zompist bboard

This is my attempt. At some points I had to give up, at some other points I wish I was doing this translation in Greek --it would have been better. :) Anyway, here it is: Jenő Rejtő Dirty Fred, the Captain Chapter 1 1 -Sir! I came for my knife! -Where did you leave it? -In a sailor. -What kind of a ...

Well, 20 days later (shame on me :oops: ), here are just a few words I can't understand, although I've already looked them up: csapos=? kocsmáros = the owner of a kocsma? And what is he doing on a ship? kivegyem ( < kivesz 'take out' ?) leszorítya <...? And finally, vágtak comes from vág 'cut/slaugh...

I'm so happy, I think I'm gonna cry! LOL

Cathbad, this is a great therad. Could I ask you for one little thing? After you're finished with the Grammar, please post some things about onomastics, that' d be great!

Should diminutives convey size, affection, scale, shortened duration, etc. as in Romance languages? Or do you want to eliminate one or two of these from your diminutive, split these among two or three different affixes, or add additional semantic distinctions beyond what is found in Romance languag...

Piero Lo Monaco wrote: Right. Who will have the nerve to contradict the Bible?

HEY! The Lord Himself blessed Beer. It was an ancient Basque drink afterall!

PS. I will come over Il CORSO D'ITALIANO e' molto interessante

People often suppose that the dialect of the capital city (or whatever other place has supplied the standard language) is more 'pure' or more conservative than provincial speech. In fact the opposite is likely to be true: the active center of a culture will see its speech change fastest; rural or i...

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 En...

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.

...Also, question: You say that Romanian /1/ came from: a > 1 / _N (if N ≠ nn, mm). But, Metaforik says the Romanian orthography represents the etymology: < ? > came from Latin /a/, while < ? > came from Latin /i/. You give the rules for a > ?, but then where did the ? come from? Sorry to jump in, ...

After a tornado of "how-do-you-pronounce-this-word" threads, I can say that I find this thread much more interesting. And btw, izopiru, are there any descent catalan grammars on the internet?

Nikura and Piero, this phrase was engineerred by Italo Calvino (1988). Go and correct him.

In Italian one could say "L' ale li l'ho, Lou! (pronounced like /lale li lo lu/): "I've got the feathers there, Lou!" (not a useful phrase, but it certainly is fitting here)

I'll just add a few things to Hlewagastiz's Romanian etymologies:
cuptor (< lat. *coctorium) is colloquial for 'extreme heat, heatwave'.
secerar (<lat. sicilare), similar to pop. Greek θεριστής. (secer@ = sickle)
frunz@ < lat. frondia <frons, -ndis

btw, these romanian month-names are not used in everyday speech, since they're dialectal, provincialisms, and folk names. They're correct, but this kind of 'parallel'-names exists in almost every language in the world.

[quote="Hlewagastiz"]Modern Greek speakers say /'mila/ = apples; speak! (imperative); they also say /'miλa/ = miles (I know, the "λ" should be reversed... In any case, it stands here for a palatalized version of /l/). Those lexemes are respectively written "μήλα" (or "μίλα!") and "μίλια"./quote] Sin...

the only word i could think of is romanian lalelele (the tulips).

As far as i know, slavomacedonian (*) is considered by many as a bulgarian dialect. Personally, I don't wish to get into the language vs. dialect debate, so I'll just say that slavomacedonian is a language very close to bulgarian with many innovative tendencies. ----------------------- (*) I'm using...

blackhand wrote:

1. "It [i.e. PIE] may not have had a passive, but it did have a middle..."

2. "But if you say that they had them at the beginning, isn't this one of those things that can't be proved?"

ANSWER: so, PIE had a middle voice, or is this one of the things that can't be proved?

Response to Echobeats sorry it took me 24 hrs to respond, but it is easter holiday in greece, so i prefer to drink some beers than type :) As for the first 2 points, i don't have something to say, i believe we're saying the same things. As for the passive thing: I still claim that SOV languages didn...

before I do that, wouldn't it be nicer if you gave an answer to my answers? (the old action-reaction pattern, you know )

1. Inflexional affixes (i.e. suffixes) are placed after the verb stem: STEM+AFFIX (affixes may be about person/number, tense/aspect, or other functions). Auxiliary verbs are usually postpositioned, as in turkish: yardIm ediyorum HELP AUX. ("I help") 2. Although the term genitive has a broader meanin...

1. Echobeats wrote that "If it [i.e. turkish Ki ] is widely used in everyday speech, it's a part of the language". Of course it is; but it is a relatively new pattern that has nothing to do with native turkish [i.e. SOV] syntactic patterns stock. (In fact, ki is usually omitted in everyday speach --...

Echobeats wrote: "People sometimes claim that Turkish has no complementisers, but that isn't true: although ki "that" is a borrowing from Persian, they use it all the time. " One objection. Turkish 'ki' does not mean that Turkish has complementisers; 'Ki' is widely used in everyday speach, but not ...

Miekko wrote: "I didn't quite understand this one [i.e that SVO lang's use conjunctions to introduce complements and SOV langs may use nouns instead]. Could you explain or provide examples?" I had in mind that english or french will normally use a conjunction (like that ) in order to introduce an o...