[Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

Wed Jun 17 10:29:56 UTC 2020

The definite article in Semitic developed also in Arabic, Aramaic, and Old South Arabian, languages that were not in contact with Egyptian in the relevant period and likely did not borrow their article from Canaanite. We know that either because they weren’t in contact with Canaanite (Old South Arabian), or because the development of the article is attested (Arabic, Aramaic). Additionally, Semitic had already a nascent article, which only fully developed in Ethiopic (bibliographical details below). This is all to say that I doubt Egyptian is the catalyst.

Huehnergard, John and Na’ama Pat-El. 2012. Third Person Possessive Suffixes as Definite Articles in Semitic. Journal of Historical Linguistics 2: 25-51.

Na'ama

On Jun 17, 2020, at 01:58, Eitan Grossman <eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il<mailto:eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il>> wrote:

Right, the idea is that it spreads from Egyptian to Canaanite and from there onwards.

As for Ancient Egyptian, the development of the definite article (and later, the indefinite article) is documented extensively and has been written about quite a lot. It's pretty clear that the definite article emerges relatively late in the history of the language, first in more colloquial texts and then later in higher-register ones. Interestingly, there have also been claims that Egyptian got the definite article from Canaanites who lived in Egypt.

Whether within Egyptian it comes from a substrate or adstrate or something else, it's virtually impossible to tell. It's not impossible but also not straightforward -- the contemporary languages, whatever they were, aren't really documented.

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 9:26 AM Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se<mailto:oesten at ling.su.se>> wrote:
Thanks, Frans, for the link to this paper, which I had not seen. (I did read Fehling’s paper, however, quite long ago.) For the record, though: although Peust claims (reasonably, it seems) that Egyptian is the ultimate source, he doesn’t say that Greek got it straight from there. Instead, he says that it is remarkable that the definite article shows up in Greek in the same time period as the Greeks took over the Phoenician script, thus suggesting Phoenician, a Semitic language, as the proximate source for the Greek definite article.

In light of Peust’s claims, it is maybe Egyptian that is most relevant for Jürgen’s project. Although who knows if they didn’t get the article from somebody else?

  *   Östen

Från: Uni KN <frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de<mailto:frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de>>
Skickat: den 17 juni 2020 00:04
Till: Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se<mailto:oesten at ling.su.se>>
Kopia: LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

Close, Östen:  they got it from Egyptian.  Or so argues Carsten Peust, in Göttinger Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 2, 1999, S. 99-120

Fälle von strukturellem Einfluss des Ägyptischen auf europäische Sprachen
(1) Die Herausbildung des definiten Artikels, (2) Die Entwicklung des grammatischen femininen Genus, (3) Die inklusive Zählweise von Zeitintervallen

https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/2274/1/Peust_Faelle_von_strukturellen_Einfluessen_1999.pdf

Similarly
LEVIN, Saul 1992: Studies in comparative grammar: I. The definite article, an Egyptian/Semitic/IndoEuropean etymology, in General Linguistics 32:1-15.
FEHLING, Detlev 1980: The origins of European syntax, in Folia Linguistica Historica 1:353-387.

Frans

On 16. Jun 2020, at 18:25, Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se<mailto:oesten at ling.su.se>> wrote:

This topic happened to come up in my recent conversation with Martin Haspelmath on his blog (https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2361). There are also some references there to earlier literature.

I would not bet on the definite article in Ancient Greek as an independent development. After all, definite articles were around in the neighbouring Semitic languages. If the Greeks got their alphabet from the Semitic-speaking peoples, they could also get the article from them, I think.

- Östen

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Från: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> För Bohnemeyer, Juergen
Skickat: den 16 juni 2020 15:44
Till: LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] Innovation of functional categories

Dear Christian — Thank you very much for your response! I'll have much more to say about your suggestions, but for now, I’d just like to try a clarification:

On Jun 16, 2020, at 6:41 AM, Christian Lehmann <christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de<mailto:christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de>> wrote:

To the extent that the contribution made by such expressions to the sentence meaning is indeed redundant, it would mean that the respective information is already contained in the context, and to this extent there would be no need for the hearer to employ inferencing.

I’m assuming a view of communication on which it is largely inference-based. The question on this view is not whether but how much inferencing the hearer has to do.

Consider the information added by gender markers to pronouns and agreement morphology. In the vast majority of cases, this information is not needed for identifying the referent. But having it by my hypothesis still facilitates processing  by further boosting the predictability of the referent. As long as the added effort for speaker and hearer in processing the gender information is minimal (that’s where grammaticalization comes in), this may confer a minuscule processing advantage.

Same story with tense or definiteness: in the vast majority of uses, tense markers and articles are not terribly informative (witness all the speech communities that get by happily without them), so that can’t be the reason why we grammaticalize them (that’s my thinking, anyway).

(As to Givón, yes, absolutely, I’m well aware that I’m merely trying to retell a story functionalists have been telling since the dawn of functionalism :-))

Best — Juergen

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