A lot of effort and money is invested to deprive us even of that, and I am sure they will charge through the nose for the privilege.... Just to show how selfish people are.
One of my favourite examples of aktionsart interacting with other aspects of a language's grammar comes from Qiang. State or activity verbs become accomplishment or achievement verbs with the addition of a directional prefix, which are also used for marking direction of action/movement in other contexts. Which directional prefix is used for this is lexically specified by the verb itself, and often draws on its semantics. To turn the state “be big” into an accomplishment “become big” the “upwards” prefix is used, while to turn “be small” into “become small” the downwards prefix is used.
@@whatno5090 Oooh good thinking! this made me curious what prefix the Qiang activity verb for eat takes to turn it into an accomplishment. Turns out it's the one for downstream movement.
This will make it a lot easier for my ESL students to grasp why we don't use some verbs in the continuous tenses (Stative/Non-progressive verbs)... Thanks Taylor ❤
Where the heck were you, Dr. Language Jones, when I was in high school? I caught the language bug as a teenager, and the morphology of languages trips a trigger I hadn’t known that I have. But nobody explained how or why aspect and tense can be combined. Since I learned Spanish as my first foreign language, my poor young semi-hispanophone ass wandered into French and Italian looking for “going to” constructions and praeterites, only to find that they NEVER SAY I DID it! They only usually say I’ve done it. Spanish and English have both, so WTF? I’m 41 now, and you’ve elucidated things that make that still unnatural passé composé construction make sense to me. May the gods bless you, and I love the hand drumming in your intro and outro.
I somehow find this both fascinating and utterly inane. Like, the insight is good but, when the hell would I _EVER_ need to know this outside of talking with fellow language geeks?
I was just about to type the semelfactive -le suffix. Drip vs dribble. We should juk, gurk and wik things. Do bobble-heads bop if their head sways just once? This is of course silly but i came to have fun
Greetings Jones! I am glad to have found your channel. I thought your video on pronouns was brave, and I really do like your angles and argumentation. I think the internet needs more of this! I was wondering if you will be diving into bigger historical topics of linguistics, such as universal grammar by Chomsky? Indeterminacy of translation by Quine? The down-to-earth way you treat your subject matter makes for a great foundation in communicating about such potentially heavy and misunderstood topics. I very much respect your choice in aiming for a niche audience, but allowing for topics that is in the cross-section of linguistics, philosophy, logic and mathematics might help your channel grow to that which it deserves. I am sure there are plenty of curious souls out there yet to find this gold! Keep on the good work!
Still batting 1.000 when providing examples. My usual viewing pattern is, "Huh?" followed by an "Ooooooohhh! OK...got it." It's a great skill (talent?)!
I really appreciate that! I always loved textbooks and teachers who had memorable examples, so it means a lot to hear you say I'm succeeding with that.
An EFL teacher here. I discuss language with my more advanced students. Great stuff to chew on. I'm reading The Loom of Language, which has also been an interesting ride.
Your presentation style reminds me of the guy from What You Ought To Know. They don't post anything anymore but you might be able to see the similarities with the beginning of this video and that guy's stuff
@@languagejones6784 Man, that episode was intriguing at the time, and it fell to pieces pretty badly in hindsight, and stayed that way for decades, but there was a pretty good talk about it last year in r/DaystromInstitute, that redeemed it for me. I feel like I've written this comment before. Apologies if so. Option 1: They have a language for direct description, but it's hideously verbose, like speaking in Natural Semantic Metalanguage all the time. Option 2: They have a language for direct description, but it's culturally inappropriate to talk that way to anyone but little kids. Addressing it to Picard would be hugely insulting to his capacity for culture and nuance. Option 3: Descriptions like "Shaka, when the walls fell" really are as far as their interest in compositional semantics goes. The scene, not the proposition, is the unit of meaning they are oriented to; the myth isn't retold, but reenacted (and, over time, of course, gets reconsidered, reinterpreted, refocused, reformed). Possibly in the Tamarian mind there's no mere allusion to a myth, only less and more detailed performance of it, and for that matter no mere performance of it, only less and more thorough partaking in it. (Sacraments ... sacraments everywhere!)
Unknowingly, you've just improved my understanding of Portuguese significantly. I could never understand these things when I was in school. I just learned how to use them without caring about how grammar would classify them.
I've recently started studying Mandarin Chinese because I've always wanted to, no for any other reason. I laughed the other day as you were talking about Duolingo and the Mandarin just rolled off your tongue. While I'm proficient in some aspects of pronunciation, at other times I feel like I've been tasked with sorting a dozen marbles by size, in my mouth. I really enjoy your content and languages have always been a hobby of mine. I get my geek on when I read or discover the etiology of a certain word or phrase. Kudos! 👍❤️💪
I enjoy your videos. Thank you. When I was checking out the first video of yours that I found I kept watching because on the shelf behind you I saw the Maigret book next to the pipe! It was a clever way to get Simenon fans curious! If you haven’t read AlexanderMcall Smith’s Portuguese Irregular Verbs series you may enjoy! Clever and quirky!
So, is the inventory of lexical aspects mappable to verbal aspects? Like, Mandarin has a durative aspect marker "-著", but I've only ever heard them in contexts with verbs that would probably also be regarded as durative lexically.
"... only ever heard [著] in contexts with verbs that would probably be regarded as durative lexically." Hmmm... Can you elaborate a little bit on this please? I'm not sure I'm seeing what you're seeing. Let's look at a simple example of: 他穿衣服 compared with 他穿著衣服 "He put on clothes." vs "He is wearing clothes." It seems to me that adding the durative aspect marker "著" to the verb 穿 is what makes it durative. Without 著, it doesn't seem durative to me. Admittedly, durative is a new concept for me to think about, so maybe I'm just thinking about it wrong? Here's another example using the verb 掛 (hang): 昨天他把地圖掛在牆上。 "Yesterday, he hung the map on the wall." compared with 牆上掛著一幅地圖。 "A map hung on the wall." It seems to me that you need to have 著 with the verb 掛 (hang) makes it durative. In the example without 著, it doesn't feel durative to me.
Thus far, I'm still surprised how many German phrases are international in linguistics, e.g. "Aktionsart". We pronounce the "-tion" more like a "Z" sound though, so say "-zion" or "-zjon" when "-tion" is written, because we got that suffix from Latin.
Would it be possible to pin a comment with references and further reading? I had already heard about Vendler and even Comrie's ideas but Moens and Steadman's system was new to me and I'd like to know where I can find out more.
I wish you would at least provide a list of your references in the description, links to books - as you've done before - are excellent, but at least a list.
4:23 very minor point but this is the first time i realised that my language also 'is happying' while english 'is happy', despite having personally translated quite a few texts quite an achievement
i'm sorry, what are the technical definitions of activity, achievement, and accomplishment? i'm kinda stoned so it would be nice to have a little text overlay with all 3 definitions at once, or maybe an annotation
Why is this video in 360p? I was wondering what's wrong with the focusing but it's nothing, it's just really small originally. You got me paused here. Sure, 'находить' is an incomplete verb, but we are using it the same as you'd use "I'm finding", e.g. figuratively. You won't answer seriously to the question 'Have you found that UBS cable yet?' - "I'm still finding it!", though that sounds like a good joke to me. You can say "I find this odd" and that's the way you'd use imperfect "находить" too.
Leaving a comment for the algorithm and asking for book recommendations to dive deeper. I did some googling and found the reading list of r/linguistics, but it feels a little bit overwhelming. I find the content on the channel interesting. Any opinions on where to start off?
Absolutely! For a general introduction, I've been recommending this textbook, which is new, comprehensive, and affordable ("Introducing Linguistics" amazon affiliate link: amzn.to/3lXp272). For this specific topic, my introduction was "introducing semantics" (amazon affiliate link: amzn.to/3Zw1lQQ). Semantics is actually not my main area of research interest or expertise, and I found this to be a very clear introduction.
@@languagejones6784 Thanks! Another book by Culpeper "Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence" sounds like a great read to be armed on the internet. See you on the next one...
0:29. I had to hit the replay button at this point because I wasn't watching the screen and didn't understand what you were saying. It was only when I saw the writing that I understood it. I am a speaker of German. The word "Aktionsart" is not pronounced the way you said it, but like this [akˈtsi̯oːnsʔaːɐ̯t] with the stress on the second syllable and specifically on the "o". It is composed of the of the German word "Aktion" (action) and the word "art", which means "type", with a linking "s" to denote a kind of genitive, so the whole compound word means "type of action". Pronouncing it the way you did renders the word incomprehensible to German speakers, I'm afraid.
Weird. What about if a person drowned, but THEN was rescued and through a combination of CPR and pumping oxygen into the blood, even though they technically flat-lined, were brought back to life? They actually DID drown - but it was reversed?
As a German, I still have trouble wrapping my head around how exactly to use Simple Past vs Present Perfect in English. I don't think we really have an imperfective perfective distinction in German. We use words that would make you think that we have the distinction when we describe our grammar, but it really doesn't work like that.
The imperfective perfective distinction in German is not as definitive as in English but one thing that helped me was using imperfective when I would use "frueher" in German. Doesn't capture every case but it helped
Honestly, American English kind of blurs their uses (allowing Simple Past to take a lot of what would historically have been said with the Present Perfect). It was confusing for me -- a native English speaker -- when I first studied it
Another partly useful guideline: With present perfect, you really are trying to talk about how things are at present. You are only mentioning the past because of how it created the present. With simple past you are talking about the past for its own sake.
Commenting for the ælgorithm. I've always hated when grammar textbooks make verb exceptions on tenses and aspects. Like the verb "seem" in present continuous. I love lingüistics but man what a way to overcomplicate second language learning. One more point in favor of immersion.
"Schmushing" implies an act of compression. When you speak of "schmushing across time", you're expressing an internally inconsistent action. "Schmearing across time" might better express the idea.
2 minutes in and you completely lost me already. Once you start throwing terms, in your speedy speach, it turns into mush and my brain just zones out. Playing at 0,75 speed helps a little bit, but I am not interested enough, I guess. And I am a complete language nut. Never mind! Going to do my Finnish lessons and Russian repeats now :)
The unhinged eyes and yelling is not how German people usually speak. Please stop perpetuating lazy American stereotypes. The split in Aktionsart is Aktions-art not Aktion-sart. The is a solid pause between the nouns in this compound. It is not a race to the finish.
I can't understand a single point Dr. Jones makes, but somehow this is my favorite channel at the moment
I had an idea like this in my head but never knew it existed. Thank you.
Study linguistics. This’ll happen all the time, which is so cool. Plus you’ll learn about stuff languages do that would never have occurred to you.
It's good to know that we'll all manage to eventually achieve something. After all, death is inevitable.
A lot of effort and money is invested to deprive us even of that, and I am sure they will charge through the nose for the privilege.... Just to show how selfish people are.
One of my favourite examples of aktionsart interacting with other aspects of a language's grammar comes from Qiang. State or activity verbs become accomplishment or achievement verbs with the addition of a directional prefix, which are also used for marking direction of action/movement in other contexts. Which directional prefix is used for this is lexically specified by the verb itself, and often draws on its semantics. To turn the state “be big” into an accomplishment “become big” the “upwards” prefix is used, while to turn “be small” into “become small” the downwards prefix is used.
this is similar to english, what with "eat up" (though interestingly the counterexample "chow down" also exists) and "plow down"
@@whatno5090 Oooh good thinking! this made me curious what prefix the Qiang activity verb for eat takes to turn it into an accomplishment. Turns out it's the one for downstream movement.
For your algorithm, I thought including Poe's "The Raven" was a nice touch :-)
Me too.
This will make it a lot easier for my ESL students to grasp why we don't use some verbs in the continuous tenses (Stative/Non-progressive verbs)... Thanks Taylor ❤
Where the heck were you, Dr. Language Jones, when I was in high school? I caught the language bug as a teenager, and the morphology of languages trips a trigger I hadn’t known that I have. But nobody explained how or why aspect and tense can be combined. Since I learned Spanish as my first foreign language, my poor young semi-hispanophone ass wandered into French and Italian looking for “going to” constructions and praeterites, only to find that they NEVER SAY I DID it! They only usually say I’ve done it. Spanish and English have both, so WTF? I’m 41 now, and you’ve elucidated things that make that still unnatural passé composé construction make sense to me. May the gods bless you, and I love the hand drumming in your intro and outro.
I somehow find this both fascinating and utterly inane.
Like, the insight is good but, when the hell would I _EVER_ need to know this outside of talking with fellow language geeks?
I was just about to type the semelfactive -le suffix. Drip vs dribble. We should juk, gurk and wik things. Do bobble-heads bop if their head sways just once? This is of course silly but i came to have fun
Greetings Jones! I am glad to have found your channel. I thought your video on pronouns was brave, and I really do like your angles and argumentation. I think the internet needs more of this! I was wondering if you will be diving into bigger historical topics of linguistics, such as universal grammar by Chomsky? Indeterminacy of translation by Quine? The down-to-earth way you treat your subject matter makes for a great foundation in communicating about such potentially heavy and misunderstood topics. I very much respect your choice in aiming for a niche audience, but allowing for topics that is in the cross-section of linguistics, philosophy, logic and mathematics might help your channel grow to that which it deserves. I am sure there are plenty of curious souls out there yet to find this gold! Keep on the good work!
I will definitely be diving into UG soon! So many people are arguing past each other when talking about it
Still batting 1.000 when providing examples. My usual viewing pattern is, "Huh?" followed by an "Ooooooohhh! OK...got it." It's a great skill (talent?)!
I really appreciate that! I always loved textbooks and teachers who had memorable examples, so it means a lot to hear you say I'm succeeding with that.
I definitely thought the design on your sweatshirt was a yaasified Circle of Willis (the main blood supply of the brain) 😂😂
An EFL teacher here. I discuss language with my more advanced students. Great stuff to chew on. I'm reading The Loom of Language, which has also been an interesting ride.
I’m planning a video on that book. It got me into linguistics, but it’s also just a wild ride.
I'm a linguistics student and I'm enjoying your videos a lot!
watching your channel makes me nostalgic for undergrad
These are genius and after binging several episodes, I’m subscribed. Thank you for this!
Thank you!
Your content is phenomenal! You deserve way more subscribers, so here's the comment to entice the algorithm. Thank you!
Your presentation style reminds me of the guy from What You Ought To Know.
They don't post anything anymore but you might be able to see the similarities with the beginning of this video and that guy's stuff
Thank you so much!
I always assumed the channel avatar was 大 (dà), or as I call it, "ancient shaman, his arms wide."
TEMBE, HIS ARMS OUTSTRETCHED
Shaka, his eyes uncovered
@@languagejones6784 Man, that episode was intriguing at the time, and it fell to pieces pretty badly in hindsight, and stayed that way for decades, but there was a pretty good talk about it last year in r/DaystromInstitute, that redeemed it for me.
I feel like I've written this comment before. Apologies if so.
Option 1: They have a language for direct description, but it's hideously verbose, like speaking in Natural Semantic Metalanguage all the time.
Option 2: They have a language for direct description, but it's culturally inappropriate to talk that way to anyone but little kids. Addressing it to Picard would be hugely insulting to his capacity for culture and nuance.
Option 3: Descriptions like "Shaka, when the walls fell" really are as far as their interest in compositional semantics goes. The scene, not the proposition, is the unit of meaning they are oriented to; the myth isn't retold, but reenacted (and, over time, of course, gets reconsidered, reinterpreted, refocused, reformed). Possibly in the Tamarian mind there's no mere allusion to a myth, only less and more detailed performance of it, and for that matter no mere performance of it, only less and more thorough partaking in it. (Sacraments ... sacraments everywhere!)
You guys are nerds! 😁
Unknowingly, you've just improved my understanding of Portuguese significantly. I could never understand these things when I was in school. I just learned how to use them without caring about how grammar would classify them.
I've recently started studying Mandarin Chinese because I've always wanted to, no for any other reason. I laughed the other day as you were talking about Duolingo and the Mandarin just rolled off your tongue. While I'm proficient in some aspects of pronunciation, at other times I feel like I've been tasked with sorting a dozen marbles by size, in my mouth. I really enjoy your content and languages have always been a hobby of mine. I get my geek on when I read or discover the etiology of a certain word or phrase. Kudos! 👍❤️💪
Man, this was deep. I will have to watch it several times and work through each element in the two L2 in which I am relatively skilled.
fantastic video as always man
I appreciate that!
I enjoy your videos. Thank you. When I was checking out the first video of yours that I found I kept watching because on the shelf behind you I saw the Maigret book next to the pipe! It was a clever way to get Simenon fans curious!
If you haven’t read AlexanderMcall Smith’s Portuguese Irregular Verbs series you may enjoy! Clever and quirky!
Awesome! Thank you!
So, is the inventory of lexical aspects mappable to verbal aspects? Like, Mandarin has a durative aspect marker "-著", but I've only ever heard them in contexts with verbs that would probably also be regarded as durative lexically.
"... only ever heard [著] in contexts with verbs that would probably be regarded as durative lexically."
Hmmm... Can you elaborate a little bit on this please? I'm not sure I'm seeing what you're seeing.
Let's look at a simple example of:
他穿衣服 compared with 他穿著衣服
"He put on clothes." vs "He is wearing clothes."
It seems to me that adding the durative aspect marker "著" to the verb 穿 is what makes it durative. Without 著, it doesn't seem durative to me.
Admittedly, durative is a new concept for me to think about, so maybe I'm just thinking about it wrong?
Here's another example using the verb 掛 (hang):
昨天他把地圖掛在牆上。
"Yesterday, he hung the map on the wall."
compared with
牆上掛著一幅地圖。
"A map hung on the wall."
It seems to me that you need to have 著 with the verb 掛 (hang) makes it durative. In the example without 著, it doesn't feel durative to me.
Thus far, I'm still surprised how many German phrases are international in linguistics, e.g. "Aktionsart". We pronounce the "-tion" more like a "Z" sound though, so say "-zion" or "-zjon" when "-tion" is written, because we got that suffix from Latin.
I think you should clarify that in German stands for the voiceless affricate /ts/, rather than voiced /z/, like in English
Would it be possible to pin a comment with references and further reading? I had already heard about Vendler and even Comrie's ideas but Moens and Steadman's system was new to me and I'd like to know where I can find out more.
I have a suggestion for a future video: I walked in vs I went/came in walking, across languages, eg French which do it dfferently
Already in the works!
youre my hero dawg
I wish you would at least provide a list of your references in the description, links to books - as you've done before - are excellent, but at least a list.
4:23 very minor point but this is the first time i realised that my language also 'is happying' while english 'is happy', despite having personally translated quite a few texts
quite an achievement
thank you!
Welcome!
i'm sorry, what are the technical definitions of activity, achievement, and accomplishment? i'm kinda stoned so it would be nice to have a little text overlay with all 3 definitions at once, or maybe an annotation
Well I suppose you could say working is an activity, your work day or project is an achievement, and getting the job or retiring is an accomplishment.
So, if I "like" and "subscribe," those are achievements. If I "share," that's an accomplishment?
Isaid the same thing but nobody understood why. i laughed so hard
>cult where they sell T-shirts
>tries to sell me a hoodie
Lol
any chance you'll look at pragmatics with data? idk what to look at i just like learning more with you
Why is this video in 360p? I was wondering what's wrong with the focusing but it's nothing, it's just really small originally.
You got me paused here. Sure, 'находить' is an incomplete verb, but we are using it the same as you'd use "I'm finding", e.g. figuratively. You won't answer seriously to the question 'Have you found that UBS cable yet?' - "I'm still finding it!", though that sounds like a good joke to me. You can say "I find this odd" and that's the way you'd use imperfect "находить" too.
what's going on with constructions like 'we went a'saiilng? is the apostrophe elipsing something?
That a' is related to modern "on". Dutch still marks progressive with a structure like "I am on the eating".
Leaving a comment for the algorithm and asking for book recommendations to dive deeper. I did some googling and found the reading list of r/linguistics, but it feels a little bit overwhelming. I find the content on the channel interesting. Any opinions on where to start off?
Absolutely! For a general introduction, I've been recommending this textbook, which is new, comprehensive, and affordable ("Introducing Linguistics" amazon affiliate link: amzn.to/3lXp272). For this specific topic, my introduction was "introducing semantics" (amazon affiliate link: amzn.to/3Zw1lQQ). Semantics is actually not my main area of research interest or expertise, and I found this to be a very clear introduction.
@@languagejones6784 Thanks! Another book by Culpeper "Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence" sounds like a great read to be armed on the internet. See you on the next one...
Interesting
"¡viva la variacicod!"?
Commenting for the algorithm :)
I love your content, and this was interesting, but I was a bit put off by the slight blurriness of this video.
It will DEFINITELY be fixed in the next video. Autofocus issues.
7:01 Does fuit sound more like "he died" or "he was born" to you?
This is for you, algorithm
0:29. I had to hit the replay button at this point because I wasn't watching the screen and didn't understand what you were saying. It was only when I saw the writing that I understood it. I am a speaker of German. The word "Aktionsart" is not pronounced the way you said it, but like this [akˈtsi̯oːnsʔaːɐ̯t] with the stress on the second syllable and specifically on the "o". It is composed of the of the German word "Aktion" (action) and the word "art", which means "type", with a linking "s" to denote a kind of genitive, so the whole compound word means "type of action". Pronouncing it the way you did renders the word incomprehensible to German speakers, I'm afraid.
Weird. What about if a person drowned, but THEN was rescued and through a combination of CPR and pumping oxygen into the blood, even though they technically flat-lined, were brought back to life? They actually DID drown - but it was reversed?
Noam Chomsky is a linguist.
As a German, I still have trouble wrapping my head around how exactly to use Simple Past vs Present Perfect in English. I don't think we really have an imperfective perfective distinction in German. We use words that would make you think that we have the distinction when we describe our grammar, but it really doesn't work like that.
The imperfective perfective distinction in German is not as definitive as in English but one thing that helped me was using imperfective when I would use "frueher" in German. Doesn't capture every case but it helped
Honestly, American English kind of blurs their uses (allowing Simple Past to take a lot of what would historically have been said with the Present Perfect). It was confusing for me -- a native English speaker -- when I first studied it
Another partly useful guideline: With present perfect, you really are trying to talk about how things are at present. You are only mentioning the past because of how it created the present. With simple past you are talking about the past for its own sake.
Commenting for the ælgorithm. I've always hated when grammar textbooks make verb exceptions on tenses and aspects. Like the verb "seem" in present continuous. I love lingüistics but man what a way to overcomplicate second language learning. One more point in favor of immersion.
360p??
pizza.
"Schmushing" implies an act of compression. When you speak of "schmushing across time", you're expressing an internally inconsistent action.
"Schmearing across time" might better express the idea.
i'm sorry man I don't want to sound rude but, your camera is about as focused as I am in class
2 minutes in and you completely lost me already. Once you start throwing terms, in your speedy speach, it turns into mush and my brain just zones out. Playing at 0,75 speed helps a little bit, but I am not interested enough, I guess. And I am a complete language nut. Never mind! Going to do my Finnish lessons and Russian repeats now :)
You mispronounced Aktionsart. And stereotypically so, making it sound much harder, more shouty than it actually is.
I find it strange how many German words are adopted into linguistics, yet completely butcher the pronunciation.
The unhinged eyes and yelling is not how German people usually speak. Please stop perpetuating lazy American stereotypes. The split in Aktionsart is Aktions-art not Aktion-sart. The is a solid pause between the nouns in this compound. It is not a race to the finish.