'Non-standard' indexicals

Question

Currently, I am doing some research on indexicals, by which I mean words like:

I
here
now
today, tomorrow, yesterday
local
present, current

For ease of reference, let’s call these the ‘standard’ indexicals. The few languages with which I’m familiar contain (translations/equivalents of) the standard indexicals. However, I also know of a few non-standard indexicals. In particular, English has ‘yesteryear’, which is like ‘yesterday’ and denotes the previous year (or the past more generally). Similarly, some German dialects have ‘heuer’ (not be confused with ‘heute’), which means the current year; so, ‘heuer’ is to ‘year’ what ‘today’ is to ‘day’.

Now, my question is: does anybody know of any language that contains non-standard indexicals, like ‘yesteryear’ and ‘heuer’? Similarly, are there languages that lack one or more of the standard indexicals?

Another, less urgent question: does anyone know a language that contains synonymous indexicals? E.g., German has both ‘jetzt’ and ‘nun’, both meaning ‘now.

EDIT in response to a comment by @Atamiri

I called the indexicals on my list ‘standard’ because they exist in all the languages with which I’m familiar (again, that’s not many). More particularly, they exist there as words – at least according to one way of individuating words. (Focus on 'I', 'now', and 'here' if you don't think 'to-day' etc. can count as words.) By contrast, there’s no word for heuer in English and we must use a compound (viz. ‘this (current) year’) to translate it. So, the kind of example I’m looking for goes a bit like this: there’s this language, Example-ese, and in Example-ese, there’s the indexical word ‘dexi’, and ‘dexi’ is roughly synonymous with ‘last month’ – but ‘de’ doesn’t mean ‘last’, and ‘xi’ doesn’t mean ‘month’. (Of course, 'dexi' doesn't have to mean 'last month' or 'next week' or anything temporal. I'd also be interested if there's an indexical (word) that denotes the speaker's birth place, say, or the person sitting opposite the speaker.)

@WiccanKarnak As in e.g.: 'When we visited Vietnam last year, we tried the local food.' So, yes: geographically. Although, I suppose I also mean to include non-physical locations - like in an IT context. — MarkOxford, Jan 27 '18 at 11:39
Why do you call them non-standard? The difference between heuer and “this year” is that the former is a synthetic indexical whereas the lattter is a compound (whose indexicality comes from “this”). — Atamiri, Jan 27 '18 at 15:22
He just says "standard" for the listed ones and everything else is "non-standard" don't worry @atamiri — WiccanKarnak, Jan 28 '18 at 02:29
You're going to have to give us a more precise definition of "standard" than "exists in all the languages with which [MarkOxford] is familiar with"... For example, would you say that the bewildering variety of Japanese pronouns are a bunch of non-standard indexicals? Or is the English word "I" better thought of as a non-standard indexical which awkwardly conflates the natural concepts denoted by the Japanese words "watashi," "ware," "ore," etc.? — John Goodrick, Jan 28 '18 at 03:06
I feel like "local" is not like the others. What sets "local" apart from, say, indigenous, ethnic, customary, contemporary, or hip? — jick, Jan 28 '18 at 03:47
@John Goodrick I’m really just trying to request examples, not propose a theory about what’s ‘standard’ or ‘non-standard’. I should have just said ‘(not) on my list’. In my field (philosophy of language), people usually just consider the ones on the list and then make claims about indexicality in general. So, I’d like indexicals beyond the ones on the list to see to what extent the claims still apply. If they are bewildering or exotic, that’s great – although I already know of the Japanese pronouns (similarly in Vietnamese). Perhaps my edit helps clarify what I’m after, too. — MarkOxford, Jan 28 '18 at 09:38
@jick Take: ‘John was born here and went to the local high school’. There, ‘local’ means roughly located near speaker – a bit like ‘here’ – and I think that’s why people often group it with the other indexicals. Now take: ‘The prisoner fled to York, where he was arrested by the local police’. In that sentence, ‘local’ means in York. Finally, take ‘Every time I go abroad, I try to local food’. This time, ‘local’ acts like a bound variable. So, I agree that ‘local’ is not like the others. I included it because some people still group it with the others. — MarkOxford, Jan 28 '18 at 09:52
@jick Note that this does not work with ‘current’: Consider ‘The prisoner was born in 1946 and then adopted by the current prime minister’ and ‘Every time there’s a thunderstorm, the current prime minister is hit by lightning’. In these sentences, it’s much harder to read ‘current’ the way you can read ‘local’. — MarkOxford, Jan 28 '18 at 09:53
@MarkOxford: I think there could be languages which lack separate lexical items for "now," instead using a complex synthetic tense/aspect system to express the idea that something is currently happening. E.g. plausibly there is some polysynthetic language from the Inuit or Athabaskan families that can only express now-ness by some verbal infix. But it's hard to prove a negative... — John Goodrick, Jan 28 '18 at 12:56
Read Fillmore's Deixis Lectures before you call anything "standard". There is a lot more going on than indexicals. — jlawler, Feb 27 '18 at 21:11
@jlawler Thanks for those links (and putting the stuff up there in the first place). That was a hugely satisfying, rewarding read. — Araucaria - him, Mar 07 '18 at 22:24
Yes, Fillmore's like that. Those lectures are my candidate for the best linguistic writing of the 20th century. As you say, they satisfy. — jlawler, Mar 08 '18 at 04:26

Adam Bittlingmayer · Answer 1 · 2018-01-28T17:23:31.850

3

If I understand the question correctly, then answer is yes.

In short, languages are not 1:1 and that includes function words. That is why translation is hard and, in some cases, impossible.

Note that there is no standard set of words that should be opaque single words, the modern English set is certainly not the standard.

Now, my question is: does anybody know of any language that contains non-standard indexicals, like ‘yesteryear’ and ‘heuer’?

I believe, by providing two examples, you have answered this yourself. In fact you have pointed out that the sets vary even between dialects of the same language.

There are plenty of opaquely-formed or anyway single-word indexicals common to not very exotic languages for concepts which are hard to represent without analysable constructs in modern English: like this, like that, the day before yesterday, the day after tomorrow, last night, you all, over there, of this, you (explicitly singular)...

If your set of concepts is basically the English one, it will be hard to find these.

Nor can we assume the reverse. here, there, today, tonight are this place, that place, this day, this night, this hour... in plenty of languages. The English versions are not totally opaque either, day and night are lexemes, it is obvious there was evolution.

In some cases, English can express a concept in a single word, but not precisely. For example you is very overloaded compared to any language known to me, except maybe English-based creoles.

Then there are concepts like the dual, we inclusive vs we exclusive, and different flavours of there (see ahí, allá, aquí, acá), and pronouns for noun classes beyond m f n which are hard to express elegantly in English.

My point is not to show that English is deficient, but to show that the number of potential concepts is great, and every language is missing many if not most.

We also do not have a perfect definition of what a word is anyway. The absence of a space is more of an orthographic convention. You should look at language cycle theory and creolisation to understand how this works. English and French alone provide plenty of examples.

edited Jan 28 '18 at 17:23

answered Jan 28 '18 at 13:51

Adam Bittlingmayer

7,664
25
40

Thanks! This is helpful, but I was really hoping for a few concrete examples (besides ‘yesteryear’ and ‘heuer’). You say: ‘There are plenty of […] single-word indexicals […] for concepts which are hard to represent without analysable constructs in modern English’ – That’s exactly what I'm looking for; but could you tell me what some of them are? Similarly, you say that ‘here, there, today, tonight are this place, that place, this day, this night, this hour... in plenty of languages.’ Again, if you could tell me what these languages are specifically, that’d be fantastic. – MarkOxford Jan 28 '18 at 14:29
Samples of English pointer words that are separate words in other languages: tr burada, orada, nerede, bugün, nasıl. Edge cases, vowel harmony is one clue, I leave that judgement to the reader. Similar constructions in fa (kuja, inja, em shab, di shab, che kar, chetor...) and hy . sada in sh. it a ora (but adesso). Arguably es ahora. fr au jour d'hui (lit the day of today). tonight is relatively unique - ca nuit, esta noche, questa notte or questa sera, segodnja nočju or reformist večerom... por qué, pour quoi, per che... – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 16:59
Honestly I always forget if heut Nacht, heut Abend are written as two words. To me it is a good sign that the definition of standard is arbitrary. – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 16:59
Now words that do not have single word equivalents in English: – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 17:00
Keeping in mind that English is evolving, so most speakers do not use hither, thou, therewith, certain senses of so or thusly, and replace them with less precise or multi-word constructions. – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 17:02
de so, es así, it cosí (typically rendered with like this, like that)... vorgestern, übermorgen, anteayer, dopodomani, anoche, sinoć... German wohin, Slavic kuda, Latin quo, Armenian ուր, English (and vulgar Romance) lost whither like it lost whom and case generally. – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 17:10
And then there is the loss of precision. Does English have an equivalent of du or not? Subjective. I assume we need not enumerate them all. – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 17:12
Partitive in fr and it: ne, ci, y. Arguably all the wo- and da- words in de, որ- and դրա- / որա- in hy, if not counting antiquitated English. – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 17:20
Thanks again. I suppose I had hoped for cases that are more substantially different from what we find in English (and German, French, Turkish, ...). @ John Goodrick mentioned Inuit languages, where they have very fine-grained tense markers – roughly for now, a moment ago, a little while ago, a long while ago, … If we found a language with separate indexicals for each, I guess that’d be more what I'm after. Or a language that uses indexicals to express a different set of concepts instead of the temporal and special ones. (Perhaps the pronouns in some Asian languages are like that.) – MarkOxford Jan 28 '18 at 20:52
ahorita comes to mind. – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 21:55
Agree all the languages in my head are too correlated. Even Turkish. But it is not IE. – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 21:56
I do not really see how what you call tense markers are distinct from adjectives like recently. – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 21:57
I am skeptical of the idea that a language per se is more expressive net, they all have their strengths here and there. If you learnt of a Chinese word meaning right now would you count it if it were composed of two chars? – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 22:01
Other thing to keep in mind is that when a feature is richer it tends to be more regular (like endings in high-morphology languages). A language with 1000 gradations of x will express them with predictable, composable, reusable parts. Speakers would not learn 1000 arbitrary expressions. – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 22:04
Inuit is polysynthetic so you can probably want whatever you wish, but you understand why it is misleading, right? – Adam Bittlingmayer Jan 28 '18 at 22:22

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 28 '18 at 22:03

I try to avoid "survey/list" questions like these to which there's no right answer, but here's one...

My aunt, a linguist and translator in Nepal, reports that the Indo-Aryan language Maithili has a word that shares the meanings "yesterday" and "tomorrow". In other words, it means "one day removed" and is qualified by a phrase like "that is yet to come" or "that has already come" to disambiguate the two (when the context doesn't make it obvious).

Come to think of it, my grandma, who ran a school in Pakistan, said that Urdu works like that too. One dictionary seems to support that; "yesterday" and "tomorrow" both yield کل kal.

Hopefully this "bifurcated" indexical constitutes an example of a "non-standard" one.

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 12 '21 at 15:27

Japanese has rainen, raigetsu, raishuu (next year, next month, next week) as well as sarainen, saraigetsu and saraishuu (the year after next, the month after next and the week after next). Japanese has words for previous year, month, week day as well but they are not quite so regular, partly because of the alternation of words of Chinese and Japanese.

Like Portuguese (see other answer) and many, many, other languages it has a threefold system of this, that by you and that over there (eg kono, sono, ano).

As for "I", Japanese is a little unusual in not having a typical system of pronouns. Most languages have a closed, or fairly closed set of pronouns if they have them at all. Japanese is a language in which there is no need to express a subject in a sentence and so it seem that pronouns are more flexible. While I learner may say watashi for "I", there are other ways of doing so which express various things about the speaker in a fairly fluid and evolving way.

I'm not sure if this is what you are asking, but hopefully it illustrates how there simply aren't standard lists of the kind you think.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 30 '18 at 12:43

Well, Portuguese has some that, whether "standard" or not, do not match English indexicals.

It has three different words for "there", aí, ali and lá, the first of which refers to something close to the second person, and the other two to something removed from both first and second person (lá conotes a longer distance than ali). And, oh, it has a fourth word for "there", acolá, meaning more or less "further there".

It has a word for the day before yesterday, anteontem. And a word for the day before that, too: trasanteontem, though this is much less used. It used to have a word for "this year", ogano, but it fell into disuse.

But I am not sure that these are "non-standard" indexicals. How do we define the standard ones? (It can't be just "I", I suppose: "you" and some third person pronouns would be necessary, too - but are plurals, gender forms, or exclusivity, "standard"?)

'Non-standard' indexicals

4 Answers4