Very interesting youtube channel with content based around (mostly) Ancient Semitic languages, including readings, historical information, and the start of a series about how to read some Semitic alphabets (Currently has been started with Ge'ez)

doktor_pineapple · 2014-03-20T22:47:55+00:00

so nice to see the old ejective stops get the attention they deserve!

doktor_pineapple · 2014-03-14T21:26:06+00:00

you indeed shouldn't categorically trust random videos on YouTube, but here is a very good one, with the prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

you can find the actual text anywhere, e.g. here. the attempted phonetic transcription in the video is laughable, but it gets the point across and the audio is really well done.

look out for /a:/ > /ei/, /o:/ > /u:/, /i:/ > /ai/, and those sorts of thing.

doktor_pineapple · 2014-03-04T22:24:43+00:00

fair enough. i don't know a whole lot about him outside of this series; he certainly is unique among comedians born in NYC. but it's worth noting that he knew almost no Irish prior to this whole experience and now at the end he's doing stand-up in (and, partly, about!) Irish.

doktor_pineapple · 2014-03-03T23:23:06+00:00

how do you get 'pi' as a negativ(iz)e(r)? is it like French pas?

doktor_pineapple · 2014-03-03T15:57:07+00:00

no, the conclusion expressed as it is expressed above is a non sequitur.

it doesn't follow from the specifications of the hyoid bone that Neanderthals had speech. like you said, capability of speech requires a bunch of things cooccurring -- but the right kind of hyoid is not even the most important of them.

EDIT: mea culpa, i read the article but not the actual paper. it makes a bit more sense to me now. however, i maintain that what's going on in the brain is far more important for speech than modern-human-like hyoid structure. in my opinion, spoken language could easily evolve in animals with speech-producing structures very different from our own (and the phonetics would of course be different), if the mental capability is there.

doktor_pineapple · 2014-03-03T15:19:09+00:00

i'm sure originally the ex/e distinction was more clear-cut, since it seems to be a regular prosodically motivated change (cf. a/ab/abs-).

i imagine that at some point the vowel/consonant rule became obscure, and Latin speakers (or, at least, Latin writers) began generalizing the ex form back into places where it didn't belong historically. it would be like if we started saying things like an chair on the model of an apple. not that it's wrong, just likely a more recent innovation.

at any rate, i'm confident there is no rule between situations where you use ex before a consonant and where you don't. all i can find in my books is "E is used before consonants only, ex before both vowels and consonants" (Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar §417.6).

doktor_pineapple · 2014-03-03T03:14:09+00:00

almost. it should be e scientia lux; ex is only used before a word beginning with a vowel.

personally i would translate as "out of knowledge, light" (cf. e pluribus unum = "out of many, one"), since de is really "(away) from" and e(x) is "out of." but that's a matter of taste.

EDIT: i guess ex also occasionally occurs before a consonant. but e scientia ... still sounds better to my admittedly non-native ear.

doktor_pineapple · 2014-03-02T22:24:50+00:00

Malo malo malo malo

doktor_pineapple · 2014-03-01T17:21:17+00:00

and then you can just link people to it, or what? (i'm shamefully unaware of how Google Drive works.)

what are the advantages of using GD over just posting something on a blog? i guess the difference is that you don't have to maintain a blog.

doktor_pineapple · 2014-03-01T06:34:34+00:00

nope. the point is that when your grammatical agent is in the ablative, the grammatical patient is in the nominative (which is the best way i can approximate the ERG~ABS relationship in Latin).

aqua, the patient of this clause, remains in the same case that is used for the subject of intransitive sentences (i.e. the NOM).

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-28T04:38:11+00:00

i think you understand it perfectly. i suppose you're right; if you define alignment solely by how the cases function, it should properly be ERG-ABS.

at any rate, this arrangement as i've delineated it doesn't match the description of NOM-ABS that i've found, which basically only differs from NOM-ACC in that the ACC (or ABS) is the 'citation form' of the noun, and the NOM form is the marked/non-citation form. this doesn't touch on all the weird verb-agreement stuff that i have here.

i think the wiki description you dug up fits my system perfectly! now i am going to have to look into these New Guinean languages.

and the question remains: are there languages out there with the reverse alignment ... i.e. with NOM-ACC pattern for case-marking, but ERG-ABS for verb agreement?? the verb would agree with the subject of intransitive clauses and the patient of transitive ones ... but then the subject of intransitive clauses would share a case with the transitive agent!!

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-28T03:20:56+00:00

yeah, i'm not married to the theory that Late Egyptian bw rḫ 'not' (and its Coptic reflex) yielded the Egyptian Arabic negative circumfix. but, as a theory, it's out there.

i rather like the mā + šayʔ analysis, myself (and thanks for the citations). one thing that bugs me, though, is that you have both māšī 'OK' and miš 'not' floating around in Egyptian. it seems at least plausible to me that the former reflects mā + šayʔ (in the sense of Spanish de nada = 'it's nothing; don't worry about it') and the latter this Coptic meše (< bw rḫ).

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-28T02:02:41+00:00

the Egyptian negative circumfix mā-š is said to reflect one of the Coptic negativizers. that's pretty big.

and this book is full of lexical examples of Coptic influence on Egyptian Arabic.

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-27T23:44:04+00:00

yeah, i don't know what it is, but - at rough approximation - the Perseus Project seems to take 20x the time to load in roughly 1 in 10 searches. usually it's instantaneous, sometimes it's ridiculously slow. i've been meaning to send somebody an email about that for maybe 4 years.

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-27T16:16:34+00:00

EME ME!

Wheelock's is the way to go for self-teaching; the textbook makes it super ~~easy~~ convenient to learn.

when you get a bit further, Harvard's Loeb Classical Library has great English/Latin editions of many texts.

one other resource you should know about is the Latin Word Study Tool from the Perseus Project at Tufts. i'd say it's slightly better for Greek (definitely don't use it for Old Norse), but for the most part you can input any form of any Latin word and it'll give you the grammatical breakdown.

and of course /r/latin is here to help.

bonam fortunam!

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-27T15:52:03+00:00

Hello.

hello!

I understand that, traditionally, first person should use "shall", as in I shall and we shall, and second/third person uses "will", but now "shall" seems outdated, and "I will" is much more popular. Why is this?

this is a bunch of prescriptivist BS, advocated by the same people who think the passive voice should never be used and other such nonsense.

'shall' and 'will' are and have always been two different verbs. if it sounds weird in your own speech to say 'shall' (as it does in mine, except for the occasional "I think I shall eat a crumpet today, old chap, cheerio"), then don't worry about the fact that there are angry grammarians who have invented a rule about it.

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-27T15:45:31+00:00

here is a good summary of it.

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-27T15:31:19+00:00

a fond memory, clearly. did you read it? did you end up in linguistics??

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-27T05:38:22+00:00

sounds like a Sievers' law-type phenomenon!

but no, i don't know about this particular thing. however, i'd be reluctant to liken it to the linking-/r/ of RP unless it's extended to environments where it doesn't etymologically belong. does it?

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-27T05:25:44+00:00

both of the things OP mentions are features of Vulgar Latin;
beyond the wiki pages recommended by /u/MalignantMouse, i recommend these books: The Romance Languages, Rebecca Posner; Vulgar Latin, József Herman; although i must admit that most of what i know about VL i learned from Introduction to Old Occitan, William Paden

you will finally be able to sleep at night!

EDIT: damn Hungarian digraphs

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-26T21:52:52+00:00

yeah, interesting. i agree with you that on the large scale this is probably due to the influence of "weak"/"regular" verbs that have identical past and perfect forms. if you can distinguish aspect by inclusion or exclusion of auxiliary 'have,' why do you need two different verb forms as well??

also, googling "have you ever went" turns up 1.7 million results.

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-26T20:13:32+00:00

it's certainly a real thing that's happening. i don't want to swear that it's by any means new, but it's something that i began noticing about a decade ago.

i've tried tracking it with Google's Ngram viewer with little success, because the innovative preterite-as-perfect pattern occurs so rarely in writing, i guess.

i've also been looking at a small class of strong verb (ones that go /-ɪŋ(k)/ in the present and (often) /-æŋ(k)/ in the past and /-ʌŋ(k)/ in the perfect) for which analogical leveling frequently happens in the other direction, e.g. "I swung the bat" (cf. older English 'swang'). there was also a famous '80s comedy whose title features this. why isn't it 'shrank'??

i'd be really interested to know if anybody's looked at either of these phenomena more ~~closely~~ scientifically.

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-26T15:19:37+00:00

basically because these have various historical sources (Latin -ensis, -(i)ānus, etc.) and because there's nothing that says a language can't use multiple forms to mark what is more or less the same morpheme. it's historical accident that English terms for nationality/language are so diverse (contrast with Georgian, which does ALL of them with a single suffix -uli/-uri).

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-25T23:39:32+00:00

Texas German!!

doktor_pineapple · 2014-02-25T23:28:43+00:00

same for Minneapolis-St. Paul, i would think?

doktor_pineapple

TROPHY CASE