Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 August 9

= August 9 =

Noun cases
I seem to read from time to time of various languages (don't ask me for examples now!) that have lost all or most of their noun cases, or are in the process of gradually losing them. Are there any languages where the differentiation of noun cases is actually getting stronger, or where new cases have been developed in historically recent times or are developing now? 86.129.16.55 (talk) 02:22, 9 August 2012 (UTC)


 * It's called grammaticalization. The PIE dative plural (in certain dialects) in -bh- is an example, believed to have arisen from postposition of "by". μηδείς (talk) 03:07, 9 August 2012 (UTC)


 * If it's part of PIE, how can it have happened in "historically recent times"? (Unless we have wildly differing interpretations of "historically recent"...) 86.146.109.55 (talk) 13:40, 9 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Sri Lankan Malay language, a creole of Malay with influences from Sri Lankan languages, reportedly developed a case system which Malay doesn't have. --Colapeninsula (talk) 14:28, 9 August 2012 (UTC)
 * That's not the development of new cases though, because the cases do exist in Sinhala and Tamil, which Sri Lankan Creole Malay is partly based on. This seems to be a case of languages with and without cases mixing while preserving the already existant case system. - Lindert (talk) 14:51, 9 August 2012 (UTC)


 * You can loose case quickly, but they take time to develop. A bit like watching species going extinct vs. watching new ones evolve. — kwami (talk) 15:57, 9 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Tocharian developed cases it didn't inherit from Indo-European, but I don't know how quickly it happened, and I wouldn't call it "historically recent". Pais (talk) 16:34, 9 August 2012 (UTC)


 * I've seen a proposed analysis of the many Finnish noun cases according to which there were once only a few cases to which different particles got fused, analogous to the PIE bh mentioned above. Don't know whether this is controversial. —Tamfang (talk) 00:31, 10 August 2012 (UTC)


 * If I remember properly, the inessive case ending -ban/ben, meaning "in": a házban "the house-in" könyvben "(a) book-in" in Hungarian developed in the middle ages from a root originally meaning belly. And yes, that is historically recent. μηδείς (talk) 02:20, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

It is always a puzzle to me why, when almost all modern trends seem to be to reduce grammatical complexity in languages, such complexity ever originally developed, especially in "primitive" times. I asked a question about this here once before but unfortunately I cannot now locate it. 86.179.3.32 (talk) 11:12, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
 * This is the main topic of 'The Unfolding of Language' by Guy Deutscher (linguist). AndrewWTaylor (talk) 12:16, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
 * For people who haven't read the book, could you summarize what his explanation is for this (apparent) simplification of languages? - Lindert (talk) 12:52, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
 * It's a while since I read the book, and I am by no means an expert, but I think the basic process is as Tamfan and Medeis have described above, where grammatical indicators start out as separate elements but gradually become joined to the roots that they modify. For verbs rather than nouns, see this article, which describes how the future tense in French derives from the addition of parts of the word avoir (to have) to the infinitive. By coincidence I've just seen this article on Language Log, describing an aspect of "grammaticization of going to in (African American) English" AndrewWTaylor (talk) 14:58, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Does the alteration of "I'm going to" to "I'm on" constitute an increase in grammatical complexity? 86.179.3.32 (talk) 17:50, 10 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Russian lost its vocative case centuries ago (except in certain fixed expressions), but recently a new vocative case, formed differently, has emerged in colloquial speech. Lesgles (talk) 22:03, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Makes me wonder whether there are any Russian names with –ья. —Tamfang (talk) 00:17, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Дарья, Софья, Марья. The new vocative is generally only used with the diminutive forms, though: Даш, Сонь, Маш. Lesgles (talk) 17:32, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

The English progressive and emphatic do constructions ("am speaking" and "do speak') are recent. Sam might say something like "I'm a-coming, Frodo" once or twice in the Lord of the Rings, but otherwise you don't hear the progressive in the entire work, which lends it some of its character.  The progressive evolved from "am on coming" to "am a-coming" to "am coming" and was considered uncouth and not found in formal writing until recently.  Now the only place you hear older constructions like "I's a-comin" is in period pieces or when Hillary Clinton speaks before a church group. μηδείς (talk) 01:44, 11 August 2012 (UTC)


 * There is also the recent -ina Russian possessive which can be added to names ending in a, such as Sashina kniga, "Sasha's book". μηδείς (talk) 03:30, 11 August 2012 (UTC) (Can anyone find an article mentioning this?)
 * How is the progressive construction in English 'recent'? It is already described in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1771): link. Its use to the exclusion of the simple present tense may be recent, but that is not an addition to the language. I also doubt it originated from 'am on coming', because parallel constructions in related languages have existed for a long time that did not need any such 'on'. In Dutch, the equivalent of 'on' is used together with the infinitive, but not the participle. btw, LotR also uses phrases like 'time is running out', 'I don't know why I am talking like this' and 'I am forgetting them!'. - Lindert (talk) 08:31, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Isn't the present progressive actually a Middle English borrowing from Old French/Old Norman? "Est+present participle" was sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) used there as a present progressive tense. And presumably that comes from Vulgar Latin. Adam Bishop (talk) 10:26, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
 * As noted above, "recent" in linguistics doesn't mean the same thing as recent in the media cycle. The English progressive with -ing was originally constructed with on plus the gerund, not the original participle, which was lost. The usage might have been reinforced by French (although I am not familiar with it, and Spanish seems more likely in form if less likely in influence--also, see Standard Average European) but it wasn't borrowed from French. μηδείς (talk) 17:37, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
 * @Medeis: Those possessive adjectives are actually quite old, dating back at least to Old East Slavic. There used to be a whole set of suffixes—-ов, -ев, -ин, sometimes -ь—but -ин is the only one which is still commonly used today. This is also how most family names were formed: Иванов, Ильин, etc. Pushkin probably had an ancestor who first adopted that name because his father was nicknamed Пушка, and so he was Пушкин сын. Lesgles (talk) 17:55, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

@ Lindert I have had trouble finding the reference in the OED itself, but it is quoted here: "I was interested to read from the Oxford English Dictionary that the structure verb to be + a (indicating action) + verbal noun (ending in -ing is the origin of all the English continuous tenses.  According to the OED, including the a in this structure is archaic or dialectal. The OED states that in literary English the a is omitted, and the verbal noun treated as a participle agreeing with the subject, and governing its case... But most of the southern dialects [I suppose this means of England], and the vulgar speech both in England and America, retain the earlier usage." (Read more.)  We were taught this in high school when we studied the progressive tense.  The a- is a reduced form of on; the construction historically derives from a prepositional noun phrase. (Compare I am a-speaking with I am in the midst of speaking.) The -ing form is not originally a participle (sprachend) but a verbal noun (Sprachung). As for the uses in Tolkien, they exist, but you will go many many pages without them. I am sure you noticed this if you searched the physical text manually. μηδείς (talk) 18:54, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Here is a thread which explicitly attributes the a-verbing form to a reduction from on-verbing: "The OED says that the a-verbing form derives from a worn-down proclitic form of the Old English preposition an, on." The next poster confirms the same is found in Chambers. μηδείς (talk) 19:04, 11 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Lindert, I am curious, did you have access to a computerized text of Tolkien (if so, where?) or did you search manually? When I last reread the LotR before the lamnetable films came out I did intentionally search for a use of the progressive for about a chapter before I came across an example, then remember remarking coming across it a few times thereafter. μηδείς (talk) 21:34, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the references. I do have access to a digital copy of Tolkien (in addition to physical copies), but it's likely against the rules to link to copyrighted material here. I believe LotR, as well as Silmarillion and The Hobbit are available in kindle format from Amazon though. Btw, I did not use the search function, I simply scrolled through the text. Of course you are right that the progressive construction is not used very often in LotR, but that does not seem strange to me considering that most narratives use the simple past. Because you referred Tolkien in the context of a 'recent' change, I assumed you were talking about the 20th century, which was, apparently, a misunderstanding.- Lindert (talk) 22:31, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I certainly wasn't trying to use his work as evidence of anything, just pointing out that the relative lack of the progressive is something that many people may not consciously realize but which plays a big role in his style. μηδείς (talk) 23:28, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
 * This topic is also addressed at some length in the book The Power of Babel by John McWhorter. r ʨ anaɢ (talk) 22:42, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I like McWhorter, but he is one long-winded emm-effer. μηδείς (talk) 23:28, 11 August 2012 (UTC)