Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Travis B.]

Today I learned, by reading the German Wikipedia entry on the glottal stop (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottaler_Plosiv), that there's a glottal stop in the northern varieties of German that I've been speaking and listening to for my whole life. I never noticed that.

Let's just say that this is a really weird thing to hear or read about. "Did you hear about the comumoungulous retrolaxive? That's the sound that speakers of your dialect put after every word-final 'o'! What do you mean, you've never noticed making a sound after a word-final 'o'?"

Similarly, I highly doubt that most English-speakers notice that coda plosives are preglottalized in general, even when /t/ itself is not fully glottalized in that position.

[Raphael]

I just learned that the word "inauguration" is derived from augurs (ancient Roman soothsaying priests). Why did I never figure that out myself?

[Travis B.]

I just learned that the word "inauguration" is derived from augurs (ancient Roman soothsaying priests). Why did I never figure that out myself?

I didn't know that either until you just said this, and I highly doubt most English speakers are aware of this either.

[Raphael]

and I highly doubt most English speakers are aware of this either.

Most English speakers are probably less interested in history than me, though.

[Linguoboy]

Came across a cute example of taboo deformation today in--of all languages--Catalan. Apparently maleta "suitcase" in the meaning of "saddlebags" was altered to boneta to avoid the association with mal "bad". (Maleta, from Old French malete, could be reanalysed as a diminutive of mala "bad thing".) Although this meaning is now obsolete, the word came to applied to the bonnets of sails (presumably by a form of visual metaphor, bonnets hanging off of the mainsails in a similar manner to how saddlebags hang off of saddles).

Guess travellers are superstitious everywhere.

[Travis B.]

Came across a cute example of taboo deformation today in--of all languages--Catalan. Apparently maleta "suitcase" in the meaning of "saddlebags" was altered to boneta to avoid the association with mal "bad". (Maleta, from Old French malete, could be reanalysed as a diminutive of mala "bad thing".) Although this meaning is now obsolete, the word came to applied to the bonnets of sails (presumably by a form of visual metaphor, bonnets hanging off of the mainsails in a similar manner to how saddlebags hang off of saddles).

Guess travellers are superstitious everywhere.

So is the sail sense of "bonnet" related to Old French via Catalan rather than Frankish via Old French (whereas the normal English sense of "bonnet" is from Frankish via Old French)?

[Kuchigakatai]

In Salvadoran Spanish, maleta is gender-invariant adjective that means 'bad' in the sense of incompetent. Un profesor maleta 'an incompetent [male] teacher', plural: profesores maletas.

[Linguoboy]

In Salvadoran Spanish, maleta is gender-invariant adjective that means 'bad' in the sense of incompetent. Un profesor maleta 'an incompetent [male] teacher', plural: profesores maletas.

According to the DCVB, it's used nominally with this meaning in Palma de Mallorca, e.g. "Ell portava l'espasa i la muleta a qualsevulga torero malgrat fòs un maleta."

[Zju]

Came across a cute example of taboo deformation today in--of all languages--Catalan. Apparently maleta "suitcase" in the meaning of "saddlebags" was altered to boneta to avoid the association with mal "bad". (Maleta, from Old French malete, could be reanalysed as a diminutive of mala "bad thing".) Although this meaning is now obsolete, the word came to applied to the bonnets of sails (presumably by a form of visual metaphor, bonnets hanging off of the mainsails in a similar manner to how saddlebags hang off of saddles).

Guess travellers are superstitious everywhere.

So is the sail sense of "bonnet" related to Old French via Catalan rather than Frankish via Old French (whereas the normal English sense of "bonnet" is from Frankish via Old French)?

Apparently Frankish borrowed it from Proto-Germanic *bundiją “bundle”

[jal]

In response to a comment of mine on a YouTube video, someone posted a piece of linguistic quackery I hadn't heard before (now apparently deleted). Apparently Germanic words are comprised of port-manteaus of more basic roots. Has anybody ever heard of such nonsense? I can hardly believe the guy invented this himself.

"About 86.5% of the French vocabulary is derived from Latin"
Except much of this supposedly Latin vocabulary is very likely romance contractions of ancient Germanic compounds of the form "ved-for-ROOT-an-sig-gøre", such as "ver-an-ACHT-am sich" = "a-nacht-se" = nox = nuit.
Doesn´t mean today´s French are Germanians, of course.

That's a load of hogwash 😄. Please leave etymology to people actually studying languages, instead of uneducated nonsense like this.

Don´t worry. Unlike you I would never refer to the old pseudo-scientific, Isidorianist "comparative etymology" which basically is nothing more than easily debunked lexicalistic and reductionist language misconceptions consisting merely of undocumented conjecture. I'm simply referring to the well-attested word-constructional grammar of Germanic languages that explains exactly how abbreviated compounds ("words") are formed by contraction of word-forming elements. Nobody with a decent knowledge of language can deny that all the word-forming elements of the word "danse" are already well-attested Germanic elements such as "uit", "an", "sich" and "gere". The "Ans"-rune is indeed attested in Germanic as well as countless Germanic words and placenames with "-nse"-endings. And talking about "-nse"-endings. All your beloved "etymologists" will insist that Vikings named the town of Odense after Odin ("Odin´s Sea") disregarding all other Germanic place-names carrying "-nse"-endings. And what is the sole basis of their claim? That they found it written in a 13th century Icelandic fairy tale! Are you kidding me? As if there weren't enough reasons to ignore all these inept birdbrains.

JAL

[zompist]

It's basically Edo Nyland's methods, with German instead of Basque.

It's hogwash, as you say, but it's also standard crankery: come up with such an involved, tedious method that the work they put into it makes it seem real to them. It must take hours to go through the dictionary to come up with this crap, but once they have, they aren't interested in arguments that their work was wasted.

[Moose-tache]

1) Never engage with Youtube comments. They are the grease trap of public discourse.
2) "Isidorianist" is actually a pretty sick burn.

[bradrn]

What is ‘Isidorianist’ even supposed to mean?

[Man in Space]

Speaking of Nyland…Juliette Blevins has published a book on the history of Basque. I haven’t really read much of it yet, but she suggests—with a straight face—that Basque is essentially para-IE (she says something about initial /h/ possibly corresponding to laryngeals and then something about stops that I don’t quite remember). My Nylandometer doesn’t know what to do with this.

[Travis B.]

Speaking of Nyland…Juliette Blevins has published a book on the history of Basque. I haven’t really read much of it yet, but she suggests—with a straight face—that Basque is essentially para-IE (she says something about initial /h/ possibly corresponding to laryngeals and then something about stops that I don’t quite remember). My Nylandometer doesn’t know what to do with this.

I wouldn't actually give this that many millinylands myself. It actually seems less crackpottish than much of Greenberg's or the Starostins' work just at first thought.

[Man in Space]

Speaking of Nyland…Juliette Blevins has published a book on the history of Basque. I haven’t really read much of it yet, but she suggests—with a straight face—that Basque is essentially para-IE (she says something about initial /h/ possibly corresponding to laryngeals and then something about stops that I don’t quite remember). My Nylandometer doesn’t know what to do with this.

I wouldn't actually give this that many millinylands myself. It actually seems less crackpottish than much of Greenberg's or the Starostins' work just at first thought.

That’s what I was thinking on the one hand, because I know Blevins has been around a while and done some other stuff (I’m familiar with her from her work on Pama-Nyungan most recently), but on the other…it’s Basque. People have been trying to tie Basque to everything under the Sun.

[fusijui]

It actually seems less crackpottish than much of Greenberg's or the Starostins' work just at first thought.

Surprised to find myself doing this, but I think Starostin (at least the senior one) is barely a crackpot at all, and it's blurring useful (or at least, entertaining) categories to drop him into Nylandland. (Don't really know jr.'s work well at all.)

At least with his (joint) work on Altaic, it's sloppy and highly motivated, but it's not bonkers enough to qualify -- IMO!

[Man in Space]

A couple tables from Blevins (2018), Advances in Proto-Basque Reconstruction with Evidence for the Proto-Indo-European-Euskaran Hypothesis.

A sample of proposed cognates:



Proposed correspondences:

[Nortaneous]

Starostin isn't Nyland, but neither are Ehret or Proulx. There's a difference between bad linguists and cranks. I don't even know that I'd call Ruhlen a crank. (Gell-Mann tho, absolutely.)

Blevins has been arguing for Indo-Vasconic for years, but I don't see any reason to hold her comparative work in high regard. Blust found serious issues with her Austronesian-Ongan hypothesis. And the low-hanging fruit in macrocomparison has already been picked - any unproven relationship is something that you can't just determine by looking, so advances will come from either deep knowledge of at least one side of the comparison (including extensive internal reconstruction) or new data.

Sometimes you can make advances in classification just by looking. Anyone here could've demonstrated the close affiliation between Tangut and West Gyalrongic with some motivation, an internet connection, and a week - all you had to do to know where to look was make a spreadsheet of directionals. The paper demonstrating it came out a year after the grammar of Geshiza was published, which, given the pace of academic publishing, suggests to me that the discovery timeline could've been approximately immediate upon receipt of new data... but Geshiza is closely related to Stau, which was documented earlier, so it could've just taken a while. I got interested because I read a description of "Tanggu Mu-nya" and wanted to see how close it was (not very), but I could imagine nobody giving it much thought - even Hsiu was more interested in coming up with a working tree for Sino-Tibetan than in the place of one lazily-classified language within it. But a lot of people have given a lot of thought to the classification of Basque. It's not a ticket you can just pull off the backlog.

And really, *atha ~ *at-? Does she at least recognize that a vision of the remit of comparativism broad enough for *atha ~ *at- is something that has to be argued for?

[bradrn]

And really, *atha ~ *at-? Does she at least recognize that a vision of the remit of comparativism broad enough for *atha ~ *at- is something that has to be argued for?

Asking as someone who knows little of either IE or Basque: what’s wrong with that?