Talk:Inclusive and exclusive we

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This article is identical to http://bibleocean.com/OmniDefinition/Inclusive_we . I suspect a copyright violation. J S Ayer 22:47, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia isn't copyrighted. Anyone can copy our articles. kwami 02:25, 2005 September 9 (UTC)

That page has no acknowledgment of Wikipedia as source, as is, I believe, required by the license. Can we establish which page is older? J S Ayer 01:15, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

We could try Google. I know this page is older, because I wrote it. My sources were Payne's Describing morphosyntax (as much from my notes in the margins as from the actual text; I relied on Payne for the Samoan example, but have confirmed it elsewhere, since his book has its share of mistakes) and a couple Wikipedia articles, such as the Telugu example (almost clip & paste, that one: I'm sure the Telugu article at least is demonstrably older than the BibleOcean page! kwami 04:06, 2005 September 10 (UTC)

The BibleOcean page isn't in the Wayback Internet Archive, which means it's less than about 6 mos old. (Of course, this article is too recent to be there either.) See [1].

Unfortunately, my Gcache extension hasn't been updated for a while and no longer works. kwami 05:23, 2005 September 10 (UTC)

If you wrote it, good for us, and thank you; but that means BibleOcean.com is in copyright violation, because they aren't observing the terms of the license. J S Ayer 02:18, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

I've checked Wikipedia's "copyleft" and you're right, they are supposed to acknowledge us. I've sent them the following message:

You have copied an article I wrote for Wikipedia without giving credit at http://bibleocean.com/OmniDefinition/Inclusive_we. Wikipedia is free, but we do have copyright; the conditions of that copyright (actually "copyleft") are that you give credit, usually by a direct link back to the article. The article in question is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_we. Please leave any comments at the discussion/Talk page if you have any. Thank you!

I've seen other copied articles at their site, but never thought much about it. It may be that this is their standard practice, so that observing copyright may be a serious issue for them.

Actually it's the Taiwanese example (which I copied from the Taiwanese article) that would clearly show Wikipedia's older. kwami 05:17, 2005 September 12 (UTC)

Okay, issue resolved: they've given us credit. kwami 22:47, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Contents 1 Tagalog 2 Format 3 Inclusive and Exclusive we in Indo-European 4 African languages

[edit] Tagalog

Hi Chris,

I see we're having something of a disagreement with Tagalog kitá. It's not indifferent to who acts on whom, is it? Also, "ergative" is generally not a good term for Philippine languages, although there are some (such as Kampapangan) which truly are ergative languages. Using the term for languages like Tagalog is a theoretical POV that hasn't been demonstrated by the languages themselves. If you don't wish to say 1st person is acting on 2nd in this example, then I suggest leaving the relationship vague. (After all, saying 1ERG+2ABS is the same as 1>2.) kwami 05:28, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Hi, it's all right to leave it vague. But, as for ergativity, I am pretty confident that Tagalog and other Philippine languages are ergative, after having learned some Basque a few months ago. Of course, Basque & Tagalog use them differently, but I got a good feel as to how they are used. Though, I am very interested in knowing on why you perceive Kapampangan to be truly ergative

Also, it was Philippine linguist Dr. Laurie Reid who convinced me that Philippine languages are ergative. I posted his comments to me here on the Ergative-absolutive_language article's talk page. --Chris S. 05:38, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

I am no specialist in Philippine languages. What little I know is from colleagues I respect who have worked on them. My understanding is that few of them are actually ergative in the sense of the Australian languages, although they do have similarities to ergative languages. There's so much more going on in the choice of case that calling the system "ergative" conceals more than it reveals -- like using the word "subject" when discussing an ergative or Philippine-type system. There's a reason that people keep coming up with new terms like "trigger" and "pivot" rather than use 'ergative'. Also, they aren't all alike!

Mithun worked on Kapampangan, not expecting it to be ergative because other claims of ergativity in Philippine languages didn't correlate well to ergativity elsewhere (or only correlated partially), so the clear ergativity she found in that language was a bit of a surprise. One reference is,

• Mithun, Marianne. 1994. The implications of ergativity for a Philippine voice system. In Voice: Form and function, ed. by Barbara Fox and Paul J. Hopper, 247-277. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

though there are others.

A book that I thought was quite a good read was

• Fay Wouk and Malcolm Ross (ed.), 2002. The history and typology of western Austronesian voice systems. Australian National University.

The nice thing about it is that the contributors are more interested in illuminating Philippine languages than in using the languages to demonstrate their pet theory, and if the system doesn't fit into a neat little package with a recognized label like 'ergative', they aren't worried about it. Other researchers start with a theory, and unfortunately it is the language that has to fit the theory rather than vice versa. They can make quite a convincing case if you don't have an alternative POV handy. kwami 07:03, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

I'll check out Mithun as well as getting in touch with Wouk & Ross, as they are on a mailing list I'm on. If you what you say about her work is true, then I am very surprised that she'd consider Kapampangan an ergative language and the others not. What separates Kapampangan from other languages is its system of pronoun agreement. But other than that, Kapampangan's treatment of verbs is very much like Tagalog and other Philippine languages. FWIW, I've been studying Kapampangan for a few years now and wrote the Kapampangan article (though not yet complete), so I'm finding this puzzling. Thanks again and congrats on the adminship. --Chris S. 23:13, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. And there's a good reason I'm giving you references instead of trying to summarize them myself! What I said above was misleading: Wouk & Ross covers Western AN, as the title suggests, not specifically Philippine languages. And perhaps Mithun was speaking of morphological rather than syntactic ergativity for K. - it's been a while. kwami 04:52, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Format

Might it be an idea to group the various language examples into language groups? At the moment a non-linguist would not be able to identify family patterns. Andrew Yong 11:48, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, Good idea. kwami 18:39, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Inclusive and Exclusive we in Indo-European

I have heard that the Indo-European language Marathi also has the inclusive and exclusive we differentiation. Could anyone having info on this update the page. I do not know much about this unfortunately. Kartheeque

There's also the 's of let's in English, which is implicitly inclusive. Mentioned as such in a footnote in Quirk's CGEL IIRC. jnestorius^(talk) 00:08, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Interesting point. Indeed, a number of languages have first-person-plural imperatives (English "Let's go!", French "Allons-y !", Spanish "Vámonos!", Hebrew [bo(ɪ) n'lex]), and I'd imagine these are always implicitly inclusive. —Ruakh_TALK 19:07, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] African languages

I just added a note re Fula (and also a link to the page on Chinese pronouns). Re African languages (and the 4 main families thereof), this may be a feature of many more than just Fula, but I do not have that info. If this can be determined & added, it would also make stronger the case for organizing the info by language families. --A12n 17:41, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Hebrew (which isn't itself an African language, per se, but which is in the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family) doesn't distinguish the two, and I've never heard anything to suggest any other Afro-Asiatic languages do. I've no clue about the other major language families. —Ruakh_TALK 18:17, 3 December 2006 (UTC)