Blackfoot V
Nov. 17th, 2005 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowBefore returning to our regular topic, I'd like to say a few words about English.
If someone asked you how you construct the plural of a noun in English, you'd probably say something about adding an "-s". Of course, there are exceptions, but only a few, and most of them have been there for a long time. Wags will coin words like "Vaxen", and Neo-Latin constructions often follow Latin patterns, but as a rule new words will fit the "-s" pattern. That is the common understanding.
Unfortunately, it's not quite correct. The standard spoken English plural is not formed by adding an "-s". Here's the correct rule:
1) If the noun ends in a sibilant sound (s, z, sh, zh, ch, j), add "-@z". ('@' is a schwa.[1])
2) Otherwise, if the noun ends in a voiceless sound (p, f, t, th as in "myth", k), add "-s".
3) In all other cases, add "-z".
(Listen carefully to how you pronounce these words; you'll hear it.)
All of this is easy to explain in terms of sounds. "-s/z" is so similar in sound to the sibilants that a schwa has to be inserted to make them separately perceptible (and easily pronounced). "-s" is voiceless and "-z" is voiced, and it's easier to have two consecutive voiceless sounds or two consecutive voiced sounds than to jam a voiced sound and a voiceless one together, especially at the end of a word.
I say all this, because in one of my earlier posts about Blackfoot I made a mistake. I wrote, concerning the various classes of Blackfoot verbs:
The stems, as the examples above suggest, are clearly related, but there is no way of predicting the forms of the related stems. (If they were, we'd be able to separate out affixes meaning "intransitive", "animate subject", or the like; but we can't.)
In point of fact, those affixes do exist. This was partly masked by the fact that Blackfoot, like English, has a number of rules concerning how sounds change depending on context, just like the ones I outlined above for English, and partly by the fact that, for example, there's more than one affix indicating, say, intransitive-with-animate-subject; different verb stems take different affixes, in an unpredictable way. Still, there are only a few affixes of each of the four types (intransitive-animate, intransitive-inanimate, transitive-animate, and transitive-inanimate), and Frantz does discuss them. Eventually.
So this is the story. Each Blackfoot verb stem can take an affix indicating one of the four types. For example, the stem "omai't-" ("believe") can take the affix "-aki" to indicate intransitive-animate ("Kitá-omai't-aki-hpooawa", "You(pl) believe"); the affix "-oo'" to indicate transitive-inanimate ("Kitá-omai't-oo'-pooawa", "You(pl) believe it"); or "-o" to indicate transitive-animate ("Kitá-omai't-o-aawaayi kóko'soaawaiksi", "You(pl) believe your kids"). (There's no affix used here for intransitive-inanimate, since "believe" can't take an inanimate subject.) Other verb stems may take three different affixes, or only two, and which affixes - and how many - depend on the verb - they have to be learned individually.
Anyway. There are some other affixes, related to these, which actually change the meaning (not merely the type) of the verb. There are two causative affixes, "-áttsi" and "-(i)pi"; these turn an intransitive verb ("ihpiyi", "dance") into a transitive one ("ihpiyi-áttsi", "to make dance"). (It's a little more complicated than that; to say, e.g., "I made him buy the cows", you attach a causative affix to the intransitive form of "buy". "He", the subject of "buy", becomes the object of "make buy", and "the cows", the object of "buy", becomes a secondary object - in this case, by being made minor third person.) Verbs involving action for the sake of someone or something else - "He bought the milk for her" - get a "benefactive" affix. There is an "accompaniment" affix: "to work" becomes "to work together", which takes two (or more) conjoined subjects. There is a reflexive affix: "to shoot" becomes "to shoot oneself", and one indicating mutuality, as in, e.g., "Your dogs are trying to kill each other". (I'm not making up these examples; they are the ones which appear in Frantz's book.) Finally, there are affixes which turn nouns into verbs. I mentioned a "to be" suffix in an earlier post; there are also suffixes meaning "to become", "to acquire", or "to provide for". (Attach the "to acquire" suffix to the noun "shoes" to get a verb meaning "to get shoes"; attach the "to provide for" suffix instead to get a verb meaning "to get shoes for (somebody)".)
[1] Since the International Phonetic Alphabet - the writing system used by linguists to represent all kinds of sounds, in all languages - isn't part of ASCII, certain conventions have been adopted for online work. This is one of them.
Whoo. Still not done yet; I'll probably make two more posts in this series... but not now.
If someone asked you how you construct the plural of a noun in English, you'd probably say something about adding an "-s". Of course, there are exceptions, but only a few, and most of them have been there for a long time. Wags will coin words like "Vaxen", and Neo-Latin constructions often follow Latin patterns, but as a rule new words will fit the "-s" pattern. That is the common understanding.
Unfortunately, it's not quite correct. The standard spoken English plural is not formed by adding an "-s". Here's the correct rule:
1) If the noun ends in a sibilant sound (s, z, sh, zh, ch, j), add "-@z". ('@' is a schwa.[1])
2) Otherwise, if the noun ends in a voiceless sound (p, f, t, th as in "myth", k), add "-s".
3) In all other cases, add "-z".
(Listen carefully to how you pronounce these words; you'll hear it.)
All of this is easy to explain in terms of sounds. "-s/z" is so similar in sound to the sibilants that a schwa has to be inserted to make them separately perceptible (and easily pronounced). "-s" is voiceless and "-z" is voiced, and it's easier to have two consecutive voiceless sounds or two consecutive voiced sounds than to jam a voiced sound and a voiceless one together, especially at the end of a word.
I say all this, because in one of my earlier posts about Blackfoot I made a mistake. I wrote, concerning the various classes of Blackfoot verbs:
The stems, as the examples above suggest, are clearly related, but there is no way of predicting the forms of the related stems. (If they were, we'd be able to separate out affixes meaning "intransitive", "animate subject", or the like; but we can't.)
In point of fact, those affixes do exist. This was partly masked by the fact that Blackfoot, like English, has a number of rules concerning how sounds change depending on context, just like the ones I outlined above for English, and partly by the fact that, for example, there's more than one affix indicating, say, intransitive-with-animate-subject; different verb stems take different affixes, in an unpredictable way. Still, there are only a few affixes of each of the four types (intransitive-animate, intransitive-inanimate, transitive-animate, and transitive-inanimate), and Frantz does discuss them. Eventually.
So this is the story. Each Blackfoot verb stem can take an affix indicating one of the four types. For example, the stem "omai't-" ("believe") can take the affix "-aki" to indicate intransitive-animate ("Kitá-omai't-aki-hpooawa", "You(pl) believe"); the affix "-oo'" to indicate transitive-inanimate ("Kitá-omai't-oo'-pooawa", "You(pl) believe it"); or "-o" to indicate transitive-animate ("Kitá-omai't-o-aawaayi kóko'soaawaiksi", "You(pl) believe your kids"). (There's no affix used here for intransitive-inanimate, since "believe" can't take an inanimate subject.) Other verb stems may take three different affixes, or only two, and which affixes - and how many - depend on the verb - they have to be learned individually.
Anyway. There are some other affixes, related to these, which actually change the meaning (not merely the type) of the verb. There are two causative affixes, "-áttsi" and "-(i)pi"; these turn an intransitive verb ("ihpiyi", "dance") into a transitive one ("ihpiyi-áttsi", "to make dance"). (It's a little more complicated than that; to say, e.g., "I made him buy the cows", you attach a causative affix to the intransitive form of "buy". "He", the subject of "buy", becomes the object of "make buy", and "the cows", the object of "buy", becomes a secondary object - in this case, by being made minor third person.) Verbs involving action for the sake of someone or something else - "He bought the milk for her" - get a "benefactive" affix. There is an "accompaniment" affix: "to work" becomes "to work together", which takes two (or more) conjoined subjects. There is a reflexive affix: "to shoot" becomes "to shoot oneself", and one indicating mutuality, as in, e.g., "Your dogs are trying to kill each other". (I'm not making up these examples; they are the ones which appear in Frantz's book.) Finally, there are affixes which turn nouns into verbs. I mentioned a "to be" suffix in an earlier post; there are also suffixes meaning "to become", "to acquire", or "to provide for". (Attach the "to acquire" suffix to the noun "shoes" to get a verb meaning "to get shoes"; attach the "to provide for" suffix instead to get a verb meaning "to get shoes for (somebody)".)
[1] Since the International Phonetic Alphabet - the writing system used by linguists to represent all kinds of sounds, in all languages - isn't part of ASCII, certain conventions have been adopted for online work. This is one of them.
Whoo. Still not done yet; I'll probably make two more posts in this series... but not now.
