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. 

Past tense is not past

It was the final of the Great British Bake Off last week. Now that it's been long enough for everyone to catch up, I can post this with no spoilers.

One of the contestants was Ruby, a very young baker (just 20) who divided opinion: many were annoyed by her apparent lack of confidence, thinking that it seemed fake. This seemed a bit harsh to me, but then as a university lecturer I'm well placed to see the lack of confidence that many young women have in their own abilities. Ruby has won over a lot of people with this article about the way she and the other female contestants were treated.

But lots of people loved Ruby and were rooting for her to win. She didn't, losing out to the contestant who was better in the final, as is right and proper. On twitter, The Invisible Woman tweeted her thoughts in the moments before the announcement was made:

Tweet: "'We will always remember Ruby for her perfect picnic pie...' I think that past tense is a clue."

The Invisible Woman is an intelligent woman and we all tweet things without thinking about them properly, so I just want to be clear that I'm not picking on her or making fun of her for making a mistake. Nevertheless, it is a mistake, and it's interesting to see why it might have been made.

We can distinguish between 'tense' and 'time' - we might talk about past, present, future, and so on, but we might not always talk about past time with past tense, for instance. Just imagine someone telling a story and saying 'So I start walking away, and he says...'. If we talk about tense, we mean something that is a grammatical feature of the language - an ending on a verb, or a word that functions to make the sentence past.

English has two tenses that are indicated with inflection on the verb: present (with either no ending or -s) and past (with -ed or an irregular ending):

walk - walks - walked

To indicate other tenses, other methods are used. We might discuss the future and use be going to, or just a present tense verb: The party starts at 8 tonight. Future tense can also be marked 'periphrastically' - that means with another word, will. That's what we've got in the tweet above: We will always remember. Future tense is about is non-past as tenses get. But not only that, it's not even referring to past time. It's referring to some time in the future, using future will, describing the action at that future time. The only past-ness about it is the fact that the meaning of remember refers to the past - if you remember something, you necessarily remember a past event.

Correlations in linguistic data

Geoff Pullum at Language Log recently reluctantly (because it's not yet published) commented on a paper by a Yale economist, Keith Chen. In this paper, Chen argues that if your language has a grammatical future tense marker, you are less likely to save money, live healthily etc because the future seems like some other time, not to be worried about now. If your language uses present tense to refer to the future, you treat is an extension of the present and you'll be much more sensible about it. Pullum is guardedly sceptical about these claims, for reasons which you can read about yourself. 


He is also sceptical about this kind of claim (made based on correlations found in large amounts of data) because

I also worry that it is too easy to find correlations of this kind, and we don't have any idea just how easy until a concerted effort has been made to show that the spurious ones are not supportable. For example, if we took "has (vs. does not have) pharyngeal consonants", or "uses (vs. does not use) close front rounded vowels", would we find correlations there too? I have some colleagues here at the University of Edinburgh, within Simon Kirby's research group, who have run some informal experiments on the data Chen uses to see if dredging up spurious correlations of this kind is easy or hard, and so far they have found it jaw-droppingly easy.

He doesn't comment further on these experiments, but it reminded me of the talk Martin Haspelmath gave when our university's linguistics research centre opened a few years ago, and he told us about the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS). After telling us what a wonderful, useful tool it is (and it is, I've found it invaluable), he ended on a note of caution. It's easy, he said, to find false correlations. For example, you can show a map of languages which have a different word for hand and arm or use the same word for both. That map shows that the languages that don't distinguish are, broadly speaking, around the warmer areas of the globe (yellow dots) and the ones that do distinguish are in colder areas (red dots):

(Map from WALS, feature 129A)

Now might one not hypothesise, asked Haspelmath, that this language fact is due to the climate? In colder countries the distinction is important, in that one wears items of clothing that cover only the hands (gloves), or sleeves that come down to the wrist. In warm countries, sleeves are not so long and gloves are not worn, so a separate word for hands never becomes necessary. A far-fetched example, but a lesson in not putting too much faith in correlations.