LINGUIST List 9.1286

Wed Sep 16 1998

Sum: Summary of 'I am hungry'

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  • Sren Harder, Summary of 'I am hungry' (long!)

    Message 1: Summary of 'I am hungry' (long!)

     Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 16:31:31 +0200 (CEST)
    From: Sren Harder <sharderling.hum.aau.dk>
    Subject: Summary of 'I am hungry' (long!)


    Thanks to everyone (all 57!) who answered my query on the semantics of 'hungry'. First I reprint the original query, then I will give a summary and an analysis of the results, and finally I will give a list of the people who replied to my message.

    ######################################## THE ORIGINAL QUERY ########################################

    In connection with my thesis on adjectival (formal) semantics, I want to exemplify the many possible ways of expressing 'adjectival' concepts; especially stage-level 'human propensity' adjectives. The concept I use as an example is 'hungry'.

    Many languages use an adjective just as English, some languages uses other strategies, but I have problems finding examples.

    Please send translations (with interlinear word-for-word translation) to sharderling.aau.dk for the sentence 'I am hungry' for as many languages as possible, especially languages that do not use a predicative adjective. (I will of course let the list know of my results).

    One example I am especially interested in would be a language that use an abstract noun as 'acting' subject and has the perceiver as object (no preposition) (paraphrase: 'Hunger takes me').

    The types I have found until now are (please let me know of corrections):

    adjective: English, Danish, Czech, Lithuanian, Urdu, (Norwegian) Romany, Turkish, Welsh (?! 'newynawl' or 'newynawg').

    verb ('He hungers'): Plains Miwok (California)

    abstract noun as object ('I have hunger'): Romance (French, Italian, Spanish), German, Albanian, ('I feel hunger'): Hausa

    prepositional phrase (abstract noun subject, perceiver in 'locational' PP) ('Hunger is on me'): Celtic (Irish, Breton, but not Welsh?).

    Thank you very much, Soren Harder

    ######################################## SUMMARY ########################################

    I first give a list of different strategies (with examples) of representing the concept of 'hungry' as in 'I am hungry'. It is my impression that for all languages, the construction given for 'hungry' is not a 'singleton', but repeated for a (small) set of other concept, e.g. 'thirsty', 'sleepy', 'scared' or 'ashamed'. For each language I have selected the one strategy that it appears to me from your answers is the most used (sometimes more than one strategy for a language is noted, if I have the impression that they are both 'natural'). Most of the results I have referred to in my original posting are not included below, as I discovered from the replies I got, that some of them were in error. This just show the danger of the dictionary-and-grammar-reading methodology of typological studies in unexperienced hands as mine.

    As I may not have made explicit in my original message, this study is made more out of curiousity than as part of a systematic research project. (Actually it was meant to support some claims I'm making in the preface to my thesis on formal semantics of adjectives in Danish and English). I do not (as of now) plan to publish these results in any other form than this. But if my material can be of any help to people doing 'real research' in this area, please do not hesitate to contact me.

    %%%% PRIMARY EXPRESSIONS %%%%

    AS ADJECTIVES: ~"I am hungry"

    1) 1sg-pron COP 'hungry' English: I am hungry Swedish: Jeg r hungrig Dialectal Swedish (Skna, SW-Sweden): Jeg r sulten Danish: Jeg er sulten Afrikaans: Ek is honger (Note! This is different from Dutch)

    2) Copular-drop languages: 1sg-pron 'hungry' Arabic: 'ana jauCaan (C is a voiced pharyngeal fricative; Arabic also uses verbal strategy) Russian: ja goloden (the adj. is declinated for gender, here masc; the so-called 'short form' of the adjective is used) Rusyn: Ya holoden

    3) Pro-drop Hungarian: ehes vagyok (hungry I-am) Polish: Jestem glodny (COP-1sg hungry-masc-sg) (but: 'Chce mi sie pic' "It is wanted for me to drink" for 'I'm thirsty')

    4) Others Tagalog: Ako'y gutom na gutom na. 1SG:REF:INV hungry LIG hungry ASP I am already famished. REF=referential, INV=inverse, LIG=ligature, linker, ASP=aspect

    Basque: Larry Trask (larrytcogs.susx.ac.uk) writes:

    You could hardly have picked a more complicated example from the Basque point of view, since `I'm hungry' is expressed in quite different ways in the several regional varieties of Basque.

    Basque <gose> is both a noun meaning `hunger' and an adjective meaning `hungry'; this is one of about two dozen ancient words which function like this. Normally, nouns and adjectives are rather sharply distinct in Basque.

    Eastern Basque usually has this: <Gose naiz.> Here <naiz> is `I am', a form of the ordinary copular verb <izan> `be'. This is slightly unusual, in that a predicate adjective usually bears the article <-a> (singular) or <-ak> (plural), and hence we might have expected <Gosea naiz.> But this is not usual, and Lafitte, in his famous grammar of French Basque, reports that this form has the specialized sense of `I'm starving', `I'm famished'. Unusual.

    A standard reference source reports another possibility in French Basque: <Gosez nago>. Here the ending <-z> is the ordinary instrumental case-ending, which often has assorted adverbial functions, and <nago> is a form of the second copular verb <egon>, which typically expresses `be (in a temporary condition)'.

    But western Basque has a very different construction: <Goseak nago>. Here <gose> takes the singular article <-a> followed by the ergative case-suffix <-k> (Basque is morphologically ergative), but the verb is again the intransitive <nago>. I believe that <gose> is the only word in the language that behaves in this strange manner: normally the ergative functions *only* as the subject of a transitive verb. Grammarians routinely explain this odd form by suggesting that it is a contraction of something like *<Goseak hartuta nago> `I am taken by hunger', more literally `I am having-been-taken by hunger', still more literally `I am hunger-taken'. Here <hartu> is the transitive verb `take'; <goseak> is its subject and hence ergative; and the ending <-ta> converts the whole thing into an adverbial participle phrase. (It is characteristic of <egon> that it takes complements which are formerly adverbial, not adjectival, in contrast to <izan>, which takes adjectival complements.)

    In support of this, note that western Basque also has <Lokartuta nago> `I'm sleepy', which is transparently from *<Loak hartuta nago> `I am taken by sleep', with <lo> `sleep' (noun).

    To complicate this Iraide Ibarretxe (iraideling.ed.ac.uk) gives the form 'gose nago' for Basque.

    Welsh and Czech do not (normally) use adjectives, as I claimed in my original mail.

    AS VERBUM HABEO + OBJECT(hunger): ~"I have hunger"

    German: Ich habe hunger Dutch: Ik heb honger French: J'ai faim Italian: Ho fame Spanish: Portuguese: (Eu) tenho fome Catalan: Tinc gana Czech: (J) mm hlad

    AS SUBJECT(hunger) + PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE (perceiver)

    1) I gave Irish Gaelic as an example of this. The thing I forgot was that IG does not have a verbum habeo (the verb 'have'); 'I have a car' is translated into 'T carr agam' or literally "There is a car at me". You could therefore see the IG expression as an 'underlying' habeo+object, as the ones above. (Apart from the difference between the preposition used: 'ag' in owning and 'ar' in perceiving). Exactly the same goes for Finnish. (Finnish have exactly the same construction for having and perceiving though.) Both languages have open adjective classes. (Thanks to the many Finns who reminded me of this).

    Irish: T ocras orm. Is hunger on-me ("There is hunger on me")

    Manx: Taa accyrys orrym (same analysis as Irish, but see AS VERB below)

    Finnish: Minulla on nlk 1sg-adessive be-3sg hunger-nom



    2) The same construction is seen in Romanian, which _do_ have a verbum habeo, but here the construction uses a dative, not a PP, for the perceiver. (Thanks to Eva Remberger and Simona Herdan for this information, and Matti Miestamo)

    Romanian: Mi-e foame 1sg-dat hunger "To me is hunger"

    AS SUBJECT(hunger) + "ACTIVE" VERB + OBJECT(perceiver)

    Somali (Cushitic, Afro-asiatic): gaajo baa i haysa `I am hungry' lit. hunger holds/possesses you gaajo = hunger (fem.), indefinite baa = focus marker (declarative `root' sentence) i = personal object pronoun, 1st person singular hay = to hold, possess + -s-a, feminine agreement, 3rd person singular, present general.

    Yoruba (Bene-Kwa, West Africa): Ebi n(H) pa mi(H) hunger PROG kill/beat me (I am hungry)

    Ndyuka (a Surinamese Creole): I quote George Huttar (george_huttarsil.org) as I do not quite know how to analyse these data: " In Ndyuka, a creole of Suriname, the usual way to express the notion of 'I am hungry' is as follows:

    Angii moo mi. hunger more 1s

    moo is a verb, though derived < Eng. more; it occurs after other, including adjectival, verbs in comparative constructions:

    A langa moo mi. 'He is taller than I.' 3s long more 1s

    Another way to express hunger, perhaps with a bit more intenity, uses the same pattern with hunger as S, experiencer as O:

    Angii kii mi. 'I am really hungry.' (lit. hunger kill me) hunger kill 1s

    George Huttar

    P.S. For thirst, change the first word in the above sentences to wataa 'water'--there is no lexeme for 'thirst' corresponding to angii 'hunger'. Another example is:

    Pisi moo mi. 'I need to urinate.' urin(at)e more 1s "

    Akan (Twi-Fante, Africa) Rich Campbell (campbellOakland.edu) notes a construction like the one in Ndyuka, but does not believe it is the verb, that occurs in this construction, is the same as the serial verb:

    "The normal way of saying 'I'm hungry' in Akan is as in (1):

    (1) Okom de me. hunger ? me

    The first NP is clearly the grammatical subject, so it seems to be of the type you're looking for. The only question I have concerns the gloss of the verb: it's clearly not the same "de" that occurs in serial verb constructions (see R. Campbell (1996) 'Serial verbs and shared arguments', The LInguistic Review 13, 83-118; see esp. note 10), so this may be an idiomatic usage of some kind; I don't really know (though you might check Christaller's grammar, which I don't have handy).

    Rich Campbell Dept. of Linguistics Oakland University Rochester, MI 48309-4401 USA

    campbelloakland.edu"

    AS VERB ~"I hunger" Some of the languages below (OEngl, Greek) has adjectives, and for those I believe this is the correct analysis. But for a language like Chinese, I believe the proper analysis would be to treat it as an adjective, as there is a sub-class of verbs, adjectives, that may be distinguished from the superclass; in Chinese by the possibility to co-occur with 'hen' (and being mono-transitive). I have decided to keep it in this class though as I do not know which other languages are also of the same type.

    Arabic: 'a-juuC 1sg-hunger

    Ojibwa: nim-bakade 1pers-be_hungry

    Micmac (East Algonkian, Canada): kewisin-k hunger-3sg

    Old English: me hyngrede 1sg-dat V This is a very interesting construction with an impersonal verb, cp. the Romanian above, which also uses a dative, but with 'hunger' as subject.

    Amharic: raba-ny V-1ps_direct_object "It hungers me". This is like Old English above, but as direct, and not indirect, object.

    Greek (Modern and Ancient): no example, but Phoevos Panagiotidis <epanagessex.ac.uk> writes: "I am hungry" is rendered as a verb ("I hunger") in both Ancient and Modern Greek, unlike the rest of Balkan languages or Romance.

    Thai: phom hiw (both lexemes rising tone) I hunger(V)

    Cheyenne: na-heana I-hunger

    Old Babylonian (Akkadian): (I am not certain of my classification of this example) baria:ku bari-a:ku be_hungry.PastPart.State-1sg.common_gender

    Chinese (Mandarin): wo3 e4 le I be-hungry change_of_state-part (another reply tags 'le' as 'currently relevant marker') or: wo3 hen3 e4 I very be_hungry

    Manx: Ta mee g'accyrys Is I -ing hunger "I am hungering" We see here that the N 'accyrys' is used as a verbal noun (and it is a VN, I believe, etymologically). This makes the analysis of 'Ta accyrys orrym' above a bit shaky. The, structural and etymological identical, Irish 'T ocras orm' cannot be analysed as a verbal expression though, as (I believe!) neither 'ocras' nor any other of the Ns that go into this construction (e.g. 'bron' "sorrow/sorry") can be used as VNs in Modern Irish (and I'm not sure whether they are all VNs originally).

    AS PARAPHRASE by 'paraphrase' I mean that the language does not normally use a noun, verb or adjective 'hunger' or 'hungry' (i.e. if the language has one it is stylistically marked). Instead the language uses another concept to express the feeling of hunger.

    1) 'stomach empty'

    Japanese:

    (Boku wa) onaka ga sui-te i-ru I TOP stomach NOM become.empty-PART be-PRES or (Boku wa) hara ga het-te i-ru stomach decrease-PART

    Notes: 1) I believe 'hara' and 'onaka' are synonymous and both occur with both verbs, but 'hara', as 'het-te' is a bit more colloquial/male-language. 2) This sentences are past tense form, but present tense meaning: it _has_ emptied = it _is_ empty (I _am_ hungry)

    Estonian: Mul on kht thi I:adessive be:pres:3sg stomach:NOM empty:NOM = "I have an empty stomach"

    Cantonese: ngo5 tou5 ngo6 I(topic) stomach hungry ="as for me, my stomach is hungry" (Note! Adj is subtype of V as for Mandarin)

    Vietnamese To ddo bu.ng 1ps-nonkin be-hungry stomach (I do not know what the tag 'nonkin' means)

    Both the Cantonese and the Vietnamese may be better described as verbal or adjectival, as they _do_ contain a root 'hungry', but I have put them together with Japanese, because of their reference to the stomach.

    2) 'want to eat' Plains Cree: ninhthkatn ni-nhte.ehkat-n 1ps-desire.eat(?)-intr

    Samoan: 'Ua 'ou fia 'ai PERF I want eat

    Sayula Popoluca (Eastern Mixe, Southern Vera Cruz): ta ky7jk+p ta kay=7o7k-j+-p 1ps eat=want-REFL-CONT or with a dependent clause: tan wmp ta kyw7n tan wa:7n-p [ta kay-wa:7n] 1-3 want-CONT [1ps eat-DEP_FUT] I want it [that I shall eat]

    3) 'need of food' Welsh: Mae eisiau bwyd arnaf (South Welsh: Mae chwant bwyd arnaf) Is need(-of-)food on-me This parallels the Irish and Manx above, but without a lexeme for 'hunger'. (W. arnaf = Ir. orm, and for possessives W. gan = Ir. ag)

    Awara (Trans-New Guinea, Finisterre-Huon, Wantoat): Nakngale tikaying for.my.food they.are.being

    Arop-Sissano (Papua New Guinea) Otouw tak'aw yia food INCOMPLETIVE-grip me I think the way to make sense of this as a speaker of 'Standard Average European' is that there is some kind of metonymy 'food' for 'lack of food' (as in 'risk death' = 'risk ones life'). This makes it comparable to hunger-as-subject

    4) Plains Indian Sign Language: Dan Alford Moonhawk (dalfordhaywire.csuhayward.edu) writes: "In PISL, it's a horizontal slice across the belly, indicating that hunger is cutting you in half."

    %%%% ALTERNATIVE EXPRESSIONS %%%%

    The constructions above are not the only one used in the languages. But the others are either highly marked, mostly used metaphorical, or have other meanings, like to starve, to diet or to be extremely hungry. I have tried to sort the examples, so that those that are the normal have been mentioned above, but I cannot guarantee that I haven't deleted important data in this process. Generally, I can say, there is none of the replies, that I have sorted out, that does not fall under the categories established above.

    1) dieting Czech: Hladovim (Verb-1sg) (eq. in Russian)

    2) starving Danish: Jeg sulter. (1sg-pron V) French: Je suis affam (adj) (Note French and Danish are mirror-images) Estonian: Mul on nlg (I-adess be-PRS-3sg hunger-NOM)

    3) metaphorical English: I hunger

    4) Poetical English: Hunger raged among the citizens

    5) just less common or more formal: Russian: mnye khochetsya yest' (to-me wants-itself to-eat) or: mne golodno (to-me hungry-short_form-neuter/adverb) Swedish: Jeg knner mig hungrig (I feel myself hungry) (eq. in Danish) Portuguese: Estou com fome (I-am with hunger) Finnish: (min) olen nlissni (I am in my hungers; nllissni is plural, inessive, 1sg-possesive) Finnish: nlk ("hunger!") Jarno Rauko writes: "It's more probable than "Hunger!" or "Hungry!" (but cf. "Food!") although it's not of course complete syntax" Italian: Sono affamato, or Ho appetito (both formal) Japanese: (Boku wa) kuuhuku de-aru (empty-stomach COP; kuuhuku is a borrowing from Chinese; formal) Japanese: onaka ga pekopeko da (stomach is hungry; very colloquial)

    ######################################## THANKS TO: ########################################

    Jarno Raukko, Arika Okrent, Scott Hersey, Emily Bender, Douglas Wulf, Bertinetto, Takae Tsujioka, Phoevos Panagiotidis, Yiwola Awoyale, Bert Peeters, Dan Moonhawk Alford, John Phillips, Mark Irwin, Keiko Unedaya, Asya Pereltsvaig, SHINOHARA Kazuko, Gary B. Palmer, Robert R. Ratcliff, Yo Matsumoto, Hiroaki Tanaka, Irmeli Helin, Jaakko Leino, Esme Jansen van Vuuren, Colin Whiteley, Henrik Rahm, Jacqueline Lecarme, Gao Hong, minne g. de boer, Michael Moss, Jan Kuper, Larry Trask, Robert Whiting, Kirsten Beissner, Renate Krist, Simona Herdan, Mari Siiroinen, Ans van Kemenade, Stephen Matthews, Anna Strom, Kenneth Holmqvist, Philip Franz Seitz, George Huttar, Eva Remberger, Judy Dick, Iraide Ibarretxe, James E. Lavine, John Hewson, Colin Harrison, Richard Rhodes, John Nystrom, Victor Pekar, Ken Cook, Helle Metslang, Jana Holsanova, Ed and Susan Quigley, Rich Campbell, Bingfu Lu, John Mackin, Richard Laurent Baruch Podolsky and Matti Miestamo.

    - Stud. mag. (Ling & Filos) e-mail: sharderling.hum.aau.dk Soren Harder, http://ling.hum.aau.dk/~sharder/ Dept. of Linguistics, phone: + (45) 89 42 21 60 University of Aarhus

    =================================================================== He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world is, it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences collectively -- Peirce (If this is not an exageration, it is just plunk crazy -- C. Hookway)