1197: Defective Verbs pt. 3/4 (Modals) Mar 20, 2018

To follow up on the previous two days about defective verbs, not only are words possibly defective if they conjugate to some but not all persons, but there are verbs that care defective for other reasons. Modal verbs like 'will' 'may' and 'can', lack the forms for infinitive (e.g. *'to may'), future aspect (*'I will might'), participle (*'maying'), imperative (*'would!'), and gerund (*"my maying is a skill"). This is in contrast to defective verbs like 'rain', because 'I rain' is not possible for semantic reasons, but given that the 'I would can' is not possible but "I would be able to" is acceptable means that the issue is at least partly syntactic and not merely semantic. This is at least partly true of other non-modal verbs such as 'to be' which cannot be used in certain forms such as in this case the imperative 'be!'. If you know of any others, write a comment.
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1196: Defective Verbs pt.2/4 (Semantics) Mar 19, 2018

Defective verbs [1], which can't be fully conjugated, sometimes are that way by chance, but other times it is for semantic reasons. For instance, it has been discussed here many times how verbs like 'rain' or 'snow' (or just about any others that relate to the weather) are stated impersonally. Indeed, it is not possible to say 'I rained earlier' or 'I snowed earlier', becasue those actions simply are not physically possible. Therefore, verbs like that are considered defective because there is no first person or second person form for the verb. Interestingly, it is far more acceptable to apply human-qualities to inanimate things than the other way around; personification allows many verbs to not be defective or anything similar, though usually there are not verbs that relate to human action that are defective in the first place.
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1195: Defective Verbs pt. 1/4 (Chance) Mar 18, 2018

Verbs are incredibly versatile, but this is not to say that they are beyond limitations. Some verbs, called "defective verbs" cannot be completely conjugated in some way or another. Because English is not a heavily inflected language, these defective verbs are rarer than in other heavily inflected languages such as Greek or Latin. Defective verbs in Latin sometimes are considered defective if there has not been a discovered instance of its usage outside of a few ways, such as the verb 'ait' or 'aiunt' meaning 'he/they speak', which is said to only be used in the third person, but theoretically could have been found in other persons. In English, there are a few verbs like this, such as 'beware', which exists almost exclusively in the imperative (e.g. 'beware of the monster") or as an infinitive (e.g. "you ought to beware of the monster") but almost never as a finite verb, and especially not with conjugational endings, such as "he bewares" or "I bewared". Hypothetically, there is nothing wrong with the syntax or semantics of this, but that is not how the verb is used. Moreover, you may believe that this is because 'beware' has the infinitive 'to be' at the beginning, therefore the defective qualities are sensible, but this defective nature is not true of other verbs that come from 'to be', such as 'behave'. There will be more about defective verbs in English over the next two days.

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1194: to be (again) Mar 17, 2018

As has been mentioned here before, the verb 'to be' is irregular, but this is in part because its conjugational forms come from 3 or 4 different origins. Indeed, many of the words that gave rise to the forms of 'to be' today were irregular in its own right. 'Am' and 'is' come from an older Indo-European (IE) root that is shared with the the corresponding versions of Latin for 'to be', i.e. 'sum' and 'est'. Not all of the words that gave rise to the current conjugational forms meant 'to be' always, such as the root of 'was' and 'were' which came from an IE root meaning ‘remain’. The forms 'be' and 'been' also come from an IE root, but it is less obvious at first glance; they are related to the Latin 'fui' meaning 'become' and Greek 'phuein' meaning 'bring forth'. This sort of relationship between [b] and [p], and also [f], are quite common across languages in the same family because they are quite phonetically similar.

1193: Degrees of Linguistic Endangerment Mar 16, 2018

Pirahã is not considered endangered necessarily—to be precise, it is merely considered vulnerable—even with only a few hundred speakers (approximately 250 and 390). Lombard, on the other hand has 3,500,000 speakers and is considered "definitely endangered". To reconcile this, it must be noted that 'endangered' is more complicated than the number of speakers. There are several factors than go into this categorisation, including how much the language is taught to children in school, how much the language is used officially, and how much the language is used in the home, along with how much other languages are spoken along side it in those same places. Also, for a language not spoken in urban areas, or at least for a language not used much for business, if members of the community urbanize there is a good chance that the rate of language-use will decrease. Insular communities therefore are less likely to see as high a risk of extinction as another language spoken by a more open community, even of the same or larger population. Finally, if the language is only spoken by older people, it will likely not survive long past that generation; a language spoken by 50,000 people only in their teens and twenties is theoretically less seriously endangered than one spoken by 5,000,000 people only over 65.
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1192: Morphophonologically Illogical Mar 15, 2018

With strong verbs (i.e. verbs that conjugate internally) the vowels change from a high or mid vowel like [i] or [e] to a lower vowel like [a] (either mid or low), or occasionally the vowels move from front to back for present and past tense respectively. The height or lowness is determined by where the tongue is in the mouth (see the diagram below). This can be seen with 'sing' in the present tense becoming 'sang' in the perfect tense. Moreover, this can be seen with truly irregular verbs (unlike 'sing', 'sang', 'sung' which is regular) such as 'to be'. With the 3rd person singular it appears as 'is' in the present tense with a high vowel, and 'was' in the imperfect tense with the back vowel /ʊ/. However, 'are' is present tense and has a low vowel, but the past tense form 'were' has a mid vowel, which is higher. Does that mean the rule is imperfect (not referring to the grammar here)?—not really, because this is an irregular verb, and not only does it not follow standard morphological rules. Becasue there is not an apparent structure thereto, even when the morphology relates to phonology as it does with strong verbs, this does not mean that morphophonological conventions correct for this illogicality.

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1191: Non-Future "As Soon As" Mar 14, 2018

As has been discussed here, while there is a past tense and a future aspect in English, both of them overlap somewhat with the present tense, syntactically. This is true of non-past before in which a subordinate clause with 'before' at the start will take the present tense, even though it is semantically in the past (even more so than the independent clause, indeed). This is also the exact same situation with 'after' possibly, but there are other words for which the present tense is used to indicate semantic future. The phrase "as soon as" like in "as soon as I finish game, we will go out" indicates that the action of completing the work is sometime in the future, but is grammatically present. Notably, both here and with non-past before, the reason that it is present tense is because it must act in a sequence with another future aspect or past tense verb respectively. If you have other examples, please comment.
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1190: Kangaroo and wendoree Mar 13, 2018

There is a myth both discussed and debunked in the 2016 film Arrival that the word 'kangaroo' is derived from a foreigner asking a native Australian what the animals are called, to which the aborigine replied 'kangaroo' meaning "I don't understand". This is just a made up story, but it does remind us that linguistic communication will always be limited in its ability to allow people to truly understand each other. Moreover, this sort of thing did really happen in Australia; the Wendoree swamp which is now the name for a nearby town and lake derives from William Yuille asking a native Australian woman for the name of the swamp, to which she replied ‘wendaaree’ meaning ‘go away'.
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1189: Inter-Linguistic Influences Mar 12, 2018

Following a post the other day about a change in morphology in certain languages, it should be noted that much of the cause of that change is due to interlinguistic influence. For instance, it was said here that people sometimes use pronouns in Modern Spanish rather than whatever verb-ending would carry that same information as happens in English where conjugation is minimal, but in the examples of Spanish, this occurs more often in U.S. Spanish, especially in the Spanish of immigrants to the U.S.. On the other hand, Tocharian—a now-extinct Indo-European language from
 modern northwest China—has eleven cases, but some have suggested that as many as half of these derived from or were influenced by neighboring Uralic cases. Considering that modern Finnish—a Uralic language—has fifteen cases, it is not hard to imagine a language of that family leading to increased declensional endings in another language.
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1188: Closed Lexical Classes / "Slash" Mar 11, 2018

There are many different parts of speech, also called lexical class; some are open meaning that people can create words that belong to that class fairly easily, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but closed lexical classes rarely change over time at all. Things like conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and articles haven't really changed in the last 800 years in English, some going back even twice as long. However, every so often something will change. The reason for this is that unlike nouns which are needed to represent lots of different things, conjunctions and other closed lexical classes already contain enough words to cover semantic needs. However, every so often one will fill a new role and catch on, such as the conjunction 'slash'. This only came about with the rise of typing, and was further reinforced through texting. Earlier—and still today—people word express certain dualities such as having the same person be a friend as well as a coworker with 'and', but now many people use 'slash' i.e. "she is my friend/coworker". Moreover, a habit from texting was borrowed into speech wherein a person writes two unrelated statements back-to-back e.g. "I went to the cinema/I'm hungry" meaning it is not only a replacement for 'and' but also has its own separate function. Perhaps one day people will consider it just as normal as any other well-established conjunction.
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1187: A Decline in Declension? Mar 10, 2018

Anyone who has studied an inflected language as a native-speaker of an uninflected language may have the question "do people always use cases right?". After all, there are plenty of examples showing that often, the rules of word-order as a method for supplying syntactic information are subverted, as with starting a clause with an object or sometimes just plain broken, as with "...than me" as opposed to "...than I". The answer to the question is that languages with a lot of morphology tend to lose those agglutinative tendencies over time, as was the situation with Ancient Latin's seven cases becoming five in Classical Latin and then as it morphed into Vulgar Latin (and became the modern Romance Languages), the cases were lost wholesale. Even some speaker of Modern Spanish often use pronouns instead of conjugational endings, as is the case in English. Does this mean that eventually there will be no inflection?—no. Logically, a heavily inflected language is more likely to lose morphological structures than gain them given there is only so much inflection a language can have anyway (though this number is quite high; e.g. Kalaallisut has 34 conjugational endings just for present tense indicative active verbs, while most languages only have 6 or fewer).

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1186: Lingua Francas Mar 9, 2018

Following yesterday's post about the effects of globalization on language, it should be noted that this is not a new problem only. While it is true that globalization is increasing in just about every sphere, any time that two or more groups come into contact with one another there will be the same problems. For instance, for a long time, Malay has been a lingua franca in Indonesia and Polynesia, especially around Borneo, even though there are as many as thousands of languages spoken in that area. There was an increased need in the 15th century to have a lingua franca as the region was becoming Islamicized, and many writings from the time indicate a high rate of second-language Malay-learning as evidenced by frequent usage of loan words from Arabic and Sanskrit, but also many more local languages. For instance, a letter from the early 16th century written to the king of Portuguese by Sultan Abu Hayat shows signs of Ternate-influence, but regardless that neither Portuguese nor Ternate are related to Malay, it was the lingua franca.

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1185: Globalization and Language Mar 8, 2018

It used to be the case that languages and dialects could easily be tied to people-groups, but with the rise of globalization, people are abandoning their older languages for more profitable languages and creoles. As has been discussed here before, most of the world's languages are spoken by the minority of people; an estimated 10% of people speak 95% of all languages, with everyone else speaking the same handful. Historically, colonization and other national and regional foreign-occupations lead to the displacement or replacement of different languages, the affect of which is still present in the Americas and Australia especially, but this has happened everywhere. There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly it is that people abandon their "local languages" in order to gain access to economic opportunities. While those are sinister or unfortunate, those sorts of issues are indeed more preventable than another large cause, which is globalization does not lead people to adopt certain lingua franca for economic reasons, or the purposes of cross-cultural communications, but also people move around more in general, which means that even non-endangered languages, and dialects thereof, are changing in increasingly broader senses. It is not really possible to halt this type of natural language-change.
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1184: Significance of 'Snuck' Mar 7, 2018

Is it 'snuck' or 'sneaked'?

Linguists don't tend to like prescriptivism, so to say "it ought to be sneaked" is not seen as especially productive per se, but it does lead to some larger linguistic insights. Indeed, traditionally the word was 'sneaked', but what the existence of 'snuck' demonstrates is that there is a natural inclination (sometimes) to conjugate verbs as strong. Most of the time, these strong verbs like 'swim, swam, swum', tend to be holdovers from much older verbal systems, dating back to Old English. Indeed, most strong forms for strong nouns and verbs in English and other languages like German are on the decline, but a few newer forms are emerging, such as 'snuck' for 'sneaked' becoming even more popular, and less significantly, the rise of 'swang' rather than 'swinged', which still has some work to do.

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1183: Computer Languages Mar 6, 2018

The question "how many languages are there?" is hard to answer not only because of the possible lack of differentiation of dialects, but also because language is not only natural anymore. Not only are there a few invented languages that people use in varying contexts including Esperanto or even Klingon, but far more significantly: computers have their own languages, so to speak. This takes multiple forms; not only are there various coding-languages with different vocabulary and syntax—more simple than human-language—which are not merely ways to transcribe a limited set of commands from another language, and are indeed can be used generatively, but also other parts of a computer will require different codes—such as for a CPU—that the rest of the systems do not understand.

This is a complicated subject, so if you have any questions or comments of what you'd like explored here in the future, feel free to write a comment.

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1182: Why Death is Euphemized Mar 5, 2018

Following the post on taboo, the reason that words are felt so powerfully is because lexicon can evoke extralinguistic responses. Ultimately all sounds are arbitrarily assigned to signs, and even when words are imitative, there is no reason that those words are and others are not. However, lexical groups (such as that of swear words) can trigger physical responses, not because of the phonetic qualities or even the meaning of the word, but because of the social significance of the word. In cultures that practice taboo, words that were the names of those who have died have become like swears only because of extralinguistic factors. For this reason, the practice of making words taboo is found to occur independently all over the world, from Africa to the Pacific to the Americas. Indeed, the cueing of death is so commonly painful—in varying senses of that word—that it is rare to not find euphemistic options such as in English 'passed on', 'no longer with us' because like any euphemism, the idea is understood, but it does not trigger the same neurological responses.
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1181: Taboo Mar 4, 2018

Taboo is a concept used in many cultures, but the traditional sense is often misunderstood due to its interpretation in English, where it can simply refer to something forbidden. The term was introduced into English by Captain Cook after he encountered the Tonga people who practiced Taboo, as is fairly common of Pacific Islanders, and also certain indigenous Americans. The practice involves not using a word that carries certain spiritual significance, including names of those whom have died. Since these cultures used names based off of words that appear in normal contexts as well, this could mean that any word used as a name for a now-deceased person could not be used. This would sometimes even extend to words that relate to the original, either semantically or phonetically, depending upon the people-group. Of course, people need to use these signs, so this practice results in certain words changing rapidly from one word to another. Among other things, this speeds up the rate at which dialects diverge from each other, and makes communication between these different groups of people potentially offensive without meaning to be. This is somewhat similar to not using the name of the divine among those who practice Abrahamic religions.
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1180: Showing Definite Articles with Case Mar 3, 2018

Plenty of languages don't have definite or indefinite articles, but as with everything, there are ways to get around this information. Sometimes this happens that the older form of languages that now have these articles, such as English and French which came from the article-lacking Old English (OE) and Latin gain these through deictic pronouns (e.g. 'that' and 'this'). Other languages just use context as well; it is fairly easy to know in the context of a conversation whether a noun is definite (e.g. 'the book') or indefinite (e.g. 'a book') or not defined (e.g. 'books'). Moreover, this is clearer in Latin, OE, and other more inflected languages like Russian that use cases, though of course languages like German have both cases and these articles. Kalaallisut has no definite articles but they have ways to get around that with cases as well, on the part of the agent. For example, in an active construction that uses a transitive verb, the ergative case  will be used to indicate that the argument (conceptually similar to an object) is definite, but will use the absolutive case to indicate that the argument is indefinite. This is in spite of the fact that an absolutive is the argument (i.e. like an object, not a subject) of a transitive verb, but in this situation the construction is subverted to note a difference in meaning.
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1179: Loaded Verbs: Marking for Subject & Objects Mar 2, 2018

Verbs are marked for subjects; in English, even passive constructions are not marked by agent, but by subject, e.g. "you are commanded by her", not "you is...". Some languages, however, distinguish between the subject and the agent—as is the case in English's passive—in the active voice as well. This, called the ergative is true of many languages, but it raises an important question:
Should the verbs be marked for subject or agent?
For Kalaallisut a.k.a West Greenlandic—which uses the ergative case rather than nominative—this is a trick question, because both are marked, and moreover, when there is possession, both are marked on the noun as well. Because verbs are marked for the subject and object, in addition to everything else that is conveyed with conjugation (person, number, tense, mood, voice), a single verb can contain all of the information that in English would require a whole clause. A pleasant example is with "I love you", which requires three words in English—and while French for instance uses the reflexive to shorten things somewhat with "je t'aime"—but in Kalaallisut it is 'asavakkit', with 'asa-' meaning 'love' and '-avakkit' being a common element meaning "I—you", such as with "Ikiorsinnaavakkit?" ("can I help you").
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1178: 4th Person (Kalaallisut) Mar 1, 2018

Nouns and verbs are always going to be in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, right?
Not necessarily. Even without conjugations, every language will have these three grammatical numbers—one for the speaker, one for the listener, and one for everyone else—so even conceptually it may seem impossible to have a fourth person, but actually some languages do. Kalaallisut, for instance, has a fourth person, which has two similar uses; it is used as the subject for subordinate verbs in the third person, and as a noun's possessor when they both reference the same 3rd person subject. That may sound fairly convoluted, but it can also sort of be considered as 'he' or 'his' when they reference the subject being 3rd person, and 'he' or 'his' when they reference someone or something besides the subject as being 4th person. For instance, "Aligoĸ illua takuaa" means "Aligoĸ saw (the) house", but specifically "Aligoĸ saw the other person's house". Otherwise, the word for 'house' becomes 'illuni' in "Aligoĸ illuni takuaa" i.e. "Aligoĸ saw his own house". It can sometimes be hard to wrap one's (own) head around concepts that may seem very foreign, but it shows the extent to which nothing can be assumed about language.
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