I just realized I’ve had a link to this post by bulbul sitting around for months, and by gad I’m finally gonna share it!
In the history of native Syriac linguistic tradition [1], Išoʕyahḇ Bar Malkōn (d. early 13th century) is the odd man out. It is not that he is unknown or forgotten: his grammatical works are preserved in a not insignificant number of manuscript copies and his name is listed with other grammarians in overviews of Syriac literature compiled by modern scholars, as well as his contemporaries. Of the latter, the testimony of ʕAbdīšōʕ Bar Brīḵā’s (d. 1318) Catalogue of Books is particularly telling: where Eliya of Ṭirhan (d. 1049) and Yōḥanan Bar Zoʕbī (d. 13th century) are described as having composed grammars or grammatical treatises, of Išoʕyahḇ Bar Malkōn and his grammatical works we only learn the following:
ܡܳܪܝ ܝܶܫܘܽܥܰܝܲܗܒ ܒܰܪ ܡܰܠܟܳܘܢ ܕܰܨܘܒܳܐ ܐܝܺܬ ܠܶܗ ܫ̈ܘܽܐܳܠܐ ܓܪܰܡܡܰܛܝܺܩܳܝܶܐ
“Mār Išoʕyahḇ bar Malkōn of Ṣōḇā [Nisibis]: he has some grammatical questions…”
Whether this refers to a specific genre, is meant to be read generally or anything else, that’s it as far as grammar is concerned. This lack of specificity with regard to Bar Malkōn’s work as a grammarian is also typical for modern sources. When consulting one, the reader typically learns no more than that he authored at least one treatise on points and one grammar (both unedited) [2], and that in his grammatical analysis, he followed the Arabic model [3]. One prominent example is Baumstark who describes Bar Malkōn’s grammar as “sachlich ganz die Methode der arabischen Grammatik befolgend” (“in terms of content, it entirely follows the methodology of Arabic grammar”) [4]. Over time, this simple observation – repeated uncritically – morphed into a judgment and finally into a condemnation: Talmon notes of Išoʕyahḇ bar Malkōn – and his contemporaries (or fellow travelers) like Yōḥannan bar Zoʕbī and Eliya of Ṭirhan – that they “exhibit either a servile attitude to Arabic grammar or poor coverage of grammatical issues.” [5]
Talmon’s “poor coverage” remark is particularly silly. For one, the comparison made here is to Jacob of Edessa’s grammar of Syriac which is notorious for – not to put a too fine point on it – BEING ALMOST ENTIRELY LOST. Secondly, “poor coverage” is a relative term, even this day and age, doubly so in the 13th century. But most importantly, none of Išoʕyahḇ Bar Malkōn’s works have been edited or analyzed in any detail, so there is simply no way for Talmon to know.
In fact, that Talmon’s (and, by extension, that of those whose judgment he relies on) assessment of Bar Malkōn is wholly wrong can be gleaned from even the most cursory of interactions with the latter’s grammatical works. […]
Turning back to the contents of the manuscripts of Kitāb al-ʔīḍāḥ, it is not the case – as Baumstark’s description (which most likely goes back to Scher’s catalogue and which Van Rompay copies in his GEDSH entry on Bar Malkōn) would have it – that Kitāb al-ʔīḍāḥ is originally written in Syriac with a translation in Arabic in two columns (“… das syrische Original in einer Parallelkolumne mit einer arabischen Üb[er]s[etzung] …”) [7]. That is not true of any of the surviving mss Baumstark was aware of, i.e. the two Paris mss and the Berlin one. Rather, the primary language of Kitāb al-ʔīḍāḥ is Arabic, but Syriac is employed throughout, in both examples and definitions of grammatical phenomena. Such Syriac text rarely constitutes a direct translation of any of the Arabic parts. […]
The major way in which Kitāb al-ʔīḍāḥ is undoubtedly a part of the native Syriac linguistic tradition – as opposed to a mindless copy of the Arabic one – is Bar Malkōn’s constant references to the same and his insistence on working within it. The introduction (BnF Syr. 170, ff. 2v-4v) contains a brief overview of the previous work by Syriac grammarians and scholars of language, including Jacob of Edessa (d. 708), Eliya of Ṭirhan and Yawsep̱ Hūzāyā (6th cent.), the purported translator of Technē Grammatikē into Syriac. The text of Kitāb al-ʔīḍāḥ then repeatedly refers to their work (the “among them” in section 5 above and “others” in section 6) and cites them by name regularly. The chapter on parts of speech cited above also contains one very telling example in section 5, i.e. the absence of time as a major criterion for the definition of a noun. This line of reasoning is unique to Syriac linguistic tradition and can be traced to Aristotle, e.g. De Interpretatione. […] The relationship of Bar Malkōn’s analysis to the Arabic linguistic tradition reminds me of the way grammars of modern languages follow the Latin model: there is some, even a lot of inspiration, that may even be slavish now and then – just think of the concept of parts of speech and the terminological fustercluck that are Wolof conjugated pronouns. Latin method, however, is not all there is.
As noted above, Bar Malkōn’s work remains unedited and unpublished – hell, this hastily put-together post might be the most comprehensive study of his work to date. If anyone wishes to change it, for example as an MA thesis (his short treatise on points would be perfect) or even a PhD dissertation, hit me up.
I love this sort of thoughtful deconstruction of an entrenched historical misunderstanding, with the concomitant restoration of a forgotten figure to importance; click through for more, including footnotes and the links I didn’t bother to carry over. I hope someone takes Slavo/bulbul up on his final offer!
The “Wolof conjugated pronouns” link won’t play nice for me, but as I understand it, the system works in the same kind of general way as Hausa, where Jaggar, for example, calls the relevant preverbal lumps “person-aspect complexes.” Calling this “conjugation of pronouns” is plain daft.
Come to think of it, you could have “conjugated pronouns” in Kusaal, too:
Ò lù tēŋīn.
he fall down
“He’s fallen down.”
Kà ò lú tēŋīn.
and he fall down
“And he fell down.”
In my informants’ speech, the difference here was all in the tone of the verb, but in David Spratt’s introduction to Kusaal, the pronoun in the second type of clause had a mid tone: ō, and the change of the following low tone on lù “fall” to high is then an automatic tone sandhi change. (The change to low tone on pronouns in this enviroment happened after Spratt’s time; it’s a historical phonological shift, which has affected other unstressed mid tones too.)
Et voilà! The pronoun in the second clause is conjugated to express VP dependency. And this kind of clause is common in narrative, so, better yet, the pronoun is conjugated for “narrative tense.”
It’s from George L. Campbell and Gareth King, Compendium of the World’s Languages, p. 1786; if you google “In Wolof, the pronoun is conjugated” you may be able to access it somewhere.
I think DE is saying more or less that precisely *because* these preverbal lumps are inflected for aspect, it’s daft to call them “pronouns”?
Yeah. A gross misuse of terms (which I take also to be Bulbul’s point.)
There are, in fact, languages in which nominals can reasonably be said to “conjugate”, for example in inflecting for tense (Bininj Gun-Wok) or for the person of the referent (Nahuatl.) The Wolof case is not that; this is just stupid labelling.
A better conjugated pronoun in Kusaal:
M̀ yɛ́l yé ò lù tēŋīn.
I say that he fall down
“I say that he’s fallen down.”
M̀ bɔ̂ɔd yé ò lú tēŋīn.
I want that he fall down
“I want him to fall down.”
Behold! A subjunctive pronoun ò! (Revealed as such by its different tone sandhi from the mere indicative pronoun ò.)
ón lù tēŋīn lā zúg
“because he’s fallen down”
A conjugated pronoun in English, from Wright’s Gothic Grammar, an example in his native Windhill dialect (p15):
ast ə dunt if id kud
“I should have done it if I had been able”
(Wright says explicitly in his section on the Gothic personal pronouns that this a/i distinction in the “I” pronoun was grammaticalised in Windhill dialect, and not just some phonological thing.)
Stressed/unstressed reinterpreted as main/subordinate clause? On one hand, stunning. On the other, I’m now wondering why this hasn’t happened more often.
It has not happened with the weird & wonderful epenthetic vowels in the clitic chains in my dialect, for example. Those are all straightforwardly phonological.
Stressed/unstressed reinterpreted as main/subordinate clause?
I presume so. Wright wrote an actual grammar of Windhill dialect, which I’ve never read, though I’ve seen it in libraries. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are pdf scans of it out there.
It’s largely main vs subordinate that is really at the back of my Kusaal examples. The wrinkles are that it’s main clauses that are specifically marked (mostly by the tone overlay I was talking about not long ago); content clauses behave like main clauses; and all clauses introduced by ka behave as subordinate, even when ka really does have an unequivocally coordinating sense “and” (all except for content clauses, that is, but it’s fairly rare for those to be introduced by ka.) The tone sandhi differences after subject pronouns are most straightforwardly regarded as further aspects of the main-clause tone overlay.
Kusaal doesn’t actually have a subjunctive at all: the contrast between “I say that he’s fallen down” and “I want him to fall down” is, in reality, that the subordinate clause in the first example is specifically marked, because it’s a content clause; the subordinate clause in the second example has no special markers. It’s kinda the opposite of having a subjunctive form.
I also cheated by using a verb which has low tone lexically, lù “fall”, so it’s not apparent when it has undergone the tone overlay: if I’d used a verb with a lexical mid tone, my trick would have been revealed. (In fact, you can still tell the difference even with low-tone verbs if they are clause-final, which induces the appearance of the postverbal particle yā, or if they are followed by a word with an initial low tone, because the overlay also messes with the following tone sandhi. So I arranged for this not to happen.)
Wright’s grammar of Windhill English (1892) is at https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Grammar_of_the_Dialect_of_Windhill_in/g_c3AQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1 if you have access over there.
There’s discussion of personal pronouns at https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Grammar_of_the_Dialect_of_Windhill_in/MxgNAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22attached+enclitically+to+a+preceding+voiceless%22&pg=PA117&printsec=frontcover
In the examples, the first-person singular pronouns “a” and “i” seem to follow the distinction you’re making, and for the second-person singular ones, the author says, “The strong form tä and the weak forms ta, tə [as opposed to forms with ð-] can only be used interrogatively and in subordinate sentences”.
Wright’s Windhill seems to have been the one in West Yorkshire, not either of the two in South Yorkshire or the one in (TIL) Ross and Cromarty.
His grammar of Gothic is also at GB. I found your sentence but only as an example of the disappearance of unstressed syllables in Germanic languages, with no comment on the two forms of “I”.
His statement that the difference is grammaticalised (though he doesn’t put it like that, of course) is in the section on Gothic pronouns. He doesn’t specify the actual distinction it signifies at that point, though.
It was indeed the West Yorkshire Windhill.
Seems to me that Arabic is really not all that bad as a model for Syriac grammars (much better than Latin or Greek, for sure.)
The traditional Hebrew grammar tradition is based on the Arab grammarians’ work, and that seems to have worked out largely OK.
His statement that the difference is grammaticalised (though he doesn’t put it like that, of course) is in the section on Gothic pronouns. He doesn’t specify the actual distinction it signifies at that point, though.
Thanks, I see it now. I had trouble finding that book at GB when I just looked, so here it is: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Grammar_of_the_Gothic_Language_and_the_G/-XcKAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22mixed+up+syntactically+by+genuine+native%22&pg=PA119&printsec=frontcover
@DavidE,
Yeah. A gross misuse of terms (which I take also to be Bulbul’s point.)
Indeed! This one doesn’t grind my gears as much as others – e.g. “pronoun-drop language” – but it does illustrate to what extremes people go.
Seems to me that Arabic is really not all that bad as a model for Syriac grammars (much better than Latin or Greek, for sure.)
It really is not, especially if you’re smart about it, like Bar Malkon and Bar Hebraeus were. To be honest, it seems to me that this poo-pooing of Arabic models for grammar writing has to do with the perception of post-12th century developments in Syriac as corruption plus some good old fashioned religious/ethnic/racial hate.
BTW, Margherita Farina has written on Ishoyahb in particular, as well as on the adoption of Greek linguistic thinking in Syriac. And speaking of Wolof inflected pronouns, she also has a paper out that discusses types of non-verbal predication that involve “attaching person-sensitive inflection markers to non-verbal predicates”.
Looks interesting: thanks!
The technique of expressing verb tense and aspect by varying the form of the pronoun is actually quite common in West African languages. Given that a lot of languages are like Kusaal in expressing verbal categories by proclitic particles between the subject and the verb, it’s hardly surprising that some languages have ended up with fused pronoun-TAM complexes. In other cases, the “conjugated pronoun” seems historically to derive from an auxiliary verb inflected for person; IIRC, Hausa is thought to be an example. I imagine that Wolof is probably another.
Nurse and Watters’ Tense in Proto-Bantu suggests that the current elaborate agglutinative mostly-prefixing inflection of (most) Bantu derives historically from a system like that seen in Kusaal (and many other W African languages), while Tom Güldemann’s Proto-Bantu and Proto-Niger-Congo suggests that instead it derives from a inflected-auxiliary-verb + main-verb pattern (there are Northwest Bantu languages where that seems like the best synchronic analysis, too.) There is, um, vigorous debate about this: some Bantuists seem to be personally affronted at the idea that something like the current (non-NW) Bantu system might not be inherited pretty much as-is from “proto-Niger-Congo.”
Excellent news that doesn’t really fit anywhere, but as I was just pontificating about African languages anyway: the Rüdiger Köppe Verlag is back from the dead (they just sent me an email.)
[Almost literally, as the long pause in its operation was due to the untimely death of Rüdiger Köppe himself.]