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A polyglot grammar comparative project | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6485 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 24 02 May 2011 at 11:20pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't have time to write such a grammar, but it is an interesting project, and to large extent I base my practical grammar study on comparative principles..
An example: when I do my 'green sheets' with morphology I try always to keep the same sequence of basic cases as I learned in Latin: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Ablative. The Vocative mostly fit above Nominative, and instead of Ablative you find Instrumental and Prepositional/Locative in Russian, in that order. The funny thing is that almost all grammars for Slavic languages I have seen move Accusative past the Genitive, but actually the logical postition is between the Nominative and the Genitive whose forms it often 'borrows'. But even without such unexpected substantiation it is preferable to stick to one order because you then literally can put the sheets beside each other and get one big multilingual table. The same applies to verbs, pronouns and ther linguistic elements. When I was still studying French in the 70s I actually wrote an article about the structure of subordinate phrases, and I later used this system in a dissertation about korrelative constructions (i.e. those constructions in the Romance languages that derive from the old correlative pronoums: tantus quantus, etc.). If I hadn't been able to fit each and every construction in the languages I knew into this system I would have felt it as a defeat. Of course there are cases where the structures aren't parallel, not even when taking simplifications in some languages into account. But by basing the descriptions on comparable principles and a shared nomenclature you can get descriptions that makes for easy comparisons between different languages. For historical reasons the words I use are Latin, but this doesn't mean that the descriptions necessarily will be Latin grammar superimposed on languages that don't fit that pattern, as some have feared (with good reason). It is just practical to use words that are in common use across different languages. Edited by Iversen on 02 May 2011 at 11:21pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5600 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 10 of 24 03 May 2011 at 7:21am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Thanks for the heads up about the not being able to edit your posts after 10 days. I had no idea about that. I guess I would have to start the threads in the "Collaborative Writing" sub-forum as long as the Mods don't have a problem with it being there as it's not a specific language profile project. Good idea about using WALS as a kind of reference (the Verb-Object group seemed cool). That and the book I linked should help us get a base-reference/starting point/blueprint. I'll try to keep the topics quite simple for now. The first thread I might start in the sub-forum will be the Alphabet (orthography on pg 43+ in the book). Next might be Adjectives, then Comparatives/Superlatives, Noun formation, Pluralization, Verb-Object order etc. I'll stay away from sounds as that can be debatable/very technical and as this is a grammar comparative, this should be feasible and you're right in that keeping it as simple as possible is the best goal (it took me long enough to write the English one and I'm a teacher and I'm still not sure about my Spanish contribution). For this initial thread, we might as well continue what a few others have already done. You (and anyone) could put any information about any languages you know and whether or not they have articles and if they do, what they are like. Thanks to Volte and Lianne for their earlier contributions (which I added to the first post). I had no idea Esperanto had no indefinite article and truth be told I'd never heard of Toki Pano until earlier so I'm glad I learnt something new. Does anyone have any suggestions for other topics we could discuss? Also please write any information you have about articles in future posts here and I'll adjust the first post for as long as I can. Edited by crafedog on 03 May 2011 at 7:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| zyz Newbie United States Joined 5118 days ago 19 posts - 28 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit | Message 11 of 24 03 May 2011 at 9:58am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Regarding the original book mentioned, Google Books has a scan of another copy of it, which appears to be in better condition. Doesn't resolve the datedness or typeface problems, of course.
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| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5600 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 12 of 24 03 May 2011 at 12:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Hey great find. Thanks for that. I'll give it a good read. As you say, it's a shame it's so out-dated. I've seen a couple of really strange things for Spanish and a couple for English so I dread to think what's unnecessary/archaic in the other live languages. It's also a bit of a shame that, as extensive as it is, it only did it for a few languages. I'd love to see something like this with Sanskrit or MSA or Russian for example but that's what this thread will hopefully be for. I'll add your link to the first post. Thanks again. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6364 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 13 of 24 04 May 2011 at 7:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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There's a difficulty with this project. This difficulty is choosing categories. It's nicely illustrated by trying to decide whether Cantonese has or hasn't definite articles.
Much like in Mandarin, in Cantonese you can say "This car" by going "This+classifier+car", where the classifier is the car's, uh, let's call it gender until we try to decide whether these languages have genders. You can also say "That car" by going "That+classifier+car". Then comes the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese. Mandarin doesn't have any definite article, but in Cantonese, you often just say "Classifier+car". That is, it's a specific car, but you're not specifying if it's "this" or "that" car. This seems to me to be approximately what a definite article is in English, correct me if I'm wrong. So far so good; it appears Cantonese has definite articles. But wait! It gets complicated. In Cantonese, when you want to say "here", you go "At+this+place" (logically enough). "There" becomes "At+that+place". But then the same thing is going on as we just saw with the car. You can (and often do) go "At+place", that is, specifying a specific place, but not saying if it's here or there (context takes care of that). This is, to me, obviously the same phenomenon as the definite article. It's even used in many places where we use a "the" in English. "By the car" becomes "At+car+place". So in Cantonese, the "definite article" is just a part of a larger "unspecified specificity" thing. Having a category in a comparative grammar which starts with a European language and tries to fit other languages into that model will be difficult. From the point of view of Cantonese, we'd say that English has an incomplete "unspecified specificity" that can be applied to objects but not locations. There's a "the" between "this" and "that", but nothing between "here" and "there". Then we get into even more trouble when we encounter a language that has a word between "now" and "then". Cantonese doesn't do this, but it's certainly possible. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5600 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 14 of 24 04 May 2011 at 11:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's true, especially with the use of Articles as this is typically (or exclusively, I don't know) a part of (Indo?) European languages. But for other 'looser' categories, your concern is weakened somewhat. For example, one category would be verb + object order/structure. English (SVO apart from passive sentences), Spanish (object-verb or verb object depending on if it's a pronoun or not) and Korean would be OV with 를/을 as the object 'marker'/indicator. Another one would be turning verbs into nouns with -ion in Spanish and English or -기 in Korean (and another way I'm forgetting). These different languages have different ways of forming the grammar in the categories but as you can see there is a higher degree of correlation between 'looser' topics (as opposed to an Articles topic). As for the Articles entry, for example, some people might not know that Russian does not use articles (right?) but a quick glance at the thread in this 'project' would correct that mis-assumption. I see your mother tongue is Swedish; I honestly don't know at all if Swedish has definite/indefinite article(s). If it does, I don't how many it has, what they look like, if they change etc. I would love to know any detail you could provide about it (or any other language) hence this project.
That's an interesting overview and I would agree that that could be what a definite article is classified as (in English at least) but I'm sure the issue of what an article is could be a huge debate in itself though (hence why we'd want to keep the future categories 'looser' and/or 'simpler' than this one).
The "the" of "By the car" could arguably be considered part of an expression (debatable but read on). For example "I travelled by car": in this sentence I didn't use a definite article or any article. Does that mean that English doesn't use an article? No of course not. If another language (that has articles) says "I travelled by a car" does that make a difference to the English article for the sake of comparison? No, it's just how it's used. Either way though, you could clearly say that English and this hypothetical language above have articles in their languages. A lack of its usage in certain situations doesn't deny this (like Spanish/English noun generalisations for example). The articles are essential and necessary parts of these languages (but not so in others).
Korean would use 에 or 에서 to indicate location depending on what was happening there. If you wanted to be very specific, you could use this (car)/that(shop)/1(city) if you wanted but it's not necessary. They would be happy saying the equivalent of 'car'에서 etc. 은/는 이/가 could be translated into English as a "a" or "the" BUT this would only be translated into "a" or "the" IF the English sentence/translation needed it; the Korean sentence/language does not need the specification hence Korean does not have an actual definite/indefinite article. It only does so when translated but it's not an integral part of the language itself. (bit tired so I apologise if I've misunderstood any of your above points) Though there are some interesting concerns here, I think we're in danger of getting a little bit caught up with: 1. the translation aspect of very specific words, rather than merely being a grammar comparative (I had the above debate with myself when I wrote the Korean entry). As I mentioned earlier, I will look at 'looser' topics. The topic 'Articles' was an exception as it's a bit too (Indo?) Euro-centric; other topics will try to avoid that. 2. Too much detail. We could literally write Mandarin: no definite article. Cantonese: definite article (debated) and I'd be more than happy with that. It's more than I knew about the languages 5 minutes ago for example and if I want to know more I can start studying the languages/look for some other threads. I envisioned this as more of a brief overview (like the Profile pages on this site) of the comparative grammar differences/similarities in languages we have studied rather than an actual, serious, definitive piece of work/debate etc. Edited by crafedog on 04 May 2011 at 11:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Haukilahti Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4746 days ago 94 posts - 126 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Polish | Message 15 of 24 04 May 2011 at 11:59am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The Slavic order is taken directly from the normal Latin order, which is Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, (Vocative), Ablative. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6364 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 16 of 24 04 May 2011 at 12:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Instead of arguing about the project, I'll just supply some more info to help it along, then. The main gist of my previous post was actually meant to be informative, rather than complainy. So here's how it works in Swedish: We do have definite and indefinite articles. They agree with the gender of the noun (we have two genders: 'utrum' and 'neutrum') and their position determines if they're definite or indefinite. So "En bil" = "A car", "bilen" = "the car". "Ett papper" = "A paper", "Papperet" = "The paper". 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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