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Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7135 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 201 of 541 31 October 2012 at 5:52pm | IP Logged |
Suur aitäh, Josh.
I'll incorporate your corrections. I don't know if you saw my mention of it in a previous log entry, but I'm working on a guide to Uralic languages for non-linguists on the suggestion of a few HTLALers. These sentences are the examples that I devised for the summary of possession in the five languages that I'm focused on.
The point of these sentences is to show that possession in Uralic is expressed in different ways contrary to what a semi-informed outsider may assume by relying on the tendency of Uralic languages to be agglutinative. Possessive constructions with suffixes would fall in line with that typology. There's one obvious hole in that assumption with Estonian not using possessive suffixes while a smaller one exists in the Saamic languages showing declining use (or no use) of the possessive suffixes for possession. In Northern Saami at least, they're still used in instances of non-possession.
That sentence about the grandfather's house is meant to show that despite the absence of a verb meaning "to have" in most Uralic languages (I found out that Nganansan, Khanty and Mansi do have such a verb), it is possible and grammatical to express something structurally identical to "to have"/"haben"/"avoir" using a verb meaning "to possess" at least in Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian even though it is indeed uncommon or sounds unusual/a little off to native speakers.
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| joshkaasik Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4491 days ago 61 posts - 66 votes Speaks: English*, Estonian* Studies: Spanish, German
| Message 202 of 541 31 October 2012 at 6:22pm | IP Logged |
Oh, I hadn't actually come across the explanation before. In that case, well noted! While we do have a word for
"possess," we don't actually have a word for "have." What we tend to use ("minul/mul/sinul/sul/teil/neil/meil on")
translates roughly to "(for) me/you/us/them there is."
Hadn't actually thought about it much before you pointed that out. Odd how native speakers tend to not analyze
their own languages as much as other languages haha :) Well done!
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| maxval Pentaglot Senior Member Bulgaria maxval.co.nr Joined 5052 days ago 852 posts - 1577 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, Bulgarian, English, Spanish, Russian Studies: Latin, Modern Hebrew
| Message 203 of 541 31 October 2012 at 6:48pm | IP Logged |
Chung wrote:
That sentence about the grandfather's house is meant to show that despite the absence
of a verb meaning "to have" in most Uralic languages (I found out that Nganansan,
Khanty and Mansi do have such a verb), it is possible and grammatical to express
something structurally identical to "to have"/"haben"/"avoir" using a verb meaning "to
possess" at least in Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian even though it is indeed uncommon
or sounds unusual/a little off to native speakers.
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I was very curious about this question and I have just checked it. I compared "háza
van" (has a house) and "házat birtokol" (possesses a house) on google.hu and the result
is 40500 against 571 - this is 71:1. And something else: in spoken language the
relation between the two will be probably 1000:1! I cannot imagine any normal
conversation where someone will say "házat birtokol". Only lawyers will use "birtok"
(possession), but only in the juridical sense of "possession" for making difference
between "property" and "possession", and even in this case it will not be used as a
verb "birtokol" (possess), but as "birtokában van" (has a possession).
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7135 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 204 of 541 31 October 2012 at 7:15pm | IP Logged |
Indeed. I didn't even know about these verbs meaning "to possess/own" in the national Uralic languages until I was pretty far along in my studies (the Estonian and Finnish ones I only found out about last week when I was doing my research!). I don't recall having used them and every textbook that I've used for these languages teaches that one expresses "to have" by putting the possessor in some oblique case and then using the copula "to be" to join it to the possessed object. However I reiterate that I want to include them in the guide to show that the technique of thinking of a possessed object as the direct object as is familiar to someone speaking German or a Balto-Slavonic language is not unknown, albeit rare and more with the sense of "to possess" rather "to have". Saying "I possess sg" for "I have sg" in English isn't wrong but would strike me and most native speakers as a little off even if their meanings overlap.
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| joshkaasik Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4491 days ago 61 posts - 66 votes Speaks: English*, Estonian* Studies: Spanish, German
| Message 205 of 541 31 October 2012 at 7:54pm | IP Logged |
Understandable :)
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7135 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 206 of 541 05 November 2012 at 6:31am | IP Logged |
FINNISH
I have completed Chapter 22 of "Kuulostaa hyvältä". The chapter's dialogue has Jutta and Kari talking Lapland and Anssi's misadventure there one winter. The chapter introduced the pluperfect and the use of essive in time expressions.
***
POLISH
I finished Chapter 2 of "Polish in 4 weeks - II". The main topics for grammar were diminutives, genitive after words denoting undefined quantity and verbs about remembering and forgetting..
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UKRAINIAN
I completed Unit 8 of "Teach Yourself Ukrainian". The chapter's dialogues introduced the instrumental, telling the time, and time expressions in general.
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OTHER LANGUAGES
In addition to having incorporated the corrections offered by maxval, bela_lugosi and joshkaasik, I've added short sections to the guide on vowels in Proto-Uralic and possessive suffixes in Northern Saami. After having discovered how the latter works by consulting the appendix in Sammallahti's Finnish-Northern Saami dictionary, and then put out a model declension, I can understand somewhat why Davvin doesn't teach it because of its complexity compared to the other technique where the possessed noun is declined but the possessor is marked by a genitive form of the pronoun which mimics the function of English "my", "your" etc. (although I find it odd that Davvin doesn't show the possessive suffixes at all in its reference section).
For anyone interested here's what I mean using goahti which is a kind of dwelling similar to a tepee.
"my goahti"
goahtán (vs. mu goahti) (nominative)
goahtán (vs. mu goađi)(accusative / genitive)
goahtásan (vs. mu goahtái) (illative)
goađistan (vs. mu goađis) (locative)
gođiinan (vs. mu gođiin) (comitative)
goahtinan (vs. mu goahtin) (essive)
"my goahtis"
gođiidan (vs. mu goađit) (nominative)
gođiidan (vs. mu gođiid) (accusative / genitive)
gođiidasan (vs. mu gođiide) (illative)
gođiinan (vs. mu gođiin) (locative)
gođiidanguin (vs. mu gođiiguin) (comitative)
goahtinan (vs. mu goahtin) (essive - same as in singular)
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7135 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 207 of 541 12 November 2012 at 2:09am | IP Logged |
FINNISH
I have finished Chapter 23 of "Kuulostaa hyvältä". The chapter's dialogue has Jutta and Anssi talking about their plans for celebrating Christmas and New Year's Eve. The chapter introduced the present active participle and its use as an alternative to a subordinate clause.
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POLISH
I finished Chapter 3 of "Polish in 4 weeks - II". The main topics for grammar were declensional endings for the masculine animate, and using the structure mieć + [infinitive] corresponding to the English "to supposed to be/do sg".
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UKRAINIAN
I finished Unit 9 of "Teach Yourself Ukrainian" and also did my homework for my Ukrainian class where we are still focused on the accusative but now on the prepositions that govern the case. The unit's dialogues introduced verbs of motion and the use of future through perfective verbs. The verbs of motion weren't presented very well in my view even though the authors try to get the learner to look at these verbs in the clearest way by noting that they can be divided on the basis of the means of that motion (i.e. on foot or not), the directionality of that motion (i.e. one action that goes in a defined direction or not), and aspect (i.e. imperfective or not). Even though the principles in choosing the suitable variant of a verbs of motion in Ukrainian are quite similar to those in Czech and Polish, with which I am familiar, I would have preferred many more exercises to get a handle on the details of these Ukrainian ones (especially the endings). I doubt that a beginner to Ukrainian with no exposure to verbs of motion in Slavonic would feel more comfortable with these concepts than I did.
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OTHER LANGUAGES
I've finished a short section on ordinal numerals in Estonian, Finnish, Northern Saami, Meadow Mari and Hungarian and have begun to put together a summary of object-marking in these languages. I'm struggling a bit with this section in trying to balance brevity with a satisfactory amount of detail to get the point across. For sure the sub-section describing the Estonian and Finnish treatment has been complicated by their declensional principles being able to show nuances in the verb's transitivity which in other languages is usually signalled by modifying the verb itself, or using adverbs. I don't expect such trouble when creating summaries of object marking in the other languages.
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7135 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 208 of 541 20 November 2012 at 7:10am | IP Logged |
POLISH
I finished Chapter 4 of "Polish in 4 weeks - II". The main topics for grammar were adverbs, and genitive as governed by quantity adverbs and brakować.
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UKRAINIAN
I finished Unit 10 of "Teach Yourself Ukrainian" (but still need to do my homework for my Ukrainian class where we're learning to talk on a basic level about the weather). The unit's narrative demonstrated use of collective numerals and the instrumental as governed by пахнути "to smell of" and verbs associated with linguistic ability (e.g. говорити "to speak"). I was particularly interested by how Ukrainian uses the collective numerals since they're used with living beings regardless of gender in addition to nouns that are grammatically plural-only (pluralia tantum) or meaningful when forming a set (e.g. (pair of) eyes, trousers). From my limited background, only the treatment in BCMS/SC comes closest to the Ukrainian method but even then it's not identical. Polish and Slovak usage is aven less similar but is what I'm most used to when I see these numerals.
"The two brothers..."
Dvojica braće (BCMS/SC - collective numeral for male humans only)
Dwaj bracia... (Polish - use the special "masculine animate" numeral)
Dvaja brati... (Slovak - use the special "masculine animate" numeral)
Двоє братів... (Ukrainian)
"The two children..."
Dvoje djece... (BCMS/SC)
Dwoje dzieci... (Polish)
Dve deti... (Slovak - the collective numerals dvoje, troje etc. are nowadays often used only with pluralia tantum. Dvoje detí... is rare but still not ungrammatical)
Двоє дітей... (Ukrainian)
"The two doors..." (pluralia tantum in these Slavonic languages)
Dvoje vrata... (BCMS/SC)
Dwoje drzwi... (Polish)
Dvoje dverí... (Slovak)
Двоє дверей... (Ukrainian)
Ukrainian allows for the use of the cardinal numerals instead of the collective ones in these instances with living beings and according to TY Ukrainian, the collective numerals are most often used at the low quantities anyway. Modern Ukrainian states that the collective numerals range from 2 to 30 anyway.
Ukrainian:
Двa брати... instead of Двоє братів...
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OTHER LANGUAGES
It's been a very busy week around here and I haven't had any time to work on the guide to Uralic languages while my Finnish exposure has been limited to watching a few clips on YouTube and a bit of conversation in my Finnish class. This week should be less hectic and so I expect myself to work on Chapter 24 in "Kuulostaa hyvältä" and put together those summaries on the direct object in Northern Saami, Meadow Mari and Hungarian for the guide.
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