(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by WeepingElf »

AFAIK, wrought originally was the past tense and past participle of work, but it has pretty much been ousted by the regular worked, and now some people (including me, a non-native speaker) use it as the past tense and past participle of wreak. I don't know about an etymological connection between work and wreak, though.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by elemtilas »

eldin raigmore wrote: 04 Sep 2021 14:30 Worked, wreaked, wrought.
What are the similarities and differences?
Which are correct and which incorrect?
I think wrought is becoming a new / alternative past tense / participle of wreak. Usually we find wreak / wrought in conjunction with havoc.

Both wrought and wreaked can be found with havoc; wreak can often be found with havoc as well. What we don't often come across is to work havoc. It's certainly to be found in the wild, lurking in old American news paper articles and Indian parliamentary journals.

Work goes back to IE werg- and is therefore a sister of Greek ergôn.

Wreak and wrack are English cousins, both going bag to IE wreg-. And they've got a nother cousin, wrake. Do note: one should never wrack nor wrake one's brains. One racks one's brains. Though after a good solid brain racking, one might very well be truly wraking indeed!

Wrought is the proper past tense & ppl of work, though it either survived the -Vr- metathesis seen in other OE words or else got restored somewhere along the way. Wreaked is the proper past tense of wreak. Wracked & wraked for wrack & wrake. I think wrought is now pretty much reserved for that particular register of English we tend to associate with scriptures and high fantasy.

Wright is not the present tense of wrought, though it might ight to be. It's the bastard cousin of work/wrought and of course means one who works or makes.

Yet another distant cousin is wark, aches and pains, of which my racked brain is now wraking.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

@elemtilas,WeepingElf:
Thank you!
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by ixals »

Very specific, but is there any reason why the Irish -ach suffix has a voiced fricative in some declined forms (-aigh) instead of the expected voiceless one? Is it just some weird irregularity or is there any reason behind it?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

I don't know where to put this question, but

I would like to read interesting grammars of some interesting native American languages. What languages and grammars do you recommend, and where to find them?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

ixals wrote: 13 Sep 2021 20:06 Very specific, but is there any reason why the Irish -ach suffix has a voiced fricative in some declined forms (-aigh) instead of the expected voiceless one? Is it just some weird irregularity or is there any reason behind it?
I don't know. However, Old Irish had had a sound change, apparently, in which voiceless fricatives between two unstressed syllables were voiced. Combined with the loss of some final verbs later on, that would seem to produce this alternation. And i guess it's irregular because other than with the suffix -ach it just didn't come up very often in practice? [it seems to be visible in Old Irish verbs - wiktionary for example seems to say give alternations like 1st singular present deuterotonic "dothluchim" vs 3rd plural perfct prototonic "rotodlaigestar" - but I think analogy and the massive simplification of the system have simply eroded this in verbs?]

But as I say, i don't know, don't take this as gospel.
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How do you say “now what?” in Nahuatl?

Post by eldin raigmore »

How does one say “Now what?” in the natlang Nahuatl?
Edit: or, in full: “Now what’ll happen?”
Last edited by eldin raigmore on 22 Sep 2021 16:49, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How do you say “now what?” in Nahuatl?

Post by Sequor »

eldin raigmore wrote: 20 Sep 2021 09:15How does one say “Now what?” in the natlang Nahuatl?
I don't know the answer, but out of curiosity, why are you interested in that specific phrase?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

Icelandic and Greek distinguish /c/ and /k/ only before back vowels. Basque, Czech, and Hungarian distinguish them in all contexts.
Is /c/ more front (front palatal) in Basque, Czech, and Hungarian than in Icelandic and Greek (back palatal), to be more easily distinguished?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by All4Ɇn »

Omzinesý wrote: 27 Sep 2021 23:02 Icelandic and Greek distinguish /c/ and /k/ only before back vowels. Basque, Czech, and Hungarian distinguish them in all contexts.
Is /c/ more front (front palatal) in Basque, Czech, and Hungarian than in Icelandic and Greek (back palatal), to be more easily distinguished?
What's sometimes described as /c/ in Hungarian is actually usually an affricate [c͡ç]
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by sangi39 »

Omzinesý wrote: 27 Sep 2021 23:02 Icelandic and Greek distinguish /c/ and /k/ only before back vowels. Basque, Czech, and Hungarian distinguish them in all contexts.
Is /c/ more front (front palatal) in Basque, Czech, and Hungarian than in Icelandic and Greek (back palatal), to be more easily distinguished?
From what I can tell, it's historical. Icelandic and Greek palatals come from velars before front vowels and before /j/ followed by a vowel, resulting in a limited distribution of velars because nothing's really happened to make them contrast in other environments, e.g. before front vowels or before consonants. In languages like Basque, Czech, and Hungarian, however, there's been other sound changes (for example, /aj/ > /e:/) resulted in velars and palatals contrasting in more and more environments, including before front vowels.

Something similar happened in the history of Sanskrit, IIRC, where the "second palatals" in Proto-Indo-Iranian come from velars before *i and *e (leaving velars before *a, *u, and *o), then *e and *o merged into *a (so the velars and second palatals contrast before *a), and then (I think?), the syllabic laryngeals merged into *i (meaning velars appeared before *i again)

I think there's some differences in position (Wikipedia suggests Greek's palatals are further back than Basque's, which are further back that Icelandic's), but for the most part its just that nothing's happened in one set of languages to make them less limited in distribution than another set of languages.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

But my question is more phonetic.
In languages with only one series of dorsals, their exact place of articulation varies quite much by the environment, basically front and back vowels.
So, the velars should be very back before front vowels in order to be distinguished from the palarals. But I don't think they are - at least I don't hear it -. So, I'm asking if the palatals are more front.
Or is the difference in the articulator (tongue) rather than POA?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Creyeditor »

Palatal consonants in general and palatal stops specifically are difficult to distinguish from other consonants and vary quite a bit between languages. They are often similar to sibilant affricates and descriptions might disagree. I have seen different descriptions of Indonesian for example that claim that there are palatal stops, whereas other describe them as post-alveolar affricates. I think this is relevant to your question because there is a large amount of 'random' language-specific variation in the articulation of palatals.
Another example is the German palatal fricative, which has been argued to be actually pre-velar, i.e. further back than the prototypical palatal. It is only marginally phonemic though and at least partially conditioned by a preceding front vowel. It also varies between dialects in being a sibilant or not. This means that palatals might vary according to at least three dimensions, passive PoA, active articulator, and tongue shape. There might be some language-internal coarticulation with vowels, but I think there is much more variation between languages here.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

Very late, I think you Creyeditor, sangi39, and All4Ɇn.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

I'm studying Latin gerunds.

Wictionary https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_gerunds says: 'The gerund is typically used without an object in Latin. When an object of the gerund is included, the gerundive is used in place of the gerund and given an ending that agrees with the object noun.'

The example is gaudium audiendī 'the joy of hearing'
How is an object added? 'the joy of audible you'?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Omzinesý wrote: 13 Oct 2021 10:16 I'm studying Latin gerunds.

Wictionary https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_gerunds says: 'The gerund is typically used without an object in Latin. When an object of the gerund is included, the gerundive is used in place of the gerund and given an ending that agrees with the object noun.'

The example is gaudium audiendī 'the joy of hearing'
How is an object added? 'the joy of audible you'?
This page explains the use of a gerundive with an object, but I'm honestly a little confused:

https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/latin ... -gerundive

From Cicero:

ars bene disserendī et vēra ac falsa dīiūdicandī

"the art of discoursing well and (of) distinguishing the true and the false". In this sentence vēra and falsa are accusative objects of the gerund dīiūdicandī. "The gerund is the neuter of the gerundive used impersonally, but retaining the verbal idea sufficiently to govern an object. It may therefore be regarded as a noun with verbal force"

But then it goes on to say "When the gerund would have an object in the accusative, the Gerundive is generally used instead. The gerundive agrees with its noun, which takes the case that the gerund would have had". But isn't the above example from Cicero a gerund with an object in the accusative?

The example given is with ad + gerundive + direct object. ad omnia perīcula subeunda - "to undergo all dangers". And there's a note below that says "The accusative of the gerund with a preposition never takes a direct object in classic Latin." So, okay, that explains why the gerundive has to be used here and you can't say *ad omnia subeundum perīcula. If a gerund is the object of ad, it can't also take an object in the accusative; the gerundive has to be used instead. But in other cases, it's okay for the gerund to have an object in the accusative? Or is the Cicero example a rare exception?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

My Latin is so rusty as to be of no worth, but google suggests that the parsing of that rule is to blame: they mean that a gerund in the accusative cannot have an object (possibly as a sort of 'no double objects' rule), particularly when governed by 'ad' (which is most accusative gerunds anyway). However, gerunds in the genitive can often take objects.

While we're at it, apparently gerunds cannot take objects when ablative and governed by 'in'. There seems to be chronological or stylistic varation regarding the possibility of an object when the gerund is (in decreasing order of legality): ablative not governed by 'in'; nominative; dative. Generally objects of gerunds are prohibited in more situations in later Latin.

[I suspect it started as a stylistic restriction on having chains of multiple accusatives, and then spread gradually by analogy to rarer gerund situations?]

So, 'ars dijudicandi', 'the art OF distinguishing', can take an object.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Ah, okay, that makes more sense. [:)]
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

Thank you!
I think I understood it.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Are interjections especially likely to be borrowed from one language to another, relative to other parts of speech, and to how many interjections each of the source language and borrowing language has?

Is the ease of borrowing interjections versus other parts of speech, significantly greater when the two languages are “genetically” unrelated and typologically dissimilar?

I ask because I’ve noticed lots of borrowed English interjections in YouTube videos by people who create in languages that are non-Indo-European and typologically not like English.
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