Pronouns That Change By Time (And Why You Shouldn't Find Them Weird)
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- Опубліковано 4 бер 2022
- A discussion of temporal pronouns, in the context of the Senegambian language of Wolof (spoken chiefly in Senegal and the Gambia).
Written and Created by Me
Art by kvd102
Interested in learning Wolof?
Check out Mor Gueye: / @morgueye1242
Translations:
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
Felt so appreciated when Singaporean English is finally shown as a dialect of English.
Also fun fact: In colloquial Singaporean English (Singlish) “he/she/it verb” doesn’t get conjugated *sometimes*. So “he shower” and “he cooks” are both commonly used somehow.
Let's not forget the distinction drop between he/she/it... so she cooks becomes he cooks, or he cooks becomes she cooks, because why not...
isnt singlish a creole continuum? at the most formal situation it's a dialect of english with a standard and at the most informal situation it's a different language unintelligible to english right?
like ive heard sentences with "lah"s and "meh"s and im like wtf does that mean 💀💀💀
btw limpeh clap for you is one of the funniest expressions ive ever heard 🤣😭
@@livedandletdie lol i guess singapore ended sexism 😎
@@mahatmaniggandhi2898
The Singaporean English and Singlish distinction is quite ambiguous. Yes there is a dialect continuum in Singapore, with Standard Singaporean English at the formal end, and Singlish at the other. But we can talk about Singlish by itself, separate from Singaporean English.
Btw “limpei clap for you” is an upgraded version of “come I clap for you” XD
Also “lah” and “Mah” are what we call “sentence final mood particles” which are borrowed from Chinese, especially Hokkien and Cantonese.
same with aave
I feel like temporal pronouns is so much "better" than temporal verbs if only for the fact that it could potentially make a language easier to speak and learn without reducing the amount of information conveyed. I've got nothing to back this up, but I imagine temporal pronouns leads to less exceptions and irregular conjugations than with verbs.
Totally agree and it's kind of obvious when you look at it this way: A language usually has a handful of pronouns but truckloads of verbs. So, either you can hope to have all the verb conjugations regular or just go wild with the pronouns knowing that it's not going to be a pain to pick up because there are so few of them anyway.
You could just have a closed set of light verbs that combine with nouns to form regular verbs. Any declension or irregularity would happen on those light verbs and nowhere else
@@LowestofheDead An interesting idea for a conlang. A verb for existence, travel/motion, change of state, sensation/perception/experience... that could work, maybe. With negation and aspect and a robust collection of nouns and adpostions or noun cases, I think you could fill out a Swadesh list with it. Was this idea based on any real languages you're aware of?
@@Amanda-C. I think Persian does this, to an extent. For instance, to say "to like," (دوست داشتن) you have to say that you "have a friend" in it-- have being داشتن and friend being دوست.
I'm guessing in Persian, the song made for Toy Story is actually called "You Like Me."
I think it's just different but in no way it is easier. Probably we should consider that the subject of a sentence can be not only a pronoun but just a noun. How does it work in Wolof? Do nouns change depending on the tense? Or maybe it's delegated to the verb in this case? In both variants it seems no less of a hustle than European languages
Ah as a Senegalese (-American) Wolof speaker and language-lover it really excites me when people speak about my language. Not many people have heard about it ever 😅
I've never thought about this aspect of our language. Every part of the sentence works around the verb which is generally unmalleable.
Like the sentence "Li, musuma kaa *gis.* " which translates to "I've never seen this before." *Gis* (hard g) means "to see" and it always stays in that form. In English, "to see" became "seen."
I think your language is so cool and I hope to learn it one day :D
I've heard of Wolof in the past, but yeah, most languages have something unique in them, and Wolof seems pretty neat.
I'd heard the word Wolof before, but it was the name of a city in an Afro-Roman inspired empire in a piece of fiction I read.
Wolof is one of my favourite languages. Used it as an inspiration for my constructed language Tifàna, which also has temporal pronouns
"Dama titt bama guissei video bi" I was shocked when I saw the video
In my native lamguage of Isnag (an austranesian language, not many speak it) we have direct articles that are dependent on location "ya" is "the" for things that are near, "tu" is the "the" for things that are far, apparently this is a very common asoect for austranesian languages, perhaps because we were voyagers? And so it was useful to refer to boats or people or islands that are far away when seafaring
IIRC, in many European languages the definitive article is in fact derived from relative pronouns.
That -> The
@@kemoiii that makes sense, in isnag we do have determiners/relative pronouns
This: idi
These: daddi
That: tuni
Those: datuni
so our articles, though they show the relative positions of thing, are used differently
"Tu" the definite article that refer to things that are far away can also be used as the article for the past
so when you say "I saw THE pigs, when I was walking" you'll have to use "Tu", if you use "Ya" then it's as if the pigs are near or you are refering to them in the present as if they're in the room kinda like saying "I saw THIS pig, while i was walking"
so essentially the that/this distinction is retained? does that language not have demonstrative pronouns?
@@isaiahsamuels9827 we have
This: Idi
These: Daddi
That: Tuni
Those: Datuni
we also have plural for our articles "ya" becoming "daya" and "tu" becoming "datu"
@@isaiahsamuels9827 the thing about demonstrative pronouns is that is that they pretty muc act like pronouns to replace the noun, or a way to point at something
"That ate the sandwich" or "That dog ate the sandwich"
in Isnag this translates to "Kinnan natuni tu sandwhich" or "Kinnan natuni nga atu tu sandwhich"
"Ate (prefix)that the sandwich"
"Ate (prefix)that (particle) dog the sandwich"
"That" is used and "Tu" -the definitive article fort things that are far away-is also used
In this context the "the" is "Tu" because the sandwich it's basically gone, or it's far away
if you were to use "Ya" then it's as if the sandwich is partly eaten and the remains are close to the speaker
"The bag" is very different from "that bag" right?
in isnag, it's just important to make sure to specify if "the bag" is far away or close to you "Tu bag" or "Ya bag"
Just binge-watched all your videos, it's some really great content!
thanks, I really appreciate that :)
same lol
🙋same!
same xD
@@kklein Beds
3:04 This actually kinda reminds me of how some English-based Creoles work, Where instead of conjugating the verb to show tense, They use certain particles, In Jamaican Patwah, For example, "Mi run" means "I run", "Mi a run" means "I am running", "Mi did run" means "I have run", And "Mi go run" means "I will run". (Although take this with a grain of salt, I don't speak Patwah and mostly got this from Wikipedia.) I could imagine a future evolution of these to temporal pronouns by just contracting into the pronoun.
Tweak: "mi run" = "I ran", "mi a run" = "I run/am running". Here, Patwa is using aspect markers rather than temporal pronouns, so it's not exactly the same, but in the same vein.
@@peabody1976 Ah, Thank you!
@@peabody1976 Temporal pronouns are nothing more than just previous aspect/tense particles (or auxiliaries) that merged with the preceding pronouns until they formed a single, inseparable lexical unit with them. Kind of like how English has 'I'mma' and 'we'll'.
2:23 actually, I'd argue that it does work exactly like that. If you have a contracted pronoun where the auxiliary is prosodically depend on the pronoun, that would be a grammaticalization process. Granted, both "I am going to" and "Imma" exist in today's English. However, during this process, it is normal to have two forms at the same time for a period of time; i.e. the grammaticalized and "un"grammaticalized construction used side by side for a while. The process of course continues by deleting one of these in the future in favour of the other. As a side note: if you look at English diachronically, then it would be interesting to look at Wolof diachronically as well; what are the historic reasons for there to be this feature in Wolof? Maybe even similarly grammaticalized as in English?
I remember finding out about Wolof from a musician, got me interested in Senegalese culture/language. I'm going to try and learn the language now to a fuller extent.
:)
I’ve definitely used “Im go” to describe a willingness to participate in the next round of a game. It’s also used in the “Mission Control” lingo where for example “FIDO GO” spoken by the Flight Dynamics Officer means that he is willing to continue with the flight. If he were to replace that by pronoun, it would also conceivably be “IM GO”. Contraction -> pronoun :^)
In movies for rocket launches you'll often hear "we are go for launch" which is similar to what you're talking about. I'd argue it's not an example of what he's talking about though. We are go = "We are ready" not "we are going".
pretty sure that use of go in "I'm go" or "we are go for launch" ir just an adjective use not a verb lol
If tense marking is on the pronouns, then what about sentences that have actual nouns as subjects🤔
I am not fluent in Wolof, so please correct me if I'm wrong - but in the reading I've done a pronoun has either usually been included after the noun or tense seems to be simply omitted like in a tenseless language? I'd love any insight you might have on the topic.
@@kklein Thanks for the reply! That sounds quite reasonable. I'm afraid I don't know anything on the subject; I was just curious.
@@kklein makes sense.
so in english it's: "subject + verb declined for tense"
and in wolof : "subject + 3rd person pronoun declined for tense + verb"
did i get it right?
@@kklein This sounds like a programming language. Functions (actions) stay the same, but we can differentiate variables (nouns) by their types (conjugation): integers, characters, etc.
This topic is close to my heart. Back in the day I designed a conlang around the idea of marking tense on the pronoun instead of the verb (because I had always thought it makes just as much sense), and I felt validated when I learned that some real languages actually do that. It doesn't get talked about nearly often enough in linguistic circles. The only good reason I can think of for why languages almost always mark tense on verbs is that it's simpler when phrases in different times are conjugated, as in "I am on my way and will be there soon."
'Bout to send this video to people who complains about using a word (them) that already exists commonly in the english language
On that note, why do we consider some things separate words and other things modifications of words? If you listen to someone who speaks a language fluently, you'll hear them mash together half the words, remove some letters and add in a few to make it flow better. And yet we say most of that's separate words.
i love these wildly different types of grammar in different languages but also at the fundamentals they are all similar
I would like to just say that I greatly appreciate that you've used te appropriate quotation marks *and* spacing for the verb table. It's a small, nerd thing, but it makes me very happy when people care about such things and get them right.
Just discovered this channel and binge-watched all your videos great stuff man
3:51 According to a video on vowels in Wolof released by Mor Gueye, the e with an accent (é) is actually like the French é while the normal e is pronounced like the a in apple.
Maybe some sources don‘t include it because Wolof speakers can guess the pronounciation since they recognise the words. If I‘m not mistaken many people also use a normal e in Russian instead of ë. Maybe it‘s similar and people just omit the accent on the e.
(I‘m not a Wolof speaker, so this is just my assumptions, based on Gueye‘s video)
Banana (0:20) is not limited geographically in Spanish, but semantically, at least in European and prestige varieties. A distinction is made between Canarian bananas (commonly referred to as "plátano", a different cultivar with a smaller size and stronger taste), average "banana" for the other varieties. The compound term "plátano macho" also exists and refer to another cultivar of large bananas that are typically fried.
Great video. Both informative, nicely presented, and containing little details that are meaningful (English flag for English, not British or American), Singapore/South Africa and other places for recognised dialects of English, etc. Thank you!
(no macron on my keyboard sorry) It is so cute the Old English Past of "gan" because "eode" kind of rhymes with Spanish/Portuguese "ido" meaning gone and I'm sure it's a coincidence but I love it.
I usually write "Ima" not "imma," and I think you should too, if you wanna follow your own suggested rules about double consonants for short vowels. Wouldn't "imma" be with a short-I (/ɪ/) sound?
Most people spell it "imma"
@@Moses_VII I actually do spell I’ma, so I don’t know how true that is. It might more of a 50-50 thing, or me and OP are illiterate
It’s spelled imma because there are two syllables: im and ma.
That's why I spell it "I'mma", where it's clear that it's "I'm".
But it's a pretty new word, so it has a few spellings and I don't think any is considered "standard"
Personally, not really backed up by anything but just a general feel from what i've heard and used myself "Imma" would be to say "i am going to (do something)" whereas "Ima" feels more like "I am a (insert profession or state of being)"
i.e. "Imma go to the store today"
"What do you do these days?" "Ima doctor"
This really blew my mind, I already love your channel, I would love like a "crash course" for all the types of pronouns there is, or maybe even all types of verbs or all types of cases in languages, hehe being idelistic here but I'm just so excited for your channel
It reminds me of how in Quantum Mechanics, you can actually chose whether the state of the system (Schrödinger Picture) or the operators acting on the system (Heisenberg Picture) evolve with time. Also, some weird in between exist (like the "Interaction Picture").
Not saying there is quantum mysticism bullshit linking the two, but just that I guess it doesn't surprise me that much that you can choose what evolves with time. It's just convention after all !
i shouldve paid more attention in the class ;-; i dont remember this
*Sakurai flashbacks* also different pictures are useful depending on the situation
Thanks for this video, I'm so happy that you talk about it much love from Senegal.
This is some quality content!
idk why this got recommended 2 me buuut i like ur voice and how you edited this video! great work :-)
My guess is that it is because you are lgbtq or an ally, I am trans and it got recommended to me as well. I think it might be youtube connecting pronouns with lgbtq content as like a key phrase, so things with 'pronouns' in the title might be recommended more often to lgbtq people. Either way I agree with you, its a cool video and I learned something new. They also have a nice voice😄
@@adelaide7822 possibly. that’s so silly, but im glad i got this video! it’s so interesting and it seems like they care a lot about the subject
@@lgbtqiarights yeah it is, but same. I think they do, they like languages.
@@adelaide7822 btw they go by they/them check their bio
@@katiedaniels9803 oh ok, thanks for telling me, I changed it.
This actually makes perfect sense. Literally never thought about it.
This kinda reminds me of the "catalyst" / "auxiliary" words in some Central Australian languages - a unique closed class of words separate from the verb that conjugate for subject, object and sometimes tense, but don't really mean anything on their own lexically.
Btw while latin had a future tense it did not stay in romance languages as vowel shifts made it indistinguishable from past imperfect. Rather, current romance languages that dont seem to use an auxillary for the future have just merged it. For example where the future of "to go" in sardinian is "at a andai" (lit: has to go) in italian it's "andrà" which actually is the contraction of "andare ha" (lit: to go has)
Thanks for this great explanation of temporal pronouns. I ran into this when I lived in Sierra Leone, and I was learning Mende, a Mande language. I don’t remember seeing the technical term “temporal pronouns “. It definitely makes a bit more sense now!
0:49 I really like how you used the correct quotes for each of the languages
I had the idea to use temporal pronouns for a conlang before watching this, or even knowing the name of them lol
Very cool to find out about a language that uses them
My linguistics teacher in college was a native Wolof speaker, and he actually taught us a few Wolof words both as a good linguistics example and as a way to show some Wolof words that have been borrowed into English due to contact with west African people.
I think we hv the same in my native language chishona in Zimbabwe
It's always a question of perspective.
Those pronouns, the ones in Wolof, the ones in standard English, the one in non standard English could be variously interpreted as prefixes, preverbs, or even a normal conjugation, one that takes place in front of the verb instead of after.
You should check out papiamentu where the verb stays the same and there’s a separate word to mark tense
We call it a ‘partikulo’ in Papiamentu
This content is so f good, I can't believe I'm the only one commenting this. Keep up the good work!
2:55 And that last remaining 3rd person singular present form is already gone in AAVE. I suspect other English varieties will eventually drop it too.
Talking about verbs that change depending on time, lead to rather tense discussions ;)
Man I miss Old English conjugation.
1st-per-Ind.Past Ic Eode... Man is it good that all the Germanic languages just decided to drop the Indicative Past and subjunctive past completely.
Me, German: **pointedly minding my own business**
African American Vernacular English (AAVE/Ebonics) differs in that I'm goning to/gonna = I'm/Ah'm gon go, and Imma go = Ah'm on go, preserving the "o" and "n" of of "going". the "on" becomes a nasal "o" befrore consonants and has the liaison effect before a vowel. I did not represent it in my writing becasue I am responding on computer and too lazy to change the keyboard LOL
You should make a video on Turkish. Vowel harmony, aggluttinative nouns, coverbs, evidentiality… lots of ground to cover.
Awesome videos btw
Programming languages like C++ or Java seem to do this. Functions (verbs) stay the same, but we can differentiate variables (nouns) by their types (conjugation): integers, characters, etc.
I wouldn't consider it conjugation because you still write the same name. Unless you use something like Fortran 77 or Hungarian notation where the spelling of a variable name depends on its type.
@@RalphInRalphWorld Thanks! If you don't use Hungarian notation, you still need to remember the type of your variable, and strongly-typed languages complain if the type is wrong, like people complain about a grammatical error. Anyways, it's not a great comparison, but I do think there's a reason programming languages are called languages.
The Present Continuous at 3:05 is just JarJar/Gungan English lol
fascinating. any good (english) sites to learn wolof online? I've got one wolof speaking family member I'd like to surprise.
In fact, when you look at wider spoken English (formal, but with contractions), you could definitely argue the language has temporal pronouns, though to a limited extent at the moment: he, he'll, he'd are a few examples. And in speech we co-conjugate the pronouns and the verb in other cases. He's speaking; He's spoken.
I can definitely see a future where the verb speak is conjugated formally as:
He speak
He's spoke
He spoke
He's speakin
He'sa speak
He'll speak
He'd speak
In that case the temporal pronouns are arguably AS important as the temporal verbs.
He'd've spoken
interesting, do they conjugate noun-subjects as well as pronouns for tense as well?
Yes! Let's please drop the English third person special verb forms, they are only used for the third person!
Wow! I have never heard of this! I love languages and never heard of this.
The same with Éwondo, spoken in Central Cameroon. They are all Banu languages. Another feature of Bantu languages as far as I know is the lack of words for colors. Instead they say "in the color of". In Yoruba, spoken in Nigeria, English loanwords were introduced to name colors.
although all of these languages are of the overall Niger-Congo family, only Ewondo is a Bantu language. Yoruba and Wolof are both of different branches of the overall language phylum. This is also not a standard feature of Bantu languages. I dont know enough about Ewondo to comment on that one, but this kind of pronoun declension doesn't occur in the major southern Bantu languages like Xhosa or Swahili.
Japanese has temporal adjectives so this isn't a super foreign concept to me but still super cool! Thanks for the video.
In Japanese, i-adjectives belong in the same syntactic category as stative verbs, and they're both quite different from pronouns, which are syntactically nouns. It's just that in English (and many other languages), adjectives tend to behave syntactically like nouns and require a copula to form a complete predicate.
I'm glad I discovered this channel before it becomes famous.
My favorite English auxiliary verb is "mm"
This is interesting, I've always heard "Imma get going" and not "Imma go" coming from central US (Colorado English).
You are correct when you point out that “Imma go” is a contraction of “I am going to go,” with “Imma” specifically taking the place of “I am going to.” However, when you break it down, “…a” is not a preposition. In the case “to” gets tucked into “Imma,” but “to” is part of the verb, “to go,” not a preposition.
I think that's debatable. For example, as a response to a question, you wouldn't say "I'm going." you'd say "I'm going to". It's kind of a similar use of "to" as "I'll see to it".
@@philipr10 In the phrase “I’m going to,” probably the complete verb is left out. Context would tell you what specifically you are going to do, but you’re going to something, and “to something” is the full two-word verb, even if context allows you to leave it out (in which case “to leave” is a verb, and “out” is a preposition because English doesn’t have separable prefix verbs like other Germanic languages do). If, however, the phrase were “I’m going to the store,” then “to” would be a preposition.
as L2 speaker i find the concept of tense in english is quite messy, would it be perfect if the tense is not about variations of verbs but with analytical component added in the sentence?
like chinese languages tend to do. so instead of "i went home 6pm yesterday" , make it "i go home 6PM YESTERDAY", the time is the analytical part. or from "i was at home" to "i at home at the time"
Exceptional video.
ok this video got me thinking about somthing
how do you actually write contractions, the one that got me thinking about this is "I am going to" which theoretically can be written 4 ways
Imma/Ima : no signifyer as to wheather it is a contraction
I'mma/I'ma : acording to some dude on reddit this is how oxford does it and personally makes the most sense 'cause it establistes that it is a contraction, but doesnt feel clunky to use.
I'm'a : I would say this is probably the most technicaly correct as It signifies its a contraction of three words
EXCEPT those its actually a contraction of another contraction.
Gunna is a contraction wich breakes the rules of traditional english vocabulary and it thus informal, so should there be an ' in gunna to? Creating I'm''a wich, just looks and feels wrong or should that also be ignored.
“Heesa/Sheesa go” is so cursed
Wolof is used as the lingua franca in Gambia as well.
it makes so much sense!!
Id love to see more coverage on sub- Saharan languages.
0:20 Serious question here why is the common etymology for most food names of West African origin listed as through Spanish when the English speaking Caribbean also uses those words and have a plethora of other food words that haven't been widely adopted into English that are of West African origin and are often times much closer on pronunciation in the creole languages to the English word than the English word is to the Spanish word. Surely it should at least be contested for some of these that they got them directly from Africans through the English creoles no? Yet as a Jamaican I've never seen a single word that's not stated as from X west African language through Spanish. I'd be interested to know if there's a reason why the Spanish claim is more valid
So... why is your English occasionally rhotic? Is it influence from a local UK rhotic dialect substrate? Or have you lived in America?
2:32 I notice you pronounce the /r/ in "verb" quite often (also a little in "futuRe")
Have you moved to a rhotic country or something? Your accent sounds like you grew up in England but that /r/ has to be coming from somewhere
English can also code for future in its pronouns in another way using , I’ll, we’ll, you’ll, they’ll he’ll , although sometimes this is to show future volition
No; the pronouns there don't code for tense. The 'll is a clitic which is a different thing from the pronoun.
@@rosiefay7283 I’d argue theirs no meaningful distinction between a clitic and an inflection… people often call the person markers in Italian and Spanish clitics and I don’t think anyone would argue that habla and Hablo are different. The only reason they are distinguished in English is that they use apostrophes… but even then that’s not consistent because so do possessives like a cat’s toe… but yet most would consider that a possessive word… one may also use the “Contraction” argument, which’s is where the origin of the distinction comes from, but that argument also doesn’t make much since considering we don’t discount non apostrophe contractions from being separate words like toenail or lungfish or always or whatever or whatsoever
I love the way you think
I'm not sure it's so unprobable that some future English dialects could lose verb conjugates to some extent. You already even see it to some extent in a lot of slang (I go, you go, she go, he go, they go etc. are quite common in place of goes for humorous effect). And after all, slang is where the new lang comes from (when said lang is not being forcefully inserted by elitists at least). I honestly view it as a real possibility to become a natural part of some dialects in the future.
So how does Wolof deal with tenses when the subject is a noun? Does it just adds pronoun too or does the noun get declined for tense? And are temporal variations used for pronouns as objects as well as subjects?
Didn’t Panini sit down and literally wrote the grammar for Sanskrit, though? After all, that’s what “Sanskrit” means: “perfected.”
No. There are constructed languages, but Sanskrit is not one of them.
There is a degree of construction and prescriptivism involved in the creation of evolution of almost all languages - but that does not mean that someone sat down and made all the grammar in one go. Yes, this did happen with Esperanto or Ido etc, as I'm fully aware, but most spoken languages did not evolve from a single instance of construction.
I'm pretty sure he just wrote down the patterns he saw. He didn't "make them up from scratch" as K Klein said.
well the oldest sanskrit texts are the rigvedas from around 1200 bc i think. at this time sanskrit was a native spoken language and like any other language it changed with time and by the mid 1st millenium bc it had disintegrated into multiple languages or closely related dialects called "prakrit"s.
however since sanskrit was a religious and "sacred" language it didn't change too much in it's non-colloquial religious ceremony form. plus it had many poems so it had to be kept the same for rhythm purposes. so from the rigvedas until panini the spoken sanskrit changed over time like other languages but the sanskrit that was used by priests and stuff didnt change too much and was very archaic, however since it was not a written language and only preserved orally, it was still prone to some change, plus it would occasionally get influenced by the colloquial spoken sanskrit of the time.
panini sat down and made a standard out of the "ceremonial sanskrit" of his time so the language of prestige would never change and be the same everywhere, and did this by pinning down it's rules, and maybe changed things here and there who knows.
however im not too sure about this and some of what i said are guesses so take it with a grain of salt
I think its cool and fair to say that "Imma" is a temporal pronoun. It went from a pronoun and semi-conjugated verb to just a temporal pronoun. Thats cool. And is correct since theres no such thing as incorrect and English doesnt have an official language regulator.
The preposition of only having to remember a couple dozen pronoun variations instead of thousands of irregular verb forms sounded really nice right until the inevitable mention of exceptions.
Tenses in English are definitely changing. The past participle is on the way out. 'I have went' is only years away from getting added to the oxford dictionary. (only slightly exaggerating here.)
I have gone... Sorry just had to write the correct form as my OCD grammar nazi mindset took over.
I disagree. We use the past participle with other verbs and based on personal preference or situation, it is still common. "I have went" happens to be an awkward phrase to say and doesn't prove that past participles are going anyway.
@@sparda11 I was obviously exaggerating. But the tendency is accelerating in an alarming way. I also observe the past tense being used in constructions where common grammar rules ask for the infinitive. (can't think of an example right now.)
Such things creep in. First they are frowned upon, then shrugged off, then accepted. And they may take over.
@@HotelPapa100 An interesting piece of writing advice I got from more than one published author was to use phrasing like "I had gone" as little as possible- and not at all if I can help it. Instead I was told to always simplify the sentence to "I went", the regular past tense. And I noticed- at least in the US where I live- I rarely ever hear people actually using "I had gone" or any verb in that tense. I can imagine us just dropping it completely fairly soon. Adding phrases to further distunguish the specific time frame can get around the need for it anyway
@@misteryA555 The plu-perfect has very special uses. You only use it when you want to express that something took place before the timeline in the past that you are currently narrating. (That's what 'plusquamperfect' means in Latin: 'more than done').As such, it's not so much a case of it falling out of use but there rarely being a necessitiy to use it.
fun fact: The respective tense in German is used in some dialects (Rhineland) as a regular past tense. (In most German dialects the tense usually employed to talk about things in the past is the perfect; it's quite hard for German speakers to follow the rather rigid usage rules for the perfect in English.)
I've jokingly said that the warmer the climate and the more food, the more time people have to sit down and make complicated grammar. This and other examples makes me wonder if I'm right :-P
I actually have thoughts like that on my conlang. Maybe I have to put it anyway
I remember I tried making a conlang a few years ago with this very concept. Then abandoned it because I'm lazy.
Banana is actually Arabic which is from
Banan al-mawz
بنان الموز
Which means the “mawz =banana” “banan=finger”
Been watchin a lot of your videos today and I really like the content, but man your visuals go way too fast sometimes. I'll be watching normally and it'll be fine n all, when suddenly you'll show an entirely new visual for like half a second, forcing me to rewind and pause if I want to even process what it was. This is perfectly fine to do every once in a while, but I feel like I see it in every video. Still like the videos though; they give me vague Xidnaf vibes
English verbs have been moving from synthetic conjugations to analytical constructions for centuries now. This could be the logical outcome.
English two hundred years from now:
ai run (I run)
aim run (I'm running)
ail run (I'll run)
ailbi run (I'll be running)
ailiv run (I will have run)
ailivbin run (I will have been running)
aid run (I would run)
aidbi run (I would be running)
aida run (I would have run)
aidabin run (I would have been running)
aiv run (I've run)
aivbin run (I've been running)
aiad run (I had run)
aiadbin run (I had been running)
aiz run (I was running)
aima run (I'm going to run)
aizona run (I was going to run)
etc...
At 3:06, I think you're steering dangerously close to Jar Jar Binks speech
Turns out something from my conlang actually exists
The future in English definitelly works this way:
I'll go --> /ail gou/
You'll go --> /jul gou/
he'll go --> /hil gou/
we'll go --> /wil gou/
they'll go --> /dheil gou/
And the present perfect is a combination of tem but ith a different verbal form:
I've gone --> /aiv gon/
You've gone --> /juv gon/
He's gone --> /hiz gon/
We've gone --> /wiv gon/
They've gone --> /dheiv gon/
true but i feel like wolof speakers might have a different "sense" of it. like when i think of /ail/ (im not a native english speaker tho) im imagining a verb right in front of it, in other words i never think of /ail/ on itself but only in context. but maybe when wolof speakers think of their own word for /ail/ they are imagining themselves in the future without thinking about any verb, its just a guess tho idk.
but outside of this "what comes to my mind when i think of a word" and in terms of grammar i think theyre exactly the same
Now change it to a question: “will I go?” Doesn’t work anymore, does it? ;)
@@HD-dq9kr wilai
wilju
wilhi
@@HD-dq9kr You can use tone rather than how words are ordered to convey questions, like Spanish
@@gammarayneutrino8413 A lot of English speakers already do that to a degree(including myself)
id say amount and time. Like y'all vs Ye mean the same but are different origins and generally used in different contexts
You expect a conservative church leader to use ye, as in "Abandon All Hope, Ye who enter here"
Ye is a defunct plural "you"
While you'd expect a lower class rural American to use "y'all"
Y'all is a contraction/conjugation of "you all"
I mean, its not the same, but English does have a small sense of pronoun tense. i.e. the formal Ye, informal Y'all; similar to Middle English with Thou vs You, The vs Thee
still very much european though. i mean, romance languages do that all the time
A better example would probably be youse. At least where I live youse and y’all are used all the time
Ladies and gentlemen, Xidnaf is back! And he's turned British...
This is so damn cool
my head is hurting from all this knowledge im gaining
I've literally never heard anyone use the word "Imma." Is this British terminology?
No it's African American in origin but it spread to other countries
I use _Imma_ all the time
use it all the time in the pacific northwest
3:05 If you have "heesa" and "sheesa" then that means the 1st person should be "meesa", even if just for the Jar Jar memes.
Before watching the video, I am reminded of how contractions between pronouns and verbs can serve a similar purpose, such as I’m vs I’ll vs I’d.
Hausa, of a different language family, does the same thing too.
could you please elaborate more on the topic of "tones in African languages"?
it sounds interesting because Chinese languages also have tones
also, I wonder if climate or temperature (or etc.) can affect the existence of tones in the languages?
sometimes I think it is easier to distinguish tones in colder places than in the hotter ones...
this feature of Wolof is actually really interesting, and quite cool. idk much tbh, but theoretically, it'd allow for far easier grammar by doing away with those verb conjugations, which are dependent on the verb and instead just using the same set of pronoun conjugations. and if those pronoun conjugations follow a good ruleset, it'd make for a simple yet flexible language (though it could become complicated very quickly)
3:35 Hey you didn'r show Penghripusch the fictional language I made
0/10 video 😤 insta report
jokes aside thats pretty cool, what is it like
@@mahatmaniggandhi2898 It's like French mixed by Arabic, but it really sounds like Greek or Portuguese (Pronouciation)
@@tunistick8044 (0_0;)
Where on the spectrum does "Imma get going" fit
Am I crazy or is the spanish word for banana "guineo" and not "banana"?
Or "Plátano" if you're a square
imma go watch another k klein video now
♡♡♡
good
Damn, I like that.
So, this is not about Peter and the Wolof?