Re: VMs: Welsh/Cornish

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Knox Mix wrote:
> Pirahã uses evidentiality to connote the speaker's assessment of the
> evidence for a statement.
>
> If I remember correctly (20 percent confidence) there are a few other
> languages that do the same. I could use that.

Whorf's discussions of Hopi might be among the earliest quasi-popular
discussions of such things, but, of course, linguists have been bumping
into them for much longer.  They're a feature of the Siouan languages
where they take the form of a particle at the end of the sentence,
enclitic to the verb.  Not all sentences have them, but typical schemes
make distinctions like 'assertion from personal experience' vs.
'traditional knowledge' vs. 'deduction' vs. 'question' vs. 'command' vs.
'doubt, surprise' and so on.

In most Siouan languages there are characteristic male and female forms,
often differing by a vowel, e.g., 19th Century Omaha athi=i ha 'he has
arrived (male speaking)' vs. athi=i he 'he has arrived (woman speaking)'.
Or sometimes just athi=i 'he has arrived'.  Or athi=i=the 'he has arrived,
he seems to have arrived, there is evidence that he has arrived, he must
be here'.  Or athi=bi=ama 'he has arrived (they say, or at least it's part
of this story)'.  The difference in these particles (when they differ) is
a large part of the distinction between "male speech" and "female speech"
in Siouan languages, and most of the rest of it is different terms for
'brother (of man)' and 'brother (of sister)', etc.

The fairly familiar Turkic languages, including (anatolian) Turkish, not
to mention many unrelated (or quite distantly related) neighboring
languages in the Caucasus and Central Asia generally oppose two past tense
forms that contrast 'deduction' with other categories.  The deductive past
is usually called the perfect tense in popular grammars and perfect tenses
tend to have the implication of a deduction in them already anyway, e.g.,
often in English.

A reference of possible interest:

Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols (eds.), 1986.  Evidentiality: The
Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Norwood, New Jersey : Ablex.

All languages have mechanisms for conveying this sort of information,
e.g., Knox's 'If I remember correctly, ...' above.  Not all languages make
a mandatory grammatical feature of it.

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