Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[vlad]

CLICS reports three languages where person and woman are colexified, here.

I can't verify the claim about Marathi. Wiktionary gives bāiko and strī for "woman". Google Translate gives strī and bā'ī for "woman", and vyaktī for "person". Print dictionaries (and not Wiktionary or Google Translate) do have a word written जण (jaṇa) or जन (jana), but only with the meaning of "person"/"people", not "woman".

I don't even know if there's etymological information available for the other two languages.

[Creyeditor]

I tracked the source down to here. A book source is given and minimal etymological information is presented. It really seems to be a change from woman to person.

[vlad]

I tracked the source down to here. A book source is given and minimal etymological information is presented. It really seems to be a change from woman to person.

It seems like there's two different etymologies, and the homophony is a coincidence:

jaṇ "person" ← Sanskrit jána ← PIE *ǵónh₁os "offspring" (→ Greek γόνος "child")
jaṇ "woman" ← Sanskrit jáni ← PIE *gʷḗn "woman" (→ Greek γυνή "woman")

[Creyeditor]

Interesting

[keenir]

What was the alphabet of Ugarit like? Archaeology magazine says it had 30 characters - which includes vowels - and called it "Alphabetic Cuneiform" which was created in the 13th Century BC.
(Omniglot doesn't talk about it; only about https://omniglot.com/writing/ugaritic.htm )

Also, has the Ugarit language been reclassified as a Semitic language? Up til today, I'd always read that Ugarit was one of two languages in an Isolate family.



These questions are founded in my reading an article in the July-August 2021 issue of Archaeology magazine.

thank you!

[Otto Kretschmer]

If there was a language that separated from the rest of Slavic languages 400-500 years earlier, would it still be considered Slavic or a separate branch of Balto Slavic altogether,?

[Richard W]

What was the alphabet of Ugarit like? Archaeology magazine says it had 30 characters - which includes vowels - and called it "Alphabetic Cuneiform" which was created in the 13th Century BC.
(Omniglot doesn't talk about it; only about https://omniglot.com/writing/ugaritic.htm )

Also, has the Ugarit language been reclassified as a Semitic language? Up til today, I'd always read that Ugarit was one of two languages in an Isolate family.

These questions are founded in my reading an article in the July-August 2021 issue of Archaeology magazine.

The characters are displayed in the script's codechart. It's an abjad rather than an alphabet - it doesn't even have matres lectionis. However, instead of a single consonant for the glottal stop, there are three different ones, depending on the vowel following it. I'm surprised at the notion of Ugaritic being reclassified as Semitic; I'd have expected it to have been recognised as Semitic immediately.

[Travis B.]

What was the alphabet of Ugarit like? Archaeology magazine says it had 30 characters - which includes vowels - and called it "Alphabetic Cuneiform" which was created in the 13th Century BC.
(Omniglot doesn't talk about it; only about https://omniglot.com/writing/ugaritic.htm )

Also, has the Ugarit language been reclassified as a Semitic language? Up til today, I'd always read that Ugarit was one of two languages in an Isolate family.



These questions are founded in my reading an article in the July-August 2021 issue of Archaeology magazine.

thank you!

Ugaritic is a Northwest Semitic language, and its script is cuneiform abjad, with IIRC a few characters that combined a vowel with a glottal stop.

[keenir]

Ugaritic is a Northwest Semitic language, and its script is cuneiform abjad, with IIRC a few characters that combined a vowel with a glottal stop.

Thank you both for the correction; I hate how I keep confusing Ugarit with Urartian, which was the Isolate I was thinking of. I think the article was pretty insistent on Ugaritic script having vowels, though - I'll try to get ahold of the magazine again ASAP.

[Pabappa]

twig is cognate to wood , says wiktionary, but the part that's in common actually means "two", and has nothing to do with trees or wood.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstr ... h%E2%82%81

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstr ... %E2%82%81-


there's dozens of other words in there, including the twin/twine/etc ablaut set i posted in the other thread, and a near-set of wide/widow/wood.

[dɮ the phoneme]

What IE languages have retain [w] for PIE *w and/or [j] for PIE *j? Obviously at least English has (everyone? only some places?) but *w > v seems to have happened in all the rest of Germanic, Romance, and Indo-Aryan at least.

[Nortaneous]

What IE languages have retain [w] for PIE *w and/or [j] for PIE *j? Obviously at least English has (everyone? only some places?) but *w > v seems to have happened in all the rest of Germanic, Romance, and Indo-Aryan at least.

Tocharian did (esp. TA where palatalization of *w was reversed, vs. TB where *wʲ > j and possibly w > β late in the period of attestation), but out of the currently living IE languages *w is probably only preserved as such in English and Elfdalian (and maybe somewhere in Indo-Iranian, but most of Indic had *w > ʋ and most of Iranian had fortition)

[Travis B.]

Ukrainian and IIRC Belarusian also often have [w] for *w even though it's commonly transliterated as v.

[Raholeun]

Chicahuaxtla Triqui has between 10 and 15 contour tones.

Triqui is not conventionally described as a "pitch accent language", but it meets your definition because only final syllables can have tone.

The description of Chicahuaxtla Triqui tones (see here) is equally baffling as inspiring. Will have to chew on this for some time. Thanks for the tip.

Here is the overview. And here is the full book. Both are free to download in PDF format.

Thank you, the diachronic perspective is especially helpful.

[Vijay]

Why?

I think I'm just confused by Donahue's paper atm especially since I have no idea what happened since that rough draft that's available on MEGA. At the end of p. 43, he writes, "Firstly, there are seven phonetic contrasts in syllables with a high pitch, arranged as follows." Then he labels Table 26 at the top of the next page "vowel qualities encountered in high or falling pitch syllables" (emphasis mine). Then he writes, "In syllables which have a falling pitch or a low pitch there is still a seven-way contrast, but it is composed of different phonetic vowels. The contrasts found in these environments are in most cases made by different vowels to those seen in high pitched syllables." Then Table 27 is labeled "vowel qualities encountered in syllables with low and falling pitch," and he labels all his examples in (or below) this table as "falling pitch unless stated."

Why did he write "high or falling" in Table 26? Was that just a typo? Did he mean all the examples in that table are just in high pitch? I'm guessing he did.

[Creyeditor]

Isn't it a draft grammar sketch? I would think it is either an error or an unintentional lack of clarity, e.g. implicit reference to phonemic and phonetic levels.

[Man in Space]

Can I just say I recently acquired a copy of Whittaker’s book on Aztec script and I’m in love with it? It’s unusual, it’s clever, it’s bonkers (the color of the ink is a meaningful distinction in some cases.) I want to make a conscript like it now…

[Creyeditor]

Is there an established term for a cleft sentnce that is also a content question? Like: What is it that you like?

Or the following Indonesian sentence?

Siapa

who

yang

REL

pukul

hit

kamu?

you

'Who beat you?'

[bradrn]

Is there an established term for a cleft sentnce that is also a content question? Like: What is it that you like?

Or the following Indonesian sentence?

Siapa

who

yang

REL

pukul

hit

kamu?

you

'Who beat you?'

Um… a clefted content question? I dunno, it just doesn’t seem like a concept significant enough to deserve its own name. Why do you ask?

(Oh, and perhaps this question might be more on topic in Syntax Random.)

[Kuchigakatai]

.

I was talking to two natives of Louisiana French, and they both agreed that Wikipedia is wrong and there is in fact a distinction between "nous" (we), "on" (some sort of impersonal) and "nous-autres" (we all, all of us). They say the 1PL form in the paradigm table should really be "nous mangeons", with on mange and nous-autres mange (yes, not "mangeons") as secondary variants. I want to correct the Wikipedia article. Do you know of any sources where this is explained this way?

J'mange
Tu manges
Il/Elle mange
Nous mangeons (On mange, Nous-autres mange)
Vous mange
Ils mange/mangeont

EDIT: although they're now emphasizing to me that nearly every town has a distinct dialect anyway...