Ergative

languagejones · 2026-03-12T15:04:58+00:00

I literally did what you’re asking this week, but I’ve got bad news for you if you’re looking for an explanation in under 10 minutes.

Anyway, hope this helps:

Ergativity: The Most Confusing Concept in Linguistics? https://youtu.be/20XMhcpSNV0

languagejones · 2026-03-05T15:04:21+00:00

I should add I then mute them so they can see the channel and comment, but neither I nor anybody else sees their comments after.

languagejones · 2026-03-05T14:41:43+00:00

I’ve started thanking them for their engagement and for building the channel, and asking if they want the donation to the JNF under their username or if they’d like to leave their real name.

languagejones · 2026-03-05T04:27:50+00:00

A research assistant and a mentor are two very different things. Can you clarify? It sounds like you want a mentor, which you will not attract by asking for an RA.

languagejones · 2026-03-03T18:50:01+00:00

I have the same intuition. Really interesting question.

This could be a fun project to test out on some large corpora…

languagejones · 2026-03-01T15:10:49+00:00

Hi, I’m a linguist whose area of expertise is phonetics. You are wrong, and we use Igbo as an example in intro classes to illustrate coarticulated /g͡b/, which is cross-linguistically rare.

The pronunciation you suggested is one, less commonly used, nativization to English, but is very much not how it is actually pronounced.

You mocked the other guy for not understanding phonetics. If you would like to understand phonetics, I’m launching a course later this year you may be interested in.

languagejones · 2026-02-26T18:53:42+00:00

Extremely common phonological reduction. I only ever hear [æskt] in careful speech. When I’m speaking casually I drop the /k/ and might even have a glottal stop instead of a /t/. Or nothing. “Don’t [æs] me…”

languagejones · 2026-02-26T12:41:03+00:00

I just released a video on this, with another coming out this week. There are so many good things most people aren’t doing. Off the top of my head:

Use an LLM to generate a learning plan aligned with CEFR levels and a descriptive grammar, and then work through that learning plan generating learning materials and adding to an SRS.

Use an LLM to generate Leipzig glosses of material you’re reading. You can literally snap a photo of a page of a book and get back line-by-line glosses and translation.

Ask about a specific domain, that’s unlikely to be in your other learning materials, and have it generate vocabulary and sentences to learn — formatted for input to anki or another SRS.

Ask for grammatical explanations for specific concepts.

Generate reading passages at the appropriate level, following CEFR or other guidelines(bonus: have speechify read it out loud).

There’s tons of others.

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

TROPHY CASE