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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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ans book there s also the word kutub which means books so in this case you ve changed the i a vowel pattern that s a short i and a long a to just two short u s kutub kita b kutub lauren hmm it s a little bit like english foot and feet gretchen a little bit except that it s changing two vowels for the price of one in this case it s a bit more complex as a whole system this is definitely an oversimplification to say that it works the same way as foot feet but the fact that the vowels change is something that s kind of neat one thing that i found particularly interesting about this system is that it can also apply to words that get borrowed into arabic arabic has the word fals which means money and the plural of it is fulu s you take this f l s set of consonants and instead of just having the single a there you have u and then a long u okay lauren right gretchen that s fine then arabic borrowed the word bank from english which is pronounced bɑnk lauren as in a money bank gretchen like a money bank not a riverbank the plural of bɑnk because it looks kind of like fals it s got a consonant and then an a and then two more consonants so the plural of bank in arabic is bunu k like fulu s you put u and then long u in between the three consonants lauren how clever gretchen i always enjoy it so much when languages take a word from another language and then adapt it to the morphology of their language and say okay we figured out how to plural it we know how to pluralise words like this we re gonna do this the way that our language does it lauren in fact nepali borrowed the word kitab from arabic and instead of using the arabic form of the plural in nepali you have one kitab but you have two kitabhæɾu they also have a suffix at the end of the word like english does but they don t use the arabic form of the word if you re listening to people speak nepali every day you can often hear two kitab and it s just as grammatical as two kitabhæɾu gretchen so it s not like in english where the s is obligatory if something is plural you can just put the hæɾu if you want it or if it s necessary but you can also omit it lauren yes whereas hindi which also borrowed kita b hindu has obligatory plurals so one kita b and two kita bɛ̃ closely related languages you can t trust them to always have the same obligatoriness or not gretchen what s interesting arabic was very influential in a lot of different areas because another language that borrowed the word for book from arabic was kinyarwanda which is spoken in rwanda it slightly adapted the form of the word instead of being kitab it borrowed as igitabo because kinyarwanda really likes words to begin and end with vowels in kinyarwanda there s also a prefix igi which means that something is singular and belongs to a particular class if you wanna make something that begins with igi plural you change igi to ibi so igitabo is book and ibitabo with the b is books because you always change igi to ibi to make something plural they just took the same pattern that they had in their language and said yeah we can do this with this word from this other language lauren what an exciting life the word kita b has had gretchen it feels very poetic that the word for book travelled around a lot it was a technology the way that a lot of languages have borrowed the english word for computer a lot of languages borrowed the arabic word for book because they were some early people to have books lauren so far we ve had you can put a suffix on the end of a word kinyarwanda has some prefixing at the start of the word so where the morphology is arabic and sometimes english involve some internal changes you re not necessarily just adding or removing something from the start or the end these are some of the strategies for pluralising but they re not the only ones gretchen what else can we do lauren one thing that i find very satisfying as a plural strategy is where you repeat the word and the repetition is what makes it indicate that it s a plural gretchen that s very economical it makes a lot of sense it s like saying book and book book to mean several books lauren yeah indonesian is one of the widely spoken languages that does this the word for student is muɾid but the word for students plural is muɾidmuɾid as one option for how to pluralise it gretchen huh very nice lauren there s something very visual about that form of plural that i find very satisfying gretchen speaking of languages that form their plural with a prefix there s actually an analysis of french traditionally speaking if you learn french in school you learn french forms a plural by changing the ending the same way that english does but in actual fact in french often those s s at the end are silent pretty much always lauren right gretchen so there s another analysis of french whereby it s actually that the plural is a prefix this especially shows up in french words that begin with vowels children who are learning french before they learn to read and write they often assume that many words in french that begin with a vowel actually have plural prefixes if you take for example the word ami which means friend in french and the plural of it is also amis but with an s at the end but you can t hear the s lauren no i could not hear that gretchen it is completely silent there is nothing to hear most of the time when you say a word in french you put another word in front of it especially for a noun you re often gonna put an article like the or my or something in front of it you would say l ami the friend les amis the friends that s les which is the plural form of the but it has this s that s silent because that silent s is before words that begin with a vowel you pronounce that s like a z lauren huh yeah gretchen the same thing with my friend you have mon ami mes amis again that a makes the s in mes which is also the plural form of my be pronounced as if it s actually there lauren i can totally see how as a child gretchen you can see where this is going right because you don t actually speak french and you re like uh oh it really sounds like the singular is ami and the plural is lauren zami gretchen exactly zami you get little kids it s really cute when they re learning to write it ll be like me zami and they ll write like z a m i for friends lauren okay that is too cute gretchen i have friends who post this is what their young children are doing on facebook like little notes that they re writing for class they re talking about le zami it s so cute lauren kids are just great little paradigm analysers aren t they gretchen well this 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 ...
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