zompist bboard

Yes, a Google search seems to indicate so. We have 'bolleboos' as well by the way, from the same Yiddish word, meaning 'smart person'. Excellent! I'm going to have to use that next chance I get. I wonder how much Yiddish vocabulary is common to Dutch, German, and English. For instance, the latter t...

bollebof (from the Jiddisch apparently, meaning 'boss'. Cool word.) Sure about the f ? The American English version is balebos , from the Yiddish pronunciation of Hebrew ba?al ha-bayith "master [of] the house". (Incidentally, this has the purely and unmistakably Yiddish feminine form baleboste .)

MUBA wrote:Isn't that what is called ablaut? Or am I completely wrong here?

Completely. Hopefully, this Wikipedia article should help clarify matters.

To me, umlaut is the "-diacritic.

It can be that, but that is not its only--or, indeed, even its primary--meaning.

How's your historical linguistics? zhenlin had some questions about i-umlaut and while I remember that it works differently in Dutch and German, I can't remember exactly how differently. Dutch has no i-umlaut. Yes, it does; all West Germanic languages do. "Umlaut" is the name for both a kind of pho...

How's your historical linguistics? zhenlin had some questions about i-umlaut and while I remember that it works differently in Dutch and German, I can't remember exactly how differently.

Does anyone know where en, na came from? /me is curious Latin DOMINUM/DOMINA , which--through VL DOM'NU/DOM'NA --yields the Spanish cognates don/do?a . DOMINA also the source of Modern Catalan dona "woman". Like German Frau , it originally meant "woman of high status; lady", but then, through pejor...

OK, here we go: Catalan to English. Oh, I thought this was going to work a little differently: You would send the texts to the volunteer translators, we would create English versions, you would vet them and post them for the learners to translate. That way, their attempts wouldn't be influenced by ...

Izo, have you got any good translation exercises for when we get proficient? The only thing I can find (and it is quite good) is the Catalan Wikipedia. If someone tells me (s)he feels prepared to translate texts from Catalan to English or vice versa, I'll be glad to post texts (or sentences if yous...

Both Rutul words (and as a matter of fact both Lezgi words, too) are ultimately from Arabic. No, wait, my dictionary says Ar. dZahannam comes from Hbr. Gehinnom. Hmm, I always thought it was a cognate not a loan. The Hebrew word is actually a composition, ge:y Hinno:m or "Valley of Hinnom". Located...

I still use the American r\ for Spanish <r> in some positions, especially word-final. Personally I think there has to be a small vowel before and after every /4/ or /r/, so in Andanese I made it a rule that <r> has to have vowels on both sides (the rn in my sig is a retroflex n). Actually, a lot of...

How can you possibly have a drive-thru funeral parlour? There must be a law against dead folks getting up and driving away... I think it's primarily the viewing that's drive-through. I've tried searching for a web site for one of these businesses that would list their services, but I'm having no lu...

Shm Jay wrote:

Sirk wrote:The reason my German teacher gives for this is that "you don't drive into the bookshop."

In Oklahoma they do, or at least for almost everything else: banks, restaurants, liquor stores, funeral parlours, drugstores...

Drive into or drive thru?

My funniest mistake came in Spanish 1. I was talking to the new teacher, and I said about the previous teacher, 'Nos gustan Morir a Jos?', when I meant 'Nos gustan <kill> a Jos?' (Damn the dissapearance of my Castellano dictionary. I've got a New Mexican/So Coloradoan dictionary, but of course it d...

I would often say things akin to, "Ich du liebst.," instead of "Ich liebst du." Other times, the error could be akin to, "T?tete er ich" rather than, "Ich t?tete er." I don't know what the second means, but shouldn't the first be Ich liebe dich ? t?ten "to kill" (from tot "dead"). The accusative ca...

With the exception of <?>, I never had much trouble with pronounciation. Although classes full of obnoxious scumbucket slackers probably hasn't helped cultivate a good accent for German. I was able to fall back on listening to my grandfather, who is fluent in Pennsylvania German, to pick up some of...

"Ich werde zu das Buchhandlung fahren." (given my woefully limited proficiency with the language, I likely made an error in my supposedly correct form) I think using gehen would be better than fahren. The reason my German teacher gives for this is that "you don't drive into the bookshop." And it's ...

I get the same. However, is there a language geek on the board who doesn't know that the language in question must be Hixkaryana? The reference is to Derbyshire and Pullum, who together edit the Handbook of Amazonian languages. Derbyshire has written extensively on Hixkaryana.

Ooh, this is cool.... A wealth of new ideas! :wink: ?no number inflection at all on any personal pronouns How does that actually work? You speak English , which lacks number inflection in one of it's most frequently-used personal pronouns, and you can't imagine? I would suppose that speakers would ...

One thing, though. Under what interpretation does German have /kx/? It said 'dialectical'; I don't think Standard German has that. It occurs in--in fact, it's a defining characteristic of--Südalemannisch or "South Alemannic". The designation includes a large chunk of Schwyzer-Tüütsch (in Höchstalem...

Came across this laundry list of grammatical oddities in the course of some Googling. I think it's especially appropriate in light of the recent discussion of linguistic "universals". (The author marks all rarities which violate published universals with bright pink dots.) http://wwwlot.let.uu.nl/zs...