Linguist Forum
Specializations => Morphosyntax => Topic started by: Vir Docilis on June 16, 2014, 01:29:34 PM
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What do you say about having forms marking persons on normal nouns:
Mom, I want to play! - (mom is in second person)
Mom is really busy right now. - (mom is in first person)
But dad said that I could. - (dad is in third person)
When I thought about this, I concluded that vocative is always in second person. And that in most cases, you are actually using the third person form.
In addition to this, I figured that you could have a pronoun in-between second person and third person. This form is used in cases like this:
Have Steven already taken a cake? (When Steven is present. Both Steven and the others may answer.)
Oh, I've forgotten to tell him / you but he / you cannot eat cake today. (Telling this to both the person he's talking about and the person asking the question).
Otherwise you would have to choose between speaking to the person himself (excluding the others) or the others (excluding him).
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Have Steven already taken a cake? (When Steven is present. Both Steven and the others may answer.)
Oh, I've forgotten to tell him / you but he / you cannot eat cake today. (Telling this to both the person he's talking about and the person asking the question).
I don't really understand this part. The "Have Steven already...?" just feels so wrong to me because of being a native English speaker that I can't figure out what you intend it to mean. In the second example, you mention that there might be some problem with pronouns where you can't just address "Steven" along with everyone else, but I'd think using a second person plural would solve that problem anyway. Everyone is being addressed and everyone can answer.
In answer to the wider question as to what we might say about this feature existing, the main question is whether it is warranted. I noticed in your first post you said you were making a conlang so I assume this is related to that, otherwise it'd only exist if speakers felt it worked or had a sufficiently accepted tradition of use. I'd hesitate to say that words needed more explicit grammatical functionality than necessary. Context takes care of a lot of issues and I don't see how grammatical role-marking would add a tremendous amount (measured against the costs of having to implement such features on all nouns all of the time). I must admit I don't understand the desire to create conlangs so that probably affects my response (but it's great to see people interested in it!)
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I'm not familiar with any languages that do this either. There are certainly some interesting nominal inflections such as tense marking (roughly like ex-wife or future-leader or president-elect) but the purpose of pronouns is to replace nouns. So they have number to show participants I'm the conversation rather than using full nouns when it isn't contextually necessary, and they have person and gender information to clarify the referent-- not needed on full noun phrases usually.
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What do you say about having forms marking persons on normal nouns:
Mom, I want to play! - (mom is in second person)
Mom is really busy right now. - (mom is in first person)
But dad said that I could. - (dad is in third person)
Are you glossing another language? If those examples are English, the first one is not in any person (since it has no verb to agree with), and the second and third are both unambiguously third person. A word does not become `second person' simply because it refers to the person you are talking to.
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I don't really understand this part. The "Have Steven already...?" just feels so wrong to me because of being a native English speaker that I can't figure out what you intend it to mean.
In Sweden you take your piece of the cake on your own, as we don't serve food. Also we don't usually talk about pieces of cake but say literally "he took a cake", which might sound stupid in English. So this is a question whither the Steven has taken his part of the cake or not. So this is what might have happened:
Person A saw everyone but Steven take a piece of the cake the mother had cooked for everyone. So the conclusion is that Steven could have either chosen take the cake now or to take it later. Person A don't want to take too much of the cake, and needs to know whither the cake should be divided in two or if he can take a bit more (because he is greedy).
So person A needs to ask Steven if he has taken. But this Steven has a routine of taking the dessert later when he is not in the mood for it. And if person A asked Steven, he might be a bit naggy and ruin Steven's mood. That's why person A normally prefers asking the others about this matter, before asking Steven. And as the others has seen him eating, they probably know the answer to his question. But there is an unwritten rule to speak to a person present in the room first when it concerns the person, so person A also wants to make it clear that he is not ignoring Steven. But in the end our grammar has no such form so he ends saying: "Has Steven already taken his part of the cake?" (corrected).
This is based on my own experiences, for I'm always last one finishing eating in my family. As an example question there seems to have been too little information, though. Also one other thing I was not thinking about at the moment when I was writing the example is that you may count the plates and choose not to ask this question. I actually do this quite often. But when you eat something which you do not eat on a plate, you have to ask. Also I think I may ask instead of looking at the plates as it might be a bit sneaky.
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...but the purpose of pronouns is to replace nouns.
I agree to you on this part completely. I've tried using this grammar, and as you say having such a grammar would not really serve any real purpose. However, in languages that use titles such as Japanese, I think this distinction might help a bit, especially the distinction between second and third person.
Then, I really love this grammar nevertheless! Having this might give way to a new way of expression. The teacher may say refer to himself as a teacher, the policeman himself as a policeman and so on. Think about having books written in this! It would be funny! Now, that's why I included this to my own language.
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Are you glossing another language? If those examples are English, the first one is not in any person (since it has no verb to agree with), and the second and third are both unambiguously third person. A word does not become `second person' simply because it refers to the person you are talking to.
Haha. Then we should really say: "Mother am busy right now"! The grammatical feature is from my own language. I made an example in English because I thought that writing in my own language might be feeling a bit showy, especially since I'm new here. The other reason was that I have very few words in my own language. In this case, I thought it would be practical to give an example in English, as people might easier relate to it. After all, we all have heard our mothers talk about themselves as "mom" and called our mother "mom".
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Are you glossing another language? If those examples are English, the first one is not in any person (since it has no verb to agree with), and the second and third are both unambiguously third person. A word does not become `second person' simply because it refers to the person you are talking to.
Haha. Then we should really say: "Mother am busy right now"!
Eh, what? "am" is the first person singular copula. "Mom" is third person.
I am busy — (no equivalent)
you are busy — (no equivalent)
s/he/it is busy — mom is busy
we are busy — us moms are busy
you are busy — you moms are busy
they are busy — moms are busy
Third person.
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Are you glossing another language? If those examples are English, the first one is not in any person (since it has no verb to agree with), and the second and third are both unambiguously third person. A word does not become `second person' simply because it refers to the person you are talking to.
Haha. Then we should really say: "Mother am busy right now"!
Eh, what? "am" is the first person singular copula. "Mom" is third person.
I am busy — (no equivalent)
you are busy — (no equivalent)
s/he/it is busy — mom is busy
we are busy — us moms are busy
you are busy — you moms are busy
they are busy — moms are busy
Third person.
It's a joke! Of course you don't say: "Mom am busy"! The point is, the grammatical person and the actual person seems to be different here! For example, if I were the mother, and were talking to my child, I'm a first person, as I'm talking about myself:
Mom needs some time alone right now. (I'm talking about myself)
In second person we prefer using vocative instead. However as vocative always addresses the listener it's actual person is second person:
Mom, I want to play! (The child is referring to me. I'm the listener.)
So that leaves the actual third person to be in every case we refer to someone who isn't us and who isn't the person(s) we are talking to.
But dad always plays with me! (but now the child is referring to someone else)
The grammar I've showed you here is only available for two nouns "mom" and "dad", and names and titles. But then we don't refer to ourselves by our name do we? Like this:
Vir likes grammar. (I'm refering to myself)
But in Japan, it would seem that female's may actually do this because they think it's cute.
So if we had these distinctions we might actually conjugate the verbs according to this. That was what I was getting at. One thing I believe will never change though is the usage of the third person to speak in an indirect manner when you are trying to hide your own personality:
I heard someone was creating a language.
He wouldn't be go by the name Vir Docilis at the forum would he? (I'm speaking)
Here the speaker wants to pretend that the person he is talking about is not himself so he's using third person. As I'm saying, I'm not talking about the grammatical person here, but rather the actual person. But even if we look at this from the grammatical person perpective: "What happens when you change the nouns in the examples to pronouns?". The answer is, that they change into the persons I'm talking about. For example:
Mom needs some time alone right now. -> I need some time alone right now.
My conclusion is that the grammatical persons in our languages are irregular. I'm putting suffixes after the nouns in my language, making this completely regular, meaning that when you change the nouns into pronouns, they will be similar to the pronouns. Like this:
Mom(I) needs some time alone right now. -> I need some time alone right now.
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It's a joke! Of course you don't say: "Mom am busy"! The point is, the grammatical person and the actual person seems to be different here! For example, if I were the mother, and were talking to my child, I'm a first person, as I'm talking about myself:
Mom needs some time alone right now. (I'm talking about myself)
That's called talking in third person.
In second person we prefer using vocative instead. However as vocative always addresses the listener it's actual person is second person:
Mom, I want to play! (The child is referring to me. I'm the listener.)
Vocative is the nominal inflection showing the object being address and as such does not have person.
One way to look at it is that because vocative essentially tells who should listen to what you are saying it is actually not "grammatical" as such, essentially metagrammatical.
"I want to play" is the actual grammatical sentence, whereas "mom" is the metagrammatical segment identifying whom you are talking to, in a sense similar to a script where it says:
[Ash] "Come get some!"
"Ash" is telling you who is saying something, and the line is telling you what they are saying. Vocative is a similar construct, except telling you whom the line is addressed to.
[Old woman] [to Ash] "I'll swallow your soul!"
[Ash] [to old woman] "Come get some!
[addresser] [addressee] content
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Vocative is the nominal inflection showing the object being address and as such does not have person.
This is actually an exception: Vocative is essentially second-person case.
As for everything else I'm just as confused as you are about why any of this would be needed, but vocative itself is already serving that purpose.
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Vocative is the nominal inflection showing the object being address and as such does not have person.
This is actually an exception: Vocative is essentially second-person case.
Oh.
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To be clear: I've never actually seen it referred to in that way, but that's exactly what vocative encodes.
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Lastly I wanted to point out that Japanese does not always use vocative when referring to a listener:
Shizuka-san ha dou omoimasu ka? - What does Shizuka think?
In this sentence, you may either be addressing the listener or someone else. In Japanese you don't generally address a person as you. There are some words meaning you, but the general rule is to address someone by name. So for example in anime, you may see woman getting annoyed at men not calling them by name (it feels as if the person did not know you). So in the end you always speaking in third person, as the expression goes. But I'd say you are using the same grammar for both second and third person, making the sentences ambiguous. So cultural values are also important when it comes to this.
But then Japanese also has vocative, which does give some clarity:
Shizuka-san, sore ha nan desu ka? - Shizuka-san, what is that?
But I think that the distinction does help anyway, because vocative is used more when you are trying to get someone's attention, and has some special nuances.
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I don't think that's a vocative in the narrow sense. It's sort of like English "Mr."
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I don't think that's a vocative in the narrow sense. It's sort of like English "Mr."
"-san" is indeed an honorific, the closest thing to a vocative in Japanese would be the "yo" particle:
狼よ, 森の浪人. — O wolf, wanderer of the forest.
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What do you say about having forms marking persons on normal nouns:
Mom, I want to play! - (mom is in second person)
Mom is really busy right now. - (mom is in first person)
But dad said that I could. - (dad is in third person)
yes! this is actually an idea i've had before. (i'm into conlanging too...) --- your idea of a 2nd/3rd person blend though is not something that had occurred to me (though it has occurred to me that words like "he" in english can seem awkward when you're talking to about a person who's involved in the conversation), and i find that really clever actually.
i also like how (in your translations into english, which (people here might not be realizing) is all that we've seen of this hypothetical grammar) you decided to use phrases like "steven have" (and later, "mom am busy"). --- i think some of the other commentors on this thread might be a little confused (but hopefully i've understood you well). in general i think that people seem to have trouble keeping grammar and semantics separate, and some of the people on this thread seem not to realize that the grammatical properties of the **ENGLISH** translations that you've provided are entirely irrelevant regarding the grammatical properties of the same idea in this hypothetical language you speak of (which, again, you have not given us any samples of). --- people need to realize that when comparing a sample of language A to its translation into language B, that the sample and its translation need only be semantically similar, and that grammatically they can be wildly different from one another. and so, the people on this thread keep talking about whether a certain noun is in the vocative, or how it's agree with the verb, etc, but they might not realize that those are grammatical designations. and so, when they point out stuff like that, all they're doing is analyzing the english translations!!
incidentally, i noticed that you said you're not a native speaker of english, and so, hopefully it's not too audacious of me (because i, as it happens, am a native english speaker,,,, or well,,, at least,,, i try to be...) to provide some english examples of my own that might help to capture what (i think) you're intending to express.
-the king has decided to expand the kingdom's territory.
-i, the king, am banning you from the kingdom.
-you, the king, are being too kind with your enemies.
now,,, in english,,, we wouldn't say that in any of the examples above the noun "king" is declined to 1st or 2nd person (or even 3rd person for that matter, since nouns aren't declined for person **in english**), but no one should disagree here that the subjects of the three examples above differ in person (and that, respectively, they are 3rd person, 1st person, and 2nd person). (notice also how i was able to use conjugated forms like "am" and "are", even though we're saying that the king himself is the one doing each of these verbs, and as technically the subject of these sentences, even though grammatically speaking the noun "king" itself is not a subject **in english**) --- all you're suggesting then (right? correct me if i'm mistaken) is that there could potentially be a language that conveys these same ideas in such a way that we might gloss it as follows:
-the king-3rd has decided to expand the kingdom's territory.
-the king-1st am banning you from the kingdom.
-the king-2nd are being too kind with your enemies.
right?
as for whether any natural languages actually do this, i could almost swear that i recently came across one that kinda does. (or was i just dreaming that? i don't think i was...) -- anyhow, i just checked through my notes kinda quickly, but didn't find anything on it. the most recent languages i've been studying though are tiwi, ainu, nivhk, and timucua, and so maybe it was one of those. (or maybe it was some language i was studying longer ago and just seems recent. or maybe i just misunderstood what the grammar was saying.) anyhow, i'll try looking through some of my grammars on those languages again and seeing if i can find what i was thinking before.
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Just for the record the "others in this thread" (like me) do actually understand what's going on, and we're not taking the English translations as examples of English grammar. We're very used to working with other languages and glosses. We're simply offering our opinion about the grammars of natural languages. If the goal of the conlang is to simulate a natural language, something that would actually be used for communication between humans, then our comments apply. If your goal is to create an unnatural sounding conlang, then you can do whatever you want, but (not in any way to be excluding) the comments probably don't belong on a linguistics forum where we're interested in linguistic analysis (of natural languages).
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@djr33,
first of all, did you not see that i said "some of the others"?
personally i find it a little unbecoming when a person makes defending themselves the top priority of a response, but whatever. even if i had been talking about you specifically, you should be open to the possibility that i have a point. and maybe i'm totally wrong, but the response to that then should be an actual argument as to why i'm wrong (not simply pointing out that you've dealt with lots of languages and grammars).
...we're not taking the English translations as examples of English grammar.
i never said you were.
If the goal of the conlang is to simulate a natural language, something that would actually be used for communication between humans, then our comments apply.
no, you're wrong. forget about conlangs altogether. even when dealing only with natural languages, many of the comments on this thread do not apply at all.
for example, if you were dealing with the english translation of a basque sentence, then it would be incorrect to conclude that because a certain noun in the english translation is in the nominative case, that it must be nominative in the basque sample as well. similarly, an english sentence like "the cat saw the mouse" has "the cat" in the nominative, but in the chechen equivalent of this sentence "cat" would actually be in the dative. (and this is not simply an arbitrary label. the chechen dative is very similar to the english dative in that it would be the case used for "him" in a sentence like "i gave it to him".) --- to take this to an even further extreme though, parts of speech themselves are not stably consistent from one language to the next. in lakota, the part of a sentence corresponding to "tall" would not be an adjective, but rather a verb. in navajo, a word like "under" is not a preposition, but rather a noun. in cherokee, a word like "sister" is not a noun, but something more similar to a verb or preposition. and in salish, a word like "building" can just as easily be used as a verb as it can a noun. --- lastly, the way in which translations can differ at the sentence level can be quite drastic (and i would expect that everyone on these boards is already well aware of that). concepts encoded by english phrases like "in spite of" or "even though" can sometimes manifest themselves in radically different forms, involving completely different constructions/processes and latching on to totally different parts of a given sentence (and in many cases, the very notion of translation stops making much sense at this level).
very simply then, anything you can say about an english sentence regarding its*grammar* is irrelevant regarding the grammar of the sentence's translation into another language. --- do you agree with this?? --- and so, if you can say about a certain english sentence that the word for "john" is the subject, and that the word for "mary" is in the vocative, and that the word for "building" is being used as a noun, then that still tells you nothing about the behavior of the words in a translation of the same sentence into a different language. this is because terms like "subject", "vocative", and "noun" are all strictly grammatical and in no way semantic (regardless of the fact that they are usually used to represent processes which seem largely semantically similar from one language to the next). (*admittedly, the term "subject" could maybe be a slight exception here since it entails topicness. for the most part though, subjects have no semantic information. it's really quite in accurate to say that subjects are always agents.)
If your goal is to create an unnatural sounding conlang, then you can do whatever you want, but (not in any way to be excluding) the comments probably don't belong on a linguistics forum where we're interested in linguistic analysis (of natural languages).
no one here has expressed any such goal. person-marking on nouns might very well be something that exists in natural languages (you might have missed the part where i said i remember coming across one), but even if it doesn't (or hasn't ever), that doesn't mean it couldn't potentially, or that there wouldn't be a usefulness to it.
just consider the example i gave. people already say stuff like "as your friend, i'm begging you not to do this". so why is it so unreasonable to think that a language might have use for a feature that enable the words "i" and "friend" here to somehow be combined into a single word (either by marking the noun "friend" as 1st person to show that it's not being used in the typical 3rd person way, or by declining the word for "i" to the "friendly form", or whatever)?
and vir docilis provided a really good natural-language example too, but you seem to have totally missed his point. (yes, in this case i am directly accusing you personally of having misunderstood something. but you should consider the possibility that maybe you did.) he gave the japanese example:
"Shizuka-san ha dou omoimasu ka?"
provided i understood correctly, this sentence has two meanings:
1. "What does Shizuka think?"
(in which, shizuka is being talked about.)
2. "what do you think, shizuka?"
(in which shizuka is the one being addressed.)
your response to this was "I don't think that's a vocative in the narrow sense. It's sort of like English "Mr."", but that doesn't have anything to do with vir docilis' post, and i can only assume that you must not have read his post very carefully. (you should reread it.) --- he wasn't talking about the "san" suffix, nor was he claiming that this sentence even uses the vocative in anyway. (in fact, he was expressly stating that it doesn't use the vocative. specifically he said "Japanese does not always use vocative when referring to a listener", and he then went on to give an example of this.)
in any case,,, just consider how useful person-marking on nouns would be for an example like this. it would totally resolve the issue of ambiguity. you might not see ambiguity as a problem here (maybe because it should always be clear to the person being addressed as to whether they're mr shizuka or not, or maybe because japanese has managed to survive despite whatever ambiguity arises), but i think that in general we should avoid logic like "well, that would never be a problem" or "why would a language ever need that?" if we wish to understand how languages (natural or otherwise) operate.
i'm sure you're familiar with all sorts of examples of natural languages making complex nuanced distinctions that other languages manage to do without. perhaps such quirks arise simply because that's just what makes good semantic sense (for example, like how in english a phrase like "five books" is convey plurality on the noun in combination with the fiveness implied by "five", which is redundant, but still makes sense on an agreement level). or maybe such quirks are only due to languages tending to become needlessly complex over time as a result of humans generally having innate tendencies for creating very idiosyncratic rituals for the purposes of weeding out those who do not possess a group mentality (or maybe it stems from innate xenophobia and serves as a means for weeding out foreigners). or maybe such quirks really do improve a language, thereby ever-so-slightly increasing the odds of survival for anyone who happens to speak it, but are easily lost if the language is regularly being learned as second language by foreigners. --- whatever the case, i can certainly see why person-marking on nouns would not be widespread (since nouns are typically just 3rd person anyway), but at the same time i can certainly see how having such a feature could be advantageous.
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I tried not writing this message, but my curiosity really did get the better of me. At first I wasn't sure, but now I'm pretty sure that it's deliberate. What is the statement/stance that you are making with not using capital letters? I know that kind of comment can easily be understood as a sarcastic slight but honestly, if I meant it like that, I wouldn't post it. I know some people take stances on certain spellings or grammatical features, I'm just wondering what the deal is in this case here. I knew someone who refused to use apostrophes because of a stance against the traditional misanalysis of how it came to be in English, and he wanted to revert back to the original declensional forms with -s. Anything similar?
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haha, no, it's nothing like that. i just don't see any use to capital letters and so i don't bother taking the time to think about when i should be using them. if i have to write some sort of a formal email to a boss or professor or something, then i do use capital letters (so as not to give them the impression that i'm incapable of following conventions), but for commenting on internet forums and the like i don't feel the same sort of pressure. --- now, if someone /wanted/ to take a stance like that, then i'd be all for that sort of thing, but that's just not the reason why i'm doing it here.