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

Seán O'Leathlóbhair:

Richard Herring wrote:

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.

I had inserted the "spoken" in order to use phonemic writing as first
means for noting down the language. Apart from that, I do not think
that spoken French is a different language from written French.

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.

Exactly as in Swahili where you also add object pronouns and negative
particles:

Nitacheka. I will laugh.
Nitamcheka. I will laugh at him.
Hanitamcheka. I will not laugh at him.
Mtu nitakayemcheka. The person (mtu) at whom I will laugh.

An inversion is seldom but occurs as well (the relative pronoun -ye-
going at the end):

Mtu nimchekaye. The person at whom I laugh.

The reason why I would call that agglutinative is not because the
morphemes are written together (in at least one Bantu language I have
heard of, they are written apart) but because

- most of them occur only in the context of verb conjugation
- their sequence cannot be interrupted by other words
- to some extent they depend on each other, and some combinations
cannot occur (e.g., in future tense either relative pronoun or
negation, but not both)

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.

It shows that "is marked" and "is not marked" is not a clear dichotomy
but rather requires a definition of what kind of marking mechanisms
one is willing to accept. The OP's question was even a lot more vague,
not even saying what part of speech was to be marked for what. It is
tempting to ask questions like "what languages in the world have xyz?"
where "xyz" is some feature, e.g. gender or tense or case. Before asking
one should ask "what features of a language would I accept as xyz?".

Helmut Richter
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: any language without person/number marking you know?
    ... that spoken French is a different language from written French. ... verb may be inverted, object pronouns may come between them, or the ... Exactly as in Swahili where you also add object pronouns and negative ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: any language without person/number marking you know?
    ... A much nearer example is spoken French: the verb is dependent on person ... But the object markers aren't truly independent pronouns - the referent ... Does agglutinative imply verb marking? ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: any language without person/number marking you know?
    ... so the verb form is dependent on person. ... >> A much nearer example is spoken French: the verb is dependent on person ... But the object markers aren't truly independent pronouns - the referent ... Does agglutinative imply verb marking? ...
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    ... Fuck me, this is depressing. ... keep saying, 'I saw Anne, and Anne was looking tired, so I told Anne to ... verb, i.e. the person who is 'doing' the verb) is 'Anne', and the object ... are object pronouns, and not subject pronouns. ...
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