zompist bboard

I suspect it's a Uralic substrate influence that it has gained so much ground in Russian, displacing иметь. Finnish also employs a 'circumlocution' of this kind. Which doesn't mean it can't have existed as an option in Common Slavic.

There are certain English verbs which end in the infinitive in what could be described as a syllabic consonant, at least in some dialects, and has also frequently been transcribed as a schwa + sonorant sequence, e.g. sparkle, babble etc. Now I'm fairly sure I hear gerund or active participle forms w...

If everything fails, send me your email address and I'll send it there. Both links are now working just fine and dandy for me, though. You have to click "Pobierz plik" in the second one.

In Welsh it can have either impersonal or habitual meaning, although in most dialects a separate form of 'to be' (the habitual/future) is used, so that might not count. I understand these are the basic or only meanings? I'm not looking just for a present tense. Thanks everyone for the examples so f...

hwhatting wrote:

Xiądz Faust wrote: Try another link, for some reason my website has gone down.

You have that file in another place as well? Or which other link can I try?

I've edited that post.

hwhatting wrote: Thanks for putting that up, but I get a gateway time-out and neither can open the file nor download it.

Try another link, for some reason my website has gone down.

Common Slavic > Polish My primary sources are Gramatyka historyczna języka polskiego by Klemensewicz et al. and GHJP (same title) by Dubisz and Długosz-Kurczabowa. link or maybe this will work you can ask me by PM about various details if it is still too chaotic for your particular needs, I don't ha...

zompist wrote: Medieval Latin is simply pronounced following the local language (so there are a bunch of pronunciation standards).

Hmmm... The kind of Latin used in medieval Poland had <g> pronounced as [j] before a front vowel. Is this based on any vernacular language at all? (certainly not on Old Polish)

Why aren't you asking on lingvoforum?

brandrinn wrote:How is it Yiuel hasn't been here yet?
Japanese combines "already" and "anymore" in "mo:"
Likewise, "yet" and "still" are combined in "mada"

This sounds similar to the Polish or Russian system (except that interrogative yet as in Have you done it yet? belongs to the former).

Are there any languages, where a construction to be + an impersonal verb form (participle, gerund, verbal noun or such) connotes a habitual or generic meaning (i.e. the opposite of what English does)?

Oh, I only vaguely remember it was probably something Caucasian (Dagestanian?), I can't find it anymore. In RMW Dixon's Ergativity there's a passage which reads "Discussing the North-east Caucasian language Archi (...) there are four auxiliary type verbs ('with the aspectual meanings durative/termin...

Certain languages reportedly have auxilliary verbs to encode the old state/new state ( ~ still/already) distinction. Maybe it's not the most realistic solution in case of central Europe, though.

I readily distinguish between these: Me too: Szpilki, pinezki, agrafki, igły. Is there a single hypernym which embraces these four terms? (In my English, the first three are "pins" but the fourth is a "needle" and I can't readily find a broader term more precise or conventionalised than "pointy thi...

Polish does (they are used in the inflection of certain foreign names, e.g. Rabelais, gen. Rabelais'go, Clarke, gen. Clarke'a). They are also misused probably as often as in English. The issue here was using apostrophes to mark palatalization, not apostrophes for other uses. If were were talking ab...

Slavic languages can be represented in both Cyrillic and Roman. Russian that is written in Roman is still Russian - the actual language doesn't change, only the writing system changes - so apostraphes are still used in this language and most likely in other Slavic languages as well. Show me a Russi...

Ulrike Meinhof wrote:I readily distinguish between these:

Me too:

Szpilki, pinezki, agrafki, igły.

some, in case of, as, seem

I often find myself trying to replace "use" with something, too...

As for Polish, nothing is coming to my mind ATM.

I forgot about a possible parallel phenomenon: the 1sg personal pronoun has/has had a longer form ~ (j)az and a shorter form ~ ja across the Slavic-speaking territory (the latter clearly dominating nowadays).

I have yet to see a convincing explanation for the tь~tъ~∅ variation in the 3rd person present suffix. AFAIK it only happens in verbs - including former verbs (I've seen the word for 'no' explained as a reflex of *něstъ < *ne estъ "[there] is not", though apparently Vasmer proposes something else, f...

Isn't Sumerican what those Mormon lost tribes used to speak?

The usual term in Polish is język sztuczny "language artificial", and there's the English loan conlang (or as some prefer to write, konlang ) but I think at the moment it's very much a jargon term used inside the conlanging community. People have tried to come up with a single-word native equivalent...

Well, there is a difference in meaning, I don't know if they're ever interchangeable in Russian - I've just found such a page: http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/for.html According to Vasmer для is a shortened form of ORu. дѣлꙗ, from Common Slavic *dělja (similarly, modern Polish has dla , wh...

Navajo does sth similar, but adding animacy, which determines the order of arguments (and it's called direct-inverse).

So you say он был его брат but он был учеником? I've never heard about that before, thought it's the nominative without a copula and the instrumental with a copula. How is it defined exactly?