5 ms·

The Matses language in the article is interesting, where the verb form indicates how you know the information you are imparting. Something like that would be ve

by kens 6y ago

The Matses language in the article is interesting, where the verb form indicates how you know the information you are imparting. Something like that would be very useful for HN, making people tag statements to indicate their reliability. Imagine the benefit of verb tenses such as "I am an expert in this area", "I read something about this topic a while ago", "I know nothing about the topic and am confidently speculating", or "I didn't read the article and am commenting off the title." Edit: the key point is that this verb tense is required; you can't say anything without stating your confidence.

xvedejas 6y ago
I don't see why I would trust grammatically-required self-assessments of expertise any more than I already do when someone tags one of those phrases (not much).
- hinkley 6y ago
  I think the effect would be greater than zero, but not as much as some might think. Some people have a pattern of speech that implies a level of authority that they don't actually feel. It's obvious when some people need to 'police their tone', less obvious for others.
  - xvedejas 6y ago
    I'll conjecture that languages will invariably end up with a more neutral option, even when such options seem required. Sometimes it is useful to the speaker to be ambiguous, whether it is to understate something, imply something, or just take a mental load off.
meepmorp 6y ago
I would be skeptical of how seriously to take the interpretation in the article. There are huge differences between English and Matses, such that naively talking what's encoded in the verb morphology is misleading at best. If you look at the section on verbs in the thesis on Matses, the author has this to say in the first paragraph: >Epistemic modality (e.g., -chit 'Uncertainty') and evidentiality (e.g., -nëdac 'Distant Past: Inferential', -ash 'Recent Past: Conjecture' and -denne 'Remote Past: Experiential') are coded in Matses by derivational suffixes or as part of the meaning of inflectional suffixes, while English uses adverbs and modals like perhaps, evidently, really, must, etc. Matses actually encodes the same information as English, it just does so through a series of particles attaches to the verb, which is not surprising in a highly synthetic language. Mind you, I haven't read all 1200+ pages, but I'd doubt the article's take on things.
- samatman 6y ago
  This depends on information I don't have access to. In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a third party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance languages, it is. If evidentiary particles are mandatory grammar, and that is the claim, then uttering a sentence without including those particles would just sound wrong, the way the Russian tendency to leave off the article of a noun when speaking English sounds wrong to us. Native speakers simply wouldn't do so.
  - meepmorp 6y ago
    > In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a third party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance languages, it is Romance languages have gender as a grammatical category, and it exists on all nouns. Semantically, gender is arbitrary, except in the case of natural gender on animate nouns. The need to express the gender of a noun is a purely syntactic requirement, which Chinese does not have. It seems like a valid comparison, but it's not really. > If evidentiary particles are mandatory grammar, and that is the claim And that's probably not really true. Instead, there's a conflation of epistemic mode and tense (and maybe aspect because why not) the verb system, and that's all tangled up with the other affixes. It's not clear from the article, (or the paper I don't have time to wade through) if there's a default mode/tense that speakers use, and then only clarify when necessary. I get your point, but I think the actual facts are probably much less stark or interesting than the article makes out.
ThinkingGuy 6y ago
The linguistic term for this, as I recently learned from the Lingthusiasm podcast, is "evidentiality" and apparently a number of languages have it as a feature. Some languages get really granular with it, having different forms of expression depending on whether you've seen something, done something, overheard it, etc. https://lingthusiasm.com/post/184928796346/change-the-audio-lingthusiasm-episode-32 https://lingthusiasm.com/post/184928796346/change-the-audio-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality
1-6 6y ago
Ancient Greek words did that. For example, the word "know" has various forms: Verbs: Ginosko, oida, epiginosko, proginosko, epistamai, sunoida, agnoeo, gnorizo Nouns: Gnosis, epignosis, agnosia https://sweeterthanhoneyministry.com/2016/02/25/greek-words-for-know-in-the-new-testament/ https://sweeterthanhoneyministry.com/2016/02/25/greek-words-...

by kens 6y ago

xvedejas 6y ago

I don't see why I would trust grammatically-required self-assessments of expertise any more than I already do when someone tags one of those phrases (not much).

hinkley 6y ago
I think the effect would be greater than zero, but not as much as some might think. Some people have a pattern of speech that implies a level of authority that they don't actually feel. It's obvious when some people need to 'police their tone', less obvious for others.
- xvedejas 6y ago
  I'll conjecture that languages will invariably end up with a more neutral option, even when such options seem required. Sometimes it is useful to the speaker to be ambiguous, whether it is to understate something, imply something, or just take a mental load off.

meepmorp 6y ago

I would be skeptical of how seriously to take the interpretation in the article. There are huge differences between English and Matses, such that naively talking what's encoded in the verb morphology is misleading at best. If you look at the section on verbs in the thesis on Matses, the author has this to say in the first paragraph: >Epistemic modality (e.g., -chit 'Uncertainty') and evidentiality (e.g., -nëdac 'Distant Past: Inferential', -ash 'Recent Past: Conjecture' and -denne 'Remote Past: Experiential') are coded in Matses by derivational suffixes or as part of the meaning of inflectional suffixes, while English uses adverbs and modals like perhaps, evidently, really, must, etc. Matses actually encodes the same information as English, it just does so through a series of particles attaches to the verb, which is not surprising in a highly synthetic language. Mind you, I haven't read all 1200+ pages, but I'd doubt the article's take on things.

samatman 6y ago
This depends on information I don't have access to. In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a third party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance languages, it is. If evidentiary particles are mandatory grammar, and that is the claim, then uttering a sentence without including those particles would just sound wrong, the way the Russian tendency to leave off the article of a noun when speaking English sounds wrong to us. Native speakers simply wouldn't do so.
- meepmorp 6y ago
  > In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a third party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance languages, it is Romance languages have gender as a grammatical category, and it exists on all nouns. Semantically, gender is arbitrary, except in the case of natural gender on animate nouns. The need to express the gender of a noun is a purely syntactic requirement, which Chinese does not have. It seems like a valid comparison, but it's not really. > If evidentiary particles are mandatory grammar, and that is the claim And that's probably not really true. Instead, there's a conflation of epistemic mode and tense (and maybe aspect because why not) the verb system, and that's all tangled up with the other affixes. It's not clear from the article, (or the paper I don't have time to wade through) if there's a default mode/tense that speakers use, and then only clarify when necessary. I get your point, but I think the actual facts are probably much less stark or interesting than the article makes out.

ThinkingGuy 6y ago

The linguistic term for this, as I recently learned from the Lingthusiasm podcast, is "evidentiality" and apparently a number of languages have it as a feature. Some languages get really granular with it, having different forms of expression depending on whether you've seen something, done something, overheard it, etc. https://lingthusiasm.com/post/184928796346/change-the-audio-lingthusiasm-episode-32 https://lingthusiasm.com/post/184928796346/change-the-audio-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality

1-6 6y ago

Ancient Greek words did that. For example, the word "know" has various forms: Verbs: Ginosko, oida, epiginosko, proginosko, epistamai, sunoida, agnoeo, gnorizo Nouns: Gnosis, epignosis, agnosia https://sweeterthanhoneyministry.com/2016/02/25/greek-words-for-know-in-the-new-testament/ https://sweeterthanhoneyministry.com/2016/02/25/greek-words-...