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Why so many alternants? | ||
Tags: Morphology | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4017 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 1 of 7 18 December 2014 at 3:35am | IP Logged |
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Yes, I will bring up Indo European as a family, but I won't let myself go too far this time, I just want an answer on the
origin or reason why IE seem to have the most alternants for derivational morphemes and (even inflectional for participles and tense roots). Loan morphemes are not included in any of my examples. This was not the case in P-IE so this is a recent phenomena, this is not to due with irregularity from sound change or erosion, but the existence of so many alternants. IE languages on top of their inflection have the most irregular, complicated, and suppletion ridden derivational methods I have seen so far. This is the reason behind the irregular inflections too. Think the differences in the 5 latin noun declensions (and some sub declensions like the I-stem and the differences in adjectives too) are from sound change? In my opinion, only a 1/5 is from sound change, I believe alternation was the main cause. A similar case could be made for Icelandic but for a much much smaller level. A diminutive in Spanish can be formed with one of a dozen suffixes, forming the same in Arabic follows one broken pattern, aspect pairs in slavic languages are formed with some tendencies but not as simple as adding -ess like in Korean. Latin has 11 suffixes, some suppletive, for forming adjectives from common nouns, some sound predictability is there but there are too many exceptions. This is not the case for one area, but for nearly all areas, the rest of slavic derivation is still the same while Arabic has its broken plurals, but word formation with consonantal roots and verb modes can be practically a type of inflection in their systematicness. I am not saying languages elsewhere do not have alternants for morphemes, just not in the same amounts, perhaps I have not looked enough but I have looked at some Polynesian, Aborigine, Papua New Guinean, and Amazon rainforest languages (very low phonological complexity and esperanto level grammar being the norm for most of them), NE Caucasian languages (despite their IE-like tendencies such as useless (noun) extensions and more than 3 random genders) and some African languages, all of which are where derivation is extremely transparent with hardly any if no allomorphs, practically one to one for everything, one diminutive for all nouns, one instrumental denominal for all nouns, etc. so the irregularity in IE is not a universal, as for the rest I would say there are usually 2-3 particular suffixes with 3-5 alternants each max on average, this of course is not an absolute statement. What I am saying is not concrete nor based on factual claim, but the reasons are worth looking into, derivation is not paid enough attention to in language learning, it is a part of vocabulary building and recognizing new words. Is there a reason? Edited by Stolan on 18 December 2014 at 5:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5044 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 2 of 7 18 December 2014 at 8:46am | IP Logged |
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I suspect your comparison languages all differ from IE in that IE uses mostly fusional morphology (e.g. Latin
"verb-orum" WORD-PLURAL-GENITIVE-NEUTER where the plural-genitive-neuter morpheme is not separable). Analytic and agglutinative languages tend to have fewer alternants because the morphemes are more independent, so they don't tend to develop different forms depending on which word they're modifying. Fusional morphology, at least to the degree of typical IE languages, is relatively uncommon. It is observed in Semitic languages and maybe Navajo, but IE appears to be the most fusional major language family in the world. I'm not sure how much of this complexity PIE had, but it might be hard to evaluate since we can't reconstruct all of PIE. If it's true that alternants arose independently in various branches of IE, that can happen because the common ancestor language had some "unstable" features that were likely to change in one general direction rather than another. More recently, this phenomenon of correlated changes in a language family has occurred in IE: several IE languages with complex, irregular fusional inflections have lost or reduced them (noun declensions are gone from English, Scandinavian, Bulgarian, and others). Interestingly, this has led to the misconception that languages in general tend to simplify their inflections, which is of course implausible because they would all have been lost by now. But other languages with different typology tend to generate the types of inflections that modern IE languages are losing. R.M.W. Dixon has even theorized that these changes go in a cycle over thousands of years, with languages repeatedly generating agglutinative morphology, then transforming it into fusional morphology, then losing it to become analytic languages which can again accumulate agglutinative morphology. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4017 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 3 of 7 18 December 2014 at 9:24pm | IP Logged |
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The idea of the cycle seems well yet it simplifies things too much, a language can go in multiple directions in many
areas. You also need to address the example of alternants themselves not originating from sound change. A suffix for deriving a word is frequently injected with SEPARATE dummy morphemes constantly in IE languages for numerous areas. I am referring to alternants in derivation mind you. Why is it you think I didn't include semitic languages and navajo under having so many alternants? Because they don't, an agglutinating language could be just as irregular hypothetically, it would just have to have dozens of suppletive morphemes for forming anything. Forming causatives in Turkish is not predictable for example, but it is that way for everything in conservative IE. Fusionality is not the explanation nor is it responsible for IE being extremely irregular. Why is Sanskrit very regular despite being fusional? Yes it was prescribed but it shows it is possible, so is hittite which is as complicated as esperanto really despite being fusional. There is so much else unique about IE that makes it so haphazard if not the most haphazard filled language family in existence, I have made my cases previously, but I ask if anyone else notices what I noticed and can answer why it's there. Edited by Stolan on 18 December 2014 at 9:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5044 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 4 of 7 19 December 2014 at 4:32am | IP Logged |
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It's true that in principle an agglutinating language could have lots of alternants, and some fusional languages
are rather regular. But, the features are strongly correlated. Agglutinating languages could have dozens of suppletive morphemes for anything, but in general they almost never do because agglutinating languages don't offer the conditions for morphemes to multiply by merging with each other--the several morphemes would have to arise all de novo. Likewise, regular fusional languages are possible, but they provide the conditions for generating messiness, so that a diverse family will eventually have some members develop that way. No general explanation is going to explain the features of every single IE language, and an argument from typology will explain a general trend but not variations around it. Languages can develop in multiple directions, but some are more likely than others given the starting point. It's my conjecture that if there were several families totaling hundreds of languages with typology similar to old/conservative IE languages, we would see many of them having similar levels of alternants as IE languages. Because we live in a world where fusional languages are uncommon outside IE, it is a plausible guess that weirdnesses of IE could be consequences of its typology. Could there be any other plausible explanations other than typology and common inheritance from PIE? Those seem like the main possibilities to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4017 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 5 of 7 19 December 2014 at 9:42pm | IP Logged |
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Ah, but the suppletive morphemes in early IE didn't arise as fusion but as old derivational markers who have lost
their original meaning, they did sort of rise de novo. Fusional languages provide the condition for some irregularities but not always de novo suppletion. Let me use an orthography as an example! Lets say we have scripts, the Chinese script is the IE Ancient Greek/modern Slavic type, the Japanese script maybe Caucasian NE languages, English is perhaps Arabic/Navajo/Estonian/ most "complex" languages outside Europe, and we have Korean which is like Turkish, very transparent, or Hittite, fusional but even more regular and simple than Turkish. Some scripts over time through sound change of the spoken form lose a correlation between spelling and pronunciation, some are nearly 1 to 1 since they have not grown irregular, but we have the Chinese script, saying it is irregular due to just pronunciation changing over time is completely missing the point. Some have become like this but only very few, some NE caucasian languages have random derivational extensions on noun cases but retain transparent derivation and suffixes outside of the stems, like Japanese which incorporates Kanji but mixes it with 2 phonetic scripts. The earlier stages of IE and modern stages of Icelandic/Balto-Slavic shows the chinese script's equivalent in morphology. In them, verbs and adjective comparative forms can be seen to have such inconsistency and missing bits that were later filled, missing superlatives, some using "more/most", infixes for the present stem but not all, etc. There are actually a lot more languages with fusional features outside of Europe, the only real area where European fusionality is unique is the noun system where many suffixes were created from using derivational markers, its that IE languages tend to have derivational suffixes but some words change from time which happens in all languages, but they make the new irregular form a productive suffix applied at random, the same case could be made for the irregularity of noun cases, not just sound change but tons of analogy and remixing. Oh, the link: http://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content_files/staff/martin_h aspelmath/pdf/Agglutination.pdf As we can see, it's not so black and white with verbs. Why don't I see similar things in Arabic for example? yet why do I see some things in some NE caucasian languages like Lezgi which have very segmental morphemes? The alternants are not fused forms I believe. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5584 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 6 of 7 20 December 2014 at 12:26am | IP Logged |
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Could someone rephrase Stolans last post, what they think it means? I am sorry, pace Stolan, but I am a bit overwhelmed, although I am used to some linguistics. I would like to follow the train of thought.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4017 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 7 of 7 21 December 2014 at 4:33pm | IP Logged |
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I tried to refute the post before me when he says its just fusionality, I point out that he's missing a point if he just
sums it all up as fusionality, since it's not. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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