Comment by macleginn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by macleginn | Hacker News Reader

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As usual, minority-language reporting is filled with weird formulations.

> Their language, also called Kusunda, is unique: it is believed by linguists to be unrelated to any other language in the world. Scholars still aren't sure how it originated.

Languages with no known relatives are called isolates, and there are a lot of those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_isolate And languages do not normally "originate", unless they are constructed, like Esperanto, or arise in unusual circumstances, like spontaneous sign languages in isolated deaf communities.

> And it has a variety of unusual elements, including lacking any standard way of negating a sentence, words for "yes" or "no", or any words for direction.

As pointed out in other comments, not having words for "yes" or "no" is not very surprising. As for a "standard way" of negating a sentence, I wonder what that means. Kusunda has negative verbal suffixes, which vary based on some grammatical features, but so do many other languages. Location and direction is also usually specified by suffixes like in, e.g., Hungarian or Finnish.

See a grammatical overview for details: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83v8d1wv

In Finnish, "not" is an auxiliary verb, so "do" + "not" and similar combinations are just one word:

"I do not" => "En"

"(It) does not" => "Ei"

etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_verb#Finnish

That's interesting - since basically every auxiliary verb I can think of for english

(Am, is, are, was, were, will, have, has, had, may, might, can, could, shall, should, must, ought to, would)

has a contraction form with "not" (although some are fairly colloquial, or considered out of date):

(amn't, isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't, willn't, haven't, hasn't, hadn't, mayn't, can't, couldn't, shalln't, shouldn't, mustn't, oughtn't to, wouldn't)

> amn't

Amn't is neither standard nor historically supported; the word naturally developed into the modern word ain't, which is stigmatized.

Standard English essentially requires "I'm not" instead. Where avoiding the inflectional form is impossible, the standard awkwardly provides first-person aren't.

> willn't

Not sure what you were thinking here; there is a negative form of will, but it's won't.

> shalln't

And this is shan't.

My daughter invented amn't when she was 3 based on the rules that she understood.

There ain't no such thing as 'Standard English.'

I don’t think that a supportable position.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_English

> Although standard English is usually associated with official communications and settings, it is diverse in registers (stylistic levels), such as those for journalism (print, television, internet) and for academic publishing (monographs, academic papers, internet). This diversity in registers also exists between the spoken and the written forms of SE, which are characterised by degrees of formality; therefore, Standard English is distinct from formal English, because it features stylistic variations, ranging from casual to formal

If there is such a thing as Standard English, then it would allow phrases like “amn’t”, according to this definition anyway, as a casual style or register.

Evidently, it is usable to all speakers - you can come up with it yourself for the first time ever, and still be perfectly understood by every other speaker who hears it for the first time.

> There are substantial differences among the language varieties that countries of the Anglosphere identify as "standard English"

There is no One True Standard.

The negative-interrogative for the first-person singular present indicative or "amn't" is historically supported and is evidenced in Scots and Hiberno english.

The reason for this is, probably, that in Irish the cluster -mn- became disallowed at some point and was obligatorily split by a schwa. As a result speakers of Hiberno English likely didn't have to simplify "amn't" because they pronounced it "ament" from the start.

The - mn - cluster is legal in Irish -- the plural of bean (woman) is mná even. It occurs a few other places too, though some dialects have gone away (though any Cn has become Cr unless it's sn, so not just mn) from it.

AFAIK, mná is never actually pronounced in this way, it’s either [mena] with an epenthetic schwa or [mra].

At least in Kerry, there's a tendency for /mna:/ (Ó Sé Gaeilge Chorca Dhuibhne, 33) and he explicitly states (32) that both /mn/ and /m'n'/ are legal consonant clusters at the beginning of words, no epenthesis (he gives 'don mbeannacht' as an example for the other, where the vowel is dropped). I'd suspect the rest of Munster to be the same.

Cool, thanks! But word-final -mnt is a slightly different thing anyway.

I willn't take any of this no more. I amn't fond of your ostentatiousness.

It is not "shalln't", it is "shan't" -- https://www.dictionary.com/browse/shant

Also, you can abbreviate "it is" as "it's" and "is not" as "isn't", but what do you abbreviate "it is not" as?

It's actually both - Shalln't is considered the archaic form, but it was used. You're right that shan't is much more common.

But hey - if Stargate uses it (and they do - S09E04) then I'm willing to count it :)

‘tis not

maybe t'isn't?

Seems like it’sn’t :V

I think it's t'isn't.

It isn’t ?

s'not

Isn’t is it “won’t” for “will not”? (Not “willn’t”)

the contraction for "am not" is "ain't", not "amn't", which isn't a word

amn't is absolutely a word. It's the standard contraction of "am not" in Hiberno-English. Wiktionary says it's used in Scotland as well: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/amn't

In Scottish and Hiberno-English the negative-interrogative for the first-person singular present indicative or "amn't" is perfectly correct. Ain't is the common term everywhere else.

The Hungarian and Finnish location and direction suffixes thing sounds a lot like latin case. Do you know off-hand if it’s related?

"Relatedness" is a very thorny notion here because we cannot discount the possibility of long-range contact influence in Western Eurasia. Many ancient Indo-European languages had some kind of ablative or locative case, and accusative was often used in a directional sense.

However, localtive-case systems of Hungarian and Finnish are much more developed than anything we see in Indo-European (Latin has at most 3 cases with locative/directional semantics; Hungarian has 9; Finnish has 8), so it's a different system anyway.

It's not related. But suffixing is a very common way of expressing stuff also in unrelated languages, e.g., your Finnish locative works just like it does in Japanese or Tamil (structurally, not literally: it is a different ending) -- and those three are totally unrelated.

Structurally, Finnish endings are also quite different from Latin as the ending is always the same (almost, except for vowel changes), while Latin has an array of endings for the same function and you need to learn about declension classes of nouns to understand how to select the right one. Finnish 'cases' are more like suffixes like '-ne' or '-que' in Latin. E.g., '-ssa' or '-ssä' is 'in (location)': 'Amerikassa' 'in America', 'Sveitsissä' 'in Switzerland'. In Japanese the ending for 'in' is '-de' and in Tamil, it is '-il'.

> Finnish 'cases' are more like suffixes like '-ne' or '-que' in Latin. E.g., '-ssa' or '-ssä' is 'in (location)': 'Amerikassa' 'in America', 'Sveitsissä' 'in Switzerland'. In Japanese the ending for 'in' is '-de' and in Tamil, it is '-il'.

This seems to confuse inflectional suffixes with analytic particles. Certainly -ne and -que in Latin are not suffixes; they are clitics, exactly analogous to the English articles a(n) and the (not usually considered "prefixes"). They are not part of the word after which they appear. In contrast, the -i in humi "on the ground" is a part of the word, which mutated into that form to express a locative use.

(As a side note, that is not at all the norm in Latin - location is usually expressed with a preposition, as in sub monte "under [at the foot of] the mountain". Humus is one of only a handful of words that preserve the locative case.)

I believe the situation for Japanese de is similar, with de being either a clitic or a fully independent word. I have no knowledge of Tamil or Finnish.

In Japanese, as in many other head-final languages, it is often hard to impossible to distinguish between clitics and suffixes. -de can only attach to a noun because a noun phrase always ends with a noun and there can be nothing between a noun and a -de, they are inseparable. On the other hand, there is no phonological fusion of any kind between a noun and -de (unlike in verbs, where yom-u 'to read' becomes yon-de in the gerund form). Because of this -de and other case markers are described both as "particles" and "case endings" in different sources.

In agglutinative languages with freer word order, it is easier to argue that a locative morpheme is a suffix because it always appears with nouns, but absent any phonological processes that bind them together, one can always write them with a space and call the second part "locative postposition". In some cases, it is even unclear if an agglutinative language is very morphologically complex or just uses a lot of function words.

Related in that they serve similar functions, perhaps. However, while Latin is an Indo-European language, Hungarian and Finnish are Uralic languages. The difference is notable in the number of cases; Latin has six, while Hungarian has 17.

Does anyone know why this was downvoted? It was a genuine question. I’m confused. Accident, maybe?

Thanks.

Most people know exactly nothing about linguistics, but because everyone speaks a language, they feel qualified to talk about it. The results are mostly ridiculous to anyone actually trained in the field.

I'm sure all that's true (we see the same things in diet threads too - you eat food? no way, me too!) - but still, please don't post empty putdowns like this to HN. It just makes things worse.

When you know more than others, the thing to do is to share some of what you know, so we all can learn. That's what macleginn did in the GP comment, making the thread much better.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I get your point, but the reasoning for my "putdown" can be found in GGP's comment, so I feel like you're getting hung up on a minor issue here. I was merely corroborating the first sentence of GGP's comment.

Certainly, if the bar for comments here is "it has to make the reader substantially more knowledgeable", not a lot of comments would remain. Even in this very comment section, I can find other "empty putdowns" or not very substantiated comments.

Maybe so, but that would be a reason to post fewer empty putdowns, not more.

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