zompist bboard

WeepingElf wrote:Polabian is AFAIK the only Slavic language with front rounded vowels.

The moment I read this, I was like, "I'm willing to bet there's at least one Slovenian dialect which has them". Et voilà!

Okay, this just in:

There are certain varieties of Franco-Provençal that preserve a nominative-oblique case distinction in the singular, marked on the article, rather like in German. This means these varieties are:

The only modern Western Romance languages to preserve a case distinction.

The only modern Romance languages to preserve a case distinction other than Romanian.

The only modern Romance languages at all to preserve a nominative-oblique case distinction.

However, I'm not sure of the diachronic origin of this distinction - the paper's in French and I don't know French so I couldn't get a super-good grasp of it.

Also: Sursilvan Romansch has innovated a distinction betweenattributive and predicative forms of the adjective bien/buns, also rather like German and Yiddish. This distinction evolved from the remnants of the old nominative-oblique distinction in Western Romance.

Porphyrogenitos wrote:
Also: Sursilvan Romansch has innovated a distinction betweenattributive and predicative forms of the adjective bien/buns, also rather like German and Yiddish. This distinction evolved from the remnants of the old nominative-oblique distinction in Western Romance.

The first four things are interesting, but how is that attributive/predicative thing any different than Spanish? Spanish has adjectives that drop the -o when they are used before the noun they describe, and bueno is one of them. Does Sursilvan do it in both genders or just masculine?

Soap wrote: The first four things are interesting, but how is that attributive/predicative thing any different than Spanish? Spanish has adjectives that drop the -o when they are used before the noun they describe, and bueno is one of them. Does Sursilvan do it in both genders or just masculine?

Hm, that's true. I guess I forgot about Spanish doing that. And I'm not familiar enough with it to be sure, I just saw someone link to that page in that book. I guess the phenomenon isn't that interesting in and of itself, more just that it's a remnant of the case system. Which I don't think is the case in Spanish, unless I'm mistaken.

Pannonian Rusyn also has front rounded vowels: nüč 'night', mnjüd 'honey', kljüč 'key'.

Porphyrogenitos wrote:

Soap wrote: The first four things are interesting, but how is that attributive/predicative thing any different than Spanish? Spanish has adjectives that drop the -o when they are used before the noun they describe, and bueno is one of them. Does Sursilvan do it in both genders or just masculine?

Hm, that's true. I guess I forgot about Spanish doing that. And I'm not familiar enough with it to be sure, I just saw someone link to that page in that book. I guess the phenomenon isn't that interesting in and of itself, more just that it's a remnant of the case system. Which I don't think is the case in Spanish, unless I'm mistaken.

Spanish and Italian do that for a limited number of adjectives (Italian: e.g. san / santo, buon / buono) and for un / uno; this system goes back to a redistribution of apocoped allegro and non-apocoped full forms. My understanding of the Sursilvan system is that it's applicable to all adjective, i.e. not just a closed class as in Spanish or Italian.

The only modern Romance languages at all to preserve a nominative-oblique case distinction.

Outside of the system of personal pronouns, obviously.

Porphyrogenitos wrote:Okay, this just in:

There are certain varieties of Franco-Provençal that preserve a nominative-oblique case distinction in the singular, marked on the article, rather like in German. This means these varieties are:

The only modern Western Romance languages to preserve a case distinction.

The only modern Romance languages to preserve a case distinction other than Romanian.

The only modern Romance languages at all to preserve a nominative-oblique case distinction.

However, I'm not sure of the diachronic origin of this distinction - the paper's in French and I don't know French so I couldn't get a super-good grasp of it.

That's cool.
As for the diachronic origin, apparently much like in Old French / Old Occitan the dialect kept a nominative/oblique distinction for masculine articles; except it generalized the masculine article to all nouns, so the distinction was kept for feminine nouns as well.