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”