zompist bboard

The use of hu for writing /w/ in Nahuatl goes back to a misunderstanding of Andres de Olmos' orthography [he wrote the first Nahuatl grammar]. Olmos used <hu> only to write the allophonically devoiced /w/ occuring wordfinally and after consonants. Elsewhere he wrote <u> or <o>, so he wrote <nauatl> ...

Most commoner Aztecs had calendar names, others were had descriptive names or nicknames. One Tlaxcaltec ruler was for example called "maxixka" meaning "he who wets himself". James Lockharts "The Nahua after the Conquest" has a chapter on naming customs and how they changed in the early postconquest ...

Luitl is an impossible Aztec name. The language has no vowel u and the phoneme l never appears word initially.

Basics Username:Radagast_revived, formerly Radagast Other nicknames: Maunus Birthplace: Holbæk, Denmark Place of residence: US, Mexico and Denmark alternately Occupation: PhD student in linguistic anthropology Identity Gender: Male Sexuality: Yes Relationship: 7 years of marriage Brain: 44% left 56%...

At the level of abstraction where most linguists work, the tree model is generally a fine heuristic. But the problems begin to mount the closer you get to the actual locus of language, in the individual speakers linguistic habits and the linguistic interactions. This is because people don't speak la...

I don't see why a strict formal definition of what is a language is of any concern to typology at all. In fact I would say that it is an absurd concern on the level of determining whether pluto is a planet or not. Except that in this case we already know before hand that no formal definition of "a l...

Many Nahuatl speakers use "Coyotl" meaning "coyote" for outsiders. I was once referred to as "ixpitzonaca" meaning "pigskinfaced" referring to my skin color.

For example, a language with a series of instrumental prefixes on the verbs that classify the motion of the verb, where these affixes are not obviously related to any particular nouns. A contact language previously lacking instrumental affixes develops a set, by influence from the first... how does...

No that point is that Whorf said the Hopi didn't do that which would be weird. It is otherwise considered a universal that all languages describe time through spatial metaphors. So that is Why Malotki is making a good point in showing that the Hopi also do this.

Our discussion prompted me to review the literature on Hopi time and begin to write this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy . Two things stand out: 1. Whorf actually claims that Hopi does not have tense at all. He analyzes Malotki's future/non-future distinction as a distinction basi...

In order to know where he was wrong you have to first try to understand what he was trying to say. I acknowledge that you do that - I don't agree with your interpretations or with what you profess to have shown. I am also not trying to maintain Whorf's "oracular status" - which I think is a rather o...

I think some issues are being confused, among them which claims Whorf made and which were made by Bboard members. Whorf never claims that English has a future tense, he claims that SAE has a future tense - that does not mean that every Indo-European language has a grammatical future tense but that o...

Yes, he does. "The three-tense system of SAE verbs colors all our thinking about time." (LTR p. 143) And the rest of the passage makes it clear that he is not confusing tense with time, as his purpose is precisely to distinguish them. I disagree with that interpretation of what Whorf is saying, so ...

brandrinn wrote:Serious question: How many languages would have a future tense if we insisted that the future tense convey absolutely zero modal or aspectual information?

How many languages would even have tense if we did that?

Yes, he does. "The three-tense system of SAE verbs colors all our thinking about time." (LTR p. 143) And the rest of the passage makes it clear that he is not confusing tense with time, as his purpose is precisely to distinguish them. English doesn't have a future tense. It has several modal constr...

That Wikipedia article gives an incorrect impression, I think, of how much Whorf's "standard average European" term is used. I just checked three books on historical linguistics and none of them mention it, though two of them talk about a European or West European linguistic area. (Whorf's own uses...

This is not true. Morphological features are every bit as prone to diffusion as phonology. There are not a single phonological feature characterizing the Mesoamerican sprachbund for example. Anyway Whorf, who defined the concept of SAE was explicitly not talking about shared phonology but about gra...

Because morphology is not shared to that extent in a sprachbund (see: Finnish, see: Hungarian, see: Basque, see: Wakashan and Salish, see: Armenian) and is a primary feature of a lingustic family of languages - Icelandic, being North-Germanic and in a special position, would share all points with F...

Australian languages with noun classes such as apparently Dyirbal tend to be dependent marking and polysynthetic!

As far as I know Discourse-Functional grammar is the same as Functional Discourse Grammar, the Dutch functionalist school represented by Kees Hengeveld who is developing the late Simon Dik's Functional Grammar. Several of the sites where I see it mentioned as "discourse-Functional" also mention Heng...

Well I suspect you're right that it is easier for a generativist to read functional literature than the other way round. The reason I think functional frameworks will be around in 50 years but generative one's wont' is that currently 90% of language documentation is carried out in a functional [oste...

I hope this has cleared it up for you Yes thank you - that was a very clear summary of what you meant. 2)If I were to advise someone who wants to study linguistics but can't choose between a university with a functionalist background and one with a generative background, I would advise this person ...

I hear New York City is a good place for that.

1) I recall that whereas nouns are used overwhelmingly as arguments, and verbs overwhelmingly as predicates, adjectives are not used overwhelmingly as noun modifiers in most languages that have them, but rather as much as they are used as predicates. I don't know where I read that and I may have re...

I must admit I don't fully understand your point about a difference in argument structure in nouns and adjectives in Hueyapan Nahuatl. I don't see the possibility of making any such distinction in HN - which HN words would you classify as adjectives according to those criteria? About the Noun verb d...