Re: Marking nouns with person?

Hello!

On 9/2/05, ?? (kutsuwamushi) <snapping.dragon@...> wrote:
> On 9/2/05, Thomas Wier <trwier@...> wrote:
>
> > I've argued that these subject markers in Nahuatl -- at least in
> > modern spoken Nahuatl -- are actually clitics, and therefore it's
> > inappropriate to say that they are marking person on the noun.
> > Launey, to be sure, thinks otherwise, but I think most linguists
> > would think that his omnipredicativity hypothesis is wrong.
>
> I think that it was a grammar of classical Nahuatl, but I can't
> remember the author. I just picked it up when I was at the library one
> day, but I hadn't paid my student fees so I couldn't check it out.
This may or may not have been the one I'm using (James Lockhart's
bilingual edition, published 2001, of Horacio Carochi's "Arte de la
lengua mexicana", originally published 1645 -- it's hard to get any
more classical than that ;) . In a footnote somewhere in the section
on conjugation prefixes, Lockhart explains that it's perfectly
grammatical to express "I am/you are/... an XYZ" by prefixing the noun
for "XYZ" with the appropriate subject prefix as used on verbs; and
that a noun by itself could be analyzed as having the 3rd-person zero
prefix. So, _cihuâtl_ can mean "woman" or "she is a woman", depending
on context; and "I am a woman" is _nicihuâtl_ (same _ni-_ as in
_ninemi_ "I live" or _nixôchitequi_ "I pick flowers").

(Are there actually linguists who claim that _cihuâtl_ *always* means
"she is a woman"? Thomas: is this what you mean by
"omnipredicativity"? -- Do these people consequently translate a
sentence such as "The woman loves her children" as "She-is-a-woman
loves they-are-her-children"? Sheesh.)

(Anyway, that's something I won't have to deal with anytime soon, I
guess. So far, I only have con-paradigms with nonzero 3rd-person
morphemes. :)


FWIW, Mohawk has a somewhat similar phenomenon. Many Mohawk "nouns"
are actually verb forms and therefore have person prefixes (for
example, _ratorats_ may mean "he hunts" or "the hunter", depending on
context). A number of other nouns have person prefixes as well (such
as _raksa'a_ "boy", which has the same 3rd-person singular masculine
prefix _ra-_ as _ratorats_) and might therefore be analyzed as
"technically verbs" for all I know. (The stem _-ksa'a_, from which
_raksa'a_ "boy" and _yeksa'a_ "girl" are derived, could be taken to be
a verb meaning "to be a child", for example.)

So, presumably, since "woman" is _yakonkwe_ in Mohawk, "I am a woman"
could be something like _wakonkwe_. But since I've never actually seen
this form, and I'm by no means an expert on Mohawk, I really don't
know if this kind of noun can even take non-3rd-person prefixes... :-(

Anyway, it gets really interesting when one wants to form duals and
plurals of nouns. ;-) Some of the nouns that have person prefixes
simply take the person prefixes for the appropriate number and gender:

(1a) ronkwe "man" -> rononkwe "men"

which is inflected just like

(1b) rotkahthonh "he saw" -> ronatkahthonh "they.MASC saw"

Others get an additional plural suffix:

(2a) raksa'a "boy" -> ratiksa'okonha "boys"

which has both the person prefixes used in verb forms such as

(2b) rahninons "he buys" -> ratihninons "they.MASC buy"

and the animate plural suffix used e.g. in

(2c) otsi'tenha "bird" -> otsi'tenhokonha "birds"

Tons of fun to be had with Mohawk morphology, as you can see. :-)

(NB. My Mohawk spelling may be a little off. My only source is David
Maracle's booklet "Let's Speak Mohawk", and I understand there was
some sort of spelling reform after the publication date...)


But anyway, I have no idea how either Nahuatl or Mohawk would express
things like "I-the-woman do this-and-this" as opposed to "The
woman does this-and-this" (i.e. whether forms like _nicihuâtl_ or
_wakonkwe_, if it exists, can be used as subjects or objects in a
sentence just like _cihuâtl_ and _yakonkwe_, or if they can only be
used as sentences of their own). :-(

Regards,
Julia

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)