Linguistics Trivia and Discussion

General Off-Topic Discussion
103

That’s what I’d go with, yeah. We talk about “adjectives” as a distinct class in English, which makes sense, because English adjectives don’t really act like anything else. But the ancient Greek and Roman grammarians thought of adjectives and pronouns as two special types of nouns: in those languages, you can use an adjective anywhere you’d use a noun (compare “the good, the bad, and the ugly”, or simply “the news”: the stuff that’s new). In Japanese, I would say there are two separate classes of adjectives: “noun-like adjectives” and “verb-like adjectives”, and one is closed while the other is open. The fact that we call them both “adjectives” is just a translation artifact.

What do I mean by “closed” versus “open”? (I feel like I said this further up the thread, but a search isn’t finding it…I love having memory problems.)

In each language, it’s really easy to add new words of certain types, and really hard to add words of other types. In English, nouns and verbs are open: we all accepted “Google” and “to Google something” very quickly. But pronouns are closed: singular “they” has been in the language for centuries, and people are still arguing over whether it’s valid or not! Compare how easily English-speakers as a whole accept a new name versus a neo-pronoun.

Which categories are open and closed varies by language, though. In Japanese, pronouns are open, but verbs are closed. When they borrowed “party” from English, they only borrowed it as a noun: you can’t “party” in Japanese, you have to “host a party”, or “go to a party”, or “join a party”, using an existing verb. Verb-like adjectives are also closed in Japanese, while noun-like adjectives are open.[1]

Swahili has a distinct class of adjectives like English does, separate from its verbs and its nouns, but that class is quite firmly closed. New adjectives get borrowed as nouns instead, attached to the sentence with “of”. The only color adjectives in Swahili are “black”, “white”, and “red”; if you want to say something is green, you say it is “of leaves”, gray is “of ashes”, brown is “of coffee”. They borrowed “blue” and “pink” from English, but only as nouns: things aren’t blue, they’re “of blue”.

Prepositions in English used to be entirely open, which is why we have such an enormous variety of them, especially starting with a- and be-. Most languages don’t have a single-word preposition for “athwart”! Even in fairly recent times, most languages wouldn’t be as accepting of new prepositions like “contra”, “circa”, “re”, “apropos”, and “vis-à-vis” as English is. Pronouns and conjunctions are our truly closed classes, and even then, I’ve heard computer science undergrads say “xor” without hesitation…

  1. There are a handful of exceptions, of course; “open” and “closed” aren’t absolutes. You can Google something in Japanese, because “Google” happens to look very much like a Japanese verb. ↩︎

6 Likes
104

(All of which I imagine you already know; you mentioned closed classes in your own post, after all! But threads like this tend to put me in teacher mode, and it’s hard to snap back out of that.)

2 Likes
105

That reminds me of the following (have we mentioned this already in this forum?)
There’s a tribe that has no words for left and right. They say things like “my northern arm”!

106

And no IF game has been made about them? For shame! It’s the ultimate retort to games which experiment with doing away with the compass rose! (I just played A Stop for the Night, and oy vey, mapping and navigating was much less straight-forward that it would have been if it just used compass directions…)

2 Likes
107

Yeah, it’s hard to find an example of a closed class that is absolutely, unalterably closed. I’ve run into the kind of conjunctions you’ve mentioned myself, but it’s the sort of thing that you’re likely to encounter iff you’re working in a specialized field (in my case, mathematics).

As for Japanese adjectives, the frustrating or confusing thing about them is that Japanese actually does have a small number of very adjective-like adjectives. Almost all of them are lexicalized phrases; kono/sono/ano ‘this/that-near/that-remote’, for example, are just older nouns plus a genitive particle no. As far I know, though, onaji ‘same’ is just an adjective: It can’t be modified for tense or polarity; it doesn’t require a particle, like noun-adjectives (or na-adjectives) do; it resists nominalization; and so on. Such true-adjectives are (again, as far as I know) also a closed class.

2 Likes
108

A meta question for you linguistic nerds: I assume the class of classes is generally itself closed, ie. a language rarely constructs a new class of words, but does it happen?

109

Another fascinating thing about compass directions is that the basis for the terminology varies depending on the geography of the area those words developed in. In Australian languages you might have solar directions as we do in English, presumably because the area is flattish and the sun is a prominent landmark. On an island with a prominent long dimension, directions might be along that axis, and uphill/downhill with the latter also applying to traveling toward the shore or out to sea. I read of one language, spoken in a long narrow valley, that oriented its directions to this valley, and IIRC in a recursive way applied them to the interiors of homes, which like the valley were narrow and open at one end. There’s the more familiar uptown/downtown, and shipboard directions too. And even when a landmark isn’t promoted to be the foundation of directional words, to orient themselves, people living near prominent landmarks naturally speak of going toward the river, or up the mountain. So the feeling that compass directions are somehow technological and unnatural to certain settings isn’t actually so well-founded. Maybe it’s only the person driving on freeways or carrying GPS everywhere who can survive thinking only in terms of left and right!

5 Likes
110

Well, what is a class as opposed to a single example, right?

I imagine the way this happens is some particular weird usage arises – which happens all the time in the Internet era – and then people add more words until it’s a consistent pattern.

So, for example, the infix usage of “un-fucking-believable” turned up at some point. Probably within living memory. It’s not currently productive; people aren’t sticking other words into the middles of words in that way. But someone could, and if that catches on, we’d wind up with a class of infixable words.

3 Likes
111

As far as I’m aware, specialized classes or subclasses do appear, but I don’t think there are any full-fledged ‘parts of speech’ (which isn’t a great term, but whatever) that appear— not out of any sort of conservatism, but there’s only so much you can do with a sentence and grammar once you’ve got nouns, verbs, modifiers, etc. But here are some examples from Indo-European languages:

  1. PIE (Proto-Indo-European) didn’t have articles (a, an, the, etc.). Some of its descendents did; some didn’t; and the rules for exactly where articles are licensed differ among the ones that do. Attic Greek, for example, did have articles, and even liked using them for proper names. Classical Latin didn’t have any, but many of its daughter languages did; they evolved from existing Latin words (e.g., Latin ille ‘that’ became French le.)
  2. PIE also didn’t have any sort of future tense[1]. The -b- marker for the Latin future tense[2] is the remnant of a separate verb that got stripped down and reused or reanalyzed as a verb ending. There’s a similar but more complicated story for past tenses, which PIE did have[3] but changed in its daughter languages. The net result was that clasiscal Latin has about a half-dozen different ways (with varying degrees of productivity) of forming the perfect; as for Attic Greek, hope you’re good at memorization[4].
  3. This one’s more conjectural, but PIE probably originally only had two grammatical genders: animate and neuter. At some point, it developed a suffix *-h₂ that marked nouns as being semantically feminine: god → goddess, bull → cow, and so on. But -h₂ is a simple and common ending, so over time it became generalized to mark a feminine grammatical gender, and so the ‘animate’ gender split into ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. That split survived in many of the daughter languages, but the h₂ was ultimately lost and wasn’t particularly stable to begin with. The result was that you had masculine, feminine, and neuter grammatical genders that looked pretty arbitrary both semantically and phonologically. The gender system changed quite a bit over time, and you have some Indo-European languages that preserve a masculine/feminine/neuter split (e.g., Latin, German), some that just keep masculine/feminine (e.g., French), some that do their own thing (e.g., Danish), and some that don’t have grammatical gender at all (e.g., English, though I guess we retain it for pronouns).

  1. That isn’t to say it was incapable of describing events in the future; English and Japanese just have a ‘non-past’ tense (e.g., “Tomorrow I’m driving to the store,” versus, “I’ll have to call you back later; I’m driving to the store now”) and Mandarin arguably ignores tenses altogether in favor of aspect. The ‘will’ in ‘Tomorrow I will go the store’ is something different than a tense. ↩︎

  2. In some conjugations, anyway ↩︎

  3. Although it’s also a matter of aspect rather than just tense. The PIE verb system is different than its descendants’. ↩︎

  4. Another interesting but more technical example is what happened to the voice system on verbs in PIE. Long story short, if you hate deponent verbs in Latin, that’s what’s to blame. ↩︎

4 Likes
112

Random question because I can’t seem to find an answer: in a hypothetical situation, what would the verb version of manic/mania be? Manicalise? Manify? Maniise?

113

I guess it depends on what the verb is used for (using “angry” as an example)…to cause mania (to infuriate)? demonstrate mania (to rage)? become manic (to anger)?

2 Likes
114

See, I would analyze these ones as determiners rather than adjectives, like how English has a distinction between “this” and “red”. But really that’s splitting hairs; the Japanese ones don’t act like English determiners either, and what we call them doesn’t change the fundamental fact of their existence!

The usual explanation is that the words in each class are part of the lexicon (easily changed, can be deliberately manipulated), while which classes exist are part of the grammar (hard to change, evolves unpredictably over time). Different theories put different amounts of stuff in the grammar versus the lexicon, but there definitely seems to be a distinction there—consider how easily we accept new brand names and technical terms, but also how easy it is to get rid of outdated terms that have become offensive or just obsolete. Meanwhile, English teachers have spent centuries trying to stamp out sentence-ending prepositions and split infinitives, to no avail.

4 Likes
115

Oh! That reminds me of an article I read in a newspaper recently (physically, so I don’t have a link) where someone had coined (the Norwegian equivalent of) “un-fucking-heimlich”, which I think was a very novel spin on the German word “unheimlich”.

116

Which, of course means, “to allow someone to choke.” :wink:

7 Likes
117

Okay, I’ve heard of verbing nouns and/or nouning verbs, and I know a lot of specific tones, shades, and tints are named for thinges that are that specific shade, tone, or tint, but I’m not sure I get the noune-like and verb-like adjectives mentioned for Japanese… Granted, when I took Japanese in Highschool over 20 years ago, I always struggled with sentences more complex than subject-wa, object-o verb-verb-ending* so while I know, aka =red, midori=green, ao=blue, pinku = pink, kuro = black, shiro = white and that iro added to the end of a color name means colored and nijiiro means rainbow colored, I have no clue how to actually use Japanese colors in a sentence and realize I can recall very little other adjective vocabulary.

*And even then, I really only ever got the hang of -masu(formal, am doing/will do), masen(formal, am not doing/will not do), -tai(want to do), and -te( imperative) and the use of desu(is).

118

Oh, here’s another fun bit of trivia!

Ever since the Norman Invasion, the English language has been a fascinating mix of Anglo-Saxon and French. There are a bunch of places in the grammar where Anglo-Saxon and French alternatives coexist: you can mark possession the Anglo-Saxon way with " 's" or the French way with “of”, for example, and Anglo-Saxon adjectives get compared with “-er” while French ones get compared with “more”.

(In both cases, Latin actually had direct cognates of " 's" and “-er”, but they were lost in the history of French and replaced by extra words.)

It used to go a lot farther than this, though. French typically puts adjectives after nouns, instead of before, so it used to be that you’d put French (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon) adjectives after their nouns in English too. Now that only survives in a few specialized phrases, like “surgeon general” and “court martial”.

Especially in technical fields like law, it was prestigious to be as French as possible. So in the 1600s, you get court reports like this:

CW: mutilation, capital punishment

Richardson Chief Justice de Common Banc al assises de Salisbury in Summer 1631 fuit assault per prisoner la condemne pur felony, que puis son condemnation ject un brickbat a le dit justice, que narrowly mist, et pur ceo immediately fuit indictment drawn per Noy envers le prisoner et son dexter manus ampute et fix al gibbet, sur que luy mesme immediatement hange in presence de Court.

Replacing the French (and Latin) words with English ones:

Richardson, Chief Justice of the Common Bench at the Assizes of Salisbury, in summer 1631, was assaulted by a prisoner there condemned for felony, who, after his condemnation, hurled a brickbat at the aforementioned Justice, which narrowly missed, and for this an indictment was immediately drawn against the prisoner by Noy, and his right hand was cut off and attached to the gibbet, upon which he himself was immediately hanged in the presence of the Court.

I love the phrase “ject un brickbat, que narrowly mist”. Several of these words are even mangled combinations of French and English, like hangé for “hanged”.

The fact that not even lawyers and justices could speak proper French eventually led to it being banned in 1731. From then on, court cases in England had to be handled in English. But after the swap, lawyers needed to use a whole lot of “X and Y” phrases: in English, the instructions for who should inherit your property are called a “will”, but all the pre-1731 precedents were in French and called it a “testament”. So just to be safe, in the courtroom, it’s a “will and testament”. A bad contract is “null and void”; good information is “true and correct”. When something is illegal, you’ll be told to “cease and desist”, and when the judge rules on something, they both “deem and consider” it.

(Some of these are even two French terms! People don’t always know the etymology of the words they use, so sometimes you have to add a second French term, just in case the first one has become too English.)

And then, once the practice of using two synonyms for something in law was established, it was extended to all sorts of other terms, even when there was no confusion in the first place. Now, saying something two or three times in different words is a classic mark of lawyerliness. Good news for clerks who get paid by the word!

14 Likes
119

I knew middle English was sort of a Frankenstein of Anglo-Saxon and the French spoken by the Norman invaders, but I had no idea that was the origin of English’s inconsistant comparative/superlative constructions nor the legal doubled for emphasis… which honestly, I never realized just how many legal terms do this until you pointed it out just now.

Though it does make one wonder, are there any Germanic words we compare/superlate* in a French way or vice versa? And how does English tend to handle comparisons and superlatives of words borrowed outside English’s direct Germanic/French ancestry?

*Is that the appropriate verb form of superlative?

Also, something that’s been bugging me since last night:

The subject is the noun doing the verb.
The object is the noun being acted on.
But what do you call the noun being used to perform the verb?

e.g. in the sentence:

James cut the steak with his knife.

James is the subject and the steak is the object, but what is the knife?

120

It’s the indirect object, while what you called just “object” is the direct object.

Edit: Actually that seems to be wrong… It seems to be the “instrument”. Indirect objects are connected with prepositions like “to” and “for”, but this is a different case. TIL!

121

Yep, the classic term for it is “instrument”, or an “instrumental” noun. Some languages have a special way of marking these nouns; in Old Hittite, you would put -it on the end of a word to mark it as an instrument.

2 Likes
122

With a few exceptions, Japanese has two flavors of adjectives: verb- or i-adjectives, and noun or na-adjectives. The former look and act like verbs: atataka-i ‘warm’ can become atataka-katta ‘was warm’, for example. There’s also the negative form atataka-kuna-i ‘not warm’ and the past negative form atataka-kuna-katta ‘wasn’t warm’, which is also fun to say. They can happily modify nouns and appear as predicates (‘The day was warm’), and in the latter case the adjective itself is marked for tense, not the copula. It’s like the word atatakai is really a verb ‘to-be-warm’, and you can use it to modify nouns (‘The being-warm day’) or as a verb itself (‘The day being-warmed’).

Noun- or na-adjectives, on the other hand, look like act like nouns. They take a particle na (or sometimes variants) when attaching to nouns; they want a copula when they’re used as predicates; and they don’t show tense or negation themselves. They’re very similar to the setup in English where shoving two nouns together turns the first one into an adjective: winter coat, Hollywood movie, business executive, etc.

(Take all this with a grain of salt. It’s been a while since I studied Japanese myself.)

3 Likes