Why linguists believe in invisible words - the story of zeros
Вставка
- Опубліковано 13 жов 2022
- Do languages have unspoken meaningful nothings? Grammatical ghosts? Syntactically significant silences? Linguists sure seem to think so. They've been writing zeros in their grammars for years. What are these nulls? Where do they come from? Are they really there?
Subscribe for more: ua-cam.com/users/subscription_...
Become my patron: / nativlang
Read my sources: docs.google.com/document/d/13...
~ Briefly ~
My animation tells the story of linguistic zeros. We'll see the evidence of their existence I've been collecting in my folder, then meet their proponents and their critics. By the end we'll aim to find good reasons for avoiding and for proposing zeros, depending on the people, the context and the cultures involved.
~ Credits ~
Art, animation, narration and music by me. All other credits in sources document above.
As a Dane, it's slightly confusing suddenly having to think of Ø as a zero.
Norwegian here. I agree.
I do not speak any languages with that letter and yet I always thought of it as an O with a dash through it.
They are actually different symbols: Ø (uppercase ø, o with dash) and ∅ (null morpheme), although I think some people just use _Ø_ for convenience.
@@maybeanonymous6846 Yes, and no. It's how you write that letter, yes, but it is its own letter in its own right, rather than a modified O.
I was going to ask how Danes do set theory, and turns out the symbol for the empty set there is ⦰ instead, according to Wikipedia
"sometimes its not a pizza with a null topping, its just bread" this is awesome
But sometimes, if indeed the bread was meant to have a topping, but it's missing, it's is pizza without a topping. Sometimes Italians intentionally make pizza bread without the topping. It's how you get focaccia. In some places it's called "pizza bianca." So when is it "just bread," and when is it topping-less pizza... 🤔
@@OsakaJoe01 maybe an example of topping-less pizza is when something is known to be dropped in specific situations for the use of humour - something like that 🤷
@@OsakaJoe01 And in some places it's called "none pizza".
Or a sandwich in the making?
Sometimes its a sandwich, sometimes its a none pizza with left beef
This is one of the [clearly omitted but relevant superlative] linguistic videos of all time.
This is probably the best way to use this meme
Ø as a superlative actually does have meaning in the context of this meme, so this is actually a good example
Underrated comment, explains the concept perfectly in meme-ese
@@Ann-mj4xnI interpret it differently. The deliberate omission of the superlative subverts the listener's expectations of this sentence structure, which normally requires a superlative to be natural/grammatical, and draws attention to the lack of it, which suggests that the thing is not at all deserving of a superlative. This further combines with the sort of expression that implies something is a remarkable example of something, typically in a negative sense: "Well, that was a movie." "We live in a society."
So in all in all, the expression says "this is a remarkably [something] linguistic video".
actually the best yt comment of all time
This feels like a video created exclusively for linguists. I had almost no idea what I was watching or listening to the whole time.
That said, it was still beautifully done... I think?
I know right? I've been watching his videos for quite a while now because this channel is fantastic but this entire video I was just staring at the screen like wtf am I listening to. But I'm sure he did a great job because he always does, and it was still nice to listen to.
Many of these videos assume you know quite a bit about language, I guess. He uses examples from many languages without explaining them, for instance, so I get what he's saying if I'm already familiar with that language.
It sounds like one of those "This is what English sounds like to non native speakers."
I like his videos but I feel like he puts more emphasis on writing a beautiful, almost poetic script than actually communicating. While watching this I felt bad for viewers who didn't already have some familiarity with these zeroes because there were very few examples. And there was much talk of the debate around them yet no real examination of WHY some people would argue for the existence of a null morpheme and others would argue against it other than the eurocentrism example. He has this way of writing his script where I sometimes can't tell what is being presented as fact, what is consensus, what is some linguist's view, what is a hypothetical we're supposed to be envisioning, etc.
@@turtlellamacow Yeah… I mean, that’s totally alright, too. I think linguists and academics will really love it. I just have to accept that I’m not the target audience.
A linguistic ghost story in time for Halloween! A trick and a treat!
Øøøøh 🤔
October 14th, truly halloween
I normally thoroughly enjoy your videos but this one went largely over my head. I think I understood the general outline of the idea of a linguistic zero because certain linguists coming from a specific background were trying to fit another language into their preconceived framework - but a few more concrete examples would have grounded it for me. Your voice over and prose were elegant as always!
But sometimes they could exist for example "I could [not] care less" or a better " this is one of the [clearly omitted superlative] videos of all time"
Here are some examples in English:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-marking_in_English
E.g. "Elephants are big" - normally you'd need a determiner e.g. " *The* elephants are big" or " *Some* elephants are big".
But in this case, the sentence doesn't have a determiner because you're talking about all elephants in general.
There are a few common cases in English where a linguistic zero is used. For example:
I said that I was going to the store.
vs.
I said I was going to the store.
Both mean the same thing, and most fluent speakers will understand the second as meaning the same.
"that" can become a zero in many contexts.
The imperative habitually drops "you". "Come here!" vs "You come here!"
"You" becomes a zero.
In informal contexts, a pronoun subject can be dropped.
in response to the question, "Where are you going?"
One might answer, simply. "Going downtown" instead of "I'm going downtown."
I'm not sure what linguists would make of my examples, but I think they are reasonable.
@@briansammond7801 I wish an explanation like this were in the first minute of the video; this was an inaccessible one.
Really agree on that there is sometimes an overuse of "zeros where there should be a morpheme/word" by many grammarians. That's why I like construction grammar it uses zeros in just the obvious cases. As you said it's sometimes because of mixing different grammatical traditions from different languages
This really would have benefited from more examples of (alleged) zeros in languages.
Exactly
No, don't you see? The examples were there, just as Øs!
Your videos are usually pretty esoteric but this goes above and beyond.
Obviously you're not a linguist.
@@puddingwithoutatheme4378 Nope :)
I’m a budding linguist and this was difficult to keep track of for myself as well :0 hopefully I can find more cultural examples to help me further my understanding of this topic tbh
@@puddingwithoutatheme4378 I'm on my third year of a degree in English Philology and I found this video quite challenging. Certain registers of language are better than others for explaining scientific knowledge, and the literary/poetic register used in this video doesn't help much. You can sense it in the comments section: most people couldn't keep up with it, even though this channel mainly has an audience used to watching content about Linguistics.
Which is a pity, because you can see that Native Lang has made a great effort in preparing, creating and editing this video.
@@ruthlopezserver I've been following Gayle Highpine for a while now.
The prose style is reminiscent of multiple (non-colonized) languages, and helped my brain shift processing styles.
Perhaps the video is like current social systems, and working exactly as designed?
A method to encourage us, the watchers, to see the world (and language) around us with a slightly different lens?
NATIVLANG IS BACK!!!
on a side note Saussure isn't from l'Héxagone, he was Swiss, and as someone from his hometown my heart just broke :((( what if someday I get called French :(((
Aaagggh so so right. That error is going in the sources doc straightaway. Thanks for correcting me.
Now you're baiting me to call you fr*nch 👀
don’t worry, one of these days you’ll definitely get called French! 😅
I love Saussure, that’d be so cool to be from his hometown
ok, french person
One of the things I love/hate the most about linguistics is how even seemingly strictly theoretical and abstract concepts, such as a null word/morpheme, end up having cultural and social implications that cannot be glossed over.
Well, language _does_ encode culture, so it's kinda hard to escape sociopolitical influences.
can you give an example?
@@cubing7276 Recently I attended a seminar in which someone was talking about their dissertation, for which they wanted to present the phonology of an indigenous language in Colombia. However (and this is a gross over-simplification), due to armed conflict in the region that goes all the way to the Spanish colonization to today, speakers of a lot of indigenous languages have had to flee to different territories, and the way the phonology of the population evolved and how the different varieties are distributed today reflect those migrations, the contact with other populations, as well as the linguistic attitudes they've had due to speaking a minority language in a hot zone. The influence of that was so big that they simply couldn't not talk about it in their dissertation, even if they originally wanted to do only a phonological analysis.
Many Native American languages (North and South) have an implied 3rd person subject in the default finite form of verbs. Linguists love to claim the presence of a null morpheme 3rd person subject pronoun, because it helps them make symmetrical Eurocentric pronominal tables.
I love learning linguistics but totally cannot wrap my head around cantonese linguistics (my first language) and i think part of it is bcoz linguistics focuses on european languages (proto indo european being the most studied family) and thus the terminology describes european languages much better than other language families. Ofc it's also cuz cantonese has no standardised form and a very flexible grammar and most of its speakers are multiingual so it's a fast evolving and very versatile language. Cantonese syntax is sth i can never understand bcoz u can just omit everything and put anything in any order and syntactic categories are so confusing (especially since the same word fits into multiple categories). I mean that's barely surprising when we have 9 tones but realised that most young people can understand full sentences with the tones taken away lol (it's easier to type canto with the english alphabet so we loosely romanise it and everyone does it differently). But hey, this versatility is what i love the most about my language and culture :) we popularised a code language in one night once someone realised we needed one. We dont need to learn it we just know it.
Closely related feature about Finnish:
In spoken language, in some situations, you can drop the word "no" and it can still be understood that the sentence is negative.
Minä tiedän = I know
Minä en tiedä = I don't know
Minä en tiedä mitään = I don't know anything
Minä mitään tiedä = I (don't) know anything
This grammatical mood is called "Aggressive mood".
There is even wikipedia article about it
It seems akin to the way French negates with "pas", "personne" and "rien".
Good point
So in the last sentence example, there is no marking for tense?
@@niharbehere1584 the verb is in infinitive. So not inflected for tense or person
Finnish is such an interesting language.
I wasn't smart enough to keep up with this video! Editing absolutely on point like usual though!
But you can, just read at your own pace!
ø brain, like me
@@halagavi लोल
I have to slow down the videos to help me process them. 😆😆
I have a degree in philosophy and I still don’t quite get the point of this argument 🤷♀️
Never been a fan of zeros in analysis except where you can clearly show that, for example, it fills a paradigm or some feature is being meaningfully marked by a deletion, like in disfixing situations when книга goes to книг in Russian, for instance. Where it starts to get really hazy to me is linguists sticking zeros on to mark things that you could also analyze as unmarked. Like in Lakota, I personally don't take it that verbs with no pronominal affixes on them are "zero-marked" for 3rd person singular, rather that the base unmarked form is heard as such and then non-3s forms are marked, i.e. "máni" (he/she/they(s)/it walked) is not ma-Ø-ni with the Ø marking 3s. That might be useful as a way of showing where to put the affix in, say, "mawáni" (I walked), but I don't think there's actually a zero there, although maybe I'm wrong, idk. The "meaningless zeros" Jakobson talks about seem particularly problematic, as how do you even show they exist apart from, as he does, an appeal to "elegance". The eurocentrism criticism is particularly sharp as well. Can you imagine if roles were reversed and European languages were being analyzed by speakers of non-European languages as being "zero-marked" for things that the non-European languages marked? What if a Mayan-speaker analyzed the English noun "singer" as having potentially TWO (OR MORE) unspoken -Ø morphemes, depending on who it's referring to, that mark the singer's gender, based on the existing English "actor"-"actress" pair and paralleling that with the Mayan-speakers' native language marking both female and male on such nouns with "ix-" and "aj-" respectively?
For the Lakota example, I have to disagree. The issue is that when adding person markers, you don’t simply add the meaning carried by that marker, but you simultaneously remove the 3rd person meaning. Of course it is correct to say, particularly on a superficial language learning level, that the base/stem without a marker is by default 3rd person; but when analyzing the language’s grammar, it is extremely useful to employ the Ø marker, to indicate that there is a morphological paradigm at play here but that this form is recognized due to the lack of affix in that position. That’s just my own understanding of the topic though, maybe I missed something, and I’d be happy to hear another view point.
Could you perhaps explain what a null is for me ? Or do you recommend I just look it up on Wikipedia ? The video itself seemed to lack an explanation that assumes I know nothing (pun intended) about the subject .
@@counting6 Well it depends on how it is used, and what it exactly it is/should be is exactly what is in question here. But, broadly speaking, a null (Ø) is a marker used in linguistic notation (particularly glossing, and to a much lesser extent transcription) to describe situation in which the lack of an element (wether it be a phoneme, an affix, or some other such unit) indicates a particular piece of meaning which wouldn’t otherwise be present. For example, let’s use the Turkish verb ‘to want’ in the present progressive. ‘I want’ is İstiyor-um, ‘you want’ (sg) is İstiyor-sun, and ‘we want’ is İstiyor-uz. The “-“ isn’t actually there in Turkish spelling, but I added it to highlight how the first part of the word (İstiyor) doesn’t change, so it must be what gives the verb it’s meaning and it’s tense and aspect. The parts after the dash (suffixes) are what indicates the person (and number). However, if you say simply ‘İstiyor’, this means ‘he/she/it/they want’. Instead of having an additional suffix to indicate 3rd person, the LACK of a suffix is what does this marking. Many linguists therefore mark this as such: İstiyor-Ø, to indicate that this form isn’t simply unmarked for person, but rather that the lack of phonological content within this verbal slot creates meaning as much as the use of select sounds (an affix) in this same position would. Sorry this explanation was so long, but I hope it helped. And again, this whole video is about the fact that there are disagreements as to how this analysis technique should be used, if at all; so there are certainly examples of linguists using it somewhat differently, while some others may argue that my example shouldn’t be described with Ø the way I showed. But I do think my explanation and example are fairly representative of how it is used in general.
Zeroes (I want to argue) are tools for notating zero length items in paradigms (the ‘vertical’ application) and zero length fillers in slots (the ‘horizontal’ application), to distinguish them from true absences that would block an utterance from being realised. In both cases the zero, being a metasymbol, is present in the analysis and absent in the utterance; a pure technicality that can be judged only in the context of a full theory.
As to eurocentrism in this regard, I dunno. French verbs have attached subject and object pronouns, along with (at least) negative, locative and partitive markers, all in a rigid frame of seven-ish slots, quite like a normal language ;). But there's an orthographic tradition of writing “je t'aime” and “il n'y en a” with spaces, and this seems to make quite a difference in how things are presented (at least outside technical communities with a point to make). I can't recall seeing a French positive sentence glossed with a null in verb slot 2 (not that I've read enough about French, TBH), but I wouldn't hesitate to code it that way if it simplified my presentation. Nothing in this picture is, after all, “real,” other than human physiology and behaviour.
None of which is to argue against euro-, anglo-, or indeed idio- centrism being an issue in general, of course. X-centrism abounds, and is the root of all stupid.
Mandatory disclaimer: IANALinguist, though I've moved in linguistic circles.
I show-Ø
You show-Ø
He/She/It shows
like this?
In Ainu when you leave the prefix of a word/verb/noun away you have he/she/it
クク I drink
ク (he) drinks
クエ→ケ I eat
エ (he) eats
Even in a dictionary it is stated as ゼロ which means zero.
In Polish; personal pronouns can be nulls as well.
Makes sense, in Basque typically third person goes with Ø suffix. We don't need to use pronouns as the verbs enclose most of the grammar, not just the subject, as in Romances but also the direct and indirect objects. Still the lack of suffix [du-Ø vs du-t or du-gu or du-te] is a clear case of zeroing also in the third person singular. English has it the other way around: the third person singular is the only non-zeored in most verbs: he does vs I doØ or they doØ.
...I for one would appreciate a followup video explaining what this one is talking about?
I appreciate how well this was done and the effort put into writing the script and making the animation. That said, I found it to be very difficult to follow in the rather poetic form in which it was written and spoken.
Same
What goes unsaid, unpaused but not unmeant?
Also, any beloved zeros to add to my folder?
As a non-native English speaker, I see a striking zero in English that no one talks about: every English sentence has a modal verb. The zero modal verb is the affirmative. One can make the zero modal verb visible, as an emphasis: I see it --> I DO see it.
They're called zeds in Canadia, and as I mentioned above, woulda coulda shoulda been zed instead of zero, at 3 seconds after 0:39, to rhyme with the previously said "said". That's 3 seconds after zed point three nine clicks, ay.
@@moisesbr It's tricky. Technically, it implies the affirmative, but lately we assume everyone's lying. So, we assume they're implying "I DO see it" but we assume it means they don't see sh... I don't remember that being as culturally widespread, in America at least, during the earlier part of my life. Maybe someday it will turn heel completely, and the verb will imply negation.
@@GizzyDillespee Well, I wasn't thinking of a diachronic analysis like yours 🤭
@@GizzyDillespee now that would interesting: in a culture in which telling the truth plainly is considered a lie, what would happen to words like "no" or "not"? I see two possibilities: either they will be discarded now that there is an unmarked negative or using them becomes interpreted as emphasis, effectively creating a chain shift. "I do see" -> "I see" -> "I do not see" -> "I do see" -> ...
I wanted to add that while the Ø might be a more of a euro linguist fad, it does help me in making sense of the difference between the topic marker 'wa' は and subject marker 'ga' が when learning Japanese. Many learners asks when to use は or が when introducing the subject, but speakers (both native and other learners) find it difficult to explain. One way I tried to make sense of it is that technically a は and が can appear at the same time but the が has become silent, essentially a Ø. Just like は can be stuck into other particles like the dative 'ni' に or locative 'de' で to make には and では、so can there be a がは but because of rules I can't explain, it becomes a Øは with the Ø being a null subject marker.
This also applies to putting the topic on the object with 'wo' を essentially turning a をは into a Øは with the object particle becoming null.
That's cool. Does the particle 'mo' も pattern the same way?
I feel like I understand も better as a replacement for は, in the same way others may understand は as replacing が or を.
I don't understand why you term Ø as a "Euro linguistic fad." Sounds rather ethnocentric.
I too was thinking of Cure Dolly in this video. Perhaps the zero-が can be seen as not a real thing, but at the least it appears to be useful in modeling the behavior of the language, which is the goal of a grammar anyway.
Cure Dolly was the first to introduce me to the Ø concept. I sure miss that beautiful android!
This video could really do with getting to a point. Having finished it, I feel I do not understand the concept any more than when I started; as to what exactly the invisible words are.
I was always under the impression that nulls were always comparative. The linguist would obviously compare another language with their own, and their own with other languages.
Hence null copula. It's saying that some languages require some sort of linking word, and some don't. That's a comparison.
These days I find myself more and more watching technically meaningless videos that practically amount to nothing, but this is not one of them. Thank you for nerding out on this amazing interesting topic!
This is the first video where I’m completely lost 😅
I need some examples or some background information.
I still feel like I’m guessing about what you’re talking about. It’s true that I have to teach ‘zero article’ in English, but I never knew it was a controversial topic.
I think it is a matter of Occam's razor. If the theory is simpler and more correct with zero morphemes, it is useful to have them. I once coded a language processing tool and since my language has fusional inflection with a lot of root vowel and consonant changes, such as umlauts, shortenings, prolongations, several kinds of palatalizations, etc., it was easier to represent inflectional modification patterns with a lot of zero-umlauts and zero-palatalizations, if there was no root change and materialize them when there was a change (which was usually coincident with zero ending) if you know what I mean. Zeros made things more regular. The funny thing is, you could have a long zero (which makes the vowel long), umlaut zero (which changes the vowel to a diphtong or a sister vowel), regular zero (just do nothing to the vowel), short zero (shorten the vowel) and null zero (leave out the vowel).
What language was that? That’s pretty cool
@@keegster7167 Sounds a bit like German (to me as a German with no linguistic experience). I don't know if German has a lot of all those, but we have probably more than English.
What's fascinating about that is that's how Saussure deduced Laryngeals for Laryngeal Theory in PIE linguistics.
It reminds me of rest notes in music! Silence is it’s own note in music, as without well-placed silences you have no meaningful melodies. Also in poetry, where a pause during a stanza can provide a separate meaning than if a silence is not provided. Akin to a linguistic body-language! Very interesting
I feel horrible because I don’t understand…but I want to so badly!
However, this video was so beautifully done and animated. I will watch again with friends so that I can grasp the Zero lesson🥰
In the simplest case he's talking of the following issue: do(Ø) vs does, why all the persons lack the -es or a comparable suffix, maybe one by person as in Basque (which also has a "Ø" instance nevertheless):
1. dut - dugu
2. duk/dun - duzu(e)
3. du(Ø) - dute
The Basque verb actually means "to have" but sounds like "do"(+ suffix) and is used much like "to do" as auxiliary verb.
In the more complex cases, I'm as lost as you are.
@@LuisAldamiz LOVE this! 🤣🤣Thank you sir! I’m still pressing in☺️
Stole this example from another comment:
Usually, every English noun has "The" or "A" before it, e.g. "the elephant is big".
But if you want to talk about elephants in general or as a species, you leave that word out:
"[nothing] Elephants are big."
"The" and "A" are called Articles, so that last sentence has a Ø-article.
Here's the interesting part: If a language doesn't have Articles at all, an English-speaker could claim that the language has Ø-articles everywhere. It's easy to carry our bias into other languages
@@LowestofheDead Ohhhh! I 100% get it now! God bless you for this! 😊 Wonderful way to put the explanation in layman’s terms.🫶🏾
I am unclear on this! The video should have given cases where zeroes exist in English to help us understand the definition, before talking about languages we do not know.
Here's one: in English we can say "I know that you received my letter" but also "I know you received my letter". So some people would say that English has two relative pronouns: "that" and a null relative pronoun which functions identically despite not being there
Don't forget that I didn't have to write the grammatical subject of this sentence.
I went to the store and (I) bought some cake. The second "I" can be omitted, but is logically assumed to the subject of "bought."
I normally enjoy it, but the poetic license and quotation instead of explanation in the script of this episode really just made it harder to follow - I'm completely lost from 3:00" on. I'm not a linguist, so maybe the Zero is just common knowledge from a Semantics & Classification 201 course everyone takes? Usually the channel videos give me a clearer understanding of linguistic concepts with liberal use of deliberate, spoken examples that re-state the concepts on screen - after a couple watches I caught that @ 5:00" the reference is, for example - "銀行へ行ってきます" (going to the bank) vs "I am going to the bank" - which is the sort of thing that's usually presented, then repeated as an explicit spoken example rather than left unsaid. Maybe that's the wink-nudge "Zero" scriptwriting technique for the episode, but I'm really struggling to grasp the content in this one as a result.
Thanks for the feedback. That was one of the potential worries on my mind as I took those creative liberties, so good to know when and where the video concept fails.
@@NativLang Indeed, it might well be worth revisiting in a clearer way someday. Still enjoyed the video though! And I think I understood it well enough.
...Though why am I not surprised the first linguist to use a zero in this way was in India, where zero was first recognized and treated as a number in its own right. 🙂
@@NativLang just make a part two with more examples
It's very strange to me that a bunch of descriptivists would be that upset about a thing that is just there to make something understandable.
What video were you watching?
@@DS-hw8id it was at the very beginning, the people who got upset with the use of zero
It's not about descriptivism vs non-descriptivism (so, prescriptivism, I assume). There is legitimate concern when zero categories are theorised without proper motivation and are just there to make the paradigm (an abstract representation of a particularly language structure) more "elegant".
@@TheWanderingNight What I'm saying is, the way you talk about language is just as arbitrary as language itself is. The motivation means nothing, as long as you're able to communicate the ideas.
@@orsonzedd Lingusitic Metalanguage is arbitrary, but some metalanguages are more useful than others. Communication is precisely the point when it comes to unmotivated categories (including zero categories). If the target audience of your grammar is computers, then maybe zeros are a good way of describing your language. But if your target audience is people (learners of the language, other linguists), then zeros might end up hurting communicability.
The style of presentation was so captivating that I was entranced though left still without comprehension.
The sheep example seems incorrect as a use. It's smuggling in the assumption that English forms plurals merely with a suffix, but the null article for unpreceded nouns seems more valid.
That's the point. A linguist might drop a null in there based on the assumption English always marks the plural, and marks it the same sort of way, when of course it does not.
"Sheep", "deer", and "neat" belong to a declension in which, since Old English, the nominative plural is the same as the nominative singular. This was not true of Proto-West Germanic, but is true of Norse (at least "dýr" and "naut"). As most plurals in English are formed by adding a suffix, and in PGmc and PWGmc these plurals were formed with a suffix, which later disappeared in English, it makes sense to call this a null suffix.
This is actually a more complex topic than I realized coming in to this video. I'm going to have to watch it again. Wonderfully put together, and great artwork!
This would have been such a great opportunity to show off the objective evidence for zeroes in general: limitations on "wanna" constructions in English would have been great for showing the existence of empty categories; surface low or high tones behaving as unmarked in various Bantu languages; null topic constructions in Japanese or other east Asian langauges, etc.
I like the idea of a video done like a Poe horror story for Halloween, but it made it more confusing to me. To really understand the video I might have to watch it multiple times. Good for your metrics I admit, but at this point I only have a vague idea of what nulls are about.
I believe Welsh actually has a great use of the ∅. When mutating words with g as their first letter, it becomes a ∅ and the second letter is said (only mutated after an "is" or an "in").
For example wet vs it's wet. In Welsh that's "gwlyb" and "mae'n wlyb" respectively. So, in this case, you can either think of the g as just gone or, the more interesting case, just turned into a ∅ letter orthographically, hidden away because of the mutation
Brilliant video, as always. And thanks for quoting me.
Best regards
Segel
this channel is a jewel. Unlikely but fortunate someone takes such specialized topics and makes then available to a yt audience
I'm confused, did you forget to include in the video what the heck these zero's/nulls are? No idea what are we talking about
Simple example:
The cat - the cats
A cat - (zero) cats
That's the zero article.
He gave examples in the video
I'm doing a master in Anthropology. But I grew with this channel which cultivated my love for languages and linguistics. But while you speak mainly of linguistics, I can't help but think of how you question languages and the world led me to stay in Anthropology. This video gave a lovely anthropological feel to linguistics that I'd love to explore more one of these days and I hope that you might do some collabs with other Anthropologists/linguistic Anthropologists or cover some stuff in those fields maybe once or twice. Either way, I love the channel and I loved this video. Hope you are well and I can't wait for the next video
I also did an anthropology master. I noticed the same thing (linguistics is a sub field of anthropology after all). Perhaps I should collaborate lol. Or you!
No matter how long, a video from NativLang is always worth the wait.
A very interesting topic, though my understanding of it is likely poor. Also the animations are always so nice. Good job!
Consistently the most fascinating videos on UA-cam.
The first time they taught about Ø-articles for Japanese in my syntax class I was shook. Then and there I asked my lecturer why we should postulate the existence of a Ø-part of speech when a language doesn’t have any evidence of said part of speech existing? It brought up a very similar discussion to this and how much of linguistics is, at the very least, based on Eurocentric precedents. That being said, I think it’s fine to propose a Ø-pronoun for subject drop, but not a Ø-article before all nouns. (Also sorry to Norwegians/Danes who hate the use of Ø for zero)
Funny how there’s a very similar thing in english that’s very easily overlooked, in the case of instructions. For example “Do the dishes” is really “(you), do the dishes”
If colonialism happened the other way round.. would Japanese linguists say that European languages had Ø-honorifics? 🤔
@@LowestofheDead I mean, Japan was a colonialist power… but if it had conquered Europe, probably.
No this is what i thought as well as a japanese speaker in syntax
@@LowestofheDead Very good point!!
In Taiwanese Min-nan we don't really use any specific word for "goodbye", we just say some other stuffs at the end of the gathering like "we're going home" or "let's go", sometimes even merely mentioning seemingly unrelated things like "(I'm going) to cook for dinner!". It's not that we don't say goodbye, it's just that the word itself is practically invisible- a ghost in our daily lexicon.
Well, "goodbye" (have a "good" whatever you do from now on, so many zeroes!) is just standardized and comparable words in other languages are different, for example "(go) to God" in some Romances (adios, adieu, etc.), "respect" in Basque (agur), "health" in modern Romances (salud, sauté), etc. are just standardized expressions of good will or respect. What appears is that in your culture you just don't wish well or express respect... at least not when parting ways.
Reminds me to expressions we also use a lot over here (Basque Country, but typically in Spanish language context) also for informal farewells, like "venga" ("let's go") or "bueno" ("well", as in "well, I don't know what to say", it's not a wish), sometimes followed by a sentence of the type you say like "bueno, me tengo que ir" ("well, I have to go") or "venga, tengo que ir a currar" ("let's go, I have to go to work"). At the extreme we often just salute with a slight move upwards and forward of the chin (along with eyes meeting) and some absurd interjection like "eh", "ep" or similar, but that's more like "good day" or "hello and bye", not specific for farewells, but still an instance of "zeroing" (or minimizing) in terms of greetings.
I wonder if you often or not express congratulations or personal recognition as in showing respect in other contexts. It may be a case where the "zero" is rather cultural than linguistic.
This is interesting to think about. Another common ghost for Chinese-speaking people is the explicit expression of love ("I love you"), especially of non-romantic varieties. The only word you're likely to hear, 疼 _thiàⁿ_ 'aching', is used to speak of affection towards someone of a younger generation or a pet. The more western-minded might use the word 愛 _ài_ 'love' in a romantic setting, but it's practically never used among family and friends.
@@BlinkyLass - But that's just a case of "lost in translation": English "love" is not used equivalently in most other languages. For example in Spanish you'd be extremely cautious about using the equivalent "amar" or "querer" (literally "want", lesser variant of "love" and more common but still used with great precaution). Anglos just spill their "love" in words, other cultures are more into acts rather.
They also imagine (notably US people) that fake smiles make you more lovable somehow, while it actually makes you scary.
This may be one of those case of mis-identifying English or US customs with generic "Western", like that Sino-American guy who tried to persuade me that eating horse was a "Western" taboo and I was like: "what?!, horse is the most delicious meat... and I live West of London". XD
@@LuisAldamiz To be fair in old (super old) times it was kinda taboo to eat horses in some European places, because they could use it to get around and utilize it for warfare. Some cultures even believed it was worth as much as a human, like Hungarians who considered it to be a sacred animal with there being many folk stories about it.
@@fancypigeon681 - Maybe. But not everywhere: the Hungarians are new to my list but I had already there the English, which for some reason also didn't like to eat their horses.
On the other hand, the second aread of horse domestication, which seems to be Iberia (while Y-DNA is all from the steppes, horse mtDNA is a much more mixed bag and much of it seems to originate in Iberia), the earliest archaeological evidence is of lots of horse remains apparently rests of food already in the Copper Age. It is in Iberia where I have eaten horse meat, most of the time the most delicious type of meat I have tasted (occasionally the horse was clearly too old and should not have been used for human consumption admittedly). We should recover that tradition, which is being lost (it's almost impossible nowadays to find meat which is not beef, pork or chicken, occasionally mutton at best) of eating horses for the sake of horses themselves, which have now almost no other use (recreational but not much).
"Zero Third Person" The phrase alone caused me to suffer from a headache, I love it.
My favorite NativLang video so far. Null morphs drive me crazy. Great video! Thank you!
Thanks for the citation of grand master Igor Mel'čuk, utter warlord of Linguistics. He deserves WAY MORE attention and acknowledgement. Most brilliant scholar I've ever found.
Is it Mel'čuk or Meľčuk?
@@PtrkHrnk I think both forms are OK. His actual surname is Мельчук.
@@moisesbr I'm asking because "ь" is clearly a soft sign, and to me it seems inappropriate to write it with an apostrophe.
@@PtrkHrnk Well, it depends on the available keyboard.
That zero sound is this video whooshing over my brain.
I just wanted to tell you how much your videos mean to me.
My mental health has been seriously shit throughout the last years and my ED almost ended me and got me admitted into hospital. I've always been watching every video when it came out, and when you published this one I tried watching it while I was in hospital and found - I couldn't. I didn't understand what you were talking about and couldn't follow at all. It really hit me then how much I had fucked up my body and mind because I usually follow your content easily. I was devastated.
Now, a few months later, I watched this video again and I understood it. I was able to follow. It really shows me how far I have come in recovery and yeah.
Just wanted to share that you've been with me through very dark and deadly times and you always managed to catch me and rekindle my love for language.
Thank you for that, really.
You did some lovely wordsmithing in this video, I don't know quite how to describe it. You slip into sentences with rhyme, aliteration and assonance.
Jeez man, i studied linguistics in college for a few years and I've read like a bazillion books about language, and i still couldn't make heads or tails of this video.
You must have studied a long time ago.
This is in one of your example sentences, but I like the null determiner analysis for certain English DPs: "a cat" vs "Ø cats". It makes a useful prediction, namely that *"a my cat" and *"the my cat" are both ungrammatical because a DP always consists of exactly one determiner (which might be Ø) and an NP.
But why is "exactly one determiner (which might be Ø)" better than "one determiner or Ø"?
Idk what Imma write, since I don't even know much about my own language's grammar, but holy shit this makes me think about it.
"Kucing itu" is *The cat*
"Kucing-kucing itu* is *The cats*
"Seekor kucing" is *A cat*
so, is "∅ kucing" *∅ cats* (like, the idea of cats or cats in general)?
@@silasfrisenette9226 The cases where you end up without an overt determiner don't form a neat class: proper nouns (like "Gate 4" in the example in the video), indefinite uncountable nouns, and indefinite plural nouns aren't cleanly described by one feature or a combination of features.
@@halagavi That's Malay right? I think "itu" is more English "that" than English "the". Malay demonstratives don't act like determiners the same way English ones do. For example, Malay is rigidly head-initial and demonstratives come at the end of the phrase. I don't know how to analyze numeral + classifier phrases like "seekor" ... that's a good question.
@@gregnisbet still not sure what that implication is? Why do you need to group them together? And why can't it be "null determiner"?
Insightful as always. This one goes beyond and above, a most impressive interweaving of poetry and puns, a flowing narration on nulls.
God this is so good. Congrats on almost reaching 1 million subs!
As a linguist with an interest in morphology, I was definitely intrigued and entertained by this video.
Sometimes a blank in your paradigm can lead you to the discovery of a new chemical element with known properties, just because it fits the gap.
But sometimes, you can just change your model so it doesn't have a gap anymore, and you don't need to fill it.
Physicists have been trying to find super partners of elementary particle for a few decades just because they would complete some beautiful symmetries in their model, but now many theorists don't think there is any reason to expect nature to have these symmetries, so, maybe, there are no gaps to fill, no ghost particles to look for (you can find some very interesting videos by Sabine Hossenfelder if you're interested in the subject...).
The thing is... I suspect that, as you say, not all zeros are the same.
Great video, very revealing! Thanks a lot!!!
That was both beautiful and intellectually stimulating. Thank you very much for it!
I loved the music!
(And the ling nerdery, of course. But I saw at the end that you did the music yourself, so now I know who to compliment!)
ø love the new background music and the personification/ghostification of zero marking!
Ok the point about Eurocentrism really resonated with me. Claiming Greenlandic has null tense can be reversed to claim that English has ergativity, it’s just null-marked on the subject, and, dare I say, English has null tones by that same logic. This whole paradigm of Universal Grammar, while it isn’t a bad one, has been taken to the extreme and caused us to assume that every language has a similar structure, and any mismatch can be explained away with null zeros. It detracts from the reality that every language is a self-contained unit, an internally consistent system. My proposal for the use of zeros is that they should only be used if they can be confirmed by edge cases, eg learning of an L2, acquiring a language from birth. The mistakes that children and second language learners make is indicative that the language they are learning/acquiring has a set of rules (you can’t break a rule is there is no rule), and therefore is internally consistent, and when we observe the language as a uniquely sovereign entity this causes us to put the zeros where they actually belong, rather than resort to Eurocentrism
I'm here for the cutest drawing of sheep since the appearance of zero.
I’m glad I waited til the end to comment because I was going to mention the Eurocentric possibility. I have a master’s in Ling, but haven’t cracked a book about Jakobson, Panini or Saussure in 10 years because…life happens 🤷♂️
Really love your channel because it gets my brain back in the linguistic analysis mode!
I do think zeros are useful in some cases. I find them particularly useful to explain how my native verb tenses work (Spanish), because we sometime don't add a particular ending to a form, but it's added in the others. However, there are also things that we add just to make the word "sound better". For example: yo como; that last "o" is only there because in Spanish it's very rare to find words ending in -m. It doesn't make the pronunciation easier necessarily, it is just aesthetic.
On the other hand we also eliminate things from the sentences to avoid sounding repetitive, mostly subjects. The same happens in Chinese with 的. The purpose of this word is mostly to link the possessor with the possession, but it can get very repetitive, because it has other uses too, so sometimes it just disappears. For example: My mom can be said 我的妈妈, but it can also be said as 我妈妈 to avoid repetition in the rest of the sentence. So that's where in my notes when learning I would put a zero.
我妈妈sounds childish to me,a native speaker, i think you usually hear 我妈
There's not such restrictions in Spanish, it is just that most of the nasal (m, n, ñ) would totally be reduced into an /n/. Also, it's the first time someone called conjugation in synthetic verbs as aesthetic, i'll write it down for the next time i saw a Syntactician to observe their reaction
Ester RB, your analysis is good. I think this video would’ve been clearer with examples from some languages and talking through them in a little bit of depth. English examples, one of which I saw at the very beginning of the video, include “your airplane is at ø gate 4“. The ø represents the missing word “the”. Here’s another: “ø coming! Instead of “I’m coming!”
@@dentescare First, you come off as a condescending person and also, you seem extremely offended by some reason I don't really understand.
Second, I didn't say there is a restriction, I said it is rare. In fact, being a native speaker, I can't right now think of a single word that ends in -m that is not directly taken from Latin.
Third, a lot of vowels are "vocales de unión" which are there just to make the pronunciation easier but other vowels are there to make a termination in a vowel. Some things in languages just "sound good" which is what I was thinking when I used the word aesthetic. Language is not just a mean of communication, it's also culture, history and art.
If you don't like my reasoning or think that every letter in a word has a grammatical purpose, it's ok. Although I have a higher than average understanding of linguistics (average being a native speaker without specific education on the matter) because I had studied several languages, I'm not an expert on Spanish, so I will not argue with you on the matter.
@@cubing7276 True, but I think the example on the omission of "的" still stands, doesn't it?
Whenever I see a notification and it's a NativLang new video, my day instantly becomes brighter!
This is a video I'm adding to watch later cause I need to have a clear mind when I watch this again and be totally focus to understand anything.
Was watching this while playing thinking this is one of those videos by the channel that you can play on the background and still understand something from it but this one comes off as a complete gibberish to me. lol
I'm so glad to know it's not just I that's completely clueless as to what was discussed. Hopefully, when I rewatch this, I'll appreciate the video more.
That was a particularly good video! How fortunate your students must be, to have so creative a prof. I was a little surprised at first, since my own exposure to linguistics during my study of Sanskrit at University did not include any references to this sort of "zero", but then I reminded myself how long ago that was. Sigh... 🤷🏻♂️
Fascinating video! Thanks for including signed languages, as well as spoken ones, and so seamlessly at that.
I'd love to see a video on signed language families. All I know is that ASL evolved from french sign language and that there's the BANZSL language family, but which of these came first or was there a common ancestor language that's fallen out of use?
Equally, do all signed languages have some original language or did they all evolve separately from the spoken languages of their regions or from isolated deaf populations?
Also, having thought about, I think what are being described in the video are actually nulls, not zeroes. Zero has meaning, whereas null is simply a lack of data.
A good example of this is databases: if a database of library users had a record with 0 fines, then that user hasn't been fined; however, a record with null fines means that no data about fines has been recorded for that user (they could have had any number of fines).
This channel could be so good if James Joyce didn't write all the copy. I swear to God every time a video is over I'm scratching my head like uhhh I didn't understand a single point he "tried" to make
...tried in quotes bc I honestly think dude is just fucking with us all
I’m afraid you might not be the target audience for this video, as it seems to have been written for people with a serious interest in linguistics, not some layman who has this as his first introduction to the field. I think you should stick to his other content for a more palatable viewing experience.
Man I love this video, it would be awesome if you made more videos like this :D
Fascinating!! And beautifully presented in every aspect, as always =D Thanks for sharing!! =D
I thought this was gonna be about historical linguistics
1:10 As a Finn, it’s a funny coincidence to see the letters: ”AAVE” (”African-American Vernacular English”), in the background, here, in a Halloween ghost-story video. In Finnish, _”Aave”_ means: ”Ghost” or: ”Phantom”. It’s a synonym to: _”Kummitus”_ and: _”Haamu”._
😅🇫🇮👻
i always look forward to these vids!
Fantastic video! I always loved the concept of "0's" in languages, ever since I came across them whilst learning japanese. It's nice to learn more about the concept.
understanding these videos is a riddle by itself, understanding the content is a challenge
This for me is a brilliant complete work.
I have yet a perspective of a language teacher to add.
For me, zeros ARE useful exactly for the reason of contrasting just two languages.
When I want to show a student a direct word-by-word translation of a phrase it's great to use zeros to show them what parts are missing. Let's say in Japanese-English pair "Gakusei desu" and "I am a student" The only directly translatable word is "student-gakusei" Japanese lacks, subject, verb and article - English misses a copula. Mapping one language into another aids comprehension at first.
In Polish for example, when we talk about compound nouns, we have 3 types, złożenia, zrosty, zestawienia.
Zestawienia are similar to English collocations, two words that just go together.
The difference between złożenia and zrosty are that we write two words as one, but złożenia has an infix, and zrosty has none, usually symbolized by a zero infix.
So I see two ways in which "lopas" are useful:
- when you contrast language you know with one you do not (in learning)
- when describing your own language in terms of grammar
When they are not?
When we try to impose one grammar system to describe another in absolute terms.
Can you give examples for the difference polish compound word categories?
I very highly doubt Polish has any infixes - maybe you mean interfix?
@@F_A_F123oh yeah, right! Thanks you for the correction!
Thank you. I have only recently come across grammatical -Ø endings. That was an incredibly succinct explanation of a very complex topic!
Not only a talented linguist, incredible artist and animator but also a master of prose with subtle assonance. A joy to learn from and a joy to listen to, thank you!
If I hadn't had experience with Classical Latin's zero articles and Russian's zero present tense copula, I would have been very lost.
I like to think about the classical American utterance "Dafuq?", which means basically "What (intensifier) did I just see", just all the words in the sentence *except* the intensifier are zeroed out... ;D
@@hoi-polloi1863 🤣 dafuq truly is Classical American at its best.
@@hoi-polloi1863 Which also raises the question, where did "dafuq" get its spelling? I know this is not an intentional UA-cam misspelling to avoid the censors; people actually spell it that way. It's cute and I never really questioned it before, but now that you bring it up, I'm like, "Dafuq?" (I get the "da", as it replicates speech, but not the "fuq"...)
@@sharonminsuk I don't have solid answers, but my theory is that a lot of people write it that way to sneak it past their internal censors. It is a bit sparky of a phrase, after all...
@@sharonminsuk for me it seems to intend to replicate a type of african-american accent in English or some type of slang-"y" pronounciation by accepting spelling mistakes but trying to maintain the original pronounciation when reading the word
As is so often the case, I wish you had gone a lot more into detail about your examples instead of just hinting at them. After watching this video, I don't feel like I know particularly much about the subject, except that it has been kind of controversial.
this is truly your magnum opus. everything i've ever wanted from such a youtube video. well done.
Rewatching this after your most recent upload. Makes more sense now.
Love it and this is a new concept for me so I'm happy for the new knowledge
Is it strange that I didn’t really get what a null even was until the Eurocentrism part? I kept thinking it meant a kind of purposeful pause at first haha. Great video as always though.
This isn't the most accessible video NativLang's done - it seemed to assume that the audience had already come across zeroes in descriptions. But I'm super excited to see Mayan languages getting more exposure, especially seeing you cite that book of Poqomchi' texts that Igor Vinogradov collected! So rare that people look at Poqomchi'!
I’ve never thought of something like this, but it does feel much more elegant for many concepts
Especially for tables of endings with one empty one, it makes more sense for it to just be a null ending than dropping
I like these videos but I feel that, especially recently, there is more emphasis on writing a beautiful, almost poetic script than actually communicating effectively. The variety in sentence structure is nice and pretty but I sometimes cannot tell what is being presented as fact, opinion, consensus, dissent, a hypothetical, a fictional scenario etc. I felt bad for viewers who didn't already have some familiarity with these zeroes because there were almost no examples. And there was much talk of the debate around them, yet no real examination of WHY, other than the eurocentrism example, or what the alternative description would be. It would be nice to see an example of a situation where some linguists prefer an analysis with zeroes and others object to it, and what their logic is.
I agree, I think that the combination of poetry with a more typical educational video is what makes this channel unique, I quite liked the New Guinea videos despite them being more on the poetic side, but I feel like this video didn't get the balance right.
I don't think a viewer who doesn't know what a zero is could learn it through this video - though maybe that's the point and this video is more targeted towards linguistic students rather than the general public. From the description, however, it sounds like the goal was to give a general overview of the subject.
Get this man to one million already!!!
I love the little sounds that were added at the correct time, it makes a difference!
My brain was a ø for the best part of this video
Great video!
I like the framing of the quote at 6:27 (my translation to English below:)
I [the author] don't use any so-called "null morphemes", which are more theoretical tools and don't correspond to any actual element of the language.
I have an ‘ancient’ PhD in linguistics, and I have learned so much from your NativLang. Thanks!
Oh, my, this one stretches my mind. I'll have to watch this a time or two more.
English may not have any articles nowadays but that used to be different: a ship is referred to as 'she', a car as well, and when you make REALLY sure, you have to say 'male nurse' or 'female/woman firefighter'. Sometimes, voids express/mean more than non-voids.
But is this a really controversial and Eurocentric topic... Or are we just exaggerating? I mean, you can basically apply zeros to any language you study, it all depends on what language is your starting point.
So for example, if you are a native speaker of Spanish and you are studying Korean, you can apply zeros to the features that you find in Spanish but have no equivalent in Korean language. The inverse also applies: if you are a Korean student learning Spanish you can apply zeros to the features that you don't find compared to your own language.
All languages "lack" features that are common in other languages.
I don't know, I just think that the "Eurocentric" accusation is thrown around a lot lately for no reason...
No reason? Spoken like a European
A true masterpiece as always and a real delight to all senses! This is how linguistic topics should be presented!
Thank you!!!
Yay! I'm glad to see you back. I hope you are able to keep a more balanced and fulfilling schedule and life.
Very informative!! Danke!
I loved how you included the Indian National integration series book that teaches you Tamil in 30 days through English!
This really takes me back to my upper level Syntax class. Bravo!!!
I thought Todd in the Shadows released a new video and I got all excited. Then I realised NativLang released a new video and I got all excited.