Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Linguoboy]

When Germany and Austria abolished their systems of nobility, Austria abolished the nobiliary particles, but Germany reinterpreted "von" as part of the name (like the Dutch "van", which wasn't a marker of nobility and was often kept in America), which is why Wernher von Braun kept it.

As I understand it, this was quite deliberately done in order to devalue it. Similar to the way that titles of nobility were also made part of the name so that they would cease to indicate anything more than descent from a one-time title-bearer. So, for instance, the German politician Otto Graf Lambsdorff was the son of Herbert Graf Lambsdorff and the brother of the diplomat Hagen Graf Lambsdorff, whose son is Alexander Graf Lambsdorff. Otto's son is Nikolaus Graf Lambsdorff and there are other living Graff Lambsdorffs as well, so it's impossible to tell any longer who in that generation is the "legitimate" heir to the title.

[Space60]

Do you ever use "anymore" in a sentence without a negative word? To me, "anymore" sounds strange without a negative word. "Who goes there anymore?" is not a sentence I would use.

[Linguoboy]

I picked up positive anymore from my late husband. As with so many things, I used to mock him for and now I do it myself without thinking twice.

[Zaarin]

Do you ever use "anymore" in a sentence without a negative word? To me, "anymore" sounds strange without a negative word. "Who goes there anymore?" is not a sentence I would use.

"Who goes there anymore?" sounds completely normal to me.

[akam chinjir]

"Who goes there anymore?" sounds completely normal to me.

It's also fine in conditionals, I think: "If anyone still goes there anymore, I'll be surprised." Maybe also in the other sorts of context that tend to license any indefinites, like in the scope of "without", or in comparisons. (Haspelmath's book on indefinite pronouns treats all of these as negative polarity contexts, fwiw.)

But that's a whole different beast from positive "anymore," which I think would confuse the hell out of me if I ever encountered it in real life.

[linguistcat]

Do you ever use "anymore" in a sentence without a negative word? To me, "anymore" sounds strange without a negative word. "Who goes there anymore?" is not a sentence I would use.

I didn't know there were people who only use it with negative words. And I grew up with a father who was very strict about "proper grammar" in both his professional and personal lives. However, I think I'd only use it with questions, and even then only with 2nd or 3rd person subjects. I could possibly see rephrasing a question someone asked me that used positive anymore, like so:

"Do you study Japanese anymore?"
"Do I study Japanese anymore? Everyday!/Not since last year."

but that's a very specific circumstance and it would come with the connotation that the answer should be obvious, whether positive or negative.

[Space60]

"Everything we do anymore seems to have been done in a big hurry." sounds strange to me. Not something I would use.

[Linguoboy]

Had to think just now whether the word is blindsided or blindsighted. At a guess, I'd have to say that the lack of primary stress on the second syllable of blindside shortens the nucleus (and perhaps causes vowel reduction) just enough to make it unclear what the voicing was on the coda consonant before flapping.

[Zaarin]

"Everything we do anymore seems to have been done in a big hurry." sounds strange to me. Not something I would use.

Okay, while not wrong per se, that does sound very awkward to me, like something a non-native speaker might say.

[Pabappa]

Still has Canadian raising for me, even unstressed, so I'd never confuse those two. e.g. "nearsighted" has /ʌi/, but "blindsided" has /ai/ (my best guess for both vowels).

[alynnidalar]

"Everything we do anymore seems to have been done in a big hurry." sounds strange to me. Not something I would use.

I think that's a tense/aspect thing. "Everything we do anymore seems to be done in a big hurry" or "Everything we do anymore, we seem to do in a big hurry" sound significantly more natural to me.

[Zaarin]

Still has Canadian raising for me, even unstressed, so I'd never confuse those two. e.g. "nearsighted" has /ʌi/, but "blindsided" has /ai/ (my best guess for both vowels).

Same.

"Everything we do anymore seems to have been done in a big hurry." sounds strange to me. Not something I would use.

I think that's a tense/aspect thing. "Everything we do anymore seems to be done in a big hurry" or "Everything we do anymore, we seem to do in a big hurry" sound significantly more natural to me.

Both still sound a little unnatural to me.

[Travis B.]

Still has Canadian raising for me, even unstressed, so I'd never confuse those two. e.g. "nearsighted" has /ʌi/, but "blindsided" has /ai/ (my best guess for both vowels).

Same.

Same for both me and my parents.

[Linguoboy]

Speaking of sides, while looking for translations of "inside out", I came across y tu chwith allan ("the left side outside") for Welsh and taobh tuathail amach ("left side outside") for Irish. I thought this was some odd Celtic idiom until a bit more poking about turned up a similar idiom in German (auf links "on left") and Slavic (Polish na lewą stronę, Russian на левую сторону "on left side").

What gives? I know that most of the world considers the left side the wrong one, but I'm still surprised to see "on [the] left [side]" used this way with no further qualification. It's also striking that this idiom seems not be found in closely related languages. (E.g. as far as I can tell, links can't be used this way in Dutch and the corresponding expression is binnstebuiten "innermost-out".)

[Vijay]

"Everything we do anymore seems to have been done in a big hurry." sounds strange to me. Not something I would use.

I think that's a tense/aspect thing. "Everything we do anymore seems to be done in a big hurry" or "Everything we do anymore, we seem to do in a big hurry" sound significantly more natural to me.

I think all of these sound fine to me...I don't know whether I'd say them or not, but they sound fine to me.

[Kuchigakatai]

I once saw someone wonder whether the presence of the Afro-Asiatic languages Berber, Punic and Coptic in North Africa might have been an influence in the widespread acquisition of Arabic after the early medieval Muslim conquests, in as much as there was a large proportion of the people that might have found the grammar of the Arabic they heard less strange than, say, Greek speakers would have.

In the same space, whoever it was also wondered whether the chance to abandon liturgical Latin was a major contributor to Germanic Protestantism in the early modern period. In the end it was the Romance-speaking nations that stayed Catholic whereas most Germanic-speaking nations became Protestant. Was it partly because Romance speakers who had the oportunity and tried to learn Latin found it easier than Germanic speakers did?

Remembering this, I noticed that, today, the European countries where English has penetrated society the most, largely through soft power and as a second practical language, are those that speak Germanic languages. Could this be another example of the same phenomenon?


The North African example is weak because Berber and Coptic are very different from Arabic, but I find the other two are nevertheless intriguing. This is also just a question about the relative ease or difficulty of language change, and whether historical examples can be convincingly shown. Language change can happen without any need of a similar substrate language of course: Arabic did expand into Andalusia and was used as a native language there even though the old substrate was Romance, not to mention the history of the expansion of Spanish in Latin America.

[Linguoboy]

I once saw someone wonder whether the presence of the Afro-Asiatic languages Berber, Punic and Coptic in North Africa might have been an influence in the widespread acquisition of Arabic after the early medieval Muslim conquests, in as much as there was a large proportion of the people that might have found the grammar of the Arabic they heard less strange than, say, Greek speakers would have.

Isn't this one of the central arguments in Ostler's Empires of the word? He also points out how much of the current Arabic-speaking world was previously Aramaic-speaking. (Compare the respective fates of the existing languages in Mesopotamia and Persia, for instance. Or even just within the boundaries of modern-day Iraq.)

[Zaarin]

I once saw someone wonder whether the presence of the Afro-Asiatic languages Berber, Punic and Coptic in North Africa might have been an influence in the widespread acquisition of Arabic after the early medieval Muslim conquests, in as much as there was a large proportion of the people that might have found the grammar of the Arabic they heard less strange than, say, Greek speakers would have.

Isn't this one of the central arguments in Ostler's Empires of the word? He also points out how much of the current Arabic-speaking world was previously Aramaic-speaking. (Compare the respective fates of the existing languages in Mesopotamia and Persia, for instance. Or even just within the boundaries of modern-day Iraq.)

Without having read the book, this is something I've been thinking about recently as well: Arabic largely supplanted Aramaic (except in certain Aramaic-speaking Christian, Mandaean, and formerly Jewish communities) while other unrelated languages like Kurdish and Persian and Turkish persisted. What makes the persistence of Aramaic more interesting to me is that while some Christian (and formerly Jewish) communities have maintained Aramaic, there are nevertheless large populations of Arabic-speaking Christians (like the Melchites and Marionites, but also others from Syriac traditions, especially in Lebanon and Jordan) and formerly Jews.

Another similar observation from the region is that Phoenician persisted for centuries after Hebrew (and the other Canaanite languages) were supplanted by Aramaic. My understanding is that Phoenician was bolstered by ongoing contact with its Carthaginian colonies in the west, while Judah was culturally and politically dominated by Aramaic-speaking Assyria and Persia to the East.

[Vijay]

There are still Muslims who speak Western Neo-Aramaic, too. I've read before that there are also plenty of Amazighs who don't speak Arabic, but this was many years ago, and I don't know how outdated this information is (if my source was correct, then this must at least have been true of some Amazighs in Morocco in the 1990s).

How long did it take North Africa to become predominantly Arabic-speaking?

[Kuchigakatai]

Late antique Romans liked forming their adverbs of manner with their minds (modifying mente 'mind.ABL.SG' with an adjective).

Meanwhile, English speakers would eventually reinterpret an adjectival suffix as a suffix to form adverbs of manner, a suffix that ultimately came from a noun meaning 'body' (or 'corpse'): Old English -liċ > Modern English -ly.

There lies the choice of mind or body for the manners in which the universe holds itself.

Isn't this one of the central arguments in Ostler's Empires of the word? He also points out how much of the current Arabic-speaking world was previously Aramaic-speaking. (Compare the respective fates of the existing languages in Mesopotamia and Persia, for instance. Or even just within the boundaries of modern-day Iraq.)

Whoever it was that I saw mentioning this (probably on the ZBB) was likely discussing that book by Ostler, yes. I had forgotten Aramaic in the Levant; that is important too.