Lund Language Diversity Forum Blog

A casual reader of one of the major texts in linguistic theory, Kayne (1994), may be struck by the statement that “reverse German” does not exist. Let us for the moment choose to ignore what Kayne actually meant by that statement. Instead, let us focus on the fact that the statement, as it stands, is bound in itself to awaken curiosity. What kind of a language would reverse German be? Or to localize the question more closely to Lund, what kind of a language would reverse Swedish be? If reverse Swedish (let us call it Dews-ish) exists, what properties would it have?

It all depends what we look at. Let us deliberately refrain from looking at what Kayne meant, and investigate some other parameters. One suitable example would be the realization of the definiteness distinction.

In Swedish, definiteness is indicated by a suffix on the noun (1a), while indefiniteness is indicated by an indefinite article preceding the noun (1b). In Arabic, the exact opposite occurs: definiteness is marked by a definite article preceding the noun (2a), while it is indefiniteness which sports the suffix (2b). The fact that the Arabic indefiniteness suffix –n appears identical to one of the forms of the definiteness suffixes in Swedish is an extra quirk: does it make Arabic more or less a reverse mirror image of Swedish?

1a) flicka-n                              1b) en flicka

girl-DEF                                  INDEF girl

‘the girl’                                    ‘a girl’

2a)  ᵓal-fatɑ̄tu                          2b)  fatɑ̄tu-n

DEF-girl                                    girl-INDEF

‘the girl’                                     ‘a girl’

In fact, Arabic also serves as another example of reverse Swedish: in Swedish, the gender of the noun is reflected on the article with which it occurs, but not on the verb of which it is the subject. In Arabic, the article is identical regardless of the gender of the noun, but the verb agrees with its subject in gender (3a, b).

3a) nɑ̄m-a                ᵓal-walad-u

slept-3S.M        DEF-boy-NOM

‘The boy slept.’

3b) nɑ̄m-a-t           ᵓal-fatɑ̄t-u

slept-3S-F       DEF-girl-NOM

‘The girl slept.’

So perhaps Arabic truly is reverse Swedish? Not if we look at noun phrase word order: For instance, in Arabic, as in Swedish, the relative clause follows the noun (4a, b).

4a)   ᵓal-fatayat-u                 [allatī                    katabna               ᵓal-risɑ̄lat-a ]

DET-girl.PL-NOM     [REL.FEM.NOM    wrote.FEM.PL    DET-letter-ACC]

‘the girls who wrote the letter.’

4b) flick-or-na      [som   skrev   brev-et]

girl-PL-DET   [REL   wrote  letter-DET

‘the girls who wrote the letter.’

However, looking at noun phrase word order, we have other candidates for “Dews-ish”. Swedish, like English and many other languages, has the ordering ADJ – NOUN- REL.CLAUSE (not surprisingly perhaps, since a relative clause is usually longer than an adjective, and there is a general preference in language to have longer, “heavier”, modifiers late in the clause). Dews-ish would then be a language with the ordering REL.CLAUSE – NOUN – ADJ. Surprisingly enough, there are many languages which could serve as Dews-ish in this respect. Basque is one, Burmese is another. For reasons of space, we will only show Basque here. Note that is so much of a mirror image that the Basque order can be derived almost entirely by reading the Swedish order backwards, word for word.

5a)   den      unga        flicka-n      [som   har    skrivit     brev-et]

DET     young      girl-DET    [REL   has    written   letter-DET]

‘the young girl who has written the letter’

5b) [eskutitz-a  idatzi            du-en ]       neska    gazte-a

[letter-DET writtten       has-REL]   girl        young-DET

‘the young girl who has written the letter’

How many such languages there are is illustrated in the following map from World Atlas of Language Structure (wals.info). The blue languages are languages with the Swedish order, and the white languages are languages with the Dews-ish order (i.e. like Basque).

There is something exotically enticing about the idea that the mirror image of Swedish is spoken in the fishing villages and mountain farms of the Basque Country, where a pre-Indo-European people is steadfastedly preserving its way of life and its language.

In fact, there is something else to be said for this idea. In Swedish, as in English and in many other European languages, there is a gender distinction on 3rd person pronouns (hon = 3sFEM, han = 3sMASC), but none on 2nd person pronouns (du = 2SING, regardless of gender). Further, in Swedish as in English and many other European languages, gender is expressed on adjectives and other elements referring to the noun, but not on the verb (although Slavic languages like e.g. Russian, Polish and Czech are an exception here, and so is Arabic, as we saw before).

So Dews-ish could be a language where:

1. i) gender is only expressed on the verb, not on a pronoun, noun or adjective or anywhere else; and
2. ii) where gender is expressed in the 2nd person, never in the 3rd person.

And yes, Basque is such a language. Basque is usually described as entirely lacking gender. There is no grammatical gender on nouns, and there is no semantic gender on pronouns. The pronoun hura can mean either he or she. The word gizon ‘man’ inflects in every way exactly like the word emakume ‘woman’.

However, there is one, and only one, Basque construction which involves gender agreement. In this construction, it is the verb, and only the verb, that agrees in gender, but only with the person spoken to, regardless of whether this person is actually referred to in the sentence.

6a) Amak         eskutitz-a         idatzi        du-k.

mother      letter-DET        written     has-MASC

‘Mother has written the letter. (said to a man)’

6b) Amak     eskutitz-a    idatzi       du-n.

mother  letter-DET   written    has-FEM

‘Mother has written the letter. (said to a woman)’

This construction type is used in a special kind of familiar speech, similar to the contexts where French would use tu instead of vous, or German would use du instead of Sie. In fact, it is sometimes heard in political songs, a usage which clearly reflects a basic assumption that all men are brothers (as are all women, apparently, since it is always the masculine form that is used!).

7a)   Ez        gaitu-k              lapurra-k        ez          eta       zakurrak…

NEG    1PL.be-MASC thief-PL           NEG     and      dog-PL

‘We are neither thieves not dogs…’

Is Basque, then, Dews-ish? We have seen some constructions where Basque does behave like Dews-ish. We have seen other constructions where Arabic behaves like Dews-ish. We could probably look at yet other constructions and discover that yet other languages are the mirror image of Swedish in that respect.

Does it even matter? In a sense, yes. Language typology is interested in what exists and what does not exist in human languages. Finding out what exists is easy enough by looking at actual languages. Finding out what does not exist can be a bit tricky, unless we imagine theoretical possibilities which we then do not actually seem to find in real languages. One simple thought experiment for identifying theoretical possibilities would be to take a random language, like Swedish, and try to imagine what the opposite of each construction type would be.

Does every construction type in Swedish actually have a mirror image? Perhaps, perhaps not. The answer to this question will be clear when we understand exactly what Kayne was referring to in his claim that  “reverse German” does not exist, an issue which will be deferred to another post…

We have discussed some interesting food-related etymologies in our past blogposts, where we could see that the origin of food items often is reflected in the provenance of its name. This is far from always the case however, but this assumption is a common source of erroneous etymologies which sometimes become widespread in popular belief. One such example is the alternative etymology of the English word pumpkin, as it is claimed across the Internet to be originally from the Eastern Algonquian language Wampanoag (also known as Massachusett and Natick). Wampanoag was spoken in the area of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, which was one of the earliest English colonies in the present United States of America, and Wampanoag was closely related to the neighbouring Narraganset from which the English borrowed the word asquutasquash that turned into the English word squash. Since both squash and pumpkins are members of the genus Cucurbita, which are all originally from the New World, it is tempting to wonder if the word pumpkin has an origin similar to that of squash, which I will prove to be incorrect below.

It is nevertheless claimed by e.g. the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, which is an effort to revitalize Wampanoag, that the English word pumpkin comes from the Wampanoag word pôhpukun with the meaning ‘grows forth round’. There are multiple problems with this claim and the first issue is that there are no historical attestations of the word pôhpukun, as it does not occur in John Eliot’s grammatical description from 1666, Cotton’s vocabulary from 1829 or Trumbull’s dictionary from 1903. The second issue is that the word pompion, which is the actual origin of pumpkin, is attested in English since the 16^th century. The etymology of pompion is Middle French pompon, which in turn comes from Latin pepōn- or pepo ‘watermelon, gourd’ with the ultimate origin being Ancient Greek pépon ‘ripe, mellow’.

The word pompon is however not found in modern French, which makes it worth questioning if French can be the source. The first attestation of the English word pumpkin, where the now obsolete diminutive suffix –kin was added to pumpon, is from Nathanial Ward’s The simple cobler of Aggawam in America from 1647, which describes life in the English colonies, thus connecting the word pumpkin with Massachusetts. Why would a Middle French word for ‘melon’ or ‘gourd’ end up in colonial New England, particularly in reference to a New World crop? This might seem implausible at first glance, but pumpkins were already present in Europe around 1500, as pumpkins occur in the illustrations of Livre d’Heures d’Anne de Bretagne from 1508 (Wehner et al. 2020: 76). This shows a connection between Middle French and pumpkins, but not specifically to the word pompon however. This is instead something we find in Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium commentarii insignes which is a herbal published in 1549 describing various plants available at the time, where pumpkins are described as having the French names Citrulle (modern French citrouille ‘pumpkin’) or Pepon (Fuchs 1549: 664).

We furthermore have an early New World attestation in English of pumpion and pumpon in William Strachey’s The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia from sometime before 1612, but whose manuscripts were not formally published until more than two centuries later in 1849. Strachey writes e.g. that the indigenous cultures of Virginia ‘sowe their tobacco, pumpons, and a fruit like unto a musk million [muskmelon], but lesse and worse, which they call macock gourds’ (Strachey & Major 1849: 72). This is highly relevant as this was written before the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts was even founded in 1620. It is therefore apparent that the word pumpon was used by English settlers prior to the colonization of New England, thus showing that is impossible for Wampanoag to be the source of the word pumpkin. This stands in stark contrast with the other etymologies we have discussed in previous blogposts, as there is no doubt in this case that the proposed Wampanoag etymology is false. It might seem like a negative conclusion, but our investigation did on the other hand also clearly confirm the somewhat contra-intuitive origin of pumpkin as coming ultimately from Ancient Greek pépon via Latin and Middle French. Etymology is a fascinating field of research, as who would ever believe that an adjective from Ancient Greek would travel across oceans and through millennia to end up as the term of North America’s most beloved gourd.

References

Cotton, Josiah (1829). Vocabulary of the Massachusetts (or Natick) Indian Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: E. W. Metcalf and Company.

Eliot, John (1666 [2001]). The Indian Grammar Begun: or An Essay to bring the Indian Language into Rules. Bedford, Massachusets: Applewood Books.

Fuchs, Leonhart (1549). De historia stirpium commentarii insignes. Lyon: Balthazar Arnoullet.

OED Online, Oxford University Press: https://www.oed.com/

Strachey, William & Major, R. H. (ed.) (1849). The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia. London: Hakluyt Society.

Trumbull, James Hammond (1903). Natick Dictionary. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of American Ethnology.

Wehner, Todd C., Naegele, Rachel P., Myers, James R., Dhillon, Narinder P. S., Crosby, Kevin. (2020). Cucurbits. 2^nd edition. Wallingford, Oxfordshire: CABI.

Reduplication is a very common morphological device used throughout the world. However, Europe being an exception as it is an area where it is not very common. In contrast, reduplication is found all over in the Austronesian language family. Below is a brief account of the different patterns found in reduplication in the Austronesian languages.

An often cited example is the reduplication of nouns in Indonesian, which is used to signal plurality. For instance, anak means ‘child’, and anak-anak means ‘children’ (reduplicated forms are usually written with a hyphen in Indonesian), while murid means student, and murid-murid means students. However, reduplication in Indonesian is not restricted to nouns. Adjectives can also be reduplicated to yield an intensified reading, for instance tinggi ‘tall’ and tinggi-tinggi ‘very tall’. Verbs can also be reduplicated to encode that the event is done in a relaxed manner, without a clear-cut goal. For instance, makan ‘eat’ becomes makan-makan ‘eat in a relaxed manner, eat for fun (with friends)’.

Not all reduplication in Austronesian is not limited to these functions. For instance, reduplication in Batak Karo  (spoken on Sumatra), has several other functions than the ones mentioned above. While it can be used to encode plurality as in Indonesian (sinuan ‘plant’ sinuan-sinuan ‘plants’), reduplication is also used to encode that something is similar to the concept denoted by the stem. For instance, mbiring means ‘black’, and mbiring-mbiring means ‘black-ish’ (i.e. something similar to black), and bərku ‘coconut shell’ in the reduplicated form bərku-bərku means ‘skull’ (i.e. something similar (in shape) to a coconut shell’).

As the attentive reader will have noticed, in all the examples above, the entire word stem is repeated. This is often referred to as ‘Full Reduplication’. This is not the only pattern found among Austronesian languages. Another common type of reduplication is to only repeat a part of the word stem, as in the Austronesian language Bunun (spoken on Taiwan), where one repeats the first sequence of a consonant and a vowel of a word. This can be seen in the reduplicated forms of ma’un ‘eat’, ma-ma’un and bazbaz ‘talk’, ba-bazbaz, where the reduplication encodes that the event is habitually repeated. This is not the only meaning available for reduplication in Bunun, as in bicvaqan ‘to thunder’, bi-bicvaqan ‘to thunder a lot’. This pattern is known as ‘Partial Reduplication’.

An interesting subtype of partial reduplication can be found in Puyuma, (spoken on Taiwan). Here, the first consonant of a stem is reduplicated. However, since a sequence of the same consonant in the beginning of a word is not allow in Puyuma, an extra vowel is inserted to separate the two. An illustration will help to clarify this: the first consonant of duduk ‘to pound’ is repeated to become d-duduk, and in order to avoid the sequence d-d, the vowel /a/ is inserted, yielding the form da-duduk, meaning ‘will pound’. The same pattern can be seen in litek ‘cold’, which becomes l-litek, and finally la-litek in its reduplicated form to mean ‘become cold’. These are both examples of reduplication, even though the vowel in the reduplicated part is not the same as in the stem. The choice of vowel here is arbitrary: In Indonesian, a similar pattern is found, but a schwa vowel /ə/ is inserted instead: pə-pohonan ‘all kinds of trees’ and bə-buahan ‘all kinds of fruits’, from pohon ‘tree’ and buah ‘fruit’, respectively.

Two parameters of reduplication have been mentioned here, form and function: What is being reduplicated and what function it has. The variation that has been illustrated here is only scratching the surface of what is out there. For those interested in learning more, Blust (2013) incudes an extensive section on reduplication in his excellent book on the Austronesian languages. For those interesting in learning more about reduplication in a broader perspective, Inkelas & Downing (2015) has written an accessible overview of reduplication from a broader typological perspective.

Blust, R., 2013. The austronesian languages. Asia-Pacific Linguistics, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.

Inkelas, S. and Downing, L.J., 2015. What is reduplication? Typology and analysis part 1/2: The typology of reduplication. Language and linguistics compass, 9(12), pp.502-515.

Different Interrogative words function to target different parts of a sentence. Interrogative pronouns replace and target a noun (what and who), whereas interrogative adverbs replace and target a constituent with an adverbial function, such as when (adverbial of time), where (adverbial of space). To ask a content question, one simply replaces the constituent one wants information about, for instance the subject (who is sleeping in my bed?), or the place (where did you sleep?). The question is then, how does one go about to ask a question about the verb of a sentence?

In English, this is done in rather complicated way. One has to use to interrogative pronoun what together with the verb do, as in ‘what are you doing?’. There is no word that can directly replace the verb, potentially leading to mismatches between the structure of the question and the structure of the answer, unlike the example above. For instance, ‘what are you doing’ is a transitive construction (it has an object, what), even though the answer might be intransitive (I was sleeping).

There are, however, languages that do not suffer from this awkward way of posing verbal questions, languages that can directly target and replace the finite verb of a sentence. To have a look at some of them, we shall follow Olof and Loren and take a closer look at the Austronesian language family, where we can find languages with not only interrogative pronouns and adverbs, but also interrogative verbs, (interrogative proverbs might be a better term, in analogy with interrogative pronouns, in which case we really should use the term interrogative proadverbs as well!).

The interrogative (pro-)verb marhua in Toba Batak (spoken on Sumatera), which literally means ‘do what’, can provide an illustrationg of how they work. Marhua can be used as the finite verb of a sentence, as in ‘marhua(do.what) ibana(he) disi(here), meaning ‘What is he doing here’, or more literally, ‘whated he here?’. Just like ordinary verbs in Toba Batak, the interrogative verb stands in the beginning of the clause, and it has the prefix mar-, which is a verbal prefix. The word is not only a (pro-)verb because it replaces a verb, but also because it has the same morphology as verbs, and is located in the same syntactic position.

While interrogative (pro-)verbs are not unique to Austronesian languages, they are found throughout the language family. Some other examples include Cebuano (spoken in the Philippines) with the interrogative (pro-)verb magunsa, Tongan (spoken on Tonga) with haa, Makassar (spoken on Sulawesi) with anapa, Colloquial Indonesian with ngapain, Bunun (spoken on Taiwan)  with makua, and Palauan  (spoken on Palau) also has an interrogative (pro-)verb mekera. All of these interrogative (pro-)verbs have the meaning ‘do what’, and can function as the finite verb of a sentence to inquire information regarding what someone did.

Like in Toba Batak, all the interrogative verbs above can host verbal morphology: ng- in Indonesian, an- in Makassar, ma- in Bunun and mag- in Cebuano, are all affixes that normally are situated on verbs. Interrogative verbs not only function as finite verbs, but they also have the same morphological (the have verbal affixes) and syntactic properties (they take the position of a verb in the clause) as lexical verbs!

Interrogative (pro-)verbs is a relatively poorly understood linguistic phenomenon, as there to date has been little research on it. Exploring rarer linguistic phenomenon like interrogative verbs is important as it allows us to get a better understanding of both the possibilities and limitations on variation in human language.

In the Western world, we are increasingly being told to pay attention to what information sources the media use. We have recently seen the emergence of strange concepts such as fake news, alternative facts, and post-truth politics.

We’ve had to retroactively come up with ways of staying aware of this problem. But I can’t help thinking about the fact that, had our mainstream media been published in one of the numerous South American languages with evidential systems instead, we would already have a system in place for handling our information sources. Let me tell you why!

We’ll start with a brief detour into tense marking. In English—like in many other languages—every time you utter a sentence, you have to place the event you talk about on a timeline by conjugating the verb. Thus, we can say things like He drives to Denmark (present tense) and He drove to Denmark (past tense), but we cannot leave out this information: the grammar forces us to make a choice, and to make it explicit. English speakers automatically time-stamp their sentences in this way, without paying much attention to it. Not all languages have obligatory tense marking, though—In Mandarin Chinese, for example, the verb remains the same throughout the timeline. It’s possible to express information about time in Mandarin Chinese by using an adverb like ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’, but the important point is that it’s optional.

On to our main topic then: evidentiality. Similarly to the way English obligatorily includes information about time on the verb, many languages obligatorily indicate information sources in their grammar. How does this work? There are different kinds of systems, with different numbers of distinctions. Let’s have a look at a few different types.

1. Languages that make a two-way distinction in their evidential system often distinguish first-hand and non-first-hand information. An example of such a language is Jarawara from the Arawa family, spoken in Brazil. In the example below, the speaker marks the verb in each clause with –no ‘non-firsthand information’ and –hiri ‘first-hand information’, respectively, thus reporting whether or not they witnessed the event.

Wero kisa    -me  -no                   ka          -me  -hiri           -ka
Wero get.down-BACK-IMM.PST.NONFH.MASC   be.in.motion-BACK-REC.PST.FH.MASC-DECL
'Wero got down from his hammock (which I didn't see), and went out (which I did see)'

2. Quechuan languages (spoken in the Andean region) make a three-way distinction of first-hand, inferred, and reported information.

trabaja         -aña-m     li-ku  -n
work.PURP.MOTION-now-DIR   go-REFL-3.person
'He's gone to work (I saw him go)'

chay   lika-n   -nii        juk  -ta -chra -a     lika-la
that   see -NMLZ-1.person   other-ACC-INFER-TOP   see-PST
'The witness must have seen someone else'

Ancha   -p  -shi   wa'a-chi -nki        wamla-a       -ta
too.much-GEN-REP   cry -CAUS-2.person   girl -1.person-ACC
'You make my daughter cry too much (they tell me)'

3. The East Tucanoan language Wanano, spoken in Brazil and Colombia, makes a four-way distinction: visual first-hand, non-visual first-hand (what you hear, smell or taste), inferred, and reported information. In first-hand information, Wanano thus makes a difference between sight and all other senses.

4. Tariana, an Arawak language from Brazil, makes a five-way distinction of visual first-hand, non-visual first-hand, inferred (from evidence), assumed (from general knowledge), and reported information.

Juse   irida      di -manika-ka
José   football   3PL-play  -REC.PST.VIS.FH 
'José played football (I saw it)'

Juse   irida      di -manika-mahka 
José   football   3PL-play  -REC.PST.NONVIS.FH
'José played football (I heard it)'

Juse   irida      di -manika-nihka
José   football   3PL-play  -REC.PST.INFER
'José played football (I infer it from evidence – his football boots are missing)

Juse   irida      di -manika-sika
José   football   3PL-play  -REC.PST.ASSUM
'José played football (we infer it from general knowledge – José usually plays football on Sundays)'

Juse   irida      di -manika-pidaka
Jose   football   3PL-play  -REC.PST.REP
'Jose played football (we were told)'

5. Last but not least, the Nambiquara language Mamaindê (from Brazil) has one of the most complex evidential systems in the world. It has a six-way distinction of information source types: visual first-hand, non-visual first-hand, inferred, assumed (from general knowledge), reported second-hand, and reported third-hand information. Thus, the Mamaindê system is similar to that of Tariana, but it also distinguishes reported information into second- and third-hand.

We can summarize the evidential systems mentioned here in a table, where their increasing complexity becomes apparent.

To a speaker of a language without evidentials (like myself), these systems are fascinating, and it is hard to believe how speakers manage to keep track of how they came to acquire every single piece of information. To a speaker of a language with evidentials, however, it comes automatically—much like English speakers’ ability to automatically time-stamp their utterances.

The way an evidential system is used can nevertheless tell us interesting things about what is valued in the social context in which the language is spoken. In many of the South American languages that use evidentials, the choice of an evidential is intimately linked to a social code of taking responsibility for the truth of the utterance. Discrepancies in the ways people relate to the ‘truth’ can lead to cultural clashes, which become apparent through the use (or non-use) of evidentials. Aikhenvald (2012:268) gives the following illustrative example from a situation that, sadly, is all too common to indigenous South American communities: “A missionary comes and starts preaching. He states that Adam ate the apple in the Garden of Eden—and uses a visual or ‘personal knowledge’ evidential. An Aymara, a Tucano or a Tariana speaker, looks at him suspiciously: has he really seen it?”

To be sure, languages without evidentials may specify the information source if they want to (just like Mandarin Chinese and other tenseless languages may optionally include information about time). In English, we can add adverbial and similar expressions such as ‘allegedly’, ‘…I heard’, ‘from what I can tell’, etc.—but, importantly, we don’t have to: the exclusion of the adverbial doesn’t make the sentence incomplete (compare Allegedly, he drove to Denmark and He drove to Denmark—there is a difference in meaning, but both are complete sentences). One may speculate that there is sometimes a certain degree of convenience (or perhaps an ideal of mutual trust?) in not having to present your source of information, and that the English speaking world prefers to keep it this way. In the end, it comes down to what the language community deems to be important enough to mention—or so I infer, based on internal conjecture.

Source: Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (2012) The Languages of the Amazon (Chapter 9: How to know things: evidentials in Amazonia). Oxford University Press.

In our last post, Loren A. Billings compared the pronoun systems of his two native languages: English and Tagalog. He pointed out some distinctions made in Tagalog which are not made in English, for instance a singular vs. plural you, or a way of distinguishing we (us including you) and we (us, but not you!). This reminded me of the pronoun system of Tok Pisin, which can give some inspiration on how such an English system would look like.

Tok Pisin is a creole language spoken in Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea is perhaps the most linguistically diverse country on earth. It is roughly the size of Sweden by area, with a slightly smaller population (8.7 million). The website Ethnologue lists 839 indigenous living languages of Papua New Guinea, which is more than 10% of their total number of languages in the world (7139). Therefore, Tok Pisin is commonly used as a lingua franca (common language) in Papua New Guinea.

Tok Pisin emerged as a result of European colonization, labor trade and plantation economy in several areas of the Pacific. In these circumstances, workers (either recruited or forced/kidnapped ‘blackbirded’) had no common language and developed a grammar of their own based on English, the language of the colonists. As such, much of the vocabulary comes from English, but with a grammar of its own.

Tok Pisin has a system of pronouns quite unlike the English system. Letʼs compare the English personal pronoun system to the Tok Pisin system below.

As we can see, Tok Pisin makes several distinctions not made in English. For instance, it distinguishes not only singular vs. plural (for instance ‘I’ vs. ‘we’), but also dual (for instance yutupela ‘the two of you’) and trial (for instance yutripela ‘the three of you’).

There is also an inclusive/exclusive distinction: yumi refers to ‘all of us, including you’ whereas mipela refers to ‘all of us, excluding you’. These types of distinctions are common in Oceanic languages of the area, so it seems safe to assume that this system has been transferred from local languages. In fact, Tolai, which had a large influence on Tok Pisin, has a very similar personal pronominal system.

Letʼs break down some of the pronouns!

In Tok Pisin, the ending -pela, which comes from the English word ‘fellow’, has many usages. It is used on personal pronouns to mark the plural, e.g. yu ‘you (sing.)’ vs. yupela ‘you all’. Quite obviously, the dual element tu and the trial element tri come from the English words two and three, respectively.

In order to make mi ‘I’ plural, we add -pela > mipela. If we want it to refer only to two people we add -tu-: mitupela, or ‘translated’ into English: me-two-fellow. In the third person, em comes from the English word ‘him’, but refers to all genders, so in this case English makes a threefold distinction not made in Tok Pisin. The plural ol comes from English ‘all’.

Letʼs look at these distinctions in action:

Yumi no ken les.
‘We all [including you] must not give up.’

Mipela i bin tromoi faiv kina tasol.
‘We all [but not you], have spent only five kinas.’

Mitripela i inap i go long ka.
‘The three of us [but not you] can go by car.’

Yumitripela inap mekim wanpela samting.
‘The three of us [including you] will be able to do something.’

Ol i no laik mekim wok long han na kisim doti.
‘They donʼt like to do manual work and get their hands dirty.’

Tupela i toktok strong long ol manmeri bai ol i no ken mekim sin.
‘The two of them urged strongly that the people not commit sin.’

My advice to Loren, longing for these distinctions, is obviously to incorporate them into English as well. Imagine the efficiency of just saying you-me instead of the somewhat clunky ‘all of us including you’, or me-three-fellow instead of ‘the three of us but not you’.

References

Lynch, John, Ross, Malcolm & Crowley, Terry (eds.) (2011). The Oceanic languages. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge

Siegel, Jeff (2008). The emergence of pidgin and Creole languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Verhaar, J. W. M. (1995). Toward a Reference Grammar of Tok Pisin: An Experiment in Corpus Linguistics. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications, 26, i–469.

Wurm, S. A. & Mühlhäusler, Peter (eds.) (1985). Handbook of Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin). Canberra: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National Univ.

Before kicking off another semester of blogging about language diversity, we thought it might finally be time to introduce ourselves properly. And what better way to do that than by our favourite language features? We asked our team members to tell us about an attested linguistic property that they wish their mother tongue had. So, without further ado, here are some of the people behind this blog along with their most-missed language features:

Eline Visser

Main research interests: Language documentation and description

A feature I wish my native language had: More case marking! It’s elegant and often shorter than using prepositions. I’d also wish for more case marking in all the languages I try to learn, because prepositions are a pain in the ass to get right.

Niklas Erben Johansson

Main research interests: My research primarily involves lexical iconicity, that is, the resemblance-based relation between sound and meaning, which I study from typological and experimental perspectives.

A feature I wish my native language had: Much in line with my own research, I would love if Swedish had a large set of ideophones. Ideophones (which are also referred to as expressives or mimetics) are words that evoke vivid impressions of sensory perceptions such as shapes, movements and colors. For example, Japanese doki-doki evokes the pounding of the heart and Siwu saaa evokes a cool sensation. Ideophones are common in some parts of the world, such as in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, where they constitute entire word classes on par with nouns, verbs and adjectives, but they are mostly absent in Eurasia with the notable exception of Basque. Having easy access to a large repertoire of expressive words seems like very fun way to spice up the often mundane act of speaking since it would change how stories are told and very efficiently convey complex thoughts, feelings and sensations.

Arthur Holmer

Main research interests: I am currently working on completing a reference grammar of the Austro-Asiatic language Kammu. Otherwise, my research interests deal primarily with the Formosan langauges (Austronesian languages of Taiwan), and more generally, I am interested in what keeps the clause together: word order, case relations, agreement etc.

A feature I wish my native language had: One feature which I really miss in Swedish (and English, and presumably all European languages) is wh-verbs, i.e. a verb meaning ‘to what?’. It seems such a handicap that, although we can question virtually any element in the clause (what?, who?, when?, why?, how?), we can not question the nature of the action itself. Instead we have to resort to clumsy methods of rephrasing the question, treating the action as the object of a dummy verb like “do”: What did you do _ ?, which is a a direct parallel to: What did you buy _ ?

In Swedish, given that the verb göra means both ‘do’ and ‘make’, a question targeting the verb even becomes ambiguous: Vad gjorde du _ ? (‘What did you do/make?’) This question could equally felicitously be answered by: a) Dansade. ‘Danced’; or b) Köttbullar. ‘Meatballs.’

This is a completely pointless gap. It is so much more elegant in the Formosan languages of Taiwan, as well as in many other Austronesian languages, where there is a dedicated verb which means ‘to what?’, which behaves like any other verb, and is inflected in the same way, cf. the following example from the Formosan language Seediq:

H<m-n>uwa=su            ciga?
<ACT-PRF>what?=you      yesterday
‘What did you do yesterday?’ (lit. ‘Thou whattedest yesterday?’)

Not only would this fill a natural communicative gap, but as a syntactician, I can’t help being curious as to how wh-verbs would behave syntactically in a language like Swedish: would they be placed in 2nd position (like verbs) or would they be fronted (like wh-words)?

Alex Garcia

Main research interests: I am interested in how languages structure or categorize their meaning, and also in how they develop their grammar. I have worked mostly on a language belonging to the Austronesian family (Northern Alta, see picture above), and previously worked on a Niger-Congo language (Diola). Outside of academic research, the language I enjoy the most is Mandarin Chinese.

A feature I wish my native language had: I think it would be cool for Spanish to have a distinction between a second person plural exclusive pronoun meaning ‘us, but not you (the addressee/s)’, contrasting with the inclusive pronoun nosotros ‘us’. This feature is not attested in any Romance or Germanic language but  is very common in other language families, as shown in this map: https://wals.info/feature/39A#2/18.0/149.6

Filip Larsson

Main research interests: My research topic is affixation in the languages of the Caucasus and my main fields of interest are historical linguistics, morphology, language contact and lexicology (particularly food terms).

A feature I wish my native language had: One thing I really miss in my native language Swedish is the absence of evidentiality marking, i.e. the possibility to use different verb forms to indicate if I have witnessed something myself or if I heard it by hearsay. Some languages even have an explicit dubitative to express doubt as well, which can be useful when you are talking about something that you have not experienced yourself and you doubt the validity of. If English had both explicit evidentiality marking and a dubitative form the sentence “I’ve heard that cats secretly rule the world but I really doubt it” would then become e.g. “cats rule-HEARSAY (1SG)-DOUBT the world”.

Victor Bogren Svensson

Main research interests: morphosyntax, linguistic diversity, Austronesian languages, Eskimo-Aleut languages, Sino-Tibetan languages

A feature I wish my native language had: I wish my native language had noun incorporation! The ability to integrate nouns (and other word classes as well, if allowed to broaden the scope!) into verbs to form finite verbs with the complexity of entire sentences is a feature that I find fascinating!

Sandra Cronhamn

Main research interests: I currently work on the classifier system of the Arawak language Baniwa, spoken in northwestern Amazonia. In more general terms, I’m interested in the semantics encoded by grammatical systems, as well as in how languages change over time and how they are affected by being in contact with one another.

A feature I wish my native language had: An elaborate, shape-based nominal classification system! Sure, Swedish has a two-partite gender system, but how cool wouldn’t it be if we attached classifiers to e.g. our numerals to specify if we are talking about the fruit, leaves or tree of a certain plant species? Swedish generally solves this problem quite well, I have to admit, by compounding (the gender inflection on the numeral is not relevant here), but I have a soft spot for the Baniwa way: changing the ending of the numeral (apa- in this case, meaning ‘one’) and leaving the noun intact. Baniwa has around 50 classifiers of this kind, which fill lots of different functions in a really elegant way.

Baniwa                                    Swedish
apáda manákhe     'a single açaí fruit'   en banan       'a single banana fruit'
aphéko manákhe    'an açaí tree'          ett bananträd  'a banana tree'
apáphe manákhe    'an açaí leaf'          ett bananblad  'a banana leaf'
apeétsia manákhe  'a bunch of açaí'       en bananklase  'a bunch of bananas'

Bird names are an exceptionally good source for funny and descriptive nomenclature. They also have some of the most predictable etymologies around as they often are of onomatopoeic origin regardless of whether the names are inherited from an earlier language stage or borrowed from another language.

For example, the English word cuckoo is very similar to the typical call the bird makes. This specific form probably comes from Old French cucu which could be entirely imitative but might simultaneously be derived from Latin cucūlus. The funny thing is that before this form was introduced to English, Old English speakers used the word ġēac. While ġēac might seem less imitative than cuckoo, it does derive from Proto-Germanic *gaukaz, which also consist of k-like sound (g), followed by a rounded vowel diphthong and another k-like sound, just like cuckoo.

Another telling example is owl which is very similar to the bird’s hooting call and to words such as howl and ululate. For comparison, the taxonomical genus horned owls belong to is called bubo, containing different, but equally hoot-like speech sounds.

Similarly, English names for the small birds belonging to the Paridae family include the tits and titmice. These names could be of imitative origin as well, since the sounds in the bird names resemble high-pitched chirping.  These sounds also denote small size, which can be found in words such as titbit as well. In North American English these birds are referred to as chickadees, which is more certainly of imitative origin due to the similarities between the names and the birds’ alarm calls.

Lastly, using names based on how something sounds like is of course not restricted only to birds. While there are hundreds of such words just in English, some of my favorites include the limnodynastes dumerilii, or the pobblebonk, named after its bonk-like call, and the dik-dik, used four species of tiny antelopes named after the repetitive dik-like sound whistle through their snouts.