What Do You Want, Your Modesty?

 One of the peculiarities of life is that you can go years or decades without examining patterns that you know are peculiar. Such was the case recently with the constant switch in Ancient Greek between singular and plural. This fluidity is particularly noticeable in the Chorus, and to a lesser degree in the protagonist, deuteragonist, and (if there is one) tritagonist of Greek tragedy. This environment, however, partially normalizes this movement, especially if you know the history of Greek drama. The Chorus was the primordial performer at the Dionysia, with the occasional Choregos as the equivalent of the modern soloist. The Choregos could stand out, but he was still ultimately part of the Chorus. The Protagonist emerged as a performer who could act independent of the Chorus and engage in dialogue with it. The Deuteragonist came next, although a bit too early to be a cat of any kind, and then, much later the Tritagonist. The Chorus was singular and plural from the beginning, and the Choregos could move between the numbers as necessary, but the permeability of grammatical number for the Protagonist and his kin I had assumed was the result of the elevated style of Greek drama. This was partially true, but not necessary for the reasons I had assumed.

Before I go any further, I would like to clarify that in almost all case the explanation of metric convenience is a facile explanation and diminishes the skill of the tragedians.

An investigation into Smythe's Greek Grammar, a tome of wisdom compiled by a greater intellect than mine, revealed much. There is a Plural of Majesty (S1005) in Greek, but it applies to the noun rather than the verb, as an Anglophone might anticipate. These plural nouns do impart an air of majesty to tragedy, but it is the number of the verb which is more relevant here. The verb, specifically in the first person, when plural with a singular noun, is termed a Plural of Modesty (S1008), a concept rather alien to English-speakers, except perhaps in a cynical and manipulative way. This Plural of Modesty is meant to diminish the individual and place her in the greater crowd of whichever category is currently applicable. The evidence that some individuality remains lies in the retention of the feminine. When a feminine speaker uses the Plural of Modesty in verbalization, the modifying participles remain feminine if singular (S1009). If the participles change their number to plural, the gender becomes masculine, because masculine is the default in Greek. The construction of participles render this condition especially visible. 

The permeability of singular and plural, however, is still far more common than the above would suggest. Tragic dialogue flows between the specific circumstances of the tragedy and general statements which are applicable to the circumstances (S1012), between individual disaster and cosmic horror. This fluidity renders most of the shifts of number comprehensible, with the remainder a matter of consistency of style.

The core of Greek is its facility with grammar, but even something as simple as grammatical number cannot escape (lanthanein) the pathological philosophizing of the greatest dramatists.

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!

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.

Hawaiian Grammar Review, Part 1

In anticipation of my upcoming trip to Hawaii, I powered through the chapters of Judd's Hawaiian Grammar up to the point where I stopped last time. If I were planning to speak Hawaiian, I would not have done so and would have switched to some modern online course; my interest, however, is more grammatical and historical, and in the historical records the macron is manqué and the 'okina is optional. Judd will serve my purpose well.

Here is what I have done: I have summarized the grammatical information of the first fourteen lessons in sensible chunks.

First, the pronouns. There are three grammatical numbers (singular, dual, plural), three grammatical persons (first, second, third), and two degrees of clusivity (inclusive, exclusive). I have concocted some tricks to remember the pronominal distinctions. The plurals all end in -kou; the duals except olua (2nd person dual) end in -aua. What about clusivity? An inclusive first person pronoun includes the addressee, whereas an exclusive one excludes the addressee. The easiest way to remember the difference in Hawaiian is that the exclusive pronouns begin with m- for 'me', since the function of the exclusive pronoun is to remind the addressee that he is not part of this 'we'.

Secondly, the verbal structure so far. The pseudo-Latin analysis rings false, but I wonder how much of that analysis was born of ignorance, and how much of convenience. The indicative present is formed by ke V nei N, where V is the verb and N is a noun or pronoun; thus ke hana nei au means "I work" The indicative past is formed by i V N: i hana au, "I worked." The indicative perfect is formed by ua V N: ua hana au, "I have worked". The indicative pluperfect tense is formed by ua V e N: ua hana e au, "I had worked." The indicative future tense is formed by e V au: e hana au, "I will work."

Thirdly, the prepositions. Given the Verb-Subject-Object structure of Hawaiian, prepositions are expected. There is a three-way distinction in the locative prepositions: mai, "from", ma, "at", and i, "towards." The preposition i also functions as a direct object marker. me means both "with" and "and". e is the preposition used for the agent of a passive verb (I suspect that this is a misreading of ergativity, but I have chosen my sourcebook). The remaining prepositions, a/o, ka/ko, and na/no, have alternating forms depending on alienability. a indicates inalienability, o alienability; thus kana papale means "her hat (made by her)", an origin which cannot be changed, but kona papale means "her hat (purchased by her)", a condition which could change if she decided to sell the hat or give it to her friend as a present.

The substantial 'declension' table for singular pronouns, compound prepositions, and the difficulties of articular allophony are subjects for Part 2 of this review.

The Tahoe Tongue: Clusivity vs. Number

One of the features of Washo unfamiliar to speakers of Indo-European languages is the concept of clusivity (whether the addressee is included in the pronoun). Clusivity in natural languages is restricted to the lst person plural, possibly because the plural of 'I' perforce includes another person. The two other grammatical persons available for this purpose are the 2nd ('thou') and 3rd ('he'). Some languages, such as Tok Pisin, do have combinatorial forms with both 2nd and 3rd, but this may be the result of the newness of the language and the ease with which the components of pronouns of Tok Pisin can be self-segregated. Washo has two suffixes, dual -ši and plural -hu, to distinguish the inclusive forms of the indicative from the exclusive (the jussive forms are -še and -hulew). The inclusive indicative suffixes may also be used on nouns. So far, this is not exotic from the linguistic point of view, but the treatment of independent pronouns in Washo shows an transformation of this system from clusivity-based to number-based.

Many Native American languages, among which Washo is included, treat grammatical number as optional; many plurals have a different shade from the corresponding singular. There are occasions, however, when it is necessary to be more specific about the person and number of the subject or object. In these cases, Washo does have a series of independent pronouns. I suspect that the prefixed pronouns of the Washo verb developed from a prior series of independent pronouns without number distinction, but I will save the detailed analysis of that phenomenon for another post. The independent pronouns of current Washo are based on the following stem: 1st person lé:, 2nd person mí:, 3rd person subject gí:, and 3rd person object gé:. The 1st and 2nd persons lack a subject/object distinction, depending on the subject-object prefix of the verb to disambiguate. The 1st person dual pronoun is léši. Note that it is not automatically parsed as inclusive. The suffix -ši has changed from a marker of inclusivity to one of duality. Even if the 2nd person dual pronoun míši acquired -ši as a sign of proxy clusivity, it has come to mean to indicate duality, since the 1st person dual has an extended form léšiši, in which the -ši suffix is attached to léši; this form means "we two (inclusive)".

There is no such reanalysis of the verbal suffix. The verbal form "you two are singing" is the same as "thou art singing" or "you-all are singing". All of these forms would be míšmi. Even though the clusivity suffixes do not have an absolute slot in the series of verbal suffixes, they always appear relatively close to the verbal root, and therefore do not have the flexibility of the independent pronouns.

(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.

The Tahoe Tongue: Stand Up, Y'All!

The second form of Washo which Jacobsen presents is the imperative prefix (the command form) on vowel-initial stems. Just as the prefixes of the previous lesson disregard the distinction between singular and plural, so too does this prefix ignore grammatical number. Another feature which has carried over from the previous lesson is “vowel coloring”; the imperative prefix ge- changes íme' 'drink' into géme', but á:hu 'stand' (plural) keeps its a in gá :hu. The vowel coloring which changes the i to e normally ends at the first consonant (including h), but the glottal stop lacks sufficient vigor to prevent further change. The imperative, therefore of the root í'is 'to hold, take, bring', is gé'es, and that of í'iw 'eat (something)' is gé'ew.

The most interesting feature introduced in this lesson is one which the Anglophone who is less experienced with non-Western languages might miss; yet it is a characteristic feature of Washo. The verb form á:hu means 'stand', but only with a plural subject.; there is a separate singular form, which will be introduced later. The imperative gásaw 'laugh!' can be addressed to one or many, but gá:hu 'stand!' can only refer to more than one. Languages which do this are said to have 'pluractionality', which may seem strange, but if some languages indicate grammatical number on both the subject and the verb, and some only on the subject, why shouldn't some indicate it only on the verb?

The Very Eσσence of You (Singular)

As the wheels of progress in Modern Greek became bogged in the mud slough of the passive (something with which, no doubt, any students of Classical or Koine Greek can identify), it was amusing that Hellenophones, ever resistant to the collapse of conjugations, such as occurred in French and English, have restored, once again, the sigma to the second person singular forms of the passive.

The change of [s] to [h] and thence to oblivion is a common process in the history of languages, and but this change affects Indo-European languages (of which Greek is one) particularly severely because the [s] marks the difference between the second and third persons, i.e., between 'you' and 'he'. Languages which which lose the sound sense between these two forms (and possible examples of such appear as early as the Hittite Empire) must make presonal pronouns obligatory; the guardians of the Greek tongue strenuously resist this aspect of analytical languages. Classical Greek uses the sigma, in various positions, as the marker of second personal singular, the future, and the aorist. The second person singular of the present active form (λυεις, “you loose”) is already a restoration of the consonant from the second person singular of the imperfect form (ελυες, “you were loosing”), although the resurrected sigma, like a borrowed letter of the alphabet, was placed after the new long vowel (ει) rather than between the two former short vowels where it had existed before (*εσι). The sigma of the future was restored in the empty position (sigmata?) between the vowels of the verb on the analogy of the sigmas which followed consonants, but not for every verb.

The damage, however, that the disappearance of future sigma caused does not compare to the jarring contractions from the absence of sigma in the present and imperfect of the medio-passive verb. This disruption appears most clearly in the student recitation of verbal endings, in a singsong voice and with frequently wrong syllabic stress, when the pleasant symmetry of the trisyllabic first and third person forms fails to appear in the second person and contracts (ηι < *εσαι, ου < *εσο), thereby hiding the characteristic vowels of these particular conjugations. Classical Greek possesses many contracted forms of verbs (three classes, in fact), but usually all six forms are contracted, not just one. The historian Herodotus' Ionic dialect shuns most contractions (and some contractions are probably the result of Attic or Atticizing editors), but even there the asigmatic second person (εαι) causes the tongue to stumble.

The preservation of the (medio)passive form in Modern Greek is not startling, given the large number of mediopassive and deponent verbs in Classical Greek, but the restoration of the sigma in the second person form (in the linguistically historical form εσαι, no less, even if the pronunciation has slightly changed) provides a symmetry and sensibility of the passive forms, and fits well with the extensive analogical remodeling of the Greek verbal system.

The Tahoe Tongue: Blankets, Blood, and Bone

The first "grammatical" chapter of Jacobsen's Washo grammar - it seems to be a language learning book tradition to treat proper pronunciation as a section before a chapter - discusses possessive prefixes on vowel-initial stems. A complete Washo "word" always begins with a consonant, of which the glottal stop is one. The expected three persons, a grammatical trinity appear here, with a fourth, more neutral, form, but there is no distinction of number. The ways of plurality and duality will be revealed in later chapters, but the idea of plurality seems less central to Washo than English. This, I am given to understand, is fairly common among North American indigenous languages, and certainly many Spanish and Chinese primary language speakers drop the English plural and find context sufficient.

The method by which the language indicates a possessor is prefixation. Thus 'my house' is láŋal, 'your house' is máŋal, and 'his/her/its/their house' is ťáŋal. Since Washo is a language in the real world, naturally this elegant system comes with a few notes. The first person prefix is not l-, but le-, in which the superscript e indicates that the /i/ of a root becomes /e/ after the first person prefix. This 'vowel coloring' will appear in later prefixed forms. What is necessary now is to note that the series 'my blanket, your blanket, his blanket' appears in Washo as lépi?, mípi?, ťípi?, in which the root is 'blanket' ípi?. The other caveat about these forms is that there exists a fourth form, d-, which indicates no particular possessor. The d- prefix, however, does not occur on every form. Vowel-initial stems for words which indicate physical relationships or parts of the body that would identify the species must take ť-. The physical relationship requirement is the clearer of the two categories; íyeš means 'daughter-in-law', and one must be a daughter-in-law in relation to someone else. The latter category can be best illustrated by two roots: ášaŋ, 'blood', and á:daš, 'meat'. The source of blood, prior to the modern era, was not immediately identifiable if the source had departed, but the source of meat could be identified by the meat itself. Rattlesnake tastes different (and worse, so I'm told) than venison. Thus dášaŋ and ťášaŋ are valid forms, but ťá:daš is the only valid form for its root.