[Lingtyp] Funny situations with epistemics

[Ekaterina Georgieva]

Hello Jenneke,

Here is my funny story. Not totally pc, tough :)
When I was doing fieldwork with native speakers of Udmurt (Uralic) in  
Russia, I met an elderly lady who told me that I looked like a gypsy.  
(Maybe because of my brown eyes?). I was like, huh, really? So I went  
to my Udmurt friends and said: "She said I look like a gypsy", and  
they were totally unbothered, like, aha, yeah. I got upset :D And then  
I realized – indexical shift. My friends understood the lady's words  
as referring to herself. (The elderly lady had brown eyes and darker  
skin color (or maybe just tan?).) A native Udmurt would have said:  
"She said you _pe_ (quotative particle) look like a gypsy". Learned it  
for life! :D

Another funny thing is the pun/tongue twister Bulgarians say about the  
evidential past tenses. (Laymen don't know what evidentiality is, but  
everyone in Bulgaria knows this joke.) Bulgarian has a rather complex  
tense system, with several analytical tenses, as well as a fairly  
complex system of evidentials (because those have tense forms, too).  
The dubitative forms use the l-participle of the lexical verb plus the  
-l-participial form of the be-verb, _bil_. The pun is that _bil_ is  
also the l-participle of the lexical verb _bija_ 'beat, hit, fight'.  
So here goes the joke:
Bil sǎm se bil napil i sǎm se bil bil.
be.ptcp be.prs.1sg refl be.ptcp get.drunk.ptcp and be.prs.1sg refl  
be.ptcp beat.ptcp
'I got drunk and I got into a fight (, they say, but I doubt it).'
(Actually, the first conjunct is technically speaking ungrammatical:  
there are two be-verbs in a participial form, as this is intended to  
be the perfect tense of the dubitative, which is considered to be a  
gap in the paradigm, according to grammars. But in this joke, the  
point is to have several _bil_ forms.)

Greetings from Budapest,
Ekaterina

Quoting "Wal, G.J. van der (Jenneke) via Lingtyp"  
<lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>:

> Dear linguists,
>
> I am looking for funny situations you encountered in the use and misuse of
>
>   *   Evidentials
>   *   Miratives
>   *   Egophorics
>   *   Epistemic modality
>   *   Information structure
>
> The goal is to use these as illustrations in an online course about  
> the broader field of epistemicity (the knowledge of speaker and  
> addressee as expressed in the linguistically), so that participants  
> in the course see the relevance of these markers in an engaging way.
> To get us started, I share one from the SIL stories in the  
> field<https://www.sil.org/linguistics/stories-field>:
>
> Roger Van Otterloo tells of the time he was discussing translation  
> with his Kifuliiru friends (Democratic Republic of Congo) and he  
> uttered the sentence “Don’t steal from widows!” They started  
> chuckling, and soon everyone was laughing uproariously. Roger was  
> mystified and wondered if he’d used the wrong tone (Kifuliiru is a  
> tonal language) or what. The Kifuliirus told him, no, the tone was  
> fine, but what he said implied that they could steal from everyone  
> besides widows!
>
> Roger found out that day that the last word in Kifuliiru is the  
> focus, the main point, of the entire sentence. So you need to say   
> “Those widows, don’t steal-from-them.” The “from-them” is a suffix  
> on the verb, so the last word in the sentence is now “steal.”
> Looking forward to hearing your field-fun!
> Thanks very much,
> Jenneke
>
> --
> Dr G.J. van der Wal | she/her
> Senior Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for  
> Linguistics<https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/humanities/leiden-university-centre-for-linguistics>
> Office: Reuvensplaats 4, room 1.25
> https://jennekevanderwal.com<https://jennekevanderwal.com/>
> MapLE project: https://epistemicity.net<https://epistemicity.net/>


-- 
Dr. Ekaterina Georgieva
Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
Benczúr utca 33
H-1068 Budapest
ekaterina.georgieva at nytud.hun-ren.hu
https://sites.google.com/view/egeorgieva