Linguistic Glossary: Nouns and Pronouns

Links:

[TheForeignersNetwork]

Native American languages mark nouns for obviation to differentiate more important subjects from less important subjects and also to create relative clauses. For example, in the sentence "He throws his ball" where "he" and "his" are referring to different people, "he" would be marked as proximate and "his ball" would be marked as obviative. This can lead to a dizzying array of grammatical persons when combined with systems of animacy--Each noun has to be marked for obviation and each verb form also has specific conjugations for obviative noun forms, and also for transitivity in relation to those nouns. There are also situations in which a transitive verb can be made intransitive when a noun is marked for obviation. Ojibwe has a total of 14 grammatical persons when all is said and done--It's extremely complex and it adds a lot of grammatical depth to the language

[cobaltmyu]

Formality is definitely not the hardest part of Japanese. It is just mostly some very conjugatable verb forms plus some separate vocabulary for basic verbs such as "walk", "see", "eat", "give", "receive" etc. for basic (informal), polite, respectful and humble and some forms of nouns that depend on whether it is possessed by you or a respected person. More specific terms or the situation when certain words are used are taught at your specific workplace and is creeping into talk of "in groups" and "out groups" which is more sociology than linguistics.
The hardest part of Japanese is probably kanji/orthography, which means most kanji have 2-3 readings (but there are some with a lot more) coming from Old/Middle Chinese and native Japanese readings, plus readings used in names and descriptive readings formed from "mistaken" Chinese readings. There are 2000+ taught kanji and you could use ones outside of that stylistically. When two kanji are put next to each other which of the Chinese readings is to be used is dependent on the compound, and on top of that there are a few scenarios where two kanji come together to form a new reading. On the other hand, for a native spoken Japanese word to be written there is usually one most commonly used way to write it in kanji but there are other ways of writing it depending on context and style.

[EkaitzIturbeltz]

About the section at 05:14, in Basque we have a T-V distinction between "zu" (formal) and "hi" (informal). It should be noted that the verb is to be conjugated according to the gender of the adressee in informal register (hi), and the verb will be conjugated with adressee even if it's not an argument : this is called allocutive agreement.

So basically, a sentence like "The dog sits down" would be translated as such :
- "Txakurra jartzen da" (neutral register, non allocutive)
- "Txakurra jartzen duk" (informal register, allocutive masculine)
- "Txakurra jartzen dun" (informal register, allocutive feminine)

My dialect even takes it a step further and as "zu" allocutive (very formal), and "xu" allocutive (affectionate formal/semi formal).

[chesqen]

It should be noted that arbitrary grammatical gender and natural animacy are not mutually exclusive systems. In Latin, every noun belongs to one of three genders, which dictates how modifiers inflect, and is animate or inanimate, which only really matters in the passive voice. Animate agents in passive sentences have to take the preposition ab (or ā), and inanimate agents cannot. For example, the sentences "These poems were written by Marius the poet, " and "These poems were written by a skilled hand, " are respectively "Hae poēmae *ā* Mariō poētā scrīptae sunt, " and "Hae poēmae manū gnarā scrīptae sunt."

[SolarLingua]

The funny thing about cases is that they are also arbitrary. If I call you, are you the direct object of my call or are you the receiver? In Russian you use dative (позвонить + dat), but in German you use accusative (anrufen + akk). Once I found out that cases are basically decoration, language learning became a lot easier. 😅

[alireza]

I think Persian actually has a general number, but it is identical to its singular, although I never hear anyone refer to it as such. For example if we say "ketāb khāndam, " it means I read book (past), but it can either be interpreted as I read a book or I read multiple books or I read from a book, but didn't finish it. That's why that combination we just use to mean generally to read. That's why that sentence is best translated with I read (past) for example.

It's kind of like saying I drank water, where it's not clear whether you drank a half, one or multiple glasses of water.

[trrtrtrtdtd]

in a sense English does have 2 noun classes it distinguishes between inanimate (it) or animate (he/she)

[heironic]

Amazing video. I do wish you went more into honorifics. They can change based on who you want to honor:
-referent (person mentioned in the sentence)
-listener
-bystander (a someone present in the conversation or within earshot)

And theres a ton of overlap between those. Like sometimes the referent is the same as the listener, sometimes not. And the listener can be honored in pronouns other than the second person (take Persian, 1st Singular changes to respect the listener). Referent honorifics can be different for possessive, like a different word for talking about my house vs grandfather's house. Some languages would want to show honorifics between the relationships between the subject person and object person of the sentence rather than their relationships to the speaker.

Languages like Korean, Japanese, and many others have "honorifics" for the setting/environment/formality of the conversation. Which will overlap with the other honorifics and can have their own forms. Most notably the politeness levels in Korean

[noahnaugler]

I am one of said overzealous linguists, my current conlang project has 7 persons, dealing with obviation in various types of dimensions

[albertmiller]

Maybe I've just been taught wrong (in Australia) but it feels like Japanese is losing formality distinctions (and other complex features like classifiers like -mai and -wa), I mean my mum told me the other day that rabbits are counted with the same classifier as birds (-wa), but I have never been corrected by Japanese speakers when I use -hiki to refer to my rabbit, and I never found myself in a situation where I had to use anything more formal than -San or -Kun or -Sensei, even at a university

[SchmulKrieger]

The genitive case is in fact the general oblique case when an object is neither direct nor indirect. Thats the Greek word for generally. For example in German: ich gedenke deines Todes. Deines Todes is genitive case because it is neither den Tod nor dem Tode. In this xase if you use datice it sounds like as if you mind for the death, instead of mind of the death.

[catritonix]

this is like the single most useful lingo video I've ever seen T_T

[pawel]

Nice video. I would like to add a few comments

The main argument against calling the construct state a grammatical case is that it is a form of head-marking. It is possible for a language to have both a construct state and a genitive case, sometimes occuring together, being an example of double marking (kind of like 'a friend of mine').
Edit: I realize now my this doesn't make much sense as an example of double marking. Let me illustrate (the aunt has a car):
1.my aunt's car : dependent marking
2.*my aunt her-car: head marking
3.*my aunt's her-car: double marking

The reason why the "locative" case in Russian is called "prepositional" might be that there are a few nouns that have distinct forms for the locative and the prepositional (in the singular).

As for the singular/dual/plural distinction, in at least some languages, the dual form is often defective, i.e. limited in use to only, pronouns some verb forms, and some nouns, most often natural pairs or body parts, while the plural retains its more regular meaning of "at least two"

[scottweber]

Amusingly, while Japanese does have a complicated honorific language system, it's not encoded in pronouns: indeed the polite way to refer to someone is just family name + title (takashi sensei, etc). The honorifics are actually encoded in a the verbs and adjectives, either by an arbritary conventional substitution or a more systemic shift in the absence of such.

[HiimIny]

gosh thank you so much for making this video, super digestible and useful

[carl]

7:38 Swedish typically uses a common/neuter distinction, but there are some situations where a special inflection can be used to indicate that something has "manly" attributes. This isn't the same as a "masculine" gender, because "masculine" is assigned strictly as a grammatical convention. It's also not "male" because it doesn't necessarily have to be a biological male. I've seen this described as a "natural gender", but based on the description here, it's not the same as "virile" in Telugu, because it doesn't necessarily have to be human. So what does one call this? We already have a "human"/"nonhuman" distinction so requiring that something also be human in order to be "virile"/"muliebrile" seems less useful, i.e. it seems sufficient to say "virile human" or "male human" and let "virile" indicate "manly" attributes regardless of sex or grammatical convention.

[Piano_Board]

"Tell me the duck story" 🗣🗣🗣🗣🔥🔥🔥🔥

[nahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh]

I love your Videos never stop doing them

[JohnSmith-ofgu]

Are there any nouns in English that can absolutely never be pluralized, not even to indicates varying types like the meat/meats example? Perhaps "silence", since the definition of that is considered so absolute there's no room for different types of it? Suddenly I can't stop thinking about what a mass noun actually is. There's plenty of nouns where a singular form refers to an abstract concept rather than a defined physical object, but that does not feel like a *grammatical* distinction.

8:55 Among native speakers of Czech, the 7 cases are usually referred to by numbers rather than linguistic terms. I'm in danger lol. But I'm curious now, is this a unique Czech thing or is internally referring categories of features by nondescriptive numbers a common thing?

[mimadm]

Thank you for the video man, I really liked it