liradi

A while back over at Lameen's place, we discussed the mystery morpheme -ij-/-iyy- that is used in Maltese and Siwi Berber with the plural suffix -at/-iet. Lameen argued that in both cases, it seems to be employed chiefly with nouns whose form is atypical for the given language. For Maltese, this would definitely make sense, since many of Maltese nouns with plural ending in -ijiet are borrowings. In fact, of the 20 most frequent nouns of this type in the MLRS Corpus, only three are of Arabic/Semitic origin: xogħlijiet = "works", mistoqsijiet = "questions" and aħbarijiet = "news". Sounds straightforward enough, especially in the context of Maltese where there is a separate conjugation paradigm for borrowed verbs, thus the existence of a noun suffix used predominantly with borrowed nouns with their strange and unusual syllable structures and vowel patterns is not that surprising.
This, however, cannot be the full story. For one, the question of 'what is a typical noun form' is one that is not that easy to answer. Secondly, Maltese is notorious - well, at least among us melitists - for applying some creative broken plurals to borrowed nouns. Thus we get forma / forom, storja / stejjer, spiża / spejjeż ("cost"), rotta / rotot ("routes") and so on, even though, say, storja with its four consonants or spiża with its very un-Semitic initial consonant cluster are not exactly, um, typical. At the same time, Romance borrowings of the honest-to-El Semitic CCVC / CVCC type (see Lipiński 2001:216) like skop or post form their plurals by means of the suffix -ijiet. Obviously there are other factors here at play, like perhaps the age of the borrowing or even the place and manner of articulation of root consonants, which would all have to be taken into account if a more detailed explanation is to be provided.
And then there's the whole semantic aspect. As Lameen notes in a reply to my comment where I wondered why we get art / artijiet ("earth, land") instead of *arieti (< Ar. 'arāḍī with presumed imāla, depharyngealization and devoicing) or żmien / żminijiet (instead of something like *azmina):

... "earth", "time", and for that matter "mother" are all words that are very rarely pluralised, increasing the pressure to adopt some commoner plural type.

This makes perfect sense - so in the evolution of Maltese, the original *arieti or something similar fell into disuse and artijiet, formed most likely by analogy, took over. And as I was reminded this morning by Charles Briffa's new book Iż-Żmien fuq Sider Malta, we actually have evidence for this shift. Not just any evidence, mind you, the mother of all evidence: Il-Kantilena. If you're reading this and you don't know about Il-Kantilena, feel free to consult Wikipedia for more details (I recommend the French version which seems to offer the most comprehensive account, and this image for the actual text). Suffice it to say that it is the oldest literary text in Maltese composed by Pietru Caxaro and dates back to the late 15th century (terminus ante quem 1485). We find what we're looking for on line 18:

Transcription (Wettinger and Fsadni 1968):
haliex liradi ’al col xibir sura

Modern orthography:
Għaliex l-iradi għal kull xiber sura:

Gloss:  
because DEF-land.PL for every span [1] shape

English: 
for each (piece of land) has its own shape (features)

And here it is: it would seem that ca. 1470, the noun art still formed a broken plural. One might consider - especially in the light of the genre - the possibility that Caxaro deliberately chose an archaism for both effect and reasons of metrics, but as for the latter, the number of syllables is the same for l-artijiet and l-iradi. In any case, it seems Lameen's hypothesis is correct and by 1796, the publication of Vassalli's Lexicon Melitense-Latino-Italum, art only had the suffixed plural form, in Vassalli's spelling Ardijyt. 
By the way, if you're wondering why it's iradi and not my hypothetical *arieti, it's because I forgot to account for the emphatic ḍ which, at least in most cases, inhibits imāla.
Finally, if you want hear what Il-Kantilena might have sounded like try the video below. The performer, Dr. Martin Zammit, is an Arabist and it kinda shows - for example in verse 18 (1:32) where the first word has -ie-, Martin reads [halāš]. Nevertheless, I think it is a pretty good approximation.

[1] span = "the space between thumb and forefinger". Cachia (1994:89) glosses għal kull xiber as għandhom = "they have".

published

How is this for a belated Christmas present: I have just learned that the paper I presented at the 2009 SBL International Meeting (prepub PDF) has been published by Peter Lang in the proceedings volume from the session titled The Canon of the Bible and the Apocrypha in the Churches of the East (full bibliographical info below).

Hovhanessian, Vahan S. (ed.):
The Canon of the Bible and the Apocrypha in the Churches of the East
Series: Bible in the Christian Orthodox Tradition - Volume 2
Peter Lang Academic Publishers
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2012. VIII, 113 pp.
ISBN 978-1-4331-1035-1 hb.

 As a budding (if not young) academic, I guess I should be proud, but truth be told, I'm not. On one hand, I'm somewhat surprised that besides from submitting the manuscript, I had no input in the editing process, which would have enabled me to correct some serious translation errors. On the other, had I had some say in the publishing process, I might have withdrawn the paper from publication completely. As I found out only a few weeks ago, the Arabic text which I thought I had rediscovered had already been published in a critical edition (Testamentum Salomonis arabicum, Córdoba: Servicio de Publicaciones Universidad de Córdoba, 2006) by Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, who is a much more competent scholar than I am. Now true, I did make a few connections he did not plus it's the first time the subject has been presented to the English-reading public, so the paper is not a complete waste of cellulose, but then again, I did make a few horrible translation errors which shall now forever live in print and on Google Books and then there's the total embarassment of the whole thing. I wonder if that's ever happened to anyone else and how they dealt with it.
And the worst part is that this seems to be a constant theme accompanying my academic endeavors - every time I invest time, energy and money into a project that seems worthvile, just as a tangible result is about to be produced, I find that someone, somewhere has already done it, only better. Used to be one of those long dead Russian motherfuckers (and they still remain the most likely suspects), now it's just about everybody. This happens three or four times and you start seriously doubting if you have what it takes to, well, make a contribution and if you and the world at large would not be better off if you just packed it in, called it a day and went off to harvest jam in Cambodia* or build power plants in Yakutia**.

* The Slovak equivalent of being up shit creek without a paddle.
** A real option available to me.

scroll

I received the following message this morning:


I sure like the 15% discount, but I love their language policy. However, it appears to be a new one, as this message from a while ago confirms:



I wonder what they thought the point of the transliteration was...

liveblogging GHILM 3

... 'cause the hell why not.
... while the battery lasts.
... theme of the day: "Work in progress" (is there any other kind)?

- Intro by Thomas Stolz and Ray Fabri.
Highlight: all future publications by GHILM will be handled by Akademie-Verlag Berlin, proceedings from GHILM 2 should be finished by the end of the month. And there will be a electronic corpus of Maltese going live by the end of the month. Dammit, beaten to the punch again.

- Invited speaker 1: Thomas Stolz. A lively talk on group formation ('we three' etc.), all of it based on Thomas' bedtime reading (with statistics!). Note to self: get it.

- Ray Fabri on clitic and definite NPs in Maltese that's bound to knock the socks of Balkanologists (spoiler alert: clitic doubling with indefinite NPs. Take that!). A lot if it overlapped with my talk and the ensuing discussion actually spoiled parts of it. Great minds etc., I guess.

- Me.
Highlight 1: I didn't shit myself.
Highlight 2: Neither did the audience.
I screwed up an example (that'll learn me to make last-minute changes), but otherwise went pretty well.

- Maris Camilleri on restrictive relative clauses. Crammed full of information and - needless to say - excellent.

- Chris Lucas on negatives from the point of view of dynamic syntax. First time I've ever heard of dynamic syntax and Chris' explanation of the principles actually made sense. Plus some interesting asides on polarity items and interrogative vs. negative 'x' in Maltese.

Lunch.

- Invited speaker 2: Frans Plank on the direction of derivation, mostly nouns<-> adjectives and comparison of direction of derivation with English and German within specific semantic classes. Poor (present) Michael Spagnol got blamed for most of errors.
A comment (from the discussion) by Frans Plank a propos basic vs. derived forms: "In Proto Indo-European, what we see as basic is actually derived. Etymological dictionaries of Indo-Euroean list roots as verbs which is probably more science-fiction than science."

- Michael Spagnol and Albert Gatt on labile verbs (see Haspelmath 1993). Michael did the theory and described Haspelmath 1993 as his favorite paper evah. I almost yelled "Nerd!". Albert presented the results of an online / corpus study examining the use (transitive vs. intransitive) of labile verbs in Maltese and put together a list of verbs biased either way. Very nice. Note to self: need to steal their methodology.

Battery died. Crap.

- Thomas Mayer (et al., but he was the one standing there) with a pretty awesome talk on finding the formula for forming the broken plural in Maltese.
- Phyllisienne Gauci and Maris Camilleri again on the dual. Next time somebody claims there are no dialects in Maltese, play them the recording of all the native speaker disagreeing on this seemingly minor point. OT: "thallasanejn" = "two seas". Archaic, but still awesome.

One last item before the poster session: Albert Gatt officially announced the launch of the Maltese Language Resource Server Corpus (http://mlrs.research.um.edu.mt/index.php?page=3). Going live soon, this will be the big ass (over 72 million word tokens) you've always dreamed about. This surely beats the 48 million words I put together over the last few months, but at least a part of it can and will be integrated into MLRSC.

And finally, the poster session. My favorite part was the statistical analysis of possible tri- and quadriliteral roots by Mike Spagnol and Thomas Mayer (busy as bees, the Konstanz guys) and the comparison between possible and attested roots. Pretty cool stuff with wide-ranging implications.

So that's it for day 1. I'm off to bed, wouldn't wanna miss Bernard Comrie's talk at 8:30.

DAY 2
... aka "Membership drive for the International Federation of the Sleep Deprived."

Invited speaker 3: Bernard Comrie on the typology of Maltese loanwords. The data was of course obtained within the scope of the Loanword Typology project (see also this LanguageLog post and the links therein). It turns out Maltese is pretty high on the list with 37.00% of the lexical items borrowed, so slightly less than 39% for English. Surprisingly enough, the ratio of borrowings from English is very low (2-3% or something like that).
- Next up, Marie Alexander with a talk on the mixing of English and Maltese in children. Fascinating data on language choice for both parents and children.
- Sandra Vella et al. on the distribution, function and pragmatic properties of pauses and breaks.
- Matt Wolf of Yale with a very heavy and very technical optimality-theory-related talk.
- Another very technical paper by Gilbert Puech analyzing the fundamentals ofMaltese phonology.
- And yet another heavily technical, but in a different way, talk by MarkBorg describing in great detail the methods he and his team are using to create a speech synthesis engine for Maltese (it's all in the diphones). Once completed, the engine will be freely available and so will the methodology.

DAY 3
... why am I up at 7:30 on a Sunday?

Invited speaker 4: Elisabeth Hume with another experiment-based analysis, this time of word-final geminates in Maltese. It turns out that not only are the geminates kept geminated (which is rare), there is also a lengthening of the preceding vowel. This has implications for the way information is transferred in terms of redundancy vs. robustness. Work in progress, but definitely a fascinating matter.
- Next up, Adam Ussishkin and Kevin Schluter with a talk on auditory root and binyan priming. The overall question is whether the roots and patterns (binyanim) are a part of the mental lexicon. If they are, then priming should be possible - in other words, if you are presented with a word with a certain root/pattern, recognizing another word with the same root/pattern should go much faster. Test like these are usually done visually which is problematic with Hebrew and Arabic script. So the Arizona guys developed an auditory test for both superliminal and subliminal priming. Superliminal means the priming element is played as it is. Subliminal - and this is where shit gets really weird - but in the best way possible - involves playing the priming element backwards, time-compressed. It turns out that there is no priming effect on patterns and there is one for root. The really surprising part is that that effect is roughly the same for supraliminal AND subliminal priming. Really awesome work.
- Mike Spagnol with a re-analysis of Maltese derived stems. Bottom line: there aren't 10 (or 9, minus IV), but actually only 4.5, seeing as there are mutually exclusive pairs (say, if a root occurs in VII, it doesn't occur in VIII) and there are only a few verbs in X.
- Martin Zammit with a much needed reevaluation of some of Aquilina's etymologies using newly published material on Tunisian Arabic. The fun part for me was that I recognized about half of the lexical items from Tunisian Judeo-Arabic.
- Another talk on etymology by Daniele Baglioni where he offers the thesis that at least some of the Romance loandwords didn't come to Maltese directly from Sicilian/Italian, but from a variety of Italian he terms 'Levant Italian' - a variety used as an international language in the late-medieval Levant and beyond.
- Jan Joachimsen with one more OT-related paper, this time focusing on Maltese orthography and its acquistion by children.
- And last, but not least, L. Brincat with a report on a study of how chatting (not texting) influences the spelling habits of Maltese teenagers. Executive summary with a bunch of caveats: there is some correlation between the amount of time spent chatting and relatively low testing scores. The real interesting part was the examination of chat Maltese, which shows a bunch of really familiar features, such as using numbers for syllables ("4c" = "forsi" = "perhaps, 8 = '-ejt', the 1SG/2SG perfect suffix for defective and loan verbs), the total absence of the word "iva" = "yes" ("ehe", "ija" and forms like that are used) and so forth. Work in progress or not, it was a fine conclusion to what I can only describe as best conference evah.

Now let's catchup on some shuteye. Tomorrow, I'm going book shopping.

overheard

... about three minutes ago here at the office, a wonderful example of Slovak-English code mixing so typical of corporatespeak:

Ísť go live s environmentom, kde nevieme restorovať produkciu, je suicide.

The items in bold are English, at least by origin. "Produkciu" is included as well - "produkcia" might be an honest-to-Shiva Slovak word, but in this context, it means "functionality" or "proper working order" and not, as it usually does, "output".