Bringing down the house? (animate wa-)

[lcumberl at indiana.edu]

Alfred’s examples of hausschlacten and radfahren, although they appear to have
the same structure, are actually different.  Schlachten and fahren are both
two-place predicates. In radfahren, one place is taken by Rad, the NP ‘bicycle’,
object of fahren, so in “ich fahre Rad, both arguments are overt. In
hausschlacten, haus- is not nominal but adverbial - it simply states where the
Schlactung will occur.  In “Morgen werden wir hausschlacten”, the object is
implied, not overt.  If you said, “Wir hausschlacten unser Vieh” then both
arguments (wir, Vieh) are visible, and you see that “haus-“ isn’t one of them!
This accounts for the ungrammaticality of *morgen schlacten wir haus.

Linda

Quoting "\"Alfred W. Tüting\"" <ti at fa-kuan.muc.de>:

> Hello Rory and John,
>
> thanks for the welcome and taking the time to comment my post. I'll
> still have to ponder on it for a while.
>
>
> >>As it seems,
> (b) tiowicakte [thi-o'wicha-kte] or [thi-owi'cha-kte ??] (*_wicu_  looks
> like a typo, as there are quite some mistakes in the listing)<<<<
>
> >This might be a typo, as you say, but it might also be a
> case of an American English spelling convention sneaking
> in.  Over here, the letter 'u' often represents a sound
> about half way between schwa and [a] as in 'father' or
> 'Vater', as in 'cut' or 'butter'.  Some people call this
> sound schwa; most language orthographies would class it
> as a type of 'a' sound.  An unaccented -a at the end of
> a word, as in Latin in'sula or puella usually seems to
> be pronounced with this sound.  In American comic book
> orthography, an open syllable of this sound is commonly
> spelled "uh".  I think the IPA symbol is an inverted 'v'.
> I suspect the Dakotan speaker didn't lower his jaw all
> all the way to full [a], so the English-thinking recorder
> may have heard this name as "Tee-oh-wee-chuck-tay", and
> failed to get all the vowels converted to proper Dakotan.<<
>
> Yes, you totally convinced me on that :-) (But there are real typos in
> the list, too, which nevertheless is an important, interesting and even
> somewhat touching historical document.)
>
>
> >I'm not sure whether mni and ti qualify as topics here or
> not.  They may; I'm just not sure.  In any case, they aren't
> participants with the verb as either actors or objects; they
> function more as qualifiers of the overall action.  Nouns
> can modify other nouns in MVS just as they do in English and
> German, with the modifying noun preceding the one modified;
> e.g. rail-road, steam-boat, etc.  In MVS, they seem to be
> able to modify verbs just as freely.  In English, this doesn't
> seem to be so acceptable, except in gerunds like the ones you
> listed: "house-killing", etc.  (I think it works freely in
> German though, doesn't it?  "Er hat ihnen hausumgebringt" ??)<<
>
> I'm not a linguist of German language either - rather than an aged
> native 'speaker' ;-), yet, thinking it over, I can say that, not unlike
> in Dakota, all this stuff is higly idiomatic also in German (and
> especially with regard to verbal expressions!).  Rendering your nice
> sentence to be grammatical (I remember Steven Pinker's examples like
> 'bringed'), as "er hat sie hausumgebracht", it still isn't possible to
> say that! The only German equivalence in structure to Lakota _tikte_
> etc.  coming to my mind is 'hausschlachten', more commonly used as
> nominal '(die) Hausschlachtung' (lit. about: to home-slaughter). It's a
> comparably old - hence familiar! - term for the butcher coming to the
> farm to kill the cattle there instead of bringing it to the slaughter
> house. So, the following utterances are possible:
>
> - Heute ist bei uns Hausschlachtung.
> - Unser Vieh wird nur hausgeschlachtet.
> - Wir verkaufen hausgeschlachtete Ware.
> - Morgen werden wir hausschlachten.
>
> - Morgen schlachten wir haus (??? although grammatical, yet sounding
> pretty unfamiliar!)
>
> On the other hand, there are no problems with an expression comparable
> from its structure:
>
> Cf. _radfahren_ (new orthography: Rad fahren): to bicycle/cycle/bike
> (lit.: to bicycle-drive):
>
> - Ich liebe das Radfahren (I love cycling)
> - Wollen wir heute radfahren? (Will we bicycle today?)
> - Ich fahre heute nicht rad/Rad. (I don't bicycle today) - no problem!
>
> Just one more example of how idiomatic all this can be:
>
> fernsehen, das Fernsehen, der Fernseher (to watch TV or to teleview;
> TV;   TV (set), lit.: 'to far-see', 'the far-seeing', 'the far-seer'):
>
> - Ich will fernsehen (I want to watch TV)
> - Ich fernsehe (I watch TV)
> - Ich schaue Fernsehen (lit.: "I look/watch television"), and even,
> pretty coll.
> - Ich tu fernsehschauen (lit.: "I do far-see-look").
>
> All this is possible because familiar through daily use!
>
> Yet, this is different with a very similar calque - used
> bureaucratically, but hardly accepted by the speakers:
>
> '(der) Fernsprecher' and 'fernsprechen' (telephone/to phone, lit.:
> 'far-speaker', 'to far-speak'). One never will hear sentences like:
>
> "Bitte sei ruhig, ich spreche gerade fern!" (Please be quiet, I'm just
> doing a phone call!), but instead "... ich telefoniere gerade!"
>
> Interestingly, this is similar also e.g. in Hungarian with a calque
> exactly along this line: 'telephone' here is _távolbeszélö_, yet most
> likely nobody would ever say "*(én) távolbeszélek..." but simply
> "telefonálok majd veled" (I'll ring you up).
>
> So, language gets coined, polished - and, hence, familiar(!) only
> through daily use. I feel that's what makes it so hard to judge and
> distinguish regular from idiomatic forms from outside a language
> community. It's even more difficult with old tongues of oral tradition
> like the Native American ones. But whom do I tell this! ;-)
>
> I apologize for this little digression!
>
> Best regards
>
> Alfred
>
>
>
>