LL-L: "Grammar" LOWLANDS-L, 14.JAN.2001 (01) [Ap/E]

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  L O W L A N D S - L * 14.JAN.2001 (01) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com]
Subject: "Grammar" (was "Morphology")

Ian James Parsley wrote:

> Now, the commas I've inserted there are in fact 'grammatical',
> they are not reflective of any break in speech. However, my
> point is that it is questionable whether the construction is
> actually 'my brother his car' - I suspect it is 'my brother,
> (well) his car'.

That is just the kind of ambiguity that can lead a new
generation of speakers to come up with a different grammar (I
mean unconsciously in their head as they learn to speak) for the
same speech output.  In this case (in this instance! sorry;),
the -s went from being an ending to being seen as a pronoun.
SInce -es and -his have both been reduced to just [s], [z] or at
most [@s] after sibilant consonants, the two grammars have
remerged.
Note that I am referring not to textbook-defined grammar, but to
the grammar that each individual speaker constructs as a child-
no two speakers have constructed -exactly- the same grammar, but
as long as they're close, there's no problem.  It is because
each speaker has to come up with their grammar essentially from
scratch that languages diverge so readily, whenever speakers are
separated by time or borders or social barriers etc., and thus
can't or won't coordinate their shifting grammar.

This possessive -s/his is a good example: here's a contemporary
one:  I see my students writing "should have" as "should of"--
they are pronounced identically in our casual speech, and the
students have lost sight that [@v] is (or to be exact, was
originally) from "have".  My generation still sees the
connection; the new generation (predominantly) doesn't.  My
guess is that "should have" will soon become simply "shoulda" as
one word.

What other examples in Lowland languages can people think of,
where you can see how an ambiguous construction/pronunciation
has led a later generation to reinterpret the grammar?  There
should be plenty of examples.

Stefan Israel
stefansfeder at yahoo.com

----------

From: Edwin Alexander [edsells at idirect.com]
Subject: Re: LL-L: "Grammar" (was "Morphology") LOWLANDS-L, 13.JAN.2001
(02) [E]

At 03:40 PM 01/13/01 -0800, John Feather wrote:

In English the apostrophe came about because some grammarians in the
16th/17th centuries assumed that the genitive "s" was a relic of "his", so
that "Bob Green his hat" had reduced to "Bob Greens hat", and inserted the
apostrophe to indicate the supposedly missing letters.

Well, this would explain why we say "Sally'r hat", for Sally her hat
[sarcasm].  However, I am confused as to why Cranmer wrote, "And this we
beg for Jesus Christ his sake." (Morning Prayer Prayer for all Conditions
of men) but elsewhere "God's holy Name be blessed and praised."  Of course,
he was not known for his consistency, was he?

----------

From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
Subject: Morphology

Críostóir wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone could help me trace the origin of the personal
pronouns in Long Eaton English ... variants of these are used in a broad
swathe across the English midlands and perhaps into Yorkshire. Could they
have cognates in Jutlandish or any Scandinavian language at all...? <

>Clearly the "senn" is a suffix of some kind. ... Danish has suffixed
definite article... Could "senn" be "self" + definite suffix? <

I'm sure the forms in "-sen(n)" are used in Yorkshire, but from looking at
a
couple of web sites it appears that they are not used in Geordie ("-sel")
or
Norfolk ("-self").

"The Ormulum" (East Midlands, ca 1200) contains the phrases:
"he wolde ben himm-sellf" and "ne mihhte thurrh himm sellfenn",
"himm-sellf"
being nominative and "himm sellfenn" accusative after the preposition. It
seems to me that "senn" is likely to be a reduced form of "sellfenn" so one

doesn't have to look for a form in another language to explain it. The
terminal or postponed definitive article found in the Scandinavian
languages
seems an unlikely source of the form of this suffix.

Just to be clear, since the meaning of "cognate" came up recently, if the
above explanation is correct "senn" is a cognate of "self" and all the
other
related words in Scandinavian and German.

John Feather johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

----------

From: Richard L Turner [fr.andreas at juno.com]
Subject: LL-L: "Grammar" (was "Morphology") LOWLANDS-L, 13.JAN.2001 (02)
[E]

Hey.
Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com] writ tae ast:

"On a tangent: when I hear _yuns_ [j at nz] for  you plural in Appalachia,
that does seem to come from "you ones".  Appalachian speakers, does that
seem to fit?"

Eah, _yuins_ [j at nz or jinz] is pernounst [jU @nz] emphatic. Hit does mean
"ye ones" an is the plural o "ye."
Yorn,

+Fr Andreas Richard Turner.

----------

From: "Ian James Parsley" [parsleyij at yahoo.com]
Subject: LL-L: "Grammar" (was "Morphology") LOWLANDS-L, 13.JAN.2001 (02)
[E]

Folk,

Three quick notes about Ulster-Scots grammar that are of interest
here:

1. The first person possessive pronoun is usually 'mines' - this still
exists in Derry City.

2. The possessive relative pronoun form (equivalent to 'whose') is
'ats' - 'the mon ats hat A fund' ('the man whose hat I found').
However, in practice this is often replaced by the relative pronoun
plus the possessive adjective - 'the mon at his hat A fund', also 'the
fowk at thair hoose A bocht' ('the people whose house I bought').

3. OSV word order is far from unusual - 'the moose the cat et' ('the
cat ate the mouse'), 'the Ford A bocht' ('I bought the Ford').
However, an objective pronoun cannot come first as the object
(objective forms are actually used as the subject if they do not stand
alone - part of the verbal concord rule), so *him A seen, *'it the
bairn uised'.

Regards,
Ian James Parsley

----------

From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk]
Subject: "Grammar"

> From: Margaret Tarbet [oneko at mindspring.com]
> Subject: Morphology
>
> On Fri, 12 Jan 2001 15:27:13 -0800, Ron wrote:
>
> >I think there is a general rule here:
> >"The less morphological marking the more syntactic marking"
>
> >marking disappears.  This is why English syntax is less flexible that
> German,
> >Latin or Russian syntax.
> >
> >Any comments?
>
> Certainly that's what I was taught when learning Russian.  Profs.
> Krasnopolski and Cherniak were quite adamant that one can map all
> Russian (in that instance) cases onto any other IE language, the
> only difference being how the case is encoded.  In their view,
> English encodes using word order and prepositions, but has exactly
> the same cases.  If I recall correctly, they said that the only
> ur-IE case that seems to be going away is vocative.

I think Ron's rule makes sense but I'm not sure how generally
applicable it might be. Could it be that this argument will
only hold if we keep the discussion within the bounds of
Indo-European languages, and then only because they're so
similar that Stefan's rule:

> Or more particles/prepositions etc.:  we might refine the rule
> to: the less you use of one strategy, the more you have to use
> of other strategies.

applies - because we're working within a limited set of
possible linguistic strategies?

However, at this point I get a bit lost as to what the
discussion here is actually about. Are we talking about
languages generally or just Indo-European grammar? In
particular, does Margaret's profs' statement only apply
to IE languages or can it be extended? It seems to me
that if we examine a concrete, universal human experience
such as "I dropped the rock on my toe" then in any
language where there are words for "dropped", "rock",
"I" and "toe", whatever grammar applies to "toe" could
be interpreted as the dative case, if we want to force a
case system on the language. I know this is a bit naïve
when we consider all the varieties of language in the
world, but nevertheless, it's always possible to make a
coarse-grain translation between any two of these
languages so I don't see why a course-grain identification
of many of the major grammatical ideas can't be made between
any two languages.

Within a purely IE context, anyway, I might add something
to Ron's rule. The success of English as a world language
is often put down to the fact that it's easy to learn. I
would suggest that:

The more morphological marking, the harder a language is to learn.
The more syntactic marking, the harder a language is to master.

By which I'm suggesting that a language like Russian is
hard for beginners but once the lessons have been learned,
there are relatively few further difficulties, whereas a
beginner can quickly learn to produce good, functional
English but it will take longer to master the more advanced
stuff.

Incidentally, Margaret's profs' idea that the vocative case
is "going away" - how can this be? Surely they only mean
that the morphological markers for the vocative case are
disappearing?

Sandy

----------

From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Grammar

Dear Lowlanders,

Sandy wrote:

> I think Ron's rule makes sense but I'm not sure how generally
> applicable it might be. Could it be that this argument will
> only hold if we keep the discussion within the bounds of
> Indo-European languages, and then only because they're so
> similar that Stefan's rule:
>
> > Or more particles/prepositions etc.:  we might refine the rule
> > to: the less you use of one strategy, the more you have to use
> > of other strategies.
>
> applies - because we're working within a limited set of
> possible linguistic strategies?

This may be a difficult one to answer, and I am not aware of any specific
study that answers it.

I think "my" rule holds true where morphological marking or distinctions
between them *disappear* (as in English "I wrote my mother a letter").

In other language families and groups in which marking is strong and thus
permits syntactic flexibility the situation may be different because of
different solutions.  A good example is the Turkic group (of the Altaic
family).  All cases are clearly marked and distinguished, morphologically
(the nominative with zero).  Some Turkish languages retain or have invented
marking of more cases than others.  Those that do not have these "extra"
case marking substitute for them by means of particles or similar
"rephrasing" (like substituting for the dative as in English "I wrote a
letter to my mother").  Thus, if there is no marking by means of suffixes
(which is the "normal" way in agglutinative languages), then a particle
instead of a suffix may follow the noun or pronoun.  At any rate, marking
of some type and thus syntactic flexibility are safeguarded.
Interestingly, some of these particles, or rather postpositions, oftentimes
develop into enclitics after a while, i.e., come to be absorbed suffix-like
(as has been proposed here that "'s" comes from "'his'" in English), and in
some language varieties they develop into actual suffixes.  (Turkic has
vowel harmony.  An enclitic is less bound to the stem than a suffix in that
the former does not and the latter does obey the vowel harmony of the stem
to which it is added.)

Barbara's remark about the loss of a vocative case is interesting.  It is
true that Germanic varieties do not have a vocative.  (Or are there any?)
In Slavic and Semitic, some varieties do and some do not have a vocative
case, or a language may have a vocative case only in certain genders or
forms.  Can we be so sure that a vocative case is ancient and has been lost
here and there?  Or could it be that some language varieties developed a
vocative independently?  (Could, for instance, Arabic vocative marking by
means of preposed _yâ_ -- e.g., _yâ bintî!_ 'my daughter/girl!_ -- have
come from a calling word like English 'hey!' or 'oy!'?)  Of course, the
fact that Latin has a vocative and the modern Romance languages do not
might sway us in the direction of assuming loss.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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