Smelling underarms in Apali
We've had a new submission for Goodies from Grammar Reading - a series of blog posts with interesting, fun or in other ways noteworthy utterances found while reading linguistic description ( blogger posts here , old posts on tumblr here ). This one was noted by Siva Kalyan during Don Daniels' talk at the annual meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS 2015 in Western Sydney University). The example is taken from a collection of texts in Apalɨ by Martha Wade (Wade n.d.) and serves to illustrate the way this language encodes imperatives. The codes for this language are: ena and apal1256 . Original text : Vac-ɨna huji hisi sɨmɨl-ɨlɨŋ u-avɨ-la-lɨ. Glossing : move.aside- 2sg.ds underarm rotten smell- 1sg.imp say- pl-hab-3 Translation: ‘ “Move aside and let me smell your underarm,” they say.’ As utterances out of context goes, this...