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litlir, minni, minnstir , I think. But there is a word smái – where does this fit in? Unlike Scandinavian små , smár is not a plurale tantum. I think lítill and smár correspond pretty well to English "little" and "small". Edit: actually, on second though, I'm not sure what the difference between lí...

I guess you can approach the question in the thread title in two different ways: allophones that are phonetically dissimilar (whatever that may mean), or allophones that share few phonological features. For instance the [t~k] alternation in Hawai'ian is striking because /t/ and /k/ tend to be quite ...

finlay wrote:yeah they are.

I assume you're referring to [l] and [r`]? I disagree, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong with some spectrograms.

Hawai'ian famously has [t] as an an allophone of /k/, though as I understand it it may be more of a case of free variation than complementary distribution. Many Norwegian and Swedish dialects have [r`] as an allophone of /l/ (though at least in my dialect /r`/ is actually a marginal phoneme). [l] an...

Skomakar'n wrote:Uh. No. Half ten. Half of ten. Half an hour left to ten. There is no logic in interpreting it the other way around.

Maybe it's a dvandva? Although even in that case you'd expect it to be "ten half".

Also, if you're going to be so literal about it, surely "half ten" can only mean five.

In Norway we say "five to half one", and also "ten to half one". "Twenty to/past" is rarely heard, and "twenty-five to/past" would be high treason. The effect of this is that numbers larger than 10 are rarely used for the minutes, except for "quarter" (and that's not even a number). Of course, readi...

Just slap an s on the end, assimilate as needed, stir for five minutes.
["mo:on`s`]
["mo:on`.n`=s`]
["mo:n`æs`]
["mo:n`An@s]

Needless to say I don't have any of this nonsense with a rich system of case inflections that you've clearly invented for yourself after reading an Old Norse grammar, but morgen is funny for me too: sg.indef: ["mo:on`] (sounds like one syllable with a very long vowel) sg.def: ["mo:on`.n`=] (a very l...

Piotr wrote:So you're suggesting it's originally been a bodypart term? That would be a valid explanation; do other Germanic languages with genders have the neuter gender here as well?

Icelandic víf is neuter.

The footnotes are because I added such after the fact, and yes, I forgot footnote 4. Try rewriting parts of the post rather than adding footnotes. Not to say footnotes are always bad, but the way you used them in that post made parsing the post much harder than it ought to have been. Anyway, enough...

How I speak is not a speech impediment* ... You post a lot interesting stuff, but I can't be the only one who gets tired while reading posts like this one. I think even you got confused by your own footnotes here (where's number 4?), so imagine how much it breaks the flow of reading for someone who...

I think TaylorS was more referring to not just constructions like that but also constructions like "I'm over by my grandma's house" meaning "I'm over at my grandma's house", mind you. Ok, yeah, that's a common (I doubt that it's limited to North Central American English) but definitely non-standard...

1. "By" replacing "at" in many locative prepositional phrases. "I'm going by the store to grab a pop." This is almost for sure a German influence. In what dialect is "I'm going at the store to grab a pop" grammatical? And, for what it's worth, I wouldn't be so quick to ascribe that kind of construc...

I don't have the answer to your question, but I can point out that the Scandinavian det works the same way (examples in Norwegian): - Var hun her i morges? ("Was she here this morning?") - Ja, det var hun. For active verbs you have to use gjøre "to do" as a pro-verb: - Kastet han ballen? ("Did he th...

Aszev wrote:Just throwing in this map,

*dative map*


Also thanks Xonen

I wonder what that map would look like if you polled present-day speakers aged, say, 30 or less.

Great thread by the way.

Not to hijack this thread, but I'd love to hear a longer recording of you speaking in your full-blown idiolect, Skomakar'n. Your descriptions make it sound so much more Norwegian than Swedish, and I'm curious to find out how my brain will categorize it.

Jæ har vært ute å løpt i skog'n i da. Jæ ha sett rever, ul-ver å bjørner, men åsså ravner og andre ful-er. Di tok sæ fram på flere måter: krøyp, fl-øy, jikk på fire eller to bæin, å sånn. De ble natt etterhvert, og himmærn fyltes av mørke, og sol-a jikk ne, sånn at stjærnene og måån kunne kåmme fra...

So far, slesk is sounding extremely close to the ordinary slang application of English "slick". A slick song, a slick person, a very slick manoeuvre--all have connotations similar to what you're describing in the register I'm most familiar with. I figured it would sound that way from my description...

We have a word in Norwegian, "slesk" (/SlEs:k/). Many words in English, including "slick", "slippery", "shrewd", "devious", etc. are semantically close, but none of them have the same all-purposeness and endless applicability to them. The most common usage of slesk is when describing something as be...