Korean Number Woes

Current varieties of English find one set of numbers sufficient. I exclude binary on the pirnciple that it is not used for counting except as a geeky in-joke. I must specify current English because there were rural systems of counting, in formerly Welsh areas such as Cumbria; the non-English system was restricted to counting herd animals, a limited but very important semantic domain for the local culture. In Korean, and I believe Japanese also, there are two counting systems: one native, and one adopted and adapted from the Chinese spoken at the time of contact. A comparison that might make more sense to those who only know Indo-European languages: this situation is as if Slavic-speakers counted numbers using Slavic numerals, but counted things using Greek.

I can more readily recognize the Sino-Korean numbers, thanks to the small amount of Chinese I learned (sadly, the lack of oral practice has made the tones nigh-impossible). Most of the numbers are easily recognizable, although I did briefly find the Sino-Korean vs. native Korean distracting. The use of Sino-Korean numerals as count nouns accords with the isolating, SVO, head-final nature of Chinese, while the agglutinative, SOV, head-final structure of Korean precludes count nouns except as a borrowing from culture languages of the area (i.e., Chinese). The head-final feature of Korean, however, does provide a convenient location for the count noun. The optionality of the plural suffix - a not uncommon feature of non-Indo-European languages - in Korean also makes the count nouns welcome.

(Ex)clusive Amator

Often the minor details of languages and the quirks of their dialects fascinate me - and I mean that in its root sense of bewitching so that the bewitched must think about his love, be it a grammatical feature or nubile young maiden. In this case, what has bewitched me is not some Thessalian hussy, but a regional clusivity distinction in the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese (which, incidentally, is not quite the same as Standard Mandarin Chinese). Clusivity, as I have written elsewhere, is the distinction between the inclusion of the addressee or his exclusion from the first person pronoun. It is an open question whether one would prefer the blunt clarity of the exclusive pronoun ("zan2men" vs. "wo3men"), or the awkward correction of the meaning of the first person plural in languages which lack a clusivity distinction. In the languages of East Asia, all of which appear to have or have had forms specific to status as well as person, some of the distinctions may have arisen as a separation of plural forms into distinct semantic spheres, although I suppose phonological change could have disguised related roots. Certainly, it took me a moment to connect Sino-Korean 'ku' and Mandarin Chinese 'jiu3' as the number '9'. The clusive forms of Tok Pisin (yumi vs. mipela) are, unsurprisingly, morphologically transparent, but sufficient time could disguise its origins. It is noticeable that the Mandarin exclusive form (the one which is clearly and analogically related to the first person singular "wo3") is the one favored by speakers who do not make the distinction. This is a case of analogical levelling, encouraged by the transparent system of plural formation. It makes me wonder whether the "men" of the Chinese plural is not generic plural marker that somehow became restricted to pronouns.

Lesson 15: Mai, Aku, La, Nei

The completion of Lesson 15 yielded no interesting grammatical gems (or even semantic), so rather than complain about the high level of ambiguity in Hawaiian particles (what can you expect from a language which has so few phonemes?), so I'll take the opportunity to explain a feature of Hawaiian unfamiliar to most English speakers: deictic particles. What is a deictic particle? It is simply an "adverbial" word that indicates direction. The old English words "where, whither, whence" illustrate a pronominal use of directionality, since the meanings are "at which place, to which place, from which place". Greek has a "deictic iota" or "deictic i" in its dramatic register. The abundant use of the deictic iota arises from the lack of stage directions (or even  indications of change of speaker!) in Greek drama. The absence of stage directions as we know them does not mean that the plays were not blocked - Greek tragedy does derive from a choral performance, after all. So where could the dramatist put the directions? He incorporated them into the text. In some cases, the direction was explicit, if one of the characters already on stage announced he could see the king approaching, but in other cases, the dramatist tacked the deictic iota onto the noun of his choice. The addition of the deictic iota indicated a "hey pay attention to this" response to the part of the players and the audience.

So far, the most striking Hawaiian deictic particles are mai, aku, la, and nei. The particle mai indicates movement away from the speaker; thus, whether the topic of discussion is coming or going does not determine the use of mai. The particle aku is the counterpart of mai, and can indicate temporal distinctions as well as physical ones - but I have not progressed far enough to say any more on the temporal uses. The particle la is a general indicator, and seems to be some sort of pan-Pacific, pan-East Asian deictic, since it is found in that use from China to Ni'ihau. In Hawaiian, la appears to be the antithesis of nei, a particle which is used quite vigorously in Hawaiian, but seems to indicate a high degree of immediacy, intimacy, and affection. I suspect that the intimate aspect of nei explains not only the use of nei as part of the present tense (what could be more relevant than what you are doing right now?) and the past with aku (only slightly less relevant than the present), and its absence when aku is used to indicate future time (irrelevant if you're an Australian Prime Minister and have just been eaten by a shark). This overlap of temporal and spatial terms is typical of natural human languages, although I am unsure what that indicates about human perception. These four deictic particle (there are others) provide additional information to allow the addressee (2nd person) to place the topic of discussion (3rd person) within a physical framework.

Aphaeresis and (Co-)Efficients

As Mr. Hawkins and the lovely Misses Tew and Ung are aware, I have been attempting to learn some Malay. The initial chapters presented no serious difficulties beyond those which any language book for beginners contain, but two features of the language struck me once I had reached Chapter V. The first, and lesser, of these features is the occasional, and occasionally rather extreme, aphaeresis of words beginning with a schwa or h and a schwa when the previous word ends in a vowel. Elision is the disappearance of a vowel before a following word which begins with a vowel; aphaeresis is the opposite effect. The reduction of hendak to ‘nak and helai to lai after a final vowel is understandable, since the schwa is never the stressed syllable in a two-syllable Malay word, and I presume that the occasional example of (pseudo-)aphaeresis before a final consonant is the result of linguistic analogy. The alternate forms present a minor difficulty to the learners who has not digested the full vocabulary and its linguistic isotopes, but the very preface of my book warns that Malay is not a book language at heart.

If I may digress for a moment to engage in linguistic geekery, the production of ’nak rather than *’ndak from the aphaeresis of hendak should not surprise; the pre-nasalized voiced plosive nd seems to require in Malay an epenthetic schwa in order to be pronounced; thus the elimination of that schwa requires a reduction of the pre-nasalized voiced plosive to either a (voiced) nasal, n, or a voiced plosive, d. Languages, such as Welsh, which face this question, appear to favor the nasal.

The other feature of Malay which struck me was the use of classifiers, which the author of my little blue-and-yellow book chooses to call coefficients. I am familiar with the concept, since Chinese possesses ‘classifiers’ and (Ancient) Middle Egyptian uses a similar system. Chinese places a classifier, which limits the possible meanings of the following monosyllabic or disyllabic word, between the numeral and the head word. Thus, the words for ‘deer’ and ‘road’, which are homonyms, are distinguished in speech by their respective classifiers. Middle Egyptian uses classifiers in the opposite way; since hieroglyphic writing only provides the consonants and omits the semantic content of the vowels, the homonyms are a visual kind (I would greatly appreciate it if anybody could provide me with the appropriate word for this phenomenon) and the scribes distinguished the senses by adding a visible but silent classifier. My experience with these languages aided me in understanding the concept of classifiers or co-efficients in Malay, but this conceptual knowledge is less useful than I would like in the practical application, especially since no dictionary of a language which uses classifiers seems to indicate the appropriate one(s) in their entries. This may be a practice akin to languages which use stress not marking this in their dictionary entries. An additional difficulty which I am experiencing in learning Malay is determining when to use a classifier and when to refrain. I trust that practice will give me a better sense of the presence or absence of this feature, although any practical advice would be received with gratitude.

Training for the Mister Babel Competition

My strength has always been languages, ancient or modern (although I did drop and run from the Russian orals), but it took me a while to formulate the most effective plan for acquiring new ones and resuscitating old ones. Ever since I went into business with Aidan, I've thought that I needed to learn Spanish as a business skill (he certainly won't), but was too preoccupied with amending my dearth of business courses.

When I was a little kid at Cathedral, I did learn some Spanish, albeit in a disorganized fashion, but when I received a choice, I chose to take French instead; in those days, not everywhere offered Chinese. I have forgotten much.

Some of you may have noticed my abortive attempts to jump start language acquisition. This was the case before I got a new public library card and discovered the foreign language CDs. I concede that these might not be the highest-rated programs, but I can't justify the expense of buying the more extensive programs such as Rosetta.

So here's the plan as it stands: I will learn to speak Spanish as a business skill, at a micro and macro business level. I will learn to speak Mandarin Chinese, because China is one of the big economies, and it might be useful in Berkeley and San Francisco. I have studied some Sanskrit, but learning Hindi, while potentially fun, is not a priority since Indians who are businessmen (no, teledrones don't count) already speak English, and frequently do so better than some of the riff-raff littering American cities. So what's language Number 3? That would be Russian - one of the sources of labor at Tahoe; last summer I surprised one of our Russian employees by spelling her name in Cyrillic! French, sadly, does not pass the expediency test, since I also need to review my Latin and Greek.