Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 November 12

= November 12 =

Ergative-Absolutive Language
Ay theories or research on how and why such a system would develop? "Martin has arrived" is clearly a sentence without an object, without a patient. Martin isn't being arrived, nor is he being made to arrive, yet EA languages mark him as if he were being acted upon, aka as if he were the object. Then again, in this case Martin isn't marked at all... déhanchements (talk) 04:02, 12 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Makuta_Makaveli -- The subject of a stative verb (such as "John is sleeping") really has very little in common semantically with the subject of a non-stative or "dynamic" verb (such as "John kicked Bill"). In some languages, stative verbs sort of merge with adjectives -- while in other languages, the subject of a stative verb grammatically groups together with the object of a transitive verb, which is quite natural, since both the stative subject and the transitive object are affected by the action of the verb (i.e. are semantically undergoers or "patients"), while the transitive subject has a different semantic role as an "agent" (i.e. the kicker, rather than the kickee).
 * Grouping together together the subject of a stative verb with the object of a transitive verb is already the nucleus of ergativity. However, this leaves it undetermined how the subject of a non-stative and intransitive verb ("John arrived") is to be classified.  If the subjects of non-stative intranstive verbs are grammatically grouped together with subjects of stative verbs then you have full ergativity.
 * Note that there are various partial way-stations on the path to or from full ergativity (which linguists call by such names as "semi-ergativity", "split egativity" etc.) AnonMoos (talk) 13:12, 12 November 2018 (UTC)


 * That's cool, didn't think of that. It's just speculation on my part, but I think that many Nominative-Accusative and Ergative-Absolutive languages were once split ergative/Active-Stative, or developed from one that was. PIE seems to have been one of these. déhanchements (talk) 00:46, 13 November 2018 (UTC)


 * EA languages mark him as if he were being acted upon, aka as if he were the object. They mark him so if we forget that they are EA languages and analyse this from the viewpoint of NA languages. &para; I think AnonMoos simplifies slightly. While I know no Basque and don't know how to say "She's running" in Basque; in English run is intransitive but certainly not stative. And it's a freakish verb, I know, but undergo is transitive yet its subject is, well, pretty much the reverse of an agent. &para; I believe that full, unambiguous ergativity is very rare and that split ergativity is a lot commoner. (Though I don't know what this implies.) &para; A good book to consult is Miriam Butt, Theories of Case, ISBN 9780521797313. -- Hoary (talk) 23:46, 13 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Why is "run" different than "arrive" in the classification of verbs as stative vs. non-stative and intransitive vs. transitive? Under some theories, the subject of "to undergo" would be an experiencer (not necessarily exactly the same thing as a patient)... AnonMoos (talk) 07:57, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Good question. Both run and arrive are non-stative and intransitive. I think I read your comment too sleepily. Sorry about that. I find the business of theta-roles rather frustrating. A typical syntax textbook introduces them in a breezy way, uses them to demonstrate a couple of things and then drops them -- not before introducing "UTAH" or whatever's the notion du jour, but before the reader asks too many questions. Anyway, am I changed by having undergone this or that? I think I am; and if I am, then I think I'm a patient rather than an experiencer. -- Hoary (talk) 13:37, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Nigerian languages


Is English used by a majority or a minority of the population of Nigeria? I don't know much about Nigerian linguistic culture; most publications I've seen from there are in English, but obviously the literate portion of the country's population is more likely to be familiar with English than the illiterate. These two maps appear to me to contradict each other: the first one seems to depict it as "Official with majority", while the second definitely portrays it as "States where English is an official language, but not the majority language". Languages of Nigeria says "As reported in 2003, Nigerian English and Nigerian Pidgin were spoken as a second language by 60 million people in Nigeria" but doesn't have statistics on first-language usage, while Nigerian English and Demographics of Nigeria don't have many usable statistics beyond the fact that there are 196 million Nigerians (so the maximum possible number of native anglophones is 136 million). Presumably there would have to be 38 million native anglophones for it to be a majority language, which would fit with the numbers, but I don't know how realistic that is. Nyttend (talk) 15:47, 12 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Not many Nigerians use English as a first language, although quite a few learn it from a very young age. It's a lingua franca that is commonly used to allow Nigerians to understand one another and is the language used by the government, but its usage is largely confined to educated urban populations. There are huge swaths of the country where hardly anyone speaks English. --Xuxl (talk) 18:56, 12 November 2018 (UTC)
 * So Xuxl, you'd conclude that Nigeria should be "official and used by a minority"? Nyttend (talk) 01:55, 13 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Looking at the article English-speaking world, where the first map is used, it seems to include "native speakers of dialect continua ranging from English-based creole languages to Standard English." The inclusion of creoles alongside standard dialects could easily account for the difference in numbers of speakers shown in the two maps. --Khajidha (talk) 02:43, 13 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Getting back to Nyttend's question, that's a fair representation. There's an interesting academic article here on the use of English in Nigeria, which goes into some of the subtleties of the situation. --Xuxl (talk) 15:52, 13 November 2018 (UTC)


 * What on earth is meant by saying that English is "not official with majority" in Germany? That a majority (more than 50% of the population) can sort of speak some English as a second language? But in France it is less than 50% that are good enough, and so "not official but minority" ?? --Lgriot (talk) 16:37, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
 * That's my reading of it, yes. Kind of an odd phrasing, but it makes sense. --Viennese Waltz 16:48, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
 * This map has a lot of issues, as it was once discussed here.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:13, 19 November 2018 (UTC)


 * I think the OP has made some wrong assumptions. The fact that English has been made an official (=bureaucratic) language in Nigeria (or other African country, because the situation is very similar in any of them) says nothing about the actual languages here. The same goes for the "French" and "Portuguese" countries in Africa. Before the colonization of the 19th century the African people there spoke their own tribal languages as well some might speak local lingua francas such as Sango or Kituba. However, the European powers were not going to create nation-states for each tribe, but just artificially drew the borders ignoring any ethnic boundaries. In the future this would create an artificial situation when the local people "needed" a lingua franca. In each colony the language of the master country was established as the language of administration, military and education. Getting education meant you went to a European-style school, learnt a European language, learnt everything in that language, and then most likely made up a career in the European-styled military or in the colonial administration. By the 1950s and 1960s there already arose a small Europeanized African ruling elite. Many spoke good English/French/Portuguese and some finished university in the master country. As for the poor rest they lacked such opportunities and at best spoke broken English/French/Portuguese. However, after the independence the local Europeanized elites were not going to change that established order. First, they were not likely to give up their status. Second, the wholly artificial nature of the borders and the newly independent countries made it very difficult to develop the local languages. You either had to totally redraw all the borders with a very good probability of unstoppable conflicts and wars over the borders, or just to go on. So people needed education. Education meant "European language only". So when laymen went to school, they had to learn everything in European languages. After half a century of this language discrimination, where you either get education in a foreign language or get no education at all, it is expectable that millions of people now know the "official" languages there. Plus the multi-ethnic nature of the states, migration and urbanization have made it impossible to know only your tribal language. Even if people cannot go to school they still may have to learn the language of the state. Though the poor quality of education means that often the resulting language learnt is a pidgin variety such as Nigerian Pidgin.
 * To sum up:
 * 1) People learn their ethnic/tribal language first.
 * 2) Then they go to school and learn the official European language.
 * 3) The poor quality of education usually means the majority speak broken English/French/Portuguese or a pidgin.
 * 4) Those who are rich enough or smart enough and can overcome those obstacles usually get a better education and speak a much better form of English/French/Portuguese. Many continue to university and in the final they make up the local English/French/Portuguese-speaking elite.
 * 5) In this situation it is really impossible to say how many people know the official language and at what level. In theory the wast majority now go to school and learn English/French/Portuguese, but as you may expect the reality is not so bright. The fact remains that all the education from Grade 4 upward, all the things "official", nearly all the press are conducted solely in the official European language.
 * 6) With such an aggressive state enforcement of European languages, the future for the majority of African languages is bleak. However, many are developing. Even if you are unlikely to get a degree in engineering in Yoruba or Hausa, there are still a lot of cultural product in those languages. So there is no reason to consider those countries have the "English-speaking majority" in the way the UK or the US do.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:06, 19 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Любослов Езыкин -- that may apply in some cases, but the future of the three big regional languages in Nigeria (Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo) seems reasonably secure for the foreseeable future. Also, what you call "broken Portuguese" is in many cases one of the Portuguese-based creole languages which have often existed in a reasonably-stable form for centuries, so that it would be inappropriate to call them "broken" something else.  Also, you could look at India, where almost all the languages which are the main official language of a state are in vigorous health, but the country can't quite get rid of English at the national level for reasons that have relatively little to do with colonial nostalgia... AnonMoos (talk) 15:14, 20 November 2018 (UTC)