“Mam Grammar”. If you’re coming from English, Spanish, or almost any other European language, it’s definitely a strange thing. But if you don’t let the differences scare you off, you’ll discover it’s really quite simple.
I mentioned in my last post that Mam clauses are verb-initial. It would be more accurate to say that they’re predicate-initial. If we divide them by personal inflection patterns, there are four classes of words that can act as predicates in Mam: common verbs, the existential verb, statives, and the predicative demonstrative. Any of these may be followed by a subject, and then (in the case of transitive verbs alone) by an object.
Today I’m going to go over just inflection for person, as some form of the same system is common to all predicates, and for the existential verb, statives, and the predicative demonstrative, it’s all you need to know to start using them. Because this is system is complicated by other factors affecting common verbs, I’ll discuss those separately later.
Person marking in Mam happens in two steps. First, unique forms are given for the first person singular, the non-first person singular, the first person plural, and the non-first person plural.
For the existential verb, each form has two or three alternatives. The most common choices are starred when known:
For statives, which may be derived from all nouns and adjectives by suffixation, the forms are:
1S - ...qin
2/3S - ...a
1P - ...qo’
2/3P - ...qe’
For the predicative demonstrative, the forms are generally given with no initial consonant, but I have only heard this word (in its third person singular) with initial /χ/:
Then onto all of these forms we add a set of clitics to distinguish between the second and third person and exclusive and inclusive first person singular forms. When following vowels, they are preceded by /j/:
In dialects like that of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, these are all pronounced /ə/, and so are sometimes all spelled ...(y)a. In these dialects, all may also apparently be dropped under certain conditions, but I’m still not sure what those conditions are. Any ...y triggered by these clitics seems to stay when the following vowel is dropped.
It seems that originally, the first person forms were different, with no clitic in the singular and ...(y)o’ in the exclusive plural. Some dialects may retain one or both of these forms.
winaqqine’ - “I am a person”
winaqa - “you are a person”
winaq - “he is a person”
winaqqo’ye’ - “we (but not you) are people”
winaqqo’ - “we (and you) are people”
winaqqe’ye’ - “you are people”
winaqqe’ - “they are people”
jaayine’ - “it is me”
jaaya - “it is you”
jaa - “it is he”
jaaqo’ye’ - “it is we (but not you)”
jaaqo’ - “it is we (and you)”
jaaqe’ye’ - “it is you all”
jaaqe’ - “it is they”
Nchin xnaq’tzaane’ tu’n tb’ant nyooline’ toj yool Mam
(Or something like that): “I’m learning to speak the Mam language!”
Or rather, I’ve already been learning this fascinating member of the Mayan language family for the past three months or so, as I’ve been staying with my grandparents in a small town in the pacific northwest with a large (primarily Mam-speaking) Guatemalan population.
I’m back home now, which means my continued progress in Mam may be a bit hampered for the time being, but I want to share some of what I know so far with you guys.
Like most Mayan languages, Mam is characterised by a colourful consonant inventory, lightly agglutinative morphology, ergative-absolutive alignment, and verb-initial clause structure. Mam is unique, though, in its development of retroflex sibilants, its reörganisation of the Mayan verbal system, and its use of intransitive verbs of motion as auxiliary “directionals”.
I’ll be posting in more detail about Mam’s phonology, morphology, and syntax soon, but for now I’ll leave you with its phoneme inventory and modern orthography:
There is a star trek TNG episode where Picard encounters a race that doesn’t speak in actual structured sentences but conveys ideas through story parralels. The ones referenced here are “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” - cooperation, “Shaka, when the walls fell” - failure and Temba, his arms wide/open" - signifying a gift.
OK, but here’s what’s awesome/hilarious about this.
The whole point about why communicating with the Tamarians was so frustrating was because all of their communication was contextual. The problem wasn’t that Picard couldn’t understand what words they were saying (the universal translator worked fine) the problem was that he didn’t understand what THOSE WORDS TOGETHER HAD TO DO WITH ANYTHING.
Why is this hilarious/fascinating to me? Because this is essentially what people are doing today with memes. They are posting pictures and writing sentences THAT MAKE NO SENSE WITHOUT PRIOR CONTEXT.
If Picard beamed down right now, and you told him that Data is a cinnamon roll… you are a Tamarian.
Actually, this isn’t something just present in memes but it seems to be a foundation of human language and partly why a universal translator could never work (or if it somehow did, it should be programmable to handle Tamarian). It’s just that most metaphors in language are so accepted or necessary to fluency that we don’t really notice them (or they seem to be a common human perspective… which aliens don’t necessarily have to share).
It is why when speaking German I have to remember it is, “How much Clock is it?” and not “What time is it?”. The metaphor in English seems to be that moments are separate entities/temporal locations that we visit through the day so we need to determine what one we are visiting now. Whereas in German, leaving aside the fact the “clock” can clearly be a stand-in metaphor for “time” the overall metaphor there seems to be that moments in time are accumulative entities that we collect through the day and we need to determine how much we’ve collected.
And speaking of time, human languages tend towards two metaphors, either favouring one or the other or happily indulging in both… either time is a stationary path which the focus moves along (”… as we’re traveling into the month February…”) or time is a river the flows past a stationary focus (”his birthday is rapidly approaching”). Technically those are metaphors to handle an abstract concept, time could just as easily be metaphorically an object that “appears” rather than “approaches” or a location you “turn towards” instead of “move into”… and I don’t know if any human language allows you to metaphorically be a man in a boat traveling up a river (or what that would look like/imply) but it is a possibility (especially if you are considering an alien perspective on time).
Leaving behind time, some emotions are metaphorically a direction. Happy is up, sometimes way up ‘til you’re “on Cloud 9″ (and there’s no obvious reason for it to be the 9th cloud but you accept it) and on the opposite end of that spectrum sadness is down (in the dumps) when it isn’t busy being a colour (blue). And naturally you yourself are a container for your emotions, or more specifically your heart is (at least in English, in Indonesian it’s your liver) and the container can be put under pressure until it is “bursting with joy” or it “explodes in anger”.
And then there are true idioms which actually do reference historic events (which is what I assume is happening in Tamarian’s “Shaka, when the walls fell”) like “Read The Riot Act” or if you “heard it through the grapevine” your people had a mess of telegraph wires at some point and grapevines to compare them to. And “apple of one’s eye” is weird for being a double metaphor… the pupil was once believed to be a solid object metaphorically called an “apple” but then, after Shakespeare popularized the phrase in reference to a person in terms of affection, and science let us know the pupil is not apple-like at all, it came to exclusively mean “this person is very dear to me” and we all forgot why apples were involved in the first place.
Of course, I am far from a linguistic expert so you should take this all “with a grain of salt” ;)
Yes, and there’s even an Official Academic name for this: intertextuality! Aka “texts referring to other texts” – whether those texts are song lyrics, proverbs, historical references, movie quotes, clichés, memes, metaphors, in-jokes, parody, fanfic, and so on.
It doesn’t even have to be as explicit as an idiom or metaphor: even a turn of phrase will do. For example, saying something “is a truth universally acknowledged” invokes Pride and Prejudice, or “a thing of beauty and a joy forever” invokes Keats (although for me it invokes Mary Poppins, because obviously as a kid I watched that movie long before I’d ever heard of Keats), or “Strange women lying in rivers distributing words” invokes Monty Python. Intertexuality is one of the reasons people study literary works within the context of what other literary works were important at that place and time, so as to catch the intertextual references that the author may be making.
that one language that makes your heart beat faster and your eyelids flutter and you can’t help smiling like a fool when you hear it because it’s just so beautiful
I am literally in love with the fact I get to see how my little cousins interact even with a language barrier. On my mom’s side, I have a 3 year old little cousin who only speaks French, and on my dad’s side I have a 2 year old cousin who only speaks Spanish. When they play together it is so funny to see them blabber on and on to each other until one of them hears a word that sounds familiar and then they just repeat that word and nod like they’re totally connecting. Like today the one that speaks Spanish said “Venga a poner los pantalones en la muneca!” and the other heard “pantalones” and was just like “Oui, pantalon!” They’re best friends and it’s the cutest and funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
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