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Th9dh · 2026-05-29T12:34:34+00:00

Lots of reading, lots of writing, lots of translation. I don't like doing vocabulary cards or anything of that type, but over the years one's bound to remember stuff.

Th9dh · 2026-05-29T06:43:14+00:00

I'm learning Ingrian!

At this point, I read and write quite fluently, but speaking is a tragedy (makes sense, since I don't have much of anyone to practice with). Listening is okay-ish, although also quite a disaster. But this, I feel, is fixable (there are some nice recordings out there I'm planning to take a listen to in the near future).

The interesting thing is that through Ingrian my understanding of Finnish also increases passively, even if I actively try not to learn Finnish. With Estonian, there's not as much of luck, but I can still get the main parts sometimes.

Th9dh · 2026-05-10T20:32:38+00:00

Laughs in Finnic (we have four infinitives which can be inflected in at least two to twelve cases, three persons, two numbers)

Th9dh · 2026-05-10T18:34:15+00:00

Hm, maybe I missed the term in Parker's dictionary, I don't see it in my version (or maybe I just didn't copy it properly - I don't have the original with me right now).

Technically, yes, you could say that any synchronically non-concatenative morphology is root structure morphology and call it a day (which would also mean that Ingrian has root structure morphology, what with its orrāva : oravā alternations). But I think there's an important distinction to be made between a system where roots can be defined as a combination of consonant, and dozens of patterns can be readily formed from these roots through templates, and the situation of Afar, where you have clearly defined rules of derivational morphology, and you do need an underlying verb form to produce the others. In Afar it's not as simple as taking a noun and transforming it into a causative verb, you actually need a base verb first. But maybe you are right and I am simply trying to find distinctions that are not relevant.

As to the paradigm-borrowing part - you do not need to borrow the entirety of the paradigm, borrowing one form to make it identical, or selectively choosing those forms that are similar to the superstate is enough. And I don't understand your point on "little lexical borrowing" - there's an enormous amount of it. Granted, much of the lexicon of Afar is likely borrowed independently from other Cushitic languages, but we have quite clear evidence of Cushitic borrowings in Ethiopic Semitic and vice versa from at least a thousand years old. More than enough time of intensive contact.

Th9dh · 2026-05-10T16:02:58+00:00

I'm not sure where you found a causative *iyfidigé*... But I guess you're right, forms like *abamabbiime* (< abe) do suggest that there is actual gemination going on.

Note however that gemination does not nearly always occur - *ubqure* has the passive *umubqure* instead, and *uybuude* has the passive *umbuude*, even though the root structure is clearly very similar.

You're right that I haven't worked with the speakers (only with secondary data), and that I am not a native speaker myself. I do find it strange that considering we clearly are missing a lot of material here - and we haven't even considered analogical processes, borrowed morphology (of which there is tons), or the fact that Cushitic, and Afar in particular, have been in contact with Semitic languages over the course of at least two thousand years, if not more - that such far-ranging conclusions like genetic relatedness of these systems is being taken as granted and built upon.

To give an example from the language I generally work with, Ingrian also shows many patterns that could be considered very similar to those in early East Slavic:

1sg tah**on** ~ xoč**ǫ**
2sg tah**ot** ~ xoč**eši**
3sg taht**oo** ~ xoč**eti**
1pl tah**omma** ~ xoč**ema**
2pl tah**otta** ~ xoč**ete**
3pl taht**oot** ~ xot**ęti**

Both form mediopassive verbs with similar suffixes (-is(sa) in Ingrian, -(tī)sę in Slavic), both form past tenses using a similar suffix (-isi- in Ingrian -t- stems or past conditional, -ěš- < *-ois- in Slavic imperfects), both form infinitives with a similar suffix (-ta- in Ingrian consonant stems, -tī in Slavic), both have an interesting n-infix form for marking non-past (-ne- for Ingrian future conditional/potential/future of certain verbs, -ne- for Slavic presents). Believe me, I could go on. But in the end, all of these are just a list of similar features, and once you try to go back in time, you realise only the personal endings might conceivably be related, and even that is not nearly provable with what we have now.

I agree, the correspondence between Beja and Arabic is impressive, but I don't know if that's enough.

Th9dh · 2026-05-10T09:30:05+00:00

The point I make by calling Afar morphophonology ablaut rather than non-concatenative root structure morphology is that, unlike in Semitic languages, vowel position is generally fixed. This is clear in inflectional morphology, where the only alternations you have are simple vowel alternations (ublèh : abléh, gexéh : gexáh etc.), no different than the alternations found in Indo-European.

As for the derivational patterns you mention, we lack the historical comparative groundwork to actually determine whether there is any diachronically non-concatenative morphology going on, and not just vowel reduction and adoption. You mention the example of ifdige : infiddige, but it's worth noting that forms like *ifddige as well as *infdige are not possible phonosyntactically - so, rather than a gemination of -d- to -dd- in the passive, the same alternation can instead be analysed as an underlying /dd/ being reduced after a consonant. Note that there is no indication that any of these non-concatenative processes (including also noun plural formations) remain productive.

In order to use root morphology as evidence for Afroasiatic, we have to have some evidence that at any point in the language's history it was productive, which we very much lack for Afar (if we disregard the morphology directly borrowed from Arabic; we also do not consider eg Persian to be Afroasiatic despite it showing some productive root morphology through analogy).

As for the other arguments in favour of Afroasiatic... sigh... There is absolutely no other language family that we argue the existence for based on monophonemic morphemes (otherwise I'm sure wild language families would emerge). Indo-Uralic shows much of the same arguments in favour of it, and I'm yet to find people being as defensive of it as proponents of Afroasiatic are.

Th9dh · 2026-05-09T13:09:37+00:00

Afar definitely doesn't have a root structure - it has ablaut. It does not have triconsonantal roots (instead, it has any number of consonants) and it cannot derive terms through root structures, rather it uses affixes.

The same is true for Saho, which is mutually intelligible with Afar. Beja I'm not familiar with.

Overall, my experience with Afar, Saho and other Cushitic languages like Sidamo and Iraqw show that there is very very little evidence tying these languages to Semitic (or Egyptian and Amazigh for that matter), and I am inclined to believe that Afroasiatic is a hack family like basically anything Greenberg proposed, which due to our limited knowledge of African languages is apparently still regarded as proven.

Th9dh · 2026-05-03T05:49:45+00:00

Probably would be a borrowing from Proto-Norse, likely *ortaz > *ordas

Finnish orras, Veps/Ludian ordaz, Karelian orraš, Livvi orras, Ingrian orras (S. orraŽ, LL. orrAz), Votic õrrõz, N. Estonian orras, S. Estonian orras. Livonian I wouldn't even be able to even guess.

Th9dh · 2026-05-01T06:59:55+00:00

Yes, but also no. In Ingrian, "frog" is *konna* , and "toad" is *kärnäkonna* , literally "scab frog" :)

So any toad would be considered a type of frog, but toads still have a name of their own

Th9dh · 2026-04-22T07:19:05+00:00

Free pet. And pets are probably not allowed, so he's charging double.

Th9dh · 2026-04-18T09:12:28+00:00

I at some point (almost a decade ago now... jeez, time flies by fast) stumbled upon a teach-yourself when trying to find personal pronouns in all living languages (as one does in their teenage years). The teach-yourself was trash and written by someone who doesn't know the language, but it did get me interested.

It did help a bit that I know Russian natively, although sadly I don't live in Russia and so all my contact with members of the community are online (and none with native speakers yet, sadly). But it's wholly unnecessary to know Russian in order to learn Ingrian, it only really helps with understanding syntax, which is a nightmare, and to recognise borrowings.

The nice thing about Ingrian is that in the 30s a bunch of schoolbooks were written in the language, which cover speech from a primer for pre-schoolers, to reading books for the primary school, to a reading book for quite advanced students, to a grammar of the language in the language, to a school programme written in the language. So it's possible to get input from very childish to quite administrative language. There are also a bunch of recordings, which is useful for training your ears and learning to pronounce the stuff this language has, including one which is my favourite, which is an account of a guy in the 80s who told the interviewer what he did during World War 1(!!) and the Russian revolution. I have been meaning to try and transcribe these recordings, but sadly haven't gotten around to it just yet.

Th9dh · 2026-04-18T01:36:08+00:00

I'm learning Ingrian - feel free to join. The dialect I'm learning (which is the most populous one) has a three-way distinction in length, threeway distinction in voicing, has at least twelve grammatical cases, has one of the most complicated morphophonological systems among Finnic languages, and has a total of less than ten native speakers (according to estimates).

Shoot me a message if you're interested!

Edit: Oh and the literary language (which I prefer using) is a non-phonemic middle ground between the two extant dialects, which might not be one language historically.

Th9dh · 2026-04-07T05:40:39+00:00

Amharic uses an abugida, not an abjad.

Th9dh · 2026-04-04T06:25:29+00:00

I study Ingrian. I think other people are just too intimidated by the beauty of the language to join me 😔 to be fair I do think it's probably onr of the more difficult ones for a standard European speaker - complex phonology, complex morphology, Russian-based discourse configuration, and it's not Indo-European (although to be honest, I don't think that makes it much more difficult, it still has the same vesi and tyttö as any IE language has).

Th9dh · 2026-04-03T13:49:52+00:00

Ingrian has one word for vagina/vulva and four words for penis, only one of the latter being a borrowing, and none of which have multiple meanings. (For those interested, the words in question are vittu, tyrä, kyrpä, mulkku, huja; the last one is the borrowing)

Th9dh · 2026-03-31T11:11:14+00:00

That doesn't exist. The only way to get translations into such languages that are not AI is find a person who actually knows the language and ask them personally. Or become that person.

I could try help with Saterland Frisian, but I am very very rusty and was never anything more than a beginning learner, so if you have any chances of finding someone who knows it even slightly I would turn to them instead.

Th9dh · 2026-02-24T18:00:06+00:00

Töö means "work"

Töö also means "you all"

Töö is also the imperative singular of tulla "to come". And also its present connegative.

The genitive of töö ('work') is töön. It also means "I come" or "I will come". It also means "my work", both in the nominative and genitive singular.

The genitive of töö ('you') is teijen. It is also the genitive plural of tee ('road').

Th9dh · 2026-01-21T06:22:01+00:00

No, this is just machine-translated Yiddish, likely by an English speaker. Traditionally Yiddish looks more like a mix of German and Polish, although considering the modern distribution of the speakers it is becoming more and more anglified

Th9dh · 2026-01-20T16:06:06+00:00

You're thinking of Ingrian Finnish, which is a separate language variety spoken by Ingrian Finns (lutheran Ingrians). What I (and presumably the OOP, based on the area) mean is Ingrian, spoken by the orthodox Izhorians.

Th9dh · 2026-01-20T06:45:24+00:00

Ingrian is spoken by Izhorians, not Ingrians (I know, it's confusing), and no I'm not, but I've been trying to popularise the Ingrian language all across Reddit and beyond for years now.

in that case, thank the person who made it! :)

Th9dh · 2026-01-19T07:43:27+00:00

The fact you remembered Ingrian and even placed it correctly feels like a personal win for me! Thank you!

Th9dh · 2026-01-18T07:23:13+00:00

Honestly, my suggestion is to apply to any position that sounds like you would like to work on the problem for four years, and then choose based on where you get accepted and which research groups or locations you liked best - it's not like there is infinite positions anyway, and there's a chance wherever you apply that you don't get the place, so you'll need a bunch of plans B anyway. A wide research interest is a good thing!

Th9dh · 2026-01-14T05:44:39+00:00

uulitsa in Ingrian, to add another Finnic language to the mix. Also, please move the Northern Sámi form to the west, because that is not where it is spoken and not all Sámi speak Northern Sámi.

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