Going places in Welsh and English

I'm learning Welsh on Duolingo. Most people in our department are doing a language on it, in some cases for practical purposes but for many of us, for family reasons. In my case, my grandmother was Welsh and spoke it as a first language, so I feel a connection to it for that reason even though I'm not Welsh myself. My other grandparents also lived in Pembrokeshire for a long time, though they weren't Welsh, and so when we visited we'd hear it spoken, especially if we went along the coast a bit to Carmarthenshire. 

I knew a fair amount about Welsh grammar before I began, because I'm a linguist so I happen to know quite a few things about quite a few languages that I don't speak, and Welsh is a language that has been studied and written about reasonably often. It's frequently studied alongside others as well as in its own right because you can compare it to other Celtic languages for within-family comparative work, or with languages from other families where it's useful as an example of a language that has VSO word order. 

Backtrack! VSO? V stands for Verb, S for Subject and O for object, and these three letters are how we talk about the basic or default order of the elements of sentences in a language. English is SVO: [S The British public] [V despise] [O the current government]. This is one of the two most common orders globally, the other being SOV (e.g. Korean). VSO is less common and it can be useful, when examining linguistic theories, to illustrate how they work in languages with this order. The same VSO order is found in languages all over the world, including Berber, the Mayan languages, and Te Reo Māori. 

There are lots of other interesting things about Welsh grammar, obviously, it's just that this is the one I happen to have read most about because word order is the area I've worked in most of all. And of course VSO is an abstraction and there is widespread use of auxiliary verbs (the English equivalent would be something like The British public is despising the government) which is still VSO but it's not quite so straightforward as just classifying languages and being done with it. Luckily, I suppose, or I'd be out of a job. 

So all this is to say that as I begin to work out what the heck is going on with this language, I might write some posts about it. So far I'm floundering in the dark as many things are very different from English. The app starts you off with things where you can make comparisons, but I'm honestly finding some of it baffling. Of course you don't get explicit grammar instruction on Duolingo, so I've got myself a grammar book as well to help me work out the things that aren't easily deducible. 

I assume they deliberately choose constructions to teach you that are similar to your language of instruction (English, in my case), to make things easier at the beginning. For me, a linguist, some of this was actually really surprising to me. For instance, all of the prepositions and articles that I've had to use so far have worked just like in English. Maybe this doesn't sound so strange but I know very well that prepositions and articles are infamously unpredictable and variable across languages. So when I'm getting sentences to translate that include a direct word-for-word equivalent of going to the office or whatever, I'm surprised. The main thing that has been different in this respect is the absence of an indefinite article (a/an in English), so here I felt back on more solid ground as I know this is a feature common to lots of languages and fully expected it. 

Another, more specific, thing that seems weirdly the same is the verb(-type thing) mynd, which apparently means 'going'. English uses go for a travelling or motion event, like going to the office: I'm travelling from one place to another. Welsh also appears to do this: mynd i'r swyddfa is the direct equivalent, and both languages need to use it with a subject and an auxiliary verb: I'm going to the office or Dw i'n mynd i'r swyddfa. Here's the weird bit though: English also uses go for expressing the future, which is not totally bizarre but also not universal by any means, and Welsh seems to do the same. So just as in English you can say I'm going to wait here, you can say Dw i'n mynd i aros yma in Welsh, and they both express future with no motion involved. This use of go for expressing the future isn't unique to English and Welsh (French and Spanish have it, and Jamal Ouhalla describes it for Moroccan Arabic here) but it's also not that common. Perhaps someone can tell me whether this similarity is a result of the very close contact between the languages, a shared familial feature, or simply coincidence that both languages have travelled this grammaticalisation path, just like Moroccan Arabic. 

The pronunciation of plantain

 Please enjoy this nice linguistic observation made by someone on twitter: 

The pronunciation of “plantain”

When a word has the suffix “-tain” it’s pronounced ‘tayn’ when it’s a verb, and ‘tin’ when it’s a noun

Verb: contain, maintain, entertain, ascertain, pertain
Noun: captain, fountain, curtain, mountain… plantain https://t.co/jXv6BEGSsN

— Sean Daley (@daleyvibes) December 17, 2021

We'll deal with the minor quibble first: –tain is not a suffix in most of these words. For it to be a suffix, it would need to be at least somewhat productively affixable, and really it's just in these words as a remnant. In the verbs it's what we might call a 'bound base', as it comes from Latin tenere 'hold', so contain is 'hold with', maintain is 'hold in the hand', entertain is 'hold together', and so on. In the nouns it's more just an accidental similarity in that mountain, fountain etc come from French words montaigne, fontaine, etc. Plantain comes from Spanish plátano. 

So, not a suffix per se, but nevertheless, the observation seems to hold. The author of the tweet even provides the exception that proves the rule: bloodstain isn't pronounced like 'tin', but it's also not got the morpheme –tain (as it's part of stain). 

It fits with other noun/verb pronunciations, such as the stress difference on record depending on whether it's a noun (play a REcord) or a verb (reCORD the show). I listen to a lot of knitting podcasts and I've noticed this with repeat, which I would always say with final stress, which I put down to the fact that it's normally a verb. But it can be a noun, in knitting, as your pattern may have a certain number of repeats. While I would still give this final stress, quite a few of the podcasters (all American English, though I'm not sure if that's relevant) will say REpeat with initial stress when it's a noun. 

Our –tain tweeter is making a point about the pronunciation of the final example, plantain, which white people typically say with the 'tayn' version while Caribbean or West African people pronounce it 'tin', so it also functions as a helpful mnemonic in that sense and I for one learnt something here and haven't said it 'tayn' since. 

Is true. Or is?

Queen Oona from Disenchantment

In a dramatic departure from blogging about the Simpsons, I'm blogging about Disenchantment, the latest Matt Groening cartoon series. This is Queen Oona, a fairly minor character (the wicked step-mother in this fairytale-inspired set of characters).

Queen Oona is from the neighbouring kingdom of Dankmire, and her accent is... European. Vaguely Russian, maybe? Kind of German? Anyway, whatever it's based on, the Dankmirian language clearly has what we call 'pro-drop', 'null subjects', or 'zero anaphora'. That means that in the right context, you can leave out a subject pronoun (this Spanish example is from Wikipedia):

Está completamente seco.
is completely dry
'It's completely dry.'

In the example above, you can infer that the subject is he/she/it because the verb (está) has 3rd person singular agreement. From there, you have more or less as much information as if we'd just used the word it, and you use your normal contextual knowledge to fill in the referent, as with the English equivalent.

Oona said, in episode 6,

Is true. 

Shortly followed by

Or is? 

Both of these sentences would be totally grammatical in Oona's (let's assume Slavic) first language, where the word it can be left out. I don't know Russian so let's illustrate with Spanish again. This is the exact equivalent, and I think it's good:

Es verdad. O es? 

But the thing is, it made me laugh, and I think it was meant to. I don't know why. I came here thinking I had a good explanation: maybe because is is a clitic (a word that needs another word to lean on) in English, so this literal translation sounds just too unnatural? Maybe lack of familiarity with post-verbal null subjects, like in the question 'is (it)?' in this example? Another one to file under Things Someone Else Should (And Probably Has) Research(ed).

I like the part where it goes

There's a Simpsons episode where Marge is 'admiring' a sculpture made by Groundskeeper Willie out of kids' braces. It's hideous, obviously, and she is trying to be nice, so she says "I like this part in here, the way it, um, it goes".

She's struggling to find a word, and none seems right. She can't find anything positive to say. So she reaches for a completely neutral word, one that doesn't mean anything, one that has basically no meaning at all. We see this again when we use go in phrases like How's it going, It goes well with that outfit, It's all going well, and so on. None of these has any sense of go in its full lexical sense, of movement away, as in I'm going to Italy on Monday. It's almost being used as a 'light' verb. These are verbs that are bleached of their meaning and just have a linking function, just making the sentence hold together. Chinese uses hit to make a noun work as a verb - where in English you can say I telephoned him, in Chinese you have to say I hit the telephone to him, or effectively I used the telephone to him. In some languages throw is used a lot - in Georgian you say that you throw a gun at someone rather than shooting them, and in Spanish I think (I overheard this so may be wrong) you'd more likely say that you throw juice at someone rather than squirt juice at them.

The gender of Brexit

A friend of mine recently drew my attention to this article about the gender of the word Brexit in various European languages. It notes that the word is masculine in French and German, but feminine in Italian. The Independent's version of the story points out that it's also masculine in Polish, Flemish, Catalan and Welsh.

Italian has a justification for making it feminine, in that the word it's based on, exit, is feminine when translated into Italian (uscita). This is a terrible justification, in my view, as it isn't the word uscita - it's the borrowed word exit, and there's no reason on earth why they should have the same gender. As someone in the comments noted, you can have two words for the same thing with different genders, and gives the example of das Auto (neuter) and der Wagen (masculine), both meaning 'car' in German. It's word that have genders, and exit is a different word from uscita. However, it's the Accademia della Crusca, Italy's language body, that has decreed this and they have fixed principles on the matter, so they must stick to them.

If a new word is similar to an existing one, then it'll tend to behave like that one. An invented verb like gling might have an irregular past tense glang, on analogy with sing. We might be tempted to pluralise POTUS (President of the United States) to POTI on analogy with other words ending in -us, like cactus.

If there isn't an easy parallel to draw, then I'd expect it to be masculine, as it is in the other languages mentioned. In Spanish and Italian, for instance, nouns end in -o or -a. This doesn't, so we have to just pick a gender. As the article says, most new words get masculine gender. This isn't, however, because 'Spain, being a Latin country, opts for male', as the Guardian lazily jokes. It's because whenever you have sets of things in grammar, there is a marked and an unmarked option. Consider number: we add something (usually -s in English) to show that a noun is plural, and without that, we assume it's singular. Singular is 'unmarked', plural is 'marked'. Consider positive and negative sentences: we have a word to show that the sentence is negative, but nothing to show that it's positive. Negative is 'unmarked', positive is 'unmarked'. The unmarked option is the default option.

When it comes to gender, masculine tends to be the unmarked option. If you have a group of friends in Spanish, then if they're all male, they're amigos. If they're all female, they're amigas. If they're mixed, then they're amigos (masculine). Now, whether this reflects a deeply sexist mindset, whether it has contributed over many generations to sexist thinking, or whether it's totally unrelated, probably remains an unsolved question. But it does mean that new words get masculine gender in most languages.

Welsh appears to be taking a very pragmatic approach to the matter: it's masculine because if it was feminine, it would have to have 'consonant mutation', which is when certain nouns change the sound they begin with under certain conditions. It's just easier to make it masculine.

Poochi!

I re-watched the Minions film last night, and wondered about their language. The Minions are these chaps and their buddies (there are no female Minions, as far as I can tell):

They speak in a language that isn't quite understandable but you get the gist - like Pingu or the Clangers. However, unlike Pingu or the Clangers, there are very definitely words in the Minions' speech, and some of them are definitely recognisable. Some are English but most are Spanish or Italian, or a mix of them all. There's also a little bit of romance language grammar in there too: at one point, one of the Minions says me le due, meaning 'I will do it', and you can see the object clitic le (a clitic is basically a type of pronoun that goes before the verb in romance languages, like the m' in je m'appelle Laura).

When I asked about the Minion language on Twitter, @terminologia directed me to this Arika Okrent article which goes into much more detail, including noting the many aspects of 'baby talk' - in that me le due sentence, for instance, there is the object form me - just like an English toddler might say me do it. The article also points out that some of the language is Indonesian - I hadn't noticed it, but there's a very clear terima kasih 'thank you' at one point. (Actually, I thought terima kasih was Malay, and so it is, but it was borrowed into Indonesian and that's the language the director is familiar with.)

Here's the Minions Dictionary (though I don't think it's quite complete).

El Gato, the nameless cat

It was revealed last week that Jeremy Corbyn's cat does not have a name, and he simply calls it 'el gato'. Or is that El Gato? It was in an interview with the Independent, and you can't hear capital letters, so we may never know. Perhaps it doesn't matter. But perhaps it does!

El Gato, the cat. 

Corbyn himself appears to regard this as not a name, as he goes on to talk about how cats don't know their own names anyway. However, El Gato could be a perfectly good name, if he chooses to think of it that way. Yes, it means 'the cat', but we can use common nouns as proper nouns quite easily. My friend does exactly this, as her car is nicknamed El Gato. Another friend's mother has a cat whose name is The Little Cat. Ella Fitzgerald and all the other Ellas are just called 'her', by the same token, but we think of it as a name. Adam West and all the other Adams are just called 'man', but again, no problem here.

Euros and the emergency plural

I'm learning German - I don't think I said. It's quite fun, although you never learn much at an evening class because there are lots of people of mixed ability and you can't ask the teacher important linguistic questions because it's not fair to expect non-linguists to know the answer to such things.

Anyway today, we learnt about currencies and big numbers, among other things. Germany obviously uses the euro as its currency, which is Euro in German. I checked, and it's not pluralised. Languages vary on what they do with the plural, so in Spanish you have 1 euro and 10 euros, but in Italian you have 1 euro and 10 euro, not 10 euri (which just looks weird). I think the most interesting thing about this is the difference between British English, which is spoken in a country where the euro isn't used and pluralises it (10 euros), and Irish English, which is spoken in a country where it is used (so it's a much more frequent word) and doesn't pluralise it (10 euro). I don't know what Northern Ireland does - I'm sure someone will tell me. I remember noticing it when an Irish friend-of-a-friend and thinking it was funny to hear an English speaker do what I'm used to hearing in other languages.

German doesn't pluralise it, as I say. Nevertheless, my teacher today definitely said '10 euros' at one point. A slip of the tongue, no doubt, or perhaps it is pluralised in some non-standard variety that she is not teaching us. But either way, it's interesting for a morphology reason. Steven Pinker published a book in 1999, too early to mention the pluralisation of euro because it had only just been introduced. But he did talk about German plural suffixes. -s is 'by far the least common' of the several possibilities (-e, -er, -en, -s, or nothing), but it is the Notpluralendung, or 'emergency plural' (p.222). It's the one you pick if the word is new, or doesn't normally pluralise. That's why it turns up on foreign words or names, and, in this case, on Euro.

The alarm, like, sounds like an alarm

I saw this tweet:

Can't help but infer commas on this sign in California hotel: "alarm makes, like, a whooping sound" @wayword pic.twitter.com/b2CAvmlzeU
— Michael P. Gerlek (@mpgerlek) February 24, 2014

While it's funny to laugh at the stereotype of Californians saying 'like' (but highly problematic to stigmatise the speech trends associated with teenage girls), I'm intrigued. I would love to think that this sign is influenced by this common feature of speech in the region, but I also wonder if it's to do with the very large Spanish influence in California, where in Los Angeles, for instance, 36% of people speak Spanish at home. Is this a possible word order in (American) Spanish, as well as the English-like order hace un ruido como... ('makes a noise like...')? Then hace is intransitive, though, which probably isn't right. Perhaps it really is, like, filler-like after all.

What came upon a midnight clear?

On Thursday, Jeremy Paxman asked this question in the Christmas university challenge: 'according to the carol, what came upon a midnight clear?'. Stephen Bayley, who as my parents noted made a bit of a tit of himself otherwise, correctly said 'it'. This was not accepted as the right answer, however. What Paxman wanted was 'that glorious song of old'. Here's the lyrics:

It came upon a midnight clear,
That glorious song of old

'That glorious song of old' is, in fact, the understood subject of the preceding clause. But it's extraposed (put outside) and the grammatical subject is 'it'. 'It' stands in here for a subject that is too long or (in this case) doesn't scan in the usual subject position.

Harsh, Paxo, very harsh.

UPDATE [23/12/12]: One of the twitterlinguists, @drswissmiss, pointed out the following:

@linguist_laura right dislocations are kind of special though, so the song is the subject in some ways and it is the co-referential pronoun
— Mercedes D (@drswissmiss) December 21, 2012

And she is, of course, correct. As I was typing the post I was thinking about the status of it - and one thing it isn't is an expletive. An expletive subject is something that English (among other languages) does when it just needs to fill in a gap. If you take a suitably seasonal verb like snow, then in Italian you can say nevica, 'snows', whereas in English you need to say 'it snows'. What snows? Nothing snows, and the Italian reflects that by not requiring a subject. English has this thing that it has to have a subject, so it bungs in this meaningless filler it. There does the same job in There's no easy way to say this, and you can check: it's not felicitous to ask 'Where's no easy way to say this?', so you're clearly not referring to a place when you say there.

But in the carol, something did come upon a midnight clear: the glorious song of old. So it is not an expletive it, it's a referential pronoun (i.e. a pronoun that refers to an actual thing rather than being a filler). That's why I called it extraposition in the original post. But that's not the full story. Because it does refer to the noun phrase 'that glorious song of old', we can say that it is co-referential with it (it refers to the same thing in the world). This is right-dislocation (putting some noun to the right of where it would normally be). When you do right-dislocation, you leave behind a pronoun to fulfil the grammatical requirements of the language (English's afore-mentioned need for a subject of some kind) and to point you in the right direction to get to the real subject.

You can also get left dislocation, which is pretty common. In some of the Romance languages it's called clitic left dislocation because the noun is moved to the front and a 'clitic' (a kind of pronoun which has certain special properties) is in the place where the noun 'should' be. Here's Spanish (example from Karlos Arregi's paper here):

Estos libros, Juan los leyó ayer.
These books, Juan read them yesterday (literally 'Juan them read'). 

The object of the verb is estos libros 'these books', but it's fronted. This often has the effect of making the noun into a topic or the focus of the sentence. In English we usually do this to contrast with something else ('these books he read, but those other ones he hasn't started'), but in Romance languages it's used for more purposes. Some languages, known as topic-prominent languages and including many (or all?) sign languages, put the topic of every sentence at the beginning (usually without a clitic though) simply to indicate that it is the topic of the sentence.

Back to the carol. I don't actually know enough about the syntax of dislocation to say whether the dislocated noun phrase is 'really' the subject of the clause. There is some evidence that the pronoun and the noun phrase are connected in this type of construction: for instance, if the language has case inflections on nouns, they may have the same case ending. (Non-linguists, move on to the next sentence; for linguists, here's a thesis chapter arguing that the pronoun in Czech left dislocation is a spelled out copy of the dislocated element.) OK, non-linguists, back in the room.

To settle this question once and for all, I'm going to refer to playground logic:

'Antidisestablishment' is a very long word. How do you spell it?

Answer: I T.  

Getting overexcited and swearing

We all know that linguists love to swear and lecturers love to shock their new students, so yesterday in my introductory lecture on morphology, I had the students try to work out the rules of expletive infixation. That's when you do this:

fan-fucking-tastic
abso-bloody-lutely

Now obviously the students found this completely hilarious and had a whale of a time swearing at the tops of their voices in the lecture. At one point I though the neighbours might come round to complain.

Importantly, though, as well as swearing a lot, they actually got on and did the exercise, and did it well. It stands to reason that the best way to get them excited about and interested in a language data exercise is to make it be about something they find interesting in the first place. Earlier in the week, they'd had to do the same type of exercise, working out how noun pluralisation works in Armenian and Spanish, and they did not like that so much. They did it, and made a decent job of it, but they clearly didn't find it exciting in the same way.

Partly this is natural, but a true linguist also gets excited about noun pluralisation rules. We find it REALLY COOL that there are rules about how this stuff works, that native speakers of a language don't know about consciously, but do perfectly subconsciously. We love to find out what the rules are and try to understand this magical language ability that allows us to communicate with each other so effectively. The rules for doing language could be anything in the world, but they aren't! They're consistently of particular types, and some other types of rule are just never ever found anywhere.

I notice the same issue when I give talks to non-syntacticians. What I'm presenting is obviously fantastically exciting stuff - there's this real issue that is there, and needs explaining - and yet it doesn't seem to excite everyone in the same way. How can we get across that this is really fascinating? Why doesn't everyone appreciate just how amazingly brilliant language is?

Think foreign, think rational

Well this is weird. Apparently, if you think in a foreign language when you're making a decision, you're more likely to make a rational, deliberate choice than to go with your gut instinct.

The premise is that these two contradictory scenarios are both plausible, so which one is right?:

1. Thinking in another language takes up cognitive power, so there aren't enough little grey cells left for decision-making, and you go with your gut.
2. Thinking in another language forces you to think quite consciously and deliberately, so you don't have as much freedom to make impulsive choices.

The experiment was based on Daniel Kahneman's famous study of framing: people are presented with a problem which involves them having to make a decision about saving or losing lives. There are two options, one of which means saving 200 out of 600 lives and the other means taking an all-or-nothing chance which will either save everyone or no one. Most people play safe and save 200 people. The framing part is that it's also presented in terms of losing lives, in which case they can either lose 400 out of 600, or take the all-or-nothing chance. Now most people prefer to take the risk. (Well, wouldn't you rather be the person that tried to save all the lives than the person who deliberately killed 400 people? Never mind that the person that chose to save 200 people was doing exactly the same thing.)

This means that people fluctuate wildly depending on how the problem is worded (framed), and allow their emotions to make illogical decisions when faced with a really hard choice. If you could remove that element of 'gut instinct', people would make the same choice each time (whichever choice it was). So if 2 above is right, this fluctuation should disappear or be much reduced. If 1 is right, it should remain.

In this new experiment, the same scenario was presented to groups of people in their first language (English) or their second language (Japanese). Graph a shows the number of people who chose the 'safe' option (chose to save the 200) in English and in Japanese. The black bar is when it's framed as saving lives, the grey when it's framed as losing them. You can see that in Japanese (L2), the number of people choosing that option remained constant, showing that they made more conscious, deliberate choices in their second language. (Graph b shows another similar experiment done on Korean speakers who'd learnt English, giving the same result.)

They even tried it with a small-risk, real-life experiment to see if it was the same, and in the process proved just how stupid people are. They gave students who had L1 English and L2 Spanish $15. For each dollar, the choice was to keep a dollar, in which case they had a dollar, or to gamble it. They might lose it, but if they won, they would get their original dollar back plus $1.50. So there is a very short-term risk, but the risk is low and the payoff worth a gamble, surely. And there's the added fact that if you gamble all your $15, you're pretty much likely to come out a couple of dollars better off. If you win nearly half the time, say 7 times out of 15 bets, you'll lose $8, but you'll win $10.50, leaving you with $17.50. Only 54% of students took the bet when it was presented in English, but when they had to use their second language, 71% of them did.

This shows that students aren't good at maths, and that people are really really scared of risk and will make irrational decisions in order to avoid it. Reduce their irrationality, and you get less risk-averse and more logical students. But then, why would you want that?