Awa Pit

Lately, I've been digging in the linguistic mines of Awa Pit, a South American language which has a feature with the fear-inducing name of conjunct-disjunct. The core concept is actually quite simple. If you are familiar with any non-English European language, you have come across conjugations - in French je chante, tu chantes, il chante, in Spanish canto, cantas, canta, in German ich singe, du singst, er singt. Even English conjugates, just barely, I sing, you sing, he sings. The good news? In Awa Pit, there is one conjugation marker per I/you/he sit.

This marker is best explained by analogy. If this worthy poster wrote a note saying "Gone fishing." and placed it on your fridge, you would interpret the sentence as "I have gone fishing." If this poster, however, sent you a text "Gone fishing?", you would interpret the question as "Have you gone fishing?" In other words, the English punctuation provides enough context without the pronouns "I" and "you" to interpret the sentences. Awa Pit, as a language of the South American jungle, is seldom written down, and therefore uses suffixes at the end of verbs to indicate this distinction.

A Hydrography of Words (Muta cum Liquida secundum linguam Graecam)

 When I was a lad, I learned a rule about length in metrical poetry called muta cum liquida, wherein the first category of consonants followed by the second could be considered long or short, depending on the needs of the poet. These terms are are no longer as useful as they once were, even to literates - the former is obsolete, while the latter appropriately has changed its shoreline. The modern meaning of 'liquid' is restricted to lambda and rho, but the older meaning encompassed nasals, mu and nu. A more nuanced understanding is not that the vowel before these consonants may be long and short, but that the short vowels may be lengthened. This revelation enables further nuance: the voiceless consonants of Greek display the fluidity of this rule, but the voiced consonants delta and gamma do not admit it. Beta is omitted, perhaps because it is more likely to assimilate to the following nasals. A potential reason for delta and gamma to deny this variability is that vowels, even short ones, are ever so slightly lengthened before a voiced consonant; this lengthening is enough (in Greek) to create an impediment. Such incomplete transitions are common among languages and go a long way to creating their individual flavors.

Now For An Epenthetic Remark ...

 As much as I love terminology, there are times when I feel that perhaps, just perhaps, scholars have gone overboard with splitting hairs (that metaphor was a malaphor with intent). Such is the case of the terminology around epenthesis. When two consonants or vowels love each other very much, but it would not be appropriate for them to conjugate, they must make room for the holy spirit, and this process is called epenthesis. Epenthesis applies to the insertion of the consonant or vowel between the sounds, but there is the possibility of being more specific, or perhaps pedantic. If it is a vowel, it is anaptyxis (Gesundheit!); if it is a consonant, it is excrescence (gross!). 

If we set aside for now the minor sin of mixing Latin and Greek terminology, an examination of the etymology of each term reveals different conceptions of the process. Epenthesis is the insertion (note the -en- of epenthesis) of a sound, and therefore a letter (in this context). Anaptyxis is the opening of a space for that sound. Excrescence is the growth of a sound between the adjacent sounds. Thus the process as viewed from anaptyxis and epenthesis is a process of forcible opening and insertion, but process as seen from excrescence is a natural growth in a space which must be occupied. All three terms are useful, but in a practical context of finishing one's assigned reading for the week, epenthesis suffices.

Take My Home, Take My An(a)-, Make It So I Cannot (Under)stand

Prepositional prefixes beyond the Attic pale often lose their final vowel. This causes the consonant to assimilate to the consonant of the verb root; thus anaphanen becomes amphanen once the nu makes contact with the phi. In the case of anamimnesko, however, the loss of the vowel can be catastrophic. The root here is mna with reduplication and suffix -sk- in the present tense alone. Neither reduplication nor the continuous suffix apply to the aorist, so anamnase becomes the unpronounceable anmnase. This is further reduced to amnase, which form now clashes with the alpha privative. If it were the alpha privative, it would have the opposite sense – both a catastrophe and an antistrophe. It is fortunate, therefore, that the preferred word for forgetfulness is lethe rather than amnesia!

Doubling Down: The Reduplication that Europeans Do Not See

Reduplication is a linguistic phenomenon so basic that it is found throughout the world, except in Europe. When, therefore, the Europeans spread across the world in conquest, encountering new languages which possessed this feature and triggering the creation of new languages which used this basic tool of communication, they scorned it; but this disdain required willful blindness on the part of the more educated Europeans to the existence of partial reduplication in one language that they elevated above all others: Greek. In some instances, where the ravages of time and the desperation of analogical repair had worn away the surface pattern, this blindness could be forgiven; in many cases, however, the reduplication was a clear and present feature. The history of the Indo-European languages in Europe was, in part, a process of systematically removing this reduplication, but in Greek, and to a lesser extent Latin, it still remained, and those were tongues which the elites of Europe held in reverence. In Latin reduplication remained only in the perfect tense as an increasingly archaic and non-productive feature; in Greek, however, reduplication was the principal method by which the perfect was created, while reduplication in the present was non-productive. Since the fact of reduplication indicates a primary segment from which the reduplicated segment is taken, the reduplicated segment is almost always simplified, although the details of that simplification varies according to the language. If the simplification of European languages had been a laudable quality, the European point of view might have been consistent, but it was the complexity of Latin and Greek that was admired. Thus, logically, the complexity of foreign tongues should have been admired instead of suffering disdain.

The more change-oriented among my readers may see a lesson in this; I merely offer it as an observation.

Looking Backward: A Tale of Tmesis

The delights of digital tools are manifold, but one area in which they fail is the phenomenon of tmesis, whereby a prefix normally attached to a verb is separated, sometimes at a considerable distance due to the non-configurational nature of Greek, and thus the unwary may be led to the wrong dictionary entry. This separation, this cutting off, is an illusion, not just in translation, but in origin. It was quite logical for the Greeks who first observed this feature to call it a cutting off, a lobotomy of an intact word, for they were looking backward and needed merely a descriptive term rather than an analytical one. The science of philology was millennia away.

The true nature of the phenomenon, however, was not one of cutting, but of grafting. In earlier days, the adverb or preposition could float, and only gradually became attached to the verb. This is why some verbs could be modified by prepositional phrases, while others, to which the prefix was appended, governed cases other than the expected case. Some barbarian tongues, such as German, left this process conspicously incomplete; thus this process should be called thesis, not tmesis, but the cruel mistress of convention had established a false analysis as the official term.

The Words We Leave Behind

 A feature of the Pindaric realm, the epinician genre, is the double use of grammatical components and its corollary, the absence of words that would not have been absent in a prosaic work. The complex meter demands such compromises. This absence works best when the audience is so familiar with the story presented that it perceives the new text as an alternate presentation rather than a novelty. A problem, arises, therefore, when the audience receiving is no longer the audience originally intended to receive; and even more so when the primary language of that audience is not the language of the work.

This phenomenon, however, is not unfamiliar to contemporary consumers of media. Movie adaptations of popular franchises often depend on the audience's knowledge of the book series and therefore feel at liberty to discard scenes that convey critical information to those who have not read the books and are merely accompanying their progeny or sweetheart to the cinema. The consumer intimately familiar with the work may not realize how deficient these lacunae can be to their companion, and perhaps even become angry when they fail to appreciate the genius of their literary god. From the perspective of the companion, however, this low esteem for the film is appropriate; the cinematographers have failed to create a coherent narrative in service of spectacle.

Let's Talk About Ptolitics

A challenge often faced by linguistic neophytes is the mastery of clusters not found in their native tongue. In the case of English-speakers learning Ancient Greek, one such cluster is πτ at the beginning of the word. The Greeks themselves were not thrilled with this combination, if the development of πτόλις to πόλις is any indication. Internally, this cluster did not present a problem. Exempla even developed from the juncture of π and the first-person suffix yo in verbs such as πίπτω and κλέπτω. The average Greek was not a linguist, even a poor one, for comparative linguistic had not yet been invented, so the root was reanalysed as πίπτ- and produced both future πεσοῦμαι and infinitive πίτνειν through another round of affixation and cluster reduction. One of the words which kept the πτ was πτῶσις, falling, from which the word for case, the best grammatical invention of man, derives its name.

Despite the potential difficulty of pronouncing πτ, the original pronunciation was even more challenging: τπ. If this looks improbable, let us remember that the Proto-Indo-European root for earth was *dhghom-, so someone at some point deemed such clusters pronounceable. In the later evolution of the language, it is a bit surprising that the t did not become an s: PIE loves its s almost as much as Greek likes to drop it intervocalically. The rule which developed in Greek was this: in a cluster of two different plosives the first could not be a dental; or in layman's terms, τ, d, and θ could not be first. Greek, therefore, has πτ and κτ and lacks τπ and τκ. The earth is χθών not θχών. 

The Curious Case of the Removable Nu

 There are many dialects of Ancient Greek, and individual dialects are often assigned to different genres, presumably due to some founder effect. This literary dialect then is smoothed and standardized and thus acquires some forms not found in the original dialect. Many literary dialects mix features from more than one dialect. Tragedy generally separates the Ionic speech of the majority of the play from the stage Doric of the Chorus, but even this relatively clear separation does not prohibit the occasional intrusion of a Doric verb into the Ionic sentence. The proper dialect of an Ode is Doric and Aeolic combined. This presents a challenge to the modern student of Ancient Greek, who has trained on Attic Greek, itself not as standard as the Athenians would have you believe. And thus we come to the removable ν.

Calling this ν 'removable' is somewhat misleading, for although it disappears, it does not do so without leaving a trace. The nature of that trace is the reason for such variation among the Greek dialects in critical grammatical forms such a participles. Greek loves participles; if one wields them correctly, they increase the subtlety of Greek to a degree that would make Cato uncomfortable. The present and aorist active particles have an affix -ντ- to which the case endings are appended; but the σ of the nominative singular triggers changes which differentiate it from the oblique cases. These changes are not the same in every dialect. In general, the change involves lengthening the preceding vowel. Such is the case in Attic. In the dialect of Pindar's Odes, however, lengthening is replaced by diphthongization; thus -ανς from -αντς becomes -αις rather than Attic -ας. This phenomenon can be confusing for a student at their first encounter because it is similar to the feminine dative -αις (which is -αισι here, for reasons best dealt with elsewhere and never had a ν). These changes create a brief uphill battle for the neophyte, until they see the horror of even more radical non-configurationality.

She Shall Be Called Woman ...

I've been brushing up on Biblical Hebrew lately, and experiencing sympathy pangs for those poor souls studying for their bar mitzvahs (bar mitzvot?).

The most common words of a language tend to preserve irregularities long past the death of their conjugational companions. In olden days, of course, these were not irregularities, but perfectly sensible in the systems of their birth. The erosion of the years and the reform of their now-wayword companions leave them orphaned and oddities which frustrate the beginning student and fascinate the linguistically savvy mind. From the multitude of en-dings for Anglo-Saxon plurals, only "children" remains a once-common "-en" ending, and throws an "r" in the mix for good measure. Seldom do comtemporary English speakers refer to "oxen", and even those who might use "brethren" are more likely to say "brothers".

It is no surprise that the Hebrew words for "man" and "woman" display such irregularities, The plural of  "ish" "man" is "anashim" and plural of "ishsha" is "nashim." The missing nun in "ish" and "ishsha" vanished through assimilation to the previous consonants, and the missing aleph in "nashim" proabably disappeared through its own weakness (I don't think the aleph is an addition, as some might, for reasons I explain below). The three-letter root, then would be aleph-nun-shin. If scholars who have dedicated their lives to the study of the Semitic languages cannot agree on the distribution of the various sibilants (s-sounds) in proto-Semitic, certainly I dare not do so. My suspicion is that the root originally meant "man or human being", and thus, according to the usual androcentricity of gender systems, declined as a masculine. The feminine meaning is probably derivative, and the bewildering multiplicity of "broken plurals" in Arabic, traditionally considered the most conservative of the Semitic languages, allows for odd plural patterns preserved in the much more orderly Hebrew. The root aleph-nun-"s", however, could extend much further back: the basic proto-Indo-European root for "man" is "H1ner", in which the "H1" represents one of the famous laryngeals, possibly a glottal stop, that is, an aleph. The speakers of Indo-European apparently treated "H1ner" as exclusively masculine, but struggled to make it fir into the later declensional patterns. In this case, at least, it seems that :"woman" really is called "woman" because she was created from "man"!

The Syntakkes Hole, or The Hollow Word

This is the last post on German for a while - the Hawaii adventure awaits. I am bringing my Hawaiian dictionary with me, so there will be linguistic content! But for now, more German. German is notorious among Anglophones for being a case language, the nearest modern one, and many fear it for that reason. If you look at the case system, however, it has a hollow core. In Indo-European languages, and perhaps other families, the core arguments have less case marking than the peripheral ones. A case system decays like a tree (in the case of Latin, like a eucalyptus on fire, once all five cases in feminine singular became -a), from the core outward. The plurals have already become arbitrary, with only a few rules of thumb and that strange little -n in the dative plural, and the only difference between the nominative and accusative is in the masculine (der vs den); all other nominatives and accusatives are the same for their genders and numbers (The pronouns have a similar problem, but that's another post, post-Maui). It's no wonder that the German have developed an obsession with word order! Yet even in languages that are far more meticulous about genders and noun classes and still preserve the nominative-accusative distinction, two participants of the same gender and number can still cause confusion. I was practicing my German composition by describing the plot of Mirror, Mirror (review coming soon), and ran into just such a problem describing the evil queen and Snow White (Schneewittchen, not Schneeweisschen - thanks to Bill Willingham, I know the difference).

The dative forms of German do not always aid in disambiguation. True to Indo-European form, the neuter article  dem shares the dative form of masculine, while the feminine dative singular definite article der shares a form with its masculine nominative counterpart. The plural dative definite article shares its form (den) with masculine singular accusative - perhaps this is why the dative -n hangs on. At least it's not a Russian genitive-accusative!

For now, German retains its cases, but the minute it loses its final -n's it's going to turn into Eastern Dutch!

Wandering Words

I've been thinking more about "separable prefixes," a truly bizarre phenomenon of German, Dutch, Afrikaans, and Hungarian (the last probably acquired the feature from German). The linguistics literati prefer the term "separable particle," which is more apt, since a prefix which wanders to the end of the clause would be a strange prefix indeed. This thing which is not a prefix could not be a clitic, either; a clitic could wander to the end of the clause, but a clitic must hang on some other word, and that is not required of the "separable prefix." Such confusion is not uncommon: the Greeks used the term "tmesis", "a cutting," to indicate a prefix which in certain cases could separate from the verb and go elsewhere in the line of poetry. In that case, however, the Greeks were looking backwards; since tmesis only occurs in forms of the language that tend towards archaism, the separation is actually a conjunction! English has adverbs and prepositions, but the use in a particular verbal phrase must be one or the other. Every grammar of a language is a snapshot, and therefore has features in transition; in the case of German, these features are the "separable prefixes" and a case system on the verge of collapse.

A Germanic Fly In Amber

I've been taking a German course over in Berkeley, and my memories of the difficulties are coming back, even if I like the language more than Mark Twain. Cases and genders are like bread and butter for me, but the truly bizarre feature of German is the Separable Prefix, a grammatical abomination in a linguistic Limbo between adverbs and prepositions. The infinitive of the verb "to call (on the phone)" is "anrufen", but "I call the doctor" is "Ich rufe den Artzt an." This example is not so bad, but a sentence with the verb "aufpassen" produces the bizarre sentence "Passen sie auf den alten Hund auf?", "Are you taking care of the old dog?" in which the last "auf" refers to the "passen" at the beginning and the first "auf" governs "Hund" - at least there are no reflexives combined with it!

Martin Buber's Bagel

 Those who know me well know that I have long had a fascination with clusivity, a highly useful grammatical feature. The two types of clusivity are inclusive and exclusive; which only appear in the first person and the non-singular grammatical numbers - or so I thought until recently. The first person inclusive means "I and you (but not other people)," whereas the first person exclusive means "I and someone else (but not you)." Thus, a Hawaiian translation of the title of Martin Buber's theological treatise I and Thou would be Kaua (first person inclusive dual) rather than Maua (first person exclusive dual). The logic of clusivity suggests a rigid limitation to the plural and whatever other non-singular forms a language may contain; clusivity by its nature is "I and X".

Language, however, is not logical; if it were, Zamenhof would not have needed to invent Esperanto. Clusivity distinctions is the standard for Polynesian languages, but formerly I had thought it well-behaved. Samoan is an ergative Polynesian language, a standard-bearer among linguists for its phonological transparency. Samoan has several form for each pronoun, but only a few concern us. The exclusive dual has forms ma and maua, while the inclusive dual has forms ta and taua (these forms are cognate with Hawaiian maua and kaua). The -ua component of taua and maua is related transparently to the common Polynesian word lua "two," so if one wanted to create a singular inclusive, the form ta would be an appropriate choice, but what would it mean? In Samoan, the first person singular inclusive is used when the subject ("I") has an emotional involvement in the verb.

Now let us apply this distinction to Martin Buber and a delicious lox bagel. If someone else saw Buber eating a bagel and heard Buber say "We (inclusive) are eating a bagel," the other person might think that Buber was sharing his bagel with God. If God can do all things, surely he can share lunch with one of his favorite theologian! If, however, Buber was aware that he alone was consuming the bagel, the dual pronoun acquires a different meaning. The bagel would be in the third person ("he/she/it"), and therefore cannot be the "X" of "I and X." The pronoun does not mask a reflexive; Buber is not eating himself! The first person inclusive singular indicates emotional involvement in the verb. Perhaps he was very hungry from thinking profound thoughts prior to devouring the bagel; perhaps this is the best (or worst) bagel he has ever eaten.

This seems bizarre, but there may be hints to its origin in other Austronesian languages such as Malay. When I was examining a basic Malay phrase book, I found an interesting phenomenon; a sentence which I would have translated as "I see you" was rendered as "We (inclusive) see" - kita, which contains -ta. The object of the sentence, in other words, had been incorporated into the subject. The verb "to see," however, is a transitive verb and therefore requires an object that is seen. The other sentence of this type which caught my attention was "We (inclusive) love," which meant "I love you." From this sentence it appears that the inclusive forms indicate emotional content if they accompany a transitive verb. This is odd but comprehensible from an Anglophone perspective. Apparently, the singular use of the inclusive has stripped away the plurality of the concept and left only the emotional core, a Star Sapphire of pronouns.

What A Complex Web We Weave ...

There is still a prejudice, broader and more pervasive in the past, that the languages of the "lesser races" are perforce simpler. This supposition, of course, is rank nonsense, as the description below illustrates.

The Hawaiian verb complex has many components. The order of the components, according to Judd, are:
1. Verbal Prefix
2. Verbal Root
3. Qualifying Adverb (any adverb, not just grammaticalized ones)
4. Passive Marker
5. Verbal Directives
6. Locative Particles, Participle Marker, or Relative Marker
7. Strengthening Particle
8. Subject
9. Object

Component 8 may or may not be valid, depending on the stress patterns of Hawaiian, about which I know little, but Component 9 is rank nonsense.

The Verbal Prefixes, which may be misnamed given the disinclination of VSO languages to prefixation, are tense/mood/aspect indicators such as ke, i, ua, and e. Ke is a marker of the subjunctive; i is the marker of the simple past; ua is the marker of the perfect; e is the marker of the nonpast or positive imperative.

The Verbal Root is the basic verb. Not much to say there, except that it need not be a single word.

The Qualifying Adverb is an adverb that modifies the verb. Although some adverbs have gained grammatical status, most are ordinary adverbs which may refine the meaning of the verb or may change it significantly.

The Passive Marker indicates that the subject of the sentence undergoes the action of the verb rather than causes it. Passive sentences are quite common in Hawaiian..

The Verbal Directive are an interesting quartet about which I have written much here
http://anglicanavenger.blogspot.com/2010/02/lesson-15-mai-aku-la-nei.html
These Verbal Directives are aku, mai, ae, and iho. aku indicates "away from the speaker". mai indicates "toward the speaker." ae indicates "on one side of the speaker." iho indicates "downwards," but can also be used as a reflexive. An example of a perhaps pleonastic distinction is ua haawi aku oe i poi i ke kanaka "You have given the poi to the man." The Verbal Directive aku is probably not necessary to describe the giving motion of haawi, but it is true that giving involve moving the gift away from the giver. In the case of hele, however, i hele aku au means "I went" and i hele mai au means "I came," which receive separate verbs in languages that lack Verbal Directives.

Component 6 can be the Locative Particles (nei and la), the Participle Marker (ana), or the Relative Marker (ai). nei indicates here-and-now. la indicates there but not not-now. It worth noting that the form which Judd introduces as the present tense, ke ... nei, is really the subjunctive Verbal Prefix ke tied to the here-and-now by the Locative Particle nei. The Locative Particle la often appears in questions as a contrast to the certainty of nei. ana changes the verb into a participle, but Hawaiian does not care whether it is passive or active. The order of ana and the Verbal Directive shifts the category of the phrase; hele mai ana is a participle; hele ana mai is a gerund. ai changes the verb into a relative form; this maneuver is necessary since Hawaiian lack a relative pronoun and does not seem to love subordinate clauses of any kind..

The Strengthening Particle is no. This is a useful device, but I have little more to say about it.

Conditional Love

I'm writing this in response to a comment about my post très romantique on Facebook, since there is much confusion between the imparfait, the futur, and the conditionnel. I recieved a lesson on the conditionnel on Thursday, and there is no better teacher than explaining it to others.
The imparfait is formed from the first plural present root (the third plural present works most of the time, but not always - the imparfait of of aller is allait, not *vait) and the endings -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, and -aient. Since this is French, the first three endings and the last are pronounced identically (for a long time, I have wanted to ask a typologists about French). So, if we take the verb danser (which, I am ashamed to admit, I misspelled in the post), the first plural present is nous dansons and the root is dans-. If we attach the imperfect endings, we get:
L'Imparfait
je dansais
tu dansais
il dansait
nous dansions
vous dansiez
ils dansaient

The futur, on the other hand, is formed from the infinitive and endings drawn from the present form of avoir: -ai, -as, -a, -ons, -ez, and -ont. Some endings, of course, are homophonous; in this case, the first and fifth, the second and third, and the fourth and last. If we attach these endings, we get:
Le Futur
je danserai
tu danseras
il dansera
nous danserons
vous danserez
ils danseront

The conditionnel is formed from the infinitive and the imparfait endings. So, one conjugates the conditionnel thus:
Le Conditionnel
je danserais
tu danserais
il danserait
nous danserions
vous danseriez
ils danseront
 

The irregular verbs are a source of confusion for the conditionnel. The imparfait of il va is il allait, the futur is il ira, and the conditionnel is il irait. These four forms have distinct pronounciations. In the first person singular, however, the forms are je vais, j'allais, j'irai, and j'irais. The futur and the conditionnel have the same pronunciation but different spellings. Homophony in spoken language is more common than many realize, and does not significantly inhibit comprension, but the overlap of the forms of the futur and the conditionnel illustrates the conceptual connection between the conjugations. The forms of aller are laid out below:
Le Futur
j'irai
tu iras
il ira
nous irons
vous irez
ils iront
Le Conditionnel
j'irais
tu irais
il irait
nous irions
vous iriez
ils iraient

The tense structure of a conditional clause is a bit bizarre to those of us accustomed to Latin and Greek. The conditionnel is not used in the protasis (the if-clause, the clause which actually establishes the condition), but in the apodosis (the then-clause). The French protasis uses the imparfait. Thus, Si j'avais d'argent, je voyagerais à Hawaii means "If had had money (but I don't), I would have gone to Hawaii." My professor anthropomorphizes this match between the imparfait and the conditionnel as les temps qu'ils s'aiment, "the tenses which love each other."

The other use of the conditionnel is one that my professor did not describe as conditional, but certainly seems so to me: the phrase au cas où, "if it be the case that," establishes a condition. The verb after au cas où must be conditionnel. So, the sentence J'ai acheté les etiquettes au cas où tu voudrais voir l'opéra means "I have bought the tickets in case you would like to see the opera."

 

I hope that clears up any confusion.

Which Way Which?

Now that I've finally reached the chapters in Judd that deal with more interesting grammar, I am much happier.

A monolingual English-speaker (aka "American") might not realize this, but the structure of the relative clause in English (who/whom/whose/which/what) is remarkably free. English allows nearly component of a clause to become the pivot on which the subordinate clause hinges. Other languages, such as Biblical Hebrew, have only one form; thus the English sentence "I saw the fish which the man caught" becomes "Saw I the fish which the man caught it." Biblical Hebrew's construction is fairly simply compared to the hoops some languages jump through: languages that have cases but insist that the relative particle be in one case (nominative or ergative, depending on the overall linguistic structure) can twist themselves into knots if the pivotal noun is not the actual subject of both sentences.

Hawaiian uses a relative particle, but is not a fan of relative clauses. In many domains, places where one could use a relative particle prefer a particle associated with the main clause. There are, however, three places where a relative particle is mandatory. The first case:
Na mea ana i ike ai. The things which he saw.
A rougher, but perhaps more illuminating, translation would be "The things of him (inalienable), past see which." The subject of the subordinate clause ("he") cannot stand its normal main clause position directly following the verb within the subordinate clause, since the relative particle ai is occupying that slot; nor can it take its normal main clause position in the main clause, since the noun phrase na mea occupies that position. A relative particle, however, is useless without a noun or pronoun to relate to, so the subject of the subordinate clause ("he") transforms and becomes an a-class genitive modifying the subject of the main clause. A-class genitives and possessives seem to be popular choices for grammatical transformations in Hawaiian.
The second case:
Eia ka mea i make ai na kanaka. Here is the cause from which the men died.
The rough translation would be "Here the cause (mea is a remarkably flexible word, meaning person, thing, or cause) past die which the men." Ai is used here because it replaces means, cause, or instrument. I am not entirely sure why ai precedes na kanaka - perhaps it is part of the verb complex, or perhaps the relative particle needs to be as close to its antecedent as possible.
The third case:
I ka la a makou i hiki mai ai. On the day when we came.
A rough translation would be "On the day when we (plural, exclusive) past come away-from-speaker which."The prepositional phrase i ka la has been fronted and its position occupied by ai. The conflation of time and place, when and where, is so common in language that I wonder if it is not a fundamentally human way of understanding the world. It is worth noting that the subject of the subordinate clause, makou, here precedes its verb, i hiki, even though the default order of the original sentence would be I hiki mai makou i ka la. A different word order in subordinate clauses from main clauses is quite common in the world's languages, but I am not certain why *I ka la a i hiki mai ai makou would be a challenge to a native Hawaiian speaker. It might mean something slightly different, or it might just be one of those things about a language that a tyro must learn.

If these three examples are typical (and I cannot imagine why one would use atypical examples in such a small sample in a teaching grammar), I would not be surprised if ai batted for the verbal team rather that the nominal one, insofar as any Hawaiian word has a firm verbal/nominal distinction; the possibility of replacing ai with the gerund-making particle ana supports this idea. If this were the case, then the three sentences have the following rough translations: "His things seen-which", "Here the cause died-which the men," and "On the day when we (but not you) came-away-from-speaker-which." Additionally, if ai were verbal in this way, it also seems to trigger a loss of valency, changing the verb from transitive to intransitive.

Ad rem Aegyptiae intelligendam

One of the forms of the Egyptian verb, and one which we recently studied, is called the "pseudo-verbal" form. This consists of a limited number of prepositions followed by the Egyptian "infinitive". The citation forms for the most common pseudo-verbals are transliterated conventionally as "Hr sDm", "m sDm", and "r sDm". Although it is difficult to describe concisely an English structural parallel, students of the Romulan tongue might find a better comparison between the Egyptian pseudo-verbal form and the Latin gerundive.

In this case, the Egyptian forms "Hr sDm", "m sDm", and "r sDm" correspond (with due allowance for prepositional semantics) to the Latin forms "de aliquo audiendo", "in aliquo audiendo", and "ad aliquid audiendum". The Latin trio, however, is crippled in its syntactical ability compared to that of the Egyptian, which can support a complex noun phrase.

Since the meanings of the constructions differ, I am presenting this as a mnemonic rather than a detailed grammatical analysis.

Beginner's Assyrian

My New Year's resolution is preceeding in fits and starts (sometimes precipitated by my absent-minded professor habit of forgetting where my books are, and sometimes by the plethora of projects on which I am working) but I have begun Beginners' Assyrian, trusting in the similarities to Biblical Hebrew to give me a leg up, not under any illusion that the differences would present challenges.

The first challenge, of course, was the gross mismatch between the radical-based Semitic morphology of the Assyrian language and the determinative- and syllable-based orthography of cuneiform. One of the motivations for the adoption, if not creation, of the Semitic writing system (I suspect) was this mismatch. It was as if the problem with English transcription and translation in both Chinese and Japanese were combined!

The second challenge was the Assyrian reduction of the proto-Semitic consonants under the influence of Sumerian, which possessed a radically different morphology. I had thought the non-pronounciation of 'aleph and 'ayin in Modern Hebrew (which I had been using as my model for pronouncing Biblical Hebrew) created enough difficulties. Assyrian, on the other hand, witnessed the collapse of six proto-Semitic consonants (and waw) into near-indistinguishable phonological effects. Since Assyrian is a Semitic language, however, the tridical structure applies, even if two of the consonants are so weak as so to disappear entirely!

The third challenge was the tendency towards vowel harmony in Assyrian, which appeared also in its sister dialect of Babylonian. Sumerian had vowel harmony, possibly mitigated by tonal differences, but even Hebrew shows evidence of morphologically-specific vowel harmony. Babylonian was the language that replaced Sumerian in that language's ancient heartland, aand thus experienced the greatest level of vowel harmony (although not to the extent that it destroyed the typical Semitic structure), and Hebrew experienced a very low level, but the effect on Assyrian lay between the two. One has to wonder how much of the vowel harmony within the Assyrian Empire was the result of the infamous deportation policies, which mixed many tribes who spoke similar Semitic tongues; thus they shared structural similarities but not necessarily vowels.

Snakes, Sinners, and Saints

It's Sunday, so it seemed appropriate that I study the "original language" on this day. I figure the Almighty wouldn't mind if I studied some Hebrew in order to read the words of his book. I am close enough to the end of Ross' "Introducing Biblical Hebrew" that all the reading exercises are taken from the Good Book (in this case, Gen. 2:15-24 at the end of Lesson 49). The repetition of roots in Hebrew oratory seems less absurd than the equivalent King James English. Is this the result of the diversity of forms in Hebrew compared to the paucity of English? Another benefit of reading the passages in Hebrew is the clear identification of prose from verse. This distinction is sometimes lost in the translations into other languages, and prose and poetry often do not fit well into the other genre.

The grammatical form du jour is the Qal passive (herein exemplified by לֻקֳחָה), which the Rabbinic Scholars appear not to have believed to exist, since the standard passive form corresponding to the Qal is the Niph'al. The vocalization for the Qal passive is identical to the Pu'al, but who knows if that's how David would have pronounced it?

On other news, I have moved my "Learn Maltese: Why Not?" (the real title of the book) and its accompanying workbook up to Tahoe. This does not exempt me from including it in my New Year's resolution, but shifts it to next summer's segment of the project. I re-read the grammar sections of the book and understood much more clearly after spending so much of my summer learning Biblical Hebrew.