tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jul 13 19:17:07 1994
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Another Hixkaryana link!
- From: [email protected] (Nick NICHOLAS)
- Subject: Another Hixkaryana link!
- Date: Thu, 14 Jul 1994 21:13:26 +1000 (EST)
Well, the Australian Linguistic Institute has just finished; it's given me
a PhD area of research (grammaticalisation), a sense of belonging in a
linguists' community; it's made me on first name basis with all those honours
linguistics students on my campus I'd only known by face; and, of course,
it taught me a lot about linguistics.
One little pearl I came up with was during a course on grammaticalisation.
Grammaticalisation is basically the phenomenon where concrete words come
to do the work of abstract grammatical particles. For example, spatial terms
like 'back', 'behind', 'front', are often derived from body part words
(eg. back, behind, front).
So! Comparatives. European languages are odd in that their expressions for
comparatives --- the 'than' bits in particular --- are etymologically
opaque; although people suspect 'than' comes from 'then': I am bigger than
you < I am big, then you are big (and I am no longer big). And other languages
vary according to geography in doing 'than' differently: they say 'from',
'for', 'defeats', 'on top of'...
And Hixkaryana (Hish-cuddle-yana, spoken in Guyana or Northern Brazil or
something), Klingon's sister language on Earth (in that it's the only
well-documented language with OVS) does things like "Fred not big, George big."
Sound familiar?
The problem with asking "So did Okrand study Hixkaryana?" (The language
description was published in 1979) is that Okrand is an Amerindianist by
trade, and apparently most American Indian languages do comparatives like
Hixkaryana (and Klingon).
Oh well. Thought you might like to know.
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****
* Nick Nicholas, Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Australia *
[email protected]; [email protected]
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****