And with clitics, it is always SOV in finite clauses and SVO in non-finite ones.

But pro-dropping the S, usually.

OVS with clitics is unmarked, but with a real noun object, you have to use an extra clitic to show its case.

er

True

Also, VS happens much more with intransitives, and especially ones in the past.

Though I’ve always just thought of that as true topicalisation (i.e., moving the constituent outside the clause).

The preterite also attracts VS ordering, even when not intransitive.

Yes, I think of it as topicalization, too, but it is formally marked because of the bonus clitic.

Un perro grande tengo yo.

Sounds poetic.

Well, if it’s topicalisation, the clitic isn’t really bonus, but logically required, since a transitive verb must have an object.

El perro mordió el hombre. But add personal a for moving it: Al hombre mordió el perro.

Hot tea is hot.

In both cases, the dog is the subject.

A mi amiga María se lo di ayer.

@KitFox Except when it’s not, then it’s not. (Archimedes’ 172nd Law)

Indeed.

That’s a duplicate dative, which can happen no matter the order. Ayer se lo di a mi amiga.

But duplicate accusatives always indicate OVS.

They duplicate the dative a lot because of the collapse of le/les into se when accusative is present making it hard to be sure who’s getting the thing acted on.

@tchrist Yeah, I was just thinking whether the datives were taking over in my head, or whether I was on solid ground still for thinking that I wouldn’t say, “Al hombre mordió el perro”—I would naturally say “Al hombre le mordió el perro”.

@JanusBahsJacquet Well, you could get away with it but it is not especially common. First, it posits a le used accusatively, which occurs in Northern Spanish for male humans alone.

(I do use that relatively consistently, but as you say, only for male humans)

They have a 3-way accusative opposition where lo is for male inanimates and le for male animates.

It is considered “wrong” or at least weird in Mexico, but the Real Academia grandfathers it as acceptable natural speech.

I s’pose that’s partly why I use it: it comes close to matching Danish.

You distinguish animates?

And of course because my old Spanish teacher used it

Then he was probably from north of Andalucía, excepting Granada alone, which speaks Northern Spanish because it wasn’t recolonized per se until 1492.

Well, we have four third-person pronouns: han (he), hun (she), den (it, commune), det (neuter). So we distinguish human vs. non-human in two genders.

Is common gender non-specified?

That is, it is for humans?

@tchrist Yeah, he was from somewhere east of Madrid, I think. Maybe Zaragoza or something.

He would be a leísta by birth then.

No, commune and neuter are purely grammatical—they apply to all nouns, but not generally humans (who take the he/she pronouns).

That missing a was because I forgot to translate correctly. :)

What is commune then?

(Or maybe it was Guadalajara …)

Guad- places tend to be from Al-Andaluz, of course.

It’s from Arabic.

The commune gender is what we have left after the historical masculine and feminine genders merged entirely in Standard Danish (though some dialects still keep all three separate, and others have merged all three).

So it is a non-neuter non-human pronoun?

Yup

k

Do you use human pronouns for household companions?

You mean pets?

Or spouses?

Heh.

Pets.

Usually, yeah. Unless we don’t know the gender of the pet in question, in which case we can get away with using commune.

It’s a PC joke. Boulderites statutorily no longer have pets, only nonhuman animal companions.

(Or neuter, depending on the gender of the noun of the species the animal is)

Because it was thought that pet was degrading to the um pet.

@tchrist you're serious?

*graon*

Oh, that's nice. We have "commune" pronouns for everything except personal pronouns.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Wish I weren’t. But yeah, I am.

And by pronoun I mean pronomen.

Cerb, you're just in time!

@Cerberus Now why would you say that?

What? Am I?

Yes, to rail against Boulder's PC law

@Cerberus Yeah, that’s one of the most annoying things about Dutch: you’ve basically completely merged the masculine and feminine, BUT if you want to use a pronoun anaphorically for a noun, you still need to know the noun’s damn gender!

@tchrist Because some speakers of English do not know the proper meaning of noun and pronoun any more...

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yay! But I thought it was a joke?

@Cerberus No such speakers of English here, I can assure you.

@JanusBahsJacquet Umm that is a slightly different issue, but yes.

@Cerberus And you were including Janus amongst those, I see I see.

@JanusBahsJacquet An adjective is a noun.

Some in this room might object to that.

@tchrist I set my bar high...

@Cerberus Yeah, like me. ;-)

See?

Adjectives are part of nominal inflectional patterns, but they are not nouns.

@Cerberus No, no joke, neither here nor there.

@JanusBahsJacquet Hence "noun as in nomen".

@Cerberus But there are no proadjectives …

Modern English has sadly killed its word for nomen. So I revive it.

We are no longer pet owners. We are guardians of companion animals.

@JanusBahsJacquet Certainly there are, many.

Like possessive adjectives, demonstrative pronouns...

Relative pronouns can be adjectival too.

And Interrogative pronouns.

But those are not known as proadjectives

Conceptually, they may be to adjectives as pronouns are to nouns, but they’re not called proadjectives, so there’s no possible misunderstanding with pronoun. (It seems there are actually a few scattered people who do use this word. Blech.)

@tchrist Hilarious.

> We got criticism both from people who just thought it was a waste of time

@JanusBahsJacquet Well, as I said, I hate the modern English nomenclature and I try not to use it whenever I can.

Your is to me a possessive adjective pronoun.

That is a demonstrative/relative adjective/substantive pronoun. Or a conjunction. Etc.

@Cerberus That’s silly.

That just makes no sense to me. Your is a possessive determiner; yours is a possessive pronoun.

@JanusBahsJacquet Thanks for saving me the typing. :)

@tchrist Nope, it would be perfectly consistent. Only English has warped the meaning of nomen in such a way as to make the whole nomenclature inconsistent.

@tchrist That article very logically presents the case for the use of the word "guardian" over "owner", but "companion animals"?!? sheesh.

English hasn’t done that—it was already like that.

Please don’t apply Latin names, nor grammar, to English. This is your flaw.

@JanusBahsJacquet You're sticking to the nomenclature that I don't like, so yeah.

@JanusBahsJacquet Then who did it?

You don’t like it because it is not Latin. That is immaterial. Neither is English.

Does Danish not have bijvoeglijke naamwoorden?

Well, Dionysos Thrax for one.

A pronoun is a substantive. A determiner is not.

@tchrist Nor is it Dutch, or German.

@Cerberus I don’t think so. Attachable nouns?

Adjective nouns.

Bijvoeglijk = adjective.

Such as?

“Adjective nouns”?

Is that intended to be autological, or merely illogical?

Such as red, large, many, no.

Tillægsordsnavneord, if you wish (but that doesn’t exist).

Nominalized adjectives are one thing.

No, those are neither nouns, nomina, substantives, nor navneord.

Noun adjuncts another.

Then what do you call red in Danish?

An adjective

Tillægsord

@JanusBahsJacquet They're all nomina!

@JanusBahsJacquet How would you translate that literally, root by root?

(Well, no, actually—an imperative of the verb at redde, or indeed of the verb at rede. But I suspect that’s not what you meant)

To-lay-word

@JanusBahsJacquet Meanie!

And you simply will not get anybody to agree with you that large, many, no are nouns.

@JanusBahsJacquet Okay, so that sounds like it is the same as adjective?

First, many and no are specialish.

Completely the same as adjective, yes. It’s a calque (like bijvoeglijk, I assume)

Many is normally a determiner, but can be used alone as a substantive.

At any rate, are you suggesting Dionysius did not call adjectives onomata?

And no is also a type of determiner, but a type that cannot be made into a substantive.

No, I’m saying he did call adjectives onomata—but most others didn’t.

Well, Dutch and Latin do!

And isn't the Danish word short for adjective noun too?

Nope, it is not.

OK.

Funny.

I don’t think you are comfortable with the entire notion of determiners.

So English and Danish.

Many older people are not.

As I recall, you get tanglefooted with demonstratives, too.

They're just a type of adjectives. They modify substantive nouns like other adjectives, is my terminology.

Or at least, remonstrative.

Sorry, those are not the droids you are looking for.

Demonstratives are nomina, sure. They can be used substantively (as "nouns") or adjectivally.

@Cerberus So articles are nouns, too?

Yes.

But not in Dutch.

Latin didn’t have articles, so they do not exist.

EOF

Why not in Dutch?

But they ought to be called nomina, they have everything in common with (other) nomina.

@tchrist End Of Fistcussion?

The only articles which are noun are mentions, not uses.

@JanusBahsJacquet Because someone made an unfortunate decision in the 17th century, probably...

@JanusBahsJacquet Amongst many other f-words.

Articles are not nouns; that is the silliest thing I have ever heard.

I would call an article a special kind of adjective pronoun.

(Pronouns are a kind of noun.)

See, you are inventing a huge amount of personal silliness that nobody else believes in and flies against any analysis more recent than Jesus H. Christ.

@Cerberus They have very little in common with nomina, actually. They play different syntactic roles, they follow different declension patterns, etc.

Of course articles come from the same roots that pronouns come from...

No, pronouns are not a type of noun. They are a type of substantive.

@JanusBahsJacquet Umm their declension is not that much different? At any rate, anything that declines is a nomen.

A participle or a gerund is also a nomen.

Nonsense.

Well, they are quite different in some languages

Speak English.

We don’t decline our -ing words.

Nor our -ed or -en words for that matter.

So declension is your elephant.

But not in Indo-European languages? They always resemble nominal inflection rather than verbal inflection, i.e. declension rather than conjugation.

In Danish, for example, nouns decline according to number and case (in a few relic forms), while adjectives decline according to number and definiteness.

Yes, that’s why I say they share nominal inflection.

The same as in the other Germanic languages.

That doesn’t make them nouns, though.

That does not make them nouns.

Well, it does to me.

jinx

@Cerberus Yes, Humpty.

They share many morphological features; but they share almost no syntactic features.

So an infinitive is a noun to you, too?

Well, you sure cannot say that we are using the ELU room for non-ELU stuff, that’s for sure.

Infinitives are verbs. They can be used substantively of course.

So what I am saying is that it is unfortunate that English and apparently some other languages do not use the word noun to indicate a nomen or naamwoord, because I like having a word for all words that decline. And my reason is that, in many cases, the line between adjectives and substantives is blurred, in Indo-European languages.

@JanusBahsJacquet It can be...it is iffy. It is certainly also a verb, to be sure, but also a noun, possibly depending on the situation.

A participle is always a verbum and a nomen.

So is a gerund.

I think not.

Participles are not nouns.

Infinitives have number, case, and gender, but no endings.

They are verbs and adjectives, never nouns.

@Cerberus Except in Portuguese, where they have conjugated infinitives.

Or at least they can have those things.

@JanusBahsJacquet Personal infinitives, but yes.

Still non-finite forms.

@tchrist Non-finite forms, but definitely conjugated forms, rather than declined forms.

@JanusBahsJacquet Hmm how is that possible? I guess we need to define conjugation first. Does a conjugated word need to have a verbal ending, or does a verbal suffix also count as conjugated?

Yes, I was just using the calque.

@Cerberus Verbal endings: personal desinences, to be exact.

OK so we do not count words without endings as conjugated, the strict definition.

So how does that work in Portuguese, and why does it not count as a finite verb?

What’s that for? It’s for us to open the door.

É para abrirmos a porta.

@Cerberus By endings you mean personal desinences, yes?

I would say so, yes.

You can’t do that in Spanish or French, you have to use subjunctives, which are finites.

And finite = having an ending, right?

So non-finite = not having an ending.

It doesn’t count as a finite verb because it is used exactly as an infinitive and can only be used in places where an infinitive can be used—it can never be used as a finite verb.

Es para que abramos / podamos abrir la puerta.

No, finite = being the main verb in a verbal clause

He wanted me to call him.

That takes a personal infinitive in Portuguese, but not in the other Romance languages.

@JanusBahsJacquet Doesn't that have the same scope?

One will note that we use a dative and an infinitive in English.

I'd have to see an example of the Portuguese personal infinitive...

I would say that is impossible by definition?

@Cerberus Nope. In the sentence above, é para abrirmos a porta, there is only one finite verb: é (‘it is’), just like “It is to open the door” has only one finite verb. But abrirmos is conjugated in the first person plural to show that the subject of ‘to open’ is ‘we’.

Oh, so they basically stick the verbal ending -mos onto the infinitive?

> The personal infinitive, a non-finite form which does not show tense, but is inflected for person and number.

And what does para do? Is it an adverb?

@Cerberus It’s like ”It’s for us to open the door’.

Para = for, preposition

@Cerberus Of course not. It’s a standard preposition.

@Cerberus Yup

@tchrist Oh OK, so it governs the infinitival phrase?

Exactly

@Cerberus It’s like for works in any other language, yes.

I agree that it is a very troubling construction!

(Why does Mr. Chat refuse to italicise my text just because there’s an accented character in it?)

It’s quite useful.

There are two options.

And we use it all the time in English.

So do the Portuguese.

In Spanish, French, and Italian, you need a que/che and a subjunctive finite clause.

In Portuguese and English, we can still use the infinitive.

Either you change the part of the the definition of an infinitive that says a verb form without an ending (but then what defines an infinitive?), or you say abrirmos has become finite and para a conjunction. Neither option is very pleasant...

@Cerberus The latter option doesn’t work at all, as @tchrist’s examples just now show.

A zero conjunction?

It’s not the preposition itself, it’s anywhere you want to use a nominal (=infinitival) form of the verb that you can conjugate it according to person without making it finite.

Right.

Then you would have to demolish too large a part of the house to fit in the new furniture.

Of course “Galician” also has personal infinitives, but so too does Sardinian.

So then how would you define infinitive, if you have to fit in the Portuguese monstrosity?

Oh, I didn’t know Sardinian had them!

Funny. I thought Sardinian was more like...influenced by Catalan?

@Cerberus A non-finite, nominal (!) verbal form.

Shocking!

An abomination!

And I'm still not entirely happy about this use of "non-finite".

I have no problem saying that infinitives are nominals—but they’re not nouns.

Would you call adjectives nominals?

@Cerberus Well, I promise it was not influenced by Galego-Português.

@tchrist Yeah that would be odd.

@Cerberus Sorry about that.

Thank you.

@Cerberus Yes, absolutely.

(By the way, infinitives in Greek can have articles and prepositions. And no doubt adjectives. And the articles/adjectives have cases and genders and numbers.)

A nominal is any word that belongs to a class that (mainly) exhibits nominal morphology.

(In Latin, infinitives cannot have prepositions, but they can have adjectives.)

@JanusBahsJacquet OK then that is the same as a nomen or naamwoord.

Basically—except that in other languages than Dutch, a nomen is a noun, and at least in the Scandinavian languages, navneord (and the other forms) are too. Nominals are nominalia.

> Further well-known properties of Medieval (and Modern) Sardinian are differential object marking, the inflected and the personal infinitive, focus fronting (also of predicative elements), as well as some idiosyncrasies in the complementiser and particle system (and some others), which will be mentioned but not be the main focus of discussion here.

@JanusBahsJacquet Hmm and how about 500 years ago?

In English, nomen/noun used to mean nominal too.

Not sure when it changed.

@Cerberus I was referring mostly to English infinitives with that. In some languages, infinitives are definitely just verbal nouns—all the living Celtic languages, for example, use infinitives that are explicitly nouns (and are rarely even called infinitives, but verbal nouns).

Right.