Expanded Problems. (2) Background Information. (1) What language(s) does this problem involve? Yolmo

Transcription

1 Expanded Problems (1) What language(s) does this problem involve? Yolmo What is the aim of this problem? To decipher a set of Yolmo vocabulary and syntax. (2) Background Information Yolmo is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nepal by around 10,000 people. The sentences below come from a small dialect spoken by around 500 people in the district of Lamjung. The characters ʈ and ɖ represent sounds like t or d but with the tongue-tip curled back. [This problem was written by Lauren Gawne, and expanded by Dick Hudson.] (3) The problem Below is a list of sentences in Lamjung Yolmo with their English translations. ngà ngàki ádzi nyímu lú lènke mò mòki kéeki lú lènke ngà ʈángaki kwèla nyòke ngà ngàki áma nyímu kwèla nyòke ngà ngàki kángbaki ɖòke ngà ngàki khí nyímu ɖòke ngà ngàki làkpaki tó sake I sing a song with my sister she sings a song with her voice I buy clothes with money I buy clothes with my mother I walk with my legs I walk with my dog I eat rice with my hand What do the following Yolmo words or phrases mean? a. ngà b. áma c. ɖòke d. kwèla nyòke e. ngàki kéeki Translate the following into Yolmo: f. I eat rice with my sister. g. I buy clothes with my dog. (Hint: Assume that I exchange my dog for the clothes.)

2 4) Solutions and mark-scheme One point each if all correct: a. I b. mother c. walk d. buy clothes e. with my voice Two points each if entirely correct, one point if one mistake, ½ point if two mistakes: f. ngà ngàki ádzi nyímu tó sake g. ngà ngàki khí kwèla nyòke (Points: 9. Marks: 5.) 5) Commentary: Exploring the System A good place to begin with dictionary problems like this is to notice what words the sentences have in common. For example, all but one Yolmo sentence contains the word ngà and all but one English sentence contains the word I. So presumably ngà means I, and the one Yolmo word that replaces ngà in sentence 2, mò, must mean she. Let s start by marking these words. Now notice that in most of the sentences ngà occurs again in the next word, followed by the suffix ki, giving ngàki. You may think that it s also found in the word ʈángaki, but notice that in this case the a has no accent, so let s assume, at least for the time being, that this word is unrelated to ngà. Now let s look at the English: what do all the sentences containing ngàki have in their translations? Easy: my. So ngàki must mean my. And the suffix ki? If ngàki means my, and ngà means I, presumably ki must mean something like belonging to in fact, not very different from our s in Mary s hat. We can hint at this division of meaning by dividing my into two parts: my. Now look at sentence 2, which repeats the same pattern, but with mò instead of ngà; and in its translation we find her, meaning belonging to her. This confirms our analysis of ngàki, but it also pushes us to look for other words containing ki and we find them in sentences 2, 3, 5 and 7. For the time being we just mark these words as needing further investigation.

3 Now let s look at the other end of the sentence. If you look at their verbs, the English sentences come in pairs: A and B contain sing(s) a song, C and D contain buy clothes, and so on. If we look at their Yolmo equivalents, it s easy to see the same patterns repeated, with a repeated suffix ke which is presumably some kind of tense marker, so we mark all the words concerned in the same colour. In the unpaired sentence 7 the corresponding words must be tó sake and eat rice. Everything confirms this analysis, but we notice an important general difference between Yolmo and English: Yolmo verbs stand at the end, after all the other parts of the sentence. In technical terms, whereas the basic order in English is S V O (subject verb object) the order in Yolmo is S O V. You can see from the colour coding that we ve already identified most of the words. The next step is to look at the English words that we haven t yet coded. One is repeated in every sentence: the preposition with. The others are nouns, and are different in every sentence: sister, voice and so on. But when we look at the Yolmo, there s no word that crops up in every sentence to match with, so let s put that on one side. The nouns should be easier to spot, since we re looking for a word which is different in every sentence. For instance, in sentence #1, we find both ádzi and nyímu, and we know that one of them must mean sister, but which? Answer: the one that doesn t occur in any other sentence, i.e. ádzi. (You ll find nyímu in #4 and #6d, so it can t mean sister.) The same argument works for all the other sentences, so we can identify the corresponding nouns. Now we come to the heart of this problem (which, incidentally, was originally called Being with it in Yolmo a heavy hint!). The last remaining question is how to translate with, and the awkward fact is that, unlike all the other English words, there s no one consistent translation for with. In three sentences it seems to be translated by nyímu, while in the other four sentences there is no word for with. BUT: wherever we don t find nyímu, what do we find? We find the suffix ki attached to a noun such as voice. Remember we identified this several steps back, but didn t try to decide its meaning. We can now say, with some confidence, that with is sometimes translated by ki, and sometimes by nyímu. If we colour-code both these patterns in green, we ve finished colour-coding.

4 But that s not the end of the problem because we need to know when to use ki and when nyímu, otherwise we won t be able to translate into Yolmo. How do you think Yolmo speakers choose? Let s look for differences between the two patterns. You ll see that nyímu is used with sister, mother and dog people or animals who can accompany one. In contrast, ki is used with voice, money, legs and hand things that we use as tools or instruments. And when you think about the meaning of with, it s obviously different in I did it with my sister and I did it with my hammer. (Think how odd it would be to coordinate these: I did it with my sister and my hammer.) So, when translating into Yolmo you have to be sensitive to the precise meaning of with : if it means in the company of, you use nyímu, but if it means using, you use the suffix ki. Another twist to the analysis is that ki, like or with, also has two meanings. You ll remember that we started by breaking ngàki, meaning my, into two parts, and suggested that the suffix meant something like our apostrophe s of possession; but we later decided that this same suffix meant with (in the sense of using ). We can t know for sure why Yolmo allows the suffix to have two such apparently different meanings, but it s interestingly parallel to the ambiguity of our with. Commentary: Answering the Questions We now have a complete dictionary and are ready to solve the problem! What do the following Yolmo words or phrases mean? a. ngà I b. áma mother c. ɖòke walk d. kwèla nyòke buy clothes e. ngàki kéeki with my voice Translate the following into Yolmo: f. I eat rice with my sister. ngà ngàki ádzi nyímu tó sake g. I buy clothes with my dog. (Hint: Assume that I exchange my dog for the clothes.) ngà ngàki khíki kwèla nyòke Note: why is this not ngà ngàki khí nyímu kwèla nyòke? It goes back to the two meanings of with. The preposition nyímu means in the company of, but in this case we need the meaning using ( I bought the clothes using my dog (as money) ).

5 6) Taking it further: Syntax Most of what we cover in this problem concentrates on semantics, or the meaning of words. Once we start noticing that the verbs appear at the end of the sentence, we are discussing rules about the order of words in a phrase or sentence, which are an important part of syntax. We also noticed the suffixes ke and ki, which took us into morphology, or the way in which words are formed from meaningless parts of words. For example, in the sentence he gives the child the ball, semantics tells you what a ball actually is; syntax tells you that it is he who is doing the giving, the child who is doing the receiving, and the ball that is being given from him to the child; and morphology that explains the s on the end of gives. write he gives rather than he *give or he *gived. (The asterisk, *, is used by linguists to indicate a non-grammatical form.) English is an SVO-language, meaning that sentences are usually of the form subject-verb-object. For example, in the sentence Mary feeds the cat, Mary is the subject and the cat is the object; a very different situation from The cat feeds Mary! Not all languages follow this pattern, however. In fact, SOV, subject-object-verb, is by far the most common throughout the world s languages. For example, the French phrase je t aime means I [je] you [t ] love [aime], or I love you, whereas to say You love me you d say tu m aimes (literally you me love ). When solving Linguistics Olympiad problems, remember that foreign languages word-order rules need not be the same as those of English. Taking it further: More information on Yolmo Yolmo is also called Helambu Sherpa and is today spoken as a first language by older adults and as a second language by kids and younger adults. Like many other peoples in this region, Yolmo speakers tend to be fluent in multiple languages (including Nepali, Central Tibetan, and Hindi) even though literacy rates for the older generation hover around only 1% and for younger generations are at most 25%. Though Yolmo is primarily spoken in the home and/or for religious purposes, there are radio programs in Yolmo, as well as Yolmo dictionaries and grammars. For more information about the Yolmo language and people, see the Ethnologue entry ( or an online collection of Yolmo resources maintained by linguist Lauren Gawne (