statelessnation wrote: ↑Thu Jul 19, 2018 11:36 am
In languages with case which are both Ergative-Absolutive and Secundative, does the role of a 'Donor' typically get marked in the Ergative case or do they typically show it some other way?
I can’t tell, really, how these languages treat the Donor/Exhibitor/Narrator. At least not easily or quickly or directly, from the information in WALS.info.
Ser wrote: ↑Fri Jul 26, 2019 4:16 pmI once saw someone wonder whether the presence of the Afro-Asiatic languages Berber, Punic and Coptic in North Africa might have been an influence in the widespread acquisition of Arabic after the early medieval Muslim conquests, in as much as there was a large proportion of the people that might have found the grammar of the Arabic they heard less strange than, say, Greek speakers would have.
Isn't this one of the central arguments in Ostler's Empires of the word? He also points out how much of the current Arabic-speaking world was previously Aramaic-speaking. (Compare the respective fates of the existing languages in Mesopotamia and Persia, for instance. Or even just within the boundaries of modern-day Iraq.)
Without having read the book, this is something I've been thinking about recently as well: Arabic largely supplanted Aramaic (except in certain Aramaic-speaking Christian, Mandaean, and formerly Jewish communities) while other unrelated languages like Kurdish and Persian and Turkish persisted. What makes the persistence of Aramaic more interesting to me is that while some Christian (and formerly Jewish) communities have maintained Aramaic, there are nevertheless large populations of Arabic-speaking Christians (like the Melchites and Marionites, but also others from Syriac traditions, especially in Lebanon and Jordan) and formerly Jews.
Another similar observation from the region is that Phoenician persisted for centuries after Hebrew (and the other Canaanite languages) were supplanted by Aramaic. My understanding is that Phoenician was bolstered by ongoing contact with its Carthaginian colonies in the west, while Judah was culturally and politically dominated by Aramaic-speaking Assyria and Persia to the East.
On a similar note, I note patterns in loanwords in European languages:
Dutch and English are the Germanic languages that loan most from Latin and Romance languages. These territories are the Germanic-speaking ones that were under Roman rule.
Likewise, recent French loanwords from English are more often from French to begin with e.g. challenge and mix
However, it should be noted that Latinate loans into English far postdate Roman rule (at which time Britain wasn't even Germanic-speaking) to the point that it is almost irrelevant.
MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Tue Jul 30, 2019 12:05 pmDutch and English are the Germanic languages that loan most from Latin and Romance languages. These territories are the Germanic-speaking ones that were under Roman rule.
For Dutch, I think it's more salient that much of the present territory was under Spanish rule until 1581 and the rest was only liberated from French rule in 1815 and is still 40% Francophone.
MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Tue Jul 30, 2019 12:05 pmDutch and English are the Germanic languages that loan most from Latin and Romance languages. These territories are the Germanic-speaking ones that were under Roman rule.
For Dutch, I think it's more salient that much of the present territory was under Spanish rule until 1581 and the rest was only liberated from French rule in 1815 and is still 40% Francophone.
And, for English, the present territory was conquered by Frenchmen in 1066. It wasn't until 1362 that English was declared the official language, and not until 1399 that England had a monarch who was actually a native English speaker. French continued to be widely spoken in the ruling (literary, legal, political) class for at least another century, and even today random French words and phrases remain important in some legal contexts.
I suspect the fact that the literary classes from 1100-1600 pretty much had to be trilingual in English, Latin, AND also French probably helped Latin words penetrate into English more extensively than they would otherwise have done.
I don't know Dutch, but the vast majority of Italic vocabulary in English was borrowed after the Norman conquest
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him! kårroť
MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Tue Jul 30, 2019 12:05 pmDutch and English are the Germanic languages that loan most from Latin and Romance languages. These territories are the Germanic-speaking ones that were under Roman rule.
For Dutch, I think it's more salient that much of the present territory was under Spanish rule until 1581 and the rest was only liberated from French rule in 1815 and is still 40% Francophone.
And, for English, the present territory was conquered by Frenchmen in 1066. It wasn't until 1362 that English was declared the official language, and not until 1399 that England had a monarch who was actually a native English speaker. French continued to be widely spoken in the ruling (literary, legal, political) class for at least another century, and even today random French words and phrases remain important in some legal contexts.
I suspect the fact that the literary classes from 1100-1600 pretty much had to be trilingual in English, Latin, AND also French probably helped Latin words penetrate into English more extensively than they would otherwise have done.
Compared to that, isn't it a bit weird that the Normans themselves had ended up speaking French after, I think, about a century or so (or less?) of living in France?
Raphael wrote: ↑Wed Jul 31, 2019 4:05 am
Compared to that, isn't it a bit weird that the Normans themselves had ended up speaking French after, I think, about a century or so (or less?) of living in France?
The difference is that the (now French-speaking) Normans in England, Scotland, and Ireland were the ruling class and had close ties with the French-speaking ruling class across the channel, whereas the Normans in France were just one little part of a ruling class that was otherwise French-speaking, and were disconnected from their Old Norse-speaking forebears.
Last edited by Travis B. on Wed Jul 31, 2019 6:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Raphael wrote: ↑Wed Jul 31, 2019 4:05 amCompared to that, isn't it a bit weird that the Normans themselves had ended up speaking French after, I think, about a century or so (or less?) of living in France?
More: 911 to 1066, or 155 years.
The trend in both cases was the same— they switched to the country's language. But Travis is right, too: as nobles, horizontal relationships were important, and those favored French in both periods.
What makes a part of speech distinct? In my language adjective is conjugated much like a verb (person-number, and also TAM, albeit restricted, diminutive/augmentative, and egophoricity) and modifies a noun with a structure like those of verb. However, it participates in resultative construction, and can be adverbialized.
For a syntactician, they're different when different syntactic operations apply. Your description shows just that (the adjectives differ from verbs in that they can participate in resultatives and adverbialization).
Parts of speech don't need to be binary— your adjectives are very verby. Or you could just say that they're a subset of verbs.
zompist wrote: ↑Thu Aug 01, 2019 1:27 pm
For a syntactician, they're different when different syntactic operations apply. Your description shows just that (the adjectives differ from verbs in that they can participate in resultatives and adverbialization).
Parts of speech don't need to be binary— your adjectives are very verby. Or you could just say that they're a subset of verbs.
In short, @Akangka; if it’s your conlang, you are what makes parts-of-speech distinct.
Akangka wrote: ↑Thu Aug 01, 2019 10:56 amWhat makes a part of speech distinct? In my language adjective is conjugated much like a verb (person-number, and also TAM, albeit restricted, diminutive/augmentative, and egophoricity) and modifies a noun with a structure like those of verb. However, it participates in resultative construction, and can be adverbialized.
One of my own projects has the same situation, albeit more general in that pretty much any stem can take nominal or verbal inflection. Most people on the ZBB were adamant that nouns and verbs remained distinct when I showed the concept to them, however. From what I recall, they felt that applying nominal inflection to the stem silently derives a noun while applying verbal inflection derives a verb. My own interpretation has always been that the nominal forms are analogous to participles.
Mureta ikan topaasenni. Koomát terratomít juneeratu!
Shame on America | He/him
Why dental stop is often voiceless while alveolar stop is often voiced? In Indonesia, there's dental/alveolar asymmetry like that. In kayardild, /t̪/ is never voiced.
A distinction should be drawn between lexical classes and syntactic classes.
A language distinguishes two syntactic word classes when it has two different sets of rules about word position and usage and inflection. If X takes one set of inflections, and appears in one place in the clause, and Y takes a different set of inflections and appears in a different place in the clause, we can say that they belong to two different syntactic word classes: they are doing different things.
A language distinguishes two lexical word classes when it has two different sets of words that belong to different syntactic word classes - that is, there are some X words in the language that cannot act like Y words and vice versa. If every X can be a Y and vice versa, you do indeed have no lexical word classes - you can't look up X in the dictionary and see a description "noun" next to it - but you can still have word classes syntactically. All you're doing is allowing zero-derivation. If you imagine English, for example, with universal zero derivation permitted... you could still give a child a sentence like "the captain lamps the dog" and have them identify which words were nouns and which were verbs - even though 'captain', 'lamp' and 'dog' can all be either a verb or a noun in different contexts. This is why "the captain the lamp dog" is not a valid sentence, because you can't identify the nouns and verbs - captain and lamp can't be verbs because they follow articles, and 'dog' can't be the verb because it's in the wrong place and doesn't agree with either possible subject. So although we have zero-derivation, we're still distinguishing between nouns and verbs syntactically, and can recognise when the verb is missing.
You can have languages with no lexical distinction between nouns and verbs. I don't know if that's the consensus for any specific language, but it's certainly been suggested for some, particularly for some Austronesian languages. But I suspect there are no languages for which it's viable to propose no syntactic distinction between nouns and verbs.
You can, however, have more and less blurred distinctions. If words can sometimes take both nominal and verbal inflections at the same time, or can take nominal inflections while standing in the place the verb usually takes, and so on, that certainly blurs the lines a bit.
[To use an example from my conlang, Rawàng Ata: it's not unambiguous whether words like 'father' and so on are nouns or verbs. If we say the word for 'father' is a noun, then we say it's inalienably possessed, with obligatory possessive prefixes... but those prefixes are the same as the verbal agreement markers. So maybe "father" is actually a verb. It also has some verbal syntactic traits - e.g. you can't usually make it the topic (instead of saying "as for the father of bob, he's very tall", you'd say "as for bob, his father is very tall"). But on the other hand, the syntax is certainly different from most verbs (you can't put it in the passive voice, for instance). So if it's a verb, it's a strange verb. Or maybe it's an adjective, because most adjectives are also 'strange verbs'. And so on. However, in the language as a whole it's clear that there are nouns and verbs... there are just some matters of judgement about some borderline cases and how they're classified.]
In my grammar for my conlang Arpien, the word-and-phrase-classes I call “parts-of-speech” are “distributional” classes.
Words in the same class have the same “privileges of distribution” (iow can “go in the same places”); and if two words have the same privileges of distribution then they’re in the same word-class.
The context-free syntax is all about these word-classes; that is, every production-rule has one of the 22 open, “branchable” classes on the left-hand side of the arrow, and has two word-classes in a particular order on the right-hand side of the arrow. (The first or leftmost one must be one of the 22 branchable classes. The second is the class of the phrase’s head-word; it may also be branchable , or it may be from one of the 80 small closed non-branchable classes.)
(It’s thoroughly left-branching and head-final.)
It has no morphology, so the word-classes can’t be distinguished on the basis of what kinds of morphology can happen to them.
When making it, I was aware of the possible polysemy of “head” and “head-word”, and took care to be clear which meaning I intended there. (Ie in that grammar, not necessarily elsewhere.)
But I was unaware of the possibility of polysemy for part-of-speech or word-class.
I don’t know whether what I came up with should be called lexical categories or lexical classes or syntactic categories or syntactic classes* or word categories or word classes. (*Probably syntactic classes, if I understand Salmoneus’s post about them.)
But I do know that, whatever they should be called, the distinction between one of them and another one is quite clear.
@Salmoneus, can you help me out?
@Akangka, does that help you out?
