Linguists are known for making questionable sentences, especially about hitting children or dogs. The cause of this is mostly practical, though, since the word for “hit”, “punch”, or “kill” are invariably transitive in many languages (I have not yet read up on a language where a is strictly intransitive—in opposition to transitive verbs, so don’t count Lushootseed in this)

But, I would like to have a weekly thing where I will write about weird/questionable glosses that I stumble around. I will try to be consistent with this, but I’m not a very

This, would be in part inspired by the blog readingglosses.com where it’s not explicitly about weird glosses, but sentences like these would be up my alley of what I will post for this blog series.

Anyway, without much rambling, here’s the first sentence, taken from Pharris, Nicholas. 2006. Winuunsi Tm Talapaas: A Grammar of the Molalla Language.

Again, out of context this is hilarious (Though, do keep in mind that public indecency is a crime!), but you’d expect that it would be less weird when you learn about it in context.

But no, Molalla has shape classifiers that highlight the shape of the absolutive argument of the clause that it’s in. There are a couple of expected classifiers such as soft/long objects, but an interesting thing is that the shape classifiers do include “shaman” and “penis”. These overly-specific classifiers seem to be shared with some Pomoan languages, which do have a classifier for action done by gambling(!) cf. Mithun (2014) about it, it’s a good paper on linguistic genders and society.

Best, N.