Search found 887 matches
- 09 Oct 2021 22:31
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences
- Replies: 881
- Views: 275260
Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences
Our tales begins, long, long ago... I hate to interrupt, but the Finnish word siemen would seem to contradict any possibility of *nimi being derived from *hnomn. FWIW, LSS Ánte says this: Another possibility is to assume that Proto-Indo-European words were not borrowed directly into Uralic, but med...
- 08 Oct 2021 13:44
- Forum: Teach & Share
- Topic: A note on urban population thresholds
- Replies: 18
- Views: 18334
Re: A note on urban population thresholds
Seems I missed this thread earlier, so first of all: thanks for making it! Highly interesting and informative. I was a bit curious about this, though: Mostly, of course, people starved to death. Good years where the ones where you lived long enough to have babies before starving to death. My underst...
- 30 Aug 2021 00:14
- Forum: Teach & Share
- Topic: Curiosities in Finnish
- Replies: 42
- Views: 28537
Re: Curiosities in Finnish
earlier vaimo also meant just ‘woman’ As far as I'm aware, it was never the standard word for 'woman', though; pretty much all Finnic languages seem to use a descendant of Proto-Finnic *nainen . By contrast, Proto-Finnic *vaimo meant 'spirit' or 'soul', and this meaning is still retained by Estonia...
- 29 Aug 2021 20:52
- Forum: Teach & Share
- Topic: Curiosities in Finnish
- Replies: 42
- Views: 28537
Re: Curiosities in Finnish
The following four terms are very outdated. I remember, in subtitles of Keeping up Appearances, Hyacinth calls Onslow her lanko , but I had to google käly and nato to see which one is which. Huh. I've certainly heard lanko and käly in use - not especially frequently, perhaps, but not solely on tele...
- 28 Aug 2021 22:58
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: False cognates
- Replies: 902
- Views: 325435
Re: False cognates
Randomly stumbled upon this: Hawaiian pū 'tree' Livonian pū 'tree' (and likewise in other Finnic languages, but spelled puu ) Another obvious Finno-Polynesian cognate is of course: Māori mana 'mana' Finnish mana 'the hereafter', 'underworld', 'death'; 'mana' Finnish manata 'to conjure'; 'to exorcize...
- 18 Jun 2021 21:37
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here
- Replies: 1110
- Views: 282608
Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here
[fwiw, I don't know if I've ever heard 'Mickey D' - I don't tend to spend much time with McDonalds enthusiasts - but it would make no sense to me as a phonemic reduction - 'Mc' has /@/, not /I/, at least in modern SSBE (I don't know about RP). That said, it could still occur as a nickname simply be...
- 22 May 2021 14:18
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: Languages with interesting phonotactics
- Replies: 60
- Views: 25234
Re: Languages with interesting phonotactics
Never heard. Same. It's hard to say at which point those clusters appear in Finnic, but I think they first appear through loan words and then also in native vocabulary by elision of vowels. A distinction between /rt/ and /rtt/ existed already in Proto-Uralic according to at least Starostin's and Sa...
- 07 May 2021 21:28
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: English Orthography Reform
- Replies: 402
- Views: 197153
Re: English Orthography Reform
But if you don't mark schwas, then you can't have a meaningful spelling reform. Schwa-mispellings are one of the two most common forms of spelling mistake in English, and are connected to the other big problem (whether a consonant should be single or double after schwa - though I guess it doesn't a...
- 04 May 2021 16:47
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: Danish vowel allophony
- Replies: 8
- Views: 2176
Re: Danish vowel allophony
Which is why I was somewhat bemused by Danish getting dubbed a minor language with few speakers; compared to the vast majority, it's positively gigantic. Yes; but the vast majority of languages are absolutely tiny, even collectively make up a tiny percentage of the world's speakers, and are going t...
- 30 Apr 2021 21:21
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: Danish vowel allophony
- Replies: 8
- Views: 2176
Re: Danish vowel allophony
Well, on the one hand: yes, absolutely, the great majority of languages on Earth are highly endangered. To quote Wikipedia: "the general consensus is that there are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages currently spoken and that between 50% and 90% of them will have become extinct by the year 2100...
- 29 Apr 2021 17:00
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: Danish vowel allophony
- Replies: 8
- Views: 2176
Re: Danish vowel allophony
I wonder how the dialects will diverge in the coming centuries. Some may develop an 8-way contrast in high vowels /i i: y y: ʉ ʉ: u u: ɪ ɪ: ʏ ʏ: ɵ ɵ: ʊ ʊ:/ from Norwegian/Swedish influence, while others may reduce it to the German system /ɪ i: ʏ y: ʊ u: ɛ e: ɛ: œ ø: ɔ o: a a:/. I'd say a bigger con...
- 03 Apr 2021 16:33
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here
- Replies: 1110
- Views: 282608
Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here
What is the history of Hungarian /ɟ/ <gy>? I know egy 'one' is related to Finnish yksi . With this one word, I infer it derives from PU *kt, but does anybody have more information? According to LSS Ánte (forthcoming) , it's a medial reflex of PU *ď (whatever sound that actually was). That's clearly...
- 01 Apr 2021 13:55
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences
- Replies: 881
- Views: 275260
Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences
Sanskrit आर्य (ārya) /ˈɑːɾ.jɐ/ “noble, noble one” v.s. Proto-Finnic orja /ˈorjɑ/ "slave" At least commonly the Finnish term (also found in other Uralic languages) is considered a loanword from Proto-Indo-Iranian, because speakers of Proto-Uralic enslaved speakers of Proto-Indo-Iranian. We...
- 24 Mar 2021 22:27
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences
- Replies: 881
- Views: 275260
Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences
And it's quite certainly not a coincidence: the sense 'world' appears to be fairly transparently derived from 'light', and the Proto-Slavic *světъ already had both of these senses. I've always understood this thread that it's about false friends and OTHER unfortunate coincidences, i.e. it doesn't n...
- 26 Feb 2021 21:33
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences
- Replies: 881
- Views: 275260
Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences
:pol: świat (world) :rus: свет (light) I'm not sure if this one really counts as a false friend... The Russian word also means 'world', even if мир is more common for that sense these days. And it's quite certainly not a coincidence: the sense 'world' appears to be fairly transparently derived from...
- 26 Feb 2021 21:20
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: False cognates
- Replies: 902
- Views: 325435
Re: False cognates
:eng: thou (formerly þou) :eng: you Given that thou was formerly written as þou and thus could also look like you (like þe/ye) it's easy to think that you was originally just a spelling pronunciation of þou when þ resembled y. Better yet, it appears that the spelling <you> could in fact be used for...
- 14 Feb 2021 12:32
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here
- Replies: 1110
- Views: 282608
Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here
I recently heard two European looking men speaking a language and was very surprised that I couldn't even guess which one it was. The intonation sounded quite similar to French but at times I thought it could be German. I couldn't understand a word they were saying which is what made it particularl...
- 07 Feb 2021 13:11
- Forum: Everything Else
- Topic: The Sixth Conversation Thread
- Replies: 762
- Views: 193940
Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread
There seem to have been several linguistics-related xkcd strips lately. I approve of this development.
- 09 Jan 2021 19:40
- Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
- Topic: False cognates
- Replies: 902
- Views: 325435
Re: False cognates
:ara: أستاذ ʾustāḏ "professor, teacher, title of courtesy for an individual of higher education or learning" :esp: usted "you (respectful)" Maybe a bit of a stretch, but it stood out to me. Not at all a stretch! In fact, I'm quite sure I've seen the possibility of a connection b...
- 05 Jan 2021 00:14
- Forum: Everything Else
- Topic: Metal Thread
- Replies: 335
- Views: 151585
Re: Metal Thread
So, I'm guessing most of the metal-listening world has heard the news by now, but in case you hadn't: Alexi Laiho is dead. While I never became a huge fan of their music, Children of Bodom was still one of the first bands my more metal-oriented friends introduced me to back in about 2000 (I think it...