Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[linguistcat]

Japanese pronouns are basically an open class historically.

[zompist]

A nice example is French on, which derives from Latin 'man'.

[Estav]

Do you guys (pun intended) know examples of new pronoun being developed other than English you guys/y'all?

Dutch has jullie for second-person plural, similar to English.

German has man in the sense of "one".

Portuguese has a gente for first-person plural (which kind of reminds me of French on for first-person plural).

Italian has ci as the first-person-plural clitic object pronoun.

[Nachtswalbe]

Should Malay be classified as an agglutinative language if the majority of its affixes are derivational rather than inflectional?
Like meN- is agent focus and di- is patient focus, but besides those, there aren't really that many inflectional affixes.
I assumed the isolating-inflecting-agglutinating-polysynthetic distinction mainly focused on inflection, not derivation

I stand corrected - it includes derivational affixes as well. e.g mempertanggungjawabkan 'to take responsbility' is derived from
meN- : the agent focus
per- : to make more
-kan: to cause
tanggungjawab: to account for

Malay has 20 or so common affixes, counting circumfixes and infixes.
Is this less than English?

[bradrn]

As with all categorisation schemes, terms like ‘agglutinative’ and ‘isolating’ are somewhat useless given that languages are on a continuum (cf. Yudkowsky on definitions). I tend to think of languages like Malay and English as ‘mostly isolating’, rather than purely ‘isolating’ or ‘agglutinative’.

As for the relevance of derivational vs inflectional affixes: firstly, even experienced linguists debate where the dividing line should be. (e.g. Is a causative derivational? What about an imperfective?) But personally, I tend to give greater weight to inflectional morphology — without a rigorous definition — as languages with no bound derivational morphology seem extremely rare. (I’ve heard it claimed for Yoruba and Vietnamese IIRC, and I suspect those both to be false.)

Malay has 20 or so common affixes, counting circumfixes and infixes.
Is this less than English?

It seems about the same.

[MacAnDàil]

Do you guys (pun intended) know examples of new pronoun being developed other than English you guys/y'all?

In Réunionese Creole (and Mauritian), the pronoun 'banna' may be used to mean 'they/them'. This developed from 'bann-la' i.e. that group.

[Creyeditor]

Should Malay be classified as an agglutinative language if the majority of its affixes are derivational rather than inflectional?
Like meN- is agent focus and di- is patient focus, but besides those, there aren't really that many inflectional affixes.
I assumed the isolating-inflecting-agglutinating-polysynthetic distinction mainly focused on inflection, not derivation

I stand corrected - it includes derivational affixes as well. e.g mempertanggungjawabkan 'to take responsbility' is derived from
meN- : the agent focus
per- : to make more
-kan: to cause
tanggungjawab: to account for

Malay has 20 or so common affixes, counting circumfixes and infixes.
Is this less than English?

tanggungjawab is also a compund consisting of tanggung to take care of, to comit to, to be liable and jawab to answer

[Richard W]

Do you guys (pun intended) know examples of new pronoun being developed other than English you guys/y'all?

Open class pronoun systems can attract forms from all over the place. For example, in Thai, the polite word for 'you' is from Sanskrit guṇa 'quality' and a pronoun for a child or countrywoman is the native word nǔː 'mouse'. I've even heard the former in a TV drama in the phrase meaning 'I love you'.

[Otto Kretschmer]

If all people were capable of voluntary flatulence*, would there be at least some languages incorporating it as a part of linguistic expression?
* Google Le Petomane and MN r Methane

[Nachtswalbe]

What is the average (mean) major (>100 million speakers) language's inflections for nouns and verbs?

[bradrn]

What is the average (mean) major (>100 million speakers) language's inflections for nouns and verbs?

Wikipedia lists the following languages with >100 million speakers: Bengali, English, French, Hindi, Indonesian (excl. Malay), Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese, Standard German, Urdu. The only non-IE languages here are Indonesian, Japanese, Standard Arabic and Standard Chinese. Thus, the ‘average’ major language is an IE language, consequently inflecting for case and number on the noun, and TAM and subject person/number/gender on the verb.

[Estav]

What is the average (mean) major (>100 million speakers) language's inflections for nouns and verbs?

Wikipedia lists the following languages with >100 million speakers: Bengali, English, French, Hindi, Indonesian (excl. Malay), Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese, Standard German, Urdu. The only non-IE languages here are Indonesian, Japanese, Standard Arabic and Standard Chinese. Thus, the ‘average’ major language is an IE language, consequently inflecting for case and number on the noun, and TAM and subject person/number/gender on the verb.

Many widely spoken IE languages don’t have case inflection outside of pronouns: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish from your list (vs Hindi, Bengali, Russian, and German with case on more than pronouns).

[zompist]

What is the average (mean) major (>100 million speakers) language's inflections for nouns and verbs?

Wikipedia lists the following languages with >100 million speakers: Bengali, English, French, Hindi, Indonesian (excl. Malay), Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese, Standard German, Urdu. The only non-IE languages here are Indonesian, Japanese, Standard Arabic and Standard Chinese.

I don't know what Nachtswalbe is after, but I'd put in some major caveats here.

1. What languages are "major" is a historical fact, not a linguistic one.
2. The list is highly affected by what you consider a "language". If you applied the same standards to Chinese and to IE, then French, Portuguese, and Spanish would all collapse together as "Romance". Hindi is the same language as Urdu. If you collapse Mandarin and Cantonese, then probably Hindi-Urdu and Bengali collapse too.
3. Counting speakers is not that straightforward. By some counts Swahili should be on the list.

Finally-- if you apply the Chinese criteria, maybe Turkic would fit too, and by numbers it certainly belongs.

[Travis B.]

What is the average (mean) major (>100 million speakers) language's inflections for nouns and verbs?

Wikipedia lists the following languages with >100 million speakers: Bengali, English, French, Hindi, Indonesian (excl. Malay), Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese, Standard German, Urdu. The only non-IE languages here are Indonesian, Japanese, Standard Arabic and Standard Chinese.

I don't know what Nachtswalbe is after, but I'd put in some major caveats here.

1. What languages are "major" is a historical fact, not a linguistic one.
2. The list is highly affected by what you consider a "language". If you applied the same standards to Chinese and to IE, then French, Portuguese, and Spanish would all collapse together as "Romance". Hindi is the same language as Urdu. If you collapse Mandarin and Cantonese, then probably Hindi-Urdu and Bengali collapse too.
3. Counting speakers is not that straightforward. By some counts Swahili should be on the list.

Finally-- if you apply the Chinese criteria, maybe Turkic would fit too, and by numbers it certainly belongs.

One should also count Malay together with Indonesian, as their relationship is pretty similar to that between Hindi and Urdu.

[bradrn]

What is the average (mean) major (>100 million speakers) language's inflections for nouns and verbs?

Wikipedia lists the following languages with >100 million speakers: Bengali, English, French, Hindi, Indonesian (excl. Malay), Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese, Standard German, Urdu. The only non-IE languages here are Indonesian, Japanese, Standard Arabic and Standard Chinese.

I don't know what Nachtswalbe is after, but I'd put in some major caveats here.

1. What languages are "major" is a historical fact, not a linguistic one.
2. The list is highly affected by what you consider a "language". If you applied the same standards to Chinese and to IE, then French, Portuguese, and Spanish would all collapse together as "Romance". Hindi is the same language as Urdu. If you collapse Mandarin and Cantonese, then probably Hindi-Urdu and Bengali collapse too.
3. Counting speakers is not that straightforward. By some counts Swahili should be on the list.

Finally-- if you apply the Chinese criteria, maybe Turkic would fit too, and by numbers it certainly belongs.

Oh, I’m very aware of all this. This is why I tend to distrust papers saying ‘widely spoken languages are simpler’ or something like that — as often as not it boils down to ‘IE languages are simpler’, which is uninteresting. As for the choice of languages, I just used Wikipedia’s list.

[Moose-tache]

This is why I tend to distrust papers saying ‘widely spoken languages are simpler’ or something like that

Not because they're written in crayon on the back of a Perkin's kid's menu?

[bradrn]

This is why I tend to distrust papers saying ‘widely spoken languages are simpler’ or something like that

Not because they're written in crayon on the back of a Perkin's kid's menu?

I am not yet aware of any such paper. (Though I have seen ones of similar interest: e.g. Comparative mobility of halogens in reactions of dihalobenzenes with potassium amide in ammonia.)

[Otto Kretschmer]

Is evolution of Proto Polynesian reconstructed to any degree? How did the simplification of phonology occur? Proto Austronesian had a rather standard phonology and all Polynesian languages have small phoneme inventory

[bradrn]

Is evolution of Proto Polynesian reconstructed to any degree? How did the simplification of phonology occur? Proto Austronesian had a rather standard phonology and all Polynesian languages have small phoneme inventory

Proto-Polynesian is probably one of the best-reconstructed protolanguages we know of today. As for why it evolved in the direction it did, well, that’s probably an unanswerable question.

[Richard W]

What is the average (mean) major (>100 million speakers) language's inflections for nouns and verbs?

Wikipedia lists the following languages with >100 million speakers: Bengali, English, French, Hindi, Indonesian (excl. Malay), Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese, Standard German, Urdu. The only non-IE languages here are Indonesian, Japanese, Standard Arabic and Standard Chinese. Thus, the ‘average’ major language is an IE language, consequently inflecting for case and number on the noun, and TAM and subject person/number/gender on the verb.

Many widely spoken IE languages don’t have case inflection outside of pronouns: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish from your list (vs Hindi, Bengali, Russian, and German with case on more than pronouns).

Yes, but Japanese and Arabic have noun case, and that swings it. Also, I'm not sure it's completely sound to say that English doesn't have a genitive case for nouns.