Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[WeepingElf]

About Ossetian cases

Are Ossetian genitive and dative descended from PIE cases or a separate creation?

The dative is certainly a separate creation, there is no PIE dative in *-n. The genitive doesn't look PIE, either. Looking at the table in Wikipedia, I have the impression that all Ossetian case endings as well as the plural marker are innovated and not inherited from PIE.

[Elancholia]

Is there any merit to the idea that American linguists were resistant to adopting the IPA in part because they associated it with prescriptivist speech departments? From Wikipedia:

The hostility derives ultimately from the existence, in most American universities, of Speech Departments, which we do not have in Britain. Speech Departments tend to be well-endowed, large, and powerful. In linguistic and phonetic matters they have a reputation for being predominantly prescriptive, and tend to be considered by some therefore to be not very scholarly. In their publications and periodicals the notation they use, when writing of pronunciation, is that of the IPA.

Abercrombie, David. (1991). "Daniel Jones's teaching". In Abercrombie, David (ed.). Fifty years in phonetics: Selected papers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 37–47.

Was there such an interdepartmental rivalry? Were Americans actively hostile to the IPA, or was the Americanist system just more entrenched or better suited to their needs? This is essentially idle curiosity, but I can't find anything more on the matter online and I'd be interested if anyone more familiar with linguistics departments knows about this.

[zompist]

Is there any merit to the idea that American linguists were resistant to adopting the IPA in part because they associated it with prescriptivist speech departments?

Possibly! But once you have an excellent transcription system and a large body of works using it, why change it? It's a lot easier to learn the important differences than to reissue all that work.

Another case in point is the IAST transliteration used for Sanskrit. It makes work on Indian languages much easier: you can consult a work from 1864 and it's almost identical to one published today. Compare the horror of dealing with three centuries of nonstandardized work on Chinese. Neither domain would be much improved by switching to IPA. (Plus IAST is intended to closely transcribe Devanagari; it isn't intended to be phonetic.)

Also, Abercrombie's opinions seem skewed to me. I'll grant him that ʃ is faster and easier than š. But tʃ is absurd, far worse than č; likewise ts for c. And e.g. a: for long vowels is ugly, and ȩ is neater than ẽ.

But a lot is just what you're used to. My own preferences turn out to be very compatible with the Americanists, though I always explain the phonology in IPA.

[Travis B.]

To me Americanist transcription is much better for use as the basis of an orthography than IPA; using IPA as the basis of an orthography seems somewhat misguided to me (even though you do see characters taken from IPA used as letters in actual orthographies ─ such as some African languages ─ but less frequently straight up unadulterated IPA).

[Ephraim]

About Ossetian cases

Are Ossetian genitive and dative descended from PIE cases or a separate creation?

The dative is certainly a separate creation, there is no PIE dative in *-n. The genitive doesn't look PIE, either. Looking at the table in Wikipedia, I have the impression that all Ossetian case endings as well as the plural marker are innovated and not inherited from PIE.

The Ossetian genitive may be from the PIE thematic genitive singular, but not everyone agrees. Some authors apparently think that it’s the Ossetian ablative that derives from the PIE thematic genitive. The Ossetian dative is certainly not inherited directly from PIE, but the exact origin is not certain.

https://vncran.ru/upload/nartamongae/2018/87-105.pdf
https://ossetic-studies.org/biblio/05-Belyayev.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... se_Systems

[Linguoboy]

Has anyone else come across the proposal that qhapaq simi, the "noble language" of the Inca elite, was a Macro-Arawakan language related to Pukina? I just stumbled across this last night and I'm curious what the evidence is.

[Travis B.]

Has anyone else come across the proposal that qhapaq simi, the "noble language" of the Inca elite, was a Macro-Arawakan language related to Pukina? I just stumbled across this last night and I'm curious what the evidence is.

I notice this proposal made its way into Wikipedia, but the only reference w.r.t. the qhapaq simi of the Incan elite being a Puquina language has succumbed to link rot.

[zompist]

Has anyone else come across the proposal that qhapaq simi, the "noble language" of the Inca elite, was a Macro-Arawakan language related to Pukina? I just stumbled across this last night and I'm curious what the evidence is.

I've heard the theory that it was Pukina, but have never seen evidence for it. I just checked Cerrón-Palomino's Lingüístic Quechua but he doesn't provide an index, el muy torpe, and his history section doesn't seem to mention the idea.

However, like many modern researchers, he considers the origin of Quechua to be in the central coast, where dialect diversity is still greatest. That is, Quechua did not originate in Cusco but spread there at some point. Bruce Mannheim notes that Pukina was widely spoken in southern Peru until the middle 1600s.

Campbell considers Pukina an isolate.

I haven't seen the arguments, but I'm also not aware that, say, the Inca nobility spoke anything but Quechua. (After all, some of the early cronistas were Inca elite, and you'd think that they'd provide a few words. Guaman Poma, for instance, is not shy about using Quechua.) As ever it's worth recalling that the Incas arose very late and only created their empire in the 1400s, and it's well known that they— and the Spanish— spread Cusqueño to areas that didn't already speak Quechua (e.g. to Ecuador). I think it's more likely that people remembered vaguely that there had been another language spoken in the Cusco area, and attributed it to the only rulers they'd heard of, the Incas.

[Travis B.]

How did /n/ > /m/ occur in Polish Mikołaj (English Nicholas, Greek Νικόλαος)?

Edit: Also note Ukrainian Микола and Hungarian Miklós but Russian Николай and Serbo-Croatian Nikola/Никола.

[jal]

Not sure if this is the canonical explanation, but it seems from contamination of Michał.


JAL

[Otto Kretschmer]

Is the Slavic genitive in -a a reflex of PIE ablative?

[jal]

According to Wikipedia, it is.

Balto-Slavic genitive case ending is by origin PIE ablative

JAL

[chris_notts]

https://chrisintheweeds.com/2024/01/24/ ... rsive-nps/

"In any case, one interesting thing about Yimas is that it has two kinds of noun phrase structure, a tightly integrated but non-recursive structure, and a much looser, more appositional structure."

[Elancholia]

Possibly! But once you have an excellent transcription system and a large body of works using it, why change it? It's a lot easier to learn the important differences than to reissue all that work.

Hm, that makes sense.

To me Americanist transcription is much better for use as the basis of an orthography than IPA; using IPA as the basis of an orthography seems somewhat misguided to me (even though you do see characters taken from IPA used as letters in actual orthographies ─ such as some African languages ─ but less frequently straight up unadulterated IPA).

Oh, absolutely, but this quotation involved work by and for linguists in an academic context.

It also seemed to involve a certain level of visceral hostility which I wouldn't have expected from something so far from real academic controversy, as such. But people can catch the odium theologicum off of pretty much anything, I guess.

[bradrn]

https://chrisintheweeds.com/2024/01/24/ ... rsive-nps/

"In any case, one interesting thing about Yimas is that it has two kinds of noun phrase structure, a tightly integrated but non-recursive structure, and a much looser, more appositional structure."

Interesting, thanks! I must have missed this in my own readings of Foley’s grammar. Though I have to say, the ‘compound vs NP’ perspective immediately occurred to me as an obvious possibility.

[chris_notts]

https://chrisintheweeds.com/2024/01/24/ ... rsive-nps/

"In any case, one interesting thing about Yimas is that it has two kinds of noun phrase structure, a tightly integrated but non-recursive structure, and a much looser, more appositional structure."

Interesting, thanks! I must have missed this in my own readings of Foley’s grammar. Though I have to say, the ‘compound vs NP’ perspective immediately occurred to me as an obvious possibility.

The compound analysis is slightly odd for two reasons:

1. Yimas has nominal compounds, which can occupy the head slot of the modifier head construction (i.e. count as one syntactic "word") despite the construction not being recursive when it comes to less predictable or more novel modifiers

2. The elements which can occupy the slot include meaningfully inflected elements (like elements with a possessive suffix)... although admittedly this is not without precedent

I do have a kind of completely made up hypothesis why compounding with novel or focused modifiers would be allowed but not recursively, and it relates to stress. Yimas is, for the more part, an initial stress language, although epenthetic vowels are skipped and there's a few exceptions. Nominal compounds form a single inflectional word, but multiple phonological words. Unless I missed it, Foley does not describe phrasal stress or differences in stress between compounded words in Yimas, but if we assume that:

1. there's a preference for phrasal stress to be initial,
2. a preference for contrastive elements like restrictive modifiers to be under such stress,
3. a preference or requirement for modifiers to either have a noun host or a nominalising suffix (i.e. no bare modifiers heading NPs)

then you would naturally get the behaviour that:

1. When there is one such element in the NP, it can be in a prominent position as the first element of a compound or integrated phrase
2. When there are multiple restrictive modifiers, the only way all of them can have prominence is to split them off into their own phrases
3. In order to split them off, they must take a noun class marker to be nominalised

So in my conjured explanation, it all comes down to prosody and emphasis.I have actually based part of my current conlanging project on this kind of approach (generalised also to elements of VP structure), even though it's just an invented explanation for why Yimas might be how it is, or how it was when Foley documented it, before decades of additional decline.

[Otto Kretschmer]

How did the strong initial accent in Proto Germanic emerge?

[WeepingElf]

How did the strong initial accent in Proto Germanic emerge?

Nobody knows for sure - things like that just happen. This kind of accent shift has also happened in Celtic and Italic (though in British Celtic and Latin, at least, further changes of accent have happened later), so this seems to be a kind of Western European areal phenomenon. Some scholars have ascribed it to a pre-IE substratum language, but that doesn't really explain anything as that language is unknown.

[Otto Kretschmer]

When is Proto Sino Tibetan dated? Is it younger than PIE?

[bradrn]

When is Proto Sino Tibetan dated? Is it younger than PIE?

Certainly not. It’s probably one of the oldest language families we’ve yet discovered, on a par with Afroasiatic. (I think; this is not my area of expertise.)