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A polyglot grammar comparative project | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5819 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 1 of 24 02 May 2011 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hello everyone
I found an interesting book scanned on archive.org today called "A polyglot grammar of the Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Greek, Latin, English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German languages, reduced to one common syntax, and an uniform mode of declension and conjugation as far as practicable" (quite the mouthful) by Samuel Barnard found here. It's a completely legal scan as the book is very old (1825). I thought this looked fascinating so I decided to download it and have a look at the PDF. Sadly the condition of the scan is quite poor. Certain parts of the book have not been scanned properly. Also there are some problems in that the book is so old, some of the grammar presented is quite out-dated. Also I think that the font for the Ancient Greek and German sections are very difficult to read. I think this is a bit of shame because I would love to read this book were it eligible. I had an idea of re-writing the book but this would take a ridiculous amount of time and as I only know English and Spanish, I wouldn't be able to update any of the work on it on the other languages. So I was thinking how about doing a thread or a few threads on a kind of comparative grammar of languages (any) on this forum? For example, rather than having one massive, super-thread, a thread could be opened entitled something like "APGC project - Adjectives" (like page 83 in the book) and people could just put information about the languages they know regarding the mentioned grammar point in a concise but easy to understand format (in your own words). Any time a new grammar is added for a language, the first post would be changed to include it (like in some of the link pages on this site/language guides) or it could just be left as is. Another example of what each thread could look like is: [with contributions from users Volte, Lianne and Ari] Articles English Definite article: an unchanging 'the' Indefinite Article: a, an. ('an' is placed before nouns that begin with a vowel sound) No gender change. a/an not used when noun is pluralized (see 'plurals'). Indefinite article not used with uncountable nouns (see 'nouns'). Chinese Cantonese Definite article: debated (see post by Ari in thread) Mandarin No definite article. Esperanto Definite article: an unchanging 'la'. No indefinite article. Japanese No articles in language. Korean No articles in language. Russian No articles in language. [please confirm] Spanish Definite articles: el (masc.), la (fem.) Plural definite articles: los (masc.), las (fem.) (nouns pluralized) Indefinite Article: un (masc.), una (fem.) Plural indefinite article: unos (masc.), unas (fem.) (nouns pluralized) [edit; this could be wrong. Like I said, bad with meta-language] Swedish Definite/Indefinite articles: Agrees with the gender of the noun (2 total genders: 'utrum' and 'neutrum'). Article position determines if they're definite or indefinite. Ex: "En bil" = "A car", "bilen" = "the car". "Ett papper" = "A paper", "Papperet" = "The paper". Toki Pona No articles in language. Some simple sentences examples could be added to each language like "I have a book", "I have 20 books", "Do you have the book?" etc. Is anyone interested in participating/helping? I'm an English teacher so I have no problems writing up the English (not great with meta-language though I have to admit) but like I said I can't do it alone. I think it would be great to see the way that Swedish and Latin and Japanese and all sorts of languages do superlatives or any language point in a simple thread on this website and I can't imagine any other website trying it/being able to do it. Does anyone want to help/participate? Update 1: I added the contributions from user Volte, Lianne and Ari to the above example. Please write any information you have about articles in the languages you know (Do they have or don't have them? How do they change?). I was informed by user Chung that initial posts cannot be edited after 10 days unless you post in certain sub-forums. I will start the first thread (probably with the topic Alphabet/Orthography) in the "Collaborative Writing" sub-forum in the very near future and I'll link to it here (while I still can). Future threads/topics will have to go there as long as the Mods are ok with it. Future topics: Alphabet/Orthography, Adjectives, Comparatives/Superlatives, Verb-Object order, Noun-Formation, Pluralization, Question words. Any suggestions for future topics? User zyz posted a link to a much better scan. It still suffers from out-datedness and a (comparative) lack of languages but it's still a great find and a great guide for this little project here. Update 2 1 is the first thread - "Alphabet/Writing System". [having problems with hyperlinks today]. It's in the "Collaborative Writing" Sub-forum. Edited by crafedog on 05 May 2011 at 11:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 24 02 May 2011 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Your proposal sounds quite similar to the list of features on WALS
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| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5819 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 3 of 24 02 May 2011 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's a really interesting website. I'd never seen that before. The French examples were interesting and so were the German ones. It's a shame that some of the other examples aren't as good (Arabic and Korean) and it's an even bigger shame that they seem to have only used Romanisation for quite a few languages. They also don't seem to have anything for Latin, Sanskrit or Esperanto which is a bit of a shame. I presume they're just using 'alive' languages and non-constructed ones. That's a pretty good idea of what I'm hoping to achieve here but a slightly simpler/less technical version that doesn't limit the number of languages would be great. Do you know of any other projects like it? Thanks for the link. Edited by crafedog on 02 May 2011 at 8:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5116 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 4 of 24 02 May 2011 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm afraid I wouldn't have much to contribute, being fluent only in English. However, I'd sure love to read it. And I might have a little contribution here and there.
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| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5819 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 5 of 24 02 May 2011 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
That sounds great. If you want to, you could start us off with any information you have about the Articles used in German, Esperanto and/or Toki Pona. Gender, pluralization and any exceptions you know of for them would be great as my knowledge of them is basically non-existent so I'd love to read anything you could contribute. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 24 02 May 2011 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
Esperanto: no indefinite article. Definite article is an unchanging 'la'. Gender: There is no grammatical gender. Some word roots are male, unless suffixed with -in (patro = father, patrino = mother); most unmarked words are considered gender-neutral in modern use (instruisto = teacher, probably of unspecified gender; in historical use, male, while a female teacher was instruistino). Esperanto does have a concept somewhat like grammatical gender (in the sense of noun classes) of 'intrinsic' forms of root words. kombi = to comb, brosi = to brush, yet broso is a brush while a comb is kombilo, as one is 'intrinsically' a noun, and one is 'intrinsically' a verb. Don't get me started on inherent transitivity/intransitivity of verb roots either... Plurals: Add -j. Specifically, add it to nouns, and any adjectives associated with them. "La verda kuko estas bela" (the green cake is beautiful) and "La verdaj kukoj estas belaj" (the green cakes are beautiful). Lernu and various grammars cover all of this in more depth. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5116 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 7 of 24 02 May 2011 at 10:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Aw man, I missed my chance to contribute my Esperanto knowledge. :( Oh well, maybe more will come up that I know.
As for toki pona, there are no articles at all! Nor do the nouns have gender. Verbs are not conjugated. All in all it's quite delightful for the language learner who's a bit sick of grammar. I'm a bit out of practice on my toki pona right now, but I do plan to review the lessons fairly soon, and I'd be interested in contributing more on the subject (as well as Esperanto). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 8 of 24 02 May 2011 at 11:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Unfortunately I don't know of anything quite like it, although the internet's potential is quite handy for such work. There are also the etymological databases for various language families that have been compiled collaboratively with several universities, and Rhinospike for gathering recordings of languages. I think that WALS is a good starting point or model although to make things a little easier for contributors to your project, I think that you should clarify which features you want us to list (I also see your point about making it less technical since I suspect that few on this board would grasp the significance or meaning of whether a language has voicing and gaps in plosive systems). From there, we can fill in the blanks (or consult WALS) and keep the lists consistent. Do you plan on posting the results here? Remember that you can't edit your posts on this forum starting 10 days after the original submission unless you make them in "Language Learning Logs" or "Collaborative Writing". In those sub-forums there are no restrictions to editing your own posts. I could provide some information for various Eastern European languages if you wish. Just confirm the features that you want to list. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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