Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Pabappa]

It was just a dream ... I dont even believe in it myself. In fact I meant to write down the rest of the dream so I could remember the context .... I think we were talking about Lycos the search engine.

But yes, it would make much more sense if the word for wolf was the derived form and the word for moon was basic. I dont think the metathesis is a problem, though, sincve metathesis is required to get the attested forms of the word for wolf in the first place.

[Raphael]

North American English accents question:

Long ago - to be precise, during the debates about passing Barack Obama's healthcare reform - I once watched the going-ons in the US Senate, and there was one reading clerk, who was tasked with calling the names of the Senators asking them to vote, who had an interesting accent. Basically, her accent made it sound as if she passionately hated each and every individual Senator and couldn't help showing it through the way she pronounced their names. Then again, perhaps she did passionately hate each and every individual Senator.

Any ideas what that accent might have been?

[Zaarin]

North American English accents question:

Long ago - to be precise, during the debates about passing Barack Obama's healthcare reform - I once watched the going-ons in the US Senate, and there was one reading clerk, who was tasked with calling the names of the Senators asking them to vote, who had an interesting accent. Basically, her accent made it sound as if she passionately hated each and every individual Senator and couldn't help showing it through the way she pronounced their names. Then again, perhaps she did passionately hate each and every individual Senator.

Any ideas what that accent might have been?

New Yorkers and New Englanders both have reputations for sounding acerbic, though in my experience it's often that they're more direct or blunt than other Americans (especially Southerners).

[Whimemsz]

North American English accents question:

Long ago - to be precise, during the debates about passing Barack Obama's healthcare reform - I once watched the going-ons in the US Senate, and there was one reading clerk, who was tasked with calling the names of the Senators asking them to vote, who had an interesting accent. Basically, her accent made it sound as if she passionately hated each and every individual Senator and couldn't help showing it through the way she pronounced their names.

Any ideas what that accent might have been?

Sorry, but how is anyone supposed to be able to guess the accent based on that information? In what way did her accent make her sound like she hated the Senators?

Then again, perhaps she did passionately hate each and every individual Senator.

(Quite reasonable...)

New Yorkers and New Englanders both have reputations for sounding acerbic, though in my experience it's often that they're more direct or blunt than other Americans (especially Southerners).

Yeah that bluntness/curtness is a cultural thing (which, having grown up in Massachusetts and visiting there every few years, frequently visiting family in NYC, and living in Texas for the last couple decades, I can confirm is accurate for these areas), not actually anything to do with pronunciation. Though perhaps intonation differences or something like that could be construed as being more or less "rude"? But I still think a lot of that interpretation would be due to preexisting stereotypes about the speakers of the dialects, and not so much that certain intonation patterns really inherently sound rude? I dunno.

[Raphael]

North American English accents question:

Long ago - to be precise, during the debates about passing Barack Obama's healthcare reform - I once watched the going-ons in the US Senate, and there was one reading clerk, who was tasked with calling the names of the Senators asking them to vote, who had an interesting accent. Basically, her accent made it sound as if she passionately hated each and every individual Senator and couldn't help showing it through the way she pronounced their names.

Any ideas what that accent might have been?

Sorry, but how is anyone supposed to be able to guess the accent based on that information? In what way did her accent make her sound like she hated the Senators?

Sorry, I'm not at sure how else to describe her accent or voice. Partly it was the long drawing out of syllables. Ok, perhaps I could try to imitate her voice and post a sound file of that tomorrow.

[Vijay]

There's no video available online?

[Raphael]

There's no video available online?

I've already done some searching in the C-SPAN archives (the senate.gov video archives don't go that far back), but so far I haven't found her.

[Zaarin]

Yeah that bluntness/curtness is a cultural thing (which, having grown up in Massachusetts and visiting there every few years, frequently visiting family in NYC, and living in Texas for the last couple decades, I can confirm is accurate for these areas), not actually anything to do with pronunciation. Though perhaps intonation differences or something like that could be construed as being more or less "rude"? But I still think a lot of that interpretation would be due to preexisting stereotypes about the speakers of the dialects, and not so much that certain intonation patterns really inherently sound rude? I dunno.

I grew up in a Northern/Midwestern enclave in the South and both of my parents are from western New York and my mom is blunt even for a New Yorker, so yeah, my directness gets me in trouble all the time online.

Partly it was the long drawing out of syllables.

Southern American accents are what I'd chiefly associate with "drawn out syllables," so-called "Southern drawl." A lot of Southerners work hard to mask their accent when they have public-facing jobs outside the South due to stigmas associated with the accent; often their speech is still less rapid than Northerners or Westerners, though, even when affecting a General American accent.

[mèþru]

As an Israeli, I can say you guys sound so cute when you claim New Yorkers are blunt. Our national stereotype in our own humour is that we don't understand the phrase "excuse me"

[Linguoboy]

As an Israeli, I can say you guys sound so cute when you claim New Yorkers are blunt. Our national stereotype in our own humour is that we don't understand the phrase "excuse me"

I've often wondered where this comes from. Was it widespread in Jewish communities before the formation of Israel, does it somehow derive from the founding ethos of a radically egalitarian state, is it another example of Ashkenazi cultural hegemony[*], or is there some other explanation for it?

[*] Ashkenazi Jews--at least those of Eastern European (as opposed to German) origin--are stereotyped as blunt within American culture. This in turn informs stereotypes of New Yorkers.

[Zaarin]

As an Israeli, I can say you guys sound so cute when you claim New Yorkers are blunt. Our national stereotype in our own humour is that we don't understand the phrase "excuse me"

This is why I love Middle Easterners, and Jews especially.

[Vijay]

As an Israeli, I can say you guys sound so cute when you claim New Yorkers are blunt.

[mèþru]

I don't know if it was specifically Ashkenazi or not, but it definitely isn't today. I think Israeli rudeness even transcends the Jewish-Goy divide.

[holbuzvala]

Can anyone explain or point me in the direction of why in PIE descendants (I'm thinking Russian and Hindi for sure, and no doubt others) why the animate direct objects are usually/always in the genetive case? (Or rather why the accusative case of animates looks the same as the genetive)

[dhok]

Can anyone explain or point me in the direction of why in PIE descendants (I'm thinking Russian and Hindi for sure, and no doubt others) why the animate direct objects are usually/always in the genetive case? (Or rather why the accusative case of animates looks the same as the genetive)

Differential object marking is pretty common. Animacy is one line along which it can manifest; so is definiteness (look at the use of rā in Persian, for example).

In the case of Slavic, sound laws merged the old nominative and accusative singular of masculine o-stems, so the genitive filled in the gap for animates, where the distinction was more important than for inanimates.

The genitive seems to be the "core-est" non-core case--if an oblique case is lost, it often gets merged into the genitive. Ablative-genitive merger, for example, occurs in Greek, Balto-Slavic and to an extent Sanskrit. (Though not always--modern Greek uses the accusative for most instances of the old dative).

[Kuchigakatai]

(Though not always--modern Greek uses the accusative for most instances of the old dative).

It's true that the accusative took over most uses of the old dative, replacing it in prepositional phrases, expressions of moment of time or duration and in comparisons for the degree of difference, but it's pretty interesting that in the most "basic" or "typical" use of the dative, indirect objects, it was replaced by the genitive.

(The dative of semantic beneficiaries, i.e. the "ethic dative", was replaced by the preposition διά 'because of' > για, so in a roundabout way that ended up accusative too. The bare instrumental dative was of course replaced by a preposition early on too.)

However, Contemporary Greek is currently in the process of replacing the genitive of indirect objects with the preposition σε (from < εἰς) when it comes to noun phrases anyway (and is quite advanced in the process), but the use of the genitive of indirect objects with personal pronouns is still going strong.

[Kuchigakatai]

Can anyone explain or point me in the direction of why in PIE descendants (I'm thinking Russian and Hindi for sure, and no doubt others) why the animate direct objects are usually/always in the genetive case? (Or rather why the accusative case of animates looks the same as the genetive)

Hindi uses को ko, which is a dative postposition (used with indirect objects), not a genitive type of marker. Gujarati also uses a dative postposition for this. Spanish uses a preposition that marks both indirect objects and motion towards somewhere. Romanian uses a preposition meaning "on (top of)".

[Kuchigakatai]

Can anyone explain or point me in the direction of why in PIE descendants (I'm thinking Russian and Hindi for sure, and no doubt others) why the animate direct objects are usually/always in the genetive case? (Or rather why the accusative case of animates looks the same as the genetive)

The post I wrote above this morning only corrects what you wrote regarding Hindi (it uses a dative postposition) and the genitive of direct objects (since it's not common throughout IE). You do ask an interesting question about Slavic languages though, since the animacy-based pattern you mention appears in a bunch of those languages:

Slovenian: singular masculine nouns
Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian: singular masculine nouns
Czech: singular masculine nouns
Slovak: singular and plural masculine nouns
Polish: rational and animal masculine singular nouns, rational masculine plural nouns
Russian: 1st declension plurals (any gender), 2nd declension neuter(!) plurals, 2nd declension masculines (both singular and plural), 3rd declension feminine singulars

Amusingly, the pattern is apparently not present in Old Church Slavonic.

I hope hwhatting sees your question and provides us with a real answer (it seems Mecislau didn't join the new board after the move), but my first guess would be that the nominative of direct objects in inanimate masculine nouns (and other listed noun categories in Russian) was created through analogy with the pattern in neuter nouns. Neuter nouns already present identical nominative and accusative cases in Proto-Indo-European, and this pattern was inherited in pretty much all the ancient daughter languages, continuing to be respected in most of the modern daughter languages that maintain both the neuter gender and some degree of case inflection. Neuter nouns in IE have always been either totally or almost totally composed of inanimates, and perhaps due to various morphological similarities the animacy-based pattern was eventually created among masculine nouns in Slavic (and a few other categories in Russian).

Meanwhile, I'd like to imagine that the genitive of direct objects comes from a reinterpretation of possessors as direct objects in a "double direct object construction" of sorts. It often happens that to specify the source people or the affected people receiving the effect of an action, a possession construction is used (here I'm using a conlang and not a Slavic language):

o d-galu i-mark a-pnoi
1SG PFV-hear GEN-Mark ACC-speech
'I heard Mark's speech'
(syntactically i-mark is a modifier of a-pnoi: [d-galu [i-mark a-pnoi]])

From here, "Mark's" can be reinterpreted as an indirect object that the verb galu 'to hear' happens to mark with the genitive, even when there is no explicit direct object:

o d-galu i-mark a-pnoi
1SG PFV-hear GEN-Mark ACC-speech
'I heard the speech for/from Mark'
(syntactically i-mark is an object of d-galu at the same level as a-pnoi: [d-galu i-mark a-pnoi], as if it was some kind of second direct object that semantically expresses the receiver)

o d-galu i-mark (ungrammatical in the previous stage)
1SG PFV-hear GEN-Mark
'I heard something from Mark'
(syntactically i-mark is an object of the verb, [d-galu i-mark], with no inanimate direct object expressed)

And then it doesn't take long to associate the genitive to human direct objects in general:

o d-galu i-mark
1SG PFV-hear GEN-Mark
'I heard Mark'
(syntactically i-mark is quite simply the direct object of d-galu: [d-galu i-mark])

It's likely that this is not what happened in Slavic, but in terms of conlanging I think it's feasible.

[holbuzvala]

@Ser and dhok

Thanks for the feedback, and for the correction apropos Hindi using dative marking.

[Kuchigakatai]

As somebody who studies Latin, I'm annoyed by a number of unetymological spellings in Spanish that break the general rules:

- ayer 'yesterday' should be ahier, cf. its etymology ad herī
- ahí 'there' should be aí, cf. its etymology ad ibī
- aun/aún 'even [if, when...]' / 'still' should be ahun/ahún, cf. their etymology adhūc (reinterpreted later as *ad hunc)
- invierno 'winter' should be himbierno, cf. its etymology tempus hībernum
- ahora 'now' should be hahora, cf. its etymology hāc hōrā
- hombro 'shoulder' should be ombro, cf. its etymology umerus
- húmedo 'humid' should be úmedo, cf. its etymology ūmidus

The latter two are more understandable since in Medieval Latin they could perfectly be spelled humerus and hūmidus though. See also, from English:

- "to hallucinate" should be "to alucinate", cf. its etymology ālūcinārī (modern Spanish has alucinar)
- "ability" should be "hability", cf. its etymology habilitās (modern Spanish has habilidad)