andative (fwd)

[Koontz John E]

Looks like I misrouted this!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2002 18:31:53 -0600 (MDT)
From: Koontz John E <koontz at spot.colorado.edu>
To: Nancy E Hall <nancyh at linguist.umass.edu>
Subject: Re: andative

On Fri, 7 Jun 2002, Nancy E Hall wrote:
> 	After reading the discussion on the word 'andative', I can't
> resist adding my two cents. As a phonologist who's not a specialist in a
> language family but does typological work that requires consulting
> literature on many families, 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, ..

We could probably all do with a bit less terminology.  It seems to me that
the most obscure terms, however, arise not from any obscurantist tendency,
but from attempts to devise a convenient terminology for dealing with an
unfamiliar new structure, incommensurate with the details of other
structures elsewhere.  It can be fairly awkward trying to describe Siouan
languages without the somewhat specialized terms we use - agent, patient,
active, stative, vertitive, ablaut, instrumental (inner and outer),
locative, dative, syncopating, etc.  I've tried.

All of these things are more or less unique bundles of behavior in Siouan
languages, though some of them correspond roughly in functional terms to
things elsewhere, and so, somewhat misleadingly, share their names.  If
these local usages are somewhat misleading or, in cases like Algonquian,
downright overwhelming, there's still very little that can be done about
it.  A succinct, locally applicable terminology is essential to specialist
discourse.  Siouan instrumentals and locatives just happen to work a bit
differently from similar things in other languages, and Algonquianists
wouldn't get far without being able to refer to the elements of Algonquian
morphosyntax as initials, medials, and finals.

If none of these terms have any Anglo-Saxon equivalents, it's mainly
because English follows the lead of the Romance languages in using
classicizing compounds instead of contemporary native ones modelled on
them.  It's not uncommon for learned disciplines to use terminologies
based on classical languages, and as a linguist I'm more or less willing
to deal with it.  I'm not even sure how to go about saying instrumental,
for example, in Anglo-Saxon.  A toolform?  Of course, I suspect that Nancy
really isn't bother by Latinity, but only by obscurity, and I apologize
now for teasing her on this score.

In a more serious vein, it strikes me as an advantage that the classical
terminology in use is more or less constant across languages sharing the
tradition.  In a very real way it's this that saves us from Russian (or
Anglo-Saxon) words for swarabhakti.

On the other hand, we do definitely owe it to the non-Siouanists and
future Siouanists, not to mention laymen speakers, to use standard terms
wherever we can, and not promote arbitrary family-specific terms where
they are not needed.  I actually thought that this was David's point, and
if I run into an andative now, I'll know what to call it.

In addition, I think we can safely avoid specialized terms for infrequent
and non-morphological patterns.  So, if it's a fairly infrequent compound
of 'go' and 'stand', even though it may be andative in some sense, I'm
inclined just to call it a compound of 'go' and 'stand', reserving
andative for productive morphological constructs as in the Shawnee case in
question.

JEK