zompist bboard

English is very poor in pronouns. "I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they"... There should be a plural "you". In many dialects, there is. If you were learning American English, you could pick up "y'all". Just a note: I'm far from representative, but I don't think I've ever actually heard anybody say "y...

As I understand it, common double negation in English developed into the modern system when the negative particle preceding the verb was dropped. "ic ne cann nawuht seon" = "I cannot see no thing" = "I can't see" (with "nawuht" < "ne-a:-wiht" ("no"-"thing") being more like "at all") And then the "ne...

2) I do not fully understand this question. You are asking why "word" is present and "werd" past? If so, I don't know the answer. But somehow I think you mean something slightly different. You have the question correct. In German, the present is "werd-" and the past is "ward-" or "wurde-". But in D...

Where did "jullie" come from? Middle Dutch je 'you' + lie(den) 'people'. je itself was a dialectal/colloquial form of the 2nd person plural personal pronoun, longer form jij . Clearly related to older English ye . (Source: B.C. Donaldson: Dutch - A linguistic history of Holland and Belgium , p.171)...

Where did "jullie" come from?

The Tundrian words are borrowings from a Germanic (probably Old English) source, as in any western Romance language: nord ?st sud huest The hu- in the last form is just an orthographic convention for initial w- , a sound that could have been difficult to write in the Middle Ages, seeing that <w> wa...

Old English: Past participles used with h?bban sometimes show what may be object marking: "ic h?bbe ?one mann geseonne". Some really cool Verner's Law forms were analogized out: "findan - fand - fundon - (ge)funden" instead of "fi:?an - fo:? - fundon - (ge)funden" (which would have led to "fithe - f...

The sound change of /e/ > /o/ or /u/ following a /w/, a very old one, still hasn't affected all possible words. So I have "woman" [wUm@n] and "twenty" [twUni], but "women" [wImIn] and "went" [wInt]. Excuse me, please, if I am confused, but is this an answer to my question? I think, that it's quite ...

Can you give some examples of sound changes that affect only common words in any natlang? The general experience of historical linguists is simply that sound changes make no reference to commonness of words, or to syntactic categories. It doesn't mean it's impossible, but it does mean that any such...

The sound change of /e/ > /o/ or /u/ following a /w/, a very old one, still hasn't affected all possible words. So I have "woman" [wUm@n] and "twenty" [twUni], but "women" [wImIn] and "went" [wInt].

Grammatical categories are a somewhat artificial concept; we don't "know" right from the beginning that there are such things as "nouns" and "verbs", we know these things because we learnt them from linguists. So it's not very natural for one to be "conscious" of word classes. My guess is, if a sou...

Some Germanic sound changes From IE to common Germanic: Consonants bh, dh, gh > B, D, G b, d, g > p, t, k p, t, k > f, T, x > B, D, G (except initially or following IE stress, in which case they remained f, T, x) s > z (except initially or following IE stress) i/j > j after short vowel plus consonan...

Consider examples in English like "reseed" and "recede". I would imagine context is more than good enough to handle such a problem.