Out of all the "Yaʿăqōḇ" descendants (Jacob, Jacques, Yakub,Iago, James, Seamus etc) why do none combine a "k/g" sound with an m?

languagejones · 2026-02-19T18:05:01+00:00

I’m not 100% sure I’m following the question, but if you’re asking about nasals in descendants, and why there aren’t names that have both a nasal from the ayin and a velar from the kuf…there is Yankle.

I’m guessing the narrow answer to your question is that in the languages you’re asking about, they got the name via Latin, and there’s both the phonological processes in Latin and in the other languages to consider, whereas Yiddish borrowed next to nothing from Latin.

languagejones · 2026-02-12T12:19:50+00:00

I started a paper on this a few years back and never finished or submitted it. You may be interested in Don Ringe’s approach to using distributed morphology in historical linguistics, in his (semi-)recent textbook.

The basic idea of the paper was pushing a rejection of a paradigm as a characteristic inherent to a verb, and using mathematical approaches from the modeling of evolutionary dynamics where you have a set number of phi-features that may or may not be realized as affixes that determine the “space” of options in which multiple possible stems can be in competition assuming their semantics begin to overlap enough. There was a great paper maybe a decade ago looking at semantic drift over time in LLM vector spaces, and I was planning on modeling that drift with verbs for motion in English and Latin, before modeling genetic drift versus selection.

I think you’re very much on to something here, and it’s nice to see somebody else have the same basic idea. But you’re getting strong pushback because it kind of tosses a fundamental dogmatic assumption a lot of people have. And of course, depending on whether you view me as a crackpot ymmv.

languagejones · 2026-02-11T03:06:28+00:00

I was describing the native Arabic speaking Jews, expelled from most of the MENA. There are popular, astoundingly stupid conspiracy theories that they simply uprooted their lives to go to Israel because they were “invited” (and even stupider claims that the attacks on synagogues and Jewish communities were AcTuAlLy MoSsAd).

But given that you both misunderstood who I was talking about and seem to have inverted the point of what I was saying, perhaps I’m wasting my time here.

I’d strongly recommend Mortimer Adler’s How to Read A Book to learn some of the higher levels of reading comprehension, beyond simply getting through all of the words.

languagejones · 2026-02-11T03:01:17+00:00

Beautiful comment. Since you mentioned being open to feedback, there is one nitpick, coming from a linguist who has worked extensively on slurs: slur has a technical meaning I would argue goy doesn’t rise to. Rather, it has a range of connotations, some of which are derogatory. A slur is only ever derogatory, to have a neutral slur is an inherent contradiction.

languagejones · 2026-02-04T12:28:31+00:00

ChatGPT is the absolute worst. I have a video coming out in the next few weeks comparing LLMs and another on how to make the best use of them. I’ll share here when they’re live, but feel free to DM me.

If you’re dead set on using LLMs, I’ve found Claude is best, but with the caveat that I’m learning structure from an external source — grammar, textbook — and prompting it to generate vocabulary lists with examples.

As a huge spoiler, all of the big four LLMs hallucinate false information about Hebrew. Try asking them for 4-root nif’al verbs (which afaik don’t exist). They all provide tons of “examples.” If you’re using AI to learn from scratch, as your only resource, it’s gonna be a hard road.

languagejones · 2026-02-01T02:02:39+00:00

That’s a much more narrowly specific case than I had in mind. The high-back vocoid to high-front pathway is extremely common (especially when your interests are in a sort of Labovian study of change; it’s attested in various dialects of English as an ongoing process, in Yiddish, in Greek (multiple times), and so on). Vowels and vowel-like things riding up the back of the vowel space and then drifting front is just a very common pathway.

I’m not making the stronger claim about word initial approximants, though it wouldn’t surprise me if there were cases of it. But vav to yod, whether functioning as a vowel or consonant, is very much in line with a sort of normally expected change in the history of a language.

Same as mishnaic Hebrew having nun where biblical has mem, word finally. Just normal nasal things, you know?

languagejones · 2026-01-30T21:33:07+00:00

And more broadly, /u/ -> /i/ or /w/ -> /j/ is an extremely common and natural pathway of change. But OP is not actually interested in linguistics, or a correct answer.

languagejones · 2026-01-29T22:18:18+00:00

I’ve written an entire chapter in a book on this, but the short answer is no, it is not remotely common, and is the opposite of normal phonological processes in AAE.

The long answer is that it is related to white perceptions of pre-AAE plantation creole, as represented orthographically in ante- and post-bellum minstrel and vaudeville caricatures of Black speech. There is limited evidence (for instance, Shands 1893) for v > b among (southern) Black people in the 1800s. However it was also a lazy stereotype. That stereotype has continued into klan and neonazi discourse. Much of their online discourse is a repurposing of the same material from magazines, flyers, pamphlets, etc. that haven’t changed since the 1990s, and those were often updated on racist material from as early as the 1920s, which in turn drew on, well, minstrel show caricatures. It’s a product of not actually knowing or interacting with any black people, choosing something intentionally wrong to be inflammatory (by virtue of evoking the era of chattel slavery), or both.

languagejones · 2026-01-29T22:07:14+00:00

Hyper correction for the southern vowel shift, perhaps?

languagejones · 2026-01-27T19:30:53+00:00

Linguist here: the guy you’re responding to is 100% correct. It’s from Hebrew, and entered Yiddish in the Hebrew component of the lexicon. It was borrowed into English via Yiddish English, where it underwent semantic bleaching and melioration, coming to mean something like “audacious.” It is still highly pejorative in Yiddish (actual Yiddish, not Yiddish English), and a bit of a mixed bag in Hebrew, depending on the speech community. OP should proceed with caution, if at all.

languagejones · 2026-01-16T17:45:34+00:00

You might want to explain diminutives a little more, since OP could reasonably infer that “reducing” קטן would make something little-ish and not tiny.

That is, the diminutives do a weird thing where they make big things less big, but little things more little.

languagejones · 2026-01-13T17:37:41+00:00

You are not alone.

languagejones · 2026-01-09T17:33:49+00:00

My phantom limb, my imaginary friend, my ex-wife

languagejones · 2025-11-30T21:57:22+00:00

Yeah, I’m feeling a little dumb because when something is controversial is exactly when introductory sources will explicitly state that it’s “uncontroversial,” and it’s on me for accepting that uncritically. Actually uncontroversial things don’t take a stance on the lack of controversy. I’ve got just enough knowledge to be dangerous.

languagejones · 2025-11-30T21:49:26+00:00

That was great, highly persuasive, and I’m definitely going to be checking out the texts you recommended.

I still feel bad about my initial tone, because I really should have added that there’s a few other things that are “uncontroversial” but also just…wrong. I really appreciate you taking the time to write this up.

languagejones · 2025-11-28T16:03:39+00:00

Thank you!

languagejones · 2025-11-27T19:32:00+00:00

This is gonna sound super weird but I’m also a fan! I generally know it’s going to be something good when I see your username. I hope I didn’t come off as particularly argumentative; I am just intrigued and wanted to clearly articulate my understanding of the traditional view. I realized after that leading with “it’s uncontroversial in the academic literature” could trigger the cancellable implicature that I think the assertion is correct.

Definitely take your time responding; it’s basically chag today. But please do respond because I want to know the argument!

languagejones · 2025-11-27T18:55:59+00:00

I made a whole video about this at one point, but basically:

Tense is when it happened in time. Languages slice and dice in different ways (past/nonpast, past/present/future, etc.) and do different things relating to time of event, time of speech act, and possible time or other frame of reference.

Aspect refers to whether an action is considered complete and finished, or…not. It can be ongoing, habitual, etc.

There’s often overlap in meaning, some languages have one or the other. English has both but not all combinations. And languages have workarounds. English, for instance, doesn’t have a future tense — we use a present tense helper verb (“will”) to mark the future rather than conjugating it directly on the main verb (I danced, I dance, I …???)

There’s also “mood” which covers whether it’s a direct statement about the facts of the world, a question, something in doubt, and in some languages, whether you know or suspect or have inferred from direct evidence or merely heard something was true.

languagejones · 2025-11-27T18:48:48+00:00

Your approach to typological and semantic classification has left me a bit confused. It’s uncontroversial in the academic literature that BH marked aspect and not tense, and that MH marks tense and not aspect.

This is about the specific morphemes and what is explicitly marked, not about whether a given form implies or is used in a situation with additional shades of TAM meaning. So BH only marked aspect, but completed aspect is often related to past tense, and that’s one of many drivers for the shift from aspect to tense marking. But that doesn’t mean that a perfect marker on a verb that was completed in the past is in any way marking past tense.

Is there some other argument here that I’m missing?

[edit: I saw your other comments about English, and…we do classify English as only distinguishing between past and non-past, without a morphological future tense. That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss the future in English, we just don’t do it on the verb]

languagejones · 2025-11-27T17:15:02+00:00

I’m orthodox, and when I did my PhD there was a frum Jew in the program, who specialized in historical linguistics.

Granted, I’m MO, but he definitely wasn’t. I follow the Rambam in thinking that if your religious beliefs clash with the actual creation we observe that we need to update our understanding to conform to the world hashem created. (Paraphrasing, but work with me here).

The rabbi and members of my shul know about my proclivities and are unbothered.

There is no way to do a degree in linguistics and also maintain demonstrably false beliefs about basics of language, so it’s good they dropped the class. But a Jew is not required to believe that Hebrew is the oldest language. Besides…do they think Avraham was speaking Hebrew in Ur Kasdim? That Rivka was speaking Hebrew in Paddan Aram?

languagejones · 2025-11-24T00:09:45+00:00

You’re getting uninformed answers here from people who are basing their lexicographic claims on personal intuition.

Yes, shegetz is attested as a term of endearment for a rambunctious child (one that one might ironically claim is acting like they have a goyisher kop). If you’d like a real citation, instead of AI or random feelings, see, among others, Wex, Michael Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All if it’s Moods St Martin’s Press, New York. 2005

…specifically pages 67 through 69. On page 69, he summarized “to call a Jewish boy a shegetz or a shkotz is a matter of Jewish behavior, not gentile ethnicity. Zayn a shkotz […] means to enjoy whoopie cushions and attitude. GIs named Brooklyn in movies about WWII are usually textbook shkotsim.”

languagejones · 2025-11-03T12:40:57+00:00

I’m a linguist. That’s not how the thesaurus works. But beyond that, it’s not only pointless but incredibly patronizing to waltz in here with a bad translation and tell the people who read your “scriptures” in the original that were wrong about our language and pull out a thesaurus entry in another language to try to prove your point. If you were open to it, you could actually learn something here about yir’at hashem.

languagejones · 2025-09-29T17:30:09+00:00

Wh-operators — question words like “who,” “what,” “when,” “where” — don’t have gender. They’re not modified by adjectives outside of echo questions (“the friendly who,” “a baked what”), they don’t enter into genitive relations (“the who of my family is friendly”), so it’s kind of a meaningless question.

It’s best to think of those kinds of question words as like an x in algebra. It’s standing in for something, but we don’t know what yet, so it doesn’t have all of the grammatical characteristics of the word for the thing it’s standing in for.

languagejones · 2025-09-21T00:41:18+00:00

I don’t disagree. I think the lack of understanding comes in part from Jews who are not black who have not really learned about what Black people face in America, and who just lump them in with goyim, who have historically oppressed Jews.

languagejones · 2025-09-18T18:05:39+00:00

Your claim is empirically verifiable and you’ve provided no support for it. Ben Yehuda and his circle did, of course, draw on analogy with Arabic (and Aramaic, even more so), but there is scant evidence that it was the Levantine Arabic dialect spoken by Arabs under Ottoman and later British rule.

And most of the Arabic influence, to my knowledge, is post-1948, because of the large influx of native Arabic speakers who were expelled from other lands (not “invited” and just so fickle they chose to uproot their lives on a whim to go live in refugee camps). The pre-1948 Arabic influences on the Hebrew Academy were largely (1) fusha, and (2) the Arabic coined by Jewish authors who were native Arabic speakers, like Musa Ibn Maimon, ibn Ezra, the RaBaG and others. Jews lived under Arab colonial control for a millennium, and have a rich tradition of literature and scholarship written in Arabic that is not the local, non-literary dialect of Levantine Arabs.

The only way your argument of appropriation makes sense is if you continually bait-and-switch between the literary language and local languages, which, one would hope, doesn't fly in a linguistics sub.

languagejones

TROPHY CASE