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"!

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.

Hebrew, Hebrew Everywhere

This morning at church, soon after the service had started, the Hebrew words within me rose. It is a peculiar sensation, and perhaps one applicable to me alone, that once I learn a sufficient amount of a language, the words arise unbidden in appropriate contexts. The trigger this time was the Hebrew/English Sh'ma, in Max Helfman's setting. Once my mind was primed, it was easy to think "Shalom aleichem" at "Lord be with you". If you have learned some basic Biblical Hebrew, the linguistic structure of the Psalms (in this case 27:1, 5-13) is glaringly obvious. My mental translation is partial and in places doubtless ungrammatical, but it is remarkable how many phrases in the service are automatically translatable - I already have switched from hearing 'Alleluia' as a rote response to an imperative plus the Name of the Most High.

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.

More Hebrew

I have mastered the chapter on the I-Yod, I-Waw, I-Waw/III-Guttural verbs and the one on III-He' verbs. The next challenge is the Doubly-Weak verbs. The exercises are moving more towards actual Biblical content! That is a good thing, not just because it is my goal to read the Tanakh in the original Hebrew, but also because it provides a check on my many errors without a teachers' guide. I managed, however, to get through the exercises with only one point of confusion. The last translation exercise in the III-He' chapter was composed of four verses from Jeremiah (4:23-26) - I've never been more excited reading about desolation and depopulation! I have also noticed increasing signs of etymological two-letter roots among the roots with "weaker" consonants, and more words of high frequency. This is not surprising, since the most common verbs of a language are often irregular - or if regular, use an uncommon pattern. The number of synonyms for generic Biblical actions and feelings is also increasing, while leads me to believe that the recitation of the Tanakh in Hebrew is less snooze-inducing (at least in terms of the variety of roots) than the standard English translation.

Palawa Kani

I am an enthusiast of languages, especially those that are moribund or reconstructed, but Palawa Kani is one of a kind. The individual features of the language are not extraordinary: many languages are creoles, or the language of post-colonial aborigines, or treated as cultural artifacts, or inspired by a need for cultural unity. I have never seen a language that combines these features in such a way, and I am simultaneously impressed and skeptical of its success.

Palawa Kani is a Aboriginal Tasmanian creole intended as a cultural language for the descendants of pure-blooded Tasmanians; it is constructed from the extant words of the Tasmanian languages and set to English word order. The Tasmanian government, in a fit of either white guilt or mainland cultural envy, is willing to support the idea. Once the idea of the savage has been abandoned, governments often promote the idea of the noble savage.

The paucity of extant Tasmanian Aboriginal words is a boon here; several endangered languages of the world do not help themselves by debating which of the dialects, all with too few people, should be the official one. The two camps of the Cornish revivalists have reconciled warring orthography (but two pronunciations) and issued official workbooks for their new Welsh-style creches, but then it's hard to get EU funding without official materials. A language that has been gutted, such as one of the languages of the California coast, may have no option, lacking sufficient grammar, other than making sacred the few remaining words.

The Tasmanian adoption of English seems to have left the languages bereft of current technological terms, although the technological level of the aboriginal population at the time of the European arrival suggests that the terms never existed. Avoidance of neologisms is a quick way to kill a fragile language; even if the language is intended as a second language and meant to place emphasis on the differences, such as the deliberately hamstrung Toki Pona, a healthy language must be able to coin new phrases, if not new words. The phrases will wear down to words later. One of the difficulties that Welsh, otherwise a relatively healthy minority language, faces is the use of Welsh in only certain contexts, even though the Cymrophones could use it in other situations.

The characterization of Palawa Kani as a creole is linguistic rather than judgmental, and the extant resources and speakers suggest a creole as the realistic option, but the associations of the word 'creole' are a liability. Creoles in Australia have names like Broken, indicating the low esteem in which they were held, and the breeding grounds were miserable camps. The use of English word order (SVO, modifier before modified word) is not far off from the syntax of global creoles (even though English IMO never was a creole), and if divergent word order is sufficient to break with tradition, then the SVO order of Modern Hebrew indicates it is not a "true" descendant of Biblical Hebrew, in which the word order is VSO. The absence of grammatical number in the 2nd personal pronoun, however, seems a little odd outside of English or a tongue which dispenses entirely with the plural; most languages which do not mandate a plural form at least possess a way of forming one if it is absolutely necessary. The holes in the grammar presumably are the result of a developing project.

This is a very new tongue, but unlike the Native American languages, it seems to have some funding and enthusiastic participants. When I first examined Washo, it seemed in a more perilous state than now. I look forward to seeing how Palawa Kani develops and thrives.