zompist bboard

Some years ago, TomHChappell (I believe) said that there were some languages that treated adjectives as though they were locations. I took that to mean that they would say something like "the dog is at/in blackness" to mean "the dog is black". My question is, if this or something very similar is true, what are those languages?

I have planned on using this scheme for Tibetan Dwarvish. One issue I never resolved was how to treat a situation where the subject was physically located in an area of blackness (or whatever the adjective was). I've thought about having a derivation that meant "a physical manifestation of a state/quality/etc.", so that a locative construction would mean that the subject was physically within the bounds of manifestation. Another idea was to use a preposition that would modify the locative noun case to explicitly mean physical location. I've started a revamp of Tibetan Dwarvish, and this locative means of expressing adjectives is something I'd like to keep, but I want to see how natlangs that use this deal with these issues.

Vardelm wrote: I have planned on using this scheme for Tibetan Dwarvish. One issue I never resolved was how to treat a situation where the subject was physically located in an area of blackness (or whatever the adjective was).

While I don't know of any specific languages off the top of my head that systematically treat adjectives as locations, I can at least say that this situation will not often be "resolved" in them by grammatical means. Actual instances of confusion between the two possibilities will be too rare for any grammaticalized workaround to be needed. Keep in mind that alternative phrasings that avoid confusion are almost always available when appropriate, in all languages. For example, "the dog is at a place that is at blackness".

Derp. Seems like the issues I think will be the hardest to resolve always turn out to be stupidly simple.

I'd still be interested to see if any & what languages treat adjectives this way.

Vardelm wrote:Derp. Seems like the issues I think will be the hardest to resolve always turn out to be stupidly simple.

I'd still be interested to see if any & what languages treat adjectives this way.

Technically, they are the hardest to resolve - so hard, in fact, that languages don't resolve them through morphology/syntax

Welsh has a particle yn used with the copula that probably derives from the locative yn meaning 'in', but it behaves differently morphologically from the preposition and in any case precedes adjectives, not nominalisations. Irish does something similar, I believe - an example sentence given on Wikipedia is Tá Seán ina dhochtúir = Sean is in.3sg doctor (Sean is a Doctor).

Yng wrote:Irish does something similar, I believe - an example sentence given on Wikipedia is Tá Seán ina dhochtúir = Sean is in.3sg doctor (Sean is a Doctor).

Except in Scottish-Gaelic and Ulster Irish, where this construction seems to be general, this contrasts with unmarked predication by means of the copula particle is to express a state that is seen as temporally bounded. That is, Tá Seán ina dhochtúir implies that he has become one relatively recently, whereas Dochtúir is ea Seán carries no such implication.

It sounds like the OP may be describing something similar to Japanese "na-adjectives", doesn't it?

Yng wrote:Welsh has a particle yn used with the copula that probably derives from the locative yn meaning 'in', but it behaves differently morphologically from the preposition and in any case precedes adjectives, not nominalisations.

I found a few books via Google books that seem to confirm yn as a locative preposition, such as this.

Apparently, yn is also an aspectual marker. In the paragraph on pg 307 that starts with "In the examples...", it mentions another author, Fife, who suggests that the locative & aspectual both involve "internality, that is, in a place, in a time, and in the duration of a situation." The aspectual use of yn is, according to some previous pages, for the progressive. This is very interesting to me, because I was thinking to have a continuous/progressive aspect using this sort of locative construction with a gerund, such as "the bird is in flight", meaning "the bird is flying".

Yeah but as I said, locative yn and predicative yn (and aspectual yn) all act differently syntactically and morphologically, which is why I stressed that though their etymology are the same, they're different. And yn isn't really just progressive, it does I guess imply some kind of imperfectivity though. Irish (again, if I remember correctly) also has a similar construction to aspectual yn using at instead, as does colloquial German.

Yng wrote:Yeah but as I said, locative yn and predicative yn (and aspectual yn) all act differently syntactically and morphologically, which is why I stressed that though their etymology are the same, they're different. And yn isn't really just progressive, it does I guess imply some kind of imperfectivity though. Irish (again, if I remember correctly) also has a similar construction to aspectual yn using at instead, as does colloquial German.

Yeah, Tá an t-éan ag grágaíl would be the Irish for "The bird is cawing"[*]. The major difference to colloquial Welsh is that, whereas the corresponding Welsh synthetic form would have future meaning, the Irish synthetic present generally expresses habitual (as in English).

Of course, there are the same issues here with the link particle (ag) behaving differently from the etymological source. The preposition is pronounced [ˈɛɟ] (historically a shortening of the inflected 3S form aige) and bears stress whereas the particle is /əg/, often realised as [ə] or 0. Additionally, there's the fact that the preposition do "to" is also often realised as [ə] or 0 and there are some cases (particularly when the verb-noun is preceded by a possessive determiner) where this is indubitably the source, at least in certain dialects. Cf. Tá an t-éan do m'ionsaí "The bird is attacking me".


[*] I was originally going to use "the bird is flying" until I realised the idiom would be different, i.e. ar eite "on wing".