Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 2:25 am
And Medieval Korean lost vowel harmony! Man, those Europeans really got around.
You're being ironic, but Richard W's post is unironic and serious...
Also serious is Arabic gaining a
high use of a preposition meaning "by X" with passive verbs (من قبل min qabli X, literally "from before") as a recent influence from English/French. Classical Arabic didn't even have a preposition to indicate the agent of passive verbs, and the use of من قبل min qabli before this recent influence was uncommon.
Frellesvig in his
A History of the Japanese Language (2010, pages 410-411) also mentions three syntactic influences of Dutch/English onto Japanese:
- a higher use of 3rd person pronouns; he mentions that in the late 19th century even the use of kanojo 'she' for ships can be found
- a higher use of the passive, including a novel use of に因りて ni-yorite ~ に因って ni-yotte 'because of' to express agents (cf. Arabic!)
- the [near-]obligatory use of the case particles は wa, が ga, を o to mark core arguments in written Japanese, with (usually) unambiguous identification of the object vs. the subject or topic. Pre-Meiji written Japanese, much like how today's spoken Japanese remains, often omitted the particles. However, Frellesvig notes that the pre-existing genre of 訓点語 kuntengo, fairly literal renditions of Classical Chinese, also had obligatory use of argument case particles.