions who don’t use it, the word has somewhat bumpkinish / grand-parenty associations, so younger people may try to avoid it. But as I don’t live in an area where it’s normally used, I can’t say say certainly.
https://youtu.be/QBel7ddJRkg
Gell appears already in first verse. It was hard for me to find a recording, I have the feeling that scripted or edited recordings avoid the word.
Wiktionary:
I was utterly unfamiliar with this regionalism, so thanks!
„Gell“ (usually abbreviated to „ge“) is still very very common in Austria. Just this morning listening to conversations at the cafe I was thinking „now there’s a German word you won’t learn in a textbook“.
„Gell“ was common in Nuremberg when I lived there in the 80s. But generally in the Federal Republic „oder“ is far more common and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has displaced regional „gell“ to some extent. It’s also true that you hear „oder“ more and more often in Vienna these days.
Yeah, „oder“ was the one I knew. But that Thesaurus:nicht wahr link has a whole raft of variants. Long live variety!
I later got the impression it was very much a Bavarian thing, where I was located.
The derivation from “gelten” surprises me. Gelten would give “gilt es?” and not “gelt es”.
vale: Somehow I had heard / been told about that phenomenon shortly before going to Madrid last December, but I was a bit surprised how widespread it was. A very useful word, though, within the day I had adopted it as my go-to affirmative answer. Instant in-group.
gelle? I remember this from working in Böblingen near Stuttgart 40 years ago.
@Peter Grubtal: Not in most southern German dialects, where the verb generally does not undergo an umlaut change in the third person singular. (E.g „I fahr, er fahrt“ instead of „ich fahre, er fährt“).
@Lars
Vale el vale. Pero no vino el vino. Sender, “La Tesis de Nancy”.
https://nomecabelpantalon.blogspot.com/2011/01/la-tesis-de-nancy-fragmento.html?m=1
There was something else with lots of cómo and como…
What is the joke about los bártulos?
That’s great stuff; this made me laugh:
I too am curious about los bártulos.
Me too, and I’m also wondering about pastizara vulgaris and guita tartesa. I see that “guita” is money and “pastizara” is a lot of money, but are there puns going on?
Doing French at school, we never even tutoyed each other in the so-called conversation lessons. So we’d say to each other “Quelle heure est il, s’il vous plaît”. Then I went to live in France for a while and was totally stumped when someone asked me “t’as l’heure?” Had to get him to repeat it five times before I finally deconstructed it.
Eso de soltar la mosca es, creo yo, una superstición. Parece que en las cajas de caudales tienen una mosca guardada. Cuando sacan dinero sueltan la mosca. Cuando meten dinero en la caja parece que guardan la mosca otra vez. Curro me explicó que es una superstición del tiempo de los bártulos.
The first part is Nancy interpreting soltar la mosca (“to pay–with an undertone of displeasure”, so “cough up” or “fork over”) as having to do with a real fly, and deciding that using a fly in this way is superstitious behaviour. Curro agrees and says that it is a superstition of the time of “los bartulos” (I think these are what are called in Ireland “yokeybobs”, but there may be some other significance I am unaware of).
i’ve been waiting for an in to ask, what are the las in arreglárselas para algo? Something generic like cosas? Also pasarsela bien? Anaphora without a reference bother me, but I’m just as unable to explain what det in det regner = ‘it is raining’ is. It’s just that in Spanish there’s lo for something you don’t care to specify the gender of, so las looks very specific.
PlasticPaddy: Thanks for the explanation! I’m still unclear about the use of bártulos, but maybe that’s beyond our ken.
@Jerry Friedman
They say in Andalusia, and Tartessos is an ancient civilisation of deep southern Spain, so it’s an erudite dig.
I suspect something similar with pastizara vulgaris, and perhaps others who know Catalonia can work it out.
Stu linked to the DWDS on gell(e): “spätmhd. gelte ‘es möge gelten’, eigentlich 3. Pers. Sing. Konj. Präs. von gelten, möglicherweise zuerst als Bekräftigung bei Wett- und Vertragsabschlüssen.”
“Late MHG gelte ‘may it be valid’, actually the 3sg present subjunctive of gelten, possibly at first as an affirmation of concluding bets and contracts.” That makes more sense than I dared hope (though I still don’t get how the /t/ just disappeared!). Es gelte would still be understood, it’s just at the other end of the register scale now.
That’s where it gets complicated!
First, the form in my dialect is /gɒɪ̯/. (Sometimes /gɒɪ̯t͡ːs/ when talking to a group.) That’s impossible to reconcile with gell; it could only be *gal(l), which I can’t get to make sense. Yes, gelten is a strong verb, so the passé simple is galt, but any past tense doesn’t makes sense here, and the dialects south of the White-Sausage Equator lost the passé simple almost wholesale some 500 years ago.
Second, the form in Viennese dia- and mesolect is /gɶ/.* That’s as if the more western /gɒɪ̯/ had been interpreted as a Standard German *geu, loaned as such into the mesolect, and pronounced accordingly; to be native in the dialect, it would have to be geil, which exists but means something completely different. (Several things actually.)
…Edit: or it’s actually/historically /gœ/, in which case there are no mysteries in the East because that’s the expected outcome of /gɛl(ː)/.
* Vanya, you missed the rounding. There is an interjection /gɛ/, but that’s geh; it’s an expression of incredulity – originally “go away and take your nonsense with you”. (Geh weiter still occurs occasionally.)
No. OHG had three kinds of strong verbs:
1) those with no umlaut in the present because they had root vowels other than /a/ or /ɛ/;
2) those with umlaut in the 2nd and 3rd persons singular because they had /a/ in the root;
3) those with umlaut in the entire singular because they had /ɛ/ in the root.
The trick here is that the 1sg ending was -u, which raised /ɛ/ to /ɪ/, while the 2sg and 3sg endings contained /ɪ/, which likewise raised /ɛ/ to /ɪ/ but also fronted-and-raised /a/ to /e/. Examples from here:
2) faran “ride or suchlike”
faru
feris(t)
ferit
3) neman “take”
nimu
nimis(t)
nimit
Vaguely Central German, and therefore the modern standard, merged 3) into 2): fahren: fahre, fährst, fährt; nehmen: nehme, nimmst, nimmt. (In both cases, the h spells out the stretching of vowels in open syllables.)
I have no idea what Alemannic did; wouldn’t be surprised if all three are still distinguished somewhere.
Bavarian merged 2) into 1), but 3) remains untouched: 2) goes as Vanya said – /fɒɐ̯n/: /fɒɐ̯/, /fɒɐ̯st/, /fɒɐ̯d/ –, but 3) retains the vowel alternation: /nɛmɐ/: /nɪm/, /nɪmst/, /nɪmd/. Also 1sg /gɪb/ and /vɪɐ̯f/ among the Wikipedia examples.
Gelten is in group 3). With /l/ rounding the preceding vowel, you get 3sg /gʏtː/. (…That’s not actually the analogical Standard gilt; it’s the regular *giltet, which you can actually hear children say in Viennese mesolect. “This doesn’t count for the rules of this game”/”you can’t do that because that’s against the rules” was das giltet nicht! as a fixed phrase WIWAL.)
Ouch. That was at least half a century out of date at that point.
I wondered whether bartulos involves playing with bastetanos, turdulos and maybe a little of tertulia, as vaguely ridiculous words with no good etymology, and therefore like soltar la mosca in need of explanation.
FWIW, ладно is introduced in Book 1 of Голоса, a widely used textbook in the US (3rd edition, 2008). But I can think of other examples, like чё as a reduced form of чего. I have the impression that most textbook dialogues are fairly bland, with few expressions of disagreement, conflict, or rudeness of any kind.
A sort of tangent on the topic of real-life situations: Foras na Gaeilge published “Gaschaint,” a wonderful Irish-English phrasebook for parents who want to use as much Irish as possible in the home. I’ve seen no other books with phrases like ‘Ná caith na píseanna ar an urlár’ (Don’t throw the peas on the floor), ‘An bhfuil do chuid fiacla glanta agat fós?’ (Have you finished brushing your teeth?).
What gives with “do chuid fiacla”? Sín do lamh amach!
@pp from the Gaschaint website, each with native-speaker audio:
Connacht — An bhfuil do chuid fiacla glanta agat fós? / An bhfuil do chuid fiacla scuabtha agat fós?
Ulster — An bhfuil do chuid cára glanta agat go fóill?
Munster — An bhfuil na fiacla nite agat fós?
das giltet nicht! as a fixed phrase WIWAL.
Huh, that exists at the other end of the German language continuum, too; Das gildet nich in the East Frisian mesolect children spoke in the village where I grew up.
@mm
Thanks!
Here is what the Christian brothers say (you can download the grammar from foras na gaeilge):
—
13.8 Is minic an focal cuid idir an aidiacht shealbhach agus a hainmfhocal nuair atá teibíocht nó iolra nó ábhar do-áirimh i gceist: a cuid eolais; a cuid leabhar; mo chuid gruaige (siúcra).
—
so the other versions are not “wrong”, but I prefer your Munster version 😊. I can’t picture one of the brothers saying “sín do chuid lamh amach, má ‘sé do thoil é”.
Corpus of Contemporary Irish:
m’fhiacla 15 matches
mo chuid fiacla 13 matches
I can’t think of a query for “na fiacla” that would give a meaningful comparison..
I welcome the appearance of untranslated Irish on LH. I have myself been known to comment in untranslated Kusaal, but it is good to see the principle being extended to languages with fewer native speakers.
It is, of course, expected that Hatters (being gentlemen) would be understandably annoyed at any suggestion that a translation was necessary for French or Latin, and those of us who lack Russian are too ashamed of ourselves to admit to it.
Could bártulos possibly be a malapropism for vándalos, the Germanic tribe?
This blog post by one Ricardo Crespo Ruiz, who certainly doesn’t intend to help the untutored foreigner, says, ‘En “soltar la mosca”, por ejemplo, –“una superstición del tiempo de los bártulos”, según la antropóloga norteamericana- lengua y cultura se unen claramente para provocar en nosotros una hilaridad impía. ¿Quiénes son los bártulos o qué significa “soltar la mosca”? Pregúntenselo a cualquier español… Tal vez mejor no…’
@Peter Grubtal: I don’t get the erudite dig you see in guita tartesa, though a dig is appropriate for the Tartessians. And maybe Spanish differs from English in comedotactics, but putting the phrase in a sentence by itself makes me think the author expected us to laugh out loud. Also, according to the Spanish Wikipedia, the adjective for Tartessos is tartesio or tartésico. So I’m still wondering whether something else is going on.
@David Eddyshaw: That’s Hattic irony.
@DM, thanks very good explanation. I got over my skis a bit there.
you can actually hear children say in Viennese mesolect
If you can find children speaking mesolect in Vienna. My younger son has been in the Viennese public school system for 13 years now and I have never once heard any of his peers speak mesolect, but of course very few of his peers have parents who speak Viennese at home. Even the Austrians tend to be „immigrants“ from Steiermark or Kärnten. Maybe mesolect is still spoken in Hietzing.
Surprised that on one has mentioned the obvious „common words“ that you hear constantly in modern spoken Russian but,
I assume, are still not taught in textbooks – obscenities.
I went to a Russian language stand up comedy workshop in Vienna a few weeks ago. The facility with which 20-something women from Ukraine or Kazakhstan casually use words like «блядь, пизда, хуй, заебать» etc. was almost shocking for a Rip Van Winkel like me who hasn’t been in an actual Russian speaking country for over 10 years. My emigre Russian friends/peers in Vienna and London still mostly adhere to Soviet era ideas of appropriate speech in public. Not the kids apparently.
I’ve noticed that Italian young women also swear an inordinate amount in public, if “cazzo” still counts as an obscenity. Probably Americans do too, I just don’t notice it. German/Austrian women don’t seem to use vulgar language in public to the same degree for whatever reason.
@de
Sorry. It was late at night, and the subject (whether mothers–sorry, fathers– would use “do chuid” for “your” in “have you brushed your [do chuid] teeth?”) was one I thought would not arouse greater philological interest. Like the Christian Brother preparing to discipline [smacht a chur ar] an unruly student, I feel mothers in such a case would prefer a briefer version, without the somewhat redundant “do chuid”, given that teeth are not like a discrete portion of a mass noun, nor is a child likely to brush the teeth of another child, pet, etc., should the words “do chuid” be omitted. Mollymooly was kind enough to provide more examples and variations, instead of just ignoring me, as I myself might have done. I then looked at what the learned brothers’ grammar said on the point, which translates as
“The word “cuid” is often [placed] between a possessive adjective and the [lit. her] noun when abstractness [teibíocht] or multiplicity or “mass-noun-ity” is relevant [atá i gceist]: her [a cuid] knowledge, book, my [mo chuid] hair (sugar).
—
Is minic an focal cuid idir an aidiacht shealbhach agus a hainmfhocal nuair atá teibíocht nó iolra nó ábhar do-áirimh i gceist: a cuid eolais; a cuid leabhar; mo chuid gruaige (siúcra).
—
To be honest, when faced with a text like the above, rather than look up terms in order to provide an exact [cruinn] translation [aistriúchán], I would have understood “cuid is often inserted in certain situations: her [a cuid] knowledge, etc..”
Correction: the [lit. his].
those of us who lack Russian are too ashamed of ourselves to admit to it
Humility is a time-tested way to avoid shame, which is merely soreness consequent to falling off a high horse.
Another way is to cultivate indifference. This is humility without the ceremony of innocence. It saves energy.
Thanks, PP! (Though I was actually entirely sincere in welcoming the appearance of untranslated Irish. Iwerddon am byth!)
Thanks, Stu, for that time-saving life hack. Indifference it shall be!
You can call it Stoic Apathy, and then you don’t even need to bother with the humility.
Q — What’s the difference between ignorance and indifference?
A — I don’t know and I don’t care.
🌰
(scrolling up; yes, this is the same thread…)
I should have called the OHG a “/ɑ/” instead of “/a/”; it came mostly from a back vowel, mostly became back vowels, and was evidently treated by the sound system as one.
Maybe you just don’t notice jeden Schas anymore. 🙂
Most people will use vulgar language more freely in a peer group of any sort than in a mixed group. This makes it hard for one to estimate the average vulgarity of any non-peer class, since one mostly hears them in mixed groups.
@PP here is a paper [in English] with some stats of various nouns which sometimes-but-not-always have “cuid” ‘portion’ between the possessive and the Noun. Mass nouns prefer cuid, plural nouns less so. Pairs like lámh ‘hand’ use dhá ‘two’ instead of cuid.
Maybe you just don’t notice jeden Schas anymore.
I know. It just doesn’t strike me as particularly vulgar, nor does “oasch”. Maybe because I also grew up in a culture where genitalia and various types of copulation and genital penetration are considered the sine qua non of vulgarity.
Ah, then you’re out of luck.
I have been laughed at before now for saying that I was going to my bed, because who else’s bed would I go to. But even the English, to the best of my knowledge, say ‘I’m going to wash my hands’, and it is more likely that you would go to someone else’s bed than that you would wash someone else’s hands.
Untranslated Irish makes my brain hurt, because I feel like I should be able to read it and I can’t. But that is not a reason why it should be banned.
Kusaal also does the English-like thing of saying by default “I’m going to wash my hands” rather than “the hands” à la française. I imagine WALS has one of their nice world maps for this.
In Kusaal, I think this probably reflects the fact that body-part nouns, while not actually obligatorily possessed, seem in actual practice nearly always to occur with explicit possessors.* That doesn’t seem to shed any light on the English usage, though.
I suppose the French is actually a kind of possessor-raising, come to think of it. “I’m going to wash me the hands.” (This issue must have been long since done to death in the literature.) Kusaal actually has construnctions like that too, but they always seem to metaphorical, not referring to actual body partsc
* Kusaal family relationship words are the same: the only Kusaal examples of unpossessed relationship words that I’ve found in the wild are those like o ka’ saam bɛɛ maa “she has no father or mother.”
[Ran out of editing time.] Metaphorical use of body-part terms appears in e.g.
Ba na nwɛ’ɛf nu’ug.
they IRREALIS hit.you hand
“They will plead with you,”
where the f “you” is an (indirect) object. Literal “they will hit your hand” would be ba na nwɛ’ɛ fʋ nu’ug.
“External possessors” (as in French and German vs. English) have indeed been done to death in the literature several times over, but I think the term is a misnomer – the beneficiary is mentioned, and once that’s done, the (identical) possessor can be, and usually (but not always) is, omitted.
In External Possession the possessor is specified, but it is outside the possessed noun phrase. “por favor, me lava [los manos]” vs. “please wash [my hands]”.
I think it’s a good term, if a bit biased.
One thing I was not taught at school, or even university (half a century ago now), was the French conventions for writing formal letters. When I had to write one in connection with spending a year abroad, I found that I had committed a faux pas by merely using my French dictionary’s translation of ‘Yours sincerely’.
Veuillez agréer mes salutations distinguées!
@Y:
Yes, “external possession” seems to presuppose that the English construction is normative. The “external” constructions do seem pretty common; polysynthetic languages seem to go for “possessor raising” a lot too.
As far as I can see, WALS doesn’t have an entry for this.
“Internal possession” does not usually come up, perhaps also because it doesn’t have enough syntactic variety to be of interest to typologists.
Possession does have variety of interest to typologists: genitive vs. “of”, word order, word order in complex situations beginning with articles…
In this century, Sincèrement has occurred in French letters. It’s less common than Cordialement, though, and I did get a form letter with a full-sized veuillez agréer phrase just a few years ago. (I posted the whole phrase here, but Google refuses to find it.)
The Kusaal example
Ba na nwɛ’ɛf nu’ug. “They will plead with you”
could be parsed with f “you” as a direct object (there’s no formal difference in Kusaal) and nu’ug “hand” as an adverbial; Kusaal adverbials are just NPs with suitable meanings, and even body parts can be used adverbially in appropriate contexts, e.g.
O keŋ nɔba.
she go feet
“She’s gone on foot.”
So “they will hit you regarding the hand.”
This would be supported by the fact that nu’ug remains singular in e.g.
Ti na nwɛ’ɛ ba nu’ug. “We will plead with them.”
we IRREALIS hit them hand [not nu’us “hands”]
(where, despite the standard orthography, which has odd word-division conventions, ba is shown by its high tone to be an object and not a possessive.)
This is reminiscent of both French je me lave les mains and the way polysynthetic languages incorporate body-part nouns and turn the possessor into the verb direct object.
Unfortunately, things are messier in Kusaal, because the language also has idioms with a fixed object noun which is possessed, e.g.
M na tɛɛgi fʋ tʋbir.
I IRREALIS pull your ear
“I will rebuke you.”
and the noun there always remains singular too:
M na tɛɛgi ba tʋbir.
I IRREALIS pull their ear [not tʋba “ears”]
“I will rebuke them.”
(Here ba has low tone, showing that it’s a possessor.)
One ear per rebukee, I suppose. Whatever.
Come to think of it, Kusaal also says e.g.
Diginim fʋ nu’ug!
lie.down.IMPERATIVE your hand
“Put your hand down!” (a very useful expression to know when doing eye surgery under local anaesthetic)
using digin “lie down”, not digil “lay down.”
So the same sort of semantic approach as je me lave les mains, even though the language is like English rather than French in including possessive pronouns with body-part objects.
It would be interesting to look cross-linguistically at how “external possession” interacts with whether languages formally distinguish alienable and inalienable possession, and whether they have a class of obligatorily possessed nouns.
In fact, someone must surely have done this.
@DE: like this or this?
Not exactly, although that’s the same ballpark.
A related oddity of Kusaal “internal” possession is that possessors only make a following possessum definite if the possessor actually has a definite article: proper names and personal pronouns do not.
So e.g. dau la biig is “the man’s child” but m biig is indefinite, and would be what you say if said child had not been mentioned before, as opposed to m biig la “my child.”
You can say
M biig ka’e.
my child not.exist
“I have no child.”
and a very typical introductory formula in a story goes like
Dau da bɛ ka mɔr o biig ka …
man TENSE exist and have his child and
“There was a man who had a child, and …”
with the child being referred to thereafter by o biig la.
Dau la biig la is grammatical, but the second instance of la cannot be taken as the article: the expression means that child of the man’s. (La was “that” historically, and remains so in this context and a few others.)
And if you want to say “a child of the man’s” you must use a specific indefinite determiner: dau la bisɔ’ (bisɔ’ “some child, another child”, with the determiner compounded with the noun, as regularly in Western Oti-Volta.)
Tone sandi after personal-pronoun possessors is different from that seen after other NP possessors, too, but that doesn’t correlate fully with this particular syntactic issue.
I reckon that what all this amounts to is that in what looks like a possessor-possessum construction in Kusaal, the first element is actually not so much “genitive” as “dative” semantically. (There are other languages like this, too.)
Come to think of it, having a quite different construction for personal pronoun possessors from all others is not rare. (Welsh even has opposite orders of the possessor and possessum in the two cases.)
Maybe that was all there was to it at one stage in pre-Kusaal, and proper names as possessors later got assimilated to the pronoun pattern in syntax but not tone sandhi. (Not such a stretch, as they are much the most common type of article-less possessors after pronouns.)
Yeah, I could go for that. Tone in these languages is often more stable historically than segmental phonology, so it’s not unreasonable to think it might be a clue to diachronic syntax changes.
In fact, tonal evidence suggests that Kusaal ka “and” was once always a subordinating particle, as indeed it very often still is (my gloss is misleading.) And the current cases where it is definitely coordinating can actually be quite plausibly explained by cross-linguistically well-attested processes of “insubordination.” They fit known patterns of syntax change.
So yeah. Tonal evidence for historical syntax change is OK. Eat your heart out, Noam Chomsky!
[Don’t mind me. I’m just thinking aloud.]
There should be a way to search for “come to think of it” in the comments of the last ten posts, as a sort of Eddyshaw wellness check. If it pops up once it could be anyone, but twice and you know DE is alive and posting.
Just for the sake of completeness, there are languages that as default use neither external nor internal possession in that kind of construction when referring to the own body; e.g., Russian has я мою голову “I wash head” = “I wash my head” (you can use a possessive pronoun for emphasis or contrast).
Tangentially wrt possession and bodies and alienability, …
How do languages express the connection between indigenes and the territory they’re indigenous to? The people’s land; the people of the land; the land’s people; …?
Nuclear Polynesian *fanua.a ‘land’, which POLLEX indexes separately to *fanua.c ‘afterbirth’ — ritually buried at the place of your ancestry; and both of which POLLEX randomly also spells ‘fenua’. Expresses both ‘land, country’ in the abstract, and ‘place of your birth’/’where you belong’. Proto-Austronesian *banua “the tract of land that provided the life support system of a human community, …”.
The Māori notion is you can take the boy out of Waipukurau, but you can’t take Waipukurau out of the boy.
possessors only make a following possessum definite if the possessor actually has a definite article
Sounds just like Korandje, except that Korandje doesn’t have a definite article. Thus, for instance, nen iz inka (your son two) renders both “your two sons” and “two of your sons”, whereas English forces a distinction between the two.
Kusaal distinguishes fʋ biisa ayi la “your two children”, with ayi “two” as a quantifier after the NP head biis “children”, which is also preceded by fʋ “your”, from fʋ biis la ayi “two of your [previously mentioned] children”, where ayi is the head, and fʋ biis la “your children” is a predependent NP, with the construction having a partitive sense. (This can only happen with quantifier NP heads: biis la zu’omis can’t mean “the blind ones of [i.e. among] the children” but only the possessive “the children’s blind people.”)
However, fʋ biisa ayi, without an article, is ambiguous, like your Korandje example.
But there is a further complication in Kusaal: in fʋ biis piiga “your ten children”, piiga “ten” has all tones mid, whereas in fʋ biis piiga “ten of your children”, piiga has a high tone followed by low. This is because a NP head following a dependent NP (other than a bare personal pronoun) undergoes a tone neutralisation/overlay, whereas a quantifier after a NP does not: this has no effect with the numbers 2 through 9 because they start with an intrinsic low tone which is not altered by the neutralisation rule, but I suppose you could still claim that fʋ biisa ayi represents two quite distinct constructions that have just ended up completely homophonous for purely phonological reasons.
(You could say “sons” specifically in these examples, rather than “children”, of course, but that’s not very idiomatic in Kusaal: you’d only do that if the fact of the children being male was significant, not as a default.)
[Should read “whereas a quantifier after a noun head does not.”]
The people’s land; the people of the land; the land’s people
It’s all the same in Kusaal: nidib la teŋ “land (teŋ) of the people (nidib la); however, you’d generally either make a compound noun of it, e.g. Nasaateŋ “Europe” (land of the Nasaarnam) or just use the stem of an ethnonym with the noun-class suffix *gɔ, as in Kʋsaʋg “Land of the Kusaasi (Kʋsaas)”, Nwampurug “Land of the Mamprussi (Nwampuris.)” You occasionally see such forms used in English: Kusago, Mampurugu.
I mean, one could perfectly well be aware of круто as a literary word meaning ‘steeply’ without having the faintest idea of how it was used in speech.
“У вас там в будущем что-нибудь пологое есть?”
(In the original, “Is there a problem with the Earth’s gravitational pull?” – there wasn’t really a good equivalent, so the translator improvised.)
(In my silly 2015-remake collection, this becomes “Is there a problem with the Earth’s surface temperature?”)
I’ve been poking about looking at Kusaal texts to see about definiteness and possession, and come to the conclusion that I got my facts wrong.
It’s true that personal pronoun and proper names as possessors don’t automatically make the possessum definite, but there are actually examples where a possessor with the article doesn’t make the possessum definite either. I missed this because it’s uncommon for pragmatic reasons, but there’s an example in the Bible translation, for example, at Numbers 36:6:
o sɔb ya’a aan ba saam dɔɔg la nid
he someone if be their father house the person
“so long as he is one of their father’s clan”
Instead, what’s going on is that you can’t use la as a definite article after a head which already has a possessor with the article. It’s a formal, not a semantic, restriction. In such cases the possessum is by default just not marked for definiteness one way or the other.
So the basic system really is much like Korandje: definite possessors just don’t automatically make the possessum definite. In other words, the relevant construction, though it has the same constituent order as an English genitive before a head, actually works semantically more like a phrase with “of”: Awin biis is more “children of Awini” than “Awini’s children.”
And the different tone sandhi after pronouns is a red herring.
I’m glad LH is helping refine your Kusaality!
(Proving yet again that you only find out if you really understand something yourself when you try to explain it to someone else. My thanks to the Hattery for being the helpless victims of this process, which has quite often improved my own understanding of Kusaal syntax substantially.)
Let me too jump on this bandwagon ! Many of my comments probably seem obscure, but that’s ok since I write them only to clarify my own thoughts.
If others want to understand my thoughts, they’ll have to put some effort into it. I can’t be expected to do their work for them.
There may be value in developing an “AI” chatbot which does not spew out its “own” tosh on prompting, but instead passively receives the user’s tosh in a way which eventually allows him or her to perceive the toshiness and perhaps even to reduce it to some extent.
A few prompts by the APE along the lines of “this is really fascinating, but I didn’t quite understand you when you said [insert random snippet of user’s input]” should do the trick. In fact, even an ELIZA-level bot might work.
Even this would help, though not as much.