Thank you both for your comments!
bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Sep 04, 2021 8:56 am
I’m curious to know if the following would also be an equally good translation of this sentence?
The dangerous animal which bit the person ate the fish which was prepared by them (the person).
It would! "Equally good" is a little tricky to gauge; I struggle sometimes to represent the newsworthiness gradient in English. In (21), the eating is the most newsworthy piece of information, and the biting is the least. But there's a number of reasons that could be the case (each of which English would handle differently), and it's hard to tell which ones are at play without more context.
Like:
squṇgukslọq might be the most newsworthy because it's being used to shift the topic, in which case a good translation could be
Speaking of the dangerous animal that ate the fish, it bit the person that prepared the fish!
Or maybe it's the most newsworthy because the speaker is trying to stress it, in which case a better translation might be
It was the dangerous animal that ate the fish that bit the person who prepared the fish.
Xịlhtuṇguklịq might be least-newsworthy because the person getting bitten by the animal is information that the listener already knows, in which case your translation works especially well.
bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Sep 04, 2021 8:56 am
Also, I can’t say I’m keeping up too well with everything you’re saying in this thread, but what I do understand leads me to believe that you have indeed managed to successfully erase the predicate/argument distinction — at least on the level of roots. I believe the closest things to ‘nouns’ in Hiding Waters would in fact be the classifier infixes, these being the only parts of the language which refer to specific referents. e.g. in the sentence above, you could easily say that
-ṇgu-,
-slo-~
-slọ-,
-li-~
-lị- are the arguments, while
squ-k-q,
xngu-k-sq,
xịlhtu-k-q are the predicates — which in fact lines up rather well with both English translations. And actually, now that I think about it some more, it may be that you can analyse all Hiding Waters roots as ‘predicates’ and all Hiding Water classifiers as ‘arguments’, which would mean that it doesn’t so much erase the predicate/argument distinction as much as transposing it onto the syntax/morphology distinction. Though I could be wrong.
That's a promising idea I think! It's definitely the case that arguments can be
marked in Hiding Waters—you're saying you would focus your description on that, conceding that arguments are not represented by syntactic constituents?
Would you still call the classifier infixes "nouns", do you think? Or would just "argument inflections" be better? I think calling them "nouns" likely makes people think of independent syntactic constituents rather than morphological inflections, or things that can be expanded into noun phrases, which these cannot be.
You did say one thing that I think isn't quite true (
"...these being the only parts of the language which refer to specific referents..."), which is probably the next interesting body of data to look at. I talk about this more below in response to Vardelm, but it'll need its own post I think.
bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Sep 04, 2021 8:56 am
EDIT: And now that I think about it even more, Hiding Waters is starting to feel exceedingly reminiscient of predicate calculus: perhaps the most direct translation of the above sentence would be EAT(dangerous,fish)∧PREPARE(generic,fish)∧BIT(dangerous,generic). Maybe Hiding Waters should simply be analysed as a direct linguistic translation of the predicate calculus.
There's definitely some resemblance there, although not to the level of Lojban or anything—or at least, I didn't set out to
accomplish that, so if the resemblance is stronger than in languages where that was the goal, I'd be very surprised.
Vardelm wrote: ↑Sat Sep 04, 2021 11:25 am
This looks different from the examples you gave previously since you have both agent & patient included in the same word/phrase. To me, this sort of look like noun incorporation. Maybe it would be good to show very simple examples of how & where agents & patients can be included in a sentence, starting with intransitive & working to transitive with the "incorporation" shown here and then in separate phrases. I would also used examples that are as close to each other as possible in terms of content so that it's easy to see what's changing. My main question is when you have "incorporation" like this (agent & patient in same word/phrase) how does that differ in meaning from when they are separate? Is it like typical noun incorporation where the referent is less salient?
Sure! I'll note here that there is
also an incorporation mechanism that I haven't talked explicitly about so far, but based on your comment and bradrn's above, sounds like what I should dig into next—I think it may have important ramifications for bradrn's idea about HW nouns manifesting purely morphologically.
Here are some examples of agent and patient marking (again just glossing the agent/patient markers). Each predicate can mark up to one agent and up to one patient.
(I think I should also give a little more detail about how the classifiers work, because it's important for differentiating them from incorporation: any given classifier can be used to reference a great many things. The
-lng- classifier used below doesn't necessarily mean a child; it could be a young animal, or a new sapling, or a bag that has been handled recently by children. While the system has a lot of metaphorical extensions, its roots are in the very acute sense of smell the conspecies that speaks the language has—the conceptual core of
-lng- is not "child" so much as "thing that smells like children". But when translating a contextless example sentence, I tend to just use the most obvious thing the referent might be.)
(22a-c) show a predicate with just an agent marked, just a patient marked, and then both an agent and patient marked. (22d) shows a two-predicate clause where the less-newsworthy predicate provides more information about a referent in the first.
22a) Ṇulukng.
- ṇu<lu>kng
- sleeping.PFV<CLF(generic).AGENT>
They went to sleep.
22b) Ṇuklụng.
- ṇuk<lụ>ng
- sleeping.PFV<CLF(generic).PATIENT>
They fell asleep.
22c) Ṇuluklngụng.
- ṇu<lu>k<lngụ>ng
- sleeping.PFV<CLF(generic).AGENT><CLF(young).PATIENT>
They put the child to bed. (Lit: 'they made the child sleep')
22d) Ṇuluklngụng hulhlngụjunaụ̀wh.
- ṇu<lu>k<lngụ>ng
- sleeping.PFV<CLF(generic).AGENT><CLF(young).PATIENT>
- hulh<lngụ>junaụ̀wh
- my.cousin<CLF(child).PATIENT>
They put my little cousin to bed. (Lit: 'they made the child sleep; the child is my cousin')
(22a) and (22b) show HW's active-stative morphosyntactic alignment at work—whether the single argument is marked as an agent or patient adds or removes a connotation of agency or intent. Given appropriate context, (22a) could also be interpreted as "They caused unspecified others to sleep", and (22b) could mean "They were put to sleep by someone unspecified", but the given translations would be the most common meaning.
(22c) explicitly marks both an agent and a patient, so it unambiguously describes a situation where one party is effecting the sleeping and another party is experiencing it.
(22d) is the same as (22c), except it adds another less-newsworthy predicate that says more about the referent of the
-lng- (child) classifier used in the first predicate.
Here's a similar example set:
23a) Hulkuxkoụ̀n.
- hu<lku>xkoùn
- brought.STAT<CLF(male).AGENT>
He is bringing (unspecified things).
23b) Huxslọkoụ̀n.
- hux<slọ>koùn
- brought.STAT<CLF(fish).PATIENT>
The fish (or fish-smelling thing) is being brought (by unspecified bringers).
23c) Hulkuxslọkoụ̀n.
- hu<lku>x<slọ>koùn
- brought.STAT<CLF(male).AGENT><CLF(fish).PATIENT>
He is bringing the fish (or fish-smelling thing).
23d) Hulkuxslọkoụ̀n ịwhulhslọxk.
- hu<lku>x<slọ>koùn
- brought.STAT<CLF(male).AGENT><CLF(fish).PATIENT>
- ịwhulh<slọ>xk
- knife<CLF(fish).PATIENT>
He is bringing the knife.
In (23d), the less-newsworthy predicate adds information about the referent of
-sl- (fish), saying that it is a knife—one that smells of fish, probably to be used for fish-cleaning.
Does that provide clarity/spark ideas about the agent/patient marking system?
Next I'll talk in detail about the root incorporation mechanism—it's featured quietly in a few of the examples so far, such as in (3) to turn "raining" into "raining in the south", in (12) to turn "bring" into "bring me", and in (15a-c) to turn "cousin" into "my cousin." There are ways in which incorporated roots
can refer to specific referents, which is peculiar for noun incorporation, and may be relevant to bradrn's observations.
. I'll try to keep it interesting, I promise!
