Some nice Siouan sites - Omaha, Ioway-Otoe-Missouria, Kansa

A great Omaha language site: Omaha Language Curriculum Development (hat tip to Mark Awakuni-Swetland.) I particularly like the cookbook. Other nice Siouan sites worth looking at are Ioway, Otoe-Missouria Language and WebKanza.

Algerians sure can code-switch

Algerians are rightly renowned for their code-switching wherever they go (or should be). I disapprove of it in general - it often reflects the unjustly low esteem Algerians tend to have for their mother tongue, and encourages the abandonment of less commonly used Algerian Arabic (Darja) terms in favor of unnecessary French loanwords. But you can't help but love an example like this one that I just heard here in London today:

gal-li y-ḥəbb to move
say+PF+3MSg-DAT+1Sg 3sg+IMPF-want "to move"
He told me he wants to move.

What's so weird about that? The thing is, while standard English want requires a non-finite complement, Algerian Arabic ḥəbb "want, like" takes a finite complement. In fact, there are no infinitives in Algerian Arabic - only finite verbs and verbal nouns. So it looks as if the non-finiteness (presumably generated in T) of the complement in the English half is being selected, not by the Arabic verb which precedes it, but by the English translation equivalent of it. I still can't quite believe I heard this sentence.

If you found that fun, you may wish to ruminate over another sentence (Arabic/French switching) from the same conversation:

`ənd-i un problème ta` wəqt
at-me "a problem" of time
"I've got a problem of time."

and, in particular, on what syntactic tree it suggests, and whether this really fits the idea of a DP. Note also that, while Algerian Arabic does have a sort of indefinite article (waḥəd əl-), its distribution is quite different from the French one, and I don't think it would occur in the corresponding code-switching-less sentence.

Center-embedding and Japanese

Lately I've been reading some of John Hawkins' A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency, which puts forwards some very appealing ideas about how to predict the relative frequency of different word orders (both cross-linguistically and within a language) by quantifying how easy they are for humans to parse. (For example, he derives such phenomena as Heavy-NP shift, the relativization hierarchy, and even the relative frequency of the six possible basic word orders SVO/SOV, VSO, etc.) Parsing issues certainly severely affect the grammaticality of sentences, as people who follow titles posts Language Log authors write have know.

I tried out a similar example in Japanese on a friend - going by the grammar books, one would expect "John said Mary thinks Bill came" to be translated as "Jon-wa Merii-ga Biru-ga kita to omou to itta", with three successive subjects followed by three successive objects. She unhesitatingly went for, as I recall, "Biru-ga kita to Merii-ga omou to Jon-ga itta" - moving the subjects to the "wrong" places to make the sentence processable - and said that the three-successive-subject one was "difficult". I can't think of any Arabic parallels offhand - postverbal objects and resumptive pronouns in relative clauses together stop most of the obvious possibilities - and Sylheti turns out to rather cleverly block almost (not quite) all possible ways in which problematic center-embedding might emerge. So my question to you is: in your language, can you think of similar examples of incomprehensible yet nominally grammatical sentences?

Baghdad Connect

Baghdad Connect is a bit of a dark horse. It gives bits of news and analysis from Iraq you do not get from anywhere else. But who are they?? Then a scan of their archive shows a letter to the Iraqi Communist Party (in the Green Zone) criticising the policy of their alliance with Allawi:

Who is Alawi? He is not part of our league neither us are part of his. And he could betray us as the Baath party did when it reversed the process of scientific socialism. We cannot rely on him just because he promised us colorful ministerial positions. He will forget all about us when the Oil deals start to pile up his desk.

Hell hath no fury than a Communist scorned.

New; 1
Total; 203

National/common/unifying language for the US?

As you may have heard on Language Log, on May 17th-18th, the US Senate approved not one but two amendments - one Republican, one Democrat - on the status of English. The first amendment, by Sen. Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), amends sections 161-2 of Title 4 of the United States Code to state:

English is the national language of the United States. The Government of the United States shall preserve and enhance the role of English as the national language of the United States of America. Unless specifically stated in applicable law, no person has a right, entitlement, or claim to have the Government of the United States or any of its officials or representatives act, communicate, perform or provide services, or provide materials in any language other than English. If exceptions are made, that does not create a legal entitlement to additional services in that language or any language other than English. If any forms are issued by the Federal Government in a language other than English (or such forms are completed in a language other than English), the English language version of the form is the sole authority for all legal purposes.

The second, by Senator Salazar (R-Colorado), makes the same section rather more reasonably, if vacuously, say:

English is the common and unifying language of the United States that helps provide unity for the people of the United States. The Government of the United States shall preserve and enhance the role of English as the common and unifying language of America. Nothing herein shall diminish or expand any existing rights under the law of the United States relative to services or materials provided by the government of the United States in any language other than English.

The bill is still under debate, so it remains to be seen what, if any, of this will be left - but, after 230 years of doing just fine without one, the USA may or may not soon have a national language. Either way, it's an interesting debate to follow. I remember in San Francisco just about any governmental document seemed to be printed in English, Chinese, and Spanish; that approach - choosing the language according to what people actually spoke on a local level, rather than a national one - strikes me as eminently sensible. What I can't seem to figure out is what the plan is now that both have passed - do they stick both texts in the section, or do they just hash it out later?

Thought Riot

Riot Starter has got her marketing right - go to every blogger and leave a little comment. Its subtle and it works. So I will let Zappy do the recommending for me...

I don't seem to know where she's blogging from, but who cares anyway, as long as its a good blog, she's taking politics to seriously.

I wish her the best.

And so do I!

New; 1
Total; 202

Nose to the Grindstone

Sunday, May 14, 2006

I took Saturday off from class as Saturday is our “conversation” day and since I had talked with Ghaleb for about eight hours the day before, I didn’t feel too bad about skipping class and getting back one of the days from my weekend.

Our Friday together must have left a good (bad?) impression on Ghaleb as he came to class today with a photocopy of Al-Thowra (a Yemeni newspaper) for me to read. The first article was a kick in the noots but the second wasn’t so bad. Long story short, I ended up with about thirty new vocabulary words to memorize tonight.

Previously Ghaleb had only had me translating individual sentences/paragraphs from his Media Arabic book which tends to build upon vocabulary introduced earlier in the book, making it infinitely easier than an article picked at random from the newspaper.

Monday, May 15, 2006

Ghaleb’s Super High Intensity Training continued today as he brought in a video recording from Al-Arabiya for me to watch. We started viewing the video but only after I got him to admit that the Arab newscasters speak faster than normal.

Much like the previous day I had the most difficulty with the first story which dealt with the investigation into Syria’s involvement (or non-involvement) with the death of a prominent Lebanese political figure. I forget his name but he was quite popular in Lebanon and I remember watching riots on the news after his death as the Lebanese were accusing Syria of having a hand in his death.

The second news story was much less difficult, probably due to what I remember from studying Arabic at DLI(?), as it dealt with the shooting down of an American helicopter.

The third and final news story was about the British Minister of Foreign Affairs praising Saudi Arabia for their recent success in the war on terror. This ended up being, to my relief, only slightly more difficult than the second story had been. Still, I once again ended up with about thirty more words to memorize this evening.

Ghaleb has decided that one day out of the week will be devoted to newspaper articles, one day for watching TV news broadcasts, one day for translating from the Media Arabic book, one day for working from the Al-Kitaab series, and one day for free discussion. Giddy-up!

Maya and Amnesty International

I went to the AI site just now, without a linguistic thought in my head, and what do I find?

Watemaal: Li risinkileb’ laj nat’ol na’ajej moko a’an ta li xb’ehil re xtuqub’alkil ru li ch’a’ajkilal chi rix li ch’och’

I applaud this, although I should point out that putting an international press release in Mayan (dunno which Mayan language - Chol?) is somewhat self-defeating...

Incidentally, if you haven't already seen it, check out the site Language Hat just found. I particularly liked the San Zi Jing.

Lunch with Gahleb

Friday, May 12, 2006

I’ve just returned from my instructor’s house, Ghaleb, about an hour ago and I must say that I had a very enjoyable time with him. You know an instructor must be doing something right when students come here to study and ask for him upon recommendation of friends that have studied with him.

The beauty of being able to spend time outside of class with my instructor is that, as my instructor, he’s familiar with the level of my Arabic and he can adjust his conversation appropriately. If he does use a word that I don’t understand I just ask him the meaning and he will try to use it in a manner in which I will understand through context. Of course, if push comes to shove he can just tell me in English. Initially I thought that he would want to take the opportunity to practice his English (which is good) but no, he only spoke Arabic straight from the get-go.

That being said, we had what I thought to be a great conversation during my time there. I felt like I was really on top of my game. To be honest, I felt more comfortable talking to him in at his place than in class as I didn’t feel as if I were under any pressure.

Lunch was also very tasty! It consisted of a very spicy broth in the beginning and after that there was the ubiquitous chicken and rice but also beef, Yemeni pizza, and some other vegetable dishes that don’t really have comparisons back home. The dessert was Bint as-Sahn, which is a type of pan bread covered with honey. Ironically, he (and most Yemenis) uses honey produced outside of Yemen because Yemeni honey is so expensive.

I would hazard that almost all Yemenis eat on the floor as this is the third Yemeni house at which I’ve eaten (the first time was at the new student luncheon, the second was at Abdul Rahman’s) where I ate on the floor. They put down some type of plastic tarp (it varies slightly) and put the plates of food on the tarp.

Three Must-Reads

Iraqi blogs are growing in quantity and quality. I am pleased to announce three new quality blogs...

A new weblog has been created on a much-needed subject. It is for Expatriate Iraqi Scientists and their role is to "Stay united and rejuvenate Iraq's scientific heritage". One important task they have started is to gather information about the spate of assassinations of Iraqi academics and professionals. One thing I want to link to here is a PDF showing the demographics of assassinations in Iraq. What is most horrifying about this is not so much the division of killings, but the fact that enough people were killed that meaningful statistics can be gathered.

Also, this blog came to my attention from a a little Smiley :-) placed in my comments section... A very warm welcome to new blogger, Fatima. Being born and raised in the US and now living in Baghdad shed is a Bridge Blog in her own right. She is, Thoughts From Baghdad. And she blogs about... her thoughts on living in post-Saddam Baghdad. I have to highlight here her post of some amazing pictures of sandstorms in Baghdad. But I did not have the time to ask for her permission to show them so you will just have to click on the links for yourself of... sandstorms and more sandstorms.

Last and most certainly not least is Iraqi Screen by Ishtar. The one and only Salam Pax has this to say...

Boys and girls do yourselves a favour and go read Iraqi Screen. You will thank me. She is funny, she is wise and she could kick your ass if you looked her up the wrong way.

With a recommendation like that from The Man himself you cannot go wrong.

...

Well, what are you waiting for?? Get reading and enjoy!

New; 3
Total; 201

Shawi blog

Shawiyya (Chaouia) is a Zenati Berber language of eastern Algeria, spoken inland on the Sahara-facing side of the Atlas Mountains. While spread over a far larger area than Algeria's other main Berber language, Kabyle, it has only about half the population (1.4 million or so). Unlike the Kabyles, the Shawis, as their Arabic name suggests, were traditionally seminomadic (transhumant, to be exact); after independence, many seized the opportunity to settle down in the cities, and, from what I hear, this major change of lifestyle led to widespread language shift to Arabic. Shawiyya, like other Zenati dialects of northern Algeria (Chenoua, Bissa, etc.), but unlike Kabyle or the Berber varieties of the Sahara, has the interesting sound change t > h initially in many contexts. Anyway, I found a Shawi-language-focused blog the other day, to my immense surprise, which I figured was worth linking:

Awal nu Shawi

It seems to mainly post lyrics, sometimes with translations.

A new primate and a nice talk

I went to a nice inaugural talk by Prof. Jaggar here at SOAS yesterday about African linguistic diversity, Afroasiatic, and SOAS linguists' resistance, then ultimate capitulation, to Greenberg's groundbreaking African classification - the talk was rendered especially notable by his getting up along with his choir to sing Nkosi sikelele iAfrika afterwards! However, I haven't really got time to summarize it (for the classification part, you could check out my previous post Beja and beyond), so instead I'll post a link to the discovery of a new species of primate: the kipunji, a close relative of the baboon which lives in trees instead of on plains. No news yet on its communication system :)

Sylheti word order

I've been working on Sylheti - a highly divergent dialect of Bengali / language very closely related to Bengali spoken around Sylhet in northeastern Bangladesh - for my field methods class for a while. The particular point I'm focusing on at the moment is the positioning of complement clauses, which obeys a simple rule: if the complement clause has a separate subject, it follows the verb; otherwise, it precedes the verb. The language is otherwise SOV, I should note, so you get contrasts like:

ami exṭa apol sai.
I an apple want-1.
“I want an apple.”

ami exṭa apol xaitam sai.
I [an apple eat-COND-1] want-1.
“I want to eat an apple.”

ami sai he exṭa apol xaok.
I want-1 [he an apple eat-3-OPT].
“I want him to eat an apple.”

This doesn't fit my Japanese-based expectations of "proper" SOV languages (in Japanese, the subordinate clause would always precede the verb) but it turns out that German has basically the same word order (if you factor out the main-clause V2 order by having an initial complementizer). There are some obvious processing motivations for such an order, but it doesn't really fit the head-position parameter idea so well. I was wondering: has anyone seen similar patterns in other SOV languages?

From Aden with Love

Please forgive my typos...

Well, I was just about to study, but as the power has gone out I thought it would be a good time to write about my trip to Aden before I forget all the details.

Ahh… Aden. Yes, Aden. After missing out on the trip to Shahara and Ma’rib, nothing was going to make me miss this trip. And that is a shame as this was probably the trip I should have missed.

The foreshadowing of events to come began when we had to wait until about three in the afternoon before heading out to hire a car to take us to Aden. The reason this is an ominous portent is that it is about a seven hour trip.

The five of us (Myself, Evan, Aaron, English Tom II, and Alex) managed to hire a car for about thirty dollars. Normally they cram about nine people into the station wagon but we paid extra so that we could have the taxi to ourselves. The foreshadowing continued as the weather had turned rainy for our darkened descent down to Aden (Sana’a is at an elevation of just over 7,000 feet).

Our driver was not shy about passing slow moving vehicles regardless as to whether he had a decent line of sight and on about three different occasions I had given myself up for dead. During the descent the weather cleared up and the drive became more pleasant. Unfortunately, since we left so late it quickly became too dark to enjoy the scenery of the drive. As we got closer to Aden the road became noticeably worse with the driver having to slow to a crawl in some places.

We arrived in Aden at about 11pm and headed to our hotel. During our drive I had asked my companions for the luxury of staying at a decent hotel. I thought we had an agreement of sorts but no such luck. Although I saw several nice looking hotels as we drove into Aden, Aaron directed our driver to the Gulf of Aden Hotel which is located almost right beside the Al-Wafi Hotel.

I was quickly becoming nervous as the neighborhood through which we were passing wasn’t one in which a decent hotel would be found. If you look in Lonely Planet’s Arabian Peninsula guide (which I don’t usually do) you will see both hotels listed in their budget selection with Al-Wafi (I think that is correct but I’ve loaned my guide out and can’t check at the moment) being described as the best of a sorry lot (I think that’s what it said). Lonely Planet could have saved everybody a lot of time by saying the Gulf of Aden has a ton of cockroaches crawling over everything but that the Al-Wafi Hotel only has 1/3 the number of cockroaches (English Tom II had to knock two of them off his bed).

I was decidedly unhappy at this point and not having a good time. A couple points to mention about Yemeni budget hotels. They may or may not include blankets on the bed. They won’t have any cute soaps and shampoos, towels or washcloths for you to use. So, if you are like me and didn’t remember to bring soap, shampoo, towels or washcloths, you will probably regret it unless you don’t like bathing. I ended up bathing with some wet-wipes that I had in my backpack. If the above doesn’t put you off, you’ll be happy to know that the air-conditioning worked just fine and that the rooms were dirt cheap.

About thirty minutes after we checked into our rooms Aaron had us out the door to The Sailors Club. The Sailors Club was pretty much the same as the Russian Club and the Palestinian Club but actually a little nicer as it was located right on the water and there was a nice breeze to boot, and dare I say, I had the tastiest tuna fish sandwich ever.

For some strange reason, I thought we would be touring through the streets of Aden but Aden is no Old Sana’a. To paraphrase a line from the musical Chess, “You’ve seen one crowded polluting stinking town, you’ve seen them all”. Actually, the cisterns there are supposed to be interesting to view but that didn’t seem to have been on the agenda. No my gentle readers, the following day we were off to the beach!

There are public and private beaches in Aden and I recommend paying the two or three dollars to go to a private beach. We ended up going to the Elephant Bay Beach Resort which was rather pleasant. If you are in Yemen and decide that you absolutely must go to the beach, you could do worse. The Elephant Bay Beach Resort has rooms for rent that are located right on the beach (for a reasonable price) a nice dining facility/gift shop, a small but modern fitness room, and the manager there seemed quite capable.

As our time at the beach neared its end, the discussion of whether to stay a second night came up and much to my delight we decided to head back that night after dinner. Dinner was at the Sheng Sheng Chinese Restaurant. We all opted for the 10 course meal which ended up costing about eight dollars a piece. Such an excellent dinner it was! I can’t recommend it enough.

The ride home was no more enjoyable than the ride down but then, long, crowded car trips usually aren’t enjoyable and since we departed once again in the evening, I missed the scenery once again. We arrived back at the school at about 3:30am at which time I promptly took a shower and then spent the entire next day in bed!

West African grammars in Arabic script

I want to see this talk by Hiroyuki Eto Nikolai Dobonravine (though I'm not likely to be in Dublin for it):

Arabic and Arabic-script writing tradition in West Africa dates back to the 12th century AD, if not earlier. Local scholars were familiar with the linguistic ideas which formed part of Islamic education. Arabic grammars and dictionaries were popular in the region. The interest in the study of Arabic resulted in the development of local Arabic and bilingual vocabularies, sometimes written in verse, as well as some works on Arabic grammar. A few versified vocabularies and grammars of West African languages were also composed. Almost all of them were written in Arabic and used Arabic linguistic terminology.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries several works were written in West African languages using Arabic script. One such work, "Littafen nahwowin Hausance" ("The book of Hausa grammar"), is analysed in the paper. The work demonstrates a special approach to the parts of speech in Hausa (the verb deprived of the "person-aspect complex" is seen as a noun, although it may be used independently in the Imperative). This is a larger work of traditional lexicography, with notes on folk etymology, pragmatic rules, grammatical gender and possessive pronouns in Hausa.

The shift from Arabic to Roman script and the decline in the use of Arabic did not lead to the disappearance of the earlier linguistic tradition. New grammatical works and vocabularies in Arabic script (including a Fula-French vocabulary in Arabic script) were published. All these writings have been largely ignored by the linguists working at the universities in West Africa and abroad.

Whorf meets warmongering

Pop Whorfianism (usually in forms that Whorf would have been the first to laugh at) is something I usually associate with a slightly hippy-ish multiculturalism. However, it seems to have a certain appeal to Islamophobes as well.

The thesis they find so appealing is summarized in one James Coffman's question: "Does the Arabic Language Encourage Radical Islam?". Apparently, he did a survey in 1988 in Algiers which confirmed a number of fairly obvious facts - notably, that the younger students that year, who were the first cohort of students whose secondary education had been mainly in Arabic, were more "Islamist" than their predecessors who had gone through a partly or wholly Francophone educational system. From this, he concluded that the Arabic language encouraged "radical Islam" - not, for example, that Arabic-literate students had much easier access to "Islamist" literature (and Islamic literature in general), or that the transition to Arabic had been accompanied by a vast expansion of the school system to cover more conservative rural areas, or that many of the imported Arabic teachers who helped tide Algeria over the transition period were Islamic Brotherhood members fleeing crackdowns in Egypt, or indeed (most importantly) that the collapse of the Algerian economy in the late 1980's was encouraging the growth of anti-government ideologies. It's an old, old saw, but one that apparently still bears repeating: correlation does not equal causation.

Mind you, like most people who cite the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, he doesn't seem to have a very clear idea of its content. On my reading of Whorf, his core idea is (plausibly enough) that a language might make its speakers more conscious of some grammaticalized categories by forcing its speakers to mark them, or less conscious of them by not providing any simple way to describe them; it would thus render some ideas more intuitive than others. For this sort of deep influence to be plausible, the speaker has to do most of his/her thinking in the language in question. But both classical Arabic and French in Algeria are only ever used by most speakers in writing, or in highly formal contexts - scarcely the sort of situation Whorf had in mind...

(PS: It seems Language Log have also just done another post on "No word for X" fallacies. Another example of ham-handed anti-Arab efforts at Whorfian analysis is alluded to on Linguistic Life.)

How to find linguistic universals

I couldn't resist posting this quote:

[In this book] I examine the general conditions under which verbal complements are licensed, and provide a possible explanation for their limited distribution. The primary reference language is English, though the proposed licensing conditions for verbal complements are assumed to hold universally.

Fortunately, the author adds:

That the main proposals of this study and the analyses do indeed carry over to other languages is shown in Chapter 5, which takes a cross-linguistic perspective.

The title of Chapter 5? "Direct Perception Complements in Other European Languages". The languages considered are German, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, representing a grand total of two neighboring subfamilies of Indo-European.

I don't mean to poke fun at this book specifically - it looks like a very thorough analysis of clausal complements of perception verbs in English - but this so neatly encapsulates what in practice is one of the main problems of the generative program: over-reliance on English in particular and what Sapir used to call "Standard Average European" in general.

Reduplication in Siouan

I've finished, handed in, and now uploaded that essay I was working on, on reduplication in Siouan. The main conclusions were that:

* Proto-Siouan-Catawban (and Proto-Siouan-Yuchi, but not Proto-Macro-Siouan) productively formed pluractionals from verb stems by full stem reduplication. Every branch of the family exhibits reflexes of this process, although these have often been affected by semantic extensions and morphological contractions.
* Stoney "adversative" reduplication is most probably borrowed from a Salish language.

Squatholes of Yemen

I know that everybody is eagerly awaiting the skinny on my trip to Aden but in the meantime I offer you…

"The Squatholes of Yemen”