Usitative

[Richard Zane Smith]

Scott,
i enjoy reading your posts.
one thing i've appreciated about your writing is the clarity
even in dealing with abstract issues..

A Wyandot man here often ends a speech by saying
"there is no word for 'goodbye' in Wyandot"
and of course,
he refers only to the current understanding of the word "goodbye"

after all...where did "bye" come from ?  "bye and bye"?
or the
16th century "God-be-with you"?
so actually
 there might be no "goodbye" (as we understand it today)
even in the older english.
Its meaning has evolved to become only the sounds you verbalize
 at a parting,yet with no obvious inherent expression or wish.

richard

> 
> From: Scott DeLancey <delancey at UOREGON.EDU>
> Date: 2006/05/17 Wed AM 11:49:09 CDT
> To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
> Subject: Re: [ILAT] Usitative
> 
> On Tue, 16 May 2006, Mia Kalish wrote:
> 
> > What I mean is that there is no usitative rule in English, but there is a
> > formal position for it in Diné Bizaad. I think the psychology of this is
> > intriguing.
> 
> How we'd say that is, the semantic category is more grammaticalized in
> Diné Bizaad than in English.  And yes, that kind of observation often
> looks interesting, and gets you thinking about cultural differences.
> But, as I pointed out in a post last week, that can be really dangerous.
> It's easy to make up stories about "other" folks that neatly explain
> why their grammar is different from yours.  Too easy, and the problem
> is that there's no way to ever confirm your particular story.
> 
> The other danger is misunderstanding your own language.  Whorf got
> great mileage out of contrasting how Hopi and other Native languages
> deal with time with the "Standard Average European" system which he
> said is found in English.  The problem is that, although the "SAE"
> concept is more-or-less what's taught in school, if you look at how
> English grammar actually deals with time, it's not an example of the
> SAE system at all.  So, while there surely are differences between
> Hopi and English means of talking about time, the differences that
> Whorf found were only in his own head.  For your question, notice that,
> although English doesn't have a formally distinct usitative verb
> construction, that's one of the main meanings that go with the simple
> present tense:  "What do you do for fun?  I watch movies."
> 
> Scott DeLancey
> Department of Linguistics
> 1290 University of Oregon
> Eugene, OR 97403-1290, USA
> 
> delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
> http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html
> 

Richard Zane Smith
18474 S.Cayuga Rd.
Wyandotte Oklahoma
                                  74370