Conlangery #70: Practicum — the Pitfalls of Frameworks
October 8, 2012 16 Comments
Kickstarter I mentioned at the top of the show.
Today, we finally get to talk about why David hates morphemes, among other things.
Top of Show Greeting: Tslure Thujekatsoth
Links and Resources:
- David’s LCC1 talk about Morphemes
- More explanation from David
- And more
- and more
- I don’t know why David put all his own stuff in the shownotes, but this one is a funny bit
- Zhyler vowel harmony (also from David, but we mention this specifically)
UPDATE: The Endangered Alphabets Kickstarter I mentioned at the top of the show and linked above has reached its goal. I like to think some of you helped push it over the edge, and if so, thanks. If you haven’t checked it out, yet, you can still donate until the 15th.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
I guess David would hate Delang, then…
Drawing up a table and filling in the spaces is the thing I was trying to avoid when I created Khangaþyagon’s morphology.
Of course, there’s also the danger of avoiding frameworks altogether…when I was reading up about the creole language Gullah, one article said – I kid you not – not only that glossing wasn’t possible, it was also not reccommended, because each sentence had too many possible meanings.
((I returned that book ASAP))
Great to hear Estonian being mentioned! Just wanted to say that Estonian isn’t as weird as David makes out. It’s true that the adjective agrees with the noun in the first 10 cases but in the final four cases (until, as, without, with) the adjective just takes the genitive and the noun takes the case endings. In the Wiki article that David mentions, ilus ‘beautiful’ is the adjective and raamat ‘book’ is the noun. It is true true though that someone learning Estonian needs to know a couple of stems which are nom sg, gen sg, part sg and part pl. From there we can make all the rest, so gen sg + -d = nom pl, part sg + -e = gen pl, gen sg + -l = add sg, gen pl + -l = add pl etc. Anyway, great show, love listening every week, keep up the good work!
Oops! Guess I misread that on the page. Okay, that makes more sense that the noun takes the cases and the adjective just gets a default agreement. Ha. My interpretation would really have been wild! Anyway, thanks for the correction!
I don’t know why David put all his own stuff in the shownotes…
Because those references were for you guys, you lunk! It was to give you and Michael background on where I was coming from, so that you knew what I was talking about. What’d you want me to put in there, a link to Redfin listings in Maine?
I know this, David. I just thought it would be amusing to make a joke about it.
Listen, that’s neither here nor there. Let me tell you about this wonderful two bedroom loft I found in Bangor. It’s got 1.5 baths, and you are going to die when you see the closet space!
The shownotes… priceless!
Great show you guys!
Yes, we’ve seen the morpheme theory fail before, just think about how Mark Okrand’s Atlantean is sometimes described, “bernot-e-kik”, and then they analyse latin in the same way “via-tor”. While I agree this may be useful for some monosyllabic languages (Chinese as stated by George, or even Sumerian, one could argue) it is not very useful for other languages as David points out with his example of goose/geese. Even though many of the ablauts and umlauts do come from missing vowels (for example a final -i being lost but affecting the vowels), but that’s historical as was mentioned.
It is interesting that this realization was prompted by such words as “goose” or “man/men” which are quite common in English. You would have had a harder time in languages like Spanish for this to become more clear as the plural with -s is incontrovertible.
The use of paradigms in verbs is important and I think the best way to tackle it, just think of the mentioned future in Spanish, you do have cantar (inf.) > cantaré (fut.), but you have tener (inf.) > tendré (fut.). Of course, again, historically it was *teneré > *tenré > tendré, but the point is that the paradigm for the future is not always the same as the infinitive for all cases.
So what I think I’m trying to say is… Go Paradigms! Haha, great job everybody! Keep up the good work!
You would have had a harder time in languages like Spanish for this to become more clear as the plural with -s is incontrovertible.
…or is it? Consider: sacapuntas.
This is true, and it is, in fact, one of my favorite features of Spanish (an one of my favorite derivational processes in general). Especially since VERB.PRES+NOUN+S compounds are nearly universally masculine, regardless of the gender of the noun element.
Very good point! And you are right, although in fact this comes from “sacar puntas” meaning many “puntas”, so it was the verb plus a plural noun that afterwards was taken as a separate entity. You could also have used “caries” (dental cavities) which has no plural (or no singular?).
Again as I said, great show! And great point. I did post something inspired by all this in one of my blogs (you can access it through the link in my name here), I would be excited to know you opinion about it.
About the gender one, well, in Spanish “masculine” is the default gender, in fact you guys mentioned “nosotros” in the podcast and it’s not like it’s that weird to use “nosotros” even with a group of mixed genders, because Spanish always uses masculine even when we talk of a couple. You would use “nosotras” if they were only women, but if there is at least 1 male, then you go back to “nosotros” as a default. Also another funny word very agglutinative and that’s masculine “correveidile” which means “a person who’s a gossip” and is composed of “corre, ve y dile” (run, go and tell him/her)
I think the more important point is that you have yo <> nosotros (as well as tu <> vosotros), which by morphemic analysis all have to be taken as monomorphemic, though it seems that nosotros and vosotros have clear historical explanations.
Don’t mistake the map for the territory?
Like it.