Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Zju]

Is there a natlang in which all or almost all nouns are obligatorily possessed? Presumably a 3SG marker would be used a lot.

[Kuchigakatai]

Is there a natlang in which all or almost all nouns are obligatorily possessed? Presumably a 3SG marker would be used a lot.

What would that mean in practice exactly? How would an entity of nature like the sky or a bug you encounter be possessed? I mean, if the sky or any random bug must be expressed with possession, at that point the 3SG is probably something else, maybe an article or a bare noun marker...

I recall that Indonesian often uses its 3SG possessive suffix -nya to express some uses normally found in demonstratives or the definite article in European languages, so it's not necessarily a possessive. It can also derive nouns; this little poorly-written entry in someone's blog gives the examples teguh 'firm' > teguhnya 'firmness', berhasil 'to succeed' > berhasilnya 'success'.

(Inspired by this I've sometimes thought of a romlang that does the same thing, except such use of su/sa is merely a merger of the demonstrative-then-article ipsum/ipsam and the possessive determiner suum/suam!)

[Vijay]

If almost all nouns were obligatorily possessed in some language, would obligatory possession even mean anything in that language?

[Pabappa]

I dont know of any natlang that does this. But in Pabappa the 3rd person possession is formed by deleting any final vowel and then adding -i. If the word does not end in a vowel the -i goes after the consonant. So, there are contrasts like
poppap ~ poppapi "purse ~ her purse", and
panesla ~ panesli "comb ~ her comb", but
pebupi ~ pebupi "house ~ her house" has the same form for both meanings because the endings are identical.

So how do I make the distinction? well, thats simple .... for most sentences, the ambiguity is no problem at all, since if there is a third person argument involved, it must have alreayd come up in the conversation. But when distinction is required, all I'd have to do is add the relevant noun back in again. Pabappa happens to have no pronouns, but chances are your language has pronouns, so you could just add the word for "her", "his", etc (in the genitive case, if you have one) and there would be no ambiguity.

In Pabappa, the system doesnt collapse because only a small number of nouns end in -i. If in your language you want *all* nouns to behave this way, however, the system might collapse as the third person possessive form comes to be reinterpreted as the free form.

[Nortaneous]

If almost all nouns were obligatorily possessed in some language, would obligatory possession even mean anything in that language?

yes, 'default nominal marker' would disappear when possessed by non-default possessor

[Vijay]

If almost all nouns were obligatorily possessed in some language, would obligatory possession even mean anything in that language?

yes, 'default nominal marker' would disappear when possessed by non-default possessor

Does there have to be a default possessor?

[Space60]

Do "cannot" and "can not" mean something different to you?

"I cannot win"/"I can't win" (it is impossible for me to win)

"I can not win" (it is possible for me not to win)

[quinterbeck]

Do "cannot" and "can not" mean something different to you?

"I cannot win"/"I can't win" (it is impossible for me to win)

"I can not win" (it is possible for me not to win)

Yes, and those are all pronounced distinctively (BrE):

"I cannot win" /aj ˈkanɒt wɪn/
"I can't win" /aj ˈkɑnt wɪn/
"I can not win" /aj kən ˈnɒt wɪn/

I would probably also parse /aj kəˈnɒt wɪn/ as "I cannot win"

[quinterbeck]

What strategies do different languages have for expressing the senses of 'even' and 'only'? The English words are very flexible, but I'm wondering if other languages have items that perform the same function in a more restrictive way.

Do they always pattern like adverbs? I'm trying to get these concepts into a conlang without resorting to adding simple adverbs that translate as 'only' or 'even'.

[Kuchigakatai]

Do "cannot" and "can not" mean something different to you?

"I cannot win"/"I can't win" (it is impossible for me to win)

"I can not win" (it is possible for me not to win)

Yeah, and they're pronounced differently too. I have also come across native speakers saying "I can't not win", usually meaning "I have to win; if I lose the consequences are very bad" (I might lose but I must do what I can to avoid that), sometimes "it is impossible for me to lose" (winning is the only possible outcome).

What strategies do different languages have for expressing the senses of 'even' and 'only'? The English words are very flexible, but I'm wondering if other languages have items that perform the same function in a more restrictive way.

Do they always pattern like adverbs? I'm trying to get these concepts into a conlang without resorting to adding simple adverbs that translate as 'only' or 'even'.

My best English>Mandarin dictionary lists 21 meanings of English "only", without counting expressions, 16 of which are for the adverb. Some of these could easily be merged though. Naturally I imagine you're talking about its use meaning 'exclusively'. (I'm mentioning this because recently in another forum I was in a discussion about the grammar of the English word "now", and we ended up needing to clarify about 8 different uses of it, because we were partially talking past each other by referring to different uses.)

On the other hand, I don't know what you mean by "flexible". Notice that regular English has some funny restriction regarding "only" when it applies to subjects. While it's possible to say the likes of "Only the blind truly appreciate sight" and "Only Quinterbeck left the place", this construction is a bit marked, so a pseudo-cleft is generally preferred: "The blind are the only ones who truly appreciate sight", "Quinterbeck was the only one who left". Note that Spanish solo doesn't have this restriction, so Solo Quinterbeck se fue sounds perfectly normal.



Anyway, Mandarin 只 zhǐ 'only' has the restriction that it must appear as an adverb modifying a verb, and it has the further restriction (similar to that of English) that it can only affect a phrase that follows it (the verb, a direct object, some adverbials). This means that, unlike English which can clarify the restriction applies to a direct object or a PP by moving the word only ("I'm bringing only apples and only for you and her"), Mandarin 只 zhǐ is forcibly ambiguous in terms of scope and can only be clarified with further explanation.

Because of these restrictions, 只 zhǐ can't modify subjects or adverbials before the main verb. Ways to get around these restrictions include using the compound 只有 zhǐyǒu only-EXIST before the subject or adverbial, the compound 只是 zhǐshì only-COPULA before the subject or adverbial, pseudo-clefts ('Only staff can read it' -> "Who can read it is only staff"), if it's a time adverbial the adverb 才 cái 'only then' ("They only recently discovered it" -> "Recently, they only-then discovered it"), and of course rewordings ('This is due to regulation only' -> "The reason is only regulation").

'Even' is handled with a serial verb construction using 連 lián 'to link sth, connect', reinforced by the adverbs 也 yě 'also' or 都 dōu 'all' next to the main verb. Think of 連...也 lián...yě and 連...都 lián...dōu as "correlatives", i.e. words that go together. It's not like the adverbs actually bear those meanings, so the latter is not "even...all", but just "even".

你連方便麵都不會煮呢？ nǐ lián fāngbiàn-miàn dōu bú huì zhǔ ne?
2SG even convenient-noodle all not can cook Q
'You can't even cook instant noodles!?'

[zompist]

What strategies do different languages have for expressing the senses of 'even' and 'only'? The English words are very flexible, but I'm wondering if other languages have items that perform the same function in a more restrictive way.

Do they always pattern like adverbs? I'm trying to get these concepts into a conlang without resorting to adding simple adverbs that translate as 'only' or 'even'.

Well, you get some interesting behavior in French. "Only" = ne...que "not...that":

Je ne lis que les bandes dessinées.
I not read-1s that the strip-p drawn-f-p
I only read comics.

There's also "seul" which may interest you as it's an adjective, not a particle.

Elle est la seule à avoir répondu.
she be-3s the-s.f only-s.f to have respond-p.part
She is the only one to have responded.


The word for 'even' is a particle, même, but it's the same particle as the reflexive, distinguished by syntax: moi-même "myself", même moi "even me".

[Kuchigakatai]

More stuff, now on Latin and Arabic.



Latin expresses "only" with the adverb sōlum, without much in terms of restrictions, like Spanish. When modifying the subject, the adjective equivalent to "alone", sōlus/a/um, is often used. E.g. Ego sōlus animadvertī ("1SG.NOM alone.MASC.SG.NOM noticed.1SG") 'I was the only one who noticed it', where sōlus agrees in gender and number with the speaker behind ego '1SG.NOM' (Latin has zero problems modifying personal pronouns with adjectives, and also participles and relative clauses). Note the historical relationship between "only" and "alone" in English, etymologically "one-ly", "all-one".

Latin uses the conjunctions "and" and "or" to express 'even'. You know they mean 'even' in those cases because they're not coordinating anything. Imagine something that is literally "I forgot everything about him; I don't remember and his face". This "and" doesn't coordinate anything, so it must mean 'even'.

Vel vultūs nōn meminī.
or face.GEN not remember.PRES.1SG
'I don't even remember his face.'


Standard Arabic has an interesting, but marked, construction to express the notion of "only" where the main verb is negated and then the conjunction إلا illaa 'except' introduces the unique thing that does the verb. It is most famously found in the shahada:

لا إله إلا الله laa ´ilaah-a ´illaa llaah-u
not.PRES god-ACC.CONST except God-NOM.DEF
(more literally) 'There isn't any god except for the God.'
(natural English) 'God is the only god [that there is].'

(The construction of the present-tense negator لا laa + a noun in the accusative construct state (ACC.CONST) is a negative existential, "there is no X". This implied existential is what إلا illaa makes an exception to.)

I mentioned the construction above is marked. The normal way to express "only" is with the sentence-final adverb فقط faqaT, which has an ambiguous scope somewhere else before in the sentence. Compare with the sentence-final uses of English 'only', 'too' and 'first', or better, the Cantonese purely sentence-final 添 tim1 'too' and 先 shin1 'first'. (these are conventionally marked with the high-level tone 1, but they actually bear a unique high-falling tone, even in HK where it's very unusual)

There is nothing interesting about "even" in Standard Arabic. It uses the conjunction حتى Hattäa.

[akam chinjir]

Cantonese has a sentence-final particle jē (I think 啫) only.

Ser, what are you counting as your best English>Mandarin dictionary?

Edit: For that matter, Mandarin has sentence-final éryǐ 而已 only, and that's all.

[Kuchigakatai]

Ser, what are you counting as your best English>Mandarin dictionary?

胡壮麟 HU Zhuanglin (ed.)'s 新世纪英汉大词典 A New Century English-Chinese Dictionary (2016), published by 外研社 (Foreign Languages Teaching and Research Press) and Collins (Amazon US, Amazon UK, Douban, Dangdang). 3100 pages, no pinyin, lots of example sentences, lots of proper names and jargon (including diseases). It's available on Pleco, which unfortunately separates the example sentences from the meanings they exemplify, but on the other hand generates both pinyin (through automatic but adjustable parsing) and a version of all example sentences in Traditional Chinese characters quite effectively.

Note that it's specifically this latest version, which is a vast improvement over the previous, 2200-page-long edition by 惠宇 HUI Yu, published in 2004. HU Zhuanglin's dictionary might be very similar or the same as the Collins FLTRP English-Mandarin Dictionary, published by Collins and 外研社 in the same year (2016).

Do not confuse it with its abridged version, which has the same Mandarin title but says "Abridged" in English, about 1900 pages long. Do not confuse it with the similarly-titled 新世纪汉英大词典 A New Century Chinese-English Dictionary (2016), also by HUI Yu and HU Zhuanglin, which goes the other direction (Mandarin->English), is ~2400 pages long, and is to a large extent an "average" and "mediocre" dictionary by Mandarin standards. There is a number of other dictionaries with similar but less easy-to-confuse titles (吴景荣 WU Jingrong's 新时代汉英大词典, 张健 ZHANG Jian's 新世纪汉英多功能词典, 潘绍中 PAN Shaozhong's 2-volume 新时代汉英大词典).

I have no idea how it compares with 陆谷孙 LU Gusun (ed.)'s simply-titled 英汉大词典 The English-Chinese Dictionary (yes, "The") (Douban), whose latest edition was in 2007 and is an official project of the Chinese government dating back to the early 1980s, apparently an ambitious piece of work originally pushed by premier Zhou Enlai some time after Nixon's visit and Mao's death... The 2007 edition is about 3200 pages long.

[akam chinjir]

Thank you!

[Travis B.]

That first construction is a Mid-Atlantic / Inland North thing, probably calqued from German.

You are referring to the use of come with without an object; alynnidalar was referring to the dropping of I, which is not something German does.

[hwhatting]

If almost all nouns were obligatorily possessed in some language, would obligatory possession even mean anything in that language?

yes, 'default nominal marker' would disappear when possessed by non-default possessor

Does there have to be a default possessor?

Yes, if possessor marking is obligatory, there has to be - not necessarily one and the same default possessor for all nouns, but maybe different ones for different word classes.

[Vijay]

Why does there have to be?

Suppose you have a language where the prefix sa- is used for a 3rd-person possessor, na- is used for a 2nd-person possessor, and ma- is used for a 1st-person possessor. Suppose also that all nouns in this language bore one of these prefixes depending on who the possessor was (e.g. sakope 'his/her/its/their basket' but nakope 'your basket'). Who is the "default possessor"?

[Nortaneous]

That first construction is a Mid-Atlantic / Inland North thing, probably calqued from German.

You are referring to the use of come with without an object; alynnidalar was referring to the dropping of I, which is not something German does.

man I completely missed that that could be a thing being commented on - which I guess proves its validity at least in writing

[alynnidalar]

That first construction is a Mid-Atlantic / Inland North thing, probably calqued from German.

You are referring to the use of come with without an object; alynnidalar was referring to the dropping of I, which is not something German does.

Ha, I noticed I put that in there as I wrote my example sentences, but it's a fun feature of my dialect so I figured I would leave it. Didn't consider it might cause confusion in a discussion over a different linguistic feature!

I was always under the impression it was a Swedish thing, to be honest--I associate the "come with" construction with people from Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I don't know how widespread it is broadly; I intentionally started using it more a few years ago because I like it so I know it's more entrenched in my speech than your average southern Michigander.

(I did a quick search in my company Slack and couldn't find many uses--mostly me and another Michigander coworker (who, interestingly enough, was born in Russia, but moved to Michigan as a child), and a couple from an Ohioan coworker)