Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Darren]

Aren't there some dialects of Jutland Danish that no longer have the common-neuter distinction?

Wikipedia seems to suggest there are. It says that there are still two noun classes though, the "n- and t- words." It could be argued that this is still sort of gender. I'm surprised there are no other Romance or Germanic languages which lost gender, even the ones which simplified a lot.

[Vijay]

But it also says they're not genders and t-words are limited to mass nouns.

[Darren]

But it also says they're not genders and t-words are limited to mass nouns.

I know, but the noun classes are somewhat like gender, so it hasn't really been as completely lost as in English.

[Kuchigakatai]

It's not just European, but it's not universal. My understanding is that languages basically fall into three or four categories:

1. Few or no ambitransitives
2. Mainly ambitransitives of the S=A type (e.g. I ate, I ate chicken, subject role doesn't change)
3. Mainly ambitransitives of the S=P type (e.g. it bent, I bent it, intransitive subject = transitive object)
4. A mix of (2) and (3)

And then, if you look at morphology, the preferred direction for overt valency change differs. Some language have a lot of transitive verbs and prefer to overly detransitivise, as Spanish does via reflexives, and some languages mostly have intransitives and add an overt transitiviser. Of course, there are some verbs which will always be transitive (it's hard to conceive of something being eaten without an eater around), but the class of verbs which are S=P in English can either be lexicalised as root transitives or root intransitives (or both, as an alternative to voice morphology) in a languages that avoids ambitransitive roots.

This is a fascinating way to look at it. It... rather suggests the linguists of Old were right in treating the active-stative morphosyntactic alignment as something that simply combines the ideal, Platonic nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive alignments in somewhat equal amounts, rather than a separate alignment of its own. The alignments are based on ambitransitivity, and your #2 matches the nominative-accusative alignment (and this is why it needs a "passive" voice to achieve S=P), your #3 matches the ergative-absolutive alignment (and this is why it needs an "antipassive" voice to achieve S=A), and #4 matches the active-stative alignment. What alignment would a language from category #1 have? (EDIT: I suppose that'd be either the tripartite alignment or the Iranian transitive alignment...)

It also makes me wonder why exactly English isn't considered a split-S active-stative language. It kinda looks like one!? Lots of words have the S=P behaviour, including borrowings from Latin and novel formations. I decline the noun this way; the noun declines this way. It solidified; I solidified it. It overheated; I overheated it. The lights turned on; I turned the lights on. "I turned around" is not an S=A sentence as it doesn't mean "I turned stuff around", but resembles S=P and is in fact not very different from "I was turned around" except in terms of volition.

[Linguoboy]

So as everyone knows, Celtic languages inflect their prepositions. However, I think Scottish Gaelic is unique in not only having the standard set for pronominal objects of prepositions, but also has an entirely separate set for marking the pronominal possessor of a following noun leading to sets like the following:

anns an taigh
in the house

annam
in me

mo thaigh
my house

nam thaigh
in my house

This becomes especially wild when you remember that the direct objects of constructions using verbal nouns is marked by the genitive, leading to examples like the following:

Tha i a' pòsadh a bhráthar
She's marrying his brother

*Tha i a' pòsadh e
*(intended: she's marrying him)

Tha i ga phòsadh
She's marrying him

You have the same thing in Irish, though the exact forms vary by dialect. The CO equivalent of that last sentence is Tá sí á phósadh (where á represents a contraction of either *ag a or *do a). But in Connaught this á generally takes the form dhá /ɣa/.

[KathTheDragon]

It also makes me wonder why exactly English isn't considered a split-S active-stative language. It kinda looks like one!? Lots of words have the S=P behaviour, including borrowings from Latin and novel formations. I decline the noun this way; the noun declines this way. It solidified; I solidified it. It overheated; I overheated it. The lights turned on; I turned the lights on. "I turned around" is not an S=A sentence as it doesn't mean "I turned stuff around", but resembles S=P and is in fact not very different from "I was turned around" except in terms of volition.

Because this isn't how morphosyntactic alignment is determined?

[Kuchigakatai]

Because this isn't how morphosyntactic alignment is determined?

Hmmm... I do see now that English doesn't show ergative-like behaviour in coordinated verb phrases. *I burned the book and turned to ashes doesn't work if you want to say the book turned to ashes. Same if I use two labile verbs: *I fried the vegetables and boiled is ungrammatical. Are there other ways in which I'm wrong?

[akam chinjir]

Because this isn't how morphosyntactic alignment is determined?

Hmmm... I do see now that English doesn't show ergative-like behaviour in coordinated verb phrases. *[i]I burned the book and turned to ashes[/i] doesn't work if you want to say the book turned to ashes. Same if I use two labile verbs: *[i]I fried the vegetables and boiled[/i] is ungrammatical. Are there other ways in which I'm wrong?

Verbs agree only with the subject. Case-marking of pronouns is accusative. No extraction restrictions of the sort you find in some ergative languages.

(Aside: it's an unfortunate effect of the influence of Dixon's book on ergativity that people think of syntactic ergativity so thoroughly in terms of conjunction reduction. That's a pretty marginal issue, with respect to ergativity, but of the very few languages it's significant in, Dixon happens to have written grammars of two of them. Restrictions on relative clause formation, that sort of thing, are much more typical.)

[chris_notts]

Because this isn't how morphosyntactic alignment is determined?

Hmmm... I do see now that English doesn't show ergative-like behaviour in coordinated verb phrases. *[i]I burned the book and turned to ashes[/i] doesn't work if you want to say the book turned to ashes. Same if I use two labile verbs: *[i]I fried the vegetables and boiled[/i] is ungrammatical. Are there other ways in which I'm wrong?

Verbs agree only with the subject. Case-marking of pronouns is accusative. No extraction restrictions of the sort you find in some ergative languages.

(Aside: it's an unfortunate effect of the influence of Dixon's book on ergativity that people think of syntactic ergativity so thoroughly in terms of conjunction reduction. That's a pretty marginal issue, with respect to ergativity, but of the very few languages it's significant in, Dixon happens to have written grammars of two of them. Restrictions on relative clause formation, that sort of thing, are much more typical.)

In some Mayan languages it's an issue with respect to complement and purpose clauses as well, not just relative clauses. And famously with transitive subject extraction for focus as well. But I think it's not unusual to single out A for pragmatic restrictions even in non-ergative languages.

[akam chinjir]

In some Mayan languages it's an issue with respect to complement and purpose clauses as well, not just relative clauses. And famously with transitive subject extraction for focus as well. But I think it's not unusual to single out A for pragmatic restrictions even in non-ergative languages.

Oh, for sure, I didn't mean to rule that out---just that I think it's as common with relative clauses as anywhere else, and generally is (or can be interpreted as being) something involving extraction.

When you say there are pragmatic restrictions on A, do you mean strictly in the Dixon sense (more agentlike argument of a transitive verb)? Or is it with agentlike arguments in general? (I also think Dixon can leave people with an exaggerated sense of the significance of the S/A/P shorthand. Quite often when you want to distinguish between different sorts of subjects, it's not really about transitivity, so it's not really a distinction you can draw in terms of S/A/P---you need S_A vs S_P or something, or just a different terminology.)

[KathTheDragon]

Because this isn't how morphosyntactic alignment is determined?

Hmmm... I do see now that English doesn't show ergative-like behaviour in coordinated verb phrases. *I burned the book and turned to ashes doesn't work if you want to say the book turned to ashes. Same if I use two labile verbs: *I fried the vegetables and boiled is ungrammatical. Are there other ways in which I'm wrong?

Alignment is the pattern of morphological and syntactic coding of the single intransitive argument, and the two arguments of transitive verbs, A (the more agent-like) and P (the more patient-like). (You can be far more rigorous in defining these but this'll do for now). All English transitives are A V P, and English intransitives are S V; hence S=A and so English is accusative. The vestigial case marking on pronouns (where it is even case marking anymore) supports this.

It's rather irrelevant that labile verbs show an alternation where S=P because this is an example of a causativity alternation that happens to be zero-marked. You might find this an interesting read. The only way specific valencies related to alignment is when you consider all verbs with one argument together, and all verbs with two arguments together, to determine the dominant intransitive and transitive valence patterns.

[chris_notts]

When you say there are pragmatic restrictions on A, do you mean strictly in the Dixon sense (more agentlike argument of a transitive verb)? Or is it with agentlike arguments in general? (I also think Dixon can leave people with an exaggerated sense of the significance of the S/A/P shorthand. Quite often when you want to distinguish between different sorts of subjects, it's not really about transitivity, so it's not really a distinction you can draw in terms of S/A/P---you need S_A vs S_P or something, or just a different terminology.)

Well, I think there is a tendency for actor-like arguments to be topical, and this is probably stronger for transitive clauses because there's something to compare them against. So maybe there's a ranking A > Sa > Sp > P.

A lot of languages seem to be more sensitive to arguments on the left being unexpectedly focal or non-topical than those on the right. In languages with a firm transitivity distinction and voice morphology, this might take the form of making the clause less transitive, e.g. by an antipassive, to turn an A into an Sa. Many languages have rigid O positioning but flexible S/A position, and usually the choice of pre or post verbal A/S relates to subject focus. In some languages cleft-like constructions are required if a transitive A is indefinite of focal. And so on. This also affects the structure of discourse, because new referents are much more likely to be introduced as a P of Sp (often of an existential or motion verb) than they are as an A/Sa. In many languages, a multiclause P -> A approach is more natural than a single clause containing a highly non-topical A.

Of course, you see the same effects with unexpectedly topical Ps, but I get the feeling that non-topical A effects may be more pervasive, even though the realisations vary from stress to word order changes to clefts to voice morphology and discourse structuring.

[akam chinjir]

[...]Of course, you see the same effects with unexpectedly topical Ps, but I get the feeling that non-topical A effects may be more pervasive, even though the realisations vary from stress to word order changes to clefts to voice morphology and discourse structuring.

That's all really interesting, thank you!

[Pabappa]

Wait.

Did the Ayatollah just say "damn"?

https://www.dailywire.com/news/iranian- ... oys-troops

Can anyone piece this apart .... is this just a very loose translation? I cant imagine a religious leader anywhere else ever using a profane word like that.

[Vijay]

is this just a very loose translation?

Yes.

It's an old slogan. هیچ غلطی hich ghalati in Persian is literally something like 'nothing wrong' but in this case is a way of intensifying هیچ hich 'nothing'.

[Kuchigakatai]

I recently finished reading Steven Dworkin's A Guide to Old Spanish (2018).

[...]

(The book contains quite a number of words I didn't know managed to survive from Latin into Old Spanish. I'll post some next time.)

And here they are. Note that the etymologies are not provided in the book, I looked them up myself (Dworkin simply mentions a word comes from Latin, he doesn't give the Latin etymon). If I don't give the Spanish meaning, assume it's basically the same as that of the etymology.

Nouns
- bibitum 'drunk (thing), a drink that has been consumed' > bebdo 'drunk (person)' (and then beudo and beodo, the latter presumably /ˈbe.odo/)
- aurificem 'goldsmith' > orebze (and then orebce, apparently still in use in the 19th century!)
- mūrem 'mouse' > mur
- vulpem 'fox' > diminutive *vulpiculam > vulpeja/gulpeja
- cor 'heart' > cuer
- tempora 'times; good/fitting hours to do sth; (by extension, as the "good" place to hit sb to kill them) the temples of the head' > eggcorned in spoken early medieval Latin/Romance into *tempula [ˈt(j)ɛmp(o)la], as if it was a feminine diminutive of tempus 'time' (then further eggcorned in written Latin as templa, plural of templum '(religious) temple') > Old Spanish tienlla 'temples of the head; cheek'
- aciem 'sharp edge; battle line' > az 'army' (with the interesting Old Spanish derivative enaziado, literally "made-into-the-army", meaning 'Christian-born man who's now a traitor that spies for the Muslims')
- fossa 'ditch, trench' > fuessa
- argenteum 'made of silver' > arienzo 'silver coin'
- medicāmen 'medicine' > analogized to *medicāminem > vedegambre (with [m...ð...ɣ] > [β...ð...ɣ] assimilation)
- synagōga 'synagogue' > esnoga/senoga/sinoa

Adjectives, plus an adverb
- collectum/am 'acquired; deduced' > collecho/a 'collected'
- domitum/am 'tamed' > duendo/a 'docile'
- putidum/am 'stinky' > pudio/a
- invītus 'reluctantly' > amidos (interesting [nw] > [m] change... contrast inviāre > enviar [emˈbjaɾ])

Verbs
- augurāre 'to prophesy by watching birds' > agorar 'to predict' (this word must have been very easy to apply a folk etymology to: hāc hōrā 'at this hour' > agora 'now'!)
- machinārī 'to arrange skillyfully; to plot (against the State)' > maznar 'to knead; shape iron, forge metal' (another easy folk etymology for medieval people: maza 'mace, club'...)
- perscrūtārī 'to investigate thoroughly' > pescudar 'to ask'
- plangere 'to hit rocks, the sea, the ground (said of natural things); to beat one's head or heart in sadness; to mourn sb' > llañir 'to weep'
- obviāre 'to meet sb' > uviar > 'to go out and meet sb'

A couple interesting new formations:
- on the basis of tam magnum/am 'so big; big like that' > tamaño/a 'so big', el tamaño 'size', and quam magnum/am 'how big?' > quamaño/a, quālem > derives calaño/a 'similar, equal' (I personally wonder if tam magnum/am was actually reinterpreted as tamm-āneum/am, with the noun>adj. suffix -āneum/am (both -agnum and -āneum become [ˈaɲo] in pre-Spanish)... then calaño would actually be quālem + -āneum!)
- from post faciem 'behind their face, behind/after their presence' > *post-faci-āre > posfaçar 'to slander sb'

A couple interesting borrowings:
- Arabic ترجمان tarjumān turjumān tarjamān (< borrowed from Syriac Aramaic ܬܪܓܡܢ <trgmn> (commonly read targmån nowadays) or ܬܪܓܡܢܐ <trgmnʔ> (commonly read targmånå nowadays) < borrowed from Akkadian 𒅴𒁄 targumannu turgumannu) 'translator' > OSp. truiamán [tɾuʒaˈman] (later trujamán)
- Gothic 𐌻𐍉𐍆𐌰 lōfa 'palm' > OSp. lúa 'glove' (this word is found today as Icelandic lófi 'palm' and northern British English loof 'palm, extended hand')



While we're at it, I recently learned that Latin foria 'diarrhea' has survived as a vulgar word into modern French: la foire. As in, avoir la foire 'to have diarrhea, to be suffering of diarrhea'.

[Pabappa]

is this just a very loose translation?

Yes.

It's an old slogan. هیچ غلطی hich ghalati in Persian is literally something like 'nothing wrong' but in this case is a way of intensifying هیچ hich 'nothing'.

Okay thanks. I didnt realize it had been used before until now.

[zompist]

medicāmen 'medicine' > analogized to *medicāminem > vedegambre

Boggle... that's amazing.

- Arabic ترجمان tarjumān turjumān tarjamān (< borrowed from Syriac Aramaic ܬܪܓܡܢ <trgmn> (commonly read targmån nowadays) or ܬܪܓܡܢܐ <trgmnʔ> (commonly read targmånå nowadays) < borrowed from Akkadian 𒅴𒁄 targumannu turgumannu) 'translator' > OSp. truiamán [tɾuʒaˈman] (later trujamán)

The same word passed through Greek, Italian, and French to give English dragoman.

[Vijay]

Malayalam has words related to that word for 'translation', too.

[mae]

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