zompist bboard

I know that Nepālī as a language isn't, but the tidbits are definitely beyond the scope of what most people think of as "IE".

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(mona nicleòid wagner, “fo shneachd”)

Maybe we should move this to a thread "Fun features of IE languages"?
There is certainly a lot more like this out there - stuff most people would be surprised to find in IE languages, especially people who just have a cursory knowledge of a few European IE languags like English or Spanish (e.g., the split ergative system of some Iranian languages I mentioned in a previous post in this thread, the incipient tone systems of Norwegian or Serbo-Croatian, etc.).
Best regards,

Hans-Werner

[quote="Ran"]No IE language, afaik, has any trace of tones.[/quote]
The search isn't turning up anything, so I'll just go ahead and say it: Isn't Punjabi a tonal language? I'm pretty sure it has three phonemically distinguished tones: high, mid and low.

PS. Okay, technical problem #1.

[quote="rotting ham"][quote="Ran"]No IE language, afaik, has any trace of tones.[/quote]
The search isn't turning up anything, so I'll just go ahead and say it: Isn't Punjabi a tonal language? I'm pretty sure it has three phonemically distinguished tones: high, mid and low.

PS. Okay, technical problem #1.[/quote]Yeah I'm sure there's tone there too. And it says so in the book 'The Indo-Aryan Languages' by Colin P. Masica, which is in front of me here. In fact, it says (page 118): Contrastive tone is reported from several NIA languages and dialects, among them Chittagong and Dacca Bengali, Shina, Khowar, Gawarbati, Bashkarik, "Lahnda", Rajasthani, Dogri, several West Pahari dialects (Kochi, Shodochi, Bishshau, Rudhari, Khashali), and possibly Wotapuri, but undoubtedly the classic case of tone in NIA is Punjabi. There are two distinctive tones in Punjabi contrasting with the neutral tone: the High (or High-Falling /`/ and the Low (or Low-Rising) /´/. (Some would say there are three tones, including the neutral or "Mid" tone as one of them.)

Thanks, and apologies for resurrecting a thread four years after it expired for something regulars already know by now, I'm sure. (only for the L&L Museum, and only because the word Punjabi, Oikoumene's Čia-Ša, doesn't occur once in the whole forum according to the search function) This is how the tones are represented orthographically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurmukh%C4%AB_script

PS. Wait a minute, the Čia-Ša languages aren't tonal? I had an Eddyimpression that they were. Huh, just isolating.

P2S. I can't believe there isn't a single tonal Eastern language, the closest being Cuezi, which is only pitch-accented. Oh well, at least Lufaša is largely monosyllabic. That's one divergence Oikoumene hasn't produced to my knowledge. It looked tonal to me because of all these accents over the vowels like bák, chàn, nük, etc, but there's no reference to tones anywhere.

Man what is up with none of the BBCode working in this forum? It's pissing me off. >:|

Wasn't Classical Greek supposed to have been tonal?

IIRC it's not quite, actually pitch accent. Says so here for example.

Something inheirited from late PIE. Early (Vedic) Sanskrit also had a pitch accent.

Also some (south?) Slavic languages IIRC.

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I think what Ran may have been getting at is that none of the IE languages that have tones today inherited them from PIE ,even in a much-changed form. They all went through stages in which they were completely toneless and then re-developed tones in various ways. I don't think everyone agrees with this, though; I remember reading on this board somewhere that there are at least some people who believe that the tones of Latvian and Lithuanian do in fact trace back directly to PIE. Even so, it's nearly certain than Punjabi and the Slavic languages' tones are innovations and not inherited from Sanskrit/Proto-Slavic.

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

I think that must be the case, because if I remember correctly, Swedish has tones (at least in some dialects), at the Flemish dialect (or sister-language, depending on one's argument) Limburgish, has tones. Both of these are, obviously IE (being Germanic).

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Nitpick: Slavic languages' tonal/pitch systems were in fact inherited from Proto-Slavic; however, Proto-Slavic did not inherit its system from PIE.

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http://www.veche.net/
http://www.veche.net/novegradian - Grammar of Novegradian
http://www.veche.net/alashian - Grammar of Alashian

Apparently, Melpa has a binary counting system.

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What's their word for "toast"?

Interesting that they use different, seemingly unrelated forms for the dyades when they are alone and when they are in composed numbers (4 alone is "tembokak", in composed numbers it's "gudl", 8 alone is "engak", in composed numbers it's "pip").

@ Tom: Gah! It took me twenty minutes to get your awful pun.

I don't buy it... they haven't given us enough information to determine what happens past 10. Is 8+7 "pömp pömp ragltika gudl pip"? Because I doubt it – that'll get very confusing very quickly.

pömp pömp ragltika gudl pip gudl pip pömp pömp ragltika gudl pip....
It sure can

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They were. But Zomp did a major overhaul a year or two ago on the Cia Shia languages.

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[quote="Nortaneous"]Is South Africa better off now than it was a few decades ago?[/quote]

Damn, my computer can't handle .ram files for some reason.

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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

Maybe try downloading real player then.

No, don't do that. RealPlayer is terrible and evil.

Can VLC play .ram files?

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nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

I'm pretty sure VLC could play the sounds captured by putting ring patterns on ancient pottery.

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[quote="Nortaneous"]Is South Africa better off now than it was a few decades ago?[/quote]

Last time I checked, it was one of the few formats it can't play, for some reason.

That reason being Real won't release the codec.

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Formerly known as Drydic.