The World Atlas of Language Structures
WALS is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of more than 40 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject).
WALS consists of 141 maps with accompanying texts on diverse features (such as vowel inventory size, noun-genitive order, passive constructions, and “hand”/”arm” polysemy), each of which is the responsibility of a single author (or team of authors). Each map shows between 120 and 1110 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature. Altogether 2,650 languages are shown on the maps, and more than 58,000 datapoints give information on features in particular languages.
WALS thus makes information on the structural diversity of the world’s languages available to a large audience, including interested nonlinguists as well as linguists who would not normally read grammars of exotic languages or specialized works by comparative linguists.
I’ve only had a chance to dip into this, but I look forward to exploring it at length. Many thanks to Casey (of Belletra) for the heads-up!
I just put up a fairly detailed review of it at The Ideophone.
Geez, this is fantastic. I only found one thing that irks me so far: the base maps for different subsections are different, and the one used for phonology leaves out a ton of North American languages. Lakota sure looks lonely all by itself. Of course, Siouan, Algonquian, and Iroqouian languages aren’t particularly phonologically interesting (especially compared to other American languages), but neither are European languages, and they don’t get left off the map.
Still, though, this is amazing. I’m particularly enjoying finding which features show surprising areality and which don’t.
The bibliographies also seem handy for the non-linguist who enjoys seeking out exotic grammars. They seem to have usually hit the key works for the handful of languages I checked. I’m surprised, though, that the source for the (extinct) Khoisan language \Xam is listed as “Anonymous 4” from the year 1000. Whatever the professional view (I don’t know it) of her skills as an amateur linguist in South Africa a century ago, I would have thought Dorothea Bleek’s grammatical sketch of \Xam and her massive Bushmen Dictionary would at least have been preferable to a fictitious citation.
In the same week that WALS has come out with its 140+ maps, I’ve managed to come up with my first on Austronesian Number Systems covering Papua New Guinea, at:
http://coconutstudio.com/An%20Numbers%20PNG.htm
It obviously needs improvement; especially better line-drawing and some of those nifty little hyperlink buttons that refer to other pages.
In the chapter on my speciality, Numeral (Bases), Bernard Comrie notes: “Non-decimal numeral systems are even more endangered than the languages in which they occur”.
It’s worse than that, on my Philippine island, nobody knows the native words for any number higher than 5, and this is the case throughout the Austronesian area.
regards
Richard
I’ve just checked Thai language. Interesting site, it seems exhaustive but that’s pretty technical.
(translator: Fixed that for you!)
This is certainly a wonderful resource. Following your first link I feared it was going to cost me $595 to access it, but the second one confirms that it is indeed freely available.
Of course, I realize that in a survey of this kind the authors are forced to use languages for which the information is readily available because someone has done the necessary research, but I was still a little disappointed in the cavalier way in which Provençal is treated. It appears in just one map, which tells us that it has a word for tea based on the Min Nan Chinese te. Given that it shares this feature with all of its Romance neighbours — French, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Romansch and Italian — it is difficult to regard this as its most interesting characteristic.
Provençal actually has two features that I find more noteworthy. First of all, in the form formalized by Frédéric Mistral it is unique (as far as I can discover) among European languages in having invariant nouns, with no plural markers. Although it shares this to a limited degree with spoken French, it certainly doesn’t share it with written French. Second, it uses -o as the usual feminine suffix, which makes it unusual, maybe unique, among Romance languages.
Good lord, your comment made me realize I’d neglected to add a link to the online site (aside from the “features” link)! Thanks for alerting me; I’ll fix that now.
The Provençal of Frédéric Mistral is but one of the varieties of Occitan.
One problem with the current standardized Occitan (based on the speech of the Montpellier area) is that it has a very conservative spelling which approximates that of the language used by the medieval troubadours but is often at odds with what speakers are used to as sound-spelling correspondences. The feminine suffix written -a is pronounced [o] in the vast majority of the modern Occitan varieties (but apparently still [a] in Montpellier), which also use [s] in the plural of nouns. Occitan spelling (“la graphie occitane”) uses the letter o for the sound [u], but also for the sound of open (low) o if stressed (as indicated by a diacritic). Another feature of the graphie occitane is that it uses an etymological sequence of vowel + nasal consonant at the end of words where actual speech only uses a vowel (thus pronunciation is as in Catalan, a word which is pronounced by its speakers “katala”, but Catalan spelling follows the pronunciation rather that the etymology, so Catala with a diacritic on the last syllable). Since most of the people reading Occitan are literate in French, the archaizing graphie occitane makes it difficult to infer what the actual pronunciation should be, or to guess spelling from the pronunciation. For instance, I once read something written in French by an Occitan speaker, in which he referred to a kind of large cooking pot as topin, a disguise under which I at first had trouble recognizing what some members of my family (originally from Languedoc) called [tupi] and would have written French-style as toupi. A French person without any connection with the language would undoubtedly have pronounced the Occitan word written topin as if it were French, with the first vowel o and the second vowel nasalized, as in French. Among the necessities of life, my relatives would have counted [de pa, de bi e d’aygo] “bread, wine and water”, written in Occitan spelling as de pan, de vin e d’aiga. A sign of affection is [yn putu] ‘a kiss’, used in local French as un poutou but written in Occitan spelling as un poton.
Not everyone (least of all true speakers) is happy with the Occitan standardized spelling which blurs dialectal differences and makes Occitan into a kind of “Esperanto” (as an old friend of my family expressed it).
I had no idea about graphie occitane—thanks for a very enlightening comment!
Des membres du C.L.O. ont rédigé un texte commun avec des principes principaux et des modalités d’organisation pour un organisme de régulation de l’occitan. Le texte a eu un consensus politique et institutionnel et à l’Assemblée de Vielha en Val d’Aran le 23 mai 2008 où étaient représentées les collectivités territoriales, les institutions et les associations historiques. Ensemble, elles ont lancé le processus de création de l’organisme de régulation de l’occitan : le Congrès permanent de la langue occitane, mis en place officiellement à l’Hôtel de la Région Aquitaine à Bordeaux le 16 décembre 2011.
Le Conseil linguistique du Congrès est en train d’actualiser et de compléter les normes orthographiques et orales du Conseil de la langue occitane.
https://locongres.org/fr/normes-et-oeuvres-normatives/normes/normes-graphiques/graphie-commune-de-l-occitan
Or as the southerners say:
I wonder how much the syntax and lexicon is influenced by French,
I don’t know Catalan as such, but it looks like the stuff that can’t be interpolated directly between French (lexicon) and Standard Spanish of Spain (inflection/spelling) could be supplied from there. (installat where Spanish has instalado looks like things I’ve seen in Catalan [instal·lat]).
I have no reason to doubt that it’s good Occitan. They just looked close on first glance, but then they are close, and this is a technical text. But one would hope that a on site like that, texts are first written in Occitan and then translated to French for a wider audience. That’s no guarantee, if the writer still thinks in French written register, but it helps.
And maybe it shouldn’t be a question anyway. If modern written Occitan takes the structure of written French, synchronically and descriptively that’s just how it is. The Western Romance languages are close, and assymetric mutual influence is the natural state.
Trond: I am reminded of a French dialectologist who observed that, in the twentieth century, pro-Occitan activists all had a first-rate knowledge of French, and that without this knowledge it was quite impossible for them to write good Occitan. That is to say, literacy in Occitan-speaking France was in French, and French enjoyed such a monopoly that even activists seeking to use Occitan as a written language were unable to do so without basing their written Occitan on French.
This is VERY unlike the mutual influence all members of the Western Romance linguistic continuum have had upon one another over the centuries. An aspect of Occitan in France which needs to be stressed is that the activists who promoted (and are still promoting) the use of Occitan were either L1 francophones or French-dominant Occitan speakers: these activists were typically middle- to upper-class urbanites, and their relationship with actual Occitan-dominant individuals or social groups (i.e. rural, isolated, lower-class) was typically dismissive to hostile (when any relationship existed at all, that is!).
Marie-Lucie (The last paragraph of your last comment: yes, I am making a comment over 14 years later, but better late than never!)-
The term “Esperanto” has also been used by some native speakers of Irish to describe Modern Standard Irish, and I suspect for the same reason: a standard (Occitan and Irish) was created by nationalists/regionalists who were somewhat removed from (all!) native speakers’ usages and sociolinguistic sensitivities, yielding a “standard” form of a language deemed artificial-looking (“Esperanto”) by all native speakers (Irish and Occitan) of the various living dialects still present “on the ground”.
All-
What this means is that, from the vantage point of language typology or linguistic theory, it is questionable whether the modern written standards of Occitan or Irish deserve to be called “natural languages” at all. I suspect the same is true of a number of other minority languages (those where the creation of a written standard did/does not involve grassroots efforts, that is!), for similar sociolinguistic reasons.
What this means is that, from the vantage point of language typology or linguistic theory, it is questionable whether the modern written standards of Occitan or Irish deserve to be called “natural languages” at all. I suspect the same is true of a number of other minority languages (those where the creation of a written standard did/does not involve grassroots efforts, that is!), for similar sociolinguistic reasons.
I’ve personally heard similar comments (though without the specific Esperanto comparison) about Standard Belarussian. I imagine the same thing probably happened with German back in the day.
And then there’s Hebrew, which is a whole other mess…
I think this is a matter of degree, and by no means confined to “minority” languages. Pretty much every “standard” language is artificial to some extent. Standard French is not Parisian French, Standard German is High German spoken with Low German phonology (and various features found in nobody’s natural speech), and Standard (UK) English only has native speakers at all because of the education system, historically. It is the local speech of nowhere at all.
Quite apart from the fact that exactly no written language accurately reflects any single person’s actual real spoken idiolect. How could it?
“Standard” entails “artificial”, linguistically. It’s inevitable.
“Written” also entails “artificial.” It is a curiously modern delusion to suppose otherwise. The point is obvious, once you think about it.
Actors’ English and preachers’ English are not spoken by anyone as a regular language. So we call them registers and accord them their place at the dinner table. I don’t think a written register of a language, however artificial and Esperantoish, automatically deserves contempt. Unless, as Etienne describes, it was born in snobbish sin.
Indeed. Artificiality is not (in itself) bad. Otherwise, there could be no poetry.
“Most women are so artificial that they have no sense of Art. Most men are so natural that they have no sense of Beauty.”
You will, Oscar, you will.
Usually language activists are not hostile to lower classes.
But I can be quite dismissive to attitudes of school graduates.
(the attitudes I’m dismissive to can also be described as snobbery)
The phonology, I’d say, is mostly Upper Franconian from before when it suggumbed to Inderior German Gonsonand Weagening.
The actual sounds used to fill in the abstract slots in this small cluster of sound systems are largely Low German in northern Germany (one notable exception is the recent but total absence of [ɣ] from all kinds of Standard German), but not so much elsewhere.
Stage pronunciation is half Very Low German Indeed, half artificial (to improve the acoustics), but only a few actors ever talk like that.
Contact/mixture phenomena seem to be very prominent in the vocabulary, however – Luther, famously, went to great lengths to make sure his Bible translation would be understood as widely as possible. The grammar differs from most to all dialects mostly in archaisms as far as I know.
There’s one phonological feature of Standard German that seems to be a contact phenomenon: I have not come across any “German” dialect that has merged the “old ei” (OHG/MHG ei) and the “new ei” (OHG/MHG î), or the “old au” (OHG/MHG ou) and the “new au” (OHG/MHG û). Some come close – Wikipedia says there are Swabian dialects where the old ei is [ae̯] and the new ei is [ɛɪ̯] – but none seem to actually get there. This is definitely not a Low German phenomenon: in most of Low German, all four of these phonemes have remained unchanged since Old Saxon, i.e. [eː iː oː uː]. I wonder if this unique but systematic merger was a feature of the definitely mixed dialect of Prague back when there was such a thing… today, in Upper Saxon, the outcomes are [eː aɪ̯ oː aʊ̯] or thereabouts, while at the other side of Bohemia the Bavarian outcomes are [oɐ̯ ɛɪ̯ a aʊ̯] in the west, [a ɛ̞ a ɒ] in eastern Austria. However, it may simply be the result of trying to square recent developments (diphthongization of the “new” ones) with MHG spelling.
Just noticed (above): “linguists who would not normally read grammars of exotic languages”
A population underrepresented on LH…
I suppose such people are, technically, linguists.
Though for some reason it puts me in mind of
https://www.neatorama.com/images/2008-12/mad-scientist-mad-engineers.jpg
David Eddyshaw: I will grant that the standardized/written register of any language can and often does contain artificial features. But once such a standardized language becomes the dominant or sole variety used by various individuals/social classes, we can count on this process (use as a dominant variety, leading to L1 speakers -often monolingual ones- a generation or more later) to filter out any artificial features which are not compatible with human beings’ language-learning abilities.
(January First-of-May: The same is true of Modern Hebrew: however artificial the written Hebrew used as the basis of the revival of Hebrew may have been, Modern Hebrew is the L1 of millions, and thus indubitably qualifies as a natural language. As for Belarussian, I am uncertain: has there ever existed a Standard Belarussian-dominant social class? The issue was discussed here at the Hattery-
https://languagehat.com/russian-belarusian-variable-and-fabricated/
-and it seems clear that no such group exists today).
My point is that Standard Irish and Standard Occitan today, on the other hand, are standards which are not only quite artificial (both having been created by groups whose dominant language was English and French, respectively, with little if any input on the part of (non-standard) Irish- or Occitan-dominant speakers + communities), but which are not and (if present trends continue) *never will be* the L1 or the dominant language of *any* social group.
As a result the filtration process I sketched above will never operate, and we are liable to have “standard languages” in existence with features which may be unlearnable by human children: again, short of massive changes in sociolinguistic trends in Ireland and Southern France, we are unlikely ever to know the truth one way or the other. I thus stand by my original point: it is indeed questionable whether the modern written standards of Occitan or Irish deserve to be called “natural languages” at all.
we are liable to have “standard languages” in existence with features which may be unlearnable by human children
Do you have any particular examples in mind? (This strikes me as a pretty strong claim, given that said standard written languages are demonstrably learnable by adults. Even.)
I perhaps wandered too far in my comment from my main point, which is that no written language (specifically) is free of artificiality, including features which are found in no spoken register apart from those which are directly parasitic on written language, like sermons and lectures delivered by the sort of academic who ought to stick to writing papers. This is strikingly so in French and German, less obviously so in English, but still very much the case. (It is extremely obvious in Welsh, too, even in these degenerate days when nobody attempts Literary Welsh prose: Cymraeg Llenyddol itself is/was a thoroughly artificial language which has never been anybody’s mother tongue; for all that, yes, it is learnable by children and it has been the vehicle of a lively literature in prose and – especially – verse.)
However, I also accept that this is a matter of degree; I’m prepared to concede (how could I not?) that some written languages are more “artificial” than others (as my example languages demonstrate, in fact.) But none is free of the taint …
Etienne, you are describing a diglossic situation (the prototypes are Arabic, Swiss German and Haitian Creole, Ferguson 59).
Usually such situations are not seen in terms of “unlearnable” or a plot by L2-speakers “with little input from the community”. But German is a plot and French was clearly made with little input form Haitians.
Als, English seems to maintain a larger gap between what people say and what people write than, say, Russian.
Of course, Esperanto itself has been acquired as an L1 by children (though typically with simplifications: the noun/adjective case system in particular seems not to be a feature of L1 Esperanto. Quite right too.)
Also, English seems to maintain a larger gap between what people say and what people write than, say, Russian.
Ah, but literary Russian was invented by Lomonosov. (Literary English just growed. Like Topsy.)
@DE, my English is undergoing simplification too…
Drasvi: inasmuch as there are plenty of Haitian creole and Dialectal Arabic monoglots (I believe a few Swiss German monoglots exist in rural Switzerland), there is zero reason to doubt that all three are bona fide natural languages.
David Eddyshaw: In saying that languages such as Modern Standard Irish and Modern Standard Occitan “are liable not to be” natural languages, I am merely bringing up a possibility, not making a firm claim.
As for the artificiality of many features of various standard written languages and their being learnable by adults and children alike (despite their not being the result of unconscious language change), I will play the academic and engage in the sin of “Selbszitat”: you may find my comments (and hatters’ replies/observations thereto) in these two threads relevant:
https://languagehat.com/the-bookshelf-in-the-land-of-invented-languages/#comments
(starting with my May 19 4:14 comment)
https://languagehat.com/clicks-in-english/
(Starting with my 4:29 comment).
Bonne lecture (as we say in Modern Standardized North-Central Gallo-Latin)!
All: A related question: could the same be true of language contact? Do there/could there exist typological features which, learnable by children though they are, will only appear in a language as a result of two languages coming into contact? I am thinking of things like the 4-gender system of Michif, 2 of which are marked within the NP (the masculine/feminine distinction of the French component) and 2 others on the verb (animate/inanimate, from the Cree component): since Michif has been transmitted over several generations as an L1 this feature is obviously learnable, but I have never heard of this kind of gender-marking split in any other language -and as a historical linguist with some interest in, and knowledge of, diachronic morphosyntax, I have a hard time imagining how such a feature could arise within the isolated evolution of a single language.
“there is zero reason to doubt that all three are 100% natural languages.”
Is literary Arabic natural, because people who read and write in it are speakers of a related language? And was medieval Latin natural too?
@Etienne:
So I take it you are not really proposing that these literary koines might be unlearnable by children? As I say, that seems to be a difficult point to contend.
On human linguistic adaptability and creativity, I can’t improve on what Kofi Yakpo says, quoted by me here:
https://languagehat.com/not-how-kids-speak/#comment-3634229
… in this case, referring to the astonishing human ability to make actual languages out of pidgins.
But the ability of children to acquire Zamenhof’s concoction as a real live L1 is probably an even better proof. We adults tremble before the awesome linguistic abilities of children.
was medieval Latin natural too?
This natural/artificial dichotomy is in reality far from clear. I’ve met many Ghanaians (for example) who speak English as well as I do, despite only acquiring it once they went to school. It seems to me that mediaeval Latin (or mediaeval Hebrew, for that matter) was often acquired in much the same way as Ghanaians acquire English. The fact that English has mother-tongue monoglot L1 speakers and mediaeval Latin and Hebrew didn’t seems to have little bearing on the question of language acquisition.
Do there/could there exist typological features which, learnable by children though they are, will only appear in a language as a result of two languages coming into contact?
This seems a bit uncomfortably reminiscent of John McWhorter’s tendency to see (semi-)creoles everywhere, without any actual evidence of actual creolisation. Though, to be less cantankerous about it, I expect you mean, only cases where language contact is actually known to have occurred.
Reminded: Maarten Kossmann Parallel System Borrowing (benjamins / sci-hub / academia.edu)
An there must be somethign in Lameen’s thesis…
Looks interesting. Thanks!
A case in point in Kusaal is Mɔr “Muslim”, plural Mɔɔm – a formation which is completely isolated* within Kusaal morphology, but which is readily explicable if both singular and plural were borrowed from Mooré (respectively More, Moeemba.)
* Though Kusaal lɔr “motor vehicle” has acquired a plural lɔɔm by analogy. The Kusaal equivalent of “octupi.”
Etienne, here’s a bigger question (I suspect not answerable): Are there any linguistic features not perfectly learnable by children acquiring them as an L1? And therefore, would a language spoken by a uniform language community change not at all or only very slowly, however baroque the grammar of that language is? And therefore, is not most if not all language change ultimately due to language contact or dialect contact?
@January First-of-May:
Would you please explain what you mean by “And then there’s Hebrew, which is a whole other mess…”?
if I raise a son on a desert island and speak English to him and find that he hasn’t acquired articles, tenses and interdentals it would mean that some combination of these features doesn’t make sense for an L1 Drasvish speaker.
It won’t mean that there is anything wrong with English tenses, just that my own manner of using them only makes sense to me.
If you don’t speak to him at all he might end up speaking Phrygian.
I just mean, it is plausible that three groups
[L1 natives], [L2 parents who acquired* it imperfectly], [L1 children]
will speak different varieties. And we may study these imperfections. But based on this you can’t claim that individual feautures (like “interdentals”) are unlearnable by babies or adults. Which somehow reminds me universals, which are more plausible as equations about systems of features.
—
* I am sleepy and wanted to use an active participle here: “imperfectly-acquire-PTCP.PST.ACT L2 parents” and for a whie couldn’t find it in ENglish….
Now I wonder why I did not think about it before: Russian does have past active participles, but passive participles are uncommon and usually awkward. English has having and being for past active and present passive, but it can’t be used attributively…
“In European and Indian languages, the past participle is used to form the passive voice.” says Wiki.
Wiki thinks that past participle is authomatically passive;)
he might end up speaking Phrygian
Phryggian is more probable.
Wiki thinks that past participle is automatically passive
I don’t think that follows from what they say: they just mean that the passive can be expressed with so-called “past participles” in some of these languages, which is true as far as it goes.
I’m not sure how helpful it is to list lots of things called “participles” in a whole lot of languages, but I suppose you have to put something like that in a WP article called “Participle.” And it shows how much these things vary between languages, too.
Kusaal has regularly derived adjectives from almost all verbs except those which themselves express predicative adjectival meanings. They typically mean “habitually associated with the activity or state of affairs described by the verb” and have no specific tense or voice association at all; they aren’t “participles”, as they can’t take objects or do anything specifically verbal. So e.g. pu’a “woman”, la’ “laugh”, pu’a la’adir “woman prone to laughing” or “ridiculous woman.” They can have the sense of English “past participles” used passively, but they don’t have to: with nim “meat” and dʋg “cook”, nim dʋgida “meat for cooking” or “cooked meat.”
[Both words of impressive antiquity: dʋg “cook” has cognates in Bantu, and nim “meat” is the Kusaal representative of a word which seems to be mysteriously Pan-African, extending across groups which not even überlumpers think are related.]
Would you please explain what you mean by “And then there’s Hebrew, which is a whole other mess…”?
Modern Hebrew is commonly said to be an artificial language, because so much of the vocabulary was made up wholesale (and/or borrowed from rare Ancient Hebrew words that probably meant something else) and so much of the grammar had been Europeanized.
At the time it was initially codified, it had no L1 speakers (and/or just one, Itamar Ben-Avi; his version of the language ended up even more Europeanized than the standard, and he eventually started spelling it in Latin letters), though AFAIK the written standard kept getting significant updates into (at least) the 1950s, by which point there’d have been much more L1 speakers and probably even some monoglots.
Of course modern Israeli Hebrew, specifically, is indeed an undoubtedly natural language, though it had moved on significantly from its standartized roots.
(I wanted to link to the story about someone who was supposedly exposed as a foreign spy for his implausibly standard Hebrew, but didn’t remember the wording well enough to google it up.)
But the ability of children to acquire Zamenhof’s concoction as a real live L1 is probably an even better proof. We adults tremble before the awesome linguistic abilities of children.
Reportedly, inspired by the success of Itamar Ben-Avi, there had been several attempts at bringing up children in Klingon, and at least one that I know of in Lojban. I imagine Klingon would be fairly tricky, because so much vocabulary is missing (mostly due to being irrelevant to spaceship situations).
Esperanto, on the other hand, could have been someone’s L1 because it was the only common language of their parents; AFAIK such cases did happen, though I’m not sure if they outnumbered deliberate experiments. (I’ve recently heard, sadly not in much detail, of a couple whose only common language was Klingon; I’m not sure what their children spoke, or whether they even had any.)
By now enough time had passed from the first experiments that there might have already been some L1 Esperanto speakers passing on the language to their children…
I’ve recently heard, sadly not in much detail, of a couple whose only common language was Klingon; I’m not sure what their children spoke, or whether they even had any
I think the question answers itself. Unless one posits parthenogenesis.
Wiki thinks that past participle is automatically passive
The prevalence of the much-beloved Ablative Absolute in literary Latin seems to be due to the fact that Latin, unlike Greek, hasn’t got any active past participles (except in deponent verbs.)
Mediaeval Hebrew in particular was learned by Jewish boys starting at age 3, which is well within the period of usual L1 acquisition.
I always thought that “first language”, “L1” etc. are only used because the concepts of “native speaker” and “mother tongue” are so confusing (and English-specific…), while “first” is more or less precise…
If L1 starts at the age of three we will need a new term from L1.
I don’t think that follows from what they say: they just mean that the passive can be expressed with so-called “past participles” in some of these languages, which is true as far as it goes.
DE, true, but I think if the author spoke a language where active past participles were common, it would not occur to her to say that “the passive” is formed from “past participles”.
(Note: We just wrote “the passive…“. Passive what? Passive participles or passive mood?
In English the answer authomatically is “mood”.)
For me the division passive/active is basic. I spent a while trying to find where they write about it… but they speak about past and present instead. “Active” appears in tables of forms in various languages. Apparently for English speakers this distinction is less basic:)
(Note: I just wrote “the division passive/active”. I meant: passive-PL [participles]/active-PL [participles], because we are speaking about participles, so the word can be omitted. And I just realized that for you this can be confusing)
Obviously, the answer to “what kind of participles is used in passive constructions?” is “passive”. Passive is used in passive. It is even the same word. And it is not by chance the same word! It is because both participles and constructions are passive.
Also I can form passive constructions from present participles: “I am loved/seen/etc.” – in Russian I can use the present form here (but apart of maybe “loved” they are awkward: reflexive forms replace them and my dinner “cooks itself”), in English it can be present semantically, but -ed present.
This formulation is possible when the author does mean “passive participles” but as this property often (but not always) coincides with “past” in her langauge, she uses “past participles”, “p.p.” as the label.
“ I’ve met many Ghanaians (for example) who speak English as well as I do, despite only acquiring it once they went to school.”
Now imagine a Klingon who went to Arabic-medium school (Fus·ha, that is). Will she speak Arabic as well as Arabs or better than Arabs? Most Arabs too go to Arabic-medium schools but in average they are not very proficient in literary Arabic.
And the same question for Russian (after all, most Russians also can’t easily imitate most written registers).
Perhaps, under certain conditions an L2 speaker has an advantage….
Foreigners can certainly acquire an unnaturally “posh” register from learning a language in school (those of us who learnt French at school can testify to this), which may even lead to kindly natives (though not Frenchmen, of course) saying “Wow: you speak our language better/more correctly than we do ourselves.” (My grandfather’s German was like that. Basically, he talked like a book.)
That isn’t really what I meant in the Ghanaian English context though. I think children pick it up much as they do any language, even though it is the first language of only a small proportion of Ghanaians. It certainly doesn’t come across as uniformly in an unnaturally high register, and it has autonomous local features (you can actually tell Ghanaian English from Nigerian English quite reliably once you know what to listen for.)
Fus·ha
…TIL. I always just assumed it was Fuša.
Foreigners can certainly acquire an unnaturally “posh” register from learning a language in school
AFAIK that’s usually the default situation, except sometimes it’s just an unnaturally archaic register that doesn’t have posh connotations.
No, it is фусха. Or fus7a. I just don’t know how to type fuṣḥā and I know how to type · (Alt-0183)
(The pharingeal fricative can be heard e.g. here – it is difficult for a Russian ear to miss it. )
“Foreigners can certainly acquire an unnaturally “posh” register from learning a language in school ”
But is English of graduates of boarding schools in India posh? They speak English to each other since childhood…
It certainly doesn’t come across as uniformly in an unnaturally high register
Yes, but specialized registers are not supposed to be the same as vernacular. You may argue that being a vernacular speaker allows you to make your high register more pleasurable…
… for other highly educated vernacular speakers used as a reference. Such a definition of “better” potentially makes people like you look better to you.
But then we enjoy translated prose.
But then we enjoy highly idiosyncratic (or unnatural) styles. And, if we are not “educated” or if we are but we received this education in a Toki Pona-medium school we can be literally struggling with some aspects of the grammar. And then this Klingon girl can do with ease what we can’t do at all.
So this rule of snobbery stated above does not really hold.
It is like with physical attractiveness of humans: some interplay between attraction to exotic and familiar.
@drasvi: Only (a subset of) linguists refer to an English-language “passive mood.” The normal (I can’t claim everyday) terminology is “passive voice.”
Basically, [DE’s grandfather] talked [German] like a book.
I, on the other hand, speak English, my L1, like a book. What you read here is basically how I talk. Books were my closest companions and still are.
Are there any linguists who say “passive mood”? Only 62 Google hits for “‘passive mood’ English”, some are not relevant, most are from L2 learners unfamiliar with the terminology, and many are complaints that it should be “passive voice”. I’d bet that all English-speaking linguists would consider “passive mood” a mistake. Were you or drasvi referring to linguists writing in another language, using something that would be literally translated as “passive mood”?
@Brett, yes, thank you. I felt that I am typing something wrong, but “mood” kept suggesting itself to me. I DO confuse them, it is not the first time when I am writing in English and can’t remember “active what” and “subjunctive what”:( When I was writing that comment I also tried to think in Russian terms and look at grammar as a Russian. Russian names “залог” and “наклонение” don’t make sense (наклонение – inclination) but at least I remember the phrase “сослагательное наклонение”.
Since we’re talking Klingon and language acquisition, I’ve always wondered what Worf’s (as in the Klingon adopted by humans in Star Trek the Next Generation) linguistic situation is. He was adopted very young by humans, and his parents speak English with “Russian” accents. Did Worf grow up speaking Russian at home? Worf however appears to speak English (and Klingon) without an accent. Does Worf speak Russian on the Enterprise and is translated by the universal translator? AFAIK Worf’s L1/L2 situation has never been addressed…
@ktschwarz: I just remember that I have encountered some linguists online who used “passive mood” for the English construction pattern. I suppose the usages might all have been nonnative solecisms though.
The sort of people who object to passives on captious or outright imaginary stylistic grounds traditionally call the passive a “tense”; however, such persons are “linguists” only in their own imaginations. (As Geoffrey Pullum has frequently pointed out, they are usually incapable even of identifying passives correctly.)
Mood and tense can be hard to draw clear lines between, and one certainly encounters proper linguists using “mood” for what other equally proper linguists might call a “tense.” But I can’t think of any justification for calling a passive a mood. It’s just a stonking great error.
The only case of overlap between voice and anything at all mood-like that I’ve ever encountered is in languages which use different case marking in different tenses (or aspects.) If you misdiagnose the ergative construnction of (say) Yucatec Maya perfectives as “passive” (as people once used to, before the nature of ergatives became clear) and muddle up aspect and tense (often a venal mistake) and then confuse tense and mood as well (likewise), then, Bingo, you have a passive mood. But I wouldn’t try it at home.
Search on the g-string shows that “passive mood” is preferred by people who don’t know what they are talking about.
I found, though, one instance that looks legit, Mood in the Languages of Europe edited by Björn Rothstein, Rolf Thieroff. The chapter on Mood in Danish by Tanya Karoli Christense and Lars Heltoft has section 4.2 The modern passive mood, which begins: “In modern Danish the so-called s-passive functions as a mood in relation to the system of periphrastic passives.” If you read it without blinking I am happy to supply a footnote: “The analysis of Danish passives as a mood system was presented in Heltoft & Jakobsen (1996) and in Heltoft (1996). Among the modern Scandinavian languages, this function is peculiar to Danish and to Norwegian as well, due to historical influence from Danish. Nothing similar is found with the Swedish s-passive.”
This seems to be a confusion of form and function; or at least, of potential confusion: the authors carefully say “so-called” s-passive, so they are not confused, at any rate. And of course they couldn’t even tell us about it the way they do if they thought that “passive” was a mood in any case.
This sort of diachronic change in the function of forms is common enough. Kusaal has a today-past form which in the great majority of its occurrences in texts actually expresses counterfactual or hypothetical senses; the cognate marker in Farefare does just the same, but in Boulba it seems to mark the past tense in ordinary narrative.
The Danish thing sounds interesting in its own right. Can you say more about it?
Sorry, DE, I cannot say anything at all about it. I tried to copy more from the section, but formatting the examples is too much. You can read the whole section in the g-books.
I recently read this is fake: only the Cree genders are still active, the French ones have become unanalyzable parts of lexicalized noun phrases, and you can tell by some sort of clever insertion experiment. Naturally, I don’t remember my second-hand source, and the massive lexicalization of phrases would likely still be unique.
I don’t understand…
Are you suggesting only women learn Klingon? 🙂
Compare PIE *mem- and Lolcat nom.
I was taught to call the three participles of Latin PPP, PPA and PFA – perfect passive, present active and future active.
And indeed it was! A lot of vocabulary was created in the three years of the first attempt.
The nominalized passive.
It does come across that way sometimes to people used to other Englishes.
Nope.
“And indeed it was! A lot of vocabulary was created in the three years of the first attempt.”
Ouch.
(thinking about the “essential vocabulary” used in communication with 2-year-old [Klingon] toddlers…)
@D.O.:
Thanks. It is interesting.
It looks like the “s-passive” was ousted by periphrastic forms in the indicative but not the subjunctive, thus leaving the modern s-passive with a modal sense as well as a voice sense. It’s ended up as a portmanteau form, albeit by a circuitous route.
I wonder how far the shift to periphrasis in the indicative was driven by the phonology (with subsequent levelling and reanalysis)? They seem to imply that the semantic change was somehow prior, but I can’t see the relevance of the stuff about monosyllabic indicative s-passives otherwise.
AFAIK Worf’s L1/L2 situation has never been addressed…
If all Klingons speak the same language, perhaps Klingon is just hard-wired into his brain genetically. Fortunately, as he also has Merge, he was able to learn Human too.
Anyway, a car is bibika in Russian baby talk.
Do Klingon spaceships have signals that they use to greet other spaceships?
At least three do in any case (article from 2015 in German).
“Diaper”.
(I don’t know what the Klingon word is, sorry.)
I expect that was at least the trigger. The loss of the synthetic past, and the concomitant release of the synthetic subjunctive, south of the White-Sausage Equator were clearly triggered by one little apocope.
Klingons do not greet. The closest they have to a greeting is nuqneH “what do you want”, and that’s an actual question with the expectation of an actual answer.
Thread won.
“This seems to be a confusion of form and function; ”
And the same in the line about “past participles” used in passive:)
and Lolcat nom.
The Russian equivalent is ням. Depending on what the African forms look like, we might be dealing with sound symbolism or even straight-up onomatopoeia.
“Klingons do not greet. The closest they have to a greeting is nuqneH “what do you want”, and that’s an actual question with the expectation of an actual answer.”
Reminded me a game (with 16-colour EGA graphics) Star Control 2. You find your first alien spaceship and you are offered a choice between several possible greetings, among them “we are Alliance of Free Stars bla-bla-bla” and a rude version to the effect of “surrender or …”. You obviously choose the polite version and… they say you are incorrect and that the polite formula is the rude one (they are subordinates of an aggressive species who’ve just conquerred the galaxy).
@J1M see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nyam, particularly the etymologies.
@David Eddyshaw: I wouldn’t infer too much from nonnative writers’ use of “so-called.” I encounter it all the time from (generally very fluent) people who just use it when they mean to introduce terminology, with no understanding the additional freight that goes with “so-called” in native English.
In Russian there are three so-called’s: (a) technical (less common) (b) colloquial ironical (c) propaganda cliché (“so-called human rights”)
( I mean USSR. If it is still in use in modern propaganda, then it is likely “so called democracy” etc. Any ideal thought to be promoted by the West that sounds sort of good but we know what they mean. Anyway, it is vague enough and you do not have to explain what exactly you don’t like about this so-called “ideal”….)
And the references!
“Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies”
Exactly as in German.
Depending on what the African forms look like, we might be dealing with sound symbolism or even straight-up onomatopoeia
It’s well-established for Volta-Congo, with the relatively specific meaning “meat” (as opposed to food in general.) Proto-Bantu has *-nyama “animal,meat”; Proto-Oti-Volta had either *nɪm- or *nam-, one of a number of cases of an a/ɪ alternation which I don’t understand as yet (Nawdm actually features this alternation in the flexion of half a dozen verbs, but I don’t understand that either.)
Hausa has nama “meat, wild animal”; however, this may not mean too much, as there are other fairly unequivocal old Volta-Congo loans in Hausa (including even the word for “two.”)
If you believe that bits of Atlantic are related to Vollta-Congo, then Fulfulde nyaama “eat” springs to mind (Fulfulde having no sign of a cognate to the perfectly good Volta-Congo verb *dɪ “eat.”) The Wolof ñàmbi “cassava” (as being food, after all) might be dragooned in, but personally I think it’s getting pretty silly at that point.
I have come across the notion that the word is found elsewhere in Africa too, but I can’t track down the reference at present. I expect Roger Blench was responsible somehow …
Phryggian is more probable.
I don’t understand…
They will speak phrygging nothing.
Oops, sorry, drasvi, didn’t notice your link to nyam.
I’m not very impressed by the etymology list there, though: the Wolof for “eat” is actually lekk, and Chichewa, LIngala, Swahili and Zulu weren’t spoken much in West Africa the last I heard. (The words are all obviously simply cognate, and the remark about “similar forms” is beside the point.) Come to that, the Ghanaian Pidgin English for “eat” is in fact chop. Also I very much doubt if any Wolof word has got to the New World via Ghanaian Pidgin English. Senegalese influence in Ghana is not marked. Fulfulde is marginally less unlikely (I mean, at least there are actual Fulɓe in Ghana, even if nowhere near where Pidgin English flourishes …)
The Efik and Esimbi forms are interesting, though.
I think there is a real inherited Volta-Congo probably-not-onomatopoeic etymon going back to something like *ɲam- meaning specifically meat (and not “food” or “eat”) and that the various other nom-words are onomatopoeic and nothing to do with it. (Possibly from Proto-Muppet.)
AFAIK Worf’s L1/L2 situation has never been addressed
the non-canonical – but widely accepted in my (likely outlier) circles – understanding that i hold to is that worf’s cradle-tongue is yiddish-inflected* russian**, with a fluent but somewhat stilted klingon as his other primary language. i think it’s safe to assume that he doesn’t speak Federation standard, and that what we’re hearing is almost always his klingon, run through the universal translator, except in emotionally heightened or intimate moments where no other klingons are present, in which case it’s U-T-processed russian.
.
* any character who is a child of theo bikel, in any role, is jewish unless explicitly made otherwise (like the von trapp kids). the same is probably also true of georgia brown.
** memory alpha says the rozhenkos are belarussian, but i think we can take that as a geographical rather than linguistic designation. but maybe there’s some surzhyk in the mix for worf’s russian as well.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Bantu/nɲàmà
Oh, I forgot the completely artificial phonological feature of German stage pronunciation – which has made it into a whole bunch of more widely used Standard accents.
That’s why I brought up the PIE “meat” root. Admittedly, words change meanings between “meat” and “food” surprisingly often – even in languages you’d think were spoken by cultures where “food” and “porridge” would interchange much more easily. …Of course both can happen, as in English: meat, meal…
Klingons do not greet. The closest they have to a greeting is nuqneH “what do you want”, and that’s an actual question with the expectation of an actual answer.
This is only used in superior-to-inferior mode when the inferior says nothing, as would be usual. (I forget where I read this.)
any character who is a child of theo bikel, in any role, is jewish unless explicitly made otherwise
Your logic is inexorable. Worf is Jewish.
Casting around for reflexes of the Volta-Congo “meat/animal” *ɲam- word in groups that aren’t either Bantu or Oti-Volta, I came across Gbeya saʔde “animal, meat” (as glossed by Samarin), which is interesting, despite the fact that it can hardly be cognate*, in showing the same semantic range. Similarly for Samba Leko, Gwenaëlle Fabre gives gɔ̀g “animal, viande.” (These are both “Adamawa” languages, the scare quotes being because, as with “Gur”, there’s not a lot of evidence that they really all constitute one single branch of the Volta-Congo tree.)
Kasem has nwam “meat”, which surely must be a cognate, but I don’t know enough about the Grũsi languages to be able to explain the -w- (and strongly suspect that nobody else does, either.) Chakali, which is fairly closely related to Kasem, has namɪ̃ã.
* I’ve often found it easier to spot cognates of Oti-Volta words in Bantu than in geographically closer language groups, which is a bit odd on the face of it; however, I suspect that this is a consequence of the fact that Bantu is (comparatively) so well documented and that reconstruction of Proto-Bantu is so far advanced, rather than some deep fact about the wider affinities of Oti-Volta within Volta-Congo.
@David: I forgot the completely artificial phonological feature of German stage pronunciation
You often refer to “German stage pronunciation”. Do you know it from seeing plays at actual theaters ?
I ask because, as far as I can remember, no one else has ever brought up stage pronunciation in any language on a thread here. Except possibly French – I think there was a discussion years ago by marie-lucie and others on the stage delivery of Racine/Corneille.
For those who want more cognates of Proto-Bantu -ɲàmà “meat” outside Bantu than Wiktionary stingily provides, here are some from Oti-Volta:
Western Oti-Volta:
Boulba: nento
Kusaal: nīm
Mooré: néongò
Buli/Konni:
Buli: lām
Yom/Nawdm:
Yom: nemnə
Nawdm: námgú
Gurma:
Gulmancéma: nàngú
Moba: nàɔ̀nŋ
Eastern Oti-Volta:
Nateni: māǹgū
Ditammari: kūmāā (ku- is a class prefix)
Waama: nántú
Mbèlimè: nìǹkɛ̀
It’s interesting that the nɪm/nam variation cuts right across subgroups. I don’t know what that’s about.
The tones also correspond regularly for the most part: Gurma, and all of Eastern except Waama, regularly keep the original Low tone, as seen in the Proto-Bantu, whereas Waama, WOV, Buli/Konni and Yom/Nawdm turn it into High as the regular outcome. Kusaal mid tone is the regular equivalent of Proto-WOV High, so the tonal correspondence of the Kusaal and Proto-Bantu forms is completely regular.
The Buli mid tone is unexpected, though. It ought to be High. The Nateni and Ditammari tones match that, etymologically, as well, instead of being Low, like the Mbèlimè. But I don’t have a working theory for how Oti-Volta developed its basic three-tone system. At this stage I don’t have much idea about internal tone sandhi, except in the Western group: that would probably solve a lot of problems.
A nim-nim is one lacking intelligence. Perhaps “meathead” is the missing semantic link.
It may well be …
You often refer to “German stage pronunciation”. Do you know it from seeing plays at actual theaters ?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Aussprache_(Siebs)
“The sort of people who object to passives on captious or outright imaginary stylistic grounds”
@DE, I disagree with Pullum. I don’t think that what made some people object to passives is “imaginary”. Rather than analyzing the situation (what makes some people uncomfortable?), he just yelled at everyone.
Presumably, on the assumption that authors of style guides are already “too loud” and he needs to compensate for that. All right, tastes are subjective by definition, why not yell at each other? But it has nothing to do with science.
______
Yes, he is right: the journalist who called “there was an agreement” the “passive tense” used terms of school grammar differently. “Led to violence” is not a passive either.
Now name this operation: “A and B agreed to/on…” -> “There was an agreement”, specifically with “there was…”. The journalist did’n know the name, but he recognized it as common and believed it needs one. He identified a function and a form and coined an ad hoc term.
Pullum is not interested in the phenomenon.
“…the people they aim to educate or intimidate don’t know enough grammar to reject the nonsense they are offered….” – that’s what he is doing.
“The claims about why you should avoid passives—the allegations about why they are bad—are all bogus, and the interesting point (the discourse condition) is always missed.”
“The”?!
The journalists in question use specifically grammatical terminology, without understanding its actual (not very abstruse) meaning. They do this to add a spurious veneer of “scientific” plausibility to their arguments. Pullum is a distinguished grammarian. If he’s not going to call out this kind of posturing, who will? Moreover, to do so is surely well within his professional remit.
I agree that there in fact can be a genuine issue with the kind of reporting that avoids explicit mention of agency (though I have yet to encounter a real-life example where the identity of an agent known to the reporter was being wickedly suppressed by such lack of mention in the immediate context. It’s not a very effective strategy for truth-suppression, if that’s really what you’re after …)
However, the peevers ignorance of basic grammar actually prevents them from analysing such reporting well enough to see where the problem really lies (it’s the rhetoric, not the syntax.) It’s both intellectually lazy and counterproductive even on its own terms.
As a narrowly stylistic peeve, the “passive bad” doctine is basically braindead. It arises from the similarly grammatically illiterate idea that “subjects” are always “agents” – unless some malefactor has introduced a passive, thereby overturning the order of nature. And a total ignorance of how textual cohesion works in English: some glimmering about which, you might think would be part of the core competence of people who do actually get paid to write this stuff …
I think drasvi doesn’t have enough background in the controversy to realize that the journalist didn’t “recognize” anything but simply jumped onto an idiotic meme he didn’t know enough to realize was idiotic.
Continuing about the journalist: he needed a name familiar to the interviewee and people and related at least to the referred phenomenon – so that we knew what he is speaking about. That’s why he borrowed from grammar textbooks. He butchered grammatical nomenclature:)
He is not discussing language here, and his phrase can’t be used as a “term” in such conversations: such names must be unique. He coined it for this specific conversation. He is curious about his language… but not about school grammar. Not uncommon.
@LH, no, I just don’t think that knowledge of grammar is an excuse for arrogance.
1. A and B did C.
2. There was an action C.
These constructions are related. (2) is used very often by journalists. How do you properly call 2 (as opposed to 1)?
@DE, a journalist who uses grammatical terminology to refer to a grammatical construction doesn’t do it to “add plausibility”. ALL terminology referring to grammar is “grammatical”. Respect the thought he was trying to express and help him to express it.
He is curious about his language
One hopes that he read Pullum’s comments and learnt to satisfy his laudable curiosity thereby.
The use of the (actual) passive in discourse and its interaction with information packaging issues (like shared topics and focus) is actually quite interesting. Especially in written English, which needs to use various dodges of that kind to compensate for the absence in the orthography of key suprasegmental cues for focus. Good writers are clever at that sort of thing.
I just don’t think that knowledge of grammar is an excuse for arrogance.
Pullum can be pretty abrasive. But if I were as good at what I do as he is, I’d probably be a whole lot arroganter than he is.* Real experts can be forgiven a bit of arrogance (though my experience is in fact that most such people seem to be distinctly less prone to it than us mortals are.)
* He also played in a rock band. I mean …
@LH, I do understand that style guides warn agains passives. Likily that’s why the journalist said “passive” (associating the name wirh “a construction for evasiveness”).
It does not mean that the ‘journalist didn’t “recognize” anything’ or is othervise silly.
I’m qouting this pulication: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf
Barely. But I mean what M. posted: the only pronunciation of German that has ever been codified in a prescriptive work. The German Wikipedia has a second article on it, titled Bühnendeutsch; the English article of that name is much more useful than both of the German ones in that it actually contains examples!
BTW, Tobias Moretti is both a Burgschauspieler and a common-or-garden TV actor, and speaks in stage pronunciation whenever his native Tyrolean dialect wouldn’t work. That includes Kommissar Rex and explains why his character there, supposedly Viennese, sounds like he’s from Hamburg or something instead.
Thank you rozele. I feel, as they say, seen knowing that at least one other person has thought about the language Worf speaks to his parents.
I assume a faulty UT is responsible for Jean-Luc Picard speaking English like Patrick Stewart, but this ground is more well trodden. Although my South African partner did apparently have a leg up getting jobs teaching English to Germans because her accent wasn’t North American. I choose to believe there are some Germans out there telling their Anglophone bokkie what a lekker time they had.
I assume a faulty UT is responsible for Jean-Luc Picard speaking English like Patrick Stewart
Of course! Now you’ve pointed it out, yes, it must be so. Lightbulb Moment, as DM says.
pulication — surely you mean pullication, @drasvi.
(A very rare iterative formation in -icō from pullō ‘I spew forth’, whence of course the name of the author. Alternatively < pullicus ‘pertaining to chickens’).{{fact}}
I just broke my keyboard:)
That doesn’t explain “his willingness to take seriously a woman named Vache”, though.
“Oh putain, du coup je kiffe une meuf qui s’appelle vache.” —J.L. P
BRB, gonna go dub an episode of TNG with Picard’s lines in French.
The full quote: “There is for a change one English‐accented character who isn’t a baddy; but despite his taste for tea, identification with Horatio Nelson, and willingness to take seriously a woman named Vache, he’s supposed to be French!”
DE, in a heated debate concerns of both sides are not unfounded. They just don’t hear each other.
“You stepped on my tail!”
“It were you and the tail was mine!”
I don’t think this is a position a scientist should assume…. especially when her opponents are not linguists and can’t articulate their concerns.
It is a conversation about style, the book Pullum criticizes is called The Elements of Style. He calls it “stupid grammar advice”.
You are treating the points of view of people who know what they are talking about (linguists) and people who have no idea what they’re talking about (journalists) as if they were equivalent; that makes no sense.
@drasvi:
Seems a fair description, in fact. (Read it and see.) The trouble is precisely that such authors persistently call constructions they dislike stylistically “ungrammatical.” Not “clunky”‘, or “ambiguous”‘, or even “lower-class”: no, “ungrammatical.”*
The effects of this sort of thing are more pronounced in the US than the UK. Generations of USians have been brainwashed into thinking (for example) that “less” is ungrammatical with count noun plurals. You know, actually a linguistic error. I’m with Pullum there: no mercy!
* This is like my criticising someone’s taste in music as “unscientific.” Or it would be, if “scientific” were an aesthetic hurrah-word and everyone felt uneasy if they felt that they weren’t living their lives in a proper scientific spirit.
(Read it and see.)
I did.
Strunk:
That has gone all the way into UK-based foreign-language teaching. I was taught this distinction between “less” & “fewer” as an unqualified fact, and only found out last year or so that reality is messier.
The people in question don’t read the actual Strunk & White, they worship it the way American fundies worship the Bible. Lots of newspaper style guides and schoolteachers really have said that the passive “voice” must always be avoided.
I think DM has nailed it. I must admit that Pullum’s jeremiads about S & W often do seem like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut; I think it’s because he takes it as emblematic of a whole strange ecosystem of grammar-peeving.
Strunk and White themselves would probably not now be Strunk-and-Whiteists.
really have said that the passive “voice” must always be avoided.
They could not have said it that way and remain consistent.
They weren’t consistent. As stated above, many were really quite bad at recognizing a passive.
I was once told by the teaching assistant in a History course that a section of my essay had too many passive constructions. I had to point out that the ones he had highlighted weren’t passives, they were participial adjectives.
He also admitted to attending an Aha! concert, which helps fill out the portrait, if you’re of a certain age.
(Though in retrospect, I wonder whether liking Aha! may have been a gay thing rather than an “overly smitten with a band whose only known song is ridiculous” thing. Hmm. Maybe it filled out the portrait in ways I didn’t recognize.)
I’m not, please explain 🙂
For us, Aha! was an avatar of bubblegum pop. When our section leader announced he was cancelling class to go to the concert, the room erupted in ridicule. It made him seem like a silly person. Someone asked whether he was chaperoning his niece.
Mostly the prejudice of college kids. But the sentiment was unanimous. Prejudice though it may be, for me it still fits together with the idea of someone judging my writing who couldn’t distinguish between passive verbs and adjectives.
@David Marjanović: a-ha’s music had a very “Eurovision” sound to it, at a time when fewer people in America were familiar with (or cared for) that European bubblegum pop esthetic. The group might be almost completely forgotten today, were it not for the fact that their most popular song, “Take On Me,” has one the best and most interesting music videos of all time.
As to Captain Picard, his supposed Frenchness never really bothered me, although I was never especially a fan of The Next Generation. However, in the “future” segments of the series finale, I did think he made perhaps the least convincing French vintner I had ever seen. Star Trek has always had a much more Raygun Gothic than Used Future esthetic, but the pristine condition of Stewart’s costume elements just makes him look absurd.
The group might be almost completely forgotten today, were it not for the fact that their most popular song, “Take On Me,” has one the best and most interesting music videos of all time.
Not in Europe, where “Take on Me” is still frequently played on oldie stations and mainstream radio (the “we play the 80s, 90s and the best of today” type of stations). And I actually saw the video first time today; I never watched music on tv much in my youth; the period when I watched music videos most was in the late 90s / early noughties, when my little daughter liked them and so we frequently had music channels running on tv in the background.
I don’t care about the song as such, but the weird title continues to fascinate me.
“It is a predecessor to atompunk with similar “cosmic” themes, but mostly without explicit nuclear power or definitive technology. It is also distinct in that it has more archaic/schematic/artistic style; and its atmosphere is more dark, obscure, cheesy, weird, mysterious, dreamy, hazy, or etheric (origins before 1880–1950), parallel to steampunk, dieselpunk, and teslapunk.” (WP)
What a disjunctive chain of adjectives!
@DE I just realized that Russian and English terminologies are different. We have :
грамматика
грамота
I hear about “grammar” in the context of descriptive linguistics, also there are books like “a grammar of the Latin language”. “Grammar advice” is only possible in Russian in the context of language learning.
Грамотный specialist is one who can do the job properly. Грамотный approach is an approach by someone who knows how to approach the problem:) (Не)грамотный person is simply a literate/illiterate person. The word грамота refers to knowlege of letters.
But неграмотная speech or a phrase is a prescriptivist concept: “uneducated” speech. The falling level of грамотность (literacy) refers to people who make orthographical mistakes.
In English “grammar” is often mentioned in the context of correctness.
Compare “grammarly” (Youtube advertizes it) and Russian gramota.ru a site run by the Institute of Russian language (a research institution) meant to answer questions about Russian usage, orthography etc. справочная служба русского языка. It is often used as a reference, but sometimes their answers are incorrect.
Also we do not have the tradition of style guides. We have books by Розенталь, but they are just “Розенталь”.
By comparison Grammarly, as I understand from Youtube advertisments, does seek to improve a user’s style.
—
Presumably “grammar advice” means norms of the literary language, but it also may expand in a speaker’s mind into the territory of stylistics. On the other hand it gives Pullum some authority. He’s a grammarian, he must understand in grammar.
I don’t think “grammar” in English is now usually understood as encompassing style (though, to be sure, an actual grammarian might study style insofar as it impinges on things like cohesion. And, pace Tolkien, Lit and Lang have much to discuss to their mutual benefit.) Historically, I think the term did have a somewhat wider sense that it now usually does.
In peeverese, “grammar” is either “correct” or “incorrect”, whereas even the most committed of peevers would not claim that there is only one correct “style.”
I think you’re on to something in implying that it is precisely the boundary between the two that is the issue. Pullum’s point (quite apart from mocking peevers’ ignorance of actual grammar) is that peevers draw the boundary in the wrong place, miscategorising stylistic issues as grammatical (and thereby wrongly categorising stylistic choices they don’t like as being simply erroneous.)
Interesting about the different Russian forms.
It sounds as if there is no actual Russian equivalent of Anglophone language peevery. (If so, good for the Russians!)
“always”
@DM, is “passive voice must always be avoided” the same as “use the active [voice]”?
Is it
– the quantifier itself that you don’t like, or
– the short simple imperative or
– some implied meaning?
————————-
Regarding the meaning, it is difficult to understand in what exact set of situations you are expected to follow such recommendations. They depend on context:
The slogans like “speak Russian properly!” don’t mean that you should never use colloquialisms. But you should avoid “zvónit” and “lozhit” because they irritate grammar nazi and “avoid” here means total absence from your speech other than when you intend to quote (or even criticize) an uneducated character. But then there are sweet colloquialisms used by Russian writers. Good in certian registers and for expressing feelings. In brief: “imitate educated Muscovites.”
A note “Please, consider, when possible, putting cigarette butts in the garbage bin rather than on the ground, if, of course, this does not restrict your creative expression” does not actually inform you about the fact that total absence of cigarette butts on the ground will please in some ways most of smokers.
You know this beforehand.
I do not know (and can’t know) if authors of style guides propose total absence of passives as the Ideal.
I think this question simply never occured to many of them. I know that they won’t tolerate a single instance of “they’re” instead of “their” and will only accept “ain’t” and “fuck” in special situations. I know this from speakers’ practice. I also know that they tolerate passives.
@drasvi, it’s the irony of expressing an injunction against passives as an actual passive (which the writer possibly didn’t recognize as such).
>I don’t care about the song as such, but the weird title continues to fascinate me.
ESL songwriter.
ESL songwriter.
Yes, of course, but they usually manage to come up with titles that make sense in the language they are writing the song in.
@Lars, I noticed it, but it was DM’s formulation.
I don’t think he meant “lots of style guides and school teachers put this (otherwise good) recommendation in the passive. If they used the active voice here, they would be a much better example for the younger generation.”:)
I think he means, their recomendation is more extreme than Strunk’s.
@Hans: “Completely forgotten” was probably an overstatement. It was a number one hit, so it is still going to get some airplay.* However, the fact that the video was played a lot on MTV was certainly part of what made it a smash hit. It had to have been one of the most played** videos, for good reason. It was, in fact, the first thing I ever saw on MTV.
As to the name “Take On Me,” I have long suspected that it was a nonnative English idiom relating to sex that made more sense to the Norwegian band members to native speakers. (Although the famous video is totally unrelated, the song itself is a guy begging for sex the night before he leaves town.) The song is full of other grammatical but odd locutions; the lyrics start out, “Talking away…,” after all.
On the question of terminology for passives: See my comment (as well as plenty of others), on this 2009 Pullum post at Language Log.
* I don’t think I have told this story here before: The most recent time, a few years ago now, that I had to replace my smart phone,*** I had a weird experience at the Verizon store. They plugged in my old phone and my new phone to a computer, to transfer all (or almost all) of my data from one to the other. And as soon as they did that, while I was dealing with the contract and then waiting for the new phone to be ready, the music in the store switched to playing things from my YouTube playlist. My playlist is pretty long (over 500 songs), but it is still pretty unusual for five random songs in a row to be drawn from that list. But it happened that day. I mentioned it to the salesman, and he said that he were in my place, he would have figured the store was peeking at my personal data, rather than it just being random chance. Among the songs were “Take On Me,” followed by Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” and I don’t remember what the others were; but it was definitely weird.
** I suppose this could be verified quantitatively. Various people and organizations, including MTV itself, have kept track of every single video that has ever been shown, in sequence, since the channel went on the air. There’s a joke that they keep track of the precise number of videos since 1981 just to publicize that whenever MTV gets to the next big, round number, they will play the first video—”Video Killed the Radio Star,” naturally—again. (There are edge cases though, which I don’t know how they handle, where they didn’t play a whole video.)
*** Actually, this is the only time I have replaced my smart phone. Prior to that, I had a regular cell phone, well into the smart phone era.
@DE, we have a plenty fo people who grumble at other people for speaking and writing incorrectly.
But we have a distinct term for this (грамотность “literacy”) and our “correctness” doesn’t cast such a shadow on the concept of грамматика. “Bad grammar” (in Russian) makes me think of an inadequate grammatical description.
Also there is some structual difference. Dangling modifiers (classic “approaching town, off me flew-off hat” where approaching refers to the topic rather than the subject “hat”) are considered an “error” *(children are taught to avoid them entirely) but apart of this I can’t remember anything similar to certian English rules for native speakers (prepositions, split infinitives).
Also certain formal registers can be viewed negatively by educated speakers. Classical literature is rooted (or thought to be) in the vernacular and is seen as trhe ideal of good prose. The language of bureaucrates is seen as corrupt and ugly (not by officials themselves presumably). When I see literary Arabic described as “formal Arabic” by Arabs (in English) I am (1) surprised that for them its function of the langauge of prose is not primary (2) feel as if it were “reduced” to the status of a language of tech manuals, stupid politicians etc.
—-
In the school taxonomy of “errors” there is such a beast as “stylistical error”. I don’t remember if this particular error is classified this or some other way.
Sounds like you have style peevers rather than grammar peevers. Fair enough.
Pullum himself somewhere says of English dangling participles that they should indeed be avoided in general; not because they’re ungrammatical (they’re not) but because they’re a kind of bad manners: carelessly depriving your listener of essential cues for working out what the hell you’re talking about. (He puts it better than me.)
Mention of formal Arabic puts me in mind of an excellent thesis (which I’ll link to if I can find it online again) on the topic of actually pronouncing the case endings in speaking Modern Standard Arabic. What made me think of this specifically was an account of an interviewer (himself highly educated) interviewing a philosophy professor who put in almost all case endings in speaking MSA, and correctly at that. The interviewer talks about having to conceal his mounting irritation at this as the interview progressed …
Well, if you confuse -ться with -тся in writing you will have to listen about the falling level of literacy.
The raison d’être of school “Russain langauge” lessons is spelling.
And if you say zvónit instead of zvonít you will make someone tremble in fear and disgust. It has almost physical effect.
Here it is, via the wonder of DuckDuckGo:
https://portal.research.lu.se/files/3772169/8852155.pdf
Favourite snippet:
It occurs to me that David may have been asking not just what Aha! signified for my circle, but why in retrospect I felt I might have mistaken the source of my TA’s fandom. I’ve come to realize that I/we may have sneered at things in those days in part out of a homophobia so implicit that you didn’t even have to consciously associate gayness with what you were sneering at. Or out of belonging to a tribe that wasn’t the gay tribe, and laughing as one does at the things that other tribes liked that weren’t yours. Aha! may not have been part of that, but in a quick google, I note that you quickly find an interviewer asking the lead singer if he was gay. Apparently not, but I doubt that question comes up unless your band has a gay following. Aha! was childish, mannered, danceable and weak, lacking the tough authenticity of Def Leppard.
(And for anyone who doesn’t know Def Leppard, that’s a preposterous dichotomy, though it may not have been apparent to many 17-year olds at the time.)
Seeing as it once turned into glamour…
Yes.
(…assuming the people in question know what the active is.)
Yes.
Expressing it in the passive, though, is on me. I’ve been really exhausted lately. 🙂
That’s normal in a diglossia.
No, I had just never heard of it.
It’s possible that I’ve heard the song many times, but I’m not curious about such things.
@DM, you wrote:
“ really have said that the passive “voice” must always be avoided.”
Do you object to brief recommendations (“use the active tense!”) because they can be interpreted this way? Or is it the word “always” that bothers you or do you think they actually mean “always”?
For example, the Economist:
“Be direct. Use the active tense. A hit B describes the event more concisely than B was hit by A.”
Because it is brief, it sounds more categorical than anything that Pullum quoted.
But I do not think that the question “is it a good idea to never use the passive voice”? ever occured to them. They hardly expect anyone to avoid it entirely.
A fair description, I think is:
(1) the Ideal: unexplored.
(2) no actual “prohibition” (not even comparable to the situation with “ain’t” or “fuck”)
(3) there is pressure towards the active voice (or discouragement of passives or encouragement of the active). They want writers to use the active voice more.* More than what? Presumably than some other writers.
(4) this pressure can be indiscriminate (as we can see from Ryan’s story).
—
* waht I mean by this is that they I believe they don’t think in terms of some ideal proportion of the active and passive they would love everyone to arrive to (thus (1)).
Real writers always use the middle voice.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness.
Real writers always use the middle voice.
It’s the Aristotelian thing to do.
Maiden a-gone !
Aha! certainly lacked the swaggering masculinity of e.g. Judas Priest or Queen … But they would have done well on the cover of some Eighties precursor to https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Non-Threatening_Boys_Magazine
They are a foreign group from 80s.
If you want to understand Soviet perception of foreign stuff, think about actual extra-terrestrials.
In other words, in can’t be “bad”.
It also means, you are not doomed. However bad a person you are, you are a foreigner. What a boring place the word would be without you!
I can’t say the same about myself;-(
What, me? I’m not objecting to anything, I’m describing the beliefs of other people!
And yes, some of them really mean “always”. They have a large overlap with the ones who can’t actually identify a passive, though.
@DM, well, not “object”, but “are finding noteworthy in the context of this conversation”
It was a honest question.
Pullum called The Elements of Style “stupid grammar advice”, DE said it is a fair description and asked me to read it, I quoted Strunk, you noted that “people in question” don’t read S&W and lots of style guides … etc.
I just want to understand what exactly is a problem here. Particularly: the meaning of what “people in question” say (you think that they think that passive is a grammatical error) or the form (irrespectively of what they mean, they formulate it in such an extreme form that…).
When nothign is quoted, and “people in question” are shapeshifters (S&W in one comment and people who don’t even read S&W in another comment) it gets difficult to understand what we are talking about. If you are referring to rules like the Economist’s “Be direct. Use the active tense. A hit B describes the event more concisely than B was hit by A.” then it is shorters and more extreme that S&W’s text (mostly because it is short). But I do not think that they mean here that using the passive is some sort of a grammatical error.
But maybe you read something much more brutal than that.
S&W is a little booklet that offers some sensible style advice and some stupid remarks on grammar. There would be no particular objection to it if it weren’t so massively popular and if so many people didn’t treat it like the Bible (or, if you prefer, the Краткий курс), treating the bits of stupidity as Holy Writ and beating other people over the head with them (while unconsciously violating the supposed rules themselves). I’m not sure what’s so hard to understand.
@LH, why, I understand this. I just said, I disagree with Pullum. Also I wanted to understand what DM means.
As I said, in a heated debate concerns of both sides are not unfounded. They just do not hear each other.
In this case, I think Strunk wrote about the passive for a reason. Also I think, journalists have a good reason to avoid using “there was C” where “A and B did C” would be accurate, even though “there was…” is not a passive.
What we are having is people writing about an actual problem because they do have a problem.
Now if their discussion is confusing, a linguist could help. Yelling at them, calling them stupid – is not what a linguist should do.
I am NOT telling that there is nothing wrong with what style guides say.
I merely asked DM to specify what he meant.
If you mean they all are idiots and nothing to specify here – that’s exactly the attitude I disagree with.
You can afford this.
But Pullum’s position entails certain responsibility. “Disagree” is a VERY mild word for a scientist who acts this way.
I think part of the trouble is that the technical linguistic term “passive” misleadingly resembles a familiar ordinary adjective which has a quite different set of associations; many who never actually acquired any formal grammar knowledge worth mentioning in the first place imagine that they know what the grammatical term means because they know what “passive” means in general (and even those who know better, like S & W, have been misled by the association into attributing “passivity” to the grammatical category because of its name.*)
Perhaps woke grammar peevers** should be objecting to the use of the accusative on the grounds that it assigns blame to people.
* “I have been granted supreme power over this realm! Henceforth I will be feared in perpetuity by all you miserable worms! I will be obeyed without question at all times!”
** One suspects that this is a contradiction in terms.
@LH, you said I treat journalists’ words and linguists words the same way… No.
I treat the content the same way: it is either true or not. But I expect much more from a scientist. Not less.
“I am NOT telling that there is nothing wrong with what style guides say.”
But Pullum says this:
“There’s nothing wrong with passives”.
“The claims about the alleged faults of passive clauses are never justified.”
“all bogus”
“The interesting point is always missed”
It’s just yelling. You are saying that yelling is well deserved. Maybe. But an expert can offer something better than yelling.
DE said he is taking a sledgehummer to crack a nut – but this is exactly the problem Pullum is speaking about!
How doing more of this is good?
Pullum:
Do you agree? But it is easier to apply this description to Pullum’s words than to S&W who said that passives can be used for topicalization (or that’s how I understand the quote from S&W above).
Pullum:
What a linguist (researcher) would do first in such a situation, when gentlemen in early 20th century start warning againts something and gentlemen now disagree?
Would she limits herself to the hypothesis of great explanatory power “they are idiots, we are so smart”?
No. I think she (a researcher) checks first if there has been any language change – or rather in this case shift in the sistem of English styles, registers and perceptions and the role of passives in it.
Perhaps Strunk was flooded by some sort of passives that he did not like (in students’ writing or elsewhere) and reacted at that?
Perhaps in 20th century (whern English speakers were exposed to lots of stuff they were not exposed in 19th century and the English language itself changed considerably) some shift occured and perceptions changed?
Perhaps nothing of this has happened.
But this is where I expect the discussion to start.
I’m currently too exhausted (from other things) to contribute to the rest of this discussion, but:
It does actually occur pretty often that there’s a heated debate and one side’s concerns are completely unfounded.
@DM, perhaps, but we still need a way to deal with situations where A says that B stepped on her tail and B says “it were you and the tail was mine”.
Noticing that both A and B may have tails (and have someone standing on it and yelling) won’t harm
Anyway. LH asked “what’s so hard to understand”. The emotional comments above were my attemtp to clarify what is it that I disagree with. I too am exhausted, it is just that there is “exhausted” when you don’t want to write anything, and there is “exhausted” when it is easier to type without thinking:)
Mine was the second.
No, I don’t think that Pullum’s article will have a devastating effect on the future generations of Burushaski speakers and that this all (my disagreement with it) is terribly improtant.
The antipassive movement is not something that arose in isolation, and it is pointless to seek its origin in actual real changes in English. There haven’t been any such changes over this timescale.*
There is a considerable tradition in English over the past three centuries of people concocting completely imaginary grammar rules and using them a stick to beat their enemies with; famous examples are the “split infinitive” and the imaginary ungrammaticality of “ending a sentence with a preposition”; a more recent invention is that “which” as a relative can only be used in restrictive relative clauses.
This is toxic because the imaginary-rule-peddlers are saying pretty explicitly that those who infringe their diktats are ignorant and uneducated. It’s not some neutral disagreement about style: it’s a deliberate weaponisation of invented grammar. That the weaponisers often believe their own crap doesn’t exonerate them; they’ve no business to be believing it. This is why Pullum gets so cross; you can’t really appreciate it without knowing some of the history of crap grammatical analysis being deployed as a means of undermining writers you disapprove of.
Look at how the passive-decriers do this in actual instances: they invariably use this passive-hostility as a means of suggesting that their targets are being deliberately mealy-mouthed and ducking issues they are uncomfortable with. That may be so; but if it is, the critic should say so upfront, and not pretend it’s about some imaginary grammar point. They never actually use the pseudorule to make a purely genuine stylistic point. It’s arguing in bad faith, and needs to be called out as such.
* Though, interestingly, there has been a relatively recent change over the progressive passive:
“The house is being built” was straightforwardly ungrammatical in Jane Austen’s time (the correct form was “The house is building.”)
@DE, no:)
OK, the cogency of your counterargument has convinced me. I was wrong.
Yes!!!!!!
I am of course, happy to give a more detailed answer:)
I was just looking at D W Arnott’s superb Nominal and Verbal Systems of Fula, and I see that he does in fact talk about “passive tenses” (middle tenses too), but he uses “tense” as a sort of in-house catch-all term for any one set of verbal forms differing only in subject agreement: he has “stative tenses” and “negative tenses” and the like too. He still uses “voice” to describe what it is that differs between (say) “General Past Active” and “General Past Passive.”
(In general, his usage is rather idiosyncratic, and he says “general future tense”, for example, for what I would call “imperfective aspect”, but he explains and exemplifies everything so well that it’s pretty easy to translate him into more current terms.)
Heh.
(I don’t understand most of it, but make sure you notice the Russian example in the last paragraph.)
I was struck by the WP claim that Koroboro Senni has an antipassive, and followed the link to WALS. I think this is just WALS being WALS: Heath calls the relevant forms “mediopassive” and “unspecified object” (which change “cut”, for example, to “be cut” or “cut something”.) I can see no reason at all to call this “antipassive”, and Heath himself does no such thing. (KS is not ergative.) If you’re going all cases of morphological valency-reduction “antipassive” there seems to be no point in having the word at all. (Same with the Russian example.)
I see that Humburi Senni has this form too: Heath there calls it “Resultative Passive or Unspecified Object” and says that only Koroboro Senni, Humburi Senni and Wogo have it in Songhay; apparently Wogo may have a tonal difference between the Resultative Passive and Unspecified Object forms, but HS doesn’t (and KS doesn’t have tones.)
@DE, I also didn’t know that there is a motivation for “antipassive” other than based on ergativity. I am not sure if the resulting cloud of meanings and forms is going to be coherent.
Google offers: Antipassive: Typology, diachrony, and related constructions with preface by Katarzyna Janic and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich. On the page 2 they define what’s antipassive “for the purposes” of the volume:
– the same verb with the same lexical meaning (the same number of participants and the same participant roles) can be found in a transitive construction.
– the sole argument of the intransitive construction is the agent in the transitive construction
– the patient is encoded with oblique or absent.
It is different from “shop opens” and is reminiscent of “Masha is-kissing Petya” – “Masha is-kissing with Petya” – “Masha and Petya are-kissing” (“Masha is kissing” is possible but less common).
Of course within Russian this should be studied and deserves to be named somehow.
The question is how does this work cross-linguistically….
Anyway, the link
I am not sure if the resulting cloud of meanings and forms is going to be coherent
I agree.
Dixon’s proposed criteria look quite reasonable (as you would expect, of course) despite not limiting the fleld to ergative languages, though it seems a stretch that even that is really a coherent concept.
The Koroboro Senni form fails to meet the criterion that the object can be expressed (by a non-core case, preposition, or whatever.) But this seems a rather odd requirement: with passives, even closely related languages differ in whether the original subject can still be expressed with a non-core NP: in Mandinka, for example, you can (as with many West African languages) use a transitive verb without formal change as a “passive”, but there is no way to express the original agent, whereas in Bambara, there is.
If you drop that criterion, all that you seem to be left with is needing a morphological process that allows you to form an intransitive verb from a transitive verb with the same subject and (much) the same meaning. If there’s no change in the case of the subject (as there would be, of course, in an ergative language), I don’t see the point of calling this “antipassive”, and moreover suspect that different languages would do this in ways which don’t really have a lot in common with each other – as you suggest.
“Mediopassive” seems a lot less misleading as a term for things like French so-called “reflexive” verbs, and Russian verbs with -ся. Calling them “ergative” just seems peculiar.
Thanks for the Mithun link. As far as I can see, none of her examples fulfils Dixon’s criteria; and using a Philippine language as an example for an “antipassive” strikes me as … bold …
Mithun’s examples do, I think, rather bear out the idea that this is not one cross-linguistically coherent process we’re talking about.
I think this is the WALS spirit at work: forcibly conflate rather different phenomena across a range of languages under one label, and then exhibit that as a cross-linguistic resemblance.
Though I would have to concede that this is a question of degree: categories are never going to match exactly across languages. I suppose the important question is really whether calling (perhaps subtly) different things by the same name helps or hinders comprehension of what’s going on in the individual languages. (Obviously it would be unhelpful to eschew labels like “noun” and “verb” altogether just because these categories never line up exactly between different languages.) There’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer to such questions, useful in all circumstances. But I think the whole conceptual basis of WALS is liable to lead people to go too far towards the forcible-conflation Procrustean pole.
“movement” makes me think of the song that kiosks in Moscow kept playing in early 90s.
“I like to move it, move it. I like to move it move it. I like to move it move it. You like to. Move it!”
With grammatical categories as with everything else, it often happens that people discover something interesting and then start to see it everywhere.
I do not know what “it” means here, but there were butts in the video. Is it an antipassive?
I guess Russian “подвигай попой” was somehow inspired by it.
“exactly across languages”
Reminds seeing recurrent patters in fractals. (butts in the Mandelbrot set:-)) I mean, all right, there are recurrent patterns. You can even formalize what I just called “butts”. But it is not just “butts” that we see there.
Catalogising patterns is a bit desperate occupation.
it often happens that people discover something interesting and then start to see it everywhere
Very true (I think Nick Evans has rather tended to do this with “insubordination”, for example.)
Another rather odd thing about Dixon’s criteria is #4: “There is some explicit marking of the construction.”
A lot of West African languages (including Mandinka, and, inevitably, Kusaal) can use a transitive verb intransitively with the same subject; Kusaal transitive verbs in fact subdivide as to whether, if you omit the object of a transitive verb, this implies anaphora or not; if not, then this seems to me to be exactly the same process as with the Koroboro Senni “mediopassive/unspecified object”:
M nuud daam.
“I drink beer.”
M nuud.
“I drink” (in general)
The fact that there is no actual morphological marker in Kusaal, whereas there is in KS, seems pretty contingent. Whether there is an explicit ending or not seems to have little relevance when it comes to analysing the syntax. If the KS form is “antipassive”, why can’t I call the Kusaal form “antipassive” too? Why not in English, too, come to that?
It occurs to me that some of this confusion may go back to the unfortunate name “ergative verb” (invented by MAK Halliday, I think, presumably on a bad day) which is used for exactly this scenario:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labile_verb
This is a use of “ergative” that should be positively banned, as causing nothing but confusion. “Unergative”, doubly so.
Interestingly, Russian -sya forms like “Masha is-kissing-self with Petya” are:
(1) somewhat parallel to “Masha with Petya are-kissing-sya” (we just put “with Petya” in the beginning and change the verb and hurra! It is a subject. But we haven’t change that much here).
(2) conversational (that is, soemwhat marked for register. This can aslo happen in Russian when the form is absent in translated literarure, but I don’t know if this is the case).
It is especially true for (different actually) forms without the “with” part:
“Petya fights-self!” (a kindergarten complaint)
“this shirt stings-self”.
“it burns-self”
“plays-self [with something]” (~preoccupied with rather carelessly toying with something) even attracted prescriptivist ire. I don’t know if there are any books and or teachers who proscribe it, but at least there are people who say it is illiterate because there are (in Russian) “play with” and “play soemthing-INSTR” that supposedly “mean the same thing, but are not wrong“.
My German dialect has sich (mit etwas) spielen “play around aimlessly (with sth)”, “engage in useless activities”. It’s blamed on Viennese, and further on Czech. Looks like it’s a pan-Slavic feature!
Reverting to my Kusaal examples
M nuud daam.
“I drink beer.”
M nuud.
“I drink.”
and the question of this not counting as an antipassive under Dixon’s rules because there’s no overt marker of the intransitive use: it’s just occurred to me that in Mooré this goes
Mam yũuda rãam.
Mam yũudame.
where me simply gets added to phrase-final verb forms (this is a Mooré innovation: the cognate particle in other WOV languages has focus and aspectual meanings, but that’s all gone in Mooré, which simply doesn’t mark the relevant distinctions at all.)
I refuse to believe that this means that the Mooré form is “antipassive” whereas the Kusaal form isn’t, or indeed that there is any real difference between the two languages in this at all.
I mean, I suppose you could claim that me is a marker of intransitivity and that with transitive verbs it is an antipassive flexion. But why the hell would you do that?
Come to think of it, Kusaal itself does something similar with perfective aspect verbs in main clauses:
M nu daam.
“I’ve drunk beer.”
M nuya.
“I”ve drunk (something.)”
This is so not an antipassiive …
“has focus and aspectual meanings,” – by the way, back to English. Pullum:
If true, this is unexpected for me. An aspectual meaning:/
Yes, Pullum is right. Though this strikes me as pragmatics more than something aspectual (in the usual technical linguistic sense.)
Passives seem quite often to be subject to interesting restrictions. When Kusaal transitive verbs are used as “passives” (which they can be, without any morphological change, a common thing in West Africa) they can’t use the imperfective aspect in a progressive sense, only habitual. So you can say: “Beer has been drunk”, “Beer gets drunk” (i.e. that’s what people do with beer) but not “Beer is being drunk.” I’ve no idea why this is so. (The English passive used to have a rather similar restriction, as I mentioned above, though the gap has been filled in the modern language.)
I suppose this means that in many languages passives haven’t quite made it to the status of full-fledged verb forms completely on a par with actives: they still trail signs of their origins as something else behind them, and remain the poor relations in the voice system. (All the more reason, of course, to treat them with respect, you Style Guides, and not discriminate against them!)
OK, the cogency of your counterargument has convinced me. I was wrong.
There is something similar in German: Ja, du hast Recht und ich hab’ meine Ruh’.
“Change of state” sounds like an aspectual meaning..
And this meaning could have arisen just because it is a verb, passive or not. Something has been done to the chair, this “something” requires a preposition, this preposition associates itself with the verb as an aspectual marker.
I didn’t know that, but there’s der Klügere gibt nach…
@de
I think the Pullums example can be analysed differently, i.e., the passive construction carries an additional meaning (or at least expected meaning) of “used for the purpose of (could also be inappropriately)”, which is absent from the active construction, i.e., he walked in the garden but not *the garden was walked in by him. Compare “he sat on the chair/dwarf” where the corresponding passive is acceptable (at least to me).
Kusaal can form adjectives from the perfective stem of verbs, but only if the perfective can have a stative reading; normally this can only happen when the verb is used intransitively, thus kpi “die”, kpiilʋŋ “dead”, yɔ “close”, yɔɔlʋŋ “closed.” However, from yɛ “put on clothes”, you can make yɛɛlʋŋ “worn” (like a shirt due for the laundry …)
How to make your partner really angry: Du får ret og jeg får fred.
Christensen’s and Heltoft’s (or maybe Heltoft and Jacobsen’s) observations on the Danish (and Norwegian) passives (refomated by me for readabiliy in quotation):
This is interesting but also, I think, not quite accurate. I’ll first contend that the difference between the periphrastic passive and the s-passive is primarily one of register, or indeed pragmatics, and it’s the officialese vibe of the s-passive that makes it sound like a commandment or an objective statement. I’ll further contend that this is mostly a feature of the present tense, since that’s the tense of of official provlamations and prohibitions, and since the s-passive also is more likely to be avoided in the past tenses. Finally I’ll contend that it’s mostly of concern in written language. In spoken language these nuances are better made by other means.
I may get into the actual examples later.
Yes, I wonder if C & H (or H & J) have given way to the temptation to fit the facts to the theory. It’s pretty easy to do that in cases where you’re trying to second-guess what the author of a written text was actually thinking when they wrote it.
I’ve encountered this sort of problem in trying to study focus phenomena from written texts: it’s a mug’s game, very often, because it’s all too easy to interpret the text in the light of your current pet theory when the author is not by your elbow to say, “Well, actually what I meant was …”
Being Norwegian I’ve always understood A-ha!’s Take on me as a word-by-word Englishing of ta på meg “touch me”.
Like Ryan I was 17 when A-ha! suddenly appeared on the horizon (i.e. hit shows on TV) in 1985. They were certainly not understood as “gay” (whatever that may mean in this context) in Norway. Rather, by appealing to the pop crowd of girls in general and boys of good family, us kids with pretentions of sophistication found them sneaky. But the success made us proud of them for patriotic reasons anyway, and when I was in university in the early nineties, us young adults with pretentions of sophistication were ready to admit to eachother that we actually liked them and we would play their later records between Pink Floyd (or Tom Waits) and the bands of the ongoing golden age of Norwegian rock.
Fun fact: går is the Verner version of yester-.
I’m just glad that A-ha! apparently didn’t feel pressured to start burning down medieval wooden churches in order to be judged sufficiently sophisticated.
Heh. The churchburning black metalists were yet another crowd* — almost off my radar until they suddenly appeared in the news and seemed to have committed all unsolved crimes in the last couple of years, But they arguably left a more lasting contribution to popular music than A-ha.
* But what are crowds? A friend of mine (who was otherwise mostly into britpop) liked black metal for its synth-based sound.
I just came across this:
Great find!
It’s actually a refreshingly sensible discussion. He cites some of the supposed reasons why “the house is being built” is “illogical” (ever the kind of argument deployed in such cases) but then goes on to point out that perfectly good writers are now using the form and it’s evidently destined to take over.
Interesting that he says “imperfect participle”, not “present participle”; that is actually a better name.
It is “the best writers” (imperfect participle) vs. “some of the best writers” and the newspapers (the passive participle with the imperfect active participle preceding it“).
“An important reason” to adopt the second construction is that the former only works for a few verbs (generalization) and a comparison of “being built” to “process” may help you accept it.
Also “logic” is not always prescriptive.
It is not always the logic of why we should prefer A to B.
It is also the logic that native users of A who find B unnatural actually feel behind it. Similarly, when they invite people to think of “being built” as “the process”, they refer to the mental relatity of speakers.
You can pretty much always concoct a reason why a construction you don’t like is “illogical” if you try.
Reminds me (pretty tangentially, admittedly) of these words from the introduction of Richard Andrews’ extremely quirky yet highly impressive Introduction to Classical Nahuatl:
(I notice, incidentally, that he doesn’t cite French as an instance of a language which might be taken as “ridiculous, illogical, or simply inferior.” Naturally not: that would be simply impossible. Illogical? French?!)
“You can pretty much always concoct a reason why a construction you don’t like is “illogical” if you try.”
True.
I just mean, it is not always a weapon.
In this case there was a large population of speakers who used “the house is building”. When you always say it this way (not because you’re prescriptivist) and never say “being built”, it is quite plausible that “being built” sounds unnatural to you, and your mind processes it differently than minds of its native users.
Particularly, it is plausible that your mind sees completion in “built” and the opposite of completion in “being”. If a foreign learner asks you : “why do you say ‘…is building’ and not ‘…being built’?” you will say “because ‘built’ implies completion” and it will be absolutely true about your mental reality, an accurate description of what’s going on in your head.
—
Anyway, what I meant is that very similar arguments are applied to both constructions.
“are applied ”
I am using the passive here, because I am “being deliberately mealy-mouthed and ducking issues I am uncomfortable with”:)
Namely, the fact that I don’t remember which of the arguments was made by whom. It was the author who spoke about “the best writers” and people (representative or not) he chose to quote (I don’t know why) who spoke about logic.
“The people in question don’t read the actual Strunk & White…” (DM)
“In question” is a similar phrase, and I just found a wonderful specimen:
“Diem (1980:79) and Blau (1970:59) have sought to explain some of the correspondences of section 1.1 as non-phonetic comparisons, by assuming that when Arabic was first transcribed with Aramaic letters, an Arabic sound was not necessarily written with the Aramaic letter which was used in Aramaic to write the Aramaic sound that was phonetically closest to the Arabic sound in question.”
Not so hard to imagine when you bear in mind that cognates are comparatively easy to spot, especially between Classical Arabic and first-millennium Aramaic dialects like Syriac. You can imagine someone thinking “they say pharyngeal d, we say ayin …” and making it into a general principle.
Similar to what? It means “the one that is the topic here”.
@DM, similar to my own passive one comment above.
Two lines of ciriticism associated with passives:
(1) in style guides, that passives are clumsy (2) criticism specifically associated with their function: to make your claims impersonal and avoid naming the agent.
Pullum quotes numerous examples where journalists speak about this second function, often applying the name “passive” to other evasive constructions like “there is”. E.g. a journalist while interviewing a commander:
“Let’s put it in the passive tense: there was a ceasefire agreement in Southern Afghanistan with some members of the Taliban at one time.“
I still don’t see how “In question” is similar; what does it have in common with a passive? It’s more like a pronoun, pointing to something previously discussed.
(This is why he is quoting them. His idea is that people often misidentify the passive.)
In your comment your “in question” allowed you not to name people in question.
In my comment “are applied” allowed me not to name people whose arguments I was discussing.
The author of the quote used “the Arabic sound in question” unambiguously, the referent is unique. A simple “it” would not work here (too many referents). But identifying the referent takes an effort from the reader: too many Aramaic and Arabic sounds and letters were piled up above.
@LH, a prounoun, but an inherently vague pronoun, occasionaly used exactly because the speaker is unable to use anythign more specific (to define and name the group of people in question).
Its native habitat is complicated chains (logical or otherwise) like that about Arabic and Aramaic. Especially useful when the referent is a variable itself, “a [referent]”, like here. In this case the referent is unambiguous (or what’s the point of such reasoning if you can’t keep it unambiguos?).
Yet it appears there because “normal” pronouns don’t work: it already reflects the author’s failure to express herself in more simple words (maybe because the thought is complex).
But people often bring it from its native habitat to conversations and it begins to mean “the one that is the topic here” (as DM defined) where “here” is a group of different people who are (as it happened here), discussing different things and sometimes are not even sure what exactly. Its original ability to refer to variables converts into vagueness.