Re: any language without person/number marking you know?


Richard Herring wrote:
In message <1142244696.391386.302970@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Seán
O'Leathlóbhair <jwlawler@xxxxxxxxx> writes

Helmut Richter wrote:
I had written:

Consider Swahili "nitacheka" (I will laugh). The syllable ni- is the
person, so the verb form is dependent on person. Would you write it in
three words "ni (I) ta (will) cheka (laugh)", the verb form were
independent of person and tense. Other persons are "utacheka", "atacheka"
etc., other tenses are "nilicheka", "ninacheka" etc.

A much nearer example is spoken French: the verb is dependent on person
[Z@ri] (I laugh), [tyri] (you laugh) etc., and just like in Swahili, the
pronouns ([mwa] (I), [twa] (you)) are only used for emphasis. Other than
in Swahili, the verb affixes are written apart from the verb stem so that
they look like separate words: "je ris", "tu ris". But they are no
separate words because they, other than the pronouns "moi" and "toi",
never occur separate from verbs.

For a while, you had me wondering whether any language could be
considered to conjugate verbs by a change in its orthography. Iwork,
youwork, heworks, etc. Then I changed my mind.

I wonder if you missed the "spoken" in the description above? It's a
restatement of Jacques Guy's thesis that modern _spoken_ French can be
analysed as agglutinative.

I spotted the spoken and it does indeed make a big difference.

Although the French pronouns je and tu cannot wander far from their
verbs, they are not forced to immediately precede it. The subject and
verb may be inverted, object pronouns may come between them, or the
negative particle ne may also do so.

But the object markers aren't truly independent pronouns - the referent
has to appear elsewhere in the same sentence - and all these particles
have to appear in a fixed order. Tres agglutinative, non?

Agglutinative maybe but I thought that the discussion was on person and
number marking in verbs. Does agglutinative imply verb marking? Would
you regard the French subject pronouns as verb markings? I guess that
due to the limited number of particles that can come between the
subject pronoun and the verb, they could all be regarded as verb
markings and you could say that French verbs are marked for subject,
object, and negativity. This is not an interpretation that I am
familiar with but that means little and I am happy to be corrected.

What about inversion of the subject and verb? Does that not stretch
the notion of verb marking? Although it may be a border line case, it
does not appear to me that it crosses the line.

Please note that I am only claiming interest and not expertise in
French or linguistics. I am happy to be corrected.

How do you say, I don't laugh?

There may be some languages which are traditionally regarded as not
conjugating their verbs that could be made to appear to do so by a
change in their orthography. I don't know one and I don't think that
French is one.


Conversely, there may be languages which are traditionally regarded as
conjugating but could be made to not do so but separating the
inflections. Again, I don't know an example.

I have a book on Swahili somewhere, I will have to find it and have a
look. It may be an example in which the behaviour is just a matter of
it orthography.

Any more examples anyone?

--
Seán O'Leathlóbhair

.

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