Ask me anything about Crow

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thetha
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Ask me anything about Crow

Post by thetha »

And I will answer according to Randolph Graczyk's book Apsaalooke Alilaau: A Grammar of Crow. It's a fairly thorough book, so don't be afraid to ask about strangely specific things. Heavy sections are devoted to morphology of nouns and verbs, and the grammar does spend a lot of time on syntax as well.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

Post by eldin raigmore »

Can you translate the story "This is the House that Jack Built" into Crow? (Or is that Absarokee?) (Is "Absarokee" another way of writing "Apsaalooke"?)
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

Post by thetha »

Absarokee seems to be a variant of the native name Apsáalooke. I would tend to use the latter spelling myself, since it is the most standardized one used by the Crow Nation.
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

Post by Boehijt »

What does it have for noun morphology?
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

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Boehijt wrote:What does it have for noun morphology?
Crow has a variety of derivational suffixes:
-aachí/lichí: approximative - forms a new noun based on resemblance to the stem noun. e.g. buluhpaachí 'pear' < buluhpá 'wild plum'. The second allomorph of this suffix appears after long vowels: biláanneelichi 'heater' < biláannee 'stove; oven'

-kaáshi: augmentative - this suffix is sometimes used just to mean 'very', but it can derive new nouns from old ones as well.

isaashká 'his/her horse' > isaashkakaáshi 'his/her dog'
baláxii 'weapon' > baláxiikaashi 'hunting bow'


Other derivational suffixes include:
táahili - often the hi is elided in this form. Most broadly means 'real; true', and is often used to derive the specific words for American Indian styled objects from generics, i.e. moccasin vs. shoe.
káata - diminutive. fairly straightforward, describes things affectionately or describes their small size.
kísshi - sportive, imitative. similar in semantics to aachí.


There are also a number of determiners and articles that suffix onto the noun. Nouns also inflect for the plural and for possession.

NB: I'm more busy with school than I thought so I might be really slow in answering these questions.
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

Post by Click »

Teddy wrote:NB: I'm more busy with school than I thought so I might be really slow in answering these questions.
Good luck!

What is the verb template? How do coordination and subordination work?
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

Post by eldin raigmore »

Click wrote:How do ... subordination work?
For instance, can you tell us how to translate "This is the House that Jack Built" into Crow? Preferably more than just the title sentence. (The entire story might be a little much; OTOH just the last sentence might be a reasonable compromise. Or not.)
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

Post by thetha »

Crow is a broadly SOV language and has internally headed relative clauses, so "The House That Jack Built" would get severely messy if I tried to translate the final sentence. Will you accept one towards the middle?
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

Post by Boehijt »

Teddy wrote: -aachí/lichí: approximative - forms a new noun based on resemblance to the stem noun. e.g. buluhpaachí 'pear' < buluhpá 'wild plum'. The second allomorph of this suffix appears after long vowels: biláanneelichi 'heater' < biláannee 'stove; oven'
kísshi - sportive, imitative. similar in semantics to aachí.
That is cool. Thanks for answering my question.
Teddy wrote:NB: I'm more busy with school than I thought so I might be really slow in answering these questions.
Good luck! [:)]
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

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Teddy wrote:Crow is a broadly SOV language and has internally headed relative clauses, so "The House That Jack Built" would get severely messy if I tried to translate the final sentence. Will you accept one towards the middle?
Sure!
Even one towards the beginning!
Anything with four (maybe five if you really want to make your point; or three if that's all you can handle) clauses counting the main clause -- the main clause and three (or four or two) subordinate clauses (nested one inside another).
For instance:
Mother Goose wrote:This is the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
And thanks so much! I sort of don't expect people to be willing to take the challenge seriously.

[hr][/hr]

The English version of this poem doesn't have central embedding -- it's all end-embedding. (Supposedly some other language might use "left-" or "head-" or "initial-" embedding.)

I read an article on "subordinate clauses of subordinate clauses of subordinate clauses" in which the author reported having spoken at a conference in which he stated, and elaborated upon, the hypothesis that English doesn't allow deep-nested central-embedding. A participant came up to him afterward and asked "But don't you find sentences people you know speak easy to understand?" (or something probably a bit more complicated than that). He was halfway through the first long sentence of his answer before he realized that the question itself was actually a counter-example. Some students can be so uppity.
Edit:
Geoffrey Sampson wrote:Doubt about this was first sown in my mind during a sabbatical I spent in Switzerland in 1980-81. Giving a seminar to the research group I was working with, I included a discussion of multiple central embedding, during which I retailed what I took to be the standard, uncontroversial position that speakers and writers do not produce multiple central embeddings and, if they did, hearers or readers could not easily interpret them. In the question period Anne De Roeck asked ‘But don’t you find that sentences that people you know produce are easier to understand?’ Well, perhaps, I responded, but this did not refute the theory because … – and I got quite a long way through my answer before the expression on Anne’s face alerted me to the fact that the point of her question had been its grammar rather than its semantics. (The structure of the question, with finite subordinate clauses delimited by square brackets, is But don’t you find [that sentences [that people [you know] produce] are easier to understand]?)
Anyway, if there's a subordinate clause SC3 in a subordinate clause SC2 in a subordinate clause SC1 in a main clause MC, then how would SC3 refer to a participant of SC1? Logophoric pronouns would allow SC3 to refer to participants of its immediate matrix clause SC2; and long-distance reflexives or long-distance anaphora would allow SC3 to refer to at least the subject of the main clause MC; but I know of no (pronoun-like or anaphor-like or reflexive-like) system in any natlang which would allow SC3 to refer unambiguously and grammatically to a participant of SC1. Even if there were such a system, suppose SC4 is embedded in SC3, and uses that system; how can speakers and addressees know for sure whether it's referring to a participant of SC2 or a participant of SC1?

In programming, one finds -- or at least one is told that one would find -- that if a subroutine needs to refer to a variable that's not locally declared for the first time inside that subroutine, it usually wants either a variable declared in the subroutine which directly called it, or a variable declared in the main program.
By the same token I theorize that a three-deep-or-deeper-embedded subordinate clause is unlikely to have to refer to something in an ancestor clause other than its own direct "mother" clause (its matrix) or the founding "matriarch" clause (the main clause). I have no way to prove that.

[hr][/hr]

That explains -- or perhaps merely illustrates -- my interest in deeply-embedded subordinate clauses, more complex than bi-level.

Since not every natlang has either kind of pronoun -- logophoric or long-distance reflexive -- and I can't remember ever hearing of a natlang that has both, and since subordinate clauses of subordinate clauses of subordinate clauses are probably pretty rare in most corpora (if that's the plural of corpus?), maybe there'll never be a provable answer to the question. But if I can't find examples I like to ask people to generate them. Or generate them myself, of course.
Last edited by eldin raigmore on 23 Aug 2014 10:34, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

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eldin raigmore wrote:The English version of this poem doesn't have central embedding -- it's all end-embedding. (Supposedly some other language might use "left-" or "head-" or "initial-" embedding.)
Japanese does...every line would end with the new element, rather than begin with it.

Don't want to derail this thread though...I'm interested to see how internally headed relative clauses work.
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

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Okay, I'll do this one:
This is the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.

[hilí [iishbíiwishkam [chiwáwuulim [[[Jack awaasúuash iluúhcheesh] awuuá] baaawúuash] akduushéesh] akdappeésh] koók].
[DEM [cat-DET [rat-DET [[[N house.NPOSS-DEF put.up-DEF] inside] seeds-DEF] NMLZ.AG-eat-DEF] NMLZ.AG-kill-DEF] COP-DECL]

For the components that have the agent as the modified noun, you must add a prefix ak- to the clause, but if it is an object then it is sufficient to treat the bare clause as a noun. This was really confusing to write but I'm very sure (through comparison with the book) that this is correct.

fun fact: the word for cat, iishbíiwishka, is a compound of dog and mountain lion.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

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Teddy wrote:This was really confusing to write but I'm very sure (through comparison with the book) that this is correct.
Thanks! (more later after I've had a chance to think about it.)

Teddy wrote:fun fact: the word for cat, iishbíiwishka, is a compound of dog and mountain lion.
That is fun.


BTW "malt" isn't just "barley seeds"; it's barleycorns that have been allowed to begin to germinate, so that the enzymes in the embryo have begun to convert the starch into simpler sugars. (I gather one must then dry or roast the malt in an "oast house" to stop the germination at that point.)
This makes malt sweet, which is why "malted milkshakes" and "chocolate malts" are such goodies.
It also makes it easier for yeast to ferment, which is why one usually makes beer from malt instead of from just plain barleycorns.

Does Crow have a word or phrase that would mean "malt" rather than just "grain" (i.e. "seed")?
Possibly it's another relative clause modifying "seed"?

Teddy wrote:… baaawúuash ...
<aaa>? Why three <a>s in a row? One syllable, or two, or three? If two, is it /aa a/ or /a aa/? If one, how is /aaa/ different from /aa/ -- does Crow have three phonemic vowel-lengths?

And BTW is Crow related to Nishnaabemwin?
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

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I don't know if there's a special word for malt in Crow, so I just used the generic word for illustration purposes.

Crow only has short v. long vowels within the morpheme, but some morphemes end in long vowels and others begin with long or short vowels. So you can get up to 4 vowels in a row, e.g. aaíik - he arrives with it, and baaaashdéek - he goes hunting.

Crow is in the Siouan family, so it's not related to Nishnaabemwin, which is an Algonquian language.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

Post by eldin raigmore »

Teddy wrote:Crow only has short v. long vowels within the morpheme, but some morphemes end in long vowels and others begin with long or short vowels. So you can get up to 4 (graphemic) vowels in a row,

Thanks!
Actually you're just getting two long vowels in a row; the <aa>s and the <ii> in your examples happen to be long vowels represented by digraphs.

Teddy wrote:e.g. aaíik - he arrives with it,

Four vowels in a row wouldn't surprise me as much as three of the same vowel in a row.
Is that regarded as a single syllable, whose nucleus is a diphthong both components of which are long vowels?
Or is there a syllable-boundary between the <aa> and the <ii>?

Teddy wrote:and baaaashdéek - he goes hunting.
Wow [O.O] . That one would surprise me.
But by your explanation that's [ba:] + [a:shdéek] or [ba:] + [a:sh 'de:k], right?
(Are é and e different vowels, or is this an accented long /e:/?)

And I still don't know whether the example in your answer to my "House that Jack Built" question has a short /a/ followed by a long /a:/ or a long /a:/ followed by a short /a/.

Do Crow-speakers pronounce all four of
…a+a…
…a+aa…
…aa+a…
…aa+aa…
differently each from each of the others?
If not which ones can get confused?
Are there any words whose spelling contains <aaa> that could have arisen both as …a+aa… and a …aa+a… and both would be grammatical words and would have different meanings?
Is there an -aa- morpheme in Crow? (Or -ee- or -ii- or -oo- or -uu- ?)
If there is, could a word possibly have a morpheme ending in a short /a/, then that morpheme -aa- consisting of a single long /a:/, then a morpheme starting with a short vowel /a/?

Teddy wrote:Crow is in the Siouan family, so it's not related to Nishnaabemwin, which is an Algonquian language.
Thanks. I knew Nishnaabemwin is Alonquian, but didn't know Crow is Siouan.
So, they don't belong to the same language family.
But how far back did Algonquian and Siouan diverge from each other?
Before any of their ancestors arrived in the Americas?
Or after the ancestors of one arrived but before the ancestors of the other arrived?
Or after the common ancestor of both languages arrived on the North American continent?

Is Siouan restricted to North America?
Is Algonquian?
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

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eldin raigmore wrote:Thanks!
Actually you're just getting two long vowels in a row; the <aa>s and the <ii> in your examples happen to be long vowels represented by digraphs.
Yeah yeah, whatever. :P
eldin raigmore wrote:Four vowels in a row wouldn't surprise me as much as three of the same vowel in a row.
Is that regarded as a single syllable, whose nucleus is a diphthong both components of which are long vowels?
Or is there a syllable-boundary between the <aa> and the <ii>?
There is a syllable boundary I think, although maybe it's not so clear since there's no intervening glide or anything of the sort to break the syllables apart. It may be the case that there isn't one. Crow is actually more of a 'mora' language than a syllable one.
eldin raigmore wrote:Wow . That one would surprise me.
But by your explanation that's [ba:] + [a:shdéek] or [ba:] + [a:sh 'de:k], right?
(Are é and e different vowels, or is this an accented long /e:/?)

And I still don't know whether the example in your answer to my "House that Jack Built" question has a short /a/ followed by a long /a:/ or a long /a:/ followed by a short /a/.
The acute on the vowel signifies which vowel is stressed. On a long vowel, if the first vowel has the accent it's falling tone, and if the second vowel has the accent it's high tone. Thus baaaashdeek is [bá:á:ʃtê:k].

morphologically it's a long /a/ followed by a short one in the example.

The book didn't go much into the 'phonological theory' of the language but there's definitely some fairly abstract limits on what forms roots and bound morphemes and such are allowed to take. I don't think you'd ever get all the possible combinations of 4 /a/'s because it violates some sort of prosody rule in the language. In any case, the only morpheme that takes the form aa is a prefix and it would never show up in that hypothetical scenario.
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Re: Ask me anything about Crow

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clawgrip wrote:Don't want to derail this thread though...
Nor I, but...
Teddy wrote:
Mother Goose wrote:This is the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
[hilí [iishbíiwishkam [chiwáwuulim [[[Jack awaasúuash iluúhcheesh] awuuá] baaawúuash] akduushéesh] akdappeésh] koók].
[DEM [cat-DET [rat-DET [[[N house.NPOSS-DEF put.up-DEF] inside] seeds-DEF] NMLZ.AG-eat-DEF] NMLZ.AG-kill-DEF] COP-DECL]
Since this seems viable, Géarthnuns can do the same thing with participles ("malt" would go before "house", though), because while this:
But don’t you find [that sentences [that people [you know] produce] are easier to understand]?
is no big whoop in Géarthnuns, The House that Jack Built is an informationally irretrievable mess if one uses relative clauses. Participles, however, agree with their heads which helps with keeping track. And since the story is cumulative, the old information is refreshed each iteration. And even Mother Goose arranges the information vertically, not horizontally (and presumably, you get a new page or at least a new picture each round, which also breaks it up). So, tried out the Crow stategy with Géarthnuns participles and it works. It clicked, it gelled. No brain-splosion, I can keep track. If you went right to the final sentence without any priming, it'd probably get dicey, but I suspect if you accost people on the street with an oral SC>4 sentence, they probably begin to shut down no matter what language you're speaking.

So, thank you Teddy, thank you Crow. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
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