Search found 183 matches

by Echobeats
Mon Aug 16, 2010 4:09 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Most difficult aspect of your native language for foreigners
Replies: 128
Views: 55845

A native Japanese speaker told me once that the thing she had a hard time with was learning the 4 or so different uses of have + VERB, although I forget how she explained what those four uses as taught to her were . I would imagine they'd be: 1. Perfect tense: I have done it 2. Deontic ("have to" =...
by Echobeats
Mon Aug 16, 2010 3:23 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Icelandic
Replies: 20
Views: 4610

Colloquial Icelandic is supposed to be pretty good +1. I love the Routledge Colloquial series, because while remaining practically orientated, they don't treat grammar as a dirty word. Also, here is a very good online Icelandic dictionary from the University of Wisconsin. Use "headword only" for Ic...
by Echobeats
Sun Aug 15, 2010 4:59 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Most difficult aspect of your native language for foreigners
Replies: 128
Views: 55845

Also, str- . That must be hell. Nah. Icelandic and Swedish dialects have strj-. You're overgeneralizing here. German has /ʃtr/ and /ʃpr/ too, and for speakers of Germanic languages this probably doesn't seem so difficult or unusual. Russian (and probably most other Slavic languages) have this clust...
by Echobeats
Sun Aug 15, 2010 4:43 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: The Suppletion Thread
Replies: 81
Views: 34235

"He went home" originally was a proper answer for "Whither (i.e. which way) did he go?". It was not originally a proper answer for "Where (i.e to what place) did he go?" Is this really how the distinction between "where" and "whither" worked? In the related Swedish, which retains the contrast (at l...
by Echobeats
Sat Aug 14, 2010 12:32 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Most difficult aspect of your native language for foreigners
Replies: 128
Views: 55845

:( German is more fun with cases and full gender distinction. Otherwise, what stops it being Dutch? :P *ducks* Anyway, I'm also interested - what happened to gender in English? The case system, as we know, was declining even before 1066, and early Middle English retains dodgy case declensions that ...
by Echobeats
Sat Aug 14, 2010 10:35 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Most difficult aspect of your native language for foreigners
Replies: 128
Views: 55845

:( German is more fun with cases and full gender distinction. Otherwise, what stops it being Dutch? :P *ducks* Anyway, I'm also interested - what happened to gender in English? The case system, as we know, was declining even before 1066, and early Middle English retains dodgy case declensions that ...
by Echobeats
Fri Aug 13, 2010 12:30 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: The Suppletion Thread
Replies: 81
Views: 34235

Anyway, wiki-what? wikipedia? because that's not called "Wiki". Or I don't particularly like it when people do call it that... +1. A wiki is a kind of website, of which wikipedia is the best-known. Mithun's Languages of North America (p. 85) gives some examples of roots that supplete based on numbe...
by Echobeats
Thu Aug 12, 2010 5:10 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: The Suppletion Thread
Replies: 81
Views: 34235

Radius Solis wrote:Cattlebeast? That's right up there with girlchild as a compound that should be taken out back and shot.

:P
My reaction was similar, but you can't deny it fills the lexical gap. Thankfully, it's much more common for cattlebeasts to be taken out back and shot than for girlchildren.
by Echobeats
Thu Aug 12, 2010 4:41 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: The Suppletion Thread
Replies: 81
Views: 34235

Actually the case of cows/cattle/whatever is different than for the other animals, because we have a bit of a lexical gap. Specifically there's no gender-neutral way to refer to a single member of the species. "Cattle" is plural-only, *one cattle is simply ungrammatical. My wife (a New Zealander) i...
by Echobeats
Mon Aug 09, 2010 4:28 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Inuktitut lessons
Replies: 4
Views: 4611

Does anyone else picture Mr. Burns going "Asukuluk!"? I wonder if they've ever translated the Simpsons into Inuktitut? Also, here's a sample sentence to tempt the rest of you. It's nice and short, only two words. Kiinaujakkuvimmiinngaarlunga niuvirviralaamuurniaqqunga. When I leave the bank I will ...
by Echobeats
Mon Aug 09, 2010 11:43 am
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Restrictive use of IPA...
Replies: 67
Views: 16305

Unicode doesn't work very well on the board *didn't. Most stuff should work now I think, as long as you have fonts supporting the characters and a browser that automatically replaces characters if Verdana doesn't have them. Chrome doesn't do this :( does firefox / opera ? I often find that the more...
by Echobeats
Mon Aug 09, 2010 11:22 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Inuktitut lessons
Replies: 4
Views: 4611

Inuktitut lessons

I thought some of you might be interested in this link: http://www.tusaalanga.ca/lesson/lessons

All dialogues and vocabulary items come with a sound file. Another useful feature is that you can see an alphabetical list of suffixes by clicking the "Grammar" tab.

Asukuluk!
Excellent!
by Echobeats
Fri Aug 06, 2010 1:22 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Vowelless words
Replies: 40
Views: 30772

This leads to the question, how minimal can we make a syntactic word? Are there syntactic words which only surface as suprasegmental features? Certainly there are morphemes like that (even in natlangs, I gather), but I don't know of any clitics like that. (Actually, Ndak Ta's copula has an essentia...
by Echobeats
Fri Aug 06, 2010 9:43 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Vowelless words
Replies: 40
Views: 30772

Yeah, I think the way I phrased it was inherently contradictory. Sorry :D For what it's worth, this has been extremely helpful to me: /fp'/ is indeed a possible preposition. So, that's cool. Something can, of course, be a syntactic word without being a phonological word. The general term for this i...
by Echobeats
Fri Aug 06, 2010 7:53 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Vowelless words
Replies: 40
Views: 30772

I think the problem here is that when you start talking about words like [p] or [sxs], the concept of a syllable pretty much becomes useless. So the only way to answer the question without attacking its premises is to talk about syllabic consonants such as nasals and approximants, which (as has now ...
by Echobeats
Fri Aug 06, 2010 5:37 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Lexicon Building
Replies: 4308
Views: 784398

next: mammal hiyalnogarwo ńnarańii greegii = (of the) 'family' of dugongs and bats. {those are the only two species of mammals they knew of, prior to the arrival of missionaries} Does this mean that the missionaries brought horses, dogs etc. with them, or that your conpeople are e.g. reptilian and ...
by Echobeats
Fri Aug 06, 2010 3:11 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: The Suppletion Thread
Replies: 81
Views: 34235

smärre is possible, though. Is that plural only, like små , or can you have en smärre hund ? Traditionally, only plural. In modern Swedish it has developed a slightly different meaning, 'unimportant, negligible, minor', and can't really be considered a comparative of liten at all, but a different l...
by Echobeats
Fri Aug 06, 2010 3:03 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Vowelless words
Replies: 40
Views: 30772

The UCLA phonetics archive does have a recording of some of the vowelless words from Nuxálk/Bella Coola, but I didn't find the sound quality very good: http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/BLC/blc.html That guy should work in sound effects for TV and radio. Unless, as I can't help suspecting,...
by Echobeats
Thu Aug 05, 2010 7:18 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: The Suppletion Thread
Replies: 81
Views: 34235

Skomakar'n wrote:
Dingbats wrote:Swedish has:

liten 'small (sg)'
små 'small (pl)'
mindre 'smaller'
smärre is possible, though.
Is that plural only, like små, or can you have en smärre hund?
by Echobeats
Thu Aug 05, 2010 5:47 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: The Suppletion Thread
Replies: 81
Views: 34235

Dingbats wrote:
vecfaranti wrote:lítill, minni, minnstur (small, smaller, smallest, compare to the Swedish example above)
What is the plural?
litlir, minni, minnstir, I think. But there is a word smái – where does this fit in?
by Echobeats
Thu Aug 05, 2010 2:49 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: The Suppletion Thread
Replies: 81
Views: 34235

Icelandic: [snip] mær, meyjar (virgin, virgins) [snip] konur, kvenna (women, women's) sjór, sævar/sjávar/sjóvar (sea, sea's) I would not really call these suppletion , in that they do not appear to actually come from distinct roots , but rather just cases of sound change having manifested itself so...
by Echobeats
Wed Aug 04, 2010 5:58 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Multiple conjugations for a verb-stem?
Replies: 21
Views: 6147

English also has a well-known process of "systematic regularisation" with what might be called "rederived" verbs. The classic example is a bit of American baseball terminology: fly (v.) -> fly ball -> fly (v.) "The batter flied out to center." (I.e. The batter hit a fly ball to center field which w...
by Echobeats
Wed Aug 04, 2010 7:43 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: The Suppletion Thread
Replies: 81
Views: 34235

I do believe I have hit the motherlode: an online suppletion database . I should have known the Surrey Morphology Group would have something good. They used to send their lecturers to teach at Cambridge because we didn't have any morphologists. Put that in the L&L Museum's "Resources" thread, pleas...
by Echobeats
Wed Aug 04, 2010 4:30 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: resources
Replies: 722
Views: 306986

A database of suppletion in languages from all across the world, from the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey.

Also following TomHChappell's advice to post this here.