[Lingtyp] Remind-Me particles across languages

[Ellison Luk]

Hi all,

The Wiktionary page that Ian linked quotes Mandarin 來著 láizhe as the
translation of the "remind me" function of 'again', and it is used as a
sentence final particle. In Cantonese, the equivalent would be 話 waa2,
diachronically related to the lexeme for 'speech'/'language' (waa2) and 'to
say' (waa6). The canonical usage of this particle would be:

咩話？
me1 waa6-2
what speech(?)
"what was that again?"

This Hong Kong University Facebook post explains this in a bit more detail
and has a few more examples:
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1502044289967874&id=100057584592581

Best,
Ellison Luk

On Mon, 31 Mar 2025, 18:42 Salminen, Jutta via Lingtyp, <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> Dear Jeanne,
>
> I think no one mentioned Finnish yet:
> In Finnish a typical way to express this Remind-Me function is a
> combination of simple past tense and the negative polarity clitic particle
> *-kAAn *‘(not) even, (n)either’ attached to the verb., e.g.
>
> *Mikä sun nimi oli-kaan?*
> what you.gen name be.3sg.pst-cl (*sun*, a colloquial form for ‘your,’ cf.
> Standard Finnish *sinu-n *you-gen)
>
> ‘What was your name, again?’
>
>
> As a clitic particle, the NPI *-kAAn – *as well as its positive polarity
> counterpart, the focus particle *-kin *‘also, even’ – can be attached
> both to nouns (basically meaning ‘even, either’ e.g. *minä-kään en tiedä *
> 1sg-cl neg.1sg know.cng ‘even I don’t know / I don’t know, either) and to
> verbs with further pragmatic meanings, such as counter-expectation:
>
> *Se ei ollut-kaan Anna.*
> it neg.3sg be.ptcp-cl A.
>
> ’It wasn’t Anna (counter to what I thought/expected).’
>
>
> For other combinations and meanings, see Vilkuna 2015.
>
> Vilkuna, Maria 2015: Negation in Finnish. In M. Miestamo, A. Tamm & B.
> Wagner-Nagy (eds.), Negation in Uralic Languages, 457–485. Typological
> Studies in Language 108. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
>
>
>
> I hope this helps you further!
>
>
> Best,
>
> Jutta
>
>
> _________________
> Dr. Jutta Salminen
> Postdoktorand / postdoc-tutkija, FT
> Lektorin für Finnisch / suomen lehtori
>
> Institut für Fennistik und Skandinavistik
> Ernst-Lohmeyer-Platz 3
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/Ernst-Lohmeyer-Platz+3+%0D%0A17489+Greifswald?entry=gmail&source=g>
> 17489 Greifswald
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/Ernst-Lohmeyer-Platz+3+%0D%0A17489+Greifswald?entry=gmail&source=g>
> jutta.salminen at uni-greifswald.de
> Tel.: +49 (0)3834 420 3601
>
> www.uni-greifswald.de/fennistik
>
>
>
>
> Am Montag, den 31-03-2025 um 11:59 schrieb Jeanne Lecavelier des
> Etangs-Levallois via Lingtyp:
>
> Dear all,
>
>   I am currently looking at Remind-Me particles (particles which express
> that the speaker is asking for an information they used to know but
> forgot,
> like English "again" in "What's your name again?") across languages.
> Specifically, I am interested in Remind-Me particles (i) which have
> another
> (canonical) meaning when used in other contexts, and (ii) whose
> other/canonical meaning is not "again".
>
> For instance, French Remind-Me particle is "déjà" ("already"): "Comment tu
> t'appelles toi déjà ?" (literally "What's your name already?") is
> interpreted as "What's your name again? (I forgot)".
>
> If you know of any such particle (which can have a Remind-Me use, and
> which
> does not mean "again") in your native language or the language(s) you're
> working on, please write to me :-)
>
> Many thanks for your help!
> Best,
> Jeanne Lecavelier
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