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Amharic and Romance | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| berabero89 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4436 days ago 101 posts - 137 votes  Speaks: English, Amharic* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, French | Message 1 of 6 23 December 2012 at 5:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Recently, I've noticed a few things that I never had paid attention to while I was
talking in Amharic: 1) That the future tense was formed by the verb allä, akin to the formation of the future tense of Romance languages through the use of an auxiliary "to have". 2) That allä, although its primary meaning is "there is/are" (like the Spanish "hay" or French "a" in "il y a"), it also denotes obligation (like the French "avoir" and Spanish "hay" again, except conjugated [he de lavar]). 3) The verb allä also means "to have" when conjugated in a certain form (akin to "avoir" and "aver" [in Old Spanish]) 4) The present perfect is also formed using allä. Again, the same thing is found in Romance languages: "J'ai vu deux hommes" or "He visto a dos hombres" Here is an internet article I found showing a whole section devoted to compound verbs formed using allä http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~eilamavi/AmharicExponence_Handout _Final.pdf I find it very strange that there should be a verb in a Semitic language, Amharic, that would denote obligation, existence, ownership and also be used as an auxiliary for forming a future and perfect tense, just like in the Romance languages. Is this all some coincidence or is this a pattern that crops up throughout languages? What do you think of this? Edited by berabero89 on 23 December 2012 at 9:46pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6233 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 6 23 December 2012 at 3:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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A lot of languages do not have this pattern. Japanese, for instance, doesn't make a grammatical distinction between present and future. The mechanisms for indicating obligation and existence are also independent of each other.
It can be surprising how often a familiar pattern shows up when you least expect it, though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| berabero89 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4436 days ago 101 posts - 137 votes Speaks: English, Amharic* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, French | Message 3 of 6 23 December 2012 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | ||
Actually, Amharic doesn't make a habitual present/future distinction either. It does, however, have a separate gerundive present (I think Japanese also has this). And my question wasn't if this was common, but rather if it was found in other unrelated languages also. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4460 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 4 of 6 24 December 2012 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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That’s an interesting observation, thanks for posting. It seems to me that your question has to do with language typology. I’ll quote what one typologist has to say about “have”:
“It has been shown that in many languages ‘have’ evolved from a transitive referential verb with a meaning like ‘hold, grasp’ or ‘take.’ In a number of languages, ‘have’ has developed a further function, as a tense and/or aspect marker. […] A recurrent scenario is for phonological erosion to reduce the inflectional complexity of a verb, new categories then being created periphrastically, typically involving ‘have’ and/or ‘be’ in new functions. For example, ‘John has gone’ and ‘Mary is coming’ in English. ‘Have’ may develop into a marker of perfect aspect, or of past tense, or of obligation modality ‘have to’ or of future tense. Illustrations of these changes [can be found in] Indo-European, African and Asian languages.” (Robert Dixon, Basic Linguistic Theory vol. 2, p. 301.) Dixon goes on to cite a range of sources, several of which are on grammaticalization. Clearly what we are talking about here falls under the rubric of grammaticalization, with the content verb “hold” (etc.) taking on various grammatical functions. So you could check a work like Heine and Kuteva’s “World Lexicon of Grammaticalization” to find a discussion of the common pathways that “have” may take when becoming grammatical as it were. I guess part of your point is that allä ‘have’ isn’t just taking on one grammatical function, but a range of them, and these happen to be similar/identical in Amharic and Romance. I would be interested to know if there has been a “reduction of inflexional complexity” as Dixon puts it in the Amharic verb – is there an “Old Amharic” with a different, less periphrastic verb system, and is there any clear development across time like that between Latin and the modern Romance languages? I don’t know anything about Amharic myself, but looking at the question diachronically like this might explain a lot. I’ll end this with the observation that while unrelated languages may be similar in this way, closely related ones may diverge. Comparing Latvian and Lithuanian, Lithuanian has grammaticalized the verb ‘tureti’ (to hold) for both possession and obligation. Latvian on the other hand uses a dative construction in both cases: Lithuanian ‘Aš turiu pinigus.’ [I (nom.) have money (acc.).] Latvian ‘Man ir nauda.’ [I (dat.) have money (nom.).] Lithuanian ‘Aš turiu eiti.’ [I have to go.] Latvian ‘Man jāiet.’ [I have to go.] In both languages, compound tenses are formed with ‘be’, not ‘have.’ Latvian also has the verb ‘turēt’ ‘to hold’, but it hasn’t taken on these extra meanings. Even though Lithuanian is generally considered the more archaic of the two, in this case the dative possessive of Latvian is actually the older, ‘common Baltic’ form (don’t ask me to prove that, though!) The Latvian obligation construction with ‘jā-’ is also an innovation, as far as I know. You could probably show this with more mainstream European languages too – linguists have compared IE languages with dative possessive constructions and ones with the verb ‘have’. I would be really interested to hear about less well-known languages from other parts of the world in this regard. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5577 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 5 of 6 20 February 2014 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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What an underrated post that was from viedums! Brilliant.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6950 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 6 of 6 24 February 2014 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ukrainian can also express future activity using a bound morpheme that derives from a verb meaning "to get, receive" (although this structure is valid only for imperfective verbs - that is the process or repetition of the actions is more important than their completion or result).
- "Tomorrow I will be reading their letters." Uk: Я читатиму завтра ïх листи. (I read-(infinitive)-(morpheme derived ultimately from 1st person singular present tense of Proto-Slavonic *jьmati "to have, take") (Cf. variant: Я буду читати завтра ïх листи. - "I will read-(infinitive) tomorrow their letters") In Hungarian, an emphasized future of sorts is expressed by using the present tense of fogni "to catch, grab; hold" as an auxillary with the main verb's infinitive. - "Tomorrow I will be reading their letters (and there's no doubt about it, either)." Hu: Holnap olvasni fogom a leveleiket. (Cf. unemphasized variant: Holnap olvasom a leveleiket. "Tomorrow I am reading / will be reading their letters.") In Finnish, pitää "to hold" in an impersonal form is used an auxillary verb to indicate a relatively moderate obligation or prescription. - "I have to go home." (as opposed to "I must go home (or else).") Minun pitää mennä kotiin. (I-(genitive) hold-(3rd person singular present tense) go-(infinitive) home-(illative)) (as opposed to Minun täytyy mennä kotiin.) - "I should/am supposed to go home." Minun pitäisi mennä kotiin. (I-(genitive) hold-(3rd person sing. conditional) go-(infinitive) home-(illative)) On a related note, Finnish saada "to get" can indicate prohibition (negated obligation) or permission (cf. "get" as in "I get to go to the movies tonight.") - "I cannot/must not/am not allowed to go home." ~ "I don't get to go home." En saa mennä kotiin. (I-(negative present tense) get-(verbal stem) go-(infinitive) home-(illative)) - "I can/am allowed to stay over at Marja's place." ~ "I get to stay over at Marja's place." Saan yöpyä Marjan luona." (Get-(1st person singular present) stay overnight-(infinitive) Marja-(genitive) vicinity/place-(essive)) As far as I know in Northern Saami, the verb oažžut "to get" can be used in a similar way to English "to get" and Finnish saada "to get" for indicating permission. - "I can/am allowed to stay at Márjá's place." ~ "I get to stay over at Márjá's place." Mun oaččun idjadit Márjjá luhtte." (Get-(1st person singular present) stay overnight-(infinitive) Márjá-(genitive) vicinity/place (postposition)) For more information, see the following: Modality in Finnish Acquisitive modals 1 Is There Any Inflectional Future in East Slavic? A Case of Ukrainian against Romance Reopened The use of verbs referring to possession or acquisition in expressing the future tense or grammmatical mood seems like a rich area of typological research as alluded to by viedums. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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