Feature Focus - Animacy

[@GmodPlusWoW]

*Biblaridion* "In Navajo, the highest tier of animacy is occupied by adult humans." *Me:* "Pretty standard." *Biblaridion:* "...and LIGHTNING." *Me:* "That's metal as fuck."

[@Wh40kk]

The most animate thing alive; a rock

[@neuekatze1]

you are forgetting dwayne johnson

[@KyivanKnyaz]

"alive"

[@leemoonlmao]

@@neuekatze1do i know you

[@gtc239]

​@@neuekatze1*animate eyebrow movement*

[@neuekatze1]

@@leemoonlmao maybe. who are you?

[@ross_codes]

Getting animacy wrong is kind of naturally funny: "Potato was feeling pensive" or "A field of Freds, stretching as far as the eye could see"

[@laurencefraser]

Of course, context can render either of these perfectly sensible. I suppose the important part is that they Require the unusual context in order to be perfectly sensible, where as if animacy was being handled correctly, it would be unnecessary.

[@jademonass2954]

something i would like to see is this series is more "uncommon" features in languages, they are always so interesting!

[@FieldLing639]

I really want a tenselessness or nominal tense feature focus

[@JuanGomez-jk9hl]

A video about symmetrical voice/austronesian alignment would be interesting. Noun incorporation would be a cool topic too

[@WannzKaswan]

​@@JuanGomez-jk9hlAgreed!! Austronesian alignment is awesome and more people needs to hear about it Ironically I speak an Austronesian language without alignment :(

[@KingJangOng]

to me the most interesting thing is how religious animism is something most (or all) religions derive from its likely language did too

[@FieldLing639]

@@WannzKaswan Austronesian Alignmen't

[@donovantownshend8783]

YAY! I'm so glad were getting this! Could you do one on some deixis stuff, perhaps? I still can't entirely wrap my head around things like associated motion, deixical markers, or obviation levels exceding three.

[@tuluppampam]

Agma schwa made two videos about deixis, and they're not particularly precise, but they can give good ideas on it (it also delves into weird supernatural stuff)

[@qwertyTRiG]

Including deixis in sign languages, which is really interesting.

[@xX_wiLLiam_Xx]

LETS GOOOOOOO FEATURE FOCUS IS BACK

[@gavinboyer4634]

1:35 All animals are animate, but some animals are more animate than others.

[@kassiopeia117]

Omg feature focus is back!!! It could've been cool to talk about how animacy affects the words for "to have" in languages Japanese and Georgian, but great video regardless! I saw someone else mention deixis, which i think would be a great topic given the number of cool demonstrative systems there are. Love your stuff!!

[@Ptaku93]

soooo, how does animacy affect possession in Japanese and Georgian?

[@kakahass8845]

I feel like in Japanese いる/ある is closer to "To be" than "To have".

[@kassiopeia117]

True, they more accurately translate as "there is/are" but they can and often are also used to mean "to have" in the sense of "there is to me", plus it works better as an example to just say they mean "to have" in both languages@@kakahass8845

[@kassiopeia117]

In japanese, the words for "there is/are" are used to mark possession, with いる used for animate objects, and ある for inanimate ones. And Georgian does basically the same thing with its words ქონა "to have (inanimate)" and ყოლა "to have (animate)" @@Ptaku93

[@whyyoulooklikethat5748]

I don't understand nor do I care, Call it ignorance, I'll call it bliss.

[@copyplanter]

Thank you! For the longest time I've decided that my conlnags have an animacy-based grammar, but had little to no idea of how to implement it. This video is súper useful! 🎉

[@TheZetaKai]

Feature Focus is by far my favorite Biblaridion series. Every second is packed with information for conlangers of all skill levels, presented with a minimalist style that makes the dense information accessible and easy to understand. The use of evolutionary vectors, real-world examples from across the world, and useful advice for implementation makes this one of the best channels for conlanging on KZbin. I literally cannot wait for the next FF.

[@secondpicture]

Lets gooo biblaridion does conlang stuff again

[@TheDrMike25]

HONEY, WAKE UP THE KIDS!! Biblaridion posted another banger

[@themoosebard6659]

So glad to see this series again!

[@Alex-lh3kp]

The direct-inverse system of Algonquin languages is very interesting! How would such a marker occur? What would the morphology be?

[@JuanGomez-jk9hl]

It could evolve from a passive voice marker

[@sniccups8390]

Funnily enough, I just came here from watching an earlier Feature Focus in which Bib explains just that! It's the one about verb agreement. That video explains it better than I could, but as I understand it, it starts with a language that prefers animate subjects and inanimate objects, so when the reverse is required, it starts using a new strategy to mark this strange situation, such as putting the verb into the passive voice (so the animate noun is still the subject, even if it's not the agent). Eventually, the passive marker (or whatever other marker they use) gets reanalyzed as a marker specifically for reverse-animacy situations.

[@nathanleech4933]

It’s amazing to see you do another conlanging feature focus video since I only got into your conlanging videos after the last one!

[@fractal_fantasymc2197]

Very nice Video! I've done a pretty extensive research on animacy for my conlang, but still you've managed to make me learn some cool things, like the animacy-sensitive prepositions in Nêlêmwa

[@whoisthisagain-n7f]

new feature focus video lets goooo

[@maxiapalucci2511]

A NEW FEATURE FOCUS VIDEO OMG 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍 thank you father Laridion for blessing my day

[@cawfeebrew3969]

Babe wake up, new Biblaridion Feature Focus just dropped

[@brillitheworldbuilder]

Can you also make a feature focus about topic marking?

[@ancientswordrage]

I love this video! So pleased Feature Focus is back! Only wish we could have a deeper dive with more examples!

[@jonahrankin6978]

Biblaridion, could you make a Feature Focus on Formality/Honorifics and how these kinds of features evolve? I feel like I have no clue about how to evolve those kinds of features in my conlangs, and it would interesting to hear you talk about it. Thanks!

[@applimu7992]

I love how often you use indigenous languages in your videos :D

[@kakahass8845]

This probably isn't intentional though Europe is like a giant Sprachbund.

[@maxiapalucci2511]

I mean that’s just how you show a broad scope of features

[@TheZetaKai]

Every language is indigenous to somewhere.

[@Релёкс84]

@@TheZetaKai Except Esperanto and modern Hebrew I guess

[@ATOM-vv3xu]

that came as a suprise, I even didn't click the vid cuz I thought it is an old video and I have already watched all your vids... (the only reason why I watch it now is because I also got the notification on Discord)

[@dan_asd]

rest in peace plant's aliveness

[@brillitheworldbuilder]

Finally another feature focus! Let's gooooo!

[@nari09070]

Thank you ❤

[@Misto_deVito6009]

Man I can listen to you to talk about anything

[@Mr.Nichan]

3:43 That Hittite example has something typographically weird. You have both an and a used, when I think Hittite only has a /š/ phoneme which probably makes some kind of [s] sound (though I think it's fun to pronounce it as a retracted s).

[@celtofcanaanesurix2245]

Oo goody, I love the speculative xenobiology stuff but I was missing some of these linguistic guides

[@kezsut-online]

Dear author, I wish you would also make videos about two topics that haven't been covered, which are: language contact (!!!) and pre-proto-language. As a conlang enthusiast, I've always given some thought to how my proto-language came to be. And also, a natural language never exists in vacuum, there is always some superstrate/adstrate/substrate that influences it.

[@StichyWichy21]

Regarding your second topic: the process for making a proto-lang that is derived from a pre-proto-lang would be the same as the process for making a lang that is derived from a proto-lang, since a proto-lang is (for natlangs) functionally indentical to a modern language. Unless I misunderstand you, and you mean to ask how to work backwards from the proto-lang to a pre-proto-lang: in this case I would recommend looking at the conlang Verdurian-its creator worked backwards its proto-lang. I did this with one of my conlangs and it is much more fiddly, essentially you run steps in reverse by considering which ancient features could give rise to a modern feature, and picking one.

[@enarmonika5557]

FINALLY! I've been CRAVING one of this for a long time now 🛐🛐

[@FunGuyFromYuggoth]

It is good to see the return of Feature Focus! Perhaps another episode could be about different plural marking strategies? Aiwoo being an interesting case study.

[@Mr.Nichan]

I recently learned that Japanese has a loose animacy distinction in it's locative copula (also claimed to be a word for "have"). "Iru" (いる) is usually used with animate subjects, while "aru" (ある) is usually with inanimate subjects. in any case the ways they can be used differ depending on animacy. It made me think about the idea that there might be something different on a metaphysical level between a consciousness being in a certain setting and an inanmiate object being in a certain setting, though I don't think that's the best way of thinking about it (since, for example, that doesn't really explain why "iru" is used even with inanimate subjects to say the subject is in a state described by a participle, while the fact that auxiliary verbs tend to become rote structures and they usually have animate subjects probably explains that better). (The "-u" at least is just the dictionary verb form and changes, as does the "r" a lot, so that "ite", for example, is another form of "iru".)

[@oreosaurs2658]

Cool

[@georgerussell2947]

babe wake up, new Feature Focus video just dropped

[@Im_talking_to_you]

Can you please do a video about tones? Like how is that started, what tones are there etc.

[@30IYouTube]

And keep in mind, just like everything in language, animacy hierarchies still have to evolve from something. They can't just appear out of nowhere, especially if it's not a protolang.

[@Релёкс84]

You don't have to search for the origin of every morphene in your language tbh. Languages are an unbroken continuum that goes back much further than we could ever hope to resoncstruct, so there's bound to be things whose origin is long lost to time in every stage of any language, including reconstructed forms.

[@Birthdayboytablet]

Not true at all. Area effects are very powerful. And things like new word orders are super easy to adopt.

[@doorhanger9317]

New biblaridion just dropped

[@adamkotter6174]

Do you have any suggestions for how to take a language with a non-morphological animacy hierarchy (e.g., English) and evolve it into a morphological one (i.e., marked noun class)? I'd love to be able to tell at a glance what degree of animacy a noun is considered to have but also have realistic irregularities in the animacy-marking system.

[@JuanGomez-jk9hl]

I’m not Bib nor do I have his experience and knowledge, but if I were to do this, I’d start by attaching some sort of classifier word on adjectives and demonstratives. In English in particular, you cannot use adjectives independently the same way you can do in Spanish, for example; you can’t say “the red”, you have to say “the red X”. That X could be a classifier word like “thing”, “person”, “animal”, etc. You could just attach X to your adjectives and demonstratives, the latter could then evolve into articles and voilà, u have noun classes.

[@kakahass8845]

@@JuanGomez-jk9hl It always fascinates me how similar yet different Portuguese and Spanish are because you can absolutely say "The red" in Portuguese it would be "O vermelho" ("Lh" is a palatal lateral).

[@JuanGomez-jk9hl]

@@kakahass8845 Yeah, u can do the same in spanish. U can just say "El rojo/la roja", but u cannot do that in english tho. It's almost as if spanish and portuguese descend from the same language 😏

[@kakahass8845]

@@JuanGomez-jk9hl Yeah but Spanish can also be very different from Portuguese in some cases.

[@arturnicaciodeandrade9861]

I've got a question, unrelated to the video: When making the pre-proto language of a nautralistic conlang family, should I still make things very naturalistic ? Like, do I need to make the conglang to be akin to what Biblaridion taught in his "How to make a language" series, as in, with virtually no features, just basic words ? I say this because I have been trying to make a conlang (its my first one) and I have been stuck at the point of figuring out how I can evolve any feature, since searching on google isn't leading me to any answers on how it happens on real languages, especially for extremly basic concepts like conjugations or certain grammatical features like TAM or grammatical gender. Can anyone help or is this too stupid of a question ?

[@evfnyemisx2121]

Remember that a proto-language is technically just any language, so just start with whatever seems right, then as you evolve it, you will slowly fade the arbitrary traits of the proto-language away

[@arturnicaciodeandrade9861]

@@evfnyemisx2121 hmm, makes sense, thanks for answering !

[@eumemo4814]

​@@evfnyemisx2121 I thought that proto langs should always be "uga buga" if you are a a beginner.

[@randomsandwichian]

I had some idea about the originality of a constructed language I'm just letting sit about atm. Basically: 1st - the self concept (blood, here, people relation, senses, etc) which also somewhat derives other concepts later on (ie. magic) 2nd - the natural world (animal types, geology, danger, unknowns, weather, the beyond, etc), this is also where supelatives get derived from (eg. Fire = hot, lesser gives warm, extreme gives immolation) 3rd - a superior power, ie God (this is also where something a kin to the world creation myth gets explained, especially with magic involved) 4th - man made constructs (every innovated, refined, or defined), a derivative of that is more "modernized" concepts like cultural definition, religion, civilisation, conflicts, etc gets emphasized. It all boils down to which "root language" (either a sacred or a natural kind) the word stems from.

[@paleomiguel]

Interessant

[@lingoteen]

YEAH BABY! Feature focus is back!

[@tiradeepinthewild]

Looks like the conlang videos are getting a glowup!

[@parmaxolotl]

I love that "hit" in Q'anjob'al is "smak'"

[@kakahass8845]

One of my languages has 3 levels of animacy which are animate, inanimate and "Half" which comes from the fact that their culture considers the sea to have a will and be able to make decisions while not having a consciousness (Kinda like when we say "Evolution gave this animal X trait") which later got expanded to other cultural stuff that wasn't completely animate nor inanimate (Like creatures that are dead since their souls are still animate while their bodies aren't).

[@viiizzaalishvili9967]

great video

[@leemoonlmao]

new feature focus just dropped 🔥🔥🔥

[@Mr.Nichan]

5:52 These bar graphs look like they're saying Swedish likes to put animate nouns at the END of clauses, rather than the beginning, in that OVS word order seems to happen with sentences that have animate subjects and inanimate objects to a much greater extent than SVO word order.

[@mambu3630]

Yeah, I noticed that as well. I don't know Swedish but I wouldn't be surprised if the OVS order is used in a specific context unrelated to animacy, especially considering how uncommon OVS word order is.

[@jvanvuren5399]

I used animacy in my conlang. It's such a cool concept compared to just your typical gender or no gender marking.

[@RandomAmbles]

Hi, I study the grounding of utilitarian ethics. This is a curious concept that comes up in many places. Animacy is closely tied to subjecthood, personhood, moral patienthood, and degrees of consciousness. It's an intrinsically ethical, moral concept. An interesting school of thought on this comes from the panpsychists, who believe that everything in the universe has a degree of consciousness, not necessarily just those physical phenomena bound into a distinct mind. In some sense it's like a version of animism, only it departs from the religious, and even from the spiritual and philosophical to some degree in that it is proposed as an explanation of some puzzling aspects of experience in a way that is consistent with the laws of physics. It's fascinating, complicated, confusing, ultimately vital stuff.

[@yellowbutterfly6796]

huh, i would think gods would be more animate than humans 1:23

[@Mr.Nichan]

6:22 is the "3rd.POSS-" on "o'kakíni" a null prefix or is actually a suffix (the final "-i")? Also, I wonder what the difference between "nínna" and "nínaawa" is in Blackfoot, since I just heard that "nínna" means MAN in Blackfoot.

[@corn.worshipper]

6:37 I’m pretty sure that you cannot use plural agreement with inanimate nouns in any case in Nahuatl, so **quincuah in tlaxcalli would be ‘quicuah in tlaxcalli’ instead? This is according to ‘an Introduction to Classical Nahuatl’, Launey & McKay (lesson 3.5)

[@maximenicolas9905]

I was wondering if you could do a showcase on D'ni, the artlang of the game and book series Myst. It's a classic, and everyone with a computer in the 90's had the game installed, yet there's very little discussion about it outside of the game community. I think it could be an interesting case study.

[@tante8074]

Return of the king

[@Sonnen_Licht]

Yay, another Feature Focus video!

[@BeneathTheBrightSky]

Another feature focus!

[@Tudsamfa]

"I'm not really one for conlangs and am happy if I can speak a language, I don't need to understand why language is the way it is, I doubt I will learn anything here relevant to..." 4:53 - 5:13 "Ay yo, wtf."

[@VictorianTimeTraveler]

I'm rewatching your alien biosphere series. It is so well thought through, the way you explore other routes that life can take.

[@MrRhombus]

TIL proto-indo-european had an inanimate/animate class system

[@noahdubuis7897]

My language, Lemannian, has a human-non-human distinction. Still, some inanimates are treated as human nouns, especially nouns that are related to some human activity or that represent a human feature such as the word buro ("name"), bodi ("language"), or even usa ("wolf"), and also all derived nouns from them. Human nouns receive the accusative mark, different from non-human nouns that don't.

[@csolisr]

Something that goes a bit under the radar nowadays, is that modern English speakers would rather lose singular-plural concordance than animate-inanimate concordance. Otherwise, the singular It would have been expanded to include both animate and inanimate objects, and avoid the verbal discontinuities that come from the classic conjugation of the singular They.

[@ylgn9561]

5:07 Well second declension is wrong. Nominative singular would be: Masc-us, Fem-a, Neu-um etc.

[@THE_ONLY_REAL_WAFFLE]

Nice 👍

[@sameer1321]

Hi I’m late but thanks for the video, I want to add animacy to my language!

[@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410]

ayyy a feature focus

[@trentedan]

7:34 Ojibwe and Hittite are swapped in the chart. “Alpaš,” I believe is the Hittite, though I wouldn’t know. “Makizin,” I know is the Ojibwe, and should not have a long /í/ in any orthography or variety Im familiar with. The general pronunciation is typically /mə.,kɪ.’zɪn/, though sometimes gets closer to [,mkɪ.’zɪn], the first syllable being not-quite-prenasalized but feeling very squeezed into the second due to it being unstressed. Bit late, but hey… 🤷‍♂️😂

[@trentedan]

Oh, sources: My cherished copy of Valentine’s 2001 Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar, and having discussed Anishinaabemowin with a couple Ojibwe elders.

[@normal7877]

zīk is nominative in hittite though?!

[@salvadorsanchez5057]

im intrigued by how broad your research goes, both in these videos and in the alien biosphere ones. how do you do it? do you have a formal education on these subjects, do you use some special resource, or are you just that broadly knowledgeable where you know what to research exactly and where?

[@TheZetaKai]

According to his Q&A videos, he has a degree in biology, and has been interested in speculative biology for many more years than his conlanging passion.

[@cadr003]

A conlang video 🎉🎉🎉

[@aknightofislamicarabia5543]

How do you have such in-depth knowledge of linguistics? Did you major in it?

[@TheArmoredArchive]

Can you make a video about how to world build?

[@copyplanter]

I don't think that's his particular forte.

[@NcxX-c8f]

He’s thinking about it, but it won’t be until Alien Biospheres is done

[@downsidebrian]

If anyone ever asks what the difference is between the singular "they" and "it," this is the answer. "It" can only refer to non-animate nouns.

[@WannzKaswan]

what's crazy is that some people want to be called it/its , literally dehumanising himself

[@downsidebrian]

@@WannzKaswan I know some people like that. That's not for us to understand. We just need to respect it. If you're referring to a specific person, don't call it "him." It's an it, whether we understand or not.

[@mambu3630]

I don't really think this is correct. I've only ever seen the singular "they" being used to refer to human beings, not other animate beings.

[@downsidebrian]

@@mambu3630 he did explain animacy hierarchy in the video. So, in English, only nouns with a particularly high degree of animacy are referred to with the singular "they." And I know for a fact I've referred to non-humans with the singular they. Granted, they've mostly all been fictional or spiritual, but they're certainly real for the purposes of grammar.

[@mambu3630]

@@downsidebrian Yes, this statement I can get behind. It's much more correct to say that "they" implies a high degree of animacy. Your other comment seemed to imply that "they = animate" and "it = inanimate", which is why I disagreed. Also: yeah, the use of singular "they" among English speakers seems to be expanding by the day, so I wouldn't be surprised if the singular "they" becomes the pronoun of preference for all animate beings before long.

[@ajgibson1307]

God bless

[@starsky43]

There's all logical in Russian, all unliving things are inanimate, for example "труп" (corpse), and all living things are animate, for example "мертвец" (dead some).. oh stop what

[@otherperson]

Should this be an animacy hierarchy or an animacy spectrum? Seems like a spectrum but at the end you call it a hierarchy.

[@the_linguist_ll]

Grammatically it's often treated as a hierarchy in the ways it interacts with morphology and other aspects of grammar, conceptually you can think of it as a spectrum too

[@otherperson]

@@the_linguist_ll it seems in this video that differences between animacy and inanimacy lead to different grammatical rules, but that doesn't imply subordination of stones beneath humans for example. The only example (in the video) that I can see is animate nouns being placed first in a sentence before inanimate nouns. I think we as a society tend to see subordination and hierarchy wherever difference exists.

[@FieldLing639]

@@otherpersonThis has nothing to do with subservience, it's a hierarchy because of how it functions in a hierarchical nature.

[@otherperson]

@@FieldLing639 can you point me to the hierarchical nature?

[@FieldLing639]

@@otherperson Its realization depends on the language, but broadly: A morphological way it can show up is that the higher up a noun is on the animacy hierarchy, the more likely it may be to receive number marking. Humans may have mandatory number marking, animals may receive it most of the time, plants may have optional number marking, and objects might not take it at all. Again, the stages in the hierarchy, as well as their treatment may vary across languages, that's true for everything going forward as well. Syntactically, you may see languages where more animate nouns get promoted closer to the start of a sentence, or they receive more topic marking, or are more likely to be made the subject of a sentence, while things further down will be the object most of the time. Example of how this may work in a language demonstrating that this effect is hierarchical rather than binary between animate-inanimate: The man covered the rock, the man covered the horse (human is the highest on the hierarchy) The horse covered the rock, the man was covered by the horse (Horse is second, it becomes the object when a human is one of the referents) The man was covered by the rock, the horse was covered by the rock (objects are last, it's always the object when something higher on the hierarchy can be the subject)

[@GordonWrigley]

Short form video... yes please more of this please.

[@KarolOfGutovo]

The way PIE inanimate morphed into neuter gives some languages a weird situation where they have a gramatical gender that isn't masculine nor feminine, but nonbinary people who use it tend to sound like they are... dehumanising themselves ig? And it feels wrong to use that gender to describe a person to their face, as if I was insulting them. In polish a fourth gramatical gender has been introduced by a sci-fi writer and now it seems like it's on the rise to become actually used in everyday speech, so that's interesting.

[@kakahass8845]

In my language the neuter is the same as the masculine so this causes some very weird situations.

[@WannzKaswan]

cringe

[@ErisCalamitasButFR]

Ooo

[@viiizzaalishvili9967]

early for the first time

[@yellowgoblin8934]

When is the next alien biosphere video???

[@FieldLing639]

How long does it take you people to get that spamming this on every non biosphere video is stupid? I mean he literally made half of one of his biosphere videos explaining how it hurts him.

[@кира-ш4ъ]

Видео вышло в 21 час по Бишкекскому времени в 2 августа

[@DyslexicGamer]

Ha ha my brain hurts

[@dietben9309]

President of the United States of Yapmerica

[@bunk_foss]

Early.

[@XVYQ_EY]

Higher arky 💀

[@WannzKaswan]

Hello I am Plant

[@Eunakria]

cong lang

[@idle_speculation]

Day 2 of asking Biblaridion to cover sign language