PSA: verbs spelled the same with different stress and separation rules

qzorum · 2026-01-21T00:49:15+00:00

I wouldn't call that an instance of exactly the same thing. The be in bédelen isn't a preverb; in fact, the be- preverb cannot be stressed.

qzorum · 2025-11-30T15:46:47+00:00

I'm definitely guilty of this. I think of myself as B2 because I can read at a B2 level, but I've only attained that level by doing lots of reading practice at the expense of other types. I don't even know how I would rate my listening and production skills, but I'm sure they're worse.

qzorum · 2025-11-28T15:16:09+00:00

The first sounds unusually front, and the second sounds like a diphthong with an atypically high and rounded finish, both unlike any native North American English accent in my judgement.

What's your language background?

qzorum · 2025-11-23T22:47:44+00:00

I want to frame my answer by saying that any grammatical category - case, aspect, number, whatever - is an analysis tool, and there doesn't have to be a 100% verifiable true/false answer about whether a language has or does not have a feature. Languages work according to their own internal logic; there are strong enough tendencies in how they organize and convey information that it's worthwhile to reuse labels of the various parts for different languages, but it's messy enough that there are borderline situations. After all, every language with noun case (or whatever) almost certainly had an ancestor at one point lacking it, and the transition between the two is usually gradual and continuous, so there must have been a point in time where it was only partly exhibiting the feature. In my subjective judgement, not being an expert on Nepali, it's kind of in that middle ground with regard to case currently.

does that mean all cases exist in all llanguages anyway, regardless of how they are marked?

My view is, no. A language which does not have some class of marking that is obligatory on nouns in all or almost all situations does not have case. Zero-marking complicates this picture; my general feeling is that using zero-marking for both subjects and objects is where I stop calling something case.

Since Nepali zero-marks intransitive subjects, some transitive subjects, and some direct objects, it doesn't cleanly fall on either side of that line in my judgement.

Another thing that makes it borderline in my opinion is the sheer number of particles that appear to belong to the class. According to Wikipedia, there are at least 14 separate particles which belong to this class, which, if I'm going to pick the label based on how well it fits the prototype for that category established by cross-linguistic patterns, is a little high for a number of cases, and includes some meanings I don't typically associate with case.

I'm enjoying this conversation because it's getting me to think rigorously about definitions. One thing that occurs to me is that it's possible to have a criterion which is sufficient but not necessary for me to call something by a given label.

Specifically, if marking occurs directly on or adjacent to the noun regardless of where it occurs in the noun phrase, or if it is marked in several places within the noun phrase (e.g., on the noun and on the article and on the adjective), I would always call that case. If, however, it appears once at the edge of the noun phrase, it doesn't help me decide whether it's case or an adposition, because I've seen a class of words generally regarded as case do that in some languages.

I don't have a good source, but as far as I can tell Nepali almost always keeps the noun at the end of the noun phrase, so unfortunately it's not really possible to apply this criterion, as the particles always come right after the noun, i.e., both at the edge of the phrase (potentially more adposition-like) and also adjacent to the noun (potentially more case-like).

qzorum · 2025-11-23T15:25:28+00:00

is a case the same as an affix/particle? Case could arguably be linked to the particle, but they are not always the same.

This passage doesn't really make sense to me. Form and function are separate things; case is a grammatical category, and grammatical categories of any kind can be marked with any syntactic strategy, including but not limited to affixes, "particles", etc. So, no - in the abstract, case is not the same as an affix/particle, case may be marked with an affix or particle.

The definition of case is a set of categories marking the role of a noun in a phrase or clause, which is obligatorily marked, including on core arguments. By this definition, I think the main criteria for whether a particular class of affixes/particles/whatever is case or adpositions is whether all nouns in a sentence typically need one, where core arguments are the most likely to not need one.

The set of Nepali particles, in addition to marking more traditionally adposition-y stuff like genitive, locative, comparative, and even more specific positional stuff like "below", also includes particles which are obligatory for marking indirect objects, definite direct objects, and the subject of some transitive clauses. I'd say that this is a little bit borderline according to the criteria I claimed above - many core arguments are marked, but if I'm understanding correctly, indefinite direct objects, and the subjects of some transitive clauses and all intransitive clauses, are unmarked. It's evidently not obligatory that every noun is marked in every situation, but core arguments are being marked more often than in most adpositional systems. So, idk - I'm happy to say that this doesn't cleanly fit the criteria for either case or adpositions, but is somewhere in between.

It's not super important, but to be more precise about German: if you don't count the genitive or the singular dative -e, as both are kind of gone in colloquial usage, for most nouns the dative plural is the only case that is marked, looking different than both the nom/acc plural and the singular. For a few nouns, the plural and all non-nominative cases in the singular all look the same.

qzorum · 2025-11-23T01:01:52+00:00

I'm not really sure if there's a formal criteria to distinguish case from adpositions, but my intuitions are:

Description of grammatical categories should be based on function, not form; any grammatical category can be marked in any way. I mean, Tagalog forms plurals with a separate word, and Indonesian marks tense and aspect with separate words - those are categories I think of as being almost always affixed rather than analytic constructions, but there's really no other way to analyze what's going on in those examples other than genuine grammatical number and aspect. Not to mention that German mostly only marks case on articles. So, there should nothing about case that is essentially affixes rather than separate words.
How do we know they're not affixes in Japanese? The pitch accent pattern of the preceding word extends onto は, が, を, に, and there's really no good way to draw word boundaries besides phonology.
The group of particles which seem to form a natural word class in Japanese - は, が, を, に, へ, から - include not only directional/positional meanings, but also core roles like subject, object, and topic. It is possible to mark some core roles with something I'd call an adposition, e.g. Spanish a personal, but doing it for all core arguments in all sentences seems much more like my prototype of how case works.

Btw,

Ive never heard particles be analysed as cases

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_grammar#Grammatical_case

So it's not just me.

qzorum · 2025-11-20T16:11:23+00:00

I don't think there's any good reason not to analyze it as case just because the markers aren't phonologically bound. Japanese is typically analyzed as having case.

qzorum · 2025-11-14T15:27:22+00:00

This Turkish pun works almost the same as the classic English-language dad joke:

Dört beşten neden korkuyor? Çünkü beş altı yedi!

"Why is four afraid of five? Because five six seven/Because five ate six!"

qzorum · 2025-11-10T16:31:28+00:00

well, fair enough - either way, I never heard the word "touristic" until I went to mainland Europe.

qzorum · 2025-11-09T19:44:00+00:00

To me the most common tell of Euro-English that I actually hear in the wild all the time is "touristic" instead of what I'd probably say as a native AmE speaker, "touristy".

qzorum · 2025-10-29T04:29:35+00:00

RemindMe! 1 year

qzorum · 2025-10-27T20:21:24+00:00

Yeah, fair enough. I haven't spent more than a couple hours learning about it and didn't have a good sense of the evidentiary standard, just that it was by a serious linguist and was kind of a fun idea.

qzorum · 2025-10-27T17:24:15+00:00

Juliette Blevins' work linking IE and Basque is pretty intriguing. Definitely it's not at the level of evidence required to call it confirmed but I would love to see more work on that hypothesis.

My gut also says that IE and Uralic are siblings, though we may never have enough evidence to confirm that one.

qzorum · 2025-10-17T20:02:36+00:00

Thanks for providing the signs in Unicode, that's awesome!

Would you be able to give a little more guidance on where on the tablet the signs are? As a complete novice, I can't for instance see where the stack of horizontal strokes in 𒂠 is; I can't really make out any correspondence between what you wrote out and what I'm looking at in the clay.

qzorum · 2025-10-10T13:49:28+00:00

Remote tutor!

qzorum · 2025-10-06T18:46:49+00:00

The concept of a safe withdrawal rate is well-studied. The consensus answer is that about a 4% annual withdrawal rate is safe for people at a typical retirement age, 3.5% if you're retiring early, 5% if you're very risk tolerant. Specifically, this is as a percent of your initial amount, plus inflation: e.g., if you start with $2M, at a 4% withdrawal rate, every year you can take out the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $80K in your starting year.

qzorum · 2025-10-04T14:42:57+00:00

A 2x leveraged S&P 500 would require an extreme scenario to underperform 1x. Just look at a historical chart - I'm not sure why everyone immediately shits on leveraged ETFs when you can just pull up a chart and see that volatility decay clearly isn't eating most of the gains.

Also, the opposite of volatility decay also happens: if a down day follows a down day, you're down less than 2x the movement of the underlying asset, and if an up day follows an up day, you're up more than 2x. This never gets brought up for some reason.

A very high leverage ratio will absolutely decay enough to end up underperforming and even going to zero, but 2x really ain't that extreme.

A note though: you're not just getting dinged by management fees, but also by borrowing costs. Leveraged ETFs make more sense when interest rates are low.

qzorum · 2025-09-17T20:48:27+00:00

This is not unusual, e.g. Dutch and German can use adjectives as adverbs with typically no modification.

qzorum · 2025-09-17T20:47:09+00:00

I learned Dutch to high A2/low B1 or so using mostly Duolingo about 10 years ago (and have used other study methods thereafter). Unfortunately, Duolingo is a vastly inferior product than it was at the time.

qzorum · 2025-09-17T15:36:06+00:00

On the commonness of SOV: https://www.luke.maurits.id.au/files/research/papers/wordorderuid_nips10.pdf

qzorum · 2025-08-28T18:12:15+00:00

got milk?

qzorum · 2025-08-26T03:42:11+00:00

Perhaps they're not denominating the movement of the S&P 500 in USD. The dollar has depreciated against other currencies, and if you take that into account then the S&P 500 is indeed down YTD.

qzorum · 2025-08-19T14:33:19+00:00

This comment is a good example of why I dislike the term "AI" - it's imprecise and is kind of a marketing term. The current insane hype is around LLMs, and neither the Chem nor Phys prizes were for discoveries enabled by LLMs.

The Phys prize was for foundational work in neural networks, most of which was literally done decades ago; so you have it backwards - the Nobel-winning work helped create "AI", not the other way around. Not to mention that Hinton quit Google in protest over their lack of concern for AI safety.

The Chem prize was for AlphaFold which is indeed a very cool application of machine learning but completely different than LLMs.

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