There are 5 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Suggestions of linguistically realistic movies.
From: Jim Henry
1b. Re: Suggestions of linguistically realistic movies.
From: Adam Walker
2a. Re: A reinterpretation of the Tatari Faran case system
From: Alex Fink
3. New Cases for Siye derived from postpositions?
From: Anthony Miles
4a. Re: Grammatical complexity
From: Randy Frueh
Messages
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1a. Re: Suggestions of linguistically realistic movies.
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [email protected]
Date: Sat May 25, 2013 5:45 am ((PDT))
On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 8:41 PM, Leonardo Castro <[email protected]> wrote:
> Maybe "The Passion of the Christ" is a good example of what I'm
There's "Apocalypto", which used Yucatec Maya.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org
Messages in this topic (11)
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1b. Re: Suggestions of linguistically realistic movies.
Posted by: "Adam Walker" [email protected]
Date: Sat May 25, 2013 6:41 am ((PDT))
Maybe this Macedonian movie I watched last week fits. The title is
Before the Rain. The firs part of the movie is set in Macedonia and
the characters speak either Macedonian or Albanian. The middle part
happens in London and is in English except for a scene at a
restaurant. Part three goes back to Macedonia. There are some phone
calls in volving attempts to communicate without a common language
that involve scattered bits of Macedonian, English, French, German and
much frustration.
Adam
On 5/24/13, Leonardo Castro <[email protected]> wrote:
> Do you have any suggestions of good linguistically realistic movies,
> that is, movies that portray the languages or dialects as close as
> possible to the ones used in the time and location of the story?
>
> Maybe "The Passion of the Christ" is a good example of what I'm
> describing, and "Agora" is a good counter-example (with people in
> Roman Egypt speaking English).
>
> Até mais!
>
> Leonardo
>
Messages in this topic (11)
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2a. Re: A reinterpretation of the Tatari Faran case system
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Sat May 25, 2013 9:34 am ((PDT))
On Fri, 24 May 2013 20:04:39 -0700, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
>Tatari Faran's case system exhibits some peculiarities, as shown by the
>following examples (in order to avoid interpretational bias, I will call
>the 3 core cases CASE1, CASE2, CASE3, instead of the usual labels):
>
>1) Adjectival predicate:
> huu sa himas tutu.
> 1SG CASE2:MASC tall FIN
> I am tall.
>
>2) Intransitive(?) verb:
> huu sa duum imim.
> 1SG CASE2:MASC sleep FIN
> I sleep.
>
>3) A different kind of intransitive verb?
> huu ka mimbai kakat
> 1SG CASE1:MASC dream FIN
> I dream.
>
>4) Transitive(?) verb:
> huu ka juerat tara' nei itu.
> 1SG CASE1:MASC look 3SG CASE3:FEM FIN
> I look at her.
>
>5) Another kind of transitive verb?
> huu na hamra tara' kei aram.
> 1SG CASE3:MASC see 3SG CASE1:FEM FIN
> I see her.
>
>6) Ditransitive verb:
> huu ka kira karen so tara' nei esan.
> 1SG CASE1:MASC give shoe CASE2:NEUT 3SG CASE3:FEM FIN
> I give the shoe(s) to her.
>
>7) Verb of motion:
> huu sa tapa buara ka buta' nei bata.
> 1SG CASE2:MASC walk volcano CASE1:MASC hut CASE3:FEM FIN
> I walk from the volcano to the hut.
>
[...]
>I have no idea what category this system falls under (AFAICT, it doesn't
>fit an ergative/absolutive or active-stative system, and definitely
>doesn't fit an accusative system -- ideas, anyone?).
No, I don't think it's any of the usual nat-systems. All of those have the
property that the normal core case(s) in intransitives is / are among the
normal core cases used in transitives, but at least numerically, your data here
suggest that "normal" intransitives get case 2 while "normal" transitives get
cases 1 and 3. If anything, this reminds of the monster raving loony system in
having a special intransitive case!
Trying to drive a line of inquiry like this further: it is not unknown for
experiencer verbs like (5) to behave differently from agentive transitives. So
taking (4) and (6) as a foundation, one might call TF underlyingly a
dechticaetiative i.e. secundative language with case 1 = agent, case 3 =
primary object, case 2 = secondary object. Experiencers appear not in case 1
but case 3, and the erstwhile stimulus gets promoted to case 1; this suggests
that case 1 has something of the status of a subject, in that when the
experiencer which "should have" been the subject is assigned a different case,
something else steps up to take the subject position. With this framing, (3)
is an intransitive of the expected sort, in having a subject. (1) and (2),
taking case 2 instead, perhaps should be seen as exceptional on account of
being statives, and case 2 as a case one of whose primary functions is
stativity i.e. undergoing no state change: I guess this is compatible with
dechticaetiativity if recipients are seen as undergoing a patientlike change of
state (now they have something they didn't before) whereas themes are seen as
having nothing happen to them.
Important question of analysis to ask at this point: why do you say (1)
contains an "adjective" while (2) and (3) contain "verbs"? Where in the
morphology or syntax does _himas_ pattern one way and _duum_, _mimbai_ the
other? (The glosses are not evidence; you could e.g. have glossed (2) "be
asleep".)
Are there intransitives that get only case 3? Honestly "dream" seems like the
epitome of an intransitive experiencer verb, to me, and intransitive
experiencer verbs would be prime candidates for case 3 on this analysis. So it
could just be that the TF speakers think of dreaming as particularly active; or
it could be a syntactic constraint against lacking a case-1 subject in
non-stative verbs (where _himas_ and _duum_ are the stative verbs in your list,
and all statives are intransitive); or ...
(7) is difficult on this reading, at any rate; it should want to mean ~="the
volcano sends the hut me"; it's as if for verbs of motion, all of a sudden, the
goer loses their empathisability to the origin and destination, i.e. the fact
that the hut is gaining me is more important than anything I might be feeling.
Particularly strange in contrast with (6).
>Suppose proto-TF's demonstratives came in 3 varieties (each inflected
>for gender, masc/fem/neut):
>
> ka/kei/ko: from that
> sa/sei/so: that
> na/nei/no: to that
>
>The sa/sei/so triplet is the bare demonstrative, whereas the other two
>are demonstratives with a directional component encoded.
On the whole, your explanation looks cogent (the conjunctive form especially),
but I have a nitpick: it is strange to speak of a one-term demonstrative
system. A system of demonstratives usually encodes a deictic contrast; if not,
it'd be more normal to call them articles instead already.
Of course, these words could certainly have been the old "that" member of a
pair of demonstratives with a deictic contrast, whose "this" member died with
(or was continued in?) the rise of whatever moder TF system _tara'_ and its
kind are a part of.
In unrelated TFery, I know there's at least one thread I've yet to respond to
you on, but one of the things I meant to ask for there was the distribution of
/o/ in words, to see how well it could be explained as of secondary origin, as
it seems to want to be. (I'm still keen on my idea that /ko so no/ were in
fact /kau sau nau/ (vel sim) in pre-TF, with allomorphs /ko so no/ in the same
positions that /kei sei nei/ had /ki si ni/, but then in the neuter the reduced
allomorphs generalised. At any rate, reductions like that may explain some
/o/, but they're not likely to yield the present situation without some more
regular source of /o/.)
Alex
Messages in this topic (2)
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3. New Cases for Siye derived from postpositions?
Posted by: "Anthony Miles" [email protected]
Date: Sat May 25, 2013 9:58 am ((PDT))
In the Siye causative construction with an imperfective verb, Siye puts the
subject of the internal clause in the instrumental case if inanimate and in the
genitive (or possessive? not sure which would be more natural) case plus a
post-positional noun in the instrumental case if animate:
Le ine eki liyo elelipunama.
le-0 i-ne e-ki liyo-0 e-le-li-pu-sum-na-ma
1-NOM 3-GEN 4-INS food-ABS 4-1-eat.IMPFV-SG-CAUS-DIR.UP-IMPFV.POS.REALIS
I will feed him (=I will cause him to eat the food)
Could this evolve into an animate instrumental -neki (-meki)? The
dative-benefactive -tu and dative-allative -su already exhibit that split
between animate and inanimate. The various locative postpositions - emsum,
emkim, emtu - could coalesce with the preceding -ne to form elative -nemsum,
inessive -nemkim, and illative -nemtu, contrasting with ablative -sum, locative
-kem, and allative -su. I've already been thinking of adding an infix -(e)mtu-
'into' to change the intransitive sentence 'um siline emtu ituputuna' 'The man
went into the house' into the transitive sentence 'um sili itupumtuna' but the
possibility of expanding the case system seems more organic, especially since
I'm not sure how far I can expand the directional slot - it and the applicative
slot before it are the only open categories, and I'm reluctant to kitchen-sink
either category rather than allowing organic growth. If all the above were the
case, -ne, the genitive suffix, (or maybe the possessive suffix -me) has become
-ne- (-me-?), the base for forming oblique stems.
Messages in this topic (1)
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4a. Re: Grammatical complexity
Posted by: "Randy Frueh" [email protected]
Date: Sat May 25, 2013 9:59 am ((PDT))
The sentence reminds me of the statements given in a logic puzzle.
Convoluted, with loads of information content presented.
On May 24, 2013 9:00 AM, "Adam Walker" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 9:10 PM, Roger Mills <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > --- On Thu, 5/23/13, Adam Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Okay here is an example of the sort of case marking -.m thinking of:
> >
> > Tom-ag bet John-da hat-or father-gen money-pa Flicka-the race-tem.
> >
> > Tom bet John, who wears the hat, father's money on Flicka during the
> race.
> > ======================================
> >
> > This isn't clear at all to me.......It seems to mean: Tom made a bet with
> > John concerning Flicka in the race. The bet was made with (somebody's)
> > father's money.
> >
> > Whose father's money-- Tom's or John's?
> > How is "who wears the hat" relevant to anything? and where would it go in
> > my interpretation?
> > =======================================
> >
> >
> Well, race is marked with temproal case so it's during the, or at the time
> of the race. The sentence is a bit of a jumble since I was trying to fit
> as many grammatical relationships into one sentence as possible to supply
> George with his requested examples. I don't know that it's terribly
> relevant whose father it is, but it could just as well be the speaker's
> father. Context would be required as it would be in English. The hat bit
> is in there to give an example of the ornative case in use, which was the
> case that got this whole thread started in the first place, so while it's
> probably the oddest bit in there, it was the most important to my purposes.
>
> Adam
>
Messages in this topic (19)
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