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description= Transcript Episode 38: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 38: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more....;
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s is the way that language change could happen because you could imagine if french wasn t a written language or if you know some sort of catastrophe happened and french people just weren t writing anymore you had an area of french where they had stopped writing for a while and they started writing again you could imagine that people would ve reanalysed it at this point this is actually what s marking plural in the spoken version of french even though the writing is preserving this other thing if you were to start writing it differently in the modern era not looking at what it did historically then it would be very sensible to say that the plural is actually zami lauren i think it s also worth mentioning that there are plenty of languages that get by just fine without any plural morphology adding onto words at all gretchen yeah absolutely but i think all languages have some way of expressing whether there re different amounts of stuff the question is just do you do this as an intrinsic part of particular words or do you do this with extra words you could say in english one book two book many book a few book these words would convey also that there s more than one book as well lauren this is what a lot of austronesian and pacific island languages do they get by obviously completely fine for example tetun which is the language of timor if they need to mark something as plural they ll just use a separate word which is sira or they so again they re using the determiners a bit like french children use when they can t hear the difference between the plural and the single form gretchen yeah i mean spoken french just completely uses the determiners to indicate what s plural it s just in the writing lauren we ve talked about determiners and how they have a lot of work to do for tiny words this is just another thing they get to do overachieving gretchen sometimes your the word can take on that function instead or you can use overt number words or you can do things like you know for english words like rice or bread you end up using things like loaves of bread or grains of rice cups of rice glasses of water because saying rices or waters or breads is a different thing and refers to kinds of rices and breads rather than specific bread items lauren we ve talked about different strategies different languages use to make plurals when we look at this across a lot of languages and see what languages do what we re doing is typology gretchen i don t know if you knew that s what you were doing right now gretchen we are doing typology yes there is a very cool website if you re interested in linguistic typology which is the world atlas of language structures or wals they have all these interesting maps pulling information from all these different grammars of all these different languages and putting it on a map so you can see how many languages have prefixes for their plurals versus suffixes for their plurals versus something else lauren because plurals are one of those things that every grammar describes if a language has plurals even if it doesn t it s such a common feature across the world s language it s often relatively easy to describe it means that wals has it s one of the biggest parts of the survey it has over a thousand languages which means that one in seven of the world s languages are included in the survey which is pretty impressive gretchen it is pretty good not all languages even have grammars written of them or have been converted into wals but that s a pretty high ratio for wals lauren what do you think is the most common strategy in the survey of making plurals gretchen well as a very anglocentric person i m gonna say suffixes lauren you are correct i don t know how distributed the survey is it could just be if you look at the map and where the plural suffixes are it is really obviously an indo european europe kind of area phenomenon gretchen yeah so it s not quite clear if that s just indo european languages are more likely to be in wals in the first place which is definitely true if we actually just had grammars for the thousand languages of papua new guinea probably this ratio would shift lauren but plural suffixes are very common the next two most common are plural words so not using any kind of morphology and plural prefixes so putting something on the start of the word rather than the end of course that s not the only options that you have gretchen what are some of these other options lauren we talked about reduplication already you can have a change in the tone of a word there are some african languages that have systems where the tone or the pitch of the word changes depending on whether it s plural or not which is obviously very different to something like mandarin tone which more people are familiar with where the tone can change whether it means a particular thing at all this is used grammatically gretchen that s really interesting i didn t know people used tone for that another one of my favourite less common types of plurals is when you just have a completely different word that means the plural thing lauren ah yeah that is super great gretchen it s a huge pain if you re trying to learn the language because you re like okay great so instead of memorising this one list of nouns and then saying i add this thing to them now they re plural you re like now i have to memorise two lists of nouns and all of their associations with each other it s a bit of a pain but once you know it it s very satisfying to be like oh yeah actually these are what were once historically completely different words and now just one of them is the plural of the other lauren it would be a very interesting language to have this feature gretchen gretchen i don t know if there are any languages that do this for all of their plurals but i think there re quite a few languages that do this in a few edge cases one of them is english english singular is person and the plural is people those are historically completely different words lauren this thing happens across languages so often and across different parts of grammar that linguists call it suppletion because one form just completely takes over and suppletes the part of the paradigm where the other one would be gretchen it s the same thing that happens in things like the english verb to be which is be am is are was why do some of them have b s in them and some of them have w s and some of them have neither it s because they were once three different verbs lauren just crashing into each other gretchen yeah but that s verbs we re not in verbs right now we re in nouns lauren i think people and person is a really good reminder as well that even though english would just fall into the wals category of a language that has plural suffixes with the s suffix it doesn t mean that it doesn t occasionally use these other things like foot feet which is just a modification internal to the word or person and people which is the suppletion or sheep and sheep where there s no change at all gretchen there are some words like that in english sheep sheep moose moose lauren emoji emoji gretchen emoji is a really interesting one because some people say emoji emoji and some people say emoji emojis which kind of brings us to the english side of do you adapt the plural for the way that you do it internally in a language in which case it would be emojis or do you make it more similar to what the source language does in which case it would be emoji because japanese does not have the english plural strategy of just add an s to it one of the strategies that it does have among others is just keep the word the same i think the best known example of do you do the source language versus the target language in terms of plural in english is a certain little creature with eight legs lauren the octopus gretchen the octopus lauren which i just avoid talking about in the plural at all to save myself a grammatical crisis gretchen i admit that i have also done this if you were gonna pluralise octopus as if it s english it would just be octopuses it s very easy but there s a fairly long standing tradition in english of when a word is borrowed from latin to make the plural the actual latin thing because historically many english speakers did learn latin and so you want to show off your education by using the latin form even though it s in english so if you re going to pretend that octopus is latin then you wanna say octopi however there is yet a third complication which is that octopus in fact is actually greek octo meaning eight and pus meaning feet so greek does not make these plural by adding i to it in that case there has recently become popular a yet even more obscure and yet even more pretentious to be honest plural lauren is there where you say octopodes akta ˈpodiz gretchen well this is where i used to say octopodes but i have recently learned that apparently it is for maximum pretentiousness ak taˈpodiz lauren you ve out pretentioused my out pretentiousness gretchen i know right which just sounds like i dunno like sophocles and euripides and like another greek playwright because i guess they are all greek to be fair but octopodes really really sounds like he should be writing some plays lauren i m looking forward to your greek tragedy about octopuses about those octopus things gretchen sea creatures of all kinds lauren we ve been starting to explore the different options that you have for plurals across languages which is part of why linguists do typological surveys to see other potential things that languages can do but i find this kind of typology work is not just useful and interesting as a linguist doing linguistic analysis it s also a really handy way to think about language if you re learning a language gretchen when you re learning a new language it s interesting to be more aware of sort of the space or what are some things that some languages do so that things are less of a surprise to you if a language that you re learning does something slightly differently one of my favourite things in languages doing things differently is also that some languages don t have this singular plural distinction they make other kinds of distinctions in how many of something there is lauren yeah so so far we ve been looking a lot at the form and where it goes or how it changes the word and if it s compulsory or not but there is just more than single and plural between one and many we have some languages that create specific forms as well we have some languages that mark there re two of something which is known as the dual as in the duo type dual rather than the fighting type duel or depending on your accent the glittering one gretchen i mean duels are also done with two people i guess you fight a duel between two people lauren yep fair call gretchen the dual tense is fascinating to me because old english had a dual lauren really we squandered it gretchen yeah we squandered it except there are still a few words that are relics of the old english dual that we use all the time in modern english lauren really is this gonna be one of those like now my eyes are open i can t un see this moments gretchen yeah they re not even obscure lauren okay gretchen lauren what s the different between both and all lauren both and all both means two and all means everything gretchen yeah so if i say both of us went to buy some books versus all of us went to buy some books all means three or more you can t use it for two all of us you and me lauren went to buy some books lauren no gretchen no lauren ahh gretchen another one is either versus any lauren hmm either is a choice between two gretchen either of you can come lauren and any is a choice between more than two i can t force a definition of any that includes only two gretchen yeah yeah any of you two can come you just can t say that lauren no ah wow i have this tiny space in my brain that works as a dual and i never even thought about it gretchen the third one is gonna be really obvious you also have neither versus none lauren right yeah gretchen so if either does it neither also does it some people insist on a plural dual distinction between between and among whereas other people don t have this distinction lauren that s what that distinction that they re trying to get at is gretchen yeah but english doesn t really have a dual anymore so do we still need it in these particular words there is still one in former versus first and latter versus last i read this book and that book and the former was really good but the latter wasn t very good you can t do that with a list of three lauren hmm yeah gretchen again those are more obscure both and all and either and any just really blew my mind lauren yeah because my intuitions are so strong there gretchen right imagine if we did this everywhere in the grammar we used to have pronouns more of the pronouns used to have singular and dual and plural forms in english i and we two and we all lauren we sneakily haven t talked about pronouns at all because obviously pronouns don t just whack an s on the end of things the way that most normal nouns do english doesn t even have a grammaticalized distinction anymore between plural and singular in second person you and you which is why people innovate things like yous or ya ll formal english doesn t have a distinction gretchen yeah formal english doesn t you guys you folks yeah the pronoun system is different and we did a whole episode with pronouns earlier but yeah english used to have a dual like everywhere lauren amazing gretchen in fact proto indo european the ancestor language of english and most of the other languages spoken in europe with the exception of a few and some of the languages spoken on the indian subcontinent it had a dual there are a few other indo european languages that still have it or still have relics of it one of them was latin which had some fossilised forms like ambo which means both if you re ambidextrous you have both hands are the right hand also had relic forms in old irish homeric greek old indo iranian and old church slavonic there are still a few dual forms in slovene and sorbian lauren if dual forms encode two you ll never guess what they call it in languages where it encodes three gretchen some languages have a trial lauren these include austronesian languages and austronesian influenced creole languages including bislama and tok pisin gretchen that s great they also have a dual right you have a singular a dual a trial and then a plural after that lauren in the pronoun systems yes gretchen just in the pronouns okay lauren pronouns obviously because they re counting people people tend to make a lot more distinctions and keep them in pronouns gretchen i should say there are other languages besides indo european that do have duals inuktitut and yupik have dual forms greenlandic doesn t even though it s related but it used to in an entirely different part of the world khoekhoegowab and o...
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