#copula

[joannekwan]

[overdoso]

Flagrante de um trisal 🐍🐍🐍😳 🙈

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Schistosomiasis is also known by the names bilharzia, red-water fever, and snail fever. It is caused by blood flukes, or flatworms, in the genus Schistosoma ("split body"; see figure 2.3).

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

[linguisticillustrations]

Hengeveld, Kees (1992). Non-verbal predication: Theory, typology, diachrony. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Figure 7. Types of predication, i.e. copula clauses (page 27).

[superlinguo]

New publication: The General Fact/Generic Factual in Yolmo and Tamang (Studies in Language)

The Yolmo evidential system includes a category for generally known facts. Things like lemons are sour or tea is sweet (in Nepal at least) are marked using the general fact evidential òŋge. The form òŋ is also the verb ‘to come’.

This evidential turns up in every dialect of Yolmo documented to date, but it doesn’t exist in any other Tibetic language, not the specific form, or the even the semantic category. There is one language with a similar category though, and that’s the variety of Tamang spoken near the Melamchi Yolmo villages. The Tamang form kha-pa covers similar evidential semantics, and is also based on the lexical verb ‘come’.

In this paper we look at these similar forms, and how the similarities between them and social history of the area indicates the Yolmo òŋge is likely a calque from the Tamang kha-pa. I’m very grateful to my colleagues Thomas Owen-Smith for working with me on this paper. Thomas was working on the documentation of this variety of Tamang while I was writing my thesis about Yolmo evidentiality. Chatting with him helped me make sense of this unique feature of Yolmo and I’m so happy we’ve turned our long conversations into a not very long paper setting out our analysis.

Abstract

This paper examines the similarity of the Yolmo ‘general fact’ evidential and the ‘generic fact’ evidential in the Tamang dialect spoken in the valley of the Indrawati Khola. Yolmo òŋge is unlike any evidential attested in other Tibetic languages, but shares features with 1kha-pa in the local dialect of Tamang. Semantically, they both are used for situations that are generally known facts. Structurally, both are copulas with evidential functions that are formed using the lexical verb ‘come’. We argue that language contact between Tamang speakers of the Indrawati Khola area and Yolmo speakers in the Melamchi Valley led to the Yolmo language calquing the Tamang form. We illustrate these copulas and their relationship because grammaticalisation of copulas from a lexical verb ‘come’ is cross-linguistically uncommon.

Reference

Gawne, L. & T. Owen-Smith. 2022. The General Fact/Generic Factual in Yolmo and Tamang. Studies in Language. Issue number forthcoming. doi: 10.1075/sl.21049.gaw

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The pen is mightier than the sword. Knowledge is power, France is bacon. These, ahem, classic quotes all have something linguistically interesting in common: they’re all formed around a particular use of the verb “be” known as a copula.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about copulas! This is a special name for a way of grammatically linking two concepts together that’s linguistically special in a lot of different languages: sometimes it’s a verb that’s super irregular (like be/is/was in English, Latin, and many other languages), sometimes it’s several verbs (like ser and estar in Iberian and Celtic languages), sometimes it’s a form of marking other words (like in Nahuatl, Auslan, and ASL), and sometimes it’s not even visible or audible at all (like zero copula in Arabic, African American English, and Russian). We also talk about some of the fun things you can do with copulas in English, such as the lexical gap that’s filled by “ain’t”, the news headline null copula, and the oddball philosophical experiment known as E-Prime.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements: We're doing another online Lingthusiasm liveshow on April 9th (Canada) slash 10th (Australia)! (What time is that for me?) It will be a live Q&A for patrons about a fan fave topic: swearing! We'll be hosting this session on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server. Become a patron before the event, and it will also be available as an edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if you prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: tell us about your favourite examples of swearing in various languages and we might include them in the show!

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If you want to help keep our ongoing lingthusiastic activities going, from the LingComm Grants to regular episodes to fun things like liveshows and Q&As, join us on Patreon! As a reward, you will get over 50 bonus episodes to listen to and access to our Discord server to chat with other language nerds. In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about character encoding! We talk about the massive list of symbols that your phone carries around, how that list (aka Unicode) came into existence, and why it's still growing a bit every year. Listen here! Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

France is Bacon dot com

Etymonline entry for copula

Lingthusiasm Episode ‘Schwa, the most versatile English vowel’

Wikipedia entry for copulas in Germanic languages

Etymonline entry for ‘be’ and ‘is’

Lingthusiasm Episode ‘That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics’

Etymonline entry for ‘ain’t’

The Copula Systems of Western European Languages from a Typological and Diachronic Perspective - Britta Irslinger

Wikipedia entry for copulas in Chichewa

Wikipedia entry for verbs in Nepali

The Japanese Professor entry ‘The Copula ‘Desu’’

Lingthusiasm Episode ‘You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality’

Wikipedia entry for verbs in Yolmo

David Bowles tweet on copulas in Nahuatl

Wikipedia entry for Nahuatl, including more detail on the geographic distribution of speakers 

Australian Sign Language (Auslan): An Introduction to Sign Language Linguistics - Johnston and Schembri

Reddit post on how to express ‘be’ in American Sign Language

Wikipedia entry for zero copula

Lingthusiasm Episode ‘When nothing means something’

WALS entry for zero copula

All Things Linguistics entry on zero copula in African American English

Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America entry for null copula

Wikipedia entry for E-Prime

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

[okinawanonline]

The Okinawan Copula — How to Say Something “Is”

In order to make a basic sentence in Okinawan, you will need to know about the copula, yan. 

Tip for Japanese Speakers: Yan is the Okinawan equivalent to the Japanese copula だ. 

Explaining the concept of the Japonic copula in English is a bit difficult as English does not have a proper grammatical equivalent. Though this might be a simplification, think that any sentence that does not end in a verb (and maybe adjective? But I’m not sure about that) should end in the copula. I’ve seen the concept of a copula translated to mean that something is, almost in the philosophical sense rather than a literal translation of the verb ‘to be.’ 

I should also note that yan is the plain version of the copula and we will go over a polite version later. But that’s enough explaining, let’s try to show some simple example sentences with the copula yan. 

Note: (Like in Japanese,) if the subject of the sentence is understood through context, you can omit the subject entirely in Okinawan. Since I haven’t covered things like pointing words or the topic particle ya yet, I will keep these examples in their “subject-omitted” form. 

わんやん。 Wan yan. (It’s) me.

沖縄やん。 うちなーやん。 Uchinaa yan. (That’s) Okinawa.

比嘉さんやん。 ひがさんやん。 Higa-san yan.  (That’s) Mr. Higa.

In review:

Yan is the copula for Okinawan basic sentences. 

Its politeness level is plain.

It expresses the concept that something is. 

[linguisticmaps]

Copula typology

The verb “to be” is a copula verb. In the languages of the world there can be just one verb like in English or French (être) or German (sein), or there can be more like Spanish/Portuguese (ser and estar), or some Bantu languages, Navajo, Lakhota, Burmese, Thai, Khmer. 

It can be an affix (mainly a suffix) for example in Turkic languages, Korean, Beja or Inuit languages, in which the suffix is attached to the noun. 

It can be a linking demonstrative or pronoun like in Arabic (hiya) or Quechua (kay, which means ‘this’). 

Some languages have a mixed strategy like Japanese, Polish, Czech and Slovak, in which, according to the context, different strategies may be used. 

A particle is used in Austronesian languages. 

Finally there may not be any copula verb at all. Beware this is different from zero copula in some contexts, like Russian and Turkish.

Please help fill the white areas/languages if you know how it works for those languages!