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In my Russian Latin alphabet: V obraşenii meždu soboy oni bıli delikatnı i ostorožnı... i kogda nužno bılo komu-nibudy skazaty čto-libo nepriyatnoe, to ono govorilosy ne prämo, a namökami ili v tretyem lice. Don't think bad, I am Ukrainian myself and have Russian as my first language. I used Turkis...

A few questions for the Arabic speakers here, out of curiosity... 1) How well have the regional Arabics kept up the system of broken plurals seen in Classical Arabic/MSA? Have they generally survived intact, or has some regularization or levelling been taking place? 2) Do any nouns (in MSA or in reg...

"As regards their manner amongst themselves, they were delicate and careful [...], and when someone needed to say anything unpleasant, it was not said directly, but discreetly and in the third person." ... a namëkami ili v tret'jem lice. ... or in the third person. :) Whoops! Figures I'd figure out...

I need a translation of the following Russian quote: V obrashchenii mezhu sovoy oni byli delikatny i ostorozhny [...], i kogda nuzhno bylo komu nibud' skazat' chto libo nepriyatnoe, to ono govorilos' ne pryamo, a namezhami ili v tret'em lice. Thanks in advance. There's a number of mistakes there, b...

How would you express manner in a system that mostly lexicalizes path? It seems that are so many manners that something along the line of prepositions would be difficult. Just look at the example in the original post, which shows verbal adverbs: He entered the house [walking] He entered the house r...

Tropylium⁺ wrote:

Mecislau wrote:you see *d as the first radical in a disproportionately large number of roots dealing with destruction, death, and desolation

…Did you do that intentionally?

Intentionally, no, but I did notice that right after I wrote it.

Yes, it's generally assumed that Proto-Afro-Asiatic was biconsonantal. There has been some efforts to identify many of the formants, but I don't know how far that's gotten. The other things I remember from what I've read on the subject (which may well be misremembered) is that you see *d as the firs...

Why is "союз советских" used as an example next to things that actually make sense? It seems weird to have, alongside normal ideas like "Tolstoi" or "Moskva", to have an incomplete thought meaning "Union of Soviet [somethings]". Also, what is this "дъйа" = /dja/ thing? That sort of spelling is absol...

Vajda probably isn't the best source for descriptive aspects of Ket verbal morphology, however. Yes, he's done quite a bit towards getting the system straightened out and its origins elucidated, but for a more descriptive overview you might want to look at books such as Stefan Georg's "A Descriptive...

@ Mecislau: You think /-bn-/ was still retained as a cluster in 800 AD? That's only a few decades before our first OCS texts, where it already was simplfied to /-n-/. What's the reasoning behind that assumption? Eh, fair enough. To some extent I wanted to make it a bit clearer that Russian конь and...

Oh, and before anyone tries, please do not post anything from the Dnghu website. Yes, they have "translations" of Schleicher's Fable into a number of IE protolanguages, but they're quite simply wrong.

As you may or may not know, Schleicher's Fable (also known as "The Sheep and the Horses") has become a common text to translate into various reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European ever since Scheicher published it and no one else wanted to be one-upped in their PIE authoring skills. However, it also...

On a side note, I know there is a website for exactly this purpose but I can't remember what it's called or find it on google. It has a side-bar on the left of a ton of different languages, and clicking on each language yields a list of books in/about the given language. Also, some of the top bar o...

Oh dear.


The king of all phoneme inventory threads.


The end is nigh.

Salmoneus, I don't think I could possibly disagree with you more on that analysis! They're adjectives, not adverbs. They're subject complements - at least, that's what I was told to call them. To see the adjectival nature, compare an example with something less adverbial: "I will run unseen ". I've ...

I've always heard that Ubykh (and as Mecislau said, Abkhaz) has only two vowels, but I've also heard that those vowels sound like an ordinary full vowel system because of allophony with the palatalized and labialized consonants. In that case, why do we even describe it as having only two vowels? Be...

I've always heard that Ubykh (and as Mecislau said, Abkhaz) has only two vowels, but I've also heard that those vowels sound like an ordinary full vowel system because of allophony with the palatalized and labialized consonants. In that case, why do we even describe it as having only two vowels? Be...

If you want to talk about Caucasian two-vowel systems, it might be better to reference languages like Abkhaz rather than Ubykh instead (or in addition to). Abkhaz is very closely related to Ubykh and also has only two vowels, yet it has well over 100,000 speakers to Ubykh's 0, and correspondingly ha...

бо́льший - большо́й (though these aren't derived from any Russian noun) What is the exact difference between these two? I see forms of больш о й all the time, but I only see the other form in contexts like б о льшая часть. It's like in English: большáя часть = "a large part" бóльшая часть = "the gr...

Since I read lots of linguistics-related texts in Russian, one that I come across quite often is врéменный "temporary" versus временнóй "temporal, related to tense". It always stands out to me whenever I see an acute accent in Russian text, since it's so infrequent. As for a list, there's none that ...

Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar, by Edward Lipiński.

In general, any questions regarding Semitic languages can be redirected to that book.

Actually, it is true that peripheral cases (which in Slavic is generally anything outside of Nom/Acc/Gen, and sometimes Dat) have a strong tendency to merge across declensions. One example is how the peripheral Proto-Slavic A-stem plural endings (dative *-amъ, instrumental *-ami, locative *-axъ) spr...

Actually, I disagree. Given words like "virulact", "ictonce", "benoormed", and "iline", there is in fact a very definite way I would stress them: /"vi.rə.lækt/ /"ɪk.tan(t)s/, /bɪ."nurmd/, /"aɪ.laɪn/; they don't feel as though they have "two or three possibilities". Actually I would stress two of th...

There are certain rules in English, but give you a real word like extant and even the dictionary isn't sure, or fake words like virulact, ictonce, benoormed, iline and you've got no clue how they'd be stressed. They all have two or three possibilities and none sounds exactly wrong. So the rules in ...

But "isn't" is usually also described as having a schwa in it, so there's no difference there. Apparently in English unstressed vowels take less time and effort. IMD it's usually just [ɪ(d)nː] Could you clarify what you're referring to when you say "IMD"? I mean, have you observed this in others ar...