Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Richard W]

Sagart neatly sidesteps the question of the core ancestry of Tai-Kadai by his term 'Austroneisan Ancestor of Kadai' (AAK). One can then debate the affiliation of AAK within Austronesian. As parallel evolution seems quite common, I haven't found the linguistic arguments on placement convincing.

I'm not sure that Tai-Kadai core vocabulary is well protected. If I understand correctly, one of the things that enabled Ostapirat to give a convincing reconstruction of Proto-Kra was using tonal correspondences to exclude Tai loans from the Kra languages. His list of Tai loans into Laha (Section 3.12.4 of his Ph.D. thesis) seems to contain some core items. More spectacularly, Tai took its primary number words from Chinese. Additionally, I find respectable recent claims that Kam-Tai and Chinese share recent core vocabulary.

One thing that bothers me about the AAK element is that it barely contributes to words in tone classes B and C. Just possibly the tones are the reflexes of derivational suffixes. While tone class A is the commonest class, almost all words for which I've seen Austronesian etymologies are in tone class A. Possibly classes B and C have disproportionately recruited new words.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Can languages suddenly develop prohibiition against closed syllabees out of nowhere? Like if English [dog] suddenlt started turning into [doge] or [dogo] out of thin air?

[Zju]

The key thing, though, is that morpheme boundaries and phoneme pair/affricate distinctions can be considered to constitute phonemic distinctions, whereas such is much more questionable for syllabification.

Yes, my question was about syllabification itself. /t͡ʃ/ and /tʃ/ are one and two phonemes respectively.

[Darren]

Can languages suddenly develop prohibiition against closed syllabees out of nowhere? Like if English [dog] suddenlt started turning into [doge] or [dogo] out of thin air?

The Slavic languages did this. And it wasn't just a coincidental result of one change; it was the result of a number of rules which all tended towards it, suggesting that proto Slavic apparently randomly began to favour open syllables. Although it wasn't exactly sudden, as it took place over 900 years. Check out the fourth section of this paper on "sound change conspiracies" for more detail.

[MacAnDàil]

Can languages suddenly develop prohibiition against closed syllabees out of nowhere? Like if English [dog] suddenlt started turning into [doge] or [dogo] out of thin air?

Some Creole languages, including Saramaccan, developed this from English.

[Raphael]

I recently heard a claim, probably made in jest, that "there is no genitive" in Swabian German. Is there anyone here who knows more about Swabian German than me who could enlighten me on that?

[Travis B.]

I recently heard a claim, probably made in jest, that "there is no genitive" in Swabian German. Is there anyone here who knows more about Swabian German than me who could enlighten me on that?

I thought most modern German dialects had lost or at least severely restricted the genitive. About Swabian German in particular, though, I think the person to ask here would be linguoboy.

[Raphael]

I thought most modern German dialects had lost the genitive.

Well, formal, written German hasn't, and in my experience, neither have German conversations among most well-educated people.

Edit: all this arose from a discussion of a piece of writing. Person A, who is Swabian, had written something and asked Person B to proofread it; Person B had done so and made some corrections related to proper genitive usage; and Person A had commented on that that "there is no genitive in Swabian".

Edit 2: As far as spoken German is concerned, would "Das Auto von meinem Nachbarn" count as a type of genitive, or is there some other linguistic term I don't know yet for it?

[Travis B.]

I thought most modern German dialects had lost the genitive.

Well, formal, written German hasn't, and in my experience, neither have German conversations among most well-educated people.

Edit: all this arose from a discussion of a piece of writing. Person A, who is Swabian, had written something and asked Person B to proofread it; Person B had done so and made some corrections related to proper genitive usage; and Person A had commented on that that "there is no genitive in Swabian".

Mind you, are said well-educated people speaking in dialect as opposed to StG in the first place?

[Raphael]

Mind you, are said well-educated people speaking in dialect as opposed to StG in the first place?

Depends on how much of a dialect influence on speech counts as "speaking in dialect", I'd say. Might also depend on the region. Or even the speakers' age.

[Travis B.]

Mind you, are said well-educated people speaking in dialect as opposed to StG in the first place?

Depends on how much of a dialect influence on speech counts as "speaking in dialect", I'd say. Might also depend on the region. Or even the speakers' age.

I get the impression that there is more of a dichotomy in the Germanosphere between dialect and standard language, particularly in more southerly parts of the Germanosphere, than in the Anglosphere where, while there are still traditional dialects in some places, for the most part traditional dialects have been replaced by regional koines (or in the case of English varieties outside the British Isles, may have never really existed in the first place) and what exists today is gradations between said regional koines and national versions of Standard English. It seems though that more northerly parts of the Germanosphere pattern more with the Anglosphere in this regard, as Low German has already largely been supplanted with a northern German koine across the board.

[Raphael]

Sure; see, for instance, my post (in this very thread) here and the discussion that followed:

viewtopic.php?p=25879#p25879

[Travis B.]

The whole notion of the traditional dialect seems predicated on the existence of varieties descended directly from a point of divergence far back in time. That is probably why it seems less applicable to varieties such as my own, which is essentially General American with a significant accent (with only limited lexical differences).

[Creyeditor]

Coming back to the German genitive case: I think there is some terminological vagueness involved. The genitive case proper in German is part of the case paradigm and does not involve any analytic construction. Some people only use genitive to refer to this construction, e.g. das Haus der Mutter.
Some people extend the use of genitive to include any possessive construction, even analytic ones. For example das Auto von Mama, von Papa das Auto, der Frau ihr Auto, ihm sein Auto would all be called genitive because they serve the same function. From a formal point of view, these involve prepositional phrases or dative marked noun phrases with postposed possessive pronoun.
Swabian might not use the genitive in the first sense, but it probably has some genitive construction in the second sense.

[Travis B.]

Coming back to the German genitive case: I think there is some terminological vagueness involved. The genitive case proper in German is part of the case paradigm and does not involve any analytic construction. Some people only use genitive to refer to this construction, e.g. das Haus der Mutter.
Some people extend the use of genitive to include any possessive construction, even analytic ones. For example das Auto von Mama, von Papa das Auto, der Frau ihr Auto, ihm sein Auto would all be called genitive because they serve the same function. From a formal point of view, these involve prepositional phrases or dative marked noun phrases with postposed possessive pronoun.
Swabian might not use the genitive in the first sense, but it probably has some genitive construction in the second sense.

I have always understood the German genitive to refer to der Mutter and Deutschlands in constructions like das Auto der Mutter and Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands and not das Auto von Mama and der Frau ihr Auto.

[Creyeditor]

Usage is not uniform: Here is a random example from the Internet: "Nomen und Eigennamen ohne Artikel bilden den Genitiv mit von."

[Raphael]

Personally, I guess I'm fine with calling Das Auto von Mama a type of genitive, but I'd draw the line at using that term for Die Mama ihr Auto, since that's a dative construction, even though it fulfils the function of the genitive.

I'd kind of wonder what else you'd call Das Auto von Mama, if not a genitive, though.

[Travis B.]

Personally, I guess I'm fine with calling Das Auto von Mama a type of genitive, but I'd draw the line at using that term for Die Mama ihr Auto, since that's a dative construction, even though it fulfils the function of the genitive.

I'd kind of wonder what else you'd call Das Auto von Mama, if not a genitive, though.

To me it is like the 's-possessive versus the of-possessive in English. The former is arguably a case, like the German genitive, whereas the latter is unambiguously not a case.

[Creyeditor]

Personally, I guess I'm fine with calling Das Auto von Mama a type of genitive, but I'd draw the line at using that term for Die Mama ihr Auto, since that's a dative construction, even though it fulfils the function of the genitive.

I'd kind of wonder what else you'd call Das Auto von Mama, if not a genitive, though.

A possessive construction? A (noun modified by a) prepositional phrase?

[Raphael]

Thank you!