Feature Focus - Head-marking vs. Dependent-marking
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- čas přidán 5. 06. 2024
- PATREON: / biblaridion
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MUSIC: On the Ground - Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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0:00 Heads and Dependents
2:42 Possessive phrases
3:59 Adpositional phrases
5:14 Verb Phrases
6:13 Mixed systems
7:41 Zero-marking
8:31 Summary - Věda a technologie
CORRECTIONS:
1. 3:22 - The construct state suffix isn't the final ך in המלך (king), but the final ת in גלימת (gown). I must have somehow got the words mixed up.
2. 4:10 - The Finnish example should be "Keskellä kylää"
3. 5:25 - The Greek example should be "βλέπω τον σκύλο" ("τον σκύλο" being the correct form for the Accusative)
4. 7:03 - The first word of the top sentence should be "Az" not "A", and the bottom sentence should be "háza" not "házá".
If anyone spots any more errors, let me know by replying to this comment.
In 5:21 there is an error with the greek text too.you write βλέπω το σκύλος while we say βλέπω τον σκύλο. Σκύλος is the nominative case form not the accusative one.. Sοmething similar happen in 3:08 ο σκύλος της γυναίκας would be the proper modern greek phrase while το σκύλος γυναίκας is ungrammatical. This time the article is in the accusative form while the noun is in Nominative and the article of the noun phrase that defines the possesor is never omitted in this context.
You ought to pin this to the top so it doesn’t get lost in the coming miasma
Edit: yayyy you listened haha
I'm not an hungarian native speaker; however I started learning the language recently, and if I'm not wrong, the example in 7:00 should say "az ember..." and not "a ember". The "standard" form of the determiner is indeed "a", but if the next word starts with a vowel the allomorph "az" is used instead.
At 7:03, the second Hungarian example is wrong!!! Correctly, it is Péter háza (not házá) This just bugs me as a Hungarian, but Great video nontheless!
@@neustrelitzvehlefanz2950 Yes, I'm native and you are completely right! Good luck learning!
I don't know about the other examples, but as a Turkish speaker, the double marking actually serves a purpose and is not actually needlessly redundant; in Turkish we have a thing called "nominal phrases". When in English we would say "I am a student", in Turkish we say "Öğrenci-yim" (Student-personal marker) without using a verb meaning "to be". Turkish once had a dedicated "to be" verb (different from "olmak" which today covers the basic meaning but is not used in the same way as English, it is used to mark a change in status, such as "I became a student", "öğrenci oldum", or in philosophical contexts, where we refer to the verb as an isolated concept), but ditched it over time, making it become an optional suffix: so in old Turkish we would say "Öğrenci dururum", and now we can say either "öğrenciyim" or "öğrenciyim-dir" (oh hey, its like Japanese), -dir being a phonetically adjusted suffix version of the verb afore mentioned.
So, saying "Kadın-ın köpek-i" (kadının köpeği) seperates it from "kadın köpeği", which would be a "womanly dog" or a "dog for women", and from "kadın köpek", which would not form a phrase by its own, but would mean "dog that is a woman"; woman would become an adjective. It would also seperate it from "kadının köpek", which would mean "dog belongs to woman" (in the more common word order it would be "köpek kadının", since here "kadının" is the nominal verb in the phrase, of which "köpek" is the subject, but this order is not wrong, just special and is an order that may be used in poetry, or in everyday speech, if we want to put the emphasis on the verb and not the subject).
Something like that happened in Latin too, with writers often ditching the copula and only using the marking on everything else (and it is a pain to translate)
I know this comment is old but I've been trying to figure out what happens in Turkish when you need a genitive (-ın) and another case on one noun. Like "He is in the woman's house" or "I see her dog", I assume in the first "house" would need to take both a locative AND the genitive (-ın)- do they just stack up? Same with the latter, I assume "dog" would get double-marked in some way.
@@technologistrevolution Exactly, I prefer saying possessive and not genitive but I don't know how they are taught as a foreign language, (and it's technically -I as a suffix and not -in, the -(n)- comes into play to glue certain suffixes), but at any rate the first example would be "Kadinin evinde", 'ev-i-(n)-de', and for the second "köpegini göruyorum", 'köpek-i-ni' (sorry for the English characters, I am using an English keyboard right now).
@@OkyanusKarSen Thanks so much!
This topic has always been slightly confusing to me - looking forward to this video!
4:20 is etymologically:
iç-i-n-de
inside (noun) - POSS - thematic consonant - LOCATIVE
This dude legit went from making Thandian to making videos for conlangers
We all have to start somewhere. We got here *because* Thandian sucked so badly that he vowed to get better at conlanging.
@@Biospark88 But we also got there because seeing how bad Thandian became, Biblaridion didn't give up and made better and better each time
And the key words are "didn't give up", because he might just have said "nah, this is not for me"
@@CommonCommiestudios very true. He knew this was his talent so he stuck it through. And my conlang, Denkiláni, pretty much owes its entire existence to Thandian and the lessons I took to heart from its story.
Don't remind him...
My favorite series, on my favorite channel, I'm squeeing.
EDIT: Having watched the video, my only complaint is that I wish I had watched this sooner. Like, last year sooner. I could have used this explanation of marking strategies when I was designing my conlangs from the beginning.
Do you have it figured out now though?
@@fernandobanda5734 I did, eventually, but this would have saved me a lot of time and stress.
More of these please!
Following your main language series can be challenging at times as a noob. But this is great stuff!
On 3:25 the possessive suffix is on the first word - the ת at the end of גלימת. Also, it doesn't mean "his", here it just translates to "gown-of the-king" as the gloss says.
Still a great video, and it's still a good example. Just slightly incorrect.
I feel like I understand the syntax side of languages a lot more after watching this video, especially because Ive forgotten about adpositions.
Omg dude, such a nice way to understand wtf is going on in Turkish.
I definitely realized how possession worked by now, but having someone else explain it in such simple terms makes me really appreciate it 🇹🇷🦃
@Biblaridion I think you got the Hebrew example backwards. The word המלך ("hamelekh") means "the king", not "his gown". The final khaf that you highlighted in blue is part of the word "melekh", not a possessive suffix, although it is true that the final khaf can act as a possessive suffix in other cases (but it's a second person posessive). גלימת ("glimat") is marked as being in the construct state, because if it weren't in the construct state it would be גלימה ("glima"). So a more accurate literal translation would be "gown-of the-king".
Hungarian actually has two ways to mark possessive phrases. Using your example: "Péter háza" (not *házá) or "Péternek a háza", adding the dative -nek/nak to the possessor while keeping the possession marker on the object (this also requires the definite article a/az on the object). The latter is more formal and corresponds roughly to "the house of Péter" in English.
woaw! Same situation is admissible to Turkish example in 7:09
Amazing to have feature focus again, best series on this channel together with conlang case study! I learnt a lot from this one, I was always confused by how possessee marking was supposed to work
WAND!! IT’S STAR! Omg what a coincidence to find you here (well not really but you know)
It’s a small world after all
@@xerenas1593 Hoi!!! Great to see you again Star! How are you doing?
@@ellies_silly_zoo I'm doing okay! Is my channel still on the server?
@@xerenas1593 Great to hear :) Yes it's still there
Ah, finally a good explanation on the subject. Thank you!
My conlang is wierd. It can be either strongly head marking or strongly dependent marking based on if you are trying to emphasis the head or dependent of a sentence. It has polypersonal agreement and a noun case system, and while both are expected to be used at the same time in formal writing, in less formal language, you can use the noun case system without polypersonal agreement to emphasize the noun, or poly-personal agreement without the case system to emphasize the verb, assuming the roles of the sentence are obvious. But in ambiguous cases, both are used. It can also be zero marking in very informal speech, but only if the subject has higher animacy then the object, or in the case of intransitive verbs without poly-personal agreement.
"My conlang is weird" is generally semantically equivalent to "My conlang is poorly made"
Yay another episode.
Fantastic video as usual! If you ever want to expand on this, I'd be happy to read a pdf or watch more videos on it
Yay, my native language is on the thumbnail!
Sincerely a great video!! Sincerely happy I subscribed. I'm relatively new to conlanging so great videos like this really help me to further develop my skills :)
Been so long since the last one, thanks bib
Another excellent video
Dude, you are explaining this so well.
Thanks. This was much needed
As a Turk, I have always found it redundant that Turkish marks both the head and the dependent in possessive phrases. Funnily enough, I noticed this when I didn't know anything about linguistics. xd
6:01 fun fact! in sign languages this is not true. nearly every sign language marks at least some verbs for their objects, but only some mark for subjects, such as ASL (and i don’t think any sign language marks only for subjects)
In ISL, the verb GIVE is inflected for subject and object by placement and direction, and for direct object by handshape. (Prototypically it takes the Irish G (American F) handshape, but it would be altered for anything you can hold in a hand.)
@@qwertyTRiG oh that’s interesting. in ASL “GIVE” marks for the indirect object and subject (and uses a hooked finger/X shape regardless). im pretty sure that all ditransitive verbs in ASL also do this secundive syntax which is fun. no idea that some languages used handshape agreement too thats super cool
@@Alice-gr1kb I have an interest in linguistics, and two years studying Deaf Studies in Ireland, but I'm definitely not an expert. I may have some of my terminology wrong.
@@qwertyTRiG that’s cool anyways. are you d/hh?
@@Alice-gr1kb Nope. I went into Deaf Studies (and want to go back) mostly out of a fascination with linguistics. (Also, my mum's an interpreter.)
When it comes to describing Hungarian as a mixed system, it's worth noting that Hungarian also has polypersonal agreement. This is traditionally analyzed as "definiteness" marking, but is in reality conjugating for both subject and object. András Bárány and Kevin Kwong have done some important theoretical work breaking this down.
I guess you're right, but it's only partial. You can express 2nd and 3rd person objects, but not 1st person objects that way. And the 2nd person only works when the subject is "I".
@@user-pk9qo1gd6r not all languages have specific conjugations for all persons - you would typically expect some of the categories to merge together a bit. Just because some of the conjugations in Hungarian correspond to multiple grammatical persons of subject and object doesn't change the fact that it's requiring agreement with both subject and object, and that's polypersonal agreement.
Very well explained
Could we have a look into the Brythonic Celtic languages, and their quirky things, like how plurality is in Breton with different classes for nouns etc
Good stuff.
Aw nice, Feature Focus!
Anyone watch these whilst knowing they’ll never make a conlang?
Would if I could but oh damn I have a lot to learn before I even actually grasp these videos
Thank you for the video. I've learned a lot. I have some questions, though. In the case of romance languages, such as Portuguese, how can I identify the marking?
For instance, using the same possessive example you used throughout the video, what is the marking in the sentence "o cachorro da mulher"? I'd say it's the preposition "da", which is actually a contraction of the prepostion "de" and the definite articile "a", but I'm not sure. How does it work in romance languages? I guess what I'm trying to understand is there are languages whose markers coalesce and there are languages, such as Portuguese, whose markers are actually separate words?
Question: If a language for instance is Head-initial, does that impact whether or not the language will be head-marking or dependent-marking?
I know I'm late to the party, and what I say might not be fully correct, but from what I've heard, suffixes are generally more common than prefixes, thus a head initial language, with arguments following the verb, would be more likely to become head marking, while a head final language, with its postpositions, would be more likely to develop cases
i love feature focus
Biblaridion! Do you think a somewhat naturalistic conlang _without_ personal pronouns is possible? I've made an attempt using a robust head-marking system for verbs and nouns (and adjectives). Thanks in advance. Your videos are wonderful, please, keep it up!
I know i'm very late but it doesn't hurt to try. Well, anyway, how in your language does a standalone pronoun work? For example, how would you translate this phrase in your language:
"Who ate my cake?"
"Me."
@arthurgabriel2625
Not him, but I can think of two ways
From context:
+ Who ate the cake? (no "my", that is inferred from context)
- One ate the cake. (one becomes a standee for any pronouns, so this phrase can also mean "he ate it" etc.)
or
+ Who ate self cake? (self here would not be a pronoun in this case)
- Self. (again, not a pronoun, so this can mean "thyself", "himself", etc.)
Something to note about Hebrew's head marking - it's usually used to signify a type or a relation, sort of like 'of' in English if it was fused to the preceding word and became a suffix: e.g. מכונה = machine, קפה = coffee and מכונת קפה = coffee machine (literally machine-of coffee).
As for possession, You rarely see it used in everyday speech except for some special words, it's regarded too formal or archaic. The common way to denote possession in Hebrew is with the word של which gets attached to pronouns like in a case system
שלי = my
שלך = your
and so on
Was trying to do some conlang and now i have to stop what im doing to watch a video ON conlanging
What a fantastic video!
I have a question: how do pronouns appear in a language?
Like, if the pronouns of a language get fixed on words they end up losing their "independence", right?
YES, CONLANGING AGAIN :D
Impressive
DOUBLE MARKING
Nice vid! will you ever make a feature focus about certain phonological features? thatd be cool
Whose dog?
The woman's
Where is Cory?
In the house
70:1 az ember, not a ember.
Also the verb felakasztja doesn't just have 3sg.SUBJ marking, but also 3.OBJ marking.
Can you make a tutorial or I guess a video explaining glossing.
Interesting I wish to increase my knowledge in more languages
At 7:03, the second Hungarian example is wrong!!! Correctly, it is Péter háza (not házá) This just bugs me as a Hungarian, but Gréta videó nontheless!
1:10 I think that example wasn't presented quite right: firstly, the "the" at the beginning is actually part of the phrase "the woman" which is itself a dependent element of the noun phrase "dog" is the head of. Secondly, "the woman's" can still stand freely in another syntax, such as "The dog is the woman's" (not necessarily pretty but possible).
Just a point to make here. It would be redundant in Georgian and Basque to mark the subject and object on the verb and the noun, except for the fact that both of those languages have Differential Argument Marking, or basically, that their cases are used for different roles depending on various factors (essentially verb tense/aspect in both languages [for example, in Georgian, the Dative case is used for the direct and indirect object in the present/future, only the indirect object in the aorist, and the subject in the perfect]). So, the case marking alone is not enough. Not a criticism, I just thought it was an interesting thing to add, and trying to figure out why those languages developed such complex systems is pretty fascinating.
Chinese has both prepositions and postpositions. The prepositions mark movement like from 从 and to 到 while postpositions mark position like in 里 or above 上。
So 'from inside the house' would be 从家里 'from house in'
This sort of structure can be described as a circumposition, as two adpositional parts surround the dependent. Also, I suspect that the "house in" structure arose as a form of possession, possibly inalienable possession.
@@Sovairu The old Chinese possessive is different though. The word is 之, and is still used today, if a little formal. The word for 'in' 里/裡 has unclear etymology.
We know that the prepositions come from verbs and some still can be used that way. No idea on the other postpositions though： 中(centre/middle)、上(on/above)、下(below)、外(outside) and 内(inside). On and below can also function as verbs.
@@eugeneng7064 裡 can still be used as a noun, "interior, " right? 中 is certainly used as a noun. The other adpositions which you list can also function as nouns. Furthermore, doesn't inalienable possession, such as of a family member or some other nouns, not require any possessive particle? So, couldn't 从家里 also be thought of as "from the house('s) interior"? This is a fairly common adpositional construction in many languages, cross-linguistically: use an actual adposition for directional or syntactic information, and use a possessed body part, literal or metaphorical, for the actual position.
@@Sovairu Pretty sure 裡 and 中 and need to form compounds before they can be used as nouns. If I were to say 'From the house's interior' I would say '从家里边/面/头' not '从家里'.
It does make sense for 里 to become a postposition if it were used that way, but I checked several of the Histories and can't find such usage or even the word '裡'. Perhaps it arose from vernacular usage.
You got articles of this arising in other languages I can read up on?
Help please:
If you evolve grammatical tenses from simple verbs in the protolanguage (ex. go > ACC) what word(s) would you use to replace such a simple root word?
I’m kinda stumped on how to replace so many simple root words. Thanks
Making up a few new root words is all thou needest to do in this occasion.
3:10 ok, lots to unpack in your Greek example here. I know it's a minor detail, that it's just a 5 second illustrative example and you're not showing off your studies of foreign languages, but i'd just like to correct that sentence (the other two are fine):
I was going to point out you forgot the definite article before "woman", but then I noticed the ancient greek marks on "dog", and that's when I spotted another mistake: the modern Greek word for dog is σκύλος and in ancient Greek it was σκῠ́λᾰξ, but Ancient Greek also had σκῠ́λος which meant "hide" and was neuter while modern σκύλος is masculine, which changes the article.
So if you want to write a correct sentence in either Ancient or Modern Greek (but not a mix of both) it would look like this:
ὁ σκῠ́λᾰξ τῆς γῠναικός or ὁ τῆς γῠναικός σκῠ́λᾰξ (Ancient)
ο σκύλος της γυναίκας (Modern)
Same for 5:26: βλέπω τὸν σκῠ́λᾰκᾰ (Ancient) or βλέπω το(ν) σκύλο (Modern), again not altering your point as both are explicitly marked accusatives
Ts'ap'u-K'ama showcase when?
3:28 How come that in the hebrew ך מלך is a posession marker?
Does this mean that restaurants with names like "Tony's" or "Angelo's" are technically without a head? So in other words, a linguist could look at the name of one these restaurants and say "So, no head?"
3:04 Hmm... those are the exact three languages I’m learning on Duolingo.
Its not every day I see some turkish in a youtube thumbnail
This person knows some.
Ah, so I was trying to create Hungarian! Well, better double down on it!
Hey what is the really complex definition of a head?
"1. the upper part of the human body, or the front or upper part of an animal body, typically separated from the rest of the body by a neck, and containing the brain, mouth, and sense organs
2. a thing resembling a head either in form or in relation to a whole"
-Google Definitions
Lmao thank you brother
3:56 Uh, how would that not result in attachments ambiguities? If you had a phrase like 'woman her dog sees', how could you know whether it means 'the woman sees her dog', 'the woman's dog sees', or if you had polypersonal agreement 'she sees the woman's dog'?
It seems like a language would need to be structured a very, very specific way to avoid ambiguities like this. I'm particularly baffled by how languages like Hungarian and Turkish have the case on the head noun vanish when its possessed. Surely this would result in ambiguities, especially given that both these languages have a rather loose word order. Hungarian it seems can resort to a more typical possessive case on the possessee to clear up such confusion, but I have a hard time imaging any occasion where this wouldn't be necessary.
Epic.
These are great educational videos and I enjoy discovering that my language has somewhat unique grammar to it but I believe that if you trying to make up a language for a fantasy world or whatever, as long as you are doing it logically you shouldn't necessarily need to possess this sort of information. Assuming you know at least a couple of languages and are creative enough, you should be able to come up with ways to symbolize possessors with ways alien to the languages we have here on our planet yet make sense to the native speakers of that language.
If you don't care about naturalism and/or are explicitly trying to make Alien languages, sure, but this series is primarily for people making Naturalistic Human (or Human-adjacent) languages. When you're trying to make a language that seems real, you have to know how real languages work, and just knowing a few languages won't really help you with that. That's also not to say you _can't_ break the rules of how real language works, but if you want to break them in a way that seems believable, you have to know them
@@Bwizz245 I mean you might be right. I was just going off my intuition there.
Conlang is yes
imagine a conlang going worldwide
It is better when head comes last, especially if you have long confusing sentence, like "the dog of sister of my mother's friend". So, you have a mother, she has a friend, he has a sister, who has a dog ☝️ So, for your mind the best order for this sentence is : mother - friend - sister - dog. This way words come in armenian language :)
Or you could also say the actual word right away and add the details afterwards, so that the speaker isn't left waiting for the actual information to come up at the very end: with head first they'll start with a basic idea of what you meant and refine it as the sentence unfolds, while in head final their idea of what you're trying to say violently flickers every word you add.
I really think it's just a matter of what you're used to. I think it's easier to understand "my mother's friend's sister's dog" but someone from Europe whose native language isn't English would probably better understand "The dog of the sister of the friend of my mother," as most European languages seem to use a preposition like "of" or a post-nominal genitive case to mark possession.
Yay thumbnail is Turkish!
new vid just dropped
wait, 24 minutes ago?
Oh, right, I was eating lunch when the notification popped up
Yahoo !
Ooo dostum
Actually there are two kinds of noun phrase in Turkish: definite and indefinite. The example given in 7:10 is a definite phrase. Besides, in indefinite phrases, it is essential to create an object or concept name rather than a noun belonging to another noun. For this case, the example given in video can be turn into:
"kadın köpeği" (LIT: woman her-dog)
In indefinite phrase there is no GEN. case suffix (-ın) for the possessor (kadın). So, the dog becomes more linked to word woman nominally rather than a specific woman.
When are ya gonna talk about evolving conjugations?
cool
What is ablative, and accusative case?
Ablative case carries the general sense of moving away from something.
Finnish examples:
away from a place
katolta: off the roof
pöydältä: off the table
rannalta: from the beach
maalta: from the land
mereltä: from the sea
häneltä: from him/her/them
Accusative marks the object of a verb in nominative-accusative languages. "He saw *him*"
wow
from this video i learnt that nahuatl is pretty heavily head marking
He has a soft spot for head marking languages, if you recall his top10 video. And Classical Nahuatl is his all time favorite language.
@Bryson Sanger mine is dependent-marking mostly, sometimes it double marks. Watch Ts'ap'u K'ama be something completely different when we finally learn more about it.
@Bryson Sanger Not surprising, Swahili is his #2 pick. Nothing wrong with author appeal as I’m sure most conlangers draw heavily from the natural languages with features they prefer most.
Please mention some things: about the expansion of flowering brachyophytes with seeds, about large tanibrachids and the development of intelligent species from them, about the development of civilization, about the mass extinction due to this very civilization, and about the restoration of the biosphere after the death of civilization. And about how tolerance to sexual deviations brought the civilization of tanybrachyds closer to moral decline and extinction. (I think there will be a moral lesson for humanity)
Next month alien biosferes ???
Hello