Grammar Girl has a deeper explanation, but basically: "thou" went from informal (something you'd use among peers) to belittling (something you'd use to highlight someone is inferior to you). So when in doubt people started using "you" in all situations, no matter formality or hierarchy.
Alexander Vovin, a former leading proponent of the Altaic theory who renounced it in 2005, provides a thorough takedown of the theory in his paper The End of the Altaic Controversy, which you can read here by logging in with Google or Facebook or creating an Academia.edu account.
Long story short, the most sophisticated and comprehensive arguments put forth by Altaic's contemporary supporters, as exemplified by the Altaic “masterwork” - the Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages - ignore the structures of the languages they aim to compare, consistently flout the principles of mainstream historical linguistics, and engage in blatant abuse of the comparative method.
Furthermore, with the development of a better understanding of language contact over the past few decades, it is generally thought that the similarities evident in the various "Altaic" languages are better explained through thousands of years of close contact, rather than descent from a common source.
Jackrabbit is a shortening of jackass rabbit, which they were called for having ears like a jackass. Jackass just means a male donkey, with Jack being a generic male name and used in Middle English to mean "any common fellow", which is also where the term "jack-of-all-trades" comes from.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=jackrabbit&searchmode=none
Here is the full text of the article, shared in accordance with the journal terms and conditions which allow "sharing discrete portions of Content for purposes of collaboration, comment, or the scholarly exchange of ideas".
^(^^Fuck ^^the ^^police)
This is common in other languages, and it's been referred to as an "address inversion" or "vocative inversion". (Here's another article, sorry in Italian) It's been speculatesd that it arises out of "baby talk", i.e. the adult talks to the child.
Would write more, but not now. Hope at least some of that might be useful!
Sistren seems nondialectal?! I've never heard it used, most modern dictionaries don't even list it, and the few that do, list it as archaic, obsolete, or "dialectal". The OED says of sistren and related forms:
> "In general literary use these were finally discarded about 1550 in favour of the pl. in -s"
You may occasionally encounter sistren nowadays, ~~but I'll warrant that every single modern usage you can find is intended as a facetious parallel to brethren, not as a standard plural of sister.~~
*edit: Obviously the crossed-out part was an assumption. Per /u/ripsmileyculture below, it was wrong.
"Arse" was the original term. It seems "ass" came about from a dialectical dropping of the R by American speakers, and it seems the same process produced the words "cuss" and "bass" (the fish).
I'm glad you asked this question, as I've already learned something interesting today and it's only 8:30 in the morning.
[Edit: Engrish]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge criticized talented as "vile" and "barbarous" in this attack from 1832:
> I Regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable talented, stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications of the day. Why not shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced, &c.? The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from America.
Here's an 1820 article from a US periodical:
> We have no good contrivance for a passive voice in the present indicative. Domus aedificatur cannot be literally translated into our language. When we say "The house is built," we assert the completion of an action. The nearest approach which we make to it in respect to tense is by the phrase "the house is building;" but here we confound the voices, at least we employ a word which in respect of voice is general, as the participle in ing is most commonly used in the active voice. Some of our southern neighbours choose to express their meaning by the phrase "the house is being built," which is no farther appropriate to the present tense than as the same combination never happens to be used for the past. It labours under the disadvantage of an awkward verbosity, which prevents it from being generally adopted, or sanctioned by the authority of persons of taste. Another effort has sometimes been made to supply this want by prefixing the letter a to the present participle, and thus converting it into a passive present, as "the house is a-building," but this has not succeeded in meeting with a permanent adoption. A strictly appropriate phrase has not been found absolutely necessary, because a slight alteration in the form of our sentence enables us to dispense entirely with the passive form of the verb. We can say "the building of the house goes forward," or "the work people are engaged in the building of the house...,' No inconvenience is experienced in expressing our meaning; it is confined to our attempts to translate Latin sentences literally into English.
EDIT: it looks as if this article comes from a Scottish source, and therefore "our southern neighbours" would presumably be the English.
Check this out. I'm just speculating, but you can see that the modern masculine pronoun (he, his, him) comes from the nominative, genitive, and dative respectively, with the accusative being lost/being subsumed into the dative. It seems that the identical thing happened with the feminine pronoun, with 'heo' turning into 'she' by being replaced by the demonstrative (source) and 'hire', in both genitive and dative, being modernized into 'her'. So to answer your question, it is very, very ancient.
Hey, yeah, sure. I'm Mvskoke Creek. We are doing our damndest to bring it back, but it's difficult when we've got so many people living outside of Indian Territory. There are immersion schools available to kids and there are teachers that will travel to Creek communities at large to provide classes. The latter option is hugely expensive and unavailable for many.
The best tool we have at our disposal right now is the language app that was put out by the nation a few years ago. You're able to learn conversational phrases, Creek hymns, and a really basic vocabulary. The app provides spelling and pronunciation help, as well.
The nation is making a reality good effort to revive Mvskoke, but a lot of the future depends on our youth. Children raised within the nation are often taught in an equivalency method where parents will teach them an english and Mvskoke word side by side. I think our youth is really who we need to focus on, get them in a room with Creek elders and give them the tools to keep the language alive.
If you want to check the app out, here is a Google play link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.languagepal.androidmuskogeecreekdraft
I don't use it as often as I should, but I'm a little old to be learning a new language, anyway. Mvto!!!
Ok, let's say there was still a core or a few cores that were still mutually intelligible to each other, which was what likely happened after Proto-Anatolian split off. If I well remember the graphs and explanations of the order of the splits. From this book. Proto-Indo-Iranian was supposedly to be the last to break off for good and thus forever ending the Proto-Indo-European period at around 2000 BC.
You should take a note that PIE appeared around 4000-4500 BC (if we assume the Kurgan theory is the best one so far) and its history lasted around two thousand years (that's a lot of time). The book then suggested early, middle, and late PIE periods. Early PIE was the PIE with Proto-Anatolian and Proto-Tocharian included. Middle PIE was the PIE when most daughters split off and at that point, I think that's where u/commercialwaste was getting at. Last PIE was the PIE with a few leftover daughters all separating from each other and that would be Proto-Indo-Iranian, Proto-Balto-Slavic, and some others I can't remember.
Finally, know that it's all a theory. Chances are good we will not know what it exactly happened. The best we can do is stick with theories that make the best sense.
Edited because: I had more to add and clarify.
Not a heck of a lot different, probably, mostly different lexical items and word choice (see /u/AgLost's link to Anglish, perhaps). French influence on English was rather superficial in the sense that most borrowing was of "wholesale" lexical items without any morphological (or phonological, syntactic) influence. You might be interested in checking out this corpus study. Most quantitative studies show that Norman influence has been overstated.
The other issue, of course, is that we can't always prove what change was or wasn't a direct or indirect result of contact with French. It's a bit silly that people are linking you to Old English, for example - English would have changed drastically in that amount of time with or without French influence.
To be clear, I don’t blame you! Morphology is most often taught in this way, suggesting that the entire subfield is pretty much settled, and the only interesting issues lie elsewhere. A good book I found is Thomas W. Stewart’s <em>Contemporary Morphological Theories: A User’s Guide</em>. In that book he describes I think 21 morphological theories, some morpheme-based, others not, and “grades” them on different axes to describe what it’s like to use those theories. He then analyzes three datasets using each theory to show how they work. He doesn’t suggest that there’s a winner; he just tries to show how they differ, and how they work.
>Reduced to i by mid-12c. in northern England, it began to be capitalized mid-13c. to mark it as a distinct word and avoid misreading in handwritten manuscripts.
Is this correct? I mean, according to etymonline, neither sex nor vagina (in the English meaning) come into this. As etymonline confirms, I always assumed vanilla came from the fact that it's a normal/standard ice cream flavour (though the 'whiteness' factor is new to me).
>I know that in English there is a technical distinction between 'may' and 'can', with 'may' being used to refer to permission and 'can' for the capacity to do something.
This isn't true, not even technically. The modal verb 'can' is used to express possibility in the dynamic, deontic, or epistemic sense and 'may' is used to express possibility in the deontic or epistemic sense. In other words, you can use 'can' in any context in which 'may' is appropriate, but not the other way around. (You of course can, but the meaning may change).
The technical distinction that you speak of was made up by EB White in his 1959 revised edition of The Elements of Style. This prescription had no basis in reality.
European languages are, on the whole, becoming more isolating. Making any kind of statement about languages worldwide from that fact is not possible.
Also, counterexample from the middle of Europe: What are sometimes called 'clitics' in colloquial spoken French can also be analyzed as person marking affixes, which would mean that French is actually grammaticalizing earlier pronouns and moving towards morphological complexity: Grammaticalization of polysynthesis with special reference to spoken French
Hey. Maybe don't call them "tribal language expeditions." That's super demeaning.
For an excellent read on the actual field experience, I can recommend Microphone in the Mud by Laura Robinson.
I agree with /u/hwamplero, the sentence didn't sound wrong to me when I read it. Being pushed to think about it, I think "...before he could/was able to..." or "...before finishing..." is what I would actually use.
This might not be as technical as you're looking for, but:
>Before with past tenses
>We sometimes use before clauses in a variety of tenses to say that the action or event in the before clause did not or may not happen:
Before I had a chance to thank him, he’d gone.
You’re interrupting her before she has even spoken.
Before he had finished his training, he was sacked.
We should stop shopping now before we spend all our money.
or maybe:
>Before as an adjunct
>We use before to connect earlier events to the moment of speaking or to a point of time in the past:
I’m so looking forward to the trip. I haven’t been to Latin America before. (up to the moment of speaking)
I introduced Tom to Olivia last night. They hadn’t met before. (up to that point in the past)
From here: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/linking-words-and-expressions/before
In my paper I claimed that nasal sounds ("mm" and "m-m") universally express yes and no, which explains why words for "not" tend to have nasal sounds across world's languages.
This might help: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=th
Thames, Thomas, and thyme are all specifically mentioned, BTW—so you had a good list.
TL;DR: sometimes "th" means "t^h ", and sometimes the h got added for no good reason.
It sounds like you're talking about something like semantic primes, but beware, because I don't believe they are a generally accepted idea.
> Given the dictionary definition of any given word, can we rewrite that word using a countable number of words as the "basis" of the language?
Since every dictionary contains a countable (nay, finite) number of words, that's of course true.
Here's what the OED says:
>1706, originally a contraction of am not, and in proper use with that sense until it began to be used as a generic contraction for are not, is not, etc., in early 19c. Cockney dialect of London; popularized by representations of this in Dickens, etc., which led to the word being banished from correct English.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=ain't&searchmode=none
I have an older version of this and it's pretty much what you want - like a thesaurus but it explains the differences
Like this:
>relevant, germane, material, pertinent, apposite, applicable, apropos are comparable when they mean having a relation to or bearing on the matter at hand...something relevant has a traceable, especially logical connection......something germane is so closely related...that the fitness or appropriateness is beyond question.....something pertinent is so decisively or significantly relevant that it touches the real point at issue....etc, etc. [heavily edited for brevity]
This is at the top of hackernews right now: http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/a-map-showing-how-much-time-it-takes-to-learn-foreign-languages-from-easiest-to-hardest.html
Russia is category 4, so I would say you're not wrong. But for English speakers these are the most difficult (requiring twice the time of category 4 to learn):
Arabic
Cantonese (Chinese)
Mandarin (Chinese)
Japanese
Korean
No, it replaced thou.
From what I understand, thou became informal and ye or you was the formal, plural form. Then thou became really informal. Then it became rude. Then people just stopped using it.
You does come from another Proto-Indo-European word, *ju accord to Etymonline.
From: http://www.etymonline.com/ >revolt (v.) >1540s, from Middle French revolter, from Italian rivoltare "to overthrow, overturn," from Vulgar Latin *revolvitare "to overturn, overthrow," frequentative of Latin revolvere (pp. revolutus) "turn, roll back" (see revolve). The noun is from 1550s. Revolting is 1590s, originally subjective; objective sense of "repulsive" is first recorded 1806.
My guess is that's not a coincidence, the saying "this makes my stomach revolt" changed to "this is revolting". No direct relationship with the French being revolting...
A lot of manager-speak involves verbing words--we could dialog extensively about how widely manager-speak is accepted, but 'access', at least, wasn't a verb until the 1960s.
Actually, the word its (as in "I saw the house; its lights were on") ultimately derived from the possessive clitic. Apparently in Middle English the neuter genitive pronoun was his, but people didn't like that and started making the pronoun it possessive just as they would a noun. Apparently some people would have written "It's lights were on" through the early 19th century. As for the reason why the apostrophe disappeared, it may have been to avoid confusion with it is, or it may have been to assimilate with the pronouns you mentioned above.
Source: Etymonline
Poul Anderson's "Uncleftish Beholding" ("Atomic Theory") is a classic example -- perhaps the first? When I was a student, it inspired me to translate part of Odyssey Book 8 into Anglish.
Here's a recent master's thesis on the subject. See also the literature review.
>Hüseyin (<strong>2014</strong>) Cross-linguistic influence: The potential effect of Chinese (L1) syntactic language transfer on English (L2) writing proficiency for students on a Pre-Master’s programme (PMP) at Queen Mary University of London.
In this study, the highest errors were with respect to articles and number agreement, though the paper also talks about other errors.
If you are currently living in Turkey, then Turkish will be reinforced by the wider environment and media. The old orthodoxy was that the mother's language influenced the child more, which if true is due probably to mothers often having more interaction with infants. I don't think balanced bilingualism is guaranteed in this set up, it is possible that the child will be Turkish dominant, Turkish-English bilingual. If the mother speaks English, then it is possible that the child will gain earlier confidence in English, but again, given the preponderance of Turkish in the wider environment, this will in all likelihood soon be overcome.
Children are very resilient and given adequate exposure - even non-systematic - multilingualism develops quite naturally.
You may find this bookhelpful.
*Edit for clarity: I am not an expert in this field at all, just some who grew up naturally multilingual and has studied linguistics.
To jump to "fortnight"'s defence: if you know its etymology, the meaning is clear.
"Bi-weekly", on the other hand, is actually less transparent because it is ambiguous - it can mean either "twice a week" or "every other week". Of course, in practice, it's only used in the US in the latter sense, but in the UK, where it's rarely used, either meaning is possible so it is generally avoided in favour of "fortnightly".
According to etymology online, they are in fact cognate! They come from a word meaning "vision" (also cognate!)
It appears totally unrelated to way, which is cognate with "weigh". Apparently they both originate from a word meaning "carry".
Let's not forget bitwise, breadthwise, crabwise (it's in my dictionary!), crosswise, edgewise, leastwise, lengthwise, likewise, nowise, pairwise, thwartwise, and many others!
Whisper and voicelessness are two different phonations, see the image here and my comment below.
It's a question of word origin, which is called etymology. The words engineer and engine are closely related to "ingenious". This means that engineers were originally people who invented (designed) machines (engines). From this search we see that the meaning of the word engine was much more broad than it is today. When mechanical engines were invented, the meaning became more narrow. This actually happens quite a bit in language when an object in need of a name comes along. In my native language, Russian, the word "mashina" used to mean machine, but now means automobile/car. The word "mashinist", however still refers to a person who works with machines, in the general sense. It's similar to what happened in English, when "engine" came to mean something specific, but "engineer" retained its older meaning.
I'm a gen-am speaker and I definitely have [ç] before [i] and [j] but not before anything else. Unfortunately your recording isn't really good enough for me to hear what you're doing, but I believe you haha. [Here's(https://www.speakpipe.com/voice-recorder/msg/bdd6fj1a38r3lowh) me pronouncing "heating" and "heeding".
Hi. This is just not true.
It's approached differently than with Indo-European, but it's not significantly more difficult. The comparative method doesn't require a phonetic script. But then, there is still phonetic data encoded in the writing system. Judging by your username I'll assume you know some Chinese. So, historically, I can look at 讓 simplified to 让 and explain, phonologically, why the phonetic component in the simplification is 上 instead of something representing Mandarin's rang, or you can say why niang 釀 and rang 讓 share the phonetic components even though they don't have similar representations in modern Mandarin's phonetic script (pinyin in this case). Or, why 你 is ni but 尓 is er. These characters all have phonetic information as part of the glyph So, even if we were relying heavily on written phonetic representations, Chinese would still not be disqualified.
>Loanwords are common and are easily assimilated into local phonetic norms
Much like any other language? Actually Mandarin loan word phonology still shows clear signs of the phonological features of the source word. Here are a few examples.
>Short words which become unrecognisable when a single sound changes
I really don't know what this is supposed to mean, so I'm not sure how to address it. Do you mean something like ran /ʐɑn/ would be unidentifiable as either /zã/ or /lɑn/ or /na/? Because it can be any of those depending on dialect, and it's always identifiable. In part this is because of predictable phonological changes. In part it's because words rarely exist without clear context, and, more importantly, it's a myth that Chinese words are monosyllable. So ran is actually just half of the word ranhou 然後, so in context, if you hear nahou…, you're gonna know what it is.
And an altogether separate, third meaning!
>rare (v.)
>"rise up," 1833, dialectal variant of rear (v.). Sense of "eager" (in raring to go) first recorded 1909. Related: Rared; raring.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=rare&allowed_in_frame=0
Whadya know?!
From http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=jail&allowed_in_frame=0
"late 13c., gayhol, from O.N.Fr. gaiole and O.Fr. jaole, both meaning "a cage, prison," from M.L. gabiola, from L.L. caveola, dim. of L. cavea "cage, enclosure, stall, coop" (see cave (n.)). Both forms carried into M.E.; now pronounced "jail" however it is spelled. Persistence of Norman-derived gaol (preferred in Britain) is "chiefly due to statutory and official tradition" [OED]."
It seems that gaol didn't turn into jail, but gaol comes from Old North French and jail from Old French.
Smitherman is a joy. Really, this is the book you should start with:
https://www.amazon.com/Talkin-Testifyin-Language-America-Waynebook/dp/0814318053
Bonvin is right: it's not a typo. "they nere" = "thine ear."
The n is written with following word, cf. "my nuncle" in early Modern English. This is slight orthographic quirk of Middle English and Early Modern English.
Interestingly, the same process behind these spellings--i.e. linking final /n/ to the following vowel--led to the reinterpretation of napron to apron, numpire to umpire, and norange to orange, just to name a few.
See here for more
By the way, "theyn" is a nattested spelling for "thine". NB: the difference between the letters y and i is negligible in this period.
Source: Trust me, I'm a medievalist.
Edit: More links for your enjoyment.
For a really confusing time concept check out the morpheme "sen" from Japanese: 先. Does it refer to the past or the future? Yes.
Edit: the kanji has some different readings as well, but I'm mainly referring to "sen" itself.
Yeah I get what you're saying. Romanian has alot of Slavic influence, and is actually part of the Balkan Sprachsbund. French has alot of Germanic influence because of the Franks, and Spanish has Germanic influence via the Visigoths and later Arabic influence via the Muslim invasion and rule in the Middle Ages, and the same goes with Portuguese.
I've always thought Italian seems the most similar to classical Latin, which would make sense because it was spoken there before anyone else, and the Romans withdrew from the western areas earlier.
https://www.quora.com/Which-language-is-closest-to-Latin
I just read this and there are some good answers. Sardinian and Italian are said to be closer phonetically, but Romanian retains some grammatical features from Latin that the rest dropped. Hope that helps.
I agree with you.
I'm doing a PhD about an accelerated language acquistion via pure game immersion. While I thought my supervisor would be sceptical about this idea ( because she is 60+ years old), it turned out this not to be the case. She said that from her whole teachng experience everyone wants to learn grammar in the early stages and noone benefits from it. She said that the best way to learn a new language till A2 is via immersion and words and phrases repetition. People who are not linguists and learn grammar at that stage often can't apply it properly until they reach certain fluency, which is achieved better via subsconscious (native-like) acquisition. I strongly believe that we should learn grammar from B1+.
By the way, in case you and any of the community readers wish to look into my game I'd appreciate your feedback. Currently there is a free early version that teaches just 50 words available for a limited time. With it you learn words and their combinations in phrases just by navigating an airplane on the screen and hitting flying translations. I've implemented inside the idea from the study I shared above as I provide to the learner not only isolated words, but also their combinations in phrases when they are not in their main form. This way the learner can learn grammar in a natural way - without being explicitely explained its rules. You can download the game here for Android and iOS.
Thanks in advance to you and to anyone who looks into it.
Right on everything except for the "Jane, his." The 's ending is actually a relic of the Old/Middle English genitive case. Check it out
I liked it. His writing is easy to understand and as someone interested in second language acquisition, I like his idea of "mentalese."
If you enjoyed the book then you should check out his TED talks, they're pretty good.
Arkadiev 2005 seems to explain it well.
Adjacency of pronominal clitics to the verbal stem seems to be one of the criteria of polysynthesis.
(1) a. *Tu vraiment l'aimes?
b. *Tu le/la vraiment aimes?
c. Tu l'aimes vraiment?
Only (1c) is acceptable, so we can say that the pronominal clitics are adjacent to the verb stem.
mid-13c., verray "true, real, genuine," later "actual, sheer" (late 14c.), from Anglo-Fr. verrai, O.Fr. verai "true," from V.L. *veracus, from L. verax (gen. veracis) "truthful," from verus "true," from PIE *weros- (cf. O.E. wær "a compact," O.Du., O.H.G. war, Du. waar, Ger. wahr "true;" Welsh gwyr, O.Ir. fir "true;" O.C.S. vera "faith"). Meaning "greatly, extremely" is first recorded mid-15c. Used as a pure intensive since Middle English.
> I thought it was common knowledge that butts "sit" and items "set".
Nope. This is your understanding based on your own dialect. Oxford Dictionaries and Merriam-Webster both list it as dialectal. The Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, in addition to noting similar uses for set down 'sit down' in the Bahamas, points out that the OED also tracks this sense as dialectal (sense 143). So different dialects use words in different ways, with no way to discern a priori which one is right or wrong.
Thanks. However, I'm interested in Yaghan at the moment. Why? Well, because. There will always be people saying "but there's X". I can't do everything, and this is a start. There will always be a Schindler-alike regret, but one step at a time. I hope that this will motivate others to do the same. :)
I've written a short introduction on why I chose Yaghan. Just because! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/saddest-book-world-kristina-%C5%A1ekrst?trk=hb_ntf_MEGAPHONE_ARTICLE_POST
As others have said, Etruscan, Greek and Oscan influenced Latin. You can see some of the Etruscan effects here (many Roman names are Latinized forms of Etruscan names), and some of the Oscan effects here.
In Latin, PIE 'kw' sometimes develops to 'p' when it normally develops to 'qu'. Oscan is a 'P-dialect' and the vicinity of Latin to Oscan can explain these changes. It can be see in 'lupus' (normally lukw-) wolf and 'popina (vs Coquina): a bar/pub.
Moldovan and Romanian are very similar. There are some dialectal differences, but nothing major. There is also some Russian influence in Moldova that isn't found in Romania. The standard written language is nearly identical between the countries.
Additionally, Moldovan was written in the Cyrillic script until 1989, and continues to be written in Cyrillic in Transnistria, a self-proclaimed (internationally unrecognized) republic. It is one of 3 official languages and is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Children are taught the Cyrillic alphabet in school, mostly using Soviet-era textbooks. There is a minority in Transnistria that wishes to use the Latin alphabet; they have a handful of their own schools, which the government tried to shut down a few years back, but quickly reversed course. The government of Transnistria considers there to be two separate languages: when written in the Latin alphabet, it is known as Romanian (the Latin alphabet schools are known as "Romanian-medium schools"); when in Cyrillic it is known as Moldovan (the Cyrillic alphabet schools are known as "Moldovan-medium schools"). The Latin alphabet has no official status in Transnistria; public documents, banknotes and the like are written in Cyrillic if there is a Moldovan version available (things are often monolingual in Russian). Here is an example of an official webpage in Moldovan Cyrillic: http://www.kspmr.idknet.com/md/ And here's an 8th grade algebra textbook in Moldovan Cyrillic: http://www.calameo.com/books/0028760921e2e7cbf5096
This causes a lot of controversy in Romania and Moldova, since many nationalists consider the Cyrillic alphabet to be a Russian imposition, and are often upset at the current political situation in Transnistria.
I'm almost done reading "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language" and learned a lot about the Steppe theory. It's really interesting stuff.
Tone languages are quite diverse, and what is true for one tone language might not be for another. Even within Chinese, there is considerable diversity; Mandarin has neutral syllables, but Cantonese doesn't, for example.
One pattern that does seem to occur frequently is that if the source language has stress, like English or French, the stressed syllable will be assigned a higher tone than other syllables. This isn't really all that surprising, since stress is correlated with higher pitch. Here (PDF) is one paper on Yoruba and English that I just found.
You can find more about this by searching for "loanword adaptation", "tone", and similar combinations. There is more on Chinese languages than African ones, so there you might have luck searching for Mandarin and Cantonese specifically.
This phenomenon is known as syncretism and there are various mechanisms.
Commonly, syncretism is preceded by a functional merger or near-merger. To take your example, the locative and dative cases might have extended their own semantic range to the point where their usages almost completely overlapped with each other (syncretism by overlap), or else one of the two cases might have increasingly taken over functions originally proper to the other case (syncretism by displacement). The end result of this process is a functionally redundant case which subsequently slips into disuse.
Another factor which often contributes to syncretism is synemptosis, the formal merger of categories. So for instance, the endings which are used to signal the locative and dative cases might, through phonological development, become formally indistinguishable, providing the catalyst for the syncretism of the two categories.
(Edit: an informative source on this is Gerhard Meiser's article "Syncretism in the Indo-European languages-motives, processes and results." Transactions of the Philological Society 90 (1992): 187–218.)
Excellent question! The genitive has gone through so much change that is is not formed by all kinds of odd rules.
Check out this explanation from the Cambridge Dictionary .
On the academy's side of things, lots of sociolinguists and computational linguists work on stuff like this! You can find plenty quantitative (i.e. Labovian-based) sociolinguistics work that leverages Big Data/web scraping for data collection and annotation. Here's some citations that I know of:
Sali A. Tagliamonte, in collaboration with Dylan Uscher, Lawrence Kwok, and students from HUM199Y, 2009-2010. So sick or so cool? The language of youth on the internet. Language in Society, 45(1), 1-32. 2016
Sali works on sociolinguistics of younger (primarily Canadian) English speakers. She looks at intensifier use and sociopragmatics (the use of 'like') a lot, and ends up doing a bit of work into digital socioling.
Tatjana Scheffler, Johannes Gontrum, Matthias Wegel, and Steve Wendler. Mapping German Tweets to Geographic Regions. In: Proceedings of the NLP4CMC Workshop at Konvens, Hildesheim, Germany. 2014.
Prof. Scheffler publishes about German mostly, and looks mostly at Twitter data from a computational angle. She's also looked at (idk if it's in this publication, I saw it in a presentation of hers) about variation in intensifiers across different social media platforms. I don't think she looked at reddit.
Gretchen McCullough's scrape + sociolinguistic investigation of big emoji data, slides here: https://www.slideshare.net/SwiftKey/the-linguistic-secrets-found-in-billions-of-emoji-sxsw-2016-presentation-59956212
Again, not reddit specifically, but it's a great and more lightweight example of how to do sociolinguistics on internet registers.
> a lot of this stuff is just very specific to a certain thing that you're only going to be looking for it if you already know how to read Ancient Greek, so it's kinda silly to go "here's a translation" when every academic needing it will go "thanks, but I need to examine it myself anyway"
This. The only other application is to maybe use it as an example in textbooks and the like for students of those languages. But even then it's usually just a couple of sentences, you rarely have stuff like Haruo Shirane's Essential Reader for texts that aren't part of the classical canon of that language.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.edwardgreve.ipakeyboard
The free version has a good variety of the symbols but you'll have to pay to get them all. Personally, I use the free one and it serves me well for the most part.
The Languages of Native North America is still the classic introduction to North American languages. Although more work has been done, the basics haven't changed.
https://www.amazon.com/Languages-America-Cambridge-Language-Surveys/dp/052129875X
Of course, you'll need something more specific for a paper topic - just listing information isn't a good approach to a paper. Also, it's not particularly productive to look for sources until you've come up with something more specific. There are a lot of sources on Native American languages out there, and what's useful to you will depend on your topic.
This etymology dictionary says it came from the French "enditer", and when the spelling was changed to make it more like the Latin word that French got it from, it kept the French pronunciation.
From a historical perspective, you would appear to be correct (see here). From a synchronic perspective, I would consider assess a single morpheme unless I saw convincing arguments to the contrary.
"linguo" is old. Much older than those other words. As in 17th century. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=lingo And I don't think "hobo" would be recognized as a contraction by many people nowadays.
But yes, it may be an English pattern to contract words like that. I doubt there's much depth in it.
The earliest example the OED gives for sick is from 1983:
> slang (now esp. Skateboarding and Surfing). Excellent, impressive; risky.
> 1983 UNC-CH Campus Slang (Univ. N. Carolina, Chapel Hill) (typescript) Spring 5 Sick, unbelievably good: The Fleetwood Mac concert was sick.
The earliest example it gives for ill is 1986:
> slang (orig. U.S., in the language of rap and hip-hop).
> b. Excellent, attractive; fashionable.
> 1986 M. Diamond et al. Rhymin' & Stealin' (song) in L. A. Stanley Rap: the Lyrics (1992) 13 Most illin-est b-boy, I got that feelin' 'Cause I am most ill and I'm rhymin' and stealin'.
Etymonline agrees that this usage of ill arose in the 1980s. It doesn't say for sick, but it looks like they both came about around the 80s.
The term for this type of semantic change is amelioration. There are other recent examples of it. Bad being used in a positive meaning has a bit longer history; oldest OED quote is from 1897. The shit also dates to the 1980s according to the OED.
~~It's the infinitive and it is grammatical.~~
It's the agentive <em>be</em> and it is certainly grammatical.
While Latin was/is great and in some aspects better than Esperanto, in my opinion, it was/is overly complicated for everyday usage. Zamenhof simplified Latin, mixed it with some other languages, added a simple and very logical grammar system and created a logical Lego like language which is quite nice. Maybe not the prettiest language, but definitely not the ugliest. I would suggest everybody to download duo lingo app (or try the web version) and start the Esperanto course - it's fun (and I have finished it today). From the beginning I was mixed but after a while I can say that I quite like Esperanto now. There will never be a perfect language, never. There will always be "but" and "why not like this" etc. However, Esperanto is here and it's a nice, logical and good sounding language and I will definitely continue studying it and reading Esperanto literature. It's especially good language for kids, for example, the logic of number creation and ability to create new words just by using different affixes - that's great for the mental development of children. I would suggest everybody who has a little kid to teach him/her Esperanto. Check the numbers section in Esperanto grammar https://lernu.net/en/gramatiko/nombraj_vortoj and see for yourself how intuitive and logical it is when compared with English.
Yes, it has a wide array of uses, including negation (m-m!), which explains why the words for "not" in world's languages tend to have nasals.
It has been discredited and is no longer accepted by any mainstream scholar. Even one of the most prominent advocates of the Altaic theory, Alexander Vovin, renounced the theory over a decade ago and published The end of the Altaic controversy, an article that explained why he no longer accepted it.
In short, Vovin shows that the arguments put forth by modern advocates of Altaic (those who have stuck with the theory to the dead end, even after decades of criticism and outright refutation) - as exemplified by the Altaic "masterwork", the Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages - consistently flout the principles of mainstream historical linguistics, engaging in often blatant abuse of the comparative method.
Not modern, and a product of right-wing propaganda, but in 1955, the McCarthyist bureaucracy of the US Army came out with a manual on how to “spot communists” by language “they” putatively used.
> While a preference for long sentences is common to most Communist writing, a distinct vocabulary provides the more easily recognized feature of the "Communist Language." Even a superficial reading of an article written by a Communist or a conversation with one will probably reveal the use of some of the following expressions: integrative thinking, vanguard, comrade, hootenanny, chauvinism, book-burning, syncretistic faith, bourgeois-nationalism, jingoism, colonialism, hooliganism, ruling class, progressive, demagogy, dialectical, witch-hunt, reactionary, exploitation, oppressive, materialist.
>
Many of these terms, esp the more overtly Marxian, eg vanguard, comrade, bourgeois-nationalism, dialectical, have been eschewed by the center-liberal-left of today in favor of more identity-based buzzwords and slogans that are coopted by capital, but others are still used in certain contexts—and in a more etiolated fashion—by some progressive factions, or as protest language.
Edit: clarification
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=to&searchmode=none
>The nearly universal use of to with infinitives (to sleep, to dream, etc.) arose in Middle English out of the Old English dative use of to, and it helped drive out the Old English inflectional endings (though in this use to itself is a mere sign, without meaning).
Both the second sense of <em>bloem</em> and <em>flour</em> (spelt flower before the 1850s) have their origin in meaning the best part of the flour. French has fleur de farine.
In English the spelling became distinctive. In Dutch it didn't.
I am guessing the set phrase was common enough to have spread to all three languages.
That'd actually be Norþweg in Old English. The Old Norse word is Norvegr.
Source: Wiktionary and the link I cited in my initial comment.
O.E. ciele, cele "cold, coolness, chill, frost," from P.Gmc. *kal- "to be cold," from PIE root *gel- "cold" (see cold). The verb (both literal and figurative) is 14c., from the noun. Related: Chilled; chilling. Meaning "hang out" first recorded 1985; from earlier (1979) sense of chill out "relax."
2 things: Where proto-sounds are concerned, we don't really know how they were pronounced. We can certainly guess, but a proto-phoneme like PIE's *h^1 is just a representative symbol. We have a higher degree of confidence that Modern Greek's /f/, /θ/, and /x/ were all /p^h/ /t^h/ and /k^h/ in Ancient Greek, for example, based on first hand sources. Sound Laws aren't fully predictive because of the complicated effects of surrounding consonants/vowels and suprasegmentals like stress.
If you have enough living linguistic cousins, the picture gets MUCH clearer. This is one reason that language death is an enormous problem.
(2) Some aspects of language change have a cultural bias, namely what particular words mean: any single 'word' denotes several sememes, which change over time. Pick any random word and look it up on http://www.etymonline.com. It's living cognates probably mean something related but its not the same. AND they have multiple different figurative meanings.
As a result we often have to guess at the original meanings of cognates. So translations of ancient texts are going to be 'incorrect' since no living native speakers remain. For example, Modern Hebrewphones reading Ancient Hebrew are largely kidding themselves because the words have changed so much in the meantime. There aren't enough extant sources regarding what the words mean, especially in figurative/mythological/poetical writings.
Well, this is pretty basic historical linguistics, but here's one.
The Indo-Europeans were an early bronze-age tribe probably originating in Ukraine. Their language, proto-Indo-European, is the ancestor language for many languages spoken in Europe, the Middle East and India. The Celtic languages, including Irish, were among them. The exact timeline is unknown but here's what the encyclopedia I linked to says:
> By about 600 BCE, Celtic-speaking tribes had spread from what today are southern Germany, Austria, and Western Czech Republic in almost all directions, to France, Belgium, Spain, and the British Isles, then by 400 BCE, they also moved southward into northern Italy and southeast into the Balkans and even beyond.
Edit: I should add that Ireland was inhabited well before that, as we have monuments here thousands of years older than the Egyptian pyramids. Those people spoke something, but it couldn't have been anything like Irish.
Tide's etymology is actually from the sense of "time".
> Old English tid "point or portion of time, due time," from Proto-Germanic *tidiz "division of time" (cf. Old Saxon tid, Dutch tijd, Old High German zit, German Zeit "time"), from PIE *di-ti- "division, division of time," suffixed form of root *da- "to divide, cut up" (cf. Sanskrit dati "cuts, divides;" Greek demos "people, land," perhaps literally "division of society;" daiesthai "to divide;" Old Irish dam "troop, company"). > > Meaning "rise and fall of the sea" (mid-14c.) is probably via notion of "fixed time," specifically "time of high water;" either a native evolution or from Middle Low German getide (cf. also Dutch tij, German Gezeiten "flood tide"). Old English seems to have had no specific word for this, using flod and ebba to refer to the rise and fall. Old English heahtid "high tide" meant "festival, high day."
>was (v.)
>Old English wesan, wæs, wæron 1st and 3rd person sing. of wesan "to remain," from Proto-Germanic *wesanan (cf. Old Saxon wesan, Old Norse vesa, Old Frisian wesa, Middle Dutch wesen, Dutch wezen, Old High German wesen "being, existence," Gothic wisan "to be"), from PIE root *wes- "remain, abide, dwell" (cf. Sanskrit vasati "he dwells, stays;" cf. vestal). Wesan was a distinct verb in Old English, but it came to supply the past tense of am. This began to develop in Proto-Germanic, because it is also the case in Gothic and Old Norse.
Actually, it was added. There was never an "s" in English "island."
Edit: The rest of your information, in regards to French though, is correct. :)
Some of them just happen to come from stare in Latin, and they've lost the ending -are, mostly through becoming words in Latin and elsewhere. They mostly come from PIE *<em>sta</em>
There are other words like esteem and stall which have little to do with it.
(Not to complain, but I think this is more /r/etymology than /r/linguistics...)
Edit: wrong word.
Scot-free on etymonline.
Assuming etymonline is correct, I imagine that 'scart-free' occurs due to contamination based on folk etymology.
The pronunciation for some languages (Esperanto, Armenian, Catalan, Romanian, Albanian, Icelandic) sounds like it is generated by eSpeak, so it probably didn't take a lot of effort to implement.
From http://www.etymonline.com:
>jack (v.) 1873, jack up, originally "abandon, give up," later (1885) "hoist with a jack;" then "increase prices, etc." (1904, Amer.Eng.), all from the noun (see jack (n.)). Jack off (v.) "to masturbate" is attested from 1916, probably from jack in the sense of "penis."
What I took it to mean is that German speech, stressed syllables (which have a higher f0) are held for longer duration and said with more force. I thought it might explain why it sounds higher pitched.
However, this analysis of football commentary does definitively say that at least in the instance of english vs german football commentary, German speakers have a higher mean f0. (page 169)
Ok Australian here to lend my 2c. A swag is a bag of basic supplies carried by vagrants and wanderers - as referenced in the famous line from Waltzing Matilda "Once a jolly swagman". Also dictionary.com has a definition for swagman which references to the word swag (from which it is clearly derived):
Thanks! The thesis version of it is available here:
And it's currently going through revision in a journal, so I hope to see it coming out this year or early next year.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Niger
the river seems to have been named for the Latin word for "black," which is the etymological root for "negro" in both Spanish and English. so to that end, yes, both "Niger" and "nigger" are etymologically related, both derived from the latin word for "black." the adoption of "negro" and the eventual shift to "nigger" was most likely influenced by French, though, and not Spanish.
That usage is probably the origin of the idiom, and is still occasionally used in that sense today. See here--"art" once referred to skill in knowledge in general, including (perhaps especially) in the sciences. An important example of that is in the US constitution, which says that the government should:
>promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
For this reason, when referring to existing patents when filing a patent you discuss "prior art", even though patents aren't really art in the colloquial definition. It seems that the definition of "art" has somewhat narrowed to only cover "liberal arts", but that's not the way it's always been, and that definition is still in enough use to keep idioms in place (though definitions in common use can and do drift quite a bit while idioms stay the same).
As with everyone else, I find the use of "state-of-the-science" very jarring and incorrect, and only a bit clever.
Latin ubi just looks a little different but in reality it comes from the same Proto-Indo-European root.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ubi
Polish gdzie doesn't seem any different as Russian где, and I would daresay that original /k/ became voiced due to it being immediately followed by a voiced consonant, /d/.
Subtle comes originally from Latin but was borrowed via Old French which had no /b/ sound -- etymonline says "c.1300, sutel, soutil". I suppose the b was restored as an etymological respelling when the Latinate origin was realised. Similar story goes for debt. Edit: Also doubt.
Then limb is a different story. The final b is "extraneous". Old English form was <em>lim</em>.. But limb with the meaning 'edge of the disk of the sun' is apparently from Latin limbus.
If you go to google scholar and search 'ok,' maybe adding 'oll korrect' too, since that's a popularly proposed etymology, you'll get a bunch of articles that I think would be of if interest that talk about various theories about the origin and proliferation of the phrase.
Well, some people argue that spoken French is actually going towards being polysynthetic, which is just obfuscated by the extremely conservative writing system.
Nope, not really. Etruscan is one of those languages which really attracts amateurs, probably due to the whole mystique of it being 'undeciphered', a window into pre-IE Europe, etc. You can find random amateurs all around the internet, some claiming they have proof that it's IE, some that it's Finno-Ugric, some that it's related to Basque, some that it's related to Sumerian, and so on. Completely well-intentioned amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless. Mel Copeland seems to be one of these: he titles himself an 'independent researcher' and his stuff isn't published in anything peer-reviewed, that I can tell. I can't even find a review of his stuff; it's gone completely ignored by mainstream academia. Obviously, that in itself doesn't make him wrong, but he certainly should not be considered as a reliable view of the state of current scholarship; quite the opposite. I'd be very careful with his work.
As you say, the scholarly consensus is decidedly against any IE origin for Etruscan. Unfortunately, we don't have that many scholars writing things giving more general overviews on the Etruscan language, especially if we're just going to talk about things written in English. Helmut Rix, above all, though, is (was) pretty much the god of Etruscan; you might want to read his chapter on Etruscan in The Ancient languages of Europe, published by Cambridge. Rex Wallace's Zikh Rasna is also a solid book. Bonfante's The Etruscan Language does leave to be desired, but it's still by far a much more reliable source than Mel Copeland. James Clackson, a very reputable scholar, also gives a nice discussion here, and that's not behind any paywall.
>He says that the words Jude and Jew were not used in common speech before the Second World War
Nope. Demonstrably counterfactual.
> and are ethnic slurs.
No more than "black" or "white" is. I mean, sure, "oh, he's black!" or "oh, she's white!" can be offensive, but that, like this, is in how it's said.
Some people come up with the stupidest things to get offended about. For example, years ago there was an Italian-American girl who got offended when I called myself (a whiteboy from just north of mexico, who was at that point nearly fluent in spanish) a gringo (/griŋgo/) claiming that it was an American slur for Italians...
/həʊld/ is UK RP pronunciation. GenAm is /hoʊld/.
/ˈtraɪɪŋ/ is better transcribed with a syllable-marking dot: /ˈtraɪ.ɪŋ/, which makes it clearer that the first ɪ is part of the aɪ diphthong and the second is part of the "-ing" suffix.
One thing you might want to look at is Google's ngram viewer. Here's a quick search showing usage of "motherfucker" in books from 1950 to 2008.
You can adjust that and filter for just American or British English, however it looks like at least for British English the number has been steadily increasing up to the end of their data (2008).
Assuming books are any indication of language use, since at least in fiction they'd presumably mirror the language of their readers, usage has gone up quite significantly from the 70s and 80s.
Unrelated: This is the first NSFW post I've seen here since making the NSFW wug. I kinda wish I'd spent more time on it…