[Lingtyp] query: cumulative songs

[Siva Kalyan]

I know of something like this in Tamil: a children’s story where a fly has forgotten its name, and so asks a calf, the calf’s mother, the calf’s mother’s cowherd, the cowherd’s stick, the tree where the stick came from, the crane that lives in the tree, the pond where the crane swims, the fish in the pond, the fisherman who catches the fish, the pot in the fisherman’s hand, the clay from which the pot was made, the grass growing in the clay, and the horse eating the grass. At the end, the horse says /iːːː/, which happens to be the Tamil word for “fly”.

Crucially, each time the fly asks someone different, it recites the list of everyone it has asked so far. Thus:

O plump calf, what is my name?

O plump calf, O calf’s mother, what is my name?

O plump calf, O calf’s mother, O cowherd who tends the mother, what is my name?

O plump calf, O calf’s mother, O cowherd who tends the mother, O stick in the cowherd’s hand, what is my name?

Etc., etc.

The original text can be found here <https://kuvikam.com/2020/09/15/%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8A%E0%AE%B4%E0%AF%81-%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8A%E0%AE%B4%E0%AF%81-%E0%AE%95%E0%AE%A9%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%B1%E0%AF%87/> (though it’s slightly different from the one I learned as a child); let me know if you need transliteration or glossing.

I’m aware that this doesn’t involve syntactic embedding, but it’s definitely cumulative.

Siva

> On 12 Feb 2023, at 5:13 pm, 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 <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
> Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-082113720302
> 
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