animate/inanimate

[David D. Robertson]

Linda,

Thanks for your good message.  You've taught me an idiom I hadn't learned
yet!  I'd sent in a reply yesterday, which didn't show up on the list (??),
so now I'll try to quickly reconstruct it.  I think I had 2 main points:

(A)  A case like "Hloosh-nanich!" makes me wonder, as I hadn't yet when I
sent the original message below, about the possibility that some phrases
like this one may be fossilized.  I mean that in many languages, phrases
can come to be taken as single words, un-analyzable units that mean
something different than their (etymologically present) constituents.  If
this is the situation here, "Hloosh-nanich!" might be, say, a set
interjection of warning, just like its English translation "Look out!"  In
both cases, the speaker & hearer don't necessarily have in mind the literal
meaning of either word in the phrase; does "Hloosh-nanich!" really
mean "watch well", or is "look out!" or "take care!" a better
representation?  And does English "Look out!" really contain the
verb "look", and the preposition "out", each in its literal meaning?  I
don't know.

(B)  It's certainly true that you can "bring out" either a thing or a
person, but I'm guessing that in the case of "kill", we're likely to find a
good test of my claim about animacy/inanimacy.  I'm thinking that we'll
want to look at whether the objectless sentence "Munk mimelus!" can
mean "Kill him/her"; and whether it's more likely you'll find "Munk mimelus
yaka!" for "Kill him/her/a particular animal we see as having a
personality".  Similarly, I'm very interested to know whether it's more
likely we'd say "Munk hlah!" or instead "Munk hlah yaka!" for
animate/inanimate objects.

(C)  Probably there are additional nuances to this animate/inanimate thing,
if it does exist at all.  Compare this with the numerous ways of
using "munk" ("mamook") to achieve various effects in Jargon; it makes
causative verbs, it can mean just plain "do" or "make", it can
mean "imitate", and so on.  In a lot of instances, you've got to become
familiar with the language before you can make the call about which meaning
is intended!

I'm off to my birthday dinner now, but before I go, let me promise to
investigate this more before cluttering up all your mailboxes with
speculation.

Hloosh-nanich!

--Dave



On Fri, 6 Dec 2002 16:02:40 -0800, Linda Fink <linda at FINK.COM> wrote:

>Hmm. I'm not sure. Hloosh-nanich! means Look Out! In other words,
understood
>subject "you". Munk mimelus means kill. You most likely would be killing
>something animate. Munk hlah (not sure how to spell that) means bring out
>(while chago hlah means come out). Seems like you could bring out a thing
or
>a person.  ???? ...Linda
>
>[quoting Dave's original message:]
>
>(1)     Munk-nanich!
>(2)     Munk-nanich yaka!
>
>My perception is that (1) is most likely to mean "Show it [to me/us]!"  My
>perception of 2 is that it's most likely to mean "Show him/her [to
>me/us]!"  That stuff in square brackets is there because I think it's a
>perfectly good, variant way to understand each of these sentences.
>
>What's the difference between the 2 sentences?  A little kid can see it:
>#2 has /yaka/.  #1 doesn't.  #2 means "he" or "she"--its object is
>animate.  #1 doesn't--it means "it", & its object is inanimate.
>
>In even simpler words:  With subjects ("doers"), always use /yaka/.  With
>objects ("do-ees"), you can leave out yaka if the object is a thing.  Final
>examples to sum this up, if I'm not wrong:
>
>(3)     Yaka kEmtEks.          "He/she/it knows it."  ("It knows it"--maybe
>referring to a computer's abilities.)