[Multilingual Monday] Nominative, Ergative, Plus A Bonus!
One of my biggest stumbling blocks in learning Georgian was -- as stupid as this sounds -- the NOMINATIVE. The nominative is the case used -- in most languages -- for the subject of a sentence. In "I speak terrible Georgian," "I" is in the nominative. "The cat is urinating on top of the television" features "cat", in the nominative. In most languages, this is the dictionary form, and indeed, for most words words you would find in a dictionary this is true.
However, to indicate the nominative, Georgian affixes a ი, -i, no matter what. This means that most nouns in, say, Wikipedia, will also have this affixed. See: the Georgian Wikipedia article on Karl Jung, where his name is written as კარლ იუნგი, Karl Iungi. And then there's Maikl Jak'soni -- these nominative markers are so much like part of someone's name that some people won't know who you're talking about if, for example, you refer to "Maikl Jak'son". So I almost always forget to attach this and thus fuck up sentences when doing something simple like introducing myself (ჩემი სახელია, chemi sak'elia, "My name is ...", and forget to add the nominative marker and, though I'm understood, it's immediately wrong.
I learned that Georgian had an ergative case, and immediately thought that it would be like Basque, where the subject of a transitive verb gets put into a different case -- see Gizonak mutila ikusi du, "The man saw the boy," where "man", ginzon, is put into the ergative case, ginzonak, because the verb is transitive. If the verb were NOT transitive, this wouldn't be used -- Gizona etorri da, "The man arrived."
But that would be too easy, and of course Georgian has to have SPLIT ergativity, so the only time this is ever employed is in the past tense -- კაცი ვაშლს ჭამს, Katsi vashls chams, "The man is eating the food" (man = kats + i, the nominative marker), BUT კაცმა ვაშლი ჭამა, Katsma vashli chama, "He ate the food" (man - kats + ma, the ergative marker). Even MORE confusing is that, chama is the standard word for a meal or for food, but when you DON'T have an ergative subject the object is marked with -s, the DATIVE marker, but NO marker to refer to the object when an ergative noun exists.
I'm starting to think I must subconsciously hate myself since I insist on studying Georgian. :: laugh ::
So the bonus: I can't believe I never wrote about this, but I'm curious. A while back I had a coworker come up to me, he asked me, "Can you move the logo here up a skosh?"
"... as what now huh?"
"A skosh. Just this much," he explained, putting a rough measurement of how far I needed to move this logo with his fingers.
Immediately I recognized the word, but not from English. Sure enough, "skosh" seems to have crept into the English language from JAPANESE, coming from the word 少し, sukoshi, "a little". I'm amazed, with all of the English words that mean "a little bit", that sukoshi would pop up, and it must have SOME currency as I just heard it yesterday on a TV show as well. Has anyone else experienced this? Do you guys have any other examples of words that were imported, but the fact that they were imported and being used surprises or confuses you for some reason? It doesn't have to be in English either; I'd love to hear it!
However, to indicate the nominative, Georgian affixes a ი, -i, no matter what. This means that most nouns in, say, Wikipedia, will also have this affixed. See: the Georgian Wikipedia article on Karl Jung, where his name is written as კარლ იუნგი, Karl Iungi. And then there's Maikl Jak'soni -- these nominative markers are so much like part of someone's name that some people won't know who you're talking about if, for example, you refer to "Maikl Jak'son". So I almost always forget to attach this and thus fuck up sentences when doing something simple like introducing myself (ჩემი სახელია, chemi sak'elia, "My name is ...", and forget to add the nominative marker and, though I'm understood, it's immediately wrong.
I learned that Georgian had an ergative case, and immediately thought that it would be like Basque, where the subject of a transitive verb gets put into a different case -- see Gizonak mutila ikusi du, "The man saw the boy," where "man", ginzon, is put into the ergative case, ginzonak, because the verb is transitive. If the verb were NOT transitive, this wouldn't be used -- Gizona etorri da, "The man arrived."
But that would be too easy, and of course Georgian has to have SPLIT ergativity, so the only time this is ever employed is in the past tense -- კაცი ვაშლს ჭამს, Katsi vashls chams, "The man is eating the food" (man = kats + i, the nominative marker), BUT კაცმა ვაშლი ჭამა, Katsma vashli chama, "He ate the food" (man - kats + ma, the ergative marker). Even MORE confusing is that, chama is the standard word for a meal or for food, but when you DON'T have an ergative subject the object is marked with -s, the DATIVE marker, but NO marker to refer to the object when an ergative noun exists.
I'm starting to think I must subconsciously hate myself since I insist on studying Georgian. :: laugh ::
So the bonus: I can't believe I never wrote about this, but I'm curious. A while back I had a coworker come up to me, he asked me, "Can you move the logo here up a skosh?"
"... as what now huh?"
"A skosh. Just this much," he explained, putting a rough measurement of how far I needed to move this logo with his fingers.
Immediately I recognized the word, but not from English. Sure enough, "skosh" seems to have crept into the English language from JAPANESE, coming from the word 少し, sukoshi, "a little". I'm amazed, with all of the English words that mean "a little bit", that sukoshi would pop up, and it must have SOME currency as I just heard it yesterday on a TV show as well. Has anyone else experienced this? Do you guys have any other examples of words that were imported, but the fact that they were imported and being used surprises or confuses you for some reason? It doesn't have to be in English either; I'd love to hear it!