sources for person & number agreement

[Xephyr]

"Много умен този Иван!"
Mnogo um.en tozi Ivan
very smart.MascSing *dropped copula* thisone Ivan

Dude, even English allows that. In that very same example. The sentence "Very smart, that Ivan" is grammatical.

Must be more Uralo-Turkic influence. Turkic slaves in the Danelaw, brought by the Varangians from Gardarike and Novgorod. Only explanation.

[Niedokonany]

In colloquial Polish it's very common to drop the copula in case of adjectival predicates having nouns as subjects, e.g. dzień już krótki "day [is] already short" (while in case of nominal predicates it's marginal at best*). In English I've only seen this when one is going for a 'retarded' effect ( u mad?) or in this special 'adjoined' clause type (she rushed at him, her hair dishevelled.)

*it happens in headlinese but well it's a different register and it's a pan-european thing afaik

[Whimemsz]

In English I've only seen this when one is going for a 'retarded' effect ( u mad?) or in this special 'adjoined' clause type (she rushed at him, her hair dishevelled.)

In normal spoken English this actually isn't uncommon at all with questions. "You mad?" is very natural (in fact, I'm sure I say it that way far more often than I say "Are you mad?").

[KathTheDragon]

You're probably more likely to find it in questions like 'You hungry?'

[Drydic]

In English I've only seen this when one is going for a 'retarded' effect ( u mad?)

It's used in that context entirely because that's a perfectly normal English utterance. U def madbro...

or in this special 'adjoined' clause type (she rushed at him, her hair dishevelled.)

That's just an absolute construction. Been around for millenia.

[Niedokonany]

In English I've only seen this when one is going for a 'retarded' effect ( u mad?) or in this special 'adjoined' clause type (she rushed at him, her hair dishevelled.)

In normal spoken English this actually isn't uncommon at all with questions. "You mad?" is very natural (in fact, I'm sure I say it that way far more often than I say "Are you mad?").

Ok I see. But as you're saying this phenomenon is restricted to interrogative clauses (e.g. did is often dropped just like that).

That's just an absolute construction. Been around for millenia.

So? Where's the copula? Dropping terminology doesn't make me see any.

[R.Rusanov]

In colloquial Polish it's very common to drop the copula in case of adjectival predicates having nouns as subjects, e.g. dzień już krótki "day [is] already short" (while in case of nominal predicates it's marginal at best*). In English I've only seen this when one is going for a 'retarded' effect ( u mad?) or in this special 'adjoined' clause type (she rushed at him, her hair dishevelled.)

*it happens in headlinese but well it's a different register and it's a pan-european thing afaik

The Poles must have inherited that construction from the Uralo-Turks

Does every construction have to be interpreted as a loan? I know foreign borrowings is fashionable nowadays - probably a reaction to the nationalist purism of ages past - but ascribing every single linguistic change ever to them is ... well ... a bit wonky. Even Noam Chomsky would probably disagree with that line of thought

[Drydic]

That's just an absolute construction. Been around for millenia.

So? Where's the copula? Dropping terminology doesn't make me see any.

That construction doesn't use one.

[Drydic]

Here since you guys seem to have missed it I'll quite Mec's destruction of your supposition for you:

Yeah mate when you have two native Slavic speakers disagreeing with you maybe it's time you reconsider your viewpoint.

Umm, just speaking a language doesn't mean your opinions on the history of the language is authoritative. But if you disagree, well, then I'm a native Slavic speaker who agrees completely with hwhatting.

Your Turco-finnish theory doesn't explain why that construction was first noted in modern times, long after the period of Finnish and Turkish influence on the language ended.

It's hardly "his theory"; it's pretty widely accepted. And it certainly is much more sensible than arguing that a fairly marginal construction (and a rather marked one at that) was generalized. And you can find plenty of examples of dropped copulas in old Russian texts; you just have to distinguish between Church-Slavonic influenced texts (like as legal and religious documents) and more pure Old East Slavic (i.e., things written by people who didn't have an education in Church Slavonic). Look at the Novgorod birchbarks, for instance, and you can find lots of быть-less forms even in the oldest layer of texts (10th-11th centuries).

"Много умен този Иван!"
Mnogo um.en tozi Ivan
very smart.MascSing *dropped copula* thisone Ivan

Dude, even English allows that. In that very same example. The sentence "Very smart, that Ivan" is grammatical.

That Finnish stuff is a lot like what Russian and other Slavic languages are going through, ditching (or having recently ditched) the old perfect in favor of the imperfect, which was formed by conjungations of бъiть + the past participle. Russian lost the copula though, leaving just the participle behind.

For example

ходихъ (hodihŭ) "I went" has given way to Russian ходил, ходила, ходило (hodil, hodila, hodilo) "He/she/it went" originally "he/she/it (was) going"

You have your history completely mixed up. The быть + l-participle forms are perfect, not imperfect. Forms like ходихъ are aorist, not perfect. And the imperfect in Proto-Slavic was a different tense entirely.

Proto-Slavic *xodixъ (aorist) would have referred to a single past action, so would mean "I went" or "I walked" (the semantics of early Russian verbs of motion are somewhat complicated, and rather different than the modern language). The form *xodilъ jesmь would have meant "I have walked", not "I was walking". To say "I was walking", you would use the imperfect tense: *xoděaxъ.

[R.Rusanov]

If you consider that a "destruction" I'd hate to put you in charge of demolishing things. He has two points in there, the second:

Dude, even English allows that. In that very same example. The sentence "Very smart, that Ivan" is grammatical.

was already addressed earlier by Xephyr and the first is very crude argumentation full of weasel words.

It's hardly "his theory"; it's pretty widely accepted.

By first year slavistic students at non-Slavic universities maybe

And it certainly is much more sensible than arguing that a fairly marginal construction (and a rather marked one at that) was generalized

That's BS, it's not marginal at all - much more common in Slavic than in English, your Anglo bias is showing - and it is certainly not marked. Lower class people across the Slavic lands all use that construction to various extents, of course it happens that Russian took it to a logical extreme but you can see that happening for any linguistic feature across a language family.

And you can find plenty of examples of dropped copulas in old Russian texts; you just have to distinguish between Church-Slavonic influenced texts (like as legal and religious documents) and more pure Old East Slavic (i.e., things written by people who didn't have an education in Church Slavonic). Look at the Novgorod birchbarks, for instance, and you can find lots of быть-less forms even in the oldest layer of texts (10th-11th centuries).

Got a source for that claim mate?

[Legion]

You're being very stupid now: Mec has studied Church Slavonic and Old Russian, he can read these languages, and the things he mentionned he probably got to witness *first hand*.

[Drydic]

And it certainly is much more sensible than arguing that a fairly marginal construction (and a rather marked one at that) was generalized

That's BS, it's not marginal at all - much more common in Slavic than in English, your Anglo bias is showing - and it is certainly not marked. Lower class people across the Slavic lands all use that construction to various extents, of course it happens that Russian took it to a logical extreme but you can see that happening for any linguistic feature across a language family.

And you can find plenty of examples of dropped copulas in old Russian texts; you just have to distinguish between Church-Slavonic influenced texts (like as legal and religious documents) and more pure Old East Slavic (i.e., things written by people who didn't have an education in Church Slavonic). Look at the Novgorod birchbarks, for instance, and you can find lots of быть-less forms even in the oldest layer of texts (10th-11th centuries).

Got a source for that claim mate?

Mec speaks Russian natively, dude. Also, Novegradian? That's his work. I can all but guarantee that he's looked at more Old Novgorodian, and Old Russian texts in general, than you.

You're not going to win this one.

[R.Rusanov]

Studying a language doesn't give you insight into how it's run. I studied Latin 5 years, but if an Italian told me something about some special native development in Neo-Romance I wouldn't go "no that's wrong u r an idiot I studied Latin 5 years it's due to Celtic influence" or whatever

Also given that this guy made a Finnish-based conlang of Slavic I wouldn't exactly call him unbiased towards the Finns ... In that page he himself says "I was also able to fully side with various theories that in reality are debatable, and take phenomena that were inconsistent in reality and make them consistent. In no way should any part of this work be taken as a scholarly piece on the real Old Novgorodian"

Also he says in his own conlang page that he first heard of Novgorodian on Wikipedia, hardly a scholarly setting ...

[Legion]

Studying a language doesn't give you insight into how it's run.

First you rejected claims because those making it weren't native speakers; then you rejected mec's claim because while he is a native speaker, that doesn't make him good at knowing the history of the language. But now that it has been said to you that Mec *has* studied the history of the language, in addition of being a native speaker, you reject this by saying studying an old form of the language isn't enough...


So what *does* it take to make valid claim in your eyes? Or do you automatically reject any claim that doesn't start with the assumption that those dirty sub-human uralic and turkic monkeys cannot possibly have tarnished the purity of the Great Russian Language?

[Xephyr]

Also given that this guy made a Finnish-based conlang of Slavic I wouldn't exactly call him unbiased towards the Finns ... In that page he himself says "I was also able to fully side with various theories that in reality are debatable, and take phenomena that were inconsistent in reality and make them consistent. In no way should any part of this work be taken as a scholarly piece on the real Old Novgorodian"

Also he says in his own conlang page that he first heard of Novgorodian on Wikipedia, hardly a scholarly setting ...

And his transcription of Aramaic on his Alashian page is totally inconsistent! Spirantized ܒ is written <v> but ܦ is written <p>?? Jeez, what a hack!

[R.Rusanov]

I'll say right now that I don't trust someone who loves Finland and the Finns and makes conlangs about them culturally enriching his Slavic brethren to state properly the amount of Finn influence on Russian (which is IRL basically none).

His argument goes like this: copula dropping was rare in Slavic and appeared in Russian very early on due to Finno-Turkic influence - and it's a sign of very little confidence in a theory that you can''t even specify which LANGUAGE FAMILY the development came from - while me and the Polish fellow ITT have pointed out that that construction is common in bydlo Slavic from a very early time period and Russian has only started to show this copula dropping very recently, consistent with the gradual regularization of a widely-used form and its diffusion upwards through society

[Legion]

I'll say right now that I don't trust someone who loves Finland and the Finns and makes conlangs about them culturally enriching his Slavic brethren to state properly the amount of Finn influence on Russian (which is IRL basically none).

Yes, God forbid we forget that you are a racist fuck.

[Xephyr]

(just noticed this)

Dude, even English allows that. In that very same example. The sentence "Very smart, that Ivan" is grammatical.

was already addressed earlier by Xephyr and the first is very crude argumentation full of weasel words.

LoL, you thought I was agreeing with you against Mec? Dream on, you racist asshole.

[R.Rusanov]

Apparently it is racist nowadays to claim that a proposed case of foreign borrowing is groundless.

I was going to say that that's an "ad hominem" and quite irrelevant to the discussion at hand but perhaps I should demonstrate how the phrase "ad hominem" is a word-for-word calque of Altaic or Niger–Congo of some sort (I'm not confident enough in my argument to even figure out which apparently) and you are a racist if you disagree.

[Xephyr]

No, it's racist nowadays to accuse people with different philological theories than you of being pekka-loving race-traitors.

[Drydic]

Could you possibly be more of a blind Slavic nationalist? I mean, come on...next you're going to say there's no finnic influence in Baltic...

also

PERKELE

[Legion]

Rusanov >

Unless you cease to sport an avatar that implicitely calls for the removal or extermination of 35+ million non-slavs from the Balkans and Baltic (I am not counting the Balts proper, which I assume are good enough to be slaves, if not slavs) in favor of some hegemonic Russian nightmare, your objections to your qualification as a racist will continue to be dismissed.

[R.Rusanov]

My avatar doesn't call for shit mate. It's a 60x58 pixel doodle drawn in paint with the borders of Slavic states past and present inked in red and a Slavic symbol on top. If you can see genocide in that I suggest you get your glasses checked

[Drydic]

I don't recall Hungary ever being part of an organized slavic state, unless you count being a Soviet puppet state.

[Mecislau]

Dude, even English allows that. In that very same example. The sentence "Very smart, that Ivan" is grammatical.

was already addressed earlier by Xephyr and the first is very crude argumentation full of weasel words.

Where was that addressed by Xephyr? The only thing I saw him say with respect to that was a joke comment.

By first year slavistic students at non-Slavic universities maybe

Where do I even start here.
1) That's a lovely ad hominem.
2) I am not a "first year slavistics student".
3) Neither is hwhatting.
4) Both of us have many years of experience in historical Slavic linguistics (and hwhatting has much more than myself even)
5) Russian linguistics programs will teach you the same thing.
6) How in the world does the location of the university matter? Does that mean American linguists can't study anything other than English? That any research on Semitic languages that didn't come out of the Middle East is useless? That virtually all fieldwork done by linguists all around the world on minority languages is completely invalid because it was conducted by foreign linguists?

And forgive me if I find it a little hard to take some of your claims on Slavic historical linguistics seriously when you completely mucked up the Proto-Slavic and Old Russian tense system. Now, I might be willing to accept it as a simple mistake if you have a specialization in some other aspect of Slavic and rarely deal with verbs, but since you're clearly making a claim about Slavic verbs (namely the use and history of *byti), we have a bit of a problem here.

And it certainly is much more sensible than arguing that a fairly marginal construction (and a rather marked one at that) was generalized

That's BS, it's not marginal at all - much more common in Slavic than in English, your Anglo bias is showing - and it is certainly not marked. Lower class people across the Slavic lands all use that construction to various extents, of course it happens that Russian took it to a logical extreme but you can see that happening for any linguistic feature across a language family.

You've misunderstood. The construction in modern Russian isn't marginal at all, of course; I said a construction that was marginal (past tense!), where an IE language that has full use of the present-tense copula can drop it in inverted constructions.

And yes, even in modern Russian, the ordering in a construction like "Очень умный этот Иван" is marked. Are you aware of what markedness is? (And for the record, the concept of markedness was first developed by Russian linguists—Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoi).

(And once again, I repeat—I am a native speaker of Russian)

And you can find plenty of examples of dropped copulas in old Russian texts; you just have to distinguish between Church-Slavonic influenced texts (like as legal and religious documents) and more pure Old East Slavic (i.e., things written by people who didn't have an education in Church Slavonic). Look at the Novgorod birchbarks, for instance, and you can find lots of быть-less forms even in the oldest layer of texts (10th-11th centuries).

Got a source for that claim mate?

Sure. You can find tons of examples in the Novgorod birchbarks in Andrei Zaliznjak's Древненовгородский диалект. And here, I'll retype exactly what he had to say on the use of the copula in the birchbarks:

§ 4.19. Употребление связки в настоящем времени следует рассматривать раздельно для 1 и 2 лиц (єсмь, єси, єсме, єсте, єсвъ, єста) и для 3 лица (єсть, суть, єста).

Для 1 и 2 лиц в берестяных грамотах соблюдается следующий основной принцип: в нормальном случае употребляется одна из двучленных моделей: далъ єсмь (виноватъ єсмь) или я далъ (я виноватъ), но не трехчленная модель я єсмь далъ (я єсмь виноватъ).

Выбор между двумя возможными двучленными моделями определяется правилами употребления личных местоимений (изложенными в § 4.13). В обычном (немаркированном) случае личное местоимение отсутствует и тогда связка сохраняется: далъ єсмь (виноватъ єсмь). В тех особых случаях, когда личное местоимение по той или иной причине всё же присутствует, связка как правило опускается: я далъ (я виноватъ). См. примеры в § 4.13.

Трехчленная модель (я єсмь далъ) берестяным грамотам практически чужда. Можно указать только: ты еси мои, а ѧ твои 605 (XII; здесь существенно, что это готовая литературная формула), то еси ты повѣдалъ къ Рожънѣтови 336 (XII). Менее надежны примеры а ѧзъ тѧ есмѣла акы братъ собѣ 752 (XI/XII) и ѧко ты си мловила емоу 731 (XII); см. о них А 11, Б 83.

[...]

§ 4.20. Положение со связками 3 лица в берестяных грамотах таково.

В перфекте общим правилом является отсутствие связки 3 лица, т. е. употребление моделей далъ "он дал", Иванъ далъ (см. примеры в § 3.38), но не далъ єсть, Иванъ єсть далъ. Во всем массиве берестяных грамот встретилось только одно формальное отклонение от этого правила: [ц]и есть саме в[ь]хоу [ли]хв[оу въд]але 736а "отдалли он сам всю лихву" (XII1); можно думать, однако, что в действительности мы имеем здесь дело с тем же явлением, которое рассматривается ниже в § 4.21, когда “избыточное” есть привносит оттенок "дело обстоит так, что ...".

В случае, когда сказуемое выражено страдательным причастием, положение, вероятно, было такое же, как в перфекте, т. е. связка 3 лица вообще не употреблялась.

Примеры см. ниже, в § 4.23. Специально отметим, что связка отсутствует не только при наличии подлежащего (например, Жизнобоуде погоублене оу Сычевиць 607), но и в безличных предложениях (например, положено на Б!ь# и на тобе Пск. 7). К сожалению, материал берестяных грамот здесь довольно ограничен (он фактически целиком приведен в § 4.23), поэтому настаивать на жестком характере данного правила было бы рискованно.

В прочих случаях в берестяных грамотах связки 3 лица при именном сказуемом в целом подчиняются следующему правилу: если во фразе есть подлежащее, выраженное отдельным словом (чаще всего существительным или местоимением), то связка отсутствует, если такого подлежащего нет — присутствует.

Примеры. Связки нет: а замѣке кѣле, а двѣри кѣлъ 247 (XI), дешеве ти хлебе 424 (XII), а стье Варъварь тьлицѧ сторова ли? 657 (XII), ци ти многи повои (букв.: "если у тебя повои многочисленны") 717 (XII), тѧжа ваша 603 (XII), Хонь жена тое грамоте господыни 112 (XIII), и товарь вохь кьль 351 (XIII), а на то послоухо Игнато Мо[исиєвъ] 377 (XIII), а Тимонѧ меретве 582 (XIII/XIV), Гжѧ волѧ i твоѧ 356 (XIV), а тѣ худѣ 242 (XV), самъ нимъ 10 (XV), землѧ готова 17 (XV), а иное все добро здорово 122, 129 (XV); также с предложной группой —— а то за нимь 9 (XII), а Бъ за мъздою 549 (XII), а роко на Роство 144 (XIV), а просоле здѣ по пѧти гривоно бочка Ст. Р. 2 (XV); аналогично: а намъ в землѣ половина а верьши цасть 755 (XIV). Особый частный случай этого же класса примеров составляет фраза: а соромъ ми оже ми лихо мълвльше "а зазорно мне, что ты дурное мне говорил" 605 (XII), где функцию
подлежащего выполняет придаточное предложение.

(He had a lot more to say, but I'm not going to copy several pages of text over. The basic gist is that in the Novgorodian birchbarks you see a mix of forms with and without the copula, in contrast to the more literary chronicles and religious texts of the time, where the use of the copula was almost mandatory. This is part of why linguists find the birchbarks so valuable, because they provide a glimpse into how people actually spoke back then, whereas commissioned texts that were written by people who were literate in Church Slavonic used Church Slavonic forms rather than actual East Slavic forms. The Roman numerals after each example above are the approximate century that particular sentence was written)


And if you insist on only Russian linguists, you're in luck—Zaliznjak is a well-known and renowned Russian linguist, is pretty much the expert on Old (Northern) Russian, teaches at МГУ, and has even been awarded the Государственная премия Российской Федерации. You can't really get more Russian than that.

Studying a language doesn't give you insight into how it's run. I studied Latin 5 years, but if an Italian told me something about some special native development in Neo-Romance I wouldn't go "no that's wrong u r an idiot I studied Latin 5 years it's due to Celtic influence" or whatever

Indeed, it doesn't. But you don't speak Old Russian natively, and I don't see any native speakers of Old Russian here talking about developments in their language. What I do see is actual examples of Old Russian that disprove your claim.

And I repeat—I am a native speaker of (modern) Russian.

Also given that this guy made a Finnish-based conlang of Slavic I wouldn't exactly call him unbiased towards the Finns ... In that page he himself says "I was also able to fully side with various theories that in reality are debatable, and take phenomena that were inconsistent in reality and make them consistent. In no way should any part of this work be taken as a scholarly piece on the real Old Novgorodian"

Um, no one was saying my Novegradian conlang should be used as a reference for Old Novgorodian. It's a fictional work. But that doesn't mean there wasn't an extensive amount of real research put into it. I wouldn't be able to say "I was also able to fully side with various theories that in reality are debatable, and take phenomena that were inconsistent in reality and make them consistent" if I didn't have at least some idea of what those theories and phenomena actually were in reality. I wouldn't have been able to choose a resolution for, e.g., Leskien's Problem in Slavic nominal morphology if I didn't know what Leskien's Problem was in the first place and what some of the differing views on it are.

And "unbiased towards the Finns", really? I have zero connection to Finland. My family is from southwestern Russia as far back as we know. One of my biggest interests is historical language contact, and I worked with some leading names in the field of Slavic contact linguistics and contact linguistics more generally. And the fact is, early Russian was in very close contact with Finnic languages (Finnic, not Finnish). This was most pronounced in the North (for obvious reasons), so of course if I make a conlang based on Old North Russian it will have substantial Finnic influence.

But even modern Russian still has some clear evidence of early Finnic contact. The most obvious one of course is the Russian possessive construction (mihi-type rather than habeo-type, which dominates the rest of Slavic). Most of these date to before the 16th century, however, since after that point in time Russian was pretty much universally more prestigious than any regional Finnic languages. In the early days when the region was still being colonized Russian and Finnic languages often had a closer-to-equal role socially in parts of the territory, with bilingualism (and thus contact + influence) being frequent and so contact-related influences were bidirectional. As Russian began to dominate and bilingualism become one-way, so did contact-related influence, so most Finnic languages acquired features from Russian while Russian gained very little from Finnic. But what's interesting is that in the very early days, you can actually see evidence of a Russian—Finnic Sprachbund, including a number of grammatical features present in both parties with unclear origins, such as, for example, the direct/indirect contrast of case agreement with numerals.

Also he says in his own conlang page that he first heard of Novgorodian on Wikipedia, hardly a scholarly setting ...

The key word there is "first". Do you think most astrophysicists first learned what "space" was in college? More than a few linguists first got interested in linguistics long before their first linguistics class.