[Lingtyp] PUT=LET GO: An areal feature?

[Joo Ian]

Dear Frans and Harmut,

I think the European verbs of ‘put/leave’ are a bit different. They cannot describe the action of letting go of something you’re holding on without moving it. However the ‘put-let go’ verbs I mentioned can do so.


  1.  Fang4 ta1 de shou3 ‘To let go of his/her hand’ (Mandarin)
  2.  Son-ul noh-ta 'to let go of the hand’ (Korean)
  3.  гараа тавих ‘to let go of the hand’ (Mongolian)
  4.  tso tes ‘to let go of the hand’ (White Hmong)

For German, for example, Hand lassen cannot express ‘to let go of the hand’, it has to be Hand loslassen.
A semi-exception would be Italian lasciare which can mean ‘to let go’ and ‘to leave (something somewhere)’.


  1.  Lasciare la mano ‘To let go of the hand’
  2.  Lasciare il libro sul tavolo ‘To leave the book on the table’

But lasciare is still not the “primary” (or the most basic, most frequent) verb for ‘to put’ as I have clarified in my first mail. The primary verb is mettere. I don’t know much about Greek but αφήνω (after some dictinoary search) seems more like Italian lasciare as well.

Regards,
Ian

________________________________
From: Hartmut Haberland <hartmut at ruc.dk>
Sent: Thursday, January 3, 2019 9:40:23 PM
To: Frans Plank; Joo Ian
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: SV: [Lingtyp] PUT=LET GO: An areal feature?

Exactly, Frans (also MGreek αφήνω ’let, let go’, German lassen).

Sie können ihren Mantel hier lassen
could be translated by ‘You can leave your coat here’ but also ‘You can put your coat her’ because putting it there implies leaving it there and vice versa.
Maybe the whole issue is an artefact of our use of English as a metalanguage: ‘to put’ has an extremely wide range of possible meanings.
Hartmut Haberland
Professor emeritus
[RUC]

Roskilde University
Department of Communication and Arts
Universitetsvej 1
DK-4000 Roskilde
Telephone: +45 46742841


Fra: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> På vegne af Frans Plank
Sendt: 3. januar 2019 14:34
Til: Joo Ian <ian.joo at outlook.com>
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org; Meichun Liu <meichunliu0107 at gmail.com>
Emne: Re: [Lingtyp] PUT=LET GO: An areal feature?

What about English, German, all the rest?

She put the book on the table
Sie legte/stellte/setzte/hängte das Buch/Glas/Kaninchen/Bild in den Kühlschrank

Don’t all these placing verbs imply that you let go?
The synthetic causatives of the corresponding inchoative verbs (with the local dative rather than the directional accusative occurring with the same prepositions) would work, too, and perhaps even better:

Sie ließ das Buch … liegen/stehen/sitzen/hängen [after she put it there]

This is German:  I can gloss it for you if you want.  But you probably don’t, because this is not exactly what you’re after :-)

Season’s Greetings all the same!
Frans
On 3. Jan 2019, at 13:08, Marcel Erdal <merdal4 at gmail.com<mailto:merdal4 at gmail.com>> wrote:

Old Turkic (Mongolia, Xinjiang) kod- 'to put down, place' and 'to abandon, give up, leave alone, desert' (e.g. in G. Clauson's dictionary).
Marcel

Am Do., 3. Jan. 2019 um 12:02 Uhr schrieb Joo Ian <ian.joo at outlook.com<mailto:ian.joo at outlook.com>>:
Dear all,
I wonder if you know any language where the primary morpheme meaning 'to put' and the one meaning 'to let go (to seize holding something)' are the same.
At this point I only know four: Mandarin (fàng), Korean (noh), Mongolian (tav), and White Hmong (tso).
They are all spoken in East Asia (with White Hmong spreading out to SE Asia), so I wonder if this feature is unique to this area.
Regards,
Ian JOO (주이안)
http://ianjoo.academia.edu<http://ianjoo.academia.edu/>

_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20190103/dc040dd6/attachment.htm>