This site popped up as a link on one of the blogs that I follow.

http://mypage.iu.edu/~shetter/miniatures/eviden.htm

I thought I'd ask the learned people here if there is anything in the assertion

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You might like to hear that there are many languages around the world that do just that. In other words, in these languages you can't say something like "he stole" grammatically without adding some element that specifies the information's source and reliability.

It seems an unlikely linguistic development to me but I suppose anything is possible.

I've no idea, but the assertation that there are many languages around the world isn't backed up as the author then goes on to say "This grammatical concept is so widespread among the Native American languages that we can make a brief survey without leaving North America."

Although the construct may well exist in other areas of the world, I'd have thought that mention of some non-native American languages would have been made.

If this article on Wintu is to be believed, there might be something to it.

Since language is only a means of exchanging thoughts and concepts with others, and since thoughts and concepts are limited only by the powers and imagination of the human brain, it does not surprise me at all that these kinds of idiosyncrasies exist.

I'm not surprised at the possible existence of the extended forms but it would surprise me if the assertion that there is no base form turned out to be true, no way to express "he stole it" without adding information about the provenance of the statement.

Very interesting, Bob. What I find rather unbelievable is that he says none of those North American languages that he cited, and he cited quite a few, are related. He says

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The Americas contain a complex array of language families. The reason why this Miniature multiplied examples at such length was so that we can now say: no two of the languages mentioned here belong to the same family. In other words ALL of them are genetically unrelated to each other.

I am not sure how to check that out, though.

If that's the case it suggests many migrations at different times, whereas I've only heard of two major ones - across the Bering Strait and down the coast by boat. I suspect there must also have been migrations from what's now Europe that haven't been mentioned.

Of the languages mentioned in this article, most of them are unrelated to each other: Pawnee, Koasati, Makah, Central Pomo. Only Coos and Wintu are related.

Other areas have a similar linguistic diversity, for instance South America, Papua New Guinea and Australia.

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Only Coos and Wintu are related.

Well, the article said that none of them were related.

It seems an unlikely linguistic development to me but I suppose anything is possible.

This is called mood or sometimes modality in linguistics (link).

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In linguistics, modals are expressions broadly associated with notions of possibility and necessity. Modals have a wide variety of interpretations which depend not only upon the particular modal used, but also upon where the modal occurs in a sentence, the meaning of the sentence independent of the modal, the conversational context, and a variety of other factors. For example, the interpretation of an English sentence containing the modal 'must' can be that of a statement of inference or knowledge (roughly, epistemic) or a statement of how something ought to be (roughly, deontic).

Languages express modality in differenmt ways (link).

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Modality is expressed in different ways by different languages. Modality can be expressed via grammaticized elements such as auxiliary verbs or verb endings, via indirect means such as a preposition phrase or a clause, or in other ways, such as via adverbs.

When reading the article Bob linked to, I was trying to figure out just what was the author's point. People value certain features of some languages. And deprecate others. So, the linguistic fact that Russian, Latin, and Chinese do not have definite articles is weird or wonderful. It's a short step from that down the slippery slope of the Inuit have X words for snow and just what that means.

I was aware that some of the languages of indigenous peoples in North America have a grammatical category, usually expressed in verbal morphology, thathas something to do with epistemic modality, i.e., the speaker's knowledge about the veracity (and/or origin) of certain statements. English (and some other Germanic languages do this with modal verbs. The fact that a certain feature is obligatory is certainly linguistically pertinent, but I'm not sure what to conclude about a language or its speakers from it.

There's a good book by F R Palmer called Mood and Modality, which should be available online from used book stores or at a good university or large public library. (It's in the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series.)

The author is correct that North America contains (or sadly contained) a huge number of language families (some estimates for California are in the teens to twenties). I know this because one of the first linguistics course I took was a survey of North American Indian languages from the late professor Mary Haas (link). A language family would be a set of languages that are genetically (linguistically) related to one another, but not to others in the area. Example for Europe: There are at least four language families I know of in Europe: Indo-European (for most of Europe), Basque (a language isolate, i.e., a language family with one known member), Finn-Ugric (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian), and Turkish (Altaic).

As I mentioned in a subsequent post, what seemed unlikely to me was that there wouldn't be a way to express the bare statement without reference to the veracity of the statement. It seems to me to be just another variant of "language X has no way to express concept Y", which always makes me wonder.

what seemed unlikely to me was that there wouldn't be a way to express the bare statement without reference to the veracity of the statement

True. It may simply be that to conjugate in a verb in one of these languages, modality is not optional. Seems that way in English and most other languages I am familiar with. The rub is that language X's default modality is not language Y's. What that means is anybody's guess.

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Originally posted by zmježd:
Example for Europe: There are at least four language families I know of in Europe: Indo-European (for most of Europe), Basque (a language isolate, i.e., a language family with one known member), Finn-Ugric (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian), and Turkish (Altaic).

Semitic (Maltese) as well.

Semitic (Maltese) as well.

Yes, the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet.