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I have a couple questions about "or". Do you guys know if there are languages without a nice, short, one morpheme-long equivalent of non-interrogative "or" (as in "I am always [either] here or there")? Yes. The following is from Martin Haspelmath (Ed.) "Coordinating Constructions", from the initial...

I think that's the first time I've encountered the idea that it isn't a completely common word. I guess I don't use it every day, but... every month? Would be much more if I more frequently encountered situations to use it in (doesn't help that I only have one sibling myself, so the utility of the ...

Swedish may have a cover term for uncles and aunts: föräldrasyskon . It's not a common word, but I did find some uses of it (including in a Wikipedia article) and it basically fits within the Swedish system of kinship terms. Swedish uses a productive system of forming complex kinship terms through c...

As Sumelic mentioned above, R.M.W. Dixon does indeed make the claim that all languages have at least one class of adjectives. The class or classes may be very small and closed, or large and open. The "core semantic types" associated with adjectives, according to Dixon, are: dimension, age, value and...

In German, a similar distribution exists between the suffixes -en and -ung : das Halten 'the act of holding' - die Haltung 'the attitude' das Laden 'the act of loading/charging' - die Ladung 'the load/charge' Just for clarification - while the nominalized infinitive in -en normally only indicates t...

The distinction you're describing might be a Norwegian innovation, actually. Interesting stuff, thanks. I'd noticed that Swedish would sometimes have -ning where -ing would be required (semantically speaking) for the Norwegian counterpart word, but I did think Swedish had the same formal distinctio...

In North Germanic some verbal nouns are formed with the suffix -ning(ur) instead of the normal -ing(ur) to indicate the outcome instead of the process. I believe this is a North Germanic innovation that originated with verbs whose stems already end in -n. Examples in Norwegian: bygging - the act of...

Haspelmath has a thing or two to say about conjunction cross-linguistically. Note that conjunction (with conjunctions and conjuncts) in his terminology specifically refers to conjunctive coordination (A and B). He uses coordination (with coordinators and coordinands) as the more general term, which ...

Maybe the history of the passive matters. I would guess that deponent verbs are more common in languages where the passive voice evolved from an earlier reflexive/middle voice, and less common in languages where it is formed by a periphrastic construction with a participle. Deponent verbs seem to re...

If it's pre-PG, does that mean it can be found in Baltic and Slavic as well? Calling the change Pre-PG was to provide chronological information more than anything else. Pre-PG usually, I think, refers to the stage of the Germanic parent language after it split from other branches of IE (with which ...

Also, if anyone has a good source on Proto-Germanic, is there anything on the source of the /*-t/ in the dual nominatives? It appears that an uninflected numeral two was suffixed to the older dual pronouns. So *wé-dwo > *wet and *yú-dwo > *jut. Similar developments are found in Lithuanian mùdu (m),...

Palatalized and dorso-palatal sounds are naturally followed by a short [j]-like glide when they are followed by a vowel other than , due to the fact that the back of the tongue is around the [j]-position during the articulation of the consonant and then has to move to the place of the vowel. So it's...

Do you happen to have an example handy from Huallaga Quechua? In Ayacuchano and Cuzequeño, the only double case marking I know of is after the genitive, e.g. tayta-pa-pi father-gen + loc at my father's That example looks very much like the type of hypostasis formation discussed above, which involve...

Ah, I hadn't noticed that it was the same author. His use of quotations makes me a little wary, but otherwise okay: you've convinced me that "surdeclinaison" is a real linguistics term (especially since that book is more recent than Double Case ). It appears to be an established term at least in va...

Yes, I also have that book-- it's where I initially found mention of "Suffixhäufung". But whether you call what Basque has Suffixhäufung or Suffixaufnahme, my point is that "surdeclinaison" seems to be hardly used in English-language publications. The way I understand the book, I don't think either...

That post is also by the same Christophe guy, who seems to be an engineer and not a professional linguist. I know it's the same guy, I just used his last name because it seemed more polite than calling him "the Christophe guy". Just because he says it doesn't make it true-- and he seems to be the o...

If I've understood this correctly, the biggest difference between prototypical suffixaufnahme of say Old Georgian and the surdéclinaison of Basque seems to be that with suffixaufnahme, the modifier agrees with the head in case (and/or some other category), whereas with surdéclinaison, the modifier t...

Castilian and various other dialects of Spanish distinguish /j/ from /ʝ/; Do they really contrast [j] and [ʝ] in the same environment? I don't speak Spanish so I'm actually curious to know, but reading on Wikipedia, I got the impression that /ʝ/ and /j/ have a different distribution. The only place...

I wonder how this relates to some other proposed correspondences of Hittite s , Luwian t and Non-Anatolian 0 . From this article: https://www.academia.edu/18952423/Proto-Indo-European-Uralic_comparison_from_the_probabilistic_point_of_view (p. 315) "An additional IE fricative *θ should probably be re...

Was it Proto-Norse or Old Icelandic that went through a phase of no /o/? Proto-Germanic lacked short *o, since earlier *o and *a merged as PG *a. But Proto-Norse (and Northwest Germanic in general) developed a new *o from a-umlaut of *u. There is a lot of variation, though. Generally, West Norse ha...

A serious theory I've seen along these lines (though I do not have a reference offhand, sorry) similarly accepts only three main components of vowel timbre: I, A and U. However, instead of assigning values for each separately, it ends up positing that a vowel can have one or more secondary timbre i...

After, all writing tones but not vowels is not, I believe, something that has happened in human writing systems. Presumably no language with an abjad has undergone tonogenesis in the East Asian manner, where some consonants turned into tones.. Punjabi, perhaps? It lost the Indo-Aryan breathy voiced...

English is (still) a West Germanic language, says George Walkden and Kristin Bech in response to Faarlund and Emonds:
https://www.academia.edu/16943599/Engli ... c_language

There are many semantic triplets where you have: 1. A stative meaning ‘to be X’ or ‘be in the state of Xing’ 2. An inchoative meaning ‘to become X’ or ‘to enter into the state of Xing’ 3. A causal meaning ‘to cause someone to be X’ (or alternatively ‘to cause someone to become X’) Triplets include (...

I think teach–learn is a causative–anticausative pair. teach = cause someone to learn (or alternatively, cause someone to know) I think it's common in languages to have teach be a causative-derivation of either a verb meaning learn or one meaning know . Alternatively, teach may be the primary form a...