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Ask-A-Linguist - Message details
Subject: Limit of tones, cases, gender, plural
Question:
I have been told that Cantonese has 6 (or 9) tones, Finnish has 16 cases, Swahili has 8 genders, and Russian has singular, plural and REALLY plural. Those are very surprising (to me, at least), but I'm sure that there's more. What's the limit of these sorts of differences in language expression and what are some other examples? Thank you for your time and consideration.

Reply:
Jacob,

You've named categories, tone, case, gender, and number, that are fairly limited in Modern English, where lexical tone does not occur, case is limited to pronouns and even there is reducing in many dialects, gender is restricted to pronouns and a few nouns, and number is limited to singular and plural.

A large number of the world's languages use lexical tone, that is, distinguish words not only by their vowels and consonants but also by their use of pitch. Many of the languages of eastern and southeastern Asia use different pitch levels and combinations of pitch levels in this way. Many languages of Africa and the Americas use just pitch level contrasts but may contrast up to five such levels, six in a small number of languages where certain consonant sounds condition a higher or lower pitch.

Case is a category many languages use in ways that correspond to the use of prepositions in English. English has an astonishingly large number of prepositions, one of the more difficult areas of the grammar for non-native speakers to learn. Other languages use postpositions instead, and in some languages prepositions or postpositions have over time become affixes, so that they become case markers. Dravidian languages in southern India have switched from one type to another more than once in their history.

We tend to think of gender as related to sex, and Indo-European languages typically have two or three such genders, like the masculine/feminine/neuter contrast in Latin or German. But grammatical gender is simply a way of classifying nouns that has grammatical consequences. It doesn't intrinsically have anything to do with sex. The genders of Swahili are marked not only by different prefixes, actually pairs of prefixes for singular plural, but also by prefixes on adjectives, relative pronouns, verbs, etc. that agree with the gender of the noun. Languages may have gender categories for humans, inanimates, tools, paired objects, very large objects, very small objects, long thin things, people in high public office, etc. Probably the most famous example of a gender is in the Dyirbal language in Australia that George Lakoff immortalized in the title of a book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (University of Chicago Press 1990).

Even number can be a more complex category. Some languages, like many West African languages, have no grammatical marking of number. Some, like Old English and Classical Greek, have a singular/dual/plural contrast. In some American languages there is even a trial number, used of sets of three. In English we distinguish not just between singular and plural but between countable and mass nouns. Rice, water, smoke are typical mass nouns. We don't say "two rices" unless we're talking about two kinds of or two orders of rice. But we do talk about two apples or two houses, typical count nouns. Actually, this illustration takes us back to gender. English mass and count nouns use different quantifiers, e.g. "many apples" but not "many rice" or "much rice" but not "much apples." Because the classification of English nouns into count and mass nouns has such grammatical correlates, some grammarians consider count vs. mass to be a kind of gender contrast.

Language is marvelously creative. If you'd like to explore this area further, I recommend John McWhorter's The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (Harper Perennial 2003) for a very broad, engaging, and data-rich discussion.

Reply From: Herbert Frederic Stahlke    click here to access email
Date: Sep-10-2009
Other Replies:
  1. Re: Limit of tones, cases, gender, plural Madalena Cruz-Ferreira    (Sep-10-2009)
  2. Re: Limit of tones, cases, gender, plural Joseph F Foster    (Sep-10-2009)
  3. Re: Limit of tones, cases, gender, plural Elizabeth J Pyatt    (Sep-10-2009)
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