#noun class

[dedalvs]

Could you please talk more about how/why agreement systems develop in language? I always feel that agreement systems are poorly justified in my conlanging

Agreement systems are retained in language because the redundancy strengthens the signal. It's better to think about linguistics systems in terms of "why didn't speakers get rid of this" as opposed to "why did this come about in the first place". Sometimes things happen randomly. They're retained because they're useful.

But like, consider gender in English. We used to have it. Gender was mostly defined by the endings of words. We lost all the endings. We lost some major forms of agreement (consider that French still has different articles). At a certain point, it was impossible to tell if a noun was m/f/n, so of course English lost its gender system. It was no longer useful. In fact, going even further, it was the opposite of useful, because it was totally unpredictable and didn't buy you anything.

As an example of the latter, there's this sign system called Signed Exact English (SEE). It's often (not always, but often) pedaled as a replacement for ASL, because it will "help" Deaf signers learn English. One of the features it retains is the distinction between "a" and "an". English speakers know how to do this instinctively: You use "a" before a noun phrase (not a noun, but a noun phrase) that begins with a consonant sound, and you use "an" before a noun phrase that begins with a vowel sound (so "umbrella" gets "an", but "union" gets "a"). In SEE, there's a separate sign for "a" and "an", and then ASL signs are used for English words like "man" and "old". So then you have to sign:

A MAN

AN OLD MAN

But, of course, the difference is based on the sound of the English pronunciation of the word the sign stands for, so it is quite literally impossible to predict for a Deaf signer. It has to be memorized. Which is an extraordinary task. Basically, all nouns, adjectives, and adverbs (consider "a really old man") have to be dumped in either the A class or the AN class with absolutely no way to predict which will be in which.

This is a great example of a feature that would quickly die in a natural language.

So looking at gender, the question is how useful is it? If it's (a) predictable, and (b) spread across multiple areas of the language, then it's more useful, and more likely to be retained. If you look at Spanish, agreement is present in pronouns, adjectives, demonstratives, and articles. The gender of a noun highly predictable (not 100%, but highly predictable). That's a stable gender system. French is similar, but the gender is less predictable for nouns. If one was going to lose gender first, you'd predict French. Even so, it's still predictable enough that more will probably have to happen for French to actually lose it.

As for where it comes from, if you want to read a detailed account of the development of Indo-European gender, this is an intro. Most of the time it's the incorporation of pronouns or small, generic nouns that become commonly associated with particular classes and are used as modifiers. We've got a pretty good example of the development of noun class in Sarkezhe, season 4 of LangTime Studio. If you want to see it done from beginning to end, check that out.

Hope that helps!

[mapswithoutwyoming]

fun fact: in gendered languages, or more generally languages with noun classes (since noun classes don't always indicate gender), the class of a noun which does not clearly fall into a class by semantics - such as the gender of a genderless inanimate noun - almost always just comes down to the phonetics of the word itself. In romance languages, since some old words and suffixes for men and women (semantically) ended in ways that evolved into -o* and -a* respectively in the modern day, when that formalized into a gender-based noun class system, inanimate nouns were classed based on how they ended.

It'd be like saying "toy" is a masculine word because it sounds like "boy" and "swirl" is a feminine word because it sounds like "girl". Really the whole point is that adding agreement in adjectives or pronouns adds redundancy, which lets sentences remain easier to understand even if they're a little garbled. It is an accident of history that the noun class systems most common in Europe are exclusively gender-based and thus socioculturally loaded. Check out the Bantu languages for some very interesting and complex examples of class systems.

going around on a building with a clipnoard assigning pronouns to various objects

[dramatic-dolphin]

waaagh i fucking love linguistics i am going to eat this book. sorry librarians

[sannehnagi]

Lexember 2

tīne, 4th class noun, lake, large body of water.

Depicts borders with the water radical inside.

e’otīne /ɛʔɔtiːnɛ/ the lake

Iatīne /iˑjatiːnɛ/ the lakes

ītīne /iːtiːnɛ/ the two lakes

iotīne /jɔtiːnɛ/ a lake

Þutīne /ðutiːnɛ/ lakes

uītīne /wiːtiːnɛ/ a couple lakes

[melit0n]

.

[proteusolm]

We need to take away the Canadian school system's mandatory french class privileges until they re-design the curriculum to be conducive to learning French. I'd bet 95% of Ontario english public school students come out of high school after ~6 years of French class unable to string together a sentence. It would be great for learning our other national language to be standard if, y'know, they actually bothered to do it in a way that considers how human beings learn language. As is it's a waste of many, many hours of kids lives that could be used for learning something of value to them, or hell, doing fun kid stuff.

It would be sooooo cool to be able to talk to my French Canadian friends in French but I wouldn't understand anything beyond picking out individual words here and there. Written french I can usually figure out, but I can't write it myself and I definitely cant understand spoken french. And I repeat. I took 6 years of French class.

[moonsidesong]

played around witg that infinite craft thing with my buddy it was very fun. we invented narutrillion (trillion naruto)

[theyuniversity]

💡🧠 Grammar Lesson: Collective Nouns

A collective noun is one that is structurally singular but refers to a plural. Examples of collective nouns include the following (but there are countless others):

group

collection

litter (of animals) 🐈🐈🐈

herd 🐄🐄🐄

flock (of birds) 🐦🐦🐦

school (of fish) 🐟🐠🐡

family 👨‍👩‍👦

trio

pair

team

Notice that each of those nouns is singular (the words do not end with -s) but refers to more than one item.

In American English, collective nouns are generally singular except for “people” and “police.” (In British English, collective nouns are plural.) For example, a football club (soccer team) is considered a plural entity in British English, whereas in American English, it is treated as one singular unit:

Image via EnglishClub

Proceeding in American English, the following are correct:

My family is going to Maui during winter break. 🏝🐳

Our football team is exceeding expectations this year; it might actually compete for the league title. 🏈🏆

A flock of birds flying in perfect synchronicity is a sight to behold. 🕊

The trio of appetizers appeals to my younger brother. 🍠🥙🥑😋

The group of contestants expects the judges’ results by next week. 🤞

⚠ However, there is one big exception:

“A lot of [x]”, “a bunch of [x],” and “a number of [x]” are all considered plural. The most basic reason for this is that all of them essentially mean ‘many’ (and “many” is always plural). For example, all of these are plural:

A lot of movie-watchers were disappointed by the director’s latest film. 🎬👎

Lately, a number of dogs have been barking at odd hours of the night. 🐕

A bunch of children are looking forward to receiving Christmas presents from Santa. 🎅

💡 Pro Tip: If you are concerned that you might misuse “a lot of,” “a number of,” and “a bunch of,” just replace them with easier synonyms, including “many” and “several.” 👌

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[amaryllisthegheist]

Mazanagu Noun Class Peak

(This is easier than trying to take 5 different screenshots lmfao)

Class 1 - ma(n): The most commonly used class, more or less committed to ‘people’ and things directly related to them. Beasts of burden or household pets which have been highly modified all fall into this class due to how they’ve changed alongside more obvious things such as jobs, kinship titles, relationships and the like.

Duja mapiya The small nomad

Class 2 - ba(n): Colloquially referred to as ‘the untamed’ class, just about every base form of creature and plant falls into this category (ex. Wolves, trees, flowers, berries, thorns) alongside other outside elements such as the weather and celestial bodies. Given its association of being ‘things beyond mortal command,’ gods and goddesses typically trigger this class.

Nayirigizan bayaa The large skewer-bird

Class 3 - azi(n):  Something of a mirror-class to the Untamed, the third class takes in all things that can be consumed by a sophonant and specifies that it is safe to do so. Consists primarily of food but also of things like medicines, water and is particularly important to pay attention to when talking about alien foods. Always ensure whatever you're eating was referred to in this class!

Nezidumi azimazilo! Delicious mudfish!

Class 4 - so(n): Specifically tools used for domestic purposes such as sewing, carving, pottery and the like. It primarily holds the words for furniture and is the class that new technologies tend to be automatically assigned to unless shown that they deserve to be elsewhere.

Sonigu soguvik A sharp needle

Class 5 - sha(n): Specifically tools and creations meant for the act of drawing blood in some fashion. Sometimes it’s still referred to as the hunter’s class due to its continued reality of it being founded on hunter’s tools (knives, spears, bows, arrows, traps) and the like. Often, the only difference between Class 5 and Class 4 words is the prefix.

Sogaaga shanyak An old dagger

Class 6- sa(n) or va(n): Primarily a migratory class that all words can be dropped in to create a place associated with the word, though all resulting words will trigger this class. Interestingly, this class appears to consist of two different variants merged under one banner.

Sakuba savivyak* A filthy nest Vakuba vagagajuk An abandoned den

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I still have to decide if I want articles. I think I only want an indefinite article (a/an) and dropping it would more mean the X.

*the v and y swapped places during this pronunciation; the actual word is vak (filth, foul, dirty, unclean) + vak (a state or condition)

[thepandalion]

in pronouns class

[irlwakko]

*points to empty seat in the total drama fandom* hey is anyone scal-ing here

[aropride]

i experience near panic attack level anxiety every time i go to my history class and i have no fucking clue why

[broke-on-books]

Just used knowledge of a word from my 3rd language (v low proficiency level) to help me w a word from my 2nd (almost fluent). Is this what photosynthesis feels like

[velaraffricate]

i'm not sure if malakawi truly counts as polysynthetic, i don't think i can be the judge of that, but it is certainly far up on that side of the morphosyntactic alignment spectrum, and it basically kind of happened on accident. at first i just wanted polypersonal agreement, then i played around with noun incorporation, and suddenly i'm at the point where an 11 word english sentence can be expressed with only 4 words in malakawi

[cursedwerewolf]

heard the word "unhorse" for the first time today and it's immediately on my list of favourite english words

[benkyoutobentou]

🙃 and 😱 for the langblr emoji asks!

🙃 - Is your target language hard for you?

Each language has its challenges, but I wouldn't really say any of them are particularly difficult for me, say, to the point of frustration. I have struggled with genders and cases in German, but changing the way I think about them has helped!

😱 - What other languages do you know?

I was raised monolingual, so English is the only language other than my target languages that I'm highly proficient in, but I guess I could say Spanish! I've mentioned this a few times here, but I took Spanish all throughout high school and had around B2 level proficiency by the time I graduated. I didn't keep up with it after I graduated, though, so although I have a working knowledge of it, I'm extremely rusty (and I was never super great to begin with). I always say that Japanese is the language that taught me how to learn languages, so if I could redo those years after I graduated (and even while I was studying!) I definitely would've kept up with it and wouldn't have let it deteriorate to this point. One of these days I'd like to work my Spanish back up to a usable point, but it's not something that's in the cards right at this moment.

Thank you for asking! ♥