To Morpheme Or Not To Morpheme?

Today I've listened to a great episode of Conlangery (http://conlangery.com/), the podcast about conlangs for conlangers by conlangers. The show, incredible as ever, made me think a lot about the idea of morphemes (and what's better than a show that also makes you think?). The whole deal about morphemes started out as a note in passing at the end of episode #68 (also recommended) with no other comment than David hating them as a linguistic tool. The ideas where hugely developed in this last episode, for which I'm very grateful.

I think it is true that many think of languages and words as a string of morphemes, while this notion is being challenged lately, it did have a very strong hold upon many linguists' minds. If you think about it, the further back you go, the more people relied on morphemes. A good example could be some old English dictionaries with etymology such as the one I have. Another example would be Esperanto itself, where this is a huge problem: morphemes are everything. This is one of the biggest downsides for me. Think about the "suffixes" which can equally be treated as whole words or units of meaning, it seems Zamenhof really believed in the theory of morphemes. You have for example:

malamiko "enemy" (mal- + amiko).

Note the prefix mal- which marks the opposite of something, the antonym if you will. It can be used as a word in itself, remember that it is considered still a prefix;

malo "opposite".

Other examples include:

junulo "youngster, young person" (juno + ulo, or more "natively" jun'ul'o)
but:
ulo "person" or;

vortaro "a group of words, dictionary" (vorto + aro, or vort'ar'o, with suffix 'ar' meaning "a group of, a collection of")
but:
aro "a group".

This is done in Esperanto intensively. In the same line I find in one of my dictionaries analyzing words things like a noun-forming suffix for proto-Aryan (sic) -ti, and thus giving English tru-th, divided into the morpheme of "true" and the morpheme of "noun", and other examples are presented in Latin do-ti, dowry, men-ti, mind, mor-ti, death.


The Atlantean Affair


I still remember it being mentioned that in the script the "Latin" phrase used by the protagonist (Milo Thatch) was written and analyzed as:

Dic-es lingu-as Rom-ae (sic)

To mean "you speak the language of Rome?" Jokes about how incorrect the phrasing is aside, it is plain that they mark the "morphemes" to relate them to the morphemes of Atlantean, as exemplified in the same text:

Kag wegen-os prid-uses es-e-nen.

Which is, by the way, reworked into "Latin":

It-a, su-m ami-ce via-tor. (sic)

In this last one you can even detect a very big mistake. The idea was to translate "Yes, I am a friendly traveler", but the problem is that in that sentence "friendly" is an adjective, it modifies "traveler", it looks like an adverb, but it isn't. So it actually says, "Yes, I'm a traveler in a friendly way", I don't know, maybe he means he never mistreats his back-pack. 

So, as you can see, so dependent were they on morphemes that they thought they could just replace the -ly morpheme for adverbs (which in English can also be used in adjectives) with the Latin morpheme -e for adverbs. And therein also rests my idea about why morphemes are not the refined tool we are lead to believe and why David Peterson is totally right, here we see that the "adverb morpheme" in fact does not act as an "adverb morpheme" but as an "adjective morpheme". There's no 1 to 1 morpheme to meaning, there's no 1 to 1 perfectly determined category for each morpheme, and even when you can work them into morphemes they will back-slap you right to your face...

Morphemes, they never fail to disappoint. 

Selk'nam concordances

A very nice, interesting language the Selk'nam, it also belongs to another indigenous people of Argentina who dwelled in the southernmost tip of the American continent. They have also been called Ona and they were part of the Chon linguistic and ethnic family.

Their language is intriguing in that it has a great number of words with very complex consonant clusters, for example; a word ʂq'òːht'èː means 'to gather', notice the retroflex with the ejective occlusive, also in the word haʔmqn which means 'coast'.

Most important about this language is the grammar, which includes a system of evidentials, namely, a dubitative, a surprisive, and a certitive. This, along with the pronominal prefixes can create quite a mouthful. The language does not take any markings for gender, but the certitive ending varies according to gender or neutrality, for example;

jah t-ahjqe-nn, I see (him), masc.

1st 3rd-to.see-CERT.masc.

jah t-ahjqe-èn, I see (her), fem.

1st 3rd-to.see-CERT.fem.

jah h-ahjq-n, I see it, neut.

1st 3rd-to.see-CERT.neut. 

In fact the same endings are also applied to the tense particles, so if we have xenn 'to come', and nèj 'present particle'.

xe-nn nèj-j čonn, the man comes. 

to.come-CERT.masc. PRS-CERT.masc. man 

But this last mark in the tense particle is not added when the pronoun is left last.

xe-nn nèj jah, I come (male). 

to.come-CERT.m PRS 1st

This suffixes can also be appended to the negative particle and other tense particles as well. Another interesting aspect of the language is the different lemmatas used in word-formation. I will discuss other interesting features of Selk'nam verbs and morphology in new posts.

Toba particles

Reading a linguistics magazine of the Argentinian Linguistics Society (RASAL in Spanish) I came across a paper by Cristina Messineo about some very interesting features about the language of the Toba people which I would like to share.

The Toba are an indigenous people in Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay in what is known as the Gran Chaco region. In Argentina they live mainly in the provinces of Chaco (not to confuse with the region), Formosa and Santa Fe.

Their language uses a set of particles to denote presence as well as to denote motion or act as classifiers. Most common particles are: da 'extended vertically classifier', ñi 'non-extended tridimensional classifier', yi 'extended horizontally classifier', na 'in motion, proximity', so 'in motion, distant', ca 'imperceptible, absent classifier'. How do we use these particles? An example would be,

qaica ca pan

EXneg CL:aus bread

'There is no bread.'

The first word literally means 'there isn't, doesn't exist' and it is followed by the absence classifier ca. Not only one must negate the verb but also the classifier must agree. On the other hand, we have the positive of this sentence,

huo'o na pan

EX CL:prox bread

'There is bread.'

Here we see the existential verb followed by the proximity classifier, indicating that the bread is there nearby. The classifiers, as seen above, can also indicate the shape of the object or if it either in repose or moving, I find this a very interesting feature of the language. But what would happen if you wanted to ask, unknowingly, if there is bread or not,

huo'o ca pan  ?

EX CL:aus bread

'Is there bread?'

The bread here has no apparent existence to the speaker and therefore the absence classifier is used, note that the existential verb is positive. To this question we might answer qaica ('there is not') if the answer is negative. The absence classifier can even be used with the verb to convey the sense of an irrealis mood, a supposed situation or a theoretical event in the future, as illustrated in the phrase,

cha'aye huo'o ca na'aq

conj. EX CL:aus day

'Because there will be a day...'

This is a very interesting construction that may help stimulate new ideas for language creation.

Random ideas for a conlang

As I was walking home from my university I started thinking about conlangs, as I usually do. I find the way home very inspiring. I was remembering my first attempts at cracking Japanese, when I only had a japanese video-game and a kana chart. I was thinking about the copulative, which really got my attention back then. The copula can change depending on register, from です to だ, without mentioning the expletives and emphasizers.

I rekindled one idea I used to have. In japanese you can say スタンドだ (sutando da), which means "it is a Stand" or "A Stand!" (this is due to the game in question being Jojo's Bizarre Adventure). But you can also say 美味しいです (oishii desu) "it is tasty" or "this is good!" depending on context. So you have in the first case a noun and in the second an adjective, so I started to think... how about a conlang with a copulative particle which changed depending wether it is a noun or adjective or whatever.

So for instance, you could have something like... unil da, "(it) is love", but you could have mundo ki "(this) is old". So the copula could act as both a copulative and also a word classifier. Maybe you could even make the words flexible enough for them to mean unil ki "this is loveable" and mundo da "it's an old thing". Now that I think about it, it'd be as if you were to take the suffixes in Esperanto as separate particles... libr o "book" and libr a "book-like". But also mixed with a little Japanese :p

Of course I'm not saying I would use this very words or particles as they appear here, just testing the idea with some sounds to see how could it work, so this is not purely theoretical. Well, this was my idea for a conlang I had yesterday, just another idea...

Affixes in Esperanto

Is it only me or does anybody else think Esperanto's affixes are cool most of the times? I mean, I know as well as the next guy the pros and cons about Esperanto, but some of the affixes, those you use to modify the root and make new words, are really interesting. I like it how they are very ambiguous; for instance, you have 'ad' or 'aĵ', which literally mean "a lasting or repeated action" and "concrete thing", I like this last one in relation to 'uj' "something that contains the thing indicated by the root". I say this is very interesting because it is very flexible to use, it can mean either something that contains but it is also mostly used for nations or trees, as they contain citizens and fruits. So for instance you have:

pomo. Apple > pomujo. Apple-tree.
hispana. Spanish > Hispanujo. Spain.

It's noteworthy that it lets you make a pair with 'ar' an infix that means "a group of", so you can have:

libro. Book > libraro & librujo

The first would mean "a group of books" as in a collection, the latter would mean the thing holding your books, a bibliotheque or a book-shelf. When you look at your own collection of books comfortably sitting in your book-shelves they can both be called either libraro or librujo, but the first would mean the books in themselves, while the latter would mean the furniture which contains them.

And that's not all, my favorite must be 'ing' which means "something that is partially introduced in what is expressed by the root". So with it you can have:

fingro. Finger > fingringo. Thimble.

I like this quite much, and the same infix could be also used in more flexible ways in conlangs, thoughts anyone?