zompist bboard

So do all Semitic dialects have the vocalic prefix to avoid illegal clusters? If not, how do those other dialects pronounce imperatives with illegal clusters? Underlying BCvD works quite well. In Biblical Hebrew, schwa is generally inserted between B and C, but if B is a weak consonant, it may be d...

hwhatting wrote:... while e.g. amatus sum means "I am loved"...

Are you sure that's good Latin? I was taught that amatus sum meant "I was loved" or "I have been loved", and, of course, for "I am loved" one should have amor. Of course, there is again the problem of the missing present passive participle.

It looks like the reason why "deponent verbs" are needed as a distinct class in Latin is that they use active forms for some parts of their paradigm, and passive forms for others, so they don't fit perfectly into either the "active" or "passive" paradigms, but constitute a third paradigm. No, they ...

So, at most, there was a tendency in early Insular Celtic to (1) phonetically run together words in certain syntagms and (2) subphonemically weaken medial stops, including the initial stops within the run-together word groups in (1), in some way. This tendency may have been caused by a substratum l...

WeepingElf wrote:And Germanic ablaut is an entirely different thing

I think Porphyrogenitos meant umlaut. Now, umlaut is something we also see in Brythonic and, to a small extent, French.

Lao allegedly has /l/ and /lʷ/ and no rhotics. The argument that /lʷ/ is a phoneme seems to be that all onsets consist of a single consonant, and therefore apparent clusters with /w/ as second element are in fact labialised consonants. It's a very rare sound (or cluster) - one of the few words is /l...

The Central Tai dialect of Longzhou (Lungchow in the literature) contrasts /l/ and /ɬ/ and has no rhotics. /ɬ/ is the reflex of Proto-Tai *r, *s and *z. The Proto-Tai voiceless lateral (possibly a cluster) has merged with *l to yield /l/.

vokzhen wrote:"I" has to either be the sole subject, or come after "and."

That's partly a politeness rule - "Don't put yourself first." It may also be a contact rule - 'I' has to come petty close to the verb, though it can be separated from it by 'who'.

Personally, I think one of two things is true of the American Indian languages: Many new language families developed in the Americas, unrelated to Eurasian languages and each other, with several giant families found over wide regions. The languages are all part of a giant superfamily after all, but...

Some of them were related to the languages that still exist today even if the majority of their sister languages have gone extinct, and naturally the separation from one another and contact with other languages influenced them in different ways. There's no reason to think that they couldn't have co...

... the reason it doesnt happen in IE ... That depends on what you mean by IE and what you mean by "doesn't happen". For example, in Classical Greek one can inflect a genitive by putting the second case marking on a preceding definite article. In English, one can add the genitive to the genitive, e...

Vlürch wrote:If the Haida came from Northeast Asia, it could well be a loanword from the Mongols if they didn't originally have a word for language, but no one would ever even consider that a serious possibility. I don't know if I do either.

A lot of languages don't have a separate word for 'language'.

Malayalam does have them but only in onomatopeia, certain proper nouns (actually I can only think of one at the moment...), and (mostly English) loanwords AFAICT. (Some?) Indo-Aryan languages have word-initial retroflexes, and I'm pretty sure some Dravidian languages (e.g. Kannada and Telugu) have ...

There doesn't seem to be any reason not to treat them as different. One can also find idiolects where nonsense words force them to be separate. for example, there are native Enɡlish speakers for whom <singer> is /sɪ.ŋər/ and to whom word-initial /ŋ/ comes easily. Another is that when trying to add a...

There's enough SVO and Adj-N lurking around in Insular Celtic that they're not impossible. 'Badly translated Welsh' might not be a bad description of what might be spoken if an English aristocracy had adopted Welsh without any regard for Welsh sensibilities.

Travis B. wrote:That's because the verbal clitics are clitics, whereas the negative "clitics" aren't clitics.

I was offering better evidence that the verbal clitics were clitics. Your argument to show that they aren't inflections aren't convincing; why can't inflections be added to phrases?

Even in cases where dialects do have truly irregular forms for verbal clitics attached to pronouns, I would still categorize them as clitics because they still syntactically behave as them. E.g. they can be attached to any subject, not just a pronoun, and when attached to NPs they attach to the end...

I'm not sure whether that's true - not all clitics can attach to anything (like English genetive 's). I'd find it difficult to give an example where the abbreviated forms of "to be" could be seperated from the subject noun. So'm I to take it that you consider this sentence either not an example or ...

If you want a literal translation, try "I'm at your loving", and note that 'your' functions as an objective genitive. There's something odd about English (or possibly the scenario); you wouldn't have any problem grasping "I was at his killing", but for some reason 'English' seems to call for "I'm at...

Iirc languages can phonemically contrast zero-initial with a glottal stop, but that phonetically such a contrast won't be realized utterance-initially. There's no way (again, iirc) to distinguish between the initiation of voicing because of a preceding glottal stop and the initiation of voicing bec...

How common is it for glottal stop and zero to indisputably contrast phonemically in word-initial position? I'm looking for a contrast that exists both in the lexicon and at the surface. For example, for German, it is argued that glottal stops are a consequence of stress. On a related issue, should t...

https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armarium_frigidarium

https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrete

KathTheDragon wrote:Now, wouldn't it be helpful if I could read German...

Indeed, it used to be mandatory for serious IE work.

In my idiolect, the possessive of the verb form How on earth does that work? What do such constructs mean? The possessive is the word (or 'word plus enclitics') form with the postposition ///s/// (or should I write it ///z///?) added. The complication is that the possessor governed by the postposit...

English, Scots, and modern-day Swedish all have lost noun case, pronouns aside. And the same thing has happened to the genitive in all three, where pronouns aside it has become a clitic postposition, i.e. not an actual case. (Note the emphasis on modern-day Swedish, as in older, but not that old, S...