andative

[voorhis at westman.wave.ca]

There is another tradition for the creation of grammatical terminology,
the Semitic one.  You take a sample root and run it through the complete
paradigm (even if some of the forms never occur in the normal, spoken
language), and each item in the paradigm of that root becomes the
technical term for the corresponding item with any root.

For verbs, it's usually a root meaning 'do' that is chosen.  With such a
system, the andative in Dakota, for example, could be called the "echuN
ye", and a form like xtani bde 'I'm going to work' presents the echuN ye
form of the verb xtani (and is also third person, incidentally, from the
Semitic point of view).

With this system, the terminology changes for each language, of course,
though the system for deriving that terminology is consistent, so the
problem Nancy Hall describes is still there.  If we could agree that the
terminology would always be in one particular language, we'd just be
where we are now, with a general concensus that grammatical terms are
Latin, though they are descriptive rather than examples from paradigms.

Floyd Lounsbury once said to me, "Why do they call it the obviative?
There's nothing obvious about it."

Paul

Nancy E Hall wrote:
> ... it drives me nuts to open a grammar and
> immediately be buried in terms like 'andative'. Subfield-specific
> traditions of terminology become so detailed and obscure that they're a
> real barrier to comprehension by outsiders ... And when they're based on classical
> languages, it becomes hard to even guess what some of the words mean.
>         I appreciate it when authors coin an apt Anglo-Saxon term-
> something self-explanatory and easy to remember- instead of a new   Latinate  one.
> ... The only thing to be said for classically-derived terminology is
> that it does tend to be uniform across languages. When I have to read an
> article in Russian I'm grateful they don't have their own word for
> 'svarabhakti'...

Alan Knutson wrote:
> ... So what would be useable (ie coming/going-verbal-mode ...

"Rankin, Robert L" wrote:
> Personally, I'm particularly fond of "go-ative" and "come-ative" ...