Osage for bigots

[muckefuck]

The Challenge: Come up with translations of "If you want to live here, learn the language!" in Amerind languages for deployment against English Only wingnuts.

My Pathetic Attempt: ðe mąžą ðalįį škǫštapi tą ie špižǫǫ

Rough pronunciation guide: /ðe 'mãʒã ða'lį: 'ʃkõʃtapi tã 'ie 'ʃpiʒõ:/

Rough gloss: this land A2P-sit/dwell A2P-want-PL if speech A2P-learn-IMP

Notes:

1. The verb lįį can mean "sit" or "dwell", so I thought a literal translation of "here" might be too ambiguous. I figure saying "this land" should clarify things.
2. ie can mean "speak" as well as "speech" or "language", so I suppose the reading "learn to speak!" is possible. I'm not sure how to disambiguate this command. I could add a plural particle, but it would probably be interpreted as applying to the subject (as in the first clause, i.e. škǫštapi "y'all want") rather than the object.
3. As cool as it is, I will refrain from pointing out the double person marking on both main verbs just this once.

Comments

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Well it's really more of a modal verb -- very much like the Japanese "-te" form. It just so happens that it has quite a high parallel in usage to the English infinitive, thus why I said what I said. It's marked with a ᏍᏗ (-sdi) at the end normally, and the present-tense verb gets a little more modification. That being said, the verb ALWAYS retains a person attachment at the beginning. Examples : ᎦᎵᎮᎵᎦ, galiheliga, "I am happy", vs. ᎠᏆᎵᎮᎵᏍᏗ, agwalihelisdi, "I to be happy"; ᎨᎵᎠ, gelia, "I think", vs. aquesdi, "I to think". That's one difference between Cherokee and Osage -- there's NO option to state verbs that have no kind of subject markings -- they NEED to be there, even in modal form.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Er..."modal verb" is usually used to refer to something quite different. I'm not sure what would be an adequate term for this particular Cherokee form. Can it ever appear alone as the main verb in a clause? If not, perhaps it's best described as a conjunctive form

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

I know that's what the modal verb normally is; however, in both the Cherokee text I have AND several of the Japanese texts of mine as well, that's how they explain this verb form. I suppose you can call it a "conjunctive" form, but that being said, they CAN appear alone, but in that case they indicate a suggestion or command (comapare in Japanese 教えてね！, oshiete ne!, "Tell me!", from 教える, oshieru, to the above example in Cherokee ᎢᏣᏕᎶᏆᏍᏗ, itsadeloquasdi, "you-all-to-learn" (meaning "you all ought to learn") from ᎢᏣᏕᎶᏆ, itsadeloqua, "you-all-learn".

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

If it can stand alone, it can't be a conjunctive form. (I assume Japanese has these because Korean does. If you tried to use one in a main clause, it would sound like you hadn't completed your thought, e.g. "Being happy..." or "I learn it and...")

Odd that they would use such misleading terminology. My Teach yourself Japanese cuts the Gordian knot and simply calls it "the -te form", whereas Martin's Reference grammar of Japanese calls it a "gerund". Does that mean it has nominal qualities?

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Actually in Japanese it doesn't sound uncompleted. This particular usage is shorthand for the more gramatically correct form of command, which is a "te-form" followed by 下さい, kudasai, literally "give me" (thus 教えて下さい is "give me the action that is you telling me", to be rather literal.) That being said, most people tend to drop it in more formal speech, and it's understood without kudasai, so yeah, in both Cherokee and Japanese they can both stand alone, and indeed in Japanese it can be quasinominal (I JUST got this in an email from Fujimoto, so I might as well use it : 落ち着いてからでいいよ, ochitsuite kara de ii yo, "It'll be okay after I've gotten to relax". Literally, "Relaxing-from being is-good," both de and ochitsuite being te forms being used as nominals.

As for Cherokee, the only stand-alone I've seen is in the "ought to" usage -- otherwise, it seems to always combine to a "tensed" verb in a "verb cluster", again akin to Japanese (though the "tensed" verb can come either at the beginning or end of the "cluster", as opposed to Japanese, who always puts the "tensed" verb at the end).

See, there doesn't seem to be a good English term for these verbs, at all, as there's really nothing in European languages to compare them TO, really, without being marginally misleading. They're tenseless, they combine with tensed verbs, they can indicate commands, and in Japanese they function as quasinominals as well. Just what do you call that? They're certainly not modals, infinitives, OR gerunds. Maybe we should just stick to "-sdi form" and "-te form"?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I've already concluded that the -te form can't be described as a conjunctive verb. What I'm saying is that I expect to find other conjunctive inflections in Japanese since they are found in Korean and the two languages have very similar verbal systems. Here's a Korean example from a post I wrote today (about the use of "rice cake" in some Korean Bible translations):

축복하시고 떼어 /chwukpokhasiko ttey.e/ blessing-do-HON.-CONJ break-INF. "blesses and breaks [then]"

축복하시고 can't stand alone in an independent clause. If you ended a sentence with it, it would give the impression that the thought was incomplete. (The so-called "infinitive form", e.g. 떼어, is different. It can end a sentence, but only in the informal speech level.)

Not knowing Japanese, I just don't know what these endings are. It's possible I'm mistaken and there simply aren't any.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Okay, in Japanese it's different, as that form CAN stand alone -- "Ganbatte" is a sentence in itself, and there's no idea of incompleteness at all. As far as I know, there's not many more conjunctive forms. "-tari" (meaning "do things like"), "-nagara" ("while doing"), "no koto" ("the thing", "the fact" -- kuma to yaru koto = "doing it with bears" -- now THIS normally doesn't stand alone -- it's MEANT to be built upon) are the ones that come to mind...

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

See, there doesn't seem to be a good English term for these verbs, at all, as there's really nothing in European languages to compare them TO, really, without being marginally misleading.

Two things to keep in mind here:

(1) Linguists have been working seriously on non-European languages for over a century now and, in the process, they've built up an increasingly accurate vocabulary for describing phenomena in non-European languages. An excellent primer on this terminology and how it's generally defined is the the SIL glossary.

(2) Despite our best efforts, there will never be a truly universal standardised vocabulary because every category is language-specific. The usage of the form called a "gerund" in English will never completely correspond to that of a "gerund" in Japanese or French even though each of these, in its own way, may fulfil equally well the abstract definition of "gerund". That doesn't mean we can't apply this terms to Japanese or Thai or whatever, just that we have to remember to leave our English-language biases behind when we do so.

I'm not convinced that "gerund" is a bad name for this form. After all, Martin uses it, and he's no slouch when it comes to grammatical description. Once I finish reading his book, I'll have a better idea what his justification is for using this term in preference to others.

As long as we're talking terminology, let me introduce you to the term "finite". A finite verb, according the SIL glossary is, a verb that "occurs in an independent clause, and is fully inflected according to the inflectional categories marked on verbs in the language". It sounds like the forms under discussion fulfil the first criterion but not the second, making them non-finite verbs. An infinitive is one kind of non-finite verb. A gerund, insofar as it is verbal, may be another. (Gerunds are words with both verbal and nominal characteristics. For instance, they may inflect like nouns but take an object like verbs.)

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

"Gerund" might make a bit more sense in Japanese, but it's clearly NOT functioning that way in Cherokee, where "infinitive" (SIGNIFYING a lack of tense) would be the best term, despite the fact that the two otherwise operate very similarly (sans Japanese's extra "quasinominative" feature). There's certainly parallels here, and that's why I personally would lean towards wanting to put a tag on the both of them that would indicate such. Does that makes sense?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It all depends how strong the parallels are and, not speaking either of the languages in question, I can't speak to those.

I don't think "infinitive" works for the Cherokee form, since according to the SIL definition, infinitives are not marked for any inflectional category including person. (Then again, this definition should render oxymoronic the term "personal infinitive" for one of the verbal forms of Portuguese; I suspect, however, that the usage here is more historical and comparative than anything else.) That's why I don't consider the corresponding Osage form an infinitive, since even though it doesn't have to be inflected for person, it always can be. I would consider these verbs non-finite forms which are nonetheless not infinitives. Unfortunately, I can't come up with a better name right now than that.