@@kosovoiskosovoproductions7001 Yes, I know that. It's related to the French "bœuf." I also know that "beef" as Grétar Reynisson used it, refers to a problem, disagreement, argument, or grudge. My second comment was directed to lare290, as they used the Japanese term 牛肉, which only refers to the meat, not the slang usage.
Polypersonal verb marking scares me just as much as it fascinates me. The agglutinative versions just seem so expressive and efficient whereas the very fusional ones (and therefor highly irregular) make me want to grab a doll and tell an adult where fusional polypersonal verb systems touched me.
There's a mistake in the Finnish at 3:44. The translation suggests that "tiedämme" is in past tense and the other 3 are in present tense, when actually, all four of the examples given are in present tense. "We knew" would be "tiesimme."
I love those language maps. I find it interesting how geographical the dominant orders are, and how even the most unusual orders have at least a few examples.
12:05 Can you believe I was reading ""HUM" twice (and ignored and imagined some other things) and somehow naturally assumed their were markers for for "Human Humble 3rd person Object" and "Human Non-humble 3rd Person Object"?
YAAAAAAAYYYYY i was just thinking last night that i hope u upload soon😂😂i love feature focus so much, it really helps me build interesting features into a conlang when im not really sure how to do it myself!! thanks for this one, have a great day!💖✨
Huge fan of your videos, but I'm not sure you really explained the difference between passive voice and inverse very well. The key thing is that the actor in a passive construction is an adjunct and can be left out of the sentence. In an inverse construction, the actor is an obligatory argument of the verb. Although it is of lower animacy than the patient, it cannot be left out, as with a passive, as valency has not changed
2 роки тому+6
A nice particularity I encountered studying Breton is how verbs are only conjugated in certain syntactic environments. In affirmative sentences the verb will only be conjugated if there’s no expressed subject, otherwise the third person form is used in all cases. For example, “I see a girl” will be either “Me a wel ur plac’h”, where “me” is the first person singular pronoun and “wel” the (mutated) third person form of the verb to see (gwellet), or “Ur plac’h a welan”, without an expressed subject but with the first person singular suffix “-an”. There is an exception: if I want to emphasize it is me who sees the girl, I can suffix the pronoun “me” to the verb which gives “Ur plac’h a welan-me”. In negative sentences, verbs are conjugated when the subject is before the verb or not expressed, and aren’t when the subject is after it. “I do not see the girl” would be either “Me ne welan ket ar plac’h” or “Ne welan ket ar plac’h”, respectively with and without the expressed pronoun “me” and with the personal suffix “-an”, but in a sentence like “My mom doesn’t see the girl”, “Ar plac’h ne wel ket ma mamm.” with the subject “my mom” (“ma mamm”) behind the verb, the verb “wel” is used without a personal ending which is the third person singular form.
In Italian we have this sort of incorporation in the imperative and sometimes in the infinitive. For example: 'daglielo' - 'give it to hm/her'; 'parlategliene' - 'talk to him/them about it'; 'diteglielo' - (you pl.) say it to him/her/them.
Ay, btw, Spanish whilst having a much stricter word order it is still pretty non strict and is used to place focus and topic (kinda like in Basque) Los peces beben agua. Topic of the sentence is Los peces. Beben agua los peces. Focus of the sentence is on los peces. Agua beben los peces. The topic is the fishes but the focus is on the water.
I'd like to do a slight correction to 2:54. The 'in' in nahuatl is not a definite but a topic article. You can say things like "In tzahtzi ca cihuātl" or "In oc tonoc, nicochi" because it's more equivalent to Japanese は or Spanish 'a'.
Also at 3:22, the third person object shouldn't be 'qui-' here because 'cua' doesn't begin with 'i' or occur alone like in 10:16. It should be "Ticcuāc" in Classical, though perhaps it's changed in some modern dialects.
Okay one last thing for real. At 12:01, the 'i' between tla- and itqui should drop to make '-tlatqui-'. This is how the noun 'tlatquitl' was made. As for causative, the vowel should be lengthened and it should be '-ltia' since itqui ends with a vowel, unless you make itqui's final vowel long. So this should rather be "Nimitztētlatquiltīlia" or "Nimitztētlatquītīlia".
@@babelKONI I’ve seen “in” been called many different things, but I often see it get referred to as the definite article, even though it definitely fills many more functions than that. I’ve been studying Nahuatl on-and-off for a few years now and I still don’t know when I should and shouldn’t use “in”. 3:22 was just a straight up mistake on my part. I think I’d written the sentence as having a third person subject, but then decided to change it to 2nd person later but forgot to change the object marker. As I understood it, inanimate nouns can still take plural marking, they just usually don’t? My dictionary still cites “xochimeh” as a valid word. I got the example at 12:01 from a paper. I guess the authors just misconjugated.
@@Biblaridion Think of 'in' as simply a clause linker, with the attached clause being what immediately follows it. It's been called many different things because all of those things fall under the category "general relation" which is what 'in' essentially does. You can use it like English's 'when', as in "In ōnimitzittac, ōztōpa tihuālhuiya. (As I saw you, you were coming from the cave.)" Also possible is using it similar to 'about' or '-copa', as in "Nimitzmachtia in timihtōtīz. (I teach you how to dance, about how you will dance.)" But in all these cases it's nothing more than the most generic possible topical/relational marker. It's like one of the most useful words in any language. I recommend J. Richard Andrews' Introduction to Classical Nahuatl for more on this; though it's pretty technical, it's like the most accurate resource on Nahuatl syntax and morphology (avoid the second edition if possible).
An example in my language (portuguese): Ele deu um gato para mim "He gave a cat to me" -the verb is already in 3rd P sing só the subject can be dropped: deu um gato para mim "gave a cat to me" -now "para mim" gets affixated to "deu" as "me": deu-me um gato "gave-me a cat" - and then "um gato" becomes gets suffixed as "o", and it crontracts with "me" to form "mo": deu-mo "gave-me-him" It's a really formal written language kind of construction, but nevertheless, it can convey the information given the right context. ;)
Thank you very much for this video, I'm studying Georgian and this explained to me understand the basics of verb agreement. Now the hard part: actually memorizing each one for all verbs (of which half in Georgian are irregular)
Well, the English sentence says "Jon saw Miren", so it should be "ikusi zuen", but "ikusi rau" might mean the same thing in some Basque dialect, even though I have never heard of it.
I noticed that some romance languages use OVS for emphasis sometimes wich seems pretty weird to me, in Portuguese a construction like "ele eu vi" ("I saw him", literally "him I saw") seems to have meaning like "of course I saw him"
Portuguese is my mother tongue. At least in my dialect, this construction will sound weird to pretty much every speaker and is likely to be perceived as a grammar mistake rather than a deliberate choice of wording.
I Thought "Hmm, I Already Know About Verb Agreement, But I'll Watch This Video Anyway", And Boy Am I Glad I Did, Because There Was A Lot More Than Just Verb Agreement In Here, Including Stuff I Didn't Know!
I actually almost included a section about Austronesian alignment, but I cut it because it doesn't actually qualify as full verb agreement, but interestingly, it's actually kind of related to direct/inverse systems. All "austronesian alignment" really is is just using passives and applicatives to keep the topic as the subject. David Peterson wrote a brief thing about it here: archives.conlang.info/pae/qhanghu/duavhualshuen.html
The Agent =/= the subject, nor does the object =/= the patient. The phrase "I receive" is a good example I is the subject and patient of the verb. Subject is who the verb is about/focus on I think of it as point of view, where as agent is the one who is doing the verb and patient is the one experiencing/having the verb be done on them.
Surface arguments like "subject" and "object" are about syntactic alignment systems, and those surface terms may not always match the deep argument roles. So, yes, in something like a passive, the surface subject is the deep patient. However, agreement on verbs will typically pattern with surface syntax, not with deep role structures.
These videos are great, but mostly apply to entirely original conlangs. I have ideas of Earth-based creole/expatriate community languages. Any guidelines for that?
In the basque example in 2:54, it would be better to be "Jonek Miren ikusi ZUEN (Subj. 3rd per. sing.; Dir. obj. 3rd per. sing.; past)" (the order doesn't matter). I don't know how ancient basque or any dialect are, but in the 'batua' dialect that would be the best option.
For European languages, like Latin and Greek, that only mark the subject with suffixes on their verbs, how do conjugation systems like this evolve? Is this the result of a language that historically was VSO and had the subject slowly over time amalgamate with the verb?
2:27 Exemplish has a SOV word order, so it makes sense that the polypersonal agreement evolves into a system where a verb is preceded by a phonologically reduced form of subject+object. Then, how to explain that many languages evolves suffix-like conjugation (spanish for example), which marks the subject at the end of a verb, if there are so rarely languages that employs VSO or OVS? Shouldn't it make more sense that personal conjugation markers are placed before rather than after the verb?
I am a German native speaker, and I realized that German is so REDUNDANT. There are pronouns, why there is verb inflection? The nouns changes in number and case, why does it the article too? In the sentence "Die Männer gingen" = "The men went" is the number of the subject marked 1. In the article (die) 2. In the umlaut (-ä-) 3. In the plural suffix (-er) 4. In the suffix of the verb for 3rd person plural. Wow!
You have a point. If there's a tendency in language to have the third person singular unmarked, why is it that English only marks the third person singular particularly in the present tense?
Great video, but one remark: It's kinda incorrect to use hyphens in the glosses and leave them out in the presented clause/word. If you put hyphens in the glosses put them in the clause/word as well.
I was wondering if there are any languages that use separate adjective-like words to mark the subject and object? Or do such words inevitably end up attached to something else? I started building a language and one of the things I did after deciding how the grammatical gender was going to work was create articles that agreed in gender and number. I later realized I didn't really care to use articles in my language, so I decided to repurpose them as a way to mark which noun is the subject and which is the object. It was perfect, because the language has 2 main word orders and I needed something to use as a marking.
Most of the time the subject and object marking will come bundled with either the nouns or the verbs, but they can sometimes occur just as separate particles. When you say the articles mark the subject and object, you mean the articles take case marking instead of the actual noun? That is rare, but it does happen every so often (I believe that sometimes happens in German?).
@@BiblaridionYes. There are 6 articles, 2 for each gender that mark the subject and object. The default word order is SVO, but VSO is used to emphasize the action was not voluntary or not something the subject has or had any control over. The nouns themselves don't take any case marking, and the articles are used if which noun is the subject and which is the object needs to be made more clear. An example would be: "Woman saw child." Sesagen var sesiten. "The woman saw the child." Net Sesagen var nut sesiten. "The woman saw the child (but didn't mean to or wasn't trying to see the child). Var net sesagen nut sesiten. Pronouns do take case marking, even though the nouns don't.
In the language in making the word order is SOV or OSV with subject, object, and verb marking, even though the verb always stays in the same place Nice little redundancy there Although, verbs arent ussally objects or subjects
There are two mistakes with the Russian example at 11:13. First, видел/видела is past tense, so it should be translated as “saw”, not “sees”. Second, in the first sentence, the а-ending in “Анна” is feminine nominative marker; it is not marker-less as is the case with masuline nouns.
Is the third argument of a verb always the beneficiary? I have a conlang with a class of transferitive verbs, such as "give to" or " buy from" distinct from "give" or "buy." With these verbs, the two parties involved in the transfer are the agent and patient, while the object being transferred takes the dative case or may be omitted entirely to show an unknown or unspecified "something." Are there any natlangs that have a similar distinction?
This looks like what is called an "applicative". This is a verb form related to voice, kind of like passives. An applicative promotes some noun phrase in the sentence to the direct object position, such as in your case, promoting the indirect object to direct object position. For example "I give the book to the dog" could become "I give-APPL the dog", where the direct object becomes who you are doing the giving to. An applicative is sometimes counted as a verb form, or a derivation method, or other times it could be a distinction made by completely separate words, as in your case (a word for "give" and a word for "give to"). For example, in English, we have "say" and "address" which kind of do this. "I said hello to the man" contrasts with "I addressed the man", where the indirect object, 'man', has been promoted to direct object position. However, as I mentioned above, applicatives are often a verb form like passives, such as an affix put onto the verb or an auxiliary or particle or whatever. For example, we could have an applicative suffix, such as '-ha' to put on verbs to promote an indirect object to direct object position: if "leki" means "say", then "lekiha" could mean "address". If "polu" means "give" then "poluha" could mean "give to". A fun verb form to play around with, to be sure!
Just rewatched this and realized a mistake in the Swahili examples: Animals are considered animate so fall in the "A-WA" class, and "-me-" indicates recent past perfect. "Watoto wametazama simba." (Children have recently seen a lion) "Simba mewatazama watoto." (A lion has recently seen children)
Hmm, How Would One Go About Specifying Which Of Two Third Person Things Are Being Referred To In A Language Where The Word Order Can Change For Emphasis, Other Than Using Obviate/Proximate Markers?
hey anyone, do you know if it'd be fair to say that spoken persian is developing a system of polypersonal agreement with its shortened pronouns affixing to conjugated verbs to mark object like می بینمت for i see you?
I have a question for my conlang. Couldn't portmanteau agreement come from regular poly personal agreement and a great deal of sound change? That was what I imagined before watching this video. Thank you.
I don't get how you can have he pronouns fuse into the verb, and then have the pronouns be separate from the verb. Would that just be like "He hewalk"?? Also despite "sha" and "ne" not being 3rd person (The slide showed "I" and "you"), the king/fish example says they are?? Unless that's you indirectly pointing out the king/fish are third person. But even then the video talks about gender rather than anything else?? This is confusing to me.
This is an old comment, but I’ll answer with an example from Spanish: I speak - yo hablo I speak - hablo The “hablo” with the “o” ending means “1st person singular speak” or “I speak”. Adding the “yo” onto the phrase isn’t necessary anymore. That’s why it’s often lost in informal speech, or when the subject was already mentioned.
@@kitdubhran2968 Thank you but that was not my question. If verb agreement forms from the pronouns fusing to the verb, how can a language get new pronouns? Example, if to say 'he walks' in a language is or would be equivalent to "walkhe", then how does the phrase "he walkhe" happen? Where does the extra pronoun come from?
@@lulujuice1 if you mean new pronouns, language evolution sometimes adds new words to fill in the spaces of something old. So an entirely new word, maybe an evolution of the word “man” will replace the old pronoun for “he”. And then you have “man walkhe”. Sort of. If you mean the same pronoun getting added back in, that happens sometimes too, when a language loses a word through a long evolution, then adds it back in for clarity, because the phrase has softened or bleached over time. Like: I’m going to => I’m gonna => imma => imma go I hope I understood your question enough to help. ❤️
@@lulujuice1 The romance languages replaced is/ea/id (demonstratives used as pronouns in Latin) with pronouns derived from ille/illa/illud (emphatic demonstratives which became Romance language pronouns).
@@somebodyelse9130Okay but by the time the Romance conjugation scheme happened, they were ALREADY inflected. PIE itself had "he hewalk"... BUT, this does indeed shed some light on the answer. Thank you.
Also, at 11:17, your Russian examples are weird again. Why do you include stress marks on everything but Anna and Annu? Additionally, this is the wrong tense, being the imperfective past rather than present. The nouns also don't agree for grammatical person, but only grammatical gender. The form of "see" for first person singular in the past used by females is the same as the form used for 3rd person feminine nouns in the same tense.
When grammatical information about syntactic roles (who is doing what in a sentence) is displayed on a noun, it's called "case declension" or "noun agreement". This is just the terminology used. When that grammatical information about syntactic roles is displayed on a verb, it's called "verb conjugation" or "verb agreement". As shown in the video, verbs can have anything from no conjugation/agreement to a lot, with a lot of various categories of distinctions used in various languages. With nouns, it's similar: languages range from no noun declensions to many, with different kinds of distinctions made in different languages. Generally, languages like to mark syntactic roles somewhere in the sentence, to supplement basic word order marking. Whether such marking happens on either nouns, verbs, or both, and the extent and variety of such marking, is part of what makes languages structurally and grammatically unique.
Why not? Finnish does. You need to put the words in some order anyway, so your default word order can step in as the final option if the others fail for some reason. Using the other options for determining the roles means you can use different word order to emphasize or something. Similarly, verb agreement gives you the option to drop the subject pronoun -- and then, not dropping them puts emphasis on them. And as for dropping the subject -- how about a form that never takes one in the first place?
Not that I know of, though in many Romance languages object (and for in some languages subject) pronouns are clitics that are attached to the verb and are common and is some languages even mandatory, even when the noun they refer to is also present in the sentence. So in a way it's an object marking. Spanish and Romanian in particular have mandatory object pronouns but only when the object is animate (more precisely, on the same animacy level as human beings), but otherwise not; and I think an animacy dependent object agreement is rather cool.
How do systems evolve where the verb conjugations sound nothing like their associated pronouns? I've looked at PIE, and it doesn't seem to me that its person-marking endings relate to its pronouns in any way. I would have expected the pronouns and endings to evolve similarly (since the verb endings are at the end of the word), but they're just completely different. Come to think of it, why are those endings suffixes and not prefixes? If PIE was SOV (as its descendants seem to indicate), then how did the pronoun get glommed onto the end of the verb?
"A VERY small number of languages mark just the object." 24/378 = 6.3% I guess everyone's "very"s are different, but that's comparable to the occurrence of VSO (95/1377 = 6.9%) and it's only about 3 times less common than marking the subject only. I would have just used a "very", rather than a "VERY", but I guess that's why you include the actual data.
1:18 Brazil: SOV and VOS? Which language is this study talking about? Portuguese I know allow some grade of permutations: SVO-> SOV, VSO, OVS, etc... But the majoritity is SVO even if you think about the assimilation of Tupi constructs...
The same way we learn any language, Pinky; TRY TO TAKE OVER THE ... I mean ... with rote memorization and constant practice. Trying to teach it to anyone else who is willing and then conversing in it may help, too, but that's not as likely a plan.
@@erdgerd5503 The Klingon experiment was about a guy who tried to teach his son Klingon language. It worked for a couple of years until the child, having already learned English as well, saw no use in speaking Klingon anymore and stopped responding in Klingon.
I mean Italian only uses tons to form polar questions, and mandarin has 2 question strategies, one which involves reduplication around a negative particle. So I wouldn’t single that out as a language with a simple way of marking questions
4:10 The more I learn about Navajo, the less I understand about it.
Im convinced Navajo is a cursed conlang. Change my mind
I have heard that if you don't start young, you'll never figure it out.
Probably what made them great code talkers during WW2.
Beef between linguists, call that verb disagreement.
*ba-dum-tssh*
言語学者と言語学者の中に牛肉があります。
@@lare290 Not literal beef, though.
Sovairu beef is really a Norman term meaning cow that made its way to England during the conquest
@@kosovoiskosovoproductions7001 Yes, I know that. It's related to the French "bœuf." I also know that "beef" as Grétar Reynisson used it, refers to a problem, disagreement, argument, or grudge. My second comment was directed to lare290, as they used the Japanese term 牛肉, which only refers to the meat, not the slang usage.
Polypersonal verb marking scares me just as much as it fascinates me. The agglutinative versions just seem so expressive and efficient whereas the very fusional ones (and therefor highly irregular) make me want to grab a doll and tell an adult where fusional polypersonal verb systems touched me.
You okay bro?
Basque is very easy despite looking hard. Perifrastikoak verbs are nice 👌
higher on the lowerarchy
More sideways on the horizontalarchy?
Ahhhhhhh, my mind
Further back on the frontarchy?
Already saw this on Patreon but I watch all of Biblaridions videos like 10 times at least
Such a stan
I have to watch them multiple times to really get to grips with the detail. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you :)
What?
Jk i do that too
same lmao
There's a mistake in the Finnish at 3:44. The translation suggests that "tiedämme" is in past tense and the other 3 are in present tense, when actually, all four of the examples given are in present tense. "We knew" would be "tiesimme."
Yep, that was just a dumb typo on my part.
The video is amazing, massive thanks for clarifying this topic
Sidenote, at 11:18 the verb 'see' actually should be in the past tense
I love those language maps. I find it interesting how geographical the dominant orders are, and how even the most unusual orders have at least a few examples.
It took me a while, but thanks to this video, I now fully understand how verb agreement works, thanks, bib! :)
12:05
Can you believe I was reading ""HUM" twice (and ignored and imagined some other things) and somehow naturally assumed their were markers for for "Human Humble 3rd person Object" and "Human Non-humble 3rd Person Object"?
In my conlang there are actually different verb markers if you wanna be more polite or more casual so it wouldn't be something rare to assume
YAAAAAAAYYYYY i was just thinking last night that i hope u upload soon😂😂i love feature focus so much, it really helps me build interesting features into a conlang when im not really sure how to do it myself!! thanks for this one, have a great day!💖✨
Huge fan of your videos, but I'm not sure you really explained the difference between passive voice and inverse very well. The key thing is that the actor in a passive construction is an adjunct and can be left out of the sentence. In an inverse construction, the actor is an obligatory argument of the verb. Although it is of lower animacy than the patient, it cannot be left out, as with a passive, as valency has not changed
A nice particularity I encountered studying Breton is how verbs are only conjugated in certain syntactic environments. In affirmative sentences the verb will only be conjugated if there’s no expressed subject, otherwise the third person form is used in all cases. For example, “I see a girl” will be either “Me a wel ur plac’h”, where “me” is the first person singular pronoun and “wel” the (mutated) third person form of the verb to see (gwellet), or “Ur plac’h a welan”, without an expressed subject but with the first person singular suffix “-an”. There is an exception: if I want to emphasize it is me who sees the girl, I can suffix the pronoun “me” to the verb which gives “Ur plac’h a welan-me”. In negative sentences, verbs are conjugated when the subject is before the verb or not expressed, and aren’t when the subject is after it. “I do not see the girl” would be either “Me ne welan ket ar plac’h” or “Ne welan ket ar plac’h”, respectively with and without the expressed pronoun “me” and with the personal suffix “-an”, but in a sentence like “My mom doesn’t see the girl”, “Ar plac’h ne wel ket ma mamm.” with the subject “my mom” (“ma mamm”) behind the verb, the verb “wel” is used without a personal ending which is the third person singular form.
In Italian we have this sort of incorporation in the imperative and sometimes in the infinitive. For example: 'daglielo' - 'give it to hm/her'; 'parlategliene' - 'talk to him/them about it'; 'diteglielo' - (you pl.) say it to him/her/them.
This video is truly fantastic! Your examples are great and you explanations are clear and comprehensive! Great work!
Ay, btw, Spanish whilst having a much stricter word order it is still pretty non strict and is used to place focus and topic (kinda like in Basque)
Los peces beben agua. Topic of the sentence is Los peces.
Beben agua los peces. Focus of the sentence is on los peces.
Agua beben los peces. The topic is the fishes but the focus is on the water.
Interesting how the top of the animacy hierarchy in Navajo is "adult humans, and also lightning."
I'd like to do a slight correction to 2:54. The 'in' in nahuatl is not a definite but a topic article. You can say things like "In tzahtzi ca cihuātl" or "In oc tonoc, nicochi" because it's more equivalent to Japanese は or Spanish 'a'.
Also at 3:22, the third person object shouldn't be 'qui-' here because 'cua' doesn't begin with 'i' or occur alone like in 10:16. It should be "Ticcuāc" in Classical, though perhaps it's changed in some modern dialects.
Also one last thing for 4:06. Inanimate nouns cannot be plural unless they're tepētl, cītlalin or āltepētl. They're all treated as mass nouns.
Okay one last thing for real. At 12:01, the 'i' between tla- and itqui should drop to make '-tlatqui-'. This is how the noun 'tlatquitl' was made. As for causative, the vowel should be lengthened and it should be '-ltia' since itqui ends with a vowel, unless you make itqui's final vowel long. So this should rather be "Nimitztētlatquiltīlia" or "Nimitztētlatquītīlia".
@@babelKONI I’ve seen “in” been called many different things, but I often see it get referred to as the definite article, even though it definitely fills many more functions than that. I’ve been studying Nahuatl on-and-off for a few years now and I still don’t know when I should and shouldn’t use “in”.
3:22 was just a straight up mistake on my part. I think I’d written the sentence as having a third person subject, but then decided to change it to 2nd person later but forgot to change the object marker.
As I understood it, inanimate nouns can still take plural marking, they just usually don’t? My dictionary still cites “xochimeh” as a valid word.
I got the example at 12:01 from a paper. I guess the authors just misconjugated.
@@Biblaridion Think of 'in' as simply a clause linker, with the attached clause being what immediately follows it. It's been called many different things because all of those things fall under the category "general relation" which is what 'in' essentially does. You can use it like English's 'when', as in "In ōnimitzittac, ōztōpa tihuālhuiya. (As I saw you, you were coming from the cave.)" Also possible is using it similar to 'about' or '-copa', as in "Nimitzmachtia in timihtōtīz. (I teach you how to dance, about how you will dance.)" But in all these cases it's nothing more than the most generic possible topical/relational marker. It's like one of the most useful words in any language. I recommend J. Richard Andrews' Introduction to Classical Nahuatl for more on this; though it's pretty technical, it's like the most accurate resource on Nahuatl syntax and morphology (avoid the second edition if possible).
An example in my language (portuguese):
Ele deu um gato para mim
"He gave a cat to me"
-the verb is already in 3rd P sing só the subject can be dropped:
deu um gato para mim
"gave a cat to me"
-now "para mim" gets affixated to "deu" as "me":
deu-me um gato
"gave-me a cat"
- and then "um gato" becomes gets suffixed as "o", and it crontracts with "me" to form "mo":
deu-mo
"gave-me-him"
It's a really formal written language kind of construction, but nevertheless, it can convey the information given the right context. ;)
És tuga ou zuca?
Thank you very much for this video, I'm studying Georgian and this explained to me understand the basics of verb agreement.
Now the hard part: actually memorizing each one for all verbs (of which half in Georgian are irregular)
3:13 I'd like to point out that 喜欢 is actually xǐhuan, with a third tone instead of the first.
Oh yeah, tones sometimes change right?
@@danieldoel6216 That's correct, but definitely not in this way.
At 2:56 in Basque, it should be "ikusi du", not "ikusi rau".
Well, the English sentence says "Jon saw Miren", so it should be "ikusi zuen", but "ikusi rau" might mean the same thing in some Basque dialect, even though I have never heard of it.
I noticed that some romance languages use OVS for emphasis sometimes wich seems pretty weird to me, in Portuguese a construction like "ele eu vi" ("I saw him", literally "him I saw") seems to have meaning like "of course I saw him"
Portuguese is my mother tongue. At least in my dialect, this construction will sound weird to pretty much every speaker and is likely to be perceived as a grammar mistake rather than a deliberate choice of wording.
@@weirdlyspecific302 I'm a native too, and I talk like that all the time, and everyone here does too, anyway, for curiosity, where are you from?
eu o vi
vi-o
ele, eu vi
etc
that is OSV
@@normal7877 you are right, I'm stupid (damn it dyslexia)
I Thought "Hmm, I Already Know About Verb Agreement, But I'll Watch This Video Anyway", And Boy Am I Glad I Did, Because There Was A Lot More Than Just Verb Agreement In Here, Including Stuff I Didn't Know!
*7:09
Did you mean to say that BOTH of those sentences are wrong, or was the bottom one supposed to be right?
Tho I love polypersonal agreement.
So many of my conlangs have it that I've kinda gotten bored of it lol
3:45 the "tiedämme" translation is wrong, it should say "we know". "We knew" would be "tiesimme".
I take it you're including pre/postpositions in the noun case category. I would have expected them to be mentioned explicitly.
How about Austronesian/Philipine alignment...? Im still confused by it, is it all about definiteness, or is it also about this verb agreement?
I actually almost included a section about Austronesian alignment, but I cut it because it doesn't actually qualify as full verb agreement, but interestingly, it's actually kind of related to direct/inverse systems. All "austronesian alignment" really is is just using passives and applicatives to keep the topic as the subject. David Peterson wrote a brief thing about it here: archives.conlang.info/pae/qhanghu/duavhualshuen.html
We do not talk of the demon that is Austronesian alignment.
What font do you use?????
Queens Park Italic
that, as always, was a great video. thank you! :)
3:27 I think it's interesting that ni- means "I" in Nahuatl because -ni means "you" in Lakota (stative verbs only).
Anyone else find it kinda funny how most languages that mark verbs don’t mark when it’s 3rd person singular but that’s the only one that English marks
Yes, that is weird, but that's how the historical-sound-change-cookie crumbled.
Polish had the 3SG as the first IE verbal ending that it loses, but keeps all other person marking.
The Agent =/= the subject, nor does the object =/= the patient.
The phrase "I receive" is a good example I is the subject and patient of the verb.
Subject is who the verb is about/focus on I think of it as point of view, where as agent is the one who is doing the verb and patient is the one experiencing/having the verb be done on them.
Surface arguments like "subject" and "object" are about syntactic alignment systems, and those surface terms may not always match the deep argument roles. So, yes, in something like a passive, the surface subject is the deep patient. However, agreement on verbs will typically pattern with surface syntax, not with deep role structures.
In accusative languages the agent is the subject, and in ergative languages the subject is the patient
These videos are great, but mostly apply to entirely original conlangs. I have ideas of Earth-based creole/expatriate community languages. Any guidelines for that?
In the basque example in 2:54, it would be better to be "Jonek Miren ikusi ZUEN (Subj. 3rd per. sing.; Dir. obj. 3rd per. sing.; past)" (the order doesn't matter). I don't know how ancient basque or any dialect are, but in the 'batua' dialect that would be the best option.
i would suggest you to talk about clauses, it would be helpful
For European languages, like Latin and Greek, that only mark the subject with suffixes on their verbs, how do conjugation systems like this evolve? Is this the result of a language that historically was VSO and had the subject slowly over time amalgamate with the verb?
Nice video. Thanks for useful information
"In all known natural languages-"
me: THERE'S NO WAY THAT A BEE SHOULD BE ABLE TO FLY
oh thank god it wasn't just me
wut
You. Yes you. Stop reanimating dead memes now! You’ll start a meme zombie apocalypse if you continue.
2:27 Exemplish has a SOV word order, so it makes sense that the polypersonal agreement evolves into a system where a verb is preceded by a phonologically reduced form of subject+object.
Then, how to explain that many languages evolves suffix-like conjugation (spanish for example), which marks the subject at the end of a verb, if there are so rarely languages that employs VSO or OVS? Shouldn't it make more sense that personal conjugation markers are placed before rather than after the verb?
Now just waiting on Conlang Critic...
And there it is.
I am a German native speaker, and I realized that German is so REDUNDANT. There are pronouns, why there is verb inflection? The nouns changes in number and case, why does it the article too?
In the sentence
"Die Männer gingen"
= "The men went"
is the number of the subject marked
1. In the article (die)
2. In the umlaut (-ä-)
3. In the plural suffix (-er)
4. In the suffix of the verb for 3rd person plural.
Wow!
I think it is charming. But yeah probably it's quite bothersome.
Whenever someone mentions the tendency for 3rd person singular to be unmarked I start laughing at English, just a little.
You have a point. If there's a tendency in language to have the third person singular unmarked, why is it that English only marks the third person singular particularly in the present tense?
@@raysan_rosado366 historical shenanigans, presumably.
5:16 the Guarani example uses the 1PL exclusive, not the inclusive.
Do you make your visuals through a slideshow (e.g. PowerPoint)? If so, would you be willing to share them along with the video?
Examplish is my favorite language
Please visit Exampland if you have the time.
Great video, but one remark:
It's kinda incorrect to use hyphens in the glosses and leave them out in the presented clause/word. If you put hyphens in the glosses put them in the clause/word as well.
Love your video, I just wanted to point out that the basque translation should be "Jonek Miren ikusi du"
I was wondering if there are any languages that use separate adjective-like words to mark the subject and object? Or do such words inevitably end up attached to something else?
I started building a language and one of the things I did after deciding how the grammatical gender was going to work was create articles that agreed in gender and number. I later realized I didn't really care to use articles in my language, so I decided to repurpose them as a way to mark which noun is the subject and which is the object. It was perfect, because the language has 2 main word orders and I needed something to use as a marking.
Most of the time the subject and object marking will come bundled with either the nouns or the verbs, but they can sometimes occur just as separate particles. When you say the articles mark the subject and object, you mean the articles take case marking instead of the actual noun? That is rare, but it does happen every so often (I believe that sometimes happens in German?).
@@BiblaridionYes. There are 6 articles, 2 for each gender that mark the subject and object. The default word order is SVO, but VSO is used to emphasize the action was not voluntary or not something the subject has or had any control over. The nouns themselves don't take any case marking, and the articles are used if which noun is the subject and which is the object needs to be made more clear.
An example would be:
"Woman saw child." Sesagen var sesiten.
"The woman saw the child." Net Sesagen var nut sesiten.
"The woman saw the child (but didn't mean to or wasn't trying to see the child). Var net sesagen nut sesiten.
Pronouns do take case marking, even though the nouns don't.
Planned name for my next clong: Examplish!
Anyone know if there's an example of the plural marker being tacked onto the verb to denote a continuous verb, or the other way around?
In the language in making the word order is SOV or OSV with subject, object, and verb marking, even though the verb always stays in the same place
Nice little redundancy there
Although, verbs arent ussally objects or subjects
There are two mistakes with the Russian example at 11:13.
First, видел/видела is past tense, so it should be translated as “saw”, not “sees”.
Second, in the first sentence, the а-ending in “Анна” is feminine nominative marker; it is not marker-less as is the case with masuline nouns.
Is the third argument of a verb always the beneficiary? I have a conlang with a class of transferitive verbs, such as "give to" or " buy from" distinct from "give" or "buy." With these verbs, the two parties involved in the transfer are the agent and patient, while the object being transferred takes the dative case or may be omitted entirely to show an unknown or unspecified "something." Are there any natlangs that have a similar distinction?
This looks like what is called an "applicative". This is a verb form related to voice, kind of like passives. An applicative promotes some noun phrase in the sentence to the direct object position, such as in your case, promoting the indirect object to direct object position. For example "I give the book to the dog" could become "I give-APPL the dog", where the direct object becomes who you are doing the giving to. An applicative is sometimes counted as a verb form, or a derivation method, or other times it could be a distinction made by completely separate words, as in your case (a word for "give" and a word for "give to"). For example, in English, we have "say" and "address" which kind of do this. "I said hello to the man" contrasts with "I addressed the man", where the indirect object, 'man', has been promoted to direct object position. However, as I mentioned above, applicatives are often a verb form like passives, such as an affix put onto the verb or an auxiliary or particle or whatever. For example, we could have an applicative suffix, such as '-ha' to put on verbs to promote an indirect object to direct object position: if "leki" means "say", then "lekiha" could mean "address". If "polu" means "give" then "poluha" could mean "give to". A fun verb form to play around with, to be sure!
There is a mistake in Russian at 11:13 the translation should be in past tence, as видела and видел are in past tence.
Just rewatched this and realized a mistake in the Swahili examples: Animals are considered animate so fall in the "A-WA" class, and "-me-" indicates recent past perfect.
"Watoto wametazama simba." (Children have recently seen a lion)
"Simba mewatazama watoto." (A lion has recently seen children)
The second I saw the thumbnail I knew it was Náhuatl ;) Nitlahtoa nawatlahtolli
Hmm, How Would One Go About Specifying Which Of Two Third Person Things Are Being Referred To In A Language Where The Word Order Can Change For Emphasis, Other Than Using Obviate/Proximate Markers?
hey anyone, do you know if it'd be fair to say that spoken persian is developing a system of polypersonal agreement with its shortened pronouns affixing to conjugated verbs to mark object like می بینمت for i see you?
You mentioned guarani
Omg thank you for this!
Magic potato
Zaccari Jarman i will sue you in the name of Latheši
@@Alice-gr1kb hehehe
Very informative video!
The graphic at 11:14 is wrong.
In the first sentence the nominative marker in "Анна" isn't -Ø but -а.
I just realised
Biblaridion is the Xidnaf that likes to make languages
He's the Xidnaf that makes videos
Alex Hampton
Why did you have to remind me that he hasn’t uploaded in 2 years, man.
7:12 - lightning up there with adult humans in the animacy hierarchy, literally a step above _children_.
I have a question for my conlang. Couldn't portmanteau agreement come from regular poly personal agreement and a great deal of sound change? That was what I imagined before watching this video. Thank you.
I don't get how you can have he pronouns fuse into the verb, and then have the pronouns be separate from the verb. Would that just be like "He hewalk"??
Also despite "sha" and "ne" not being 3rd person (The slide showed "I" and "you"), the king/fish example says they are?? Unless that's you indirectly pointing out the king/fish are third person. But even then the video talks about gender rather than anything else?? This is confusing to me.
This is an old comment, but I’ll answer with an example from Spanish:
I speak - yo hablo
I speak - hablo
The “hablo” with the “o” ending means “1st person singular speak” or “I speak”. Adding the “yo” onto the phrase isn’t necessary anymore. That’s why it’s often lost in informal speech, or when the subject was already mentioned.
@@kitdubhran2968 Thank you but that was not my question. If verb agreement forms from the pronouns fusing to the verb, how can a language get new pronouns? Example, if to say 'he walks' in a language is or would be equivalent to "walkhe", then how does the phrase "he walkhe" happen? Where does the extra pronoun come from?
@@lulujuice1 if you mean new pronouns, language evolution sometimes adds new words to fill in the spaces of something old. So an entirely new word, maybe an evolution of the word “man” will replace the old pronoun for “he”. And then you have “man walkhe”. Sort of.
If you mean the same pronoun getting added back in, that happens sometimes too, when a language loses a word through a long evolution, then adds it back in for clarity, because the phrase has softened or bleached over time.
Like: I’m going to => I’m gonna => imma => imma go
I hope I understood your question enough to help. ❤️
@@lulujuice1 The romance languages replaced is/ea/id (demonstratives used as pronouns in Latin) with pronouns derived from ille/illa/illud (emphatic demonstratives which became Romance language pronouns).
@@somebodyelse9130Okay but by the time the Romance conjugation scheme happened, they were ALREADY inflected. PIE itself had "he hewalk"... BUT, this does indeed shed some light on the answer. Thank you.
Why is there an accent on "девушка" but not on the othe words in your Russian example? That doesn't make any sense
Also, at 11:17, your Russian examples are weird again. Why do you include stress marks on everything but Anna and Annu?
Additionally, this is the wrong tense, being the imperfective past rather than present. The nouns also don't agree for grammatical person, but only grammatical gender. The form of "see" for first person singular in the past used by females is the same as the form used for 3rd person feminine nouns in the same tense.
What's the source of the map at 2:22?
WALS
Where do you get those cool world maps with dots representing each language?
I think they're from World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS)
@@ibi6262 Thank you!
I don't get what the difference between verb agreement and cases is
When grammatical information about syntactic roles (who is doing what in a sentence) is displayed on a noun, it's called "case declension" or "noun agreement". This is just the terminology used. When that grammatical information about syntactic roles is displayed on a verb, it's called "verb conjugation" or "verb agreement". As shown in the video, verbs can have anything from no conjugation/agreement to a lot, with a lot of various categories of distinctions used in various languages. With nouns, it's similar: languages range from no noun declensions to many, with different kinds of distinctions made in different languages.
Generally, languages like to mark syntactic roles somewhere in the sentence, to supplement basic word order marking. Whether such marking happens on either nouns, verbs, or both, and the extent and variety of such marking, is part of what makes languages structurally and grammatically unique.
In the next video about your conlang do you start with the lexicon
Thank you for this
so is it good or bad that i have a word order, noun cases and verb agreement?
Why not? Finnish does. You need to put the words in some order anyway, so your default word order can step in as the final option if the others fail for some reason. Using the other options for determining the roles means you can use different word order to emphasize or something. Similarly, verb agreement gives you the option to drop the subject pronoun -- and then, not dropping them puts emphasis on them. And as for dropping the subject -- how about a form that never takes one in the first place?
Is any object marking attested in Indo-European languages?
Not that I know of, though in many Romance languages object (and for in some languages subject) pronouns are clitics that are attached to the verb and are common and is some languages even mandatory, even when the noun they refer to is also present in the sentence. So in a way it's an object marking. Spanish and Romanian in particular have mandatory object pronouns but only when the object is animate (more precisely, on the same animacy level as human beings), but otherwise not; and I think an animacy dependent object agreement is rather cool.
How do systems evolve where the verb conjugations sound nothing like their associated pronouns? I've looked at PIE, and it doesn't seem to me that its person-marking endings relate to its pronouns in any way. I would have expected the pronouns and endings to evolve similarly (since the verb endings are at the end of the word), but they're just completely different.
Come to think of it, why are those endings suffixes and not prefixes? If PIE was SOV (as its descendants seem to indicate), then how did the pronoun get glommed onto the end of the verb?
"A VERY small number of languages mark just the object."
24/378 = 6.3%
I guess everyone's "very"s are different, but that's comparable to the occurrence of VSO (95/1377 = 6.9%) and it's only about 3 times less common than marking the subject only. I would have just used a "very", rather than a "VERY", but I guess that's why you include the actual data.
why is this only on the playlist
Discord gang.
Rise up.
Nahuatl thumbnail real nice
Beautiful
1:18 Brazil: SOV and VOS? Which language is this study talking about? Portuguese I know allow some grade of permutations: SVO-> SOV, VSO, OVS, etc... But the majoritity is SVO even if you think about the assimilation of Tupi constructs...
Why is this unlisted?
Patreon exclusivity
@@oz_jones I'm not a patreon though
The Russian sentences at 12 mins are wrongly translated видел/ видела are past tense. So it should be the man saw Anna.
3:31 What does DEF dog mean?
DEF -> “definite article”, ie the English “the”. So DEF dog means “the dog”
Imagine... grammatical disagreement
Now I want to see if I can make that happen in a language.
I made my own conlang but how do I learn it ?
The same way we learn any language, Pinky; TRY TO TAKE OVER THE ... I mean ... with rote memorization and constant practice. Trying to teach it to anyone else who is willing and then conversing in it may help, too, but that's not as likely a plan.
Mhh ok My sister will have a baby soon, I could teach him the language.
@Erdgerd so basically you’re going to do that one Klingon experiment all over again?
What Klingon experiment?
@@erdgerd5503 The Klingon experiment was about a guy who tried to teach his son Klingon language. It worked for a couple of years until the child, having already learned English as well, saw no use in speaking Klingon anymore and stopped responding in Klingon.
Spanish subtitles will help las personas
the full language of examplish is just TH-----------ian.
Most languages: have a complex system of question marking
Mandarin: like?🤨
I mean Italian only uses tons to form polar questions, and mandarin has 2 question strategies, one which involves reduplication around a negative particle. So I wouldn’t single that out as a language with a simple way of marking questions
Finally
The Bee Movie in Edun
Ojibwe be like: NO U
Wow i didn't understand that at all
they
Why is this unlisted?