Features English Lacks

Credits for images and fonts. Sources and notes for claims made.

Sources

General remarks
This animation was my own choice of a fun, experimental project between more
demanding patron-voted tales, particularly the upcoming history I mention in the
outro. It came from my attempt to build a believable human language as fast as I
could. Preparing for that, I took a bunch of notes on linguistic typology, including
every chapter in WALS. So, why not get animated about some of the fun features in
those chapters? Specific sources follow the video timeline below.

Specific claims
Compared to most languages … skills you're missing. My playful language here isn't
replicated in the literature. The term used in my sources is "properties" or
"features". Specifically, this video showcases grammatical features in languages
around the world. I selected features found in WALS that sounded potentially
interesting to share with you and where English is counted within a group that does
not employ the dominant strategy for that feature. I sometimes combined groups to
keep the bigger picture in view. For example, I compared grammatically
reduplicating vs non-reduplicating languages, while the WALS data breaks out "full
reduplication" vs "full and partial reduplication" across languages that "employ
reduplication as a grammatical device" (chapter 27 – more about the "grammatical"
part of that particular feature in the next paragraph). My use of "most" deserves a
bunch of asterisks, since samples vary in membership and size between features
and are not always representative of the feature's distribution around the world (as
Maddieson mentions for tones in chapter 13). My use of "rare" trespasses on the
cautious words of Cysouw and Wohlgemuth, who disprefer "the collocations 'rare
languages' or 'unique languages' to refer to languages having such rare or unique
characteristics… especially in the context of language endangerment, and given the
fact that, by virtue of its specific combination of features and characteristics, every
language is unique" (page 2 of Rethinking Universals).

Reduplication in English. According to Rubino in WALS chapter 27, English is not

among languages that "employ reduplication as a grammatical device", despite
using it to coin words, shift semantic values and in cases like infant-directed
speech. Nevertheless, this has become the biggest point of contention since I
launched the video. As I said in the outro, this wasn't about proving points, but I'm
seeing lots of "uhm no, hey, what about this example?" comments including some
examples that had occurred to me before too. So, since it hit a nerve, would it be
worth a followup digging into definitions and whether or not English fits? (For
starters, one responder sent a link to the "SALAD-salad paper".)

Grammatical reduplication examples. Rubino gives the example of Pangasinan

pluralizing "amigo" to "amimígo" (plural), along with the cut example of partial
reduplication in Tuvan "pelek-selek" (diminutive). I scanned Benton's Pangasinan
Reference Grammar to get pronunciation help from its vowel and consonant
sections. I trusted the accent markings found in Rubino and WALS for determining
stressed vs unstressed syllables, which determines vowel qualities in Pangasinan. I
originally had "orang-orang" for an Indonesian example, but immediately switched
to this non-plural example after finding section 4.1 of Bambang Kaswanti Purwo's
"The categorical system in contemporary Indonesian: pronouns" where I found
"Mengapa hanya saya-saya yang diberi tugas yang berati ini!", where "saya-saya"
was translated as "(poor) me". Though the example struck me as so unique (when
are pronouns productively reduplicated?!), my choice of "saya-saya" here may be a
poor one for two reasons: (1) Indonesian speakers have commented that they're
unaware of it, that it sounds wrong or is outdated, and (2) it's less squarely in the
camp of Rubino's "grammatical device[s]" that set the sample cutoff for a language
that employs productive reduplication in its grammar. "Orang-orang", while optional
in Indonesian as far as I'm aware, would've been more fitting as it marks a
grammatical category (plurality) rather than a semantic one, as semantic features
weren't the topic of this video.

Australian place names. I originally mentioned reduplication in Wiradjuray

numerals, but after reading relevant sections of Giacon's thesis on the related
Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay, I stuck with the simpler case of reduplicated place
names. It's not an academic source but this wiki page keeps a running list of names
that can be verified through maps and historical records.

Ghanaian creole. Magnus Huber's "Ghanaian Pidgin English" gives us this

hyper-reduplicated example in 2.4.1: "wì no dè si sɔm lait-lait-lait-lait-lait-lait". This
showcases noun plurals with a "dispersive ('here and there, all over the
place')...meaning". Note that sometimes reduplicated noun plurals are instead
"iterative ('again and again, i.e. nothing but')".

Sam-sami. This is an example of the distributive numerals described in chapter 54

of WALS. Gil's 1988 example with carrying suitcases "sam-sami" is repeated in
other material including Patricia Cabredo Hofherr & Brenda Laca introduction to
Verbal Plurality and Distributivity. I planned to stray from the source and use
another number, but I had this inked image of three children from my Tsakonian
video at hand and sank back into the number three. My source for verifying this
claim about Georgian numbers was Hewitt's Georgian: A Structural Reference
Grammar, where the author says that "by reduplicating cardinals one produces
distributive numerals (e.g. or=or-i '2 each', as=as-i '100 each')" (112).

Politeness. Helmbrecht looks at pronoun politeness in WALS chapter 50. The value
"no politeness distinction" actually captures largest group in this smaller sample,
hence the focus on contrasting English with other European languages. The atlas
points to the descriptive grammar of Malayalam by Asher and Kumari, where it
counts six levels of politeness, while Pandharipande's grammar of Marathi lists
seven including that "uncertainty of status" form transliterated as "tumhī".

Predicative adjectives. More details in WALS chapter 118. Amara & Matt's Luo
guide, which rests on the Dholuo Course Book, explains and confirms the WALS
example "aber", and has "ibor ahinya" for "[y]ou're very tall". "Ok ibor" follows the
use of "ok" explained under "Negatives" in that guide.

Better ways to ask questions. This part weaves together WALS chapters 116, 92
and (at the end) 93. The Arabic particle is the topic of Alhawary's Modern Standard
Arabic Grammar 7.1.1, while the Majang example is from Dryer's chapter 92. My
pronunciation of "Majang" sounds off compared to here. Dryer does give a similar
Kichwa example, but I pulled "wasiman rinkichu" vs "wasimanchu rinki" from 5.4.3
of Kichwa: Kichwata yachaymanta by the Ministry of Education of Ecuador.
Kichwa-English-Spanish Dictionary by Kinti-Moss & Chango gives "rinki" in phrases
alongside translations with "you go" / "te vas". The Swahili example to go with
chapter 93 took question words from the University of Kansas KiSwahili pdfs
webpage lesson 32, while the rest of the sentence was built using my limited
experience with Swahili and some online translation checking and one glance at
Mohamed's Modern Swahili Grammar.

Postpositions (remarks cut). As described by Dryer in WALS chapter 85, English is

less typical in employing prepositions instead of postpositions. Still, as an SVO
language, English has prepositions and suffixes, but – notably uncommon for SVO
– adjectives before nouns.

Copula and locative be. The two Chinese characters are 是, 在, which are the ones
being transliterated as "shi" and "zái" in the opening example of chapter 119 in
WALS, but which I intonated as shì and zài.

Weather verbs. This feature isn't featured in WALS; its inclusion is on me. The focus
here is on "pleonastic" it. Bleotu's "Why Does IT Always Rain on Me?" contrasts
Germanic weather verbs in 2.1 with Romance ones in 2.2. I'm unsure of the
typology or the world distribution of these two options.

Comitatives vs instrumentals. The relevant chapter is 52. Anna Bugaeva's "An

equivalent of the standard of comparison relativization in Ainu" gives "tura(no)" and
"ani" on page 45, while WALS has "ari" for the latter. Bugaeva derives "ani" from
the verb with the same spelling meaning "hold [something]" (46). Chapter 5 of
Batchelor's dictionary lists the instrumental as formed "by ani or ari".

Clusivity. Inclusive vs exclusive first-person pronouns are discussed by Cysouw in

WALS chapter 39. I chose these examples from my own learning experience and did
a quick check in Te Aka Online Māori Dictionary. Lihir pronouns have singular, dual,
trial and quadral forms according to Bradshaw's Grammar of the Lihir Language of
New Ireland (p. 692), while Corbett's Number table 2.2 gives the singular, dual,
trial, paucal and plural forms seen here.

Evidentials. The discussion starts in WALS chapter 77. Kalsang et al., "Direct
evidentials, case, tense and aspect in Tibetan", discusses evidentials in Tibetan,
with a footnote on Sherpa noting different interactions between tense and
evidentials in that Tibetic language. I used the three categories given there ("direct
evidence, indirect evidence and ego evidence") but in the order listed by Garret in
the first sentence of the abstract of "Evidentiality and assertion in Tibetan": "ego,
direct and indirect".

Evidentials in English. When it comes to my two constructed English examples, I

have some explaining to do. These are based on my simplistic take on a
witness/nonwitness system similar to Yarawara. Aikhenvald's "Evidentiality in
typological perspective" (appearing in Studies in Evidentiality) tells us that "In
Jarawara, eyewitness usually implies visually acquired information; but can be
extended to hearing and even smelling" while "[t]he noneyewitness term covers...
just unseen events and inference in Jarawara (which does have a distinct reported)"
(p. 12). With that system in mind but no clear etymology for the Jarawa markers at
hand, I turned back to Tibetan for inspiration. Direct or "testimonial ’dug" is defined
as "was there" in the abstract to Zemp's "Origin and evolution of the opposition
between testimonial and factual evidentials in Purik and other varieties of Tibetan",
while ego "yin" and "yod" are "to be" and "to exist" and "red" is "to be" in
Tournadre's "Typological sketch of evidential/epistemic categories in the Tibetic
languages" section 4.3. So my first hunch for a direct witness was "-there", but I
went with "near" instead to convey the sense of "was there" without potentially
implying it was distant. For the nonwitness, I noticed other inferential/indirect
markers have connections to statives, including Chirikba's reconstructed "Common
Abkhaz inferential suffix *-za+p'" (p. 257 in Studies in Evidentiality by Dixon &
Aikhenvald), though all on that same page "Chkauda... proposes interpreting -za-
as the expression of anteriority", while "Lomtatidze regards it as the expression of
durativity". I went with Chkauda's take. So I stretched that English pair of examples
around a Miri/Yarawa system with Tibetan + Abkhaz morphology.

Maybe someone should animate that. Out of those four cases, I'm working on a
followup that looks at the other mismatch: features English has but many/most
other languages lack. Until then, thanks for watching this fun take and for reading
my sources doc!

Images
NASA Visible Earth images for globe textures:
https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/collection/1484
Shading and texturing based on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYe2HtS8BJE

WALS maps from wals.info rely on STAMEN project:

https://wals.info
http://maps.stamen.com/

Lock, locked and unlocked:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Iconic_lock_locked.svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Iconic_lock_unlocked.svg

Ashoka Pillar:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ashoka_pillar_at_Vaishali,_Bihar,_India.jp
g

Hammer icon:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tools-hammer.svg

Canoe Fisherman painting:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Canoe_Fisherman%27_by_D._Howar
d_Hitchcock,_1911.JPG

Fonts
Perspective Sans and Daniel by Daniel Midgley, CC BY - NoDerivs 3.0.
http://goodreasonblog.com/fontery/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/

Architect's Daughter by Kimberly Geswein, commercial use license purchased.

http://www.kimberlygeswein.com/commercial-use/

Alegreya by Juan Pablo del Peral, SIL Open Font License 1.1.
https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/alegreya

JSL Ancient, JSL Ancient Italic, JSL Blackletter by Jeff Lee, custom license
("Permission is granted to freely distribute them, provided that they are distributed
unaltered").
http://www.shipbrook.net/jeff/typograf.html

Noto Sans used under SIL Open Font License 1.1.

https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/noto-sans

Kelvinch by Paul Miller, SIL Open Font License 1.1.

https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/kelvinch

Charis used under SIL Open Font License 1.1.

http://software.sil.org/charis/

cwTeXQKai for Chinese characters, GNU GPL 2.

https://github.com/l10n-tw/cwtex-q-fonts-TTFs

FFF Tusj, custom license ("free for both personal and commercial use"):
https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/fff-tusj

Music
I created the outro theme and one piece that plays in the middle during the
Georgian distributive numeral "quiz". The rest of the credit goes to Kevin MacLeod
from incompetech.com:

The Show Must Be Go, Arid Foothills, Our Story Begins, Marty Gots a Plan,
The Path of the Goblin King v2, Silver Flame, Lotus, Big Mojo
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

SFX
I recorded the shooshes/hushes used numerous times and the writing/chalk sound
that gets used once. Other sound effects are from soundbible, pdsounds (currently
only available online through a backup site) and soundeffect-lab.

(from www.soundbible.com or www.pdsounds.org)

Woosh, Mark DiAngelo

Swoosh 1, man

Swooshing, man

Blop, Mark DiAngelo

Mouth pop, Cori Samuel

Wind Storm, Mark DiAngelo

Dragon Wheeze, Gregory Weir

Dull thud, Gregory Weir

Light wood piece, Stephan, pdsounds.org

Turning a page, John Rose

Page turn, planish

Old book noises, Cori, pdsounds.org

Books and paper, Stephan, pdsounds.org

Reverse, Mike Koenig

Storm, Stephan, pdsounds.org

Rain Inside House, Mark DiAngelo

Pin dropping, Brian Rocca

Sea Waves, Mike Koenig

Osprey Bird Call, nps.gov

Loading gun, Stephan, pdsoungs.org (used for unlocked lock)

Clock ticking, Natalie, pdsounds.org

(from http://en.soundeffect-lab.info)

head-stroke1

head-write1

page1, page2

whip1

warning1

decision7