zompist bboard

I have heard lots of people claiming that English is descended from Latin. That would make it a Romance language. [r̼:] ENGLISH IS WEST GERMANIC, PEOPLE! It drives me insane how ignorant people are. This is one of my biggest pet peeves. People do this all the time. "My teacher said German is from L...

The two big voices, that you didn't mention, are applicative and causative. Also the middle voice (seen, at the very least, in a number of IE languages), which is a valency-decreasing operation in which the patient is promoted to subject and the agent is completely eliminated, and is present in Eng...

Viktor77 wrote:Man, I feel ashamed that the answer was so easy to find. My apologies for wasting your time.

To be fair, part of the problem is that infinitives are still often taught to always be "to" + a verb, which was never accurate to begin with, seeing as English has always had lots of bare infinitives.

This is to-less infinitive, not what you wrote. I've always found it a bit weird that verbs in English supposedly have "to" to mark the infinitive. And actually that's a pretty rare construction. I'm more tempted to analyse "want to" or "cause to" (or "tempted to") as a single unit rather than the ...

1) This thread's title makes no sense. "Infinitive-less to"? You mean a "to" that occurs without an infinitive? Yeah, that happens all the time. 2) "to x" is not an infinitive, it is the particle "to" plus an infinitive. In "to read", you have a particle "to" plus an infinitive "read". It's just tha...

I know the Turkish case endings but that doesn't mean I can understand Turkish. I mean that a speaker of a Slavic language other than Bulgarian or Macedonian would be additionally aided in ineligibility by a knowledge of recognised case-endings for nouns. Since Bulgarian lacks case, it lacks those ...

Yeniseian languages are supposedly quite horrible in their verbal morphology, with so many strata of thematic extensions, fossilized derivativ suffixes, incorporated objects, preverbal particles etc. that some of them have spontaneously reanalyzed the morphology as suffixing rather than prefixing. ...

The problem with your question is that a language can make the distinction between alienable and inalienable, yet not exactly put the two on equal footing. It's not like every language would have to have two sets of possessive affixes. For instance, Proto-Yeniseian is sometimes believed to have had ...

I don't really know if this was the case in PIE or not, but it could also be that the different conjugations (ie, different thematic vowels) actually had different meanings. Look at Slavic languages, were -i- verbs are prototypically causatives, -ě- verbs are statives or transformatives, and -a- ver...

As a Russian speaker... Ukrainian: Written Ukrainian is quite easy for me to understand. The hardest part is really just dealing with some Polonisms and native coinages where Russian uses Slavonicisms, though in written text those are usually not too tricky to figure out based on context. A couple U...

I can't make heads or tails of it, either, I haven't found an entry for it in the Serbo-Croatian etymological dictionary I once downloaded, and yes, apparently it means "also". In addition, it has an alternative form такођер. What's interesting is that by googling you can find numerous instances of...

It's an emphatic particle, one of many particles used in Russian. It's not really possible to provide a simple translation when dealing with a language that has no equivalent. Books have been written about how these types of particles are used. The two examples Gray Richardson provided sound good to...

Yeah, the distinction you're describing is definitely /ʌl/ vs /ʊl/ for me. No schwa involved.



(Though since I have very strong schwa-fronting, my /ə/ and /ʌ/ don't sound alike at all; if anything it's my /ə/ and /ɪ/ that merge everywhere except word-finally)

I don't know how that would be possible. Can speakers even begin to speak with each other without deictic pronouns (you/ I for example)? Mecislau thinks avoiding personal pronouns is possible (even if avoiding personal pronouns sounds rather tiring after a while), but other pronouns can be much tri...

I doubt humans started with "this and that" and like most grammatical things it started from somewhere but my question is where does it come from exacly? Definite articles usually come from them which can render one of them useless (since it is now taking definite form and not deixis) so where woul...

Viktor77 wrote:I don't know where Renacido gets off saying X de X is productive, especially versus XX.

You... don't know what "productive" means in linguistics, I take it.

It could also be a matter of what splits such a tree should be recording - how long has the North Slavic dialect continuum been dead? Note that Lusatian is shown as splitting off from the languages of the North Slavic continuum. As Frisian has remained part of the West Germanic continuum and Englis...

Sorry for the lack of response... I've had a busy week. It's not the only exception - there's the apocopation of the jussives and imperfective consecutives of the lamedh he verbs. Sometimes a segholate form results, but not always. Do you have some examples? The loss of final -i could be fairly late...

Also, PIE did not have M/N/F. At least not early on.


Early PIE is believed to have had an animacy-based system. Late PIE had developed this into a M/N/F system.

Let me just start by saying that everything I wrote in that thread is several years old, from back when I was really just beginning to study comparative Semitic linguistics (informally). I'm certain there are plenty of mistakes, and I didn't intend it to be any sort of formal exposition. If I had my...

There was a thread on this a few weeks ago where most of the people gave disappointing answers, essentially saying that tones don't tend to leave anything behind. I can't seem to find that thread, so presumably it was on C&C Quickies. Maybe someone will have more ideas this time around. Oh, really?...

So I've seen plenty of information about tonogenesis, how tones can arise from the loss of various consonants or by the bleeding effect of things like voicing of nearby consonants. But what sorts of things can happen when tones are lost? My personal knowledge is really limited to Slavic, where the e...

Someone with *waaaaaaaaaaaay* too much time on their hands built a working 16-bit ALU (an arithmetic logic unit) inside a computer game, with plans to add RAM and a working compiler.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGkkyKZVzug

No, I don't. Rather, I just do actual phonetic transcription , as opposed to doing what most people do, which is a mish-mash of marking phonemic and phonetic features. Conversely, when I mark historical phonemes, I mark historical phonemes , and I do not confuse synchronic realizations with them. M...

I just did some comparison of genitive plural forms of nouns ending in -ня: спальня - спален башня - башен басня - басен песня - песен But then there's кухня - кухон ь I wonder if there's a rule for this, or if кухня is just irregular. Off of the top of my head I can't think of other words ending i...