Different word categories to express a concept

[Vijay]

I might be wrong here, but I get the impression that Malayalam (if not other Dravidian languages as well) has several (animate) nouns that have two plural forms, one of which expresses more respect (towards the pluralized noun) than the other. For example, IINM 'Brahmins' can be either [ˈbraːməɳər] or [braːmɛɳɛnˈmaːr], but [ˈbraːməɳər] is the more respectful form.

[Chuma]

Maybe sort of an example: One of the words I most miss in English is what in Swedish is ju (German uses ja; it's not the same meaning as the interjection ("yes"), but cognate). It's an adverb basically meaning "I don't mean to imply that you don't already know this". English would have to use something like "obviously" or phrases like "of course", "as you know", or so on. In some cases you can use "since X, Y" instead of "X ju, so Y".

[Kuchigakatai]

Many languages have "stative verbs" that express notions rendered in English as adjectives. The likes of Mandarin don't interest me here (for the reason expressed in the opening post), but Latin has a few such verbs, like calēre 'to be hot', madēre 'to be wet', patēre 'to be open, lie open'. Examples: caeli maxima porta patet 'heaven's greatest gate is open' (Ennius), sanguine terra madet 'the soil is wet with blood' (Vergil).

Arabic has a few similar verbs translated with an English copula + an adjective, but dynamic instead of stative, that mean 'to become X'. The X is usually a colour or "defect". E.g. ʔiħmarra 'to become red, to blush', ʔiswadda 'to become black, darken', ʔiʕwad:ʒa 'to get twisted or bent'.

In transitive verbs with an expressed direct object, Mandarin often expresses duration adverbials as noun modifiers. The classic example is expressing "I have studied Mandarin for two years" as literally "I have studied two years' Mandarin". English has a reminiscent construction: "two years' worth of Mandarin".

我學了兩年的中文了
wǒ xué-le liǎng nián de zhōngwén le
1SG study-PRFV two year ATTRIB Chinese COS

ATTRIB = attributive, marking a possessor noun, or an adjective, or the end of a relative clause
COS = change-of-state; the Mandarin equivalent of the perfect ("I have done") involves a combination of the perfective -le and the change-of-state final particle le in the same sentence

[Qwynegold]

Today I learned the Finnish verb harrastaa, which my source glossed as "to have as a hobby". The hobby is expressed as an object in the elative case (which often translates English "from", e.g. talosta "from the house"), so I suppose it could be glossed even more literally as "to make a hobby of". In any case, it seems unusual crosslinguistically to have a transitive verb for this concept rather than using a copular expression. (I thought Korean might also express this with a transitive verb, but it turned out I was wrong.)

(I don't know how common elative objects are in Finnish, but I note that the common verb pitää takes one in the sense of "to like"; with a partitive or accusative object, it means "hold" bzw. "keep".)

Um, harrastaa takes a partitive object. I think you may have been confused by some object with some kind of nominalizer ending with -s and then the partitive -tA.

I think verbs that require an elative object are quite rare. The only other one I can think of rn is tykätä, which also means like.

[Seirios]

A Mandarin verbal aspect, -过 -guo. It's formally an experiential, but when used alone it means "ever". e.g.

nǐ

2s

chī

eat

-guo

-EXPR

fàn

meal

ma

Q.POLAR

"Have you ever had a meal?"

To ask about a recent experience, which is the more common usage of English perfect, you also need what's sometimes called the actual aspect, using a sentence final particle 了 le:

nǐ

2s

chī

eat

-guo

-EXPR

fàn

meal

le

ACTU

ma

Q.POLAR

"Have you had your meal?"

Take out the polar question marker ma and you have the indicative version.

For negative statements and questions, without resorting to adverbs like 还 hái "yet", my intuition is to use the continuative SFP 呢 ne instead of le, though some others may not share my judgment:

tā

3s

méi

NEG.IMPF

chī

eat

-guo

-EXPR

fàn

meal

"S/he's never had a meal."

tā

3s

méi

NEG.IMPF

chī

eat

-guo

-EXPR

fàn

meal

ne

CNTV

"S/he's not had her/his meal."



Another case is the concept of "man"/"woman" (as in "(adult) male/female human being"). Arguably Mandarin does not have a synchronically simple lexeme for either concepts, but it does for the adjectives "male human"/"female human": 男 nán 女nǚ. These are narrowed from their original meaning as either adjectival or nominal.
In standard Mandarin, "man"/"woman" are instead expressed with synchronically regular morphology or compounding (use "man" as example as it's got simpler Pinyin diacritics): 男-的 nán-de 'human.male-MODIF', 男-人 nán-ren 'human.male-person', 男-性 nán-xìng 'human.male-gender[ed]', 男-生 nán-shēng 'human.male-student', and arguably 男-子 nán-zǐ 'human.male-person' (the literary morpheme also seen in words like 学子 xué-zǐ "student" lit. 'study-person')

[Kuchigakatai]

For negative statements and questions, without resorting to adverbs like 还 hái "yet", my intuition is to use the continuative SFP 呢 ne instead of le, though some others may not share my judgment

Yeah, I wonder how that'd fare if we asked native speakers if they'd agree with this use of 呢 ne with the meaning given...

This is basically off-topic now, but that speculation of yours on negation also reminds me of a passage in Kubler & Wang's Intermediate Spoken Chinese, where they teach (in unit 11) that the negated form of

Xiǎo

little

Liú

Liu

chī-le

eat-PRF

hěn

very

jiǔ

long_time

le

ACTU

'Little Liu has been eating for a long time.'

is

Xiǎo

little

Liú

Liu

hěn

very

jiǔ

long_time

méi

hasn't

chī

eat

le

ACTU

'Little Liu hasn't been eating for a long time.'

and that of

Tā

3SG

kāi-chē

drive-car

kāi-le

drive-PRF

yì

one

nián

year

le

ACTU

'She's been driving for a year.'

is

Tā

3SG

yì

one

nián

year

méi

hasn't

kāi-chē

drive-car

le

ACTU

'She hasn't been driving for a year / hasn't driven in a year.'

...which is an interesting transformation. I wonder why Mandarin grammars tend not to give a clear picture of how negation works.

Another case is the concept of "man"/"woman" (as in "(adult) male/female human being"). Arguably Mandarin does not have a synchronically simple lexeme for either concepts

Yeah, I love pointing that out to people. "Did you know Mandarin is so gender-neutral it doesn't even really have words for 'man' and 'woman'? Just adjectives meaning 'male' and 'female'." (A simplification of course, since the lexemes are there, they're just... compounds, surprisingly.) There's also 男人 nánrén and 女人 nǚrén.

[Seirios]

For negative statements and questions, without resorting to adverbs like 还 hái "yet", my intuition is to use the continuative SFP 呢 ne instead of le, though some others may not share my judgment

Yeah, I wonder how that'd fare if we asked native speakers if they'd agree with this use of 呢 ne with the meaning given...

A question with just guo gives me the "ever" interpretation. E.g.

tā

3s

méi

NEG.IMPF

wèi

feed

-guo

EXPR

māo

cat

ma

Q.POLAR

I would definitely understand it as "has s/he ever fed a cat before?" (i.e. whether s/he has ever had such an experience)

Personally, for a recent instance in negatives, I use the adverb hái "yet" very commonly for some reason, and it can get so reduced as a [ɛ̤] for me. But without it and with ne (le here is either ungrammatical or expresses a meaning that's usually too weird to parse)

tā

3s

méi

NEG.IMPF

wèi

feed

-guo

EXPR

māo

cat

ne

CNTV

ma

Q.POLAR

I'd (still) definitely understand it as asking whether s/he's fed the cat in say, the last 24 hours or something (i.e. asking whether the cat's been fed by her/him for the most recent time it was supposed to).

The part I'm not sure of is the reason of the supplementation. A ne instead of le in a positive -guo sentence would definitely be interpreted as the interjection ne, and when I force a reading of the continuative ne the result sounds worse than using le in the negative, and neither is parsable.

This is basically off-topic now, but that speculation of yours on negation also reminds me of a passage in Kubler & Wang's Intermediate Spoken Chinese, where they teach (in unit 11) that the negated form of

Xiǎo

little

Liú

Liu

chī-le

eat-PRF

hěn

very

jiǔ

long_time

le

ACTU

'Little Liu has been eating for a long time.'

is

Xiǎo

little

Liú

Liu

hěn

very

jiǔ

long_time

méi

hasn't

chī

eat

le

ACTU

'Little Liu hasn't been eating for a long time.'

and that of

Tā

3SG

kāi-chē

drive-car

kāi-le

drive-PRF

yì

one

nián

year

le

ACTU

'She's been driving for a year.'

is

Tā

3SG

yì

one

nián

year

méi

hasn't

kāi-chē

drive-car

le

ACTU

'She hasn't been driving for a year / hasn't driven in a year.'

...which is an interesting transformation.

Ouch. I can see why the book says these are the negative counterparts...but I wouldn't be sure that that's in a way the readers necessarily expect. They mean the following, more unambiguously (disregarding any emphasis in English my paraphrases might imply)

"It's been a long time since LL started eating and LL hasn't stopped doing that yet."
"LL has been without food for a long time."

"It's been one year since s/he started driving, during which s/he (mostly) kept doing so."
"It's been one year since s/he last drove."

If you wanted to express "LL has been eating but not for a long time" or "S/he's been driving but not for one year", I'd say the following:

For the former:

Xiǎo

,

Liú

,

(hái)

yet

méi

NEG.IMPF

chī

eat

duó/hěn

QUANT.INDEF/very

jiǔ

long.time

ne

CNTV

or

Xiǎo

,

Liú

,

chī

eat

-le

PFV

{ bù ,

NEG

méi

NEG.IMPF

duō }

QUANT.INDEF

jiǔ

long.time

and for the latter:

tā

3s

{ kāi

drive

chē ,

car

(kāi)

drive

chē

car

kāi

drive

-le }

PFV

méi/bú

NEG.IMPF/NEG

dào

reach

yì

one

nián

year

. "S/he's been driving for less than a year."
if you want to emphasise the negation. More usually I'd say

tā

3s

(kāi)

drive

chē

car

(hái)

yet

méi

NEG.IMPF

kāi

drive

yì

one

nián

year

ne

CNTV

I wonder why Mandarin grammars tend not to give a clear picture of how negation works.

Probably the thematic approach of grammar books. One section on direct objects, one section on causative, one on passive, one on negation, etc. So it's easy for their interactions to be neglected.

[Linguoboy]

Several languages constructions to indicate recent past ("to have just") which differ significantly from the English perfect + just construction and from other perfect constructions in those languages.

Romance languages tend to use a non-modal auxiliary;

Spanish: Acabo de comer. lit. "I finish eating"
French: Je viens de manger. lit. "I come from eating"

Modern Celtic languages use a construction somewhat similar to English. The Welsh construction parallels both the progressive and perfect constructions in that language:

Rw i'n bwyta. "I'm eating."
Rw i wedi bwyta. "I've eaten". (lit. "I am after eating".)
Rw i newydd bwyta. "I've just eaten". (lit. "I am newly eating".)

Irish, though, traditionally lacked a perfect construction equivalent to that of English. It uses a passive-perfect construction to express recent past; being passive, it can't be used with intransitive verbs[*]).

Tá an práta ite agam. lit. "The potato is eaten at-me".

But the recent perfect construction parallels not this but the progressive:

Táim/Tá mé ag ithe. "I'm eating."
Táim/Tá mé t'réis/i ndiaidh ithe. "I've just eaten." (lit. "I am after eating".)

This last construction has been calqued in Irish English.

It's a similar situation in Scotland, where the preposition air "on" is swapped in for aig "at":

Tha mi aig ithe. "I am eating."
Tha mi air ithe. "I have eaten."

(There's a parallel construction in Irish, but it's only used with a limited number of verbs. I suspect in both cases, modern ar/air derives here not from but from Old Irish for "on", but íar "after'.)

[*] I think it might be possible to use a periphrasis with déan "do", but Tá an t-ithe déanta agam sounds stilted to me to say the last.

[MacAnDàil]

That's all cool.

I think you miss-wrote by accident the first Scottish Gaelic example. I think the first should be 'ag ithe' and not 'air ithe'.

[Linguoboy]

I think you miss-wrote by accident the first Scottish Gaelic example. I think the first should be 'ag ithe' and not 'air ithe'.

Cheers. I was kind of rushing when I wrote that. I'm hoping to do a little more investigation and add more. (ISTR that both Korean and Hindi use light verb constructions but I can't remember the details.)

[Kuchigakatai]

I don't feel like rewriting everything I had written, but it was mostly examples of how Arabic uses verbs to express "almost/nearly", "barely/almost not/narrowly", "still" and "not anymore", which English uses adverbs for. They're all auxiliary verbs basically.

Just learned Hebrew has a verb meaning "to [do something] again":
https://biblehub.com/hebrew/3254.htm

It is followed by the infinitive optionally marked by לְ lə- (a basic preposition), optionally accompanied by עוֹד ʿôḏ 'again'. Literally, and more basically, the verb means "to add".