Re: Ant: Re: Most challenging features of languages?

On Thu, 23 Jun 2005 12:22:05 +0300, Julia "Schnecki" Simon
<helicula@...> wrote:

>A friend of mine brought back an interesting anecdote from a general
>linguistics class, where the professor, who was apparently not
>familiar with Finnish, had claimed that in all languages, verbs
>contain aspect information on some level (or something like that). My
>friend pointed out that in Finnish, aspect is encoded on the object,
>if anywhere: _söin omenan_ (accsg) "I ate an apple" (the whole of it),
>_söin omenat_ (accpl) "I ate the apples" (specific apples, e.g. "the
>apples you bought yesterday", and I ate all of them completely); but
>_söin omenaa_ (partsg) "I ate some apple/apples" (could be an
>unspecified/unimportant number of apples, for example, or just part of
>an apple, or a number of apple slices or wedges without any way of
>determining the number of actual apples involved). _Söin_ "I ate"
>always has the same form here, but the sentences seem to contain some
>sort of aspect information, which therefore must be encoded in some
>place outside the verb. Which only leaves the noun. Right? ;-)
Well, there are all kinds of things that delimit the meaning of the verb
without being considered a part of the verb.  Prepositional phrases come to
mind.

>Similarly, when dealing with books instead of apples: _luin kirjan_
>(accsg) means "I read the book" (in its entirety, probably even in the
>right order), but _luin kirjaa_ (partsg) means either "I read some
>part of the book" or "I browsed the book". (My Russian is quite rusty,
>but I'm pretty sure that these two sentences would be _ya prochitala
>knigu_ resp. _ya chitala knigu_, i.e. "I read.PERF book.ACC" resp. "I
>read.IMPERF book.ACC". Voilà, aspect.)
>
>Another friend, a native speaker of Finnish and a computer geek,
>explained to me once that when you talk about reading Usenet news, you
>can't use the accusative case when referring to entire newsgroups; the
>accusative would imply that you've read the whole of the thing, but
>since people keep posting new articles, that would be impossible, so
>the partitive is your only option. I assume similar rules apply to
>reading mailing lists, watching (infamously endless) telenovelas, and
>so on.
>
>Now I'm not sure if I feel comfortable claiming that Finnish shows
>aspect marking in nouns; but at the very least, it's probably a nice
>mnemonic trick for speakers of an aspect language who want to learn a
>language that has such partitive constructions, or vice versa.
I wonder if, at some point in the future, Finnish will abandon
the "definite accusative" (identical to the genitive) and employ the
partitive as *the* accusative affix.  Then, of course, a new partitive
would have to be formed... hmm... ;)

- Rob