Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[dhok]

Yes, Greek has ἤ...ἤ..., Latin aut...aut... and Russian или...или....

Finnish distinguishes inclusive (tai) and exclusive (vai); I don't know the etymology.

[Kuchigakatai]

Got me thinking, are there languages that distinguish inclusive 'or' and exclusive 'or'? I feel there must be. And as a corollary to this, how would such a conjunction evolve?

Latin distinguishes:

- vel X vel Y (can also be "X vel Y" or "X-ve Y-ve"): non-interrogative inclusive disjunction
- aut X aut Y: non-interrogative exclusive disjunction
- sive X sive Y (can also be "seu X seu Y"): synonymic disjunction (to give another name of a person or thing, cf. English "X, also called Y", "X a.k.a. Y"), non-interrogative irrelevant disjunction (it doesn't matter whether X or Y is true, cf. English non-interrogative "whether X or Y", "it doesn't matter if it's X or Y")
- utrum X an Y (can also be "X-ne an Y"): interrogative disjunction (exclusive/inclusive "or" are not distinguished in questions)
- neque X neque Y (morphophonological variant: "nec X nec Y"): negated disjunction (cf. English "neither X (n)or Y")
- X necne X: disjunction of ignorance in indirect questions (cf. English "(I want to know) whether he X-ed or didn't X-ed")
- necne and annōn can also stand on their own meaning "...or not?"

However, because natural languages are never neat like this, the distinction between vel...vel and aut...aut exists more strongly for noun/adjectival/adverbial phrases than verb phrases, i.e. vel X vel Y and aut X aut Y mean pretty much the same thing if they coordinate verb phrases. "Vel X vel Y" may be very rarely found in questions, and "aut X aut Y" appears in questions even less frequently. "X-ve Y-ve" is only extremely rarely found coordinating other things than nouns.

The distinction of inclusive vel...vel vs. exclusive aut...aut falls out of regular usage in early medieval Latin. Note that vel...vel doesn't survive in Romance, as aut...aut takes over it.

Etymologically, "vel" comes from a verb meaning "to want" (synchronically volō in Latin), and "aut" seems to be derived from an adverb meaning "away from there".

English has either... or, and I feel like some of the older IE languages have the equivalent of or... or.

Modern Spanish has "o X o Y". Modern French similarly has "ou X ou Y", although "soit X soit Y" (using the 3SG form of the present subjunctive of the copula) is more common.

[Travis B.]

Don't overlook English and or for inclusive or - it just happens that prescriptivists don't like it for some reason.

[Moose-tache]

Fun fact: these aut ... aut ... constructions were the original meaning of the word "correlatives" before Zamenhof used them to mean featural pronouns.

[Kuchigakatai]

Fun fact: these aut ... aut ... constructions were the original meaning of the word "correlatives" before Zamenhof used them to mean featural pronouns.

Latin has a very large number of these constructions involving a pair of words, most of which involve what you call "featural pronouns", namely interrogative pronouns (and determiners), indefinite pronouns (and determiners) and demonstrative or some kind of anaphoric pronouns (and determiners).

The idea that Zamenhof expanded the term "correlative pronoun" to refer to any individual such pronoun because of a table layout for these pronouns that he allegedly invented is a conlanger myth, probably popularized by its appearance in Zompist's online LCK.

I don't know what the first attestation of the term "correlative pronoun" is or the first time a Latin (or Greek) grammar included such a table layout, but you can relatively easily find examples of both on Google Books that predate Zamenhof's birth, mostly of German origin. I imagine Zamenhof might have learned about the term and the layout in a late 19th century German-language or Polish-language grammar of Latin or Greek, and then adapted the principle to his conlang.

[Moose-tache]

The idea that Zamenhof expanded the term "correlative pronoun" to refer to any individual such pronoun because of a table layout for these pronouns that he allegedly invented is a conlanger myth, probably popularized by its appearance in Zompist's online LCK.

The claim about Zamenhof (that he called featural pronouns "correlatives," not that he invented the chart; plenty of people have independently invented that chart without ever knowing about Esperanto) has been in the air since Zompist was in short pants, so it's nothing to do with him. But I am surprised that it's a myth. I guess I haven't seen the word "korelativo" (more likely "tablvort" or similar) in any Esperanto grammar, so perhaps it is just an internet fable.

[zompist]

Esperantists have been calling them correlatives approximately forever. For instance, here's a 1907 cite:

https://books.google.com/books?id=NzANA ... #v=onepage

I can't find anything by Zamenhof himself that uses the word, but Ekzercaro 30 certainly shows that he perceived them as a system:

https://archive.org/details/fundamentod ... g/page/n86

The current version of the LCK mentions Esperanto but doesn't attribute the term to Zamenhof.

[Pabappa]

Are there any known instances of a language differentiating a pair of stops where the only differentiating feature is that one is released and the other is unreleased? one would think it would be a middle step that appears as final vowels are being lost in a language that up until then had only unreleased stops in the coda, but if it has happened it seems to not be talked about much.

e.g. /tap/ where /p/ is unreleased contrasts with /tapŭ/ with an ultrashort /u/. but as the /u/ disappears, should there be a stage where there is a contrast between released /p/ and unreleased /p/?

[Zaarin]

Are there any known instances of a language differentiating a pair of stops where the only differentiating feature is that one is released and the other is unreleased? one would think it would be a middle step that appears as final vowels are being lost in a language that up until then had only unreleased stops in the coda, but if it has happened it seems to not be talked about much.

e.g. /tap/ where /p/ is unreleased contrasts with /tapŭ/ with an ultrashort /u/. but as the /u/ disappears, should there be a stage where there is a contrast between released /p/ and unreleased /p/?

I'm not sure it answers your question, but the Avestan alphabet has a symbol for unreleased /t/.

[Nortaneous]

Are there any known instances of a language differentiating a pair of stops where the only differentiating feature is that one is released and the other is unreleased? one would think it would be a middle step that appears as final vowels are being lost in a language that up until then had only unreleased stops in the coda, but if it has happened it seems to not be talked about much.

e.g. /tap/ where /p/ is unreleased contrasts with /tapŭ/ with an ultrashort /u/. but as the /u/ disappears, should there be a stage where there is a contrast between released /p/ and unreleased /p/?

dunno, try looking at languages with word-final plosive aspiration contrasts (like Armenian)

[Tropylium]

Finnish distinguishes inclusive (tai) and exclusive (vai);

That's not quite the distinction, it's one of pragmatics: as a conjunction vai is primarily used for questions with options, tai otherwise (the non-conjunction uses are not relevant at all probably). The former pretty much implies exclusive, but this still leaves exclusive functions for the latter too:
haluatko vaniljaa vai suklaata? 'do you want vanilla xor chocolate?'
vaihtoehdot ovat vaniljaa tai suklaata 'the options are vanilla xor chocolate'

[dhok]

Finnish distinguishes inclusive (tai) and exclusive (vai);

That's not quite the distinction, it's one of pragmatics: as a conjunction vai is primarily used for questions with options, tai otherwise (the non-conjunction uses are not relevant at all probably). The former pretty much implies exclusive, but this still leaves exclusive functions for the latter too:
haluatko vaniljaa vai suklaata? 'do you want vanilla xor chocolate?'
vaihtoehdot ovat vaniljaa tai suklaata 'the options are vanilla xor chocolate'

Mead púlpad--that was how I learned the distinction somewhere or other.

[Pabappa]

is that Italic?

Anyway, I had a dream last night ... or maybe a first-minute conscious thought ... that "wolf" and "luna" might be cognates, because wolves howl at the moon. It would make more sense if the lupus~lykos root was the original, since then there would just be luk- vs lukʷ- ... and arent the labiovelars supposed to delabialize after /u/ anyway? (or was that just germanic?) Of course the major flaw in the theory is that both words appear to be root primitives ... e.g. lykos is not analyzable as /luk/ plus something plus the noun suffix.

[Vijay]

is that Italic?

Mead púlpad? That looks like a conlang, a jokelang, or just a plain joke.

[Pabappa]

An Italic-based conlang maybe? There was loss of -d in Latin that was preserved in some other Italic languages, and though I didnt bother to look it up, I know some /k/ in Latin is from /kʷ/, which turned to /p/ in other languages. So it could translate into mea culpa.

[Richard W]

Of course the major flaw in the theory is that both words appear to be root primitives ... e.g. lykos is not analyzable as /luk/ plus something plus the noun suffix.

Well, Latin lūna comes from *leuksnā, which is built on the root *leukʷ, so formally you've got a contrast *wlkʷ v. *lwkʷ.

[KathTheDragon]

The problem with assuming a *kʷ in the *leuk- root is that there's no evidence for it. Compare Hittite lukta "it's getting light", where you'd expect a spelling lukutta at some point if that were a labiovelar.

[dhok]

You would get a plain velar from the boukólos rule anyways. Presupposing a pre-PIE *lewkʷ- seems reasonable.

[KathTheDragon]

Well yes, that's true, but you can't connect lupus.

[mae]

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