Passivity And The Framing Of Descriptions

Latin verbs tend to be pretty uninteresting. Complicated and frustrating, occasionally, but not all too interesting. However, when going through my textbook last year, there were a tiny handful of verbs that caught my attention. Not their conjugations, but their meanings - more specifically, how the textbook phrased their meanings.

Gaudēre - To be happy

Esurire - To be hungry

Timēre - To be afraid of

Now, the knee-jerk reaction of a modern English speaker would probably be "Why are those verbs? They should just be adjectives." Mine was. After all, what was the point of having specific verbs if they were just other ways of saying "I'm hungry" - Latin has plenty of adjectives used those exact ways.

However, then I looked at the specific words that fit this construction. I remembered that they all have alternate phrasings (in English) - that, in fact, were verbs. You rarely (if ever) hear or see these anymore, but recall:

To rejoice

To hunger

To fear

There we go, other ways of saying "I am ___" within the same language.

And those are what you would use if you were trying to literally translate a Latin sentence using gaudēre, esurire, or timēre. I'm not sure why these verb forms died in favor of their adjectives, but I know one thing: The meaning a verb form constructs and the meaning an adjective form constructs are different.

It's the difference between active and passing. With the verbs you are the one feeling the emotion. You're fearing the wolf, you're hungering, you're actively expressing happiness. By putting you in an active role - by framing emotions* as acts - the verb forms of these words indicate that you are seemingly in control of what your body experiences.

Whereas, in the adjective form, you're passive. Hunger is simply something happening to you - you're not doing anything. Happiness is in you, but you're not expressing or creating that happiness.

So, using an adjective as opposed to a verb is a way of linguistically taking the blame off the subject. You're not responsible for your fear if it just happened to....well, happen to you.

It's a minor thing, but an interesting one. Of course, this isn't even getting into the other methods of constructing what in English would be adjectives. One step at a time.

*Yes, I know that hunger isn't really an emotion. I have trouble phrasing things.

Sorry

For the lack of posting recently. I'm savoring my last few days before I am once again trapped within the confines of a school...

But, after thee first couple days of school, I'l probably start making normal posts again. I'm writing out a little review of the Finnish emersion camp I went to, and I have some topic ideas.

But for now, just hang back and check out this amazing new linguistics blog. A kickass aspiring linguist - what I aspire to be. (I'll probably never get there, but...)

Songs In Languages I Don't Speak - Round 19: В моей душе осадок зла

L.I.D.S.: Russian!

Here's a cute little tune from Russian rock band Воскресенье. Nothing too special, but a nice song. Admittedly Russian isn't my favorite Slavic language, but I don't actively dislike it.

Songs In Languages I Don't Speak - Round 18: Mijn Leven Is Van Mij

L.I.D.S.: Dutch!

Okay, so this is another one where I'm "cheating" a little bit - This song was originally in German. In fact, it's from the same musical that provided S.I.L.I.D.S. Round 9. This is the Dutch version of the most famous song in the musical, Ich Gehör Nur Mir.

Interesting Articles, Round 2

This is another day when I'm too lazy to write up my own posts, and I found some nice articles to share. Aren't I just a wonderful student? As usual, some are new, some are old, all are fun to read.

(Also, I should mention that I was going to write a post about my experiences at a Finnish emersion camp. I found that I actually didn't have much to say on my own. But, if any of you are curious about it - maybe consider gooooing - I could give some information about it and a basic "review".)

Categorisation, Categories, and Prototypes - A piece about what we consider prototypes for categories, and the blurry boundary lines between categories.

List Of Unsolved Problems In Linguistics

Learning To Speak Czech - About some of the challenges that face Czech students, and perceptions of speakers of the language.

Initial Reactions To Czech (AKA, All I Can Say Without Doing Any Real Grammatical Research)

As a follow-up to my post on the Czech games, I'd like to post some short observations on the little Czech those games taught me.

*There are a lot more cognates than I thought there would be. Due to my socialization of language perception, I had always thought that Slavic languages in general, while in the Indo-European family and therefore bound to have some similarities to the Germanic/Romance section, would have pretty much unrecognizable vocabulary. I was amazed how many cognates I could recognize.

*I was right - Czech seems even more similar to Polish than I had guessed. In those little list of words, I recognized so many Polish cognates. One that really stood out to me was the phrase/word for "I don't understand" - "Nerozumím".

And now I can get off on a tangent about Polish grammar. In Czech, because "Ne" means "no", I can logically assume that "I understand" would be something along the lines of "rozumím". And the word for "I understand" in Polish? "Rozumiem".

I can also go one step further (now we're really getting into "Lorre, you should not be assuming this until you actually do some serious research" territory) and assume something about the first-person verb ending. In Polish, (one of the) present-tense first-person endings is an "m". "Rozumie" would be the stem of the word above. And take a look at the word for "I do not speak" - "Nemluvím". Removing the negative prefix, "I speak" would be "Mluvím". And for confirmation that this is an ending, I looked at the word for "you speak" - "Mluvíte". (Allow me to also point out the cognate in the "te" ending, identical in countless European languages, including one or two outside the Indo-European family.)

Anyway, my point is that "m" might be the first-person ending in both Polish and Czech.

*There also seem to be several grammatical similarities to Lithuanian. The one that made me go "Wow, holy crap!" (Honestly, I did think that. Yes, I do know I'm hopeless, thank you very much.) was that "ne": Lithuanian uses that negative prefix the same way Czech seems to. "I understand" = "Aš suprantu", while "I don't understand" = "Aš nesuprantu". Identical to the structure of "Nerozumím" or "Nemluvím".

*I already knew that Czech was gendered, but I wasn't sure how many it had. Slavic languages are pretty bad about gender - Polish has five genders that a word can be. I'm still not sure exactly how many Czech has, but  I now know it has at least three. You can deduce this if you look at the greetings for "Good morning", "good evening", and "good night". Each uses a different form of the adjective meaning "good":

"Dobré ráno"
"Dobrý večer"
"Dobrou noc"

*The number system seems as logical as they come. 11-19 all use their second number (i.e. "4" in 14) or modifications of it, plus the ending "-náct".

*Here's another one of those "I should probably research this" conjectures. There appears to be some sort of vowel gradation system used within the language. I take this from looking at the numbers.

"Five" = "Pět"
"Nine" = "Devět".

But, when the "náct" ending is added on, those "ě"s turn into "a"s.

"Fifteen" = "Patnáct"
"Nineteen" = "Devatenáct"

And that's all I have to say for now..although that was a lot of rambling. I will now proceed to do some actual studying on Czech, maybe see if I can confirm some of my theories. Actually, wait, I have one last observation:

*Czech seems like a very nice language. It may be conventionally "difficult", but then so are 99% of the languages I like. I have a strong feeling I'll be studying it for a while.

An Excellent Tool For Beginners Studying Czech

Lately, thanks largely to my growing obsession with the musical Drákula, I've become curious about the Czech language. Other than that one musical, I haven't looked into it much. However, I have studied bits of Polish, and listen to quite a bit of Russian, so I reckoned they couldn't be too far off, what with the closeness of Slavonic languages in general.

Thanks to the ever-amazing treasury of information that is Omniglot, I found a perfect new site for people who just want to learn some incredibly basic Czech: Games at Digital Dialects. It contains six games that teach you basic vocabulary - Numbers, survival greetings, colors, and the calendar.

The game goes a little differently depending on which one you're playing, but they follow a basic formula: You're shown a short list of vocabulary words that you'll use in the game, with their English equivalents. You can study them for as long as you want. If you're like me, you may want to write them down - both as a "cheat sheet" to use in emergencies, and to study later if you want to pursue the language. Then, the game starts.

I first played the numbers games (1-12, 13-20, and 10-100). This is probably the only time in history that I will say I actually enjoyed doing math. First, you do addition. You'll be given a problem like Čtrnáct + Tři, and a small list of possible answers (so it's multiple choice, in a way). You then choose the number that's the correct answer (in this case, 14 + 3 is 17, so the answer would be Sedmnáct). You're timed for each problem, with the time getting shorter as you progress.

After a while of addition problems, it switches to subtraction (don't worry, you never have to do multiplication or division!).

My personal favorite game was the colors. It gives you visual aids, which normally don't help me in learning, but worked here for association. This plays a little differently than the number games, so I would recommend you play it yourself to find out.

Now, I walked into this knowing not one word of Czech. And in the first half of the first game I played, I was failing pretty miserably - but by the end of that game I was doing much better. And I did excellently in the next game. By the third, I was kicking some vocabularies' asses. It was enjoyable, but most of all, really damn helpful. I can now recognize numbers up to 20, the basic color wheel, and basic greetings.

And, because I am a hopeless nerd, that gives me a sense of satisfaction beyond description.

So yes, I recommend these games for everyone who hasn't ever considered Czech as a language to learn. They're what language memory tools should be - easy, helpful, and fun.

Next I'll write up some of my initial observations, conjectures, and opinions about Czech. Remember, I love to run my mouth about things I know very little about.

Songs In Languages I Don't Speak - Round 17: Pani Capuletti

L.I.D.S.: Polish!

Oh yeah, more musicals. As much as I'm normally neutral about Slavic languages - "Eh..they sound fine. Wouldn't wanna learn one." - Polish is one that I really do like. The way the words look and sound really appeals to me for a reason I can't quite put my finger on.

Anyway, this is a song from the Polish musical Romeo I Julia. You should probably be able to guess what it's an adaptation of.