Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[alynnidalar]

Further down the page is "You should take with a gun." I would never use this sentence at all.

To me that is ungrammatical - rather, it would be "You should take a gun with".

On that note, who also has go with, take with, or bring with?

I have "come with" and "go with" but nothing else, I think. "You should take with a gun" and "you should take a gun with" are both ungrammatical for me (though I agree the second is more comprehensible than the first).

[Travis B.]

In reality, it most likely comes from a Germanic source, so ultimately the same origin as English "tit(ty)", German Titte, Yiddish tsitse, etc.

Is the German form a borrowing from Low German? I would have expected Zitze, paralleling the Yiddish form.

[Linguoboy]

In reality, it most likely comes from a Germanic source, so ultimately the same origin as English "tit(ty)", German Titte, Yiddish tsitse, etc.

Is the German form a borrowing from Low German? I would have expected Zitze, paralleling the Yiddish form.

It is, and in fact Zitze is also found in Standard German, except that it is primarily used in reference to animal teats and is considered vulgar when applied to humans. (See also: Lippen vs Lefze. It's typical of Yiddish to use a "vulgar" SG cognate as its unmarked term; see also: Maul/moyl.)

[Linguoboy]

You are referring to the use of come with without an object; alynnidalar was referring to the dropping of I, which is not something German does.

I missed this the first time around. This is, in fact, something German does. As in English, it's highly colloquial and considered somewhat brusque, but it's commonplace--so commonplace, in fact, it's even been used in ads by municipal authorities:



(The sentence formed here from pieces of subway signs is Bin gleich da "[I'll] be right there".)

[Travis B.]

My bad! Somehow completely missed that German dropped ich so readily.

[Linguoboy]

My bad! Somehow completely missed that German dropped ich so readily.

It's interesting to me that, in situations where the object is fronted, it's what gets dropped rather than the personal pronoun, e.g.:

"Das weiss ich" ("I know that") > "Weiss ich".

(This isn't simply an intransitive usage because German is too strongly V2 to allow VS order without some fronted element.)

[Travis B.]

Does StG drop personal pronouns other than ich, considering that it drops non-pronominal arguments when they are fronted to initial positiion?

[Linguoboy]

Does StG drop personal pronouns other than ich, considering that it drops non-pronominal arguments when they are fronted to initial positiion?

More rarely, I think. I can think of examples like "Kommt nicht in Frage!" or "Macht nichts" where a 3s neuter subject (either es or das) is dropped, but it's hard to think of natural-sounding examples with a 3s animate subject, let alone a second-person subject of any sort.

Hopefully some of our native speaker contributors will pipe up here.

[Travis B.]

Hopefully some of our native speaker contributors will pipe up here.

/me performs a ritual to summon Hans-Werner.

[WeepingElf]

Does StG drop personal pronouns other than ich, considering that it drops non-pronominal arguments when they are fronted to initial positiion?

More rarely, I think. I can think of examples like "Kommt nicht in Frage!" or "Macht nichts" where a 3s neuter subject (either es or das) is dropped, but it's hard to think of natural-sounding examples with a 3s animate subject, let alone a second-person subject of any sort.

Hopefully some of our native speaker contributors will pipe up here.

Here I am.

2nd person pronouns can be dropped, too. You can ask Kommst morgen? for Kommst Du morgen? 'Are you going to come tomorrow?' This shows that while the formal register of Standard German is non-pro-drop, the colloquial register is quite much pro-drop.

[Linguoboy]

2nd person pronouns can be dropped, too. You can ask Kommst morgen? for Kommst Du morgen? 'Are you going to come tomorrow?''

I think in this instance I would imagine I heard a brief shwa there. (I normally reduce du to a shwa in this context.)

Could you say "Kommt morgen?" or "Kommen morgen?"

[Travis B.]

To my knowledge the -st ending specifically arose through the merger of du with a previous 2S ending ending in -s, so it would be only natural to say Kommstu morgen - and since -st on a verb is unambiguously 2S, it makes sense that the u could be dropped too.

[Pabappa]

That reminds me. Does anybody know if this beer ad is anything like colloquial German, or is it meant to sound like Japanese or something else exotic?

[Vijay]

Could you say "Kommt morgen?"

Of course, because that's just how you tell more than one person to come tomorrow.

But I think it is possible with 3SG and 3PL, too.

[cedh]

You can certainly hear things like "Kommt/kommen dann morgen" sometimes, but my native speaker intuition would probably tend to say that the pronoun is not dropped syntactically here, but just phonetically (being in an unstressed utterance-initial syllable). And it's definitely much rarer to drop a 3s animate or 3pl pronoun than to drop a 1s or 3s neuter pronoun.

However, you can also frequently read pro-drop constructions in colloquial instant messaging, where the "phonetic elision" explanation doesn't really work, so maybe this is an instance of incipient ongoing language change...

(And then there's the fact that "Kommen dann morgen" can also be 1pl, of course, in which situation the pronoun can be dropped much more easily.)

[Kuchigakatai]

I just noticed this post:

In the song "Antes de Huir," Natalia Lafourcade seems to say [antes je wir] for the words in the title. Have any of y'all heard anything like this in spoken Spanish? And is ð > j an attested sound change anywhere? I recall seeing something about it having happened in Faroese.

"huir" in both normal pronunciation and in Natalia Lafourcade's song is [u.ˈiɾ] (two syllables), but yes, she does say [ˈantes je u.ˈiɾ] in the song. The [j] sounds like a glide on the [s] to me too, i.e. [an.te.sje.u.ˈiɾ], as opposed to something longer that more clearly demarks the word boundary, i.e. [tes.je].

I think it's an after-effect of heavy lenition of the /d/, where [ˈantes ð̞e u.ˈiɾ] has such a lenited [ð̞] that it ends up being performed as barely some movement of the tip of the tongue towards the front, producing a rather accidental [j] after the [s]. It's pretty interesting, and I don't think I would've noticed the [j] myself if I hadn't read your post.

(Books describing Spanish pronunciation always state that /sd/ surfaces as [zð̞], with regressive voicing. Books describing Spanish pronunciation are wrong, and in reality you can hear various pronunciations including the [zð̞] they mention; [sð̞] with a voiceless [s]; [hd], [sd] or [zd] with the plosive allophone of /d/ especially in Central America and Colombia (also, I imagine, Quechua-influenced areas, where the plosive [d] is used a lot in the local Spanish), and in El Salvador and Honduras also [d:] e.g. los dos [lodˈdos].)

[Zju]

Consider the following nucleus inventory:

1. /ɑ o e i/
2. /ɑː oː eː iː/
3. /ɑʊ̯ oʊ̯ eɪ̯ ii̯/

Is it plausible that, when it comes to morphological and morphophonological alternations, one of rows 2. or 3. behaves as long vowels, the other as overlong vowels?

[Vijay]

Aren't overlong vowels rare to begin with?

[Pabappa]

Well, it's certainly plausible, yes. Trimoraic vowels are rare, but they obviously have to have come from somewhere in proto-Germanic and Finno-Ugric, since their respective proto-languages didnt have them.

Though, the way you ask about morphological behavior specifically means to me that you just want two sets of long vowels that behave differently, in which case I'd say there's no way to go wrong, really. Since the sequences you're contrasting are different from the outset, it's easy to see them behaving differently even if they become closer, or even identical, in pronunciation.

[Tropylium]

Yea, "behaves morphophonologically like overlong vowels" is not really well-defined.

If you mean something like a vowel shortening process that turns e.g. the diphthongs into short vowels vs the long vowels into diphthongs? Sure, why not, but this does not have to involve any overlength anywhere, e.g. this could be that /aː oː eː iː/ come from *awa *owo *eje *iji and the shortening process actually shortens these to *aw *ow *ej *ij, while shortening also *aw *ow *ej *ij to *a *o *e *i. Or vice versa: maybe a general process smoothes *aw *ow *ej *ij to /aː oː eː iː/ but also reduces *awV *owV *ejV *ijV to *awə *owə *ejə *ijə > /aʊ oʊ eɪ iɪ/, in which case it would be the diphthongs that are "overlong" and the long vowels "plain long".

(Beside the point: a contrast between /iː/ and /ii̯/ looks somewhat improbable.)