Comments on: Ir, Ser, and Suppletion in Spanish

By: Mateus

Mateus — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:32:58 +0000

Another odd thing, in Portuguese, the verbs ’stay’ and ‘become’ have the same shape: ‘ficar’

1) Ela vai ficar doida.
she will become crazy.

2) Ela vai ficar em casa.
She will stay at home.

I don’t know the history behind this, but it’s strange because when something stays in some state x, it hasn’t undergone a change of that state, which is exactly what the verb is used to express (a change of state, such that x was not true of the subject s before s became x).

By: Ryan O'Brien

Ryan O'Brien — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 05:57:37 +0000

Elliott (who’s friendship can never be broken) has told me verbally that my first comment was “snarky” (”rudely sarcastic or disrespectful; snide”). He has misunderstood me. While I sometimes make “snarky” comments during our long walks together, in which we share our often not fully developed impressions of this wacky world we inhabit, I would never make a disrespectful comment to Elliot on his public blog. Such is my affection for him.

I am truly interested in Elliott’s opinion of the whys (not just the wherefores) of the evolution of modern language and look forward to discussing it with him in future talks/walks. He is my most favorite linguist next to Noam Chomsky. The difference is, I can never understand Chomsky and sometimes I can understand Callahan.

By: Elliott

Elliott — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 04:32:53 +0000

@ Ryan

No language is more expressive than another, but some are more finely tuned to their world. Let’s say Finnish doesn’t have a verb ‘to google (something).’ It doesn’t mean they can’t express the verbal action ‘to use google to search for something,’ it just means they can’t do it in one word.

English doesn’t have a noun that means ‘the prevailing intellectual, cultural, social, political, and ethical climate of an era, viewed retrospectively,’ but it doesn’t mean we can’t work around it, by borrowing the word ‘zeitgeist’ from German, or creating a word to do the job. Which is I think the crux of your question. We are always fine tuning our language to better suit our world. Pruning words like ‘thou,’ ‘whilom,’ and ‘abaft’ and adding words like ‘to text,’ ‘blog,’ and ’santorum.’ So yeah, you’re mostly right.

By: Whitney

Whitney — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:49:35 +0000

When I was learning Spanish I also wondered about this but I never asked the question, for fear of the answer. But that wasn’t so bad. I’m glad that I ran into a Linguist, and I wish that we could all go back in time and undo the installation of fear, loathing, boredom, and hatred into learning the interworkings of language.

By: Ryan O'Brien

Ryan O'Brien — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:17:43 +0000

Interesting — as my eyelids slowly close and my head droops down to my chest.

Really, it is fascinating and I’m glad someone pays attention to this stuff. Otherwise, how would we ever understand Beowulf?

Do you think there’s anything Darwinian going on here? Is language evolving to a more “expressive” level or does it just change? In other words, did early English have the capacity to describe everything in it’s known universe completely? Does the language change to express a new, more complex social and/or technical organization or does it change for other reasons such as, for example, cultural intermingling, educational standards, TV, media, whatever?