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William is back! He talks with us all about definiteness.
Top of Show Greeting: Vreksi
Links and Resources:
- Typology of definiteness
- Irish initial mutations (note the difference in masculine and feminine definites)
- Javanese and definiteness in subjects
- Another paper on definiteness
- Hungarian definiteness marking on verbs
Feedback:
Email from Patrick:
I do in fact listen to the entirety of every episode, although I do admit I listen at 1 1/2 speed because I actually have no time to listen in the first place.
And, I’d like to thank y’all so much for your podcast. Without it, I’d’ve been bald because I attempted to learn my sinklang. Your podcast has helped me figure out how to reel in my craziness while still keeping features I love. And, you do it with humor and intelligence; y’all are EPICally amazing, awesome, helpful, [insert other applicable adjectives here] people. -Patrick Garza, from Southwestern University.
AlucardNoir
At the binning of the podcast you say most young conlangers omit definiteness, I don’t get it, why would anyone pass over something as – well not important per se, more like useful for shortening a conversation, I mean this is one of the first features I think of when designing a grammar. I still remember when I was at school and had to analyse a poem of other literary work, and every time I made the mistake of using an authors name, especially when the’re not that known, and had to use the whole name in place of “the author”. Though now that I think of it, omitting this particular kind of article can be one way of ensuring a certain work hits the minimum word count.
Pete Bleackley
Honestly! David’s only been gone 2 weeks, and already you’re using the “m” word!
wm.annis
David and I have different agendas.
admin
I am not really as strongly against morphemes and some other things as David is. And I really prefer to keep theoretical arguments out of my conlanging.
Pete Bleackley
Very well, but if Wisconsin is overrun with hordes of barbarian horsemen, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Anthony Docimo
also, watch the skies.
as to the podcast, great work to one and all involved. definately food for thought as to how my concreole can regain definatenesses.
thanks.
Ossicone
I’ve got into the habit with my langs to only have definite marked.
Or for a very fun European system, I mixed Swedish with German to get definite suffixes and indefinite articles that mark for case.
And most importantly, I had to sacrifice heat for conlangery too! My electric blanket used to create a hum (outside of human hearing) that would get picked up. I think you should form a union and demand heating rights from George. 😛
Jyri
It’s an old podcast but deserves reply. The Hungarian definite conjugation is shared by the Ob-Ugrian and Samoyed languages which even expand it a bit. Besides a plain indefinite subject conjugation they use conjugation patterns that correlate with the definiteness of the object and agree with the person and number of the subject and the number of the object (either sg vs. non-sg or sg vs. du vs. pl). They however lack the funky Hungarian S1sgO1sg/pl -lak/lek category.
Then there’s also Mordvin which has a more fully polypersonal definite conjugation that in principle agrees with the person and number of both the subject and definite object. Quite many forms of the conjugation pattern are however identical with each other.