zompist bboard

That's all well and good. But what if you want to use a pronoun? This is where personal pronouns come in, another trait of Irish. If you'll allow a quibble: I would call these inflected prepositions , since the conventional definition of personal pronouns makes them a feature of virtually every nat...

-Klaivas- wrote:It looks like Irish Gaelic is much easier than Scottish Gaelic (which I attempted to learn some time ago). I might have a go :)

I've fooled around with both and I remember the Scottish verbs as being much more analytic and, thus, easier for an English-speaker like me.

Now for an irregular verb Sin an bhean. Chonaic s? m?. ~ "That is the woman. She saw me." Sin an bhean. Chonaic m? ?. ~ "That is the woman. I saw her." Relativise to ... Sin an bhean a chonaic m?. ~ "That's the woman who saw me." Sin an bhean a bhfaca m? ?. ~ "That's the woman whom I saw." That's d...

Ydy 'meddai' yn amser conditional i'r unigol trydydd person? Ond beth berf yw fe yn saesneg? Mae hi'n ferf ddiffygiol, felly "quoth" yn Saesneg. 'Ocheneidio' restrir yn y ddau geiriadur ar-lein 'ma. Bues i'n cael holiadau i di yfory achos mae hi'n hwyrhau. "I have gotten questions to you tomorrow b...

Funkypudding wrote:Wouldn't it be bymp, what with <y> being /@/ on occasion and all?

Except that "pump" is pwmp, so bwmp works by analogy. Or you could go all hypernative and say cnwc.

I would be interested to see your examples of categories with morphological markers that are not compulsory. All nominal cases in Korean are this way. Also, some (e.g. subject, direct object) are incompatible with the topic marker ( n ) un whereas others take both particles. If I say Eddy nun cwuky...

But if a language has singular and plural as exponents of a grammatical category of number in nouns, no noun is a "better" representative of singular or plural than any other noun, and no noun can escape being categorized for number. It's all 0s and 1s. Is it? I would think that the prototypical ca...

When I starting learning Chinese, I had difficulty learning the use shang4 "above" and xia4 "below" to mean, respectively "last" and "next" with regard to time (e.g. shang4ci4 "last time", xia4xing1qi2 "next week"). I've never thought of this as oddness, or particulary difficult to imagine a reason...

Interestingly enough, something similar exists in colloquial Greek: you can use the words /parak?to/ (= further down) and /parap?no/ (= further up) with days/words denoting time: /tin parak?to Tr?ti/ (next Tuesday). Nevertheless, you can't use these words with terms mening 'morning', 'evening', or ...

When I starting learning Chinese, I had difficulty learning the use shang4 "above" and xia4 "below" to mean, respectively "last" and "next" with regard to time (e.g. shang4ci4 "last time", xia4xing1qi2 "next week"). Because we don't really use a vertical orientation of the TIME=SPACE metaphor in Eng...

In most of the turkic world, ak means both 'white' and 'south' (cf. Ak deniz), and kara means both 'black' and 'north' (Kara deniz). Black has of course negative connotations, whereas south is considered a good thing since that's where good news come from. I think it's more fundamental than that. I...

And, of course, there's the english "To Go West" meaning "To Die", which I've found ascirbed to a Native American folktale, a thirteenth-century poem, and 19th century English thieve's cant, relating it to hangings at Tyneburn Prison. Odd you should mention that. There's a popular Breton idiom roe?...

Per cert linguoboy, d'on ets tu? Vaig n?ixer a Baltimore (com el meu pare) i m'he criat en St. Louis (com la meva mare), tot i que ara visc a Xicago (com el meu germ?). Els meus avantpassats s?n en major part d'Alemanya. Les faltes que he fet s?n est?pides, per? no entenc perqu? cal dir ben en lloc...

S?, estem d'acord. Pel que fa a que els que no parlen catal? amb els catalans... b?, qu? vols que et digui... ells s'ho perden! El problema ser? per a ells quan el nostre pa?s recuperi la independ?ncia i els nostres fills no aprenguin castell? a les escoles. Aleshores s? que es veuran empesos a par...

Les meves dues ?vies per?, van ser filles de la primera immigraci? espanyola que va tenir Catalunya (tot i que elles van ser nascudes a Catalunya). Aquella immigraci? va ser gradual i menys nombrosa, i malgrat els seus pares no parlessin el catal?, elles dues s?. D'on van venir llurs pares? Foren d...

I've also heard that some English creoles/dialects etc. do have a "double negation"; is this true? Plenty, but it's generally considered to be incorrect or a sign of uneducated speech. The same is true for colloquial German, e.g. keine Lust auf nichts "no interest in nothing," although I think doub...

Diogenes wrote:One from German, at last:

What do you mean "at last"? It's at least the second!

yes, another one of those threads. i probably sound like a broken record player. what are some interesting things encoded in motion verbs besides path and method, and among the aforementioned, what are some interesting paths and methods encoded? When you say "path", are you including such things as...

gsandi wrote:/*As has been pointed out, the far eastern languages just count months. In Japanese, it's ichigatsu (1-month), nigatsu (2-month) and so on.

D'OH! Wrong on-yomi in my post. I'll go take care of that now.

Can someone complete this list?? I know some language like Japanese or Chinese have other systems too but it's just too much, I've limited my search to Europe and some little part of Asia.... We can also start to speak about it, and try to compare/explain etymologies etc etc. I think it can be inte...

Turtlehead wrote:Well?

I'm sure if anyone would like to send donations to compensate Dewrad for the time away from renumerative activity that he spends on crafting these lessons, he'd be more than happy to accept them.

/"mE:@n"Ept@"k_hle:/?
/"Ept@"mE:@n"ni:"k_hle: "Ept@"be:tn=/

Name the dialect and give the translation into Standard English.

The words for island (?) and river (?) were present in Old English, and if they had survived to modern English, I think both of them would have merged as /i:/. Not quite. The former (OE ieγ ) consitutes the first element in modern island , now pronounced /aj/. The later (OE ea ) would indeed have b...

Dutch is alot like German, but with some quirky spelling and some franch/nordic influences (like "het" for "it", which probably comes from "det" in swedish/norsk/dansk) Doubt it, given that hit is attested in 9th century Anglo-Saxon. Most likely it's German that's the odd man out on this. "Hit" eve...

So we have words like 'jatten' (hands, to steal, from Hebrew 'jad'), 'mazzel' (luck, also commonly used in greetings by young people, as in 'de mazzel') and 'temeier' (prostitute, from Hebrew 'temea', unclean). I don't know any of those, except mazel appears in compounds like shlimazzel / Schlimmas...