Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Linguoboy]

The thing about those moods is that I can't take them seriously for some reason with the exception of the cohortative, probably because the cohortative is the only one that is really grammaticalized (i.e. let's has become grammaticalized as a cohortative marker). The rest just seem like different vague ways of categorizing hortative statements, with the only clear differences being positive versus negative and cohortative verssu non-cohortative.

Agreed. In general I'm sceptical of multiplying grammatical distinctions in the absence of clear morphosyntactic distinctions because otherwise where do you stop?

[Salmoneus]

The thing about those moods is that I can't take them seriously... The rest just seem like different vague ways of categorizing hortative statements, with the only clear differences being positive versus negative and cohortative verssu non-cohortative.

I'm confused. A "mood" IS a vague way of categorising modal statements. What more do you want from it?

I also don't believe you. I'm sure, having gotten this far in life, that you can recognise the difference between, say, encouraging (adhortative) and pleading (suprahortative).

[malloc]

One thing I have always wondered: how does rhyming work in languages with significant inflection and agreement? Consider a language like Latin where nouns and adjectives agree in number, gender, and case. It seems like rhymes would frequently turn into repeating the same inflectional form in successive lines, like -ōrum or -āvērunt or something.

[Travis B.]

The thing about those moods is that I can't take them seriously... The rest just seem like different vague ways of categorizing hortative statements, with the only clear differences being positive versus negative and cohortative verssu non-cohortative.

I'm confused. A "mood" IS a vague way of categorising modal statements. What more do you want from it?

I also don't believe you. I'm sure, having gotten this far in life, that you can recognise the difference between, say, encouraging (adhortative) and pleading (suprahortative).

The key thing about moods is that they are grammaticalized, even if their meanings themselves are vague. And I am not saying I don't recognize some of the distinctions referred to in the Wiki article, but I do not think they count as separate moods per se beyond cohortative versus non-cohortative and affirmative versus negative hortative, precisely because these distinctions are encoded grammatically.

[Vijay]

The Tamil word for 'rough, uncombed hair' sounds in Malayalam like 'pubic hair that was shat'.

[zompist]

The key thing about moods is that they are grammaticalized, even if their meanings themselves are vague.

Right, and moods are generally a dimension of verbal morphology.

However, the Wikipedia article didn't call them moods-- it called them modalities. Modality is a vaguer term and can include lexical items (like English 'may'), and need not be marked only on verbs.

At the same time, the Wikipedia article is questioned as original research and has no citations, so at best it's someone's guess. It doesn't match Palmer's breakdown in Mood & Modality.

[Frislander]

One thing I have always wondered: how does rhyming work in languages with significant inflection and agreement? Consider a language like Latin where nouns and adjectives agree in number, gender, and case. It seems like rhymes would frequently turn into repeating the same inflectional form in successive lines, like -ōrum or -āvērunt or something.

Bold of you to assume speakers would see that as a problem and wouldn't use it as an opportunity to rhyme the shit out of their language. Alternatively if rhyming is so easy and common in the language, that might also encourage them to use other forms of rhyme like alliteration (which I hear is technically a kind of rhyme).

[gach]

One thing I have always wondered: how does rhyming work in languages with significant inflection and agreement? Consider a language like Latin where nouns and adjectives agree in number, gender, and case. It seems like rhymes would frequently turn into repeating the same inflectional form in successive lines, like -ōrum or -āvērunt or something.

To continue on Frislander's second point, if you think that there's no artistry in mechanical rhyming emerging out of suffix morphology, you should probably adopt some other pattern as your main poetic device. You can still throw in a selection of rhymes here and there, but if a large proportion of the ones you can come up with are boring and predictable, the resulting poetry will be that much less captivating.

Similarly, if your language had a rich system of alliterative concord, alliteration is probably not the best device for creating interesting poetry. It would then make sense that Bantu poetry for example wouldn't care that much about alliteration. If any expert from the field can provide counter evidence for that prediction, I'd be interested to know.

[Pabappa]

Does anybody know how Polish evolved a gender contrast in the past tense of its verbs? (And in fact, almost everything except the present tense?) It looks like they stuck person markers on top of a word that had a fixed gender contrast, but do we know what that was? Russian may preserve the older state, in that its past tense verbs distinguish gender but have no person marking at all .... kind of like an adjective or a participle. But Polish doesn't seem to have any word forms that look like they might have been the source of the new verbs, and Russian's don't seem to have any other use besides verbs. Im just curious, this is to fulfill my own desire for knowledge. Can anyone help?

[WeepingElf]

I am not a Slavicist, but AFAIK the gendered past tense forms continue old participles. Polish must have tacked on personal endings analogously to the present tense.

[Linguoboy]

IIRC, the personal forms are just cliticised forms of “to be”. You can see a parallel development in the Indic languages.

[Pabappa]

Okay thank you. Two interesting things, though:

1) It's interesting that it's "be" instead of "have". I would have thought that saying the equivalent of "i am written", "i am slapped" etc would cause confusion, but i suppose its likely that Polish went through the stage where Russian is now, and therefore the old meanings of the participles were long gone by the time the Poles slapped the person endings on.
2) Interesting that gender was preserved, unlike in the Romance languages where the participles are in use for the perfect tense but are (afaik) always masculine in all Romance languages, even Romanian which was in contact with Slavic languages.

As for why participles and past tense seem to merge in the first place, Im not sure ... but as can be seen in the "slapped" example above, even English does it, so there must be something psychological going on that causes this to happen so often.

[zompist]

2) Interesting that gender was preserved, unlike in the Romance languages where the participles are in use for the perfect tense but are (afaik) always masculine in all Romance languages, [...]

Not quite: the participles are gendered in French when the verb is conjugated with être. That includes verbs of motion (je suis venu(e), nous sommes venue(e)s) and reflexives (je me suis caché(e)).

What's harder to find is cases where this affects the spoken language. It does affect a few: je me suis mis(e) (en colère, etc.), elle s'est assise.

Oh, just because there's always one more exception... if the direct object occurs before the verb, the participle is supposed to agree with it: Voici les lettres qu'il a écrites. But speakers tend to ignore this rule.

[Linguoboy]

1) It's interesting that it's "be" instead of "have".

None of these languages have a word for “have”. They all express possession periphrasticly with “be”.

[alice]

Pedants might point that they're actually continuums between two extremes, but that's not the point. We all know of the Sonority Hierarchy (voiceless stops to low vowels) and the Animacy Hierarchy (first-person subjects to abstract nouns); there's also the hierarchy which Revouse identifies as "the chain of being", from adjectives to adverbs, and one implied in Describing Morphosyntax which goes from nouns (most time-stable) to verbs (least time-stable). Obviously, these things are interesting and important to know about. How many are there altogether, and how many can be considered to be universal?

[alice]

Consider:

"Tora put her beer-glass on the table, and it broke".

How many different ways of resolving the ambiguity of "it" are there, without recasting the sentence? I can think of at least these:

- Context; try replacing "her beer-glass" with "a sixteen-ton weight".
- Gender, if available ("le tankard", "la table")
- First-mentioned versus second-mentioned (former-latter)
- Closeness to the verb
- Proximate versus obviative, or third/fourth person
- Case (second subject is the same as the direct/indirect object of the first)

Any more?

[Estav]

The English verb "break" might be translated differently depending on the semantic category of the thing that is breaking. I suppose this could be viewed as a kind of gender system, if it were systematic enough, but I'm thinking of the things that have been called "classificatory verbs".

[Qwynegold]

You could use the word which to specify that it's the table that broke.

[zompist]

Topicalization, in languages where it's a key thing.

I think you can do this in French:

La table, Tora y a mis la verre, et elle s'est brisee. < probably the table broke
La verre, Tora l'a mis a la table, et elle s'est brisee. < probably the glass did

In ASL-- or Elkaril-- you assign pronouns as you set up actors and objects in a scene, so the equivalent of 'it' clearly refers to one or the other. Also, if I'm not mistaken, you can modify the verb 'break' positionally, so you'd sign it differently based on whether the glass or the table broke.

[zompist]

There's an Agreement Hierarchy-- if you have ALC, see p. 132: semantic gender agreement is more likely as you go from attributive adjectives to predicative adjectives to relative pronouns to personal pronouns.