French and Arabic indefinites

[Cathbad]

Our Arabic teacher today said he once attended a talk by a linguist (?) claiming that Arabic indefinite "nunated" endings have had an influence on the development of un/une in French.

Is there any evidence for it either way? I'd instinctively distrust any such claims, but maybe there's some proper linguistic evidence (rather than just nebulous inferences) that confirm this. I don't know.

[masako]

Sounds like bunk to me.

[Ser]

Definitely lingogarbage.

[Cathbad]

Definitely bunk.

So the lesson is: never trust a qualified teacher (decidedly not an academic) on matters of formal linguistics.

[masako]

Definitely bunk.

So the lesson is: never trust a qualified teacher (decidedly not an academic) on matters of formal linguistics.

My French teacher (of many years ago) once instructed the class to say /sIl vuz pleɪt/...so, yeah...trust but verify.

[Ser]

Definitely bunk.

So the lesson is: never trust a qualified teacher (decidedly not an academic) on matters of formal linguistics.

Why don't you go ask him for evidence/references then? Never seen that mentioned, can't even imagine how that'd work.

A friend of mine taking Latin at uni heard her professor implying that English comes from Latin. Something like "the difference between qui and quem is close to who and whom. The -m in who and whom actually goes back to our Latin times!"...

[masako]

A friend of mine taking Latin at uni heard her professor implying that English comes from Latin. Something like "the difference between qui and quem is close to who and whom. The -m in who and whom actually goes back to our Latin times!"...

Now, that's a fairly common misconception, which, outside of linguistic circles is slightly reasonable considering how many borrowings the modern English lexicon has from Greek and Latin. I'm not saying it's correct, just that so many people (non-linguist types) assume that the use of the borrowings somehow indicates descendancy.

[Cathbad]

Definitely bunk.

So the lesson is: never trust a qualified teacher (decidedly not an academic) on matters of formal linguistics.

Why don't you go ask him for evidence/references then? Never seen that mentioned, can't even imagine how that'd work.

To be honest it wasn't actually him who made the claim; he says he heard a linguist claim this at some talk, but that he "can't remember the details". Which is supremely risky for the spread of an unfounded urban legend, especially among my classmates, whose linguistic skepticism is probably rather less developed than mine. But I can't go around telling them all that what the teacher said is plainly wrong, can I?

[Astraios]

The Persian professor at my uni got his textbook published which had grammatical errors in it which his students had to point out to him. So yeah, never trust a professor. (Luckily they've got postgrads and very kind native-speaker students teaching them now instead...)

[Terra]

So the lesson is: never trust a qualified teacher (decidedly not an academic) on matters of formal linguistics.

Indeed, language teachers are not linguists.

The Persian professor at my uni got his textbook published which had grammatical errors in it which his students had to point out to him. So yeah, never trust a professor. (Luckily they've got postgrads and very kind native-speaker students teaching them now instead...)

I think it is intensely sad to see a professor who's studied English for 20+ years but still make numerous simple grammar and spelling mistakes in a single paragraph. It's one thing when a Russian professor leaves out "a" or "an", but the stuff my Chinese professors come up with is just ridiculous. I've also had a professor that spoke Arabic that left the 's' off the end of every 3rd person singular verb... except "is" and "has". At least he'd spell and use it right though.

[Astraios]

(Professor of Persian language, that is, wrote a textbook for his students with grammatical errors in the Persian. Not a professor who is Persian with mistakes in the English.)

[Khvaragh]

Our Arabic teacher today said he once attended a talk by a linguist (?) claiming that Arabic indefinite "nunated" endings have had an influence on the development of un/une in French.

Is there any evidence for it either way? I'd instinctively distrust any such claims, but maybe there's some proper linguistic evidence (rather than just nebulous inferences) that confirm this. I don't know.

Well, besides the fact that the syntactic placement is completely different (and nunation is an affix, not a pronominal clitic), the use of a morpheme meaning "one" evolving into an indefinite marker is a widespread linguistic phenomenon (not to mention a common development in many Romance langs). Why do we need to explain this by Arabic influence, especially a feature of formal non-pausal Arabic?

[Cathbad]

The other option is of course that the argument was something completely different, and that my teacher misremembered it (which would not be surprising).

I'll do a quick Google search later if I have time.