Posts tagged grammar

On the weekend I’ll be heading back to Nepal for a couple of months as the final field work visit for my PhD project. I’ll still be blogging, but there will undoubtedly be a bit more of a Nepal influence to the posts. I’m hoping that I can base some of the TwwEh posts around some of the interesting grammatical features I often encounter while I’m over there.

There are two languages which are the main sources of my linguistic knowledge in Nepal. They’ve already had a fair bit of influence over what I’ve already written for TwwEh posts, as you’ll see below.

Nepali is the national language of Nepal, and the language that I use to get by in day to date life. It’s an Indo-Aryan language, so it’s closely related to Hindi, and it’s part of the bigger Indo-European family so at a distance it’s related to English way way back before documented history. Nepali has retroflex consonants, Ergativity (but only i the past tense), a distinction between second person plural and singular, and a word for the day after tomorrow.

Yolmo is the language I’m working with for my PhD, and more specifically I’m working with speakers of the Lamjung dialect. It’s a Tibeto-Burman language, closely related to Tibetan and Sherpa, but also to many languages of Nepal, India, Bhutan, Burma, Bangladesh and all the way down through south China and Laos. Yolmo has many of the features above, and more. The sound system has retroflex consontants, as well as many words that start with ng-. The ergative system is much harder to analyse than Nepali, and it has a base-20 as well as a base-10 counting system and evidentiality. Yolmo not only has a distinction between second person plural and singular but it also has dual forms as well as plural, and an inclusive/exclusive first person plural distinction.

Hopefully over the next two months I’ll be able to share a lot more interesting features of these languages!

I’m always slightly wary of books where the person who wrote the foreword has their name in bigger print than the person who actually wrote the book. One could very easily be forgiven from thinking, at first glance, that Lynne Truss was back with ‘Can You Eat, Shoot and Leave?’ (Indeed, the book’s own publisher seems to think so) but on closer inspection of the cover, and the contents, I’m glad to say this book was left in the capable and slightly less bombastic care of Clare Dignall.

Once you get over the fact that this book is a cynical exercise in cashing in on Truss’s well-known ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ and in the process has ruined the whole joke of the title, this book is actually not that bad, if you know what you’re getting yourself in for. Dignall takes us through the main punctuation problem areas. We start with the apostrophe, then commas, before the double-billing colon and semi-colon. The next chapter is a grab-bag of ‘expressive marks;’ the question mark, exclamation mark, italics, quotation marks, dashes, brackets and ellipses all get a workout, before we finish with a chapter on the hyphen. There’s a final section where you get to practice what you’ve learned - but I was bored by that point and didn’t bother… let’s admit it, I was only there for the factoids.

Dignall’s book differs from its predecessor in that there is nice dot-pointed explanation of each grammatical feature and then there’s the opportunity to try out your new-found knowledge. Whereas I read Truss’s book and then forgot everything except her self-deprecating punctuation pedantry, the inclusion of exercises means that I’m probably more likely to actually remember the lessons on offer. Dignall’s explanations are couched in an understanding that the knowledge she is imparting is, at best, an arbitrary social convention. On the topic of the Oxford comma: ‘Ultimately the choice is yours.’

The pace is zippy, the example questions are sufficiently amusing and while I was a bit over it by the end to bother with the ‘final challenge’ I really felt like I learned something. This book is nothing to set a linguists heart a-flutter, but if you’ve always been curious about whether your deployment of punctuation conforms to editorial norms, or just want to learn what an em-dash is, Dignall’s book is welcoming, enthusiastic and never takes itself too seriously.

Strap yourself in tight - today we’re going to take a look at ergativity, which for English speakers can often be a little tough to get your head around. Since coming home from ALS I’ve been knee deep in grammar - including the aforementioned construction - and so today I thought I’d share it with you.

First things first. We remember what subjects and objects are. For some fast Friday over-generalisations - the subject is usually the one ‘doing’ the the thing, and in basic English sentences is the first noun:

“I eat cake”

“the handsome man hugged me”

Some verbs don’t take an object, they just have a subject, these are called intransitive verbs:

“I sleep”

You can’t say:

“I sleep the cake” 

Right, so we have three things: subjects of intransitive verbs, subjects of transitive verbs and objects, which occur in transitive verbs. English speakers think of those two subjects as being the “same” - they are in the same position, both “do” the action, and have the same form I instead of the object me.

But not all languages are like this. Instead, many languages treat the subject of transitive verbs differently to the other two. I’ll give you an example from Yolmo, only because it’s one of the few languages I can give an example for without having to look in a book”

“nga nyal-ke” I sleep (lit. I sleep-present)

“nga-ki to sa-ge” I eat rice (lit. I-ergative rice eat-present)

That -ki suffix only goes on the transitive subject, while the intransitive subject and transitive object remain unmarked. That’s ergativity!

This kind of pattern can be found in a range of languages - from Basque in Europe, to parts of North America, Meso-America, Australia and of course the Himalayan area where Kagate is from. Some languages make it even more complicated by only having the ergative marking as an optional or occasional feature!