Heard on the Olympics broadcast

[Wilson Gray]

What might be useful is a return the study of other languages as
primarily an intellectual exercise. The fuller story is that only
those students at the Language School who had not had any previous
experience of a language with (true) grammatical gender had their
minds blown by the fact that, in Russian, if a nominal has grammatical
gender G, then all adjectives modifying that nominal must exhibit that
same feature, even when the nominal is a Predicate Nominative of
gender G referring to a Subject Nominative of gender H.

Another feature of Russian that messed with the minds of
linguistically-inexperienced students is the fact that, in a Negative
sentence, every word that *can* be negated *must* be negated. A
sentence like Labov's famous

Can't no cat get in no coop

is Russian

Not can no cat get in no coop

and not

Not can [a(ny)] cat get in [a(ny)] coop


FWIW, I've long had the feeling that English would be like Russian,
WRT to negation, if not for the Greco-Latin straitjacket that
prescriptivism has forced it into, given that native speakers of
English have to be *taught* not to be using no multiple surface
reflexes of no NEG.

-Wilson

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Heard on the Olympics broadcast
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Aug 10, 2008, at 8:31 AM, Gerald Cohen wrote:
>
>> German does the same: "Sie ist ein guter Mensch" (= She is a good
>> person).  "Ein guter" here are both masculine.
>>
>> [quoting Wilson Gray]
>>
>> ... I can recall how shocked and disgusted we were
>> when, at the Army Language School, there were revealed to us such
>> examples of genderism as the fact that one is not permitted by the
>> grammar of Russian to say
>>
>> *Ona (= Feminine) khoroshaia (= Feminine) chelovek "She [is a] nice
>> person"
>>
>> Rather, one *must* say:
>>
>> Ona khoroshii (= Masculine) chelovek (= Masculine)
>>
>> despite the fact that the subject is Feminine!
>
> in languages in general, the principles for different kinds of
> agreement (within an NP, between subject and verb, between subject and
> predicative, between anaphor and antecedent) are somewhat different.
> in general, agreement within an NP is strictly "grammatical",
> sensitive to the grammatical categories (including grammatical gender)
> of the elements involved.  subject-predicative agreement (including
> gender agreement), however, is suspended in many cases, in particular
> for certain predicative nouns that have a gender but can be used for
> sex-general predication (as in these russian and german cases).
>
> arnold
>
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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
 -Sam'l Clemens

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