Halfway down the Danube

The admirative and the optative

So the Albanian language has these moods.

No, I'm serious. "Mood" is a grammatical term describing the relationship of a verb with reality and intent. And Albanian has some moods that English lacks.

-- Not clear? Okay, think about a common English verb... say, "eat". I eat, you eat, they eat. Now add modal verbs: I could eat, you should eat, they would have eaten. Those modal auxiliary verbs -- could, would, should, ought -- help set the mood of the verb.

Still not clear? Okay, some examples.

Indicative mood. Used for factual statements:

You eat.
We go.

Imperative mood: used for commands, direct requests, prohibitions.

Eat!
Let's go!

Subjunctive mood: several uses, including discussing hypothetical or unlikely events, expressing opinions or emotions, and making polite requests.

I suggest (that) you eat.
Perhaps we should go.

Conditional mood: used to express uncertainty or an "if" situation.

You would eat (if you could).
We might go (if we want to).

BTW, those modal verbs? That's an English thing. Okay, a Germanic thing. Romance languages -- like French and Spanish and Romanian -- don't use them so much. Instead, they change the form of the verb, usually by messing with the ending. So, "eat" in Spanish is comer; "you should eat" is comerias.

Okay, still with me? Well, Albanian has two moods that English doesn't: the optative and the admirative.

The optative (it's also called the desiderative sometimes) expresses hopes or wishes. Think of it as the "if only" or "would that" mood. Only a few languages have an optative as a distinct mood. Among Indo-European languages, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit are examples; elsewhere, Japanese and Finnish.

An ancient Greek speaker might say "Would that you would eat!" with the words "would that" expressed by putting the verb "read" in the optative mood.

Here is an example of the optative mood in ancient Greek:

ei gar genoime teknon anti sou nekros

oh that become-I [OPTATIVE] son instead-of thou corpse
‘O that I might be a corpse, my child, instead of you!’

(Euripides, Hippolytos 1410. Sorry, I can't do the diacritical markings.)

In Japanese the verb inflection -tai expresses the speaker's desire, e.g. watashi wa asoko ni ikitai "I want to go there". Remove the "-tai" at the end, and it becomes "I go there". Neat, neh? Oddly, Japanese uses a completely different method to indicate the desire of a person other than the speaker. (They use the auxilliary verb garu. I know you wanted to know that.)

Google tells me that a contrast to this example is contemporary spoken Finnish, where the optative suffixes -koon and -koot express annoyed dismissal:

Korjatkoon sen itse!
has the he can fix in optative third-person singular
"He can fix it himself!"

Personally, I don't see that as an optative mood, but okay.

Anyway, in Albanian, the optative mood takes the form of an inflection of the verb. So the phrase

If only you would eat!

is, in Albanian, a single word. (If this seems strange, consider the English imperative mood. "Eat!")

And "Oh, how I wish I could see an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker!" would be "I can see (optative) an Ivory-Bill."

Now: waaaay back when the first chariot-riding, beer-drinking, proto-Indo-Europeans came swarming out of Central Asia (or wherever), they spoke a language with four moods: indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative.

Three thousand years later, some Indo-European languages have added new moods, such as the English conditional. But almost all of them have lost the optative. Only a few older or conservative languages -- Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Tocharian, Lithuanian, Albanian -- have kept it. (This leads to the interesting question of whether proto-Indo-European might have shared the optative with proto-Finno-Ugric, the distant ancestor of Finnish and Hungarian. But let that bide.)

Okay, so much for the optative. What of the admirative?

Well, the admirative is a mood that expresses surprise. In English, this is usually represented by an exclamation point. In Albanian, it's done by inflecting the verb. (They have exclamation points too, of course.)

A couple of examples. (These are from the work of Dr. Victor Friedman, of whom more anon.)

A man walks into a barber shop expecting to find the owner, a master barber, but instead no one is there but the owner’s apprentice. The potential customer has two choices in inquiring after the man he is looking for:

(2a) Ku ‘sht‘ mjeshtri?

(2b) Ku qenka mjeshtri?

‘Where is the boss?’

Question (2a) contains a neutral request for information, whereas, in the context given above, version (2b) could only convey surprise at not finding the boss in the shop and could not be dubitative or nonguarantive. An admirative question in this context is thus simultaneously a request for information (attempt to have the addressee take responsibility for an assertion) and an implicit assertion that the speaker had expected to find the boss in his shop

Clear, no? And then this:

If the barber comes out from behind a curtain at the back of the shop, and the customer realizes that the barber was in the building all along and simultaneously receives an answer to his question by seeing the barber, he has the following possibilities of response:

(3a) Ah, k‘tu je.

(3b) Ah, k‘tu pask‘sh qen‘!

‘Ah, here you are’

Response (3a) is a simple acknowledgment that the barber’s act of coming out from behind a curtain in the back of his shop is a sign (index or token) of his presence. Response (3b) however, contains a grammatically expressed tone of the speaker’s surprise that is absent from (3a)... with nuances of ‘as it turns out, you have been here all along and I was unaware of it’.

To use our earlier examples, the admirative would express something like

Wow, you're eating!

Hey, we're going!

But there are a couple of twists.

One, nobody knows where the Albanian admirative comes from. The optative is ancient Indo-European; the admirative seems to have appeared out of nowhere. They didn't get it from the Turks, either. It's unique to the Balkans, where it appears in several languages whose bases are geographically close to each other: Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian. There's reason to believe that the Albanians invented it and the neighbor languages borrowed it, but that just raises the obvious question: why did the Albanians, alone in Europe, develop this unique verb mood?

But wait: there's more. I said that it looked like the neighbors had borrowed this mood from the Albanians. Well, at least one group of neighbors not only borrowed it, but improved on it.

There's a group in the Balkans called the Arumanians. Arumanians are people who speak a language that's very, very close to Romanian... so close that some call it a dialect of Romanian, rather than a separate language. (Apparently an Arumanian and a Romanian can understand each other, if they both speak very slowly and wave their hands a lot.) Arumanians live all over the place, thinly scattered across Albania, Romania, Macedonia and Greece.

Now, there's a dialect of Arumanian -- the Frasheriote dialect, to be precise -- that has taken the Albanian admirative and run with it. That is, they use the admirative, but they use it ironically -- to express not just surprise, but disbelief, uncertainty, or the fact that the information is based on a report. It carries the nuance "to my surprise" or "supposedly, but I don't believe it," or "allegedly, but I won't vouch for it" or "so they say," depending on the context.

So, the Frasheriote Arumanian admirative would go something like

You're eating! (I didn't believe it until I saw you eat.)

We're going! (Someone said so, but I don't think it's true.)

What's interesting is that this wasn't discovered until 1992 -- again by the redoubtable Dr. Friedman:

In the summer of 1992, I was in Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia, conducting field research on Macedonian. There, I had the opportunity to meet Marjan Markovik, who was then working on his M.A. thesis on the verb systems of the Arumanian and Macedonian dialects of Ohrid. At the time, Mr. Markovik was doing fieldwork for the Arumanian part of his thesis with his mother's relatives and their friends (see note 1), who now live in Ohrid and Struga but who come from the village of Beala de Sus (Macedonian: Gorna Belica). We arranged to visit some of them together, and I decided to compose a little story in Macedonian and ask them to translate it into Arumanian. I composed the story so that it would contain many expressions of surprise, doubt, uncertainty, and reported information. Despite the established view that Arumanian had no special verb forms for these nuances, I was curious to see for myself.

Mr. Markovik and I spent a pleasant afternoon and evening with his relatives and their friends, enjoying traditional Arumanian hospitality and discussing with them questions of the Arumanian language over glasses of their delicious homemade arâchie. At one point, I brought out my story, and we taped a line by line translation into Arumanian. The next day Mr. Markovik and I met at my room to transcribe the story. As we sat listening to the tape and writing, we were suddenly amazed to encounter a sentence with a verb form that neither of us had ever seen or heard in Arumanian.

It's not quite up to seeing a live Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, but it still must have been quite a thrill.

What's really interesting about this is that the Arumanians use of the admirative comes very close to being an evidential marker.

Evidential markers are grammatical forms used by a speaker to show where information is coming from. For instance, a language might have a suffix that could be added to a verb to indicate whether "I am told this is true" or "I believe this is true" or "I, personally saw this". Evidential markers are found in a lot of American Indian languages but they're totally absent from the Indo-European language family. Except in Frasheriote Arumanian, kind of.

(Well, to be strictly correct, there's also some ironic/nonconfirmative use of the admirative in Macedonian. But let's not complicate this any more.)

So, I end by putting these sentences in the straight admirative:

An evidential marker in an Indo-European language. And not discovered until 1992.

The Balkans are interesting.

Posted by douglas at May 2, 2005 09:57 PM