[Lingtyp] query: cumulative songs

[Pierre-Yves Modicom]

Here is the Middle High German nursery song sometimes suspected to be a 
source for /Had Gadya/:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Bauer_schickt_den_Jockel_aus 
<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Bauer_schickt_den_Jockel_aus>

A farmer asks the farmboy to cut the oats, but the farmboy doesn't want. 
Then the farmer asks the farmworker to summon the farmboy who doesn't 
want to cut the oats, but he doesn't want, either, so he unleashes his 
dog after the farmworker who doesn't want to summon the farmboy who 
doesn't want to cut the oats etc etc

Interestingly and to the contrary of /Had Gadya/, in /Der Bauer schickt 
den Jockel aus/, the cumulation does NOT rely on the embedding of 
standard relative clauses. What we have is a series of NPs followed by 
verb-second relative clauses, but these can also be analyzed as matrix 
clauses with a left-dislocated subject:

Der Bauer schickt den Hund hinaus:
Er soll den Knecht beißen.
Hund, der will den Knecht nicht beißen,
Knecht, der will nicht Jockel holen,
Jockel will nicht Hafer schneiden,
will lieber zuhause bleiben.

Roughly equivalent to:

The farmer unleashes the dog:
It must bite the farmworker
Dog, he doesn't want to bite the farmworker
Farmworker, he doesn't want to summon the farmboy
Farmboy, he doesn't want to cut the oats
rather wants to stay at home.

etc.

Depending on the hypothesis on the link between the availability 
recursive embedding strategies in discourse and the success of 
cumulative songs, that kind of syntactic pattern may be interesting to 
look after, too.

Best,

Pierre-Yves



Le 12/02/2023 à 07:36, Moshe Taube a écrit :
> Another one in English is:
> There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...
> (https://allnurseryrhymes.com/there-was-an-old-lady-who-swallowed-a-fly/)
> As for the Jewish Aramaic Had Gadya, I doubt whether it is very early, 
> since, as far as I remember, it is not attested before the 16th c. CE, 
> and according to Khone Shmeruk (I don't have the bibliographical 
> details) was adapted from the Middle High German nursery song 
> /Zicklein klein/ or something like that.
>
> Moshe
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 12, 2023 at 9:14 AM David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
>
>     Dear all,
>
>     A cumulative song is one in which each unit, or stanza, introduces
>     an additional layer of syntactic embedding, such as the following ...
>
>         This is the house that Jack built.
>
>         This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
>
>         This is the rat that ate the malt
>         That lay in the house that Jack built.
>
>         This is the cat
>         That killed the rat that ate the malt
>         That lay in the house that Jack built.
>
>         This is the dog that worried the cat
>         That killed the rat that ate the malt
>         That lay in the house that Jack built.
>
>     ... and so forth.  Perhaps the earliest example of a cumulative
>     song is the Jewish Aramaic hymn /Had Gadya/.
>
>     My query: Is anybody familiar with examples of cumulative songs
>     from other non-WEIRD cultures and languages.  While my main
>     interest is in "indigenous" attestations, I would also be
>     interested in successful adaptations and translations of western
>     cumulative songs into other languages.
>
>     (Background to the query: I am interested in exploring variation
>     in the propensity of different languages to make use of syntactic
>     embedding.  My focus is on languages such as Malay/Indonesian,
>     which have various tools to construct embedded clauses but
>     generally choose not to make use of them in natural discourse.  I
>     would like to test the hypothesis that such cumulative songs are
>     absent or otherwise less successful in such languages.)
>
>     Thanks,
>
>     David
>
>
>     -- 
>     David Gil
>
>     Senior Scientist (Associate)
>     Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
>     Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
>     Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany
>
>     Email:gil at shh.mpg.de
>     Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
>     Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-082113720302
>
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>
>
> -- 
> Professor Moshe Taube (Emeritus)
> The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
> Mt. Scopus 91905 Israel
> https://huji.academia.edu/MosheTaube
>
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