Peripheral Euro features

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Porphyrogenitos
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Peripheral Euro features

Post by Porphyrogenitos »

I once recall someone remarking that interdentals aren't all that uncommon in Europe, they just seem to be distributed rather oddly around the periphery of the continent—Greek, Albanian, Spanish, Welsh, English, Icelandic, Sami, some Finnish dialects, and presumably some other Uralic languages in Russia.

Today I also found myself thinking about how the only languages to retain a segmental reflex of PIE nominative /s/ have quite a disparate distribution around Europe - Greek, Lithuanian, Latvian, Icelandic, and Faroese.

Can anyone think of any other uncommon-but-not-that-uncommon features in European languages with this kind of periphery-hugging or spatially disparate distribution? I also thought of:
  • Initial consonant mutation: Italian varieties (with mixed phonemic/phonetic status, but in some, including Standard Italian, it is at least partially morphophonological) and the Celtic languages on the other hand.
  • Suffixed definite articles: Albanian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and then the Scandinavian languages.
  • Retroflex consonants: Sardinian, Sicilian, and Swedish and Norwegian.
I'd be curious if there are any verbal examples as well. I'm now wondering about combining all of these to make a language that's definitely European, but European in a rather odd way.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

Post by Sequor »

This is a pretty interesting challenge.

One thing that I think is peripheral regarding verbs is the use of a periphrastic construction involving a non-finite verb form to express progressive/continuous aspect in the standard language, in an unmarked way, practically as part of the verb paradigm. French je suis en train de travailler for 'I am working (right now)' is marked as emphatic, so it doesn't count. Modern Scandinavian, Dutch and German have similar constructions but they're all fairly colloquial (e.g. German ich bin am Arbeiten for 'I am working'). However, the construction is quite unmarked in English, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. (I'd be interested in hearing if modern Greek or south Slavic have anything like this too.)

Not as good because this is Romance-specific, but Differential Object Marking where human direct objects (including common nouns like 'man', 'nurse', 'my cousins'...) are marked as such with a preposition, as opposed to non-human direct objects, is found across various southernly Romance languages of the Mediterranean (Asturian and Spanish, Neapolitan and Sicilian, Sardinian, and Romanian) but not the more northern languages like French, Occitan, standard Italian or Emilian-Romagnol. (Nor Portuguese.)
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

Post by Znex »

Sequor wrote: 03 Jan 2023 02:30 This is a pretty interesting challenge.

One thing that I think is peripheral regarding verbs is the use of a periphrastic construction involving a non-finite verb form to express progressive/continuous aspect in the standard language, in an unmarked way, practically as part of the verb paradigm. French je suis en train de travailler for 'I am working (right now)' is marked as emphatic, so it doesn't count. Modern Scandinavian, Dutch and German have similar constructions but they're all fairly colloquial (e.g. German ich bin am Arbeiten for 'I am working'). However, the construction is quite unmarked in English, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. (I'd be interested in hearing if modern Greek or south Slavic have anything like this too.)
Modern Welsh has this as the unmarked norm:

dw i'n gweithio
be.PRS.1SG 1SG=CONN work.VN
(contra Literary Welsh gweithiaf i)

as does Cornish (I think Breton too maybe?), and Scottish Gaelic.

Irish still generally prefers simplex verbs to periphrasis (oibrím); a present progressive construction can be used, but it's not very common AFAIK:

tá mé ag obair
be.PRS 1SG CONN work.VN

I've never heard of it for Modern Greek (norm is eg. δουλεύω doulévo), and South Slavic in this case seems to behave much the same as other Slavic languages (eg. Bulgarian аз работя az rabotja), but Albanian does have this:

unë po punoj
1SG.NOM PROG work-PRS.1SG

or more similarly to the SAE forms (but narrower in scope),

jam duke punuar
be.PRS.1SG CONN work-PART

It seems some obscure Slavic dialects in close contact with Albanian do then do this, but it's not very common. Romanian similarly follows the lead of Greek and Slavic here.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

Post by Salmoneus »

Znex wrote: 03 Jan 2023 13:17 as does Cornish (I think Breton too maybe?), and Scottish Gaelic.

Irish still generally prefers simplex verbs to periphrasis (oibrím); a present progressive construction can be used, but it's not very common AFAIK:

tá mé ag obair
be.PRS 1SG CONN work.VN
This greatly surprises me! I thought the progressive was almost always used. Looking at nualeargais it's a little frustrating: it says clearly that the present progessive is used "for actions that take place now, or should continue", but goes further to say that in colloquial Irish only the progressive is ever used, except with habituals (as in English, almost). This is frustrating because it doesn't give examples of where the simple present would be used in literature but the progressive in colloquial speech (that is, other than genuine progressives and habituals, what other present tense verbs ARE there? English also includes performatives here ("I promise") and states ("I hate you"), but I don't know how either formal or informal Irish handles these.

Nonetheless, my understanding was/is that the progressive is used ubiquitously and the simple present very rarely, even if it's true that it's less rare in literature.

EDIT: nualeargais also confirms that there's a progressive form of the famous 'after' perfect: Tá mé tar éis bheith ag léamh an nuachtáin for "I've been reading the paper" [lit. "I am over [the] path [of the] ['over path' = 'after'] being at the reading of the paper]

Also there are some verbs that almost only appear in the progressive, with verbal noun, reinforced by possessive: "I am living in X" is literally constructed as "I am in my living in X"...

-------

Then again, I'm a bit surpised by Sequor's post, for that matter. I knew that the construction was colloquial in German, but I thought it was more accepted in other Germanic languages (I once read a paper on how these constructions differ in different languages, but didn't come away thinking it was something inherently informal in most of them).

icelandicgrammar.com, for instance, which claims to be written by a "teaching fellow in icelandic" at the university of edinburgh (albeit not one with an icelandic name), talks about the progressive straightforwardly with no hint that it should be considered informal?
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

Post by Znex »

Salmoneus wrote: 03 Jan 2023 23:35
Znex wrote: 03 Jan 2023 13:17 as does Cornish (I think Breton too maybe?), and Scottish Gaelic.

Irish still generally prefers simplex verbs to periphrasis (oibrím); a present progressive construction can be used, but it's not very common AFAIK:

tá mé ag obair
be.PRS 1SG CONN work.VN
This greatly surprises me! I thought the progressive was almost always used. Looking at nualeargais it's a little frustrating: it says clearly that the present progessive is used "for actions that take place now, or should continue", but goes further to say that in colloquial Irish only the progressive is ever used, except with habituals (as in English, almost). This is frustrating because it doesn't give examples of where the simple present would be used in literature but the progressive in colloquial speech (that is, other than genuine progressives and habituals, what other present tense verbs ARE there? English also includes performatives here ("I promise") and states ("I hate you"), but I don't know how either formal or informal Irish handles these.

Nonetheless, my understanding was/is that the progressive is used ubiquitously and the simple present very rarely, even if it's true that it's less rare in literature.
I must admit, I only looked up Irish again very briefly when writing the post, but I'm just now looking more carefully through the few Irish grammar pdfs I have, and it would appear that the progressive construction is indeed used often for progressive aspect, but the simplex verb does remain in use for habitual usage (and emotions, perception, states, performatives, etc.), much like how we have in English, though there are minor differences. I think where I was mislead is that in contrast, Welsh mostly uses the periphrastic construction for both habitual and progressive (but the future tense can be used in a narrowly habitual sense; set phrases and literary Welsh also use the future tense more generally), and Scottish Gaelic has a similar preference. Irish on the other hand still has a distinct simplex present tense in contrast to the future tense.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

Post by qwed117 »

I think that English and the Romance languages all sharing the same perfect construction consisting of a verb that is roughly shaped like "have" and a past participle is pretty strange, and that similarity is even stronger in Spanish and Italian where the other half of the construction contains a verb suffixed with a vowel and a coronal stop. If you're more lenient with the pattern, you can add in Modern Greek which uses έχω <echo>, effectively "eho", plus a verb with a suffix containing a coronal fricative. Interestingly, the base form in Ancient Greek is //hekho//, with the initial /h/ deleted by Grassman's law-but in Ancient Greek it couldn't be used to make perfects. The funnier thing about this though, is that all three constructions are completely unrelated (at least to my knowledge)

(Major/National) Languages that do this: English, Icelandic, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Greek, Swedish, Norwegian
Languages that don't: French, German, Dutch, Slavic languages, Celtic languages, Finnish, Romani, etc.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

Post by Salmoneus »

qwed117 wrote: 04 Jan 2023 10:03 I think that English and the Romance languages all sharing the same perfect construction consisting of a verb that is roughly shaped like "have" and a past participle is pretty strange, and that similarity is even stronger in Spanish and Italian where the other half of the construction contains a verb suffixed with a vowel and a coronal stop. If you're more lenient with the pattern, you can add in Modern Greek which uses έχω <echo>, effectively "eho", plus a verb with a suffix containing a coronal fricative. Interestingly, the base form in Ancient Greek is //hekho//, with the initial /h/ deleted by Grassman's law-but in Ancient Greek it couldn't be used to make perfects. The funnier thing about this though, is that all three constructions are completely unrelated (at least to my knowledge)

(Major/National) Languages that do this: English, Icelandic, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Greek, Swedish, Norwegian
Languages that don't: French, German, Dutch, Slavic languages, Celtic languages, Finnish, Romani, etc.
Huh? The perfect in German is likewise formed with "have", surely, just as in English? And likewise in French? And also I assume Dutch? I don't think the fact that the perfect is increasingly used more broadly than in English in colloquial speech in several languages should really cause us to pretend that it's not the same phenomenon in all the languages.

And yes, the haben and habere constructions are clearly related by calqueing, probably from Latin. [I think some people still blame the Franks, but certainly it was more widespread in Latin than in some later Germanic languages, like English (it's used much more often in Old English translations of Latin than in native texts), which suggests a Latin origin, or at least rapid adoption in Latin, though that doesn't rule out the Latin fashionable over-adoption of a Frankish construction and then re-adoption back into Germanic languages in its new more extensive form. Then again, the overwhelming direction of linguistic influence in general (grammatical and lexical) seems to be from Latin into Proto- and Old Germanic, not vice versa]

Rather than seeing this as a 'peripheral' feature, I'd have thought it was one of the central and strongest elements of Standard Average European. Because it's not actually one feature, it's a whole chronological series of developments clearly loaned between languages:

- the adoption of a "hab" verb of holding for possession (though of course habana and habere aren't actually cognate)
- the creation of a periphrastic perfect with auxiliary hab + passive participle for actions, and "to be" + participle for states
- the spread of the hab+ form to all transitive verbs, but retention of "to be" for intransitive verbs
- the spread of the hab+ form to many transitive verbs, leaving only a relict class taking "to be"
- the spread of the hab+ form to all verbs

meanwhile:
- the spread of the perfect from only situations with a strong emphasis on resultant states to any past event with present relevance
- the spread of the perfect from only past events with present relevance to any past event with strong telicity or completivity
- the spread of the perfect to all past events without strong imperfectivity
- the spread of the perfect to all past events aside from a relict class of highly perfective verbs
- the spread of the perfect to all past events

Different languages obviously fall at different points on these paths, and different dialects or registers may do also (with more progress usually in colloquial forms). And some of the common development along both paths can be ascribed to genuine convergent evolution. But the following of two such clear paths simultaneously in all of Western Europe, without any notable divergence (languages may be faster or slower but haven't broken off in totally different directions) is clearly the result of extensive grammatical influence between languages.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

Post by Sequor »

Salmoneus wrote: 03 Jan 2023 23:35Then again, I'm a bit surpised by Sequor's post, for that matter. I knew that the construction was colloquial in German, but I thought it was more accepted in other Germanic languages (I once read a paper on how these constructions differ in different languages, but didn't come away thinking it was something inherently informal in most of them).

icelandicgrammar.com, for instance, which claims to be written by a "teaching fellow in icelandic" at the university of edinburgh (albeit not one with an icelandic name), talks about the progressive straightforwardly with no hint that it should be considered informal?
Oh, I know zero Icelandic, I really had mainly Swedish and Norwegian in mind when I said "modern Scandinavian". I based that on some note I wrote one time, off some paper I didn't bother citing in the note, but you definitely made me curious so I asked some native speakers around about this.

The German constructions are indeed colloquial so at least this was right. The Dutch ik ben aan het wachten (I am waiting) is common but not at all formal, while the use of zitten/staan/liggen te wachten are perfectly standard but do have to be used while literally sitting/standing/lying... Same goes for Swedish sitta och + finite verb, you need to be sitting, which makes it unlikely to be used in an academic paper but of course it'd be fine in a novel or press conference... But Swedish turns out to have a number of other constructions too, which aren't necessarily colloquial.

Basically I now think I am wrong and the progressive built with a non-finite as part of standard/formal language seems to be pretty SAE even if what I said is still true of the very core (French + German). Incidentally, Louisiana French has j'suis apé attendre (je suis après attendre) for 'I am waiting', but no matter.
Salmoneus wrote: 04 Jan 2023 13:45 Huh? The perfect in German is likewise formed with "have", surely, just as in English? And likewise in French? And also I assume Dutch? I don't think the fact that the perfect is increasingly used more broadly than in English in colloquial speech in several languages should really cause us to pretend that it's not the same phenomenon in all the languages.
At first I thought he wasn't counting French due to participles being formed with -é(e)(s) [e] rather than a coronal consonant, while forgetting German/Dutch form their regular verb participles with -t and -d respectively (as opposed to the -en of most irregular verbs), but I think your interpretation is right, and yes, I agree they should be counted as the same construction even if they're well on their way of replacing the old simple preterite verb forms.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

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Salmoneus wrote: 04 Jan 2023 13:45
qwed117 wrote: 04 Jan 2023 10:03 I think that English and the Romance languages all sharing the same perfect construction consisting of a verb that is roughly shaped like "have" and a past participle is pretty strange, and that similarity is even stronger in Spanish and Italian where the other half of the construction contains a verb suffixed with a vowel and a coronal stop. If you're more lenient with the pattern, you can add in Modern Greek which uses έχω <echo>, effectively "eho", plus a verb with a suffix containing a coronal fricative. Interestingly, the base form in Ancient Greek is //hekho//, with the initial /h/ deleted by Grassman's law-but in Ancient Greek it couldn't be used to make perfects. The funnier thing about this though, is that all three constructions are completely unrelated (at least to my knowledge)

(Major/National) Languages that do this: English, Icelandic, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Greek, Swedish, Norwegian
Languages that don't: French, German, Dutch, Slavic languages, Celtic languages, Finnish, Romani, etc.
Huh? The perfect in German is likewise formed with "have", surely, just as in English? And likewise in French? And also I assume Dutch? I don't think the fact that the perfect is increasingly used more broadly than in English in colloquial speech in several languages should really cause us to pretend that it's not the same phenomenon in all the languages.
The languages that I refer to "doing this" and "not doing this" is the more strict hab- [suffix] + verb + -[coronal obstruent], which German and Dutch do not do. Dutch has a circumfix ge- -t, and German has -t. French eroded the coronals in the suffixes to the point where it's just -u -i -e iirc.

And yes, the haben and habere constructions are clearly related by calqueing, probably from Latin. [I think some people still blame the Franks, but certainly it was more widespread in Latin than in some later Germanic languages, like English (it's used much more often in Old English translations of Latin than in native texts), which suggests a Latin origin, or at least rapid adoption in Latin, though that doesn't rule out the Latin fashionable over-adoption of a Frankish construction and then re-adoption back into Germanic languages in its new more extensive form. Then again, the overwhelming direction of linguistic influence in general (grammatical and lexical) seems to be from Latin into Proto- and Old Germanic, not vice versa]

Rather than seeing this as a 'peripheral' feature, I'd have thought it was one of the central and strongest elements of Standard Average European. Because it's not actually one feature, it's a whole chronological series of developments clearly loaned between languages:

- the adoption of a "hab" verb of holding for possession (though of course habana and habere aren't actually cognate)
- the creation of a periphrastic perfect with auxiliary hab + passive participle for actions, and "to be" + participle for states
- the spread of the hab+ form to all transitive verbs, but retention of "to be" for intransitive verbs
- the spread of the hab+ form to many transitive verbs, leaving only a relict class taking "to be"
- the spread of the hab+ form to all verbs

meanwhile:
- the spread of the perfect from only situations with a strong emphasis on resultant states to any past event with present relevance
- the spread of the perfect from only past events with present relevance to any past event with strong telicity or completivity
- the spread of the perfect to all past events without strong imperfectivity
- the spread of the perfect to all past events aside from a relict class of highly perfective verbs
- the spread of the perfect to all past events

Different languages obviously fall at different points on these paths, and different dialects or registers may do also (with more progress usually in colloquial forms). And some of the common development along both paths can be ascribed to genuine convergent evolution. But the following of two such clear paths simultaneously in all of Western Europe, without any notable divergence (languages may be faster or slower but haven't broken off in totally different directions) is clearly the result of extensive grammatical influence between languages.
Lacking French, German, Slavic, and Albanian in the strict form makes this a tiny bit less usual. Of note the coronal suffixes all have different sources despite their similarity.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

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qwed117 wrote: 05 Jan 2023 02:47The languages that I refer to "doing this" and "not doing this" is the more strict hab- [suffix] + verb + -[coronal obstruent], which German and Dutch do not do. Dutch has a circumfix ge- -t, and German has -t. French eroded the coronals in the suffixes to the point where it's just -u -i -e iirc.
I have to say I remain confused... How does ich habe diskutiert not count as "hab-[suffix] + verb + -[coronal obstruent]"?
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

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Sequor wrote: 05 Jan 2023 09:10
qwed117 wrote: 05 Jan 2023 02:47The languages that I refer to "doing this" and "not doing this" is the more strict hab- [suffix] + verb + -[coronal obstruent], which German and Dutch do not do. Dutch has a circumfix ge- -t, and German has -t. French eroded the coronals in the suffixes to the point where it's just -u -i -e iirc.
I have to say I remain confused... How does ich habe diskutiert not count as "hab-[suffix] + verb + -[coronal obstruent]"?
My understanding is that the pure -t suffix is a lot rarer than the ge- -t circumfix and the -en suffix. :). If it isn't, then maybe it should be considered a central European feature.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

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qwed117 wrote: 05 Jan 2023 20:44
Sequor wrote: 05 Jan 2023 09:10
qwed117 wrote: 05 Jan 2023 02:47The languages that I refer to "doing this" and "not doing this" is the more strict hab- [suffix] + verb + -[coronal obstruent], which German and Dutch do not do. Dutch has a circumfix ge- -t, and German has -t. French eroded the coronals in the suffixes to the point where it's just -u -i -e iirc.
I have to say I remain confused... How does ich habe diskutiert not count as "hab-[suffix] + verb + -[coronal obstruent]"?
My understanding is that the pure -t suffix is a lot rarer than the ge- -t circumfix and the -en suffix. :). If it isn't, then maybe it should be considered a central European feature.
The -t suffix is the most productive one. ge- -t only attaches to roots with initial stress (IINM) but that includes a lot of native roots, so idk.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

Post by Porphyrogenitos »

Another possible candidate feature: More than 3 noun classes. Some Southern Italian varieties feature both an innovative neuter for materials and abstractions, and a "genus alternans" that switches from masculine in the singular to feminine in the plural, like the Romanian neuter. Some even have an additional "neuter" that switches from the feminine in the singular to masculine in the plural. And then quite a distance away, Polish, Russian, and some other Slavic varieties have innovated a distinction between animate and inanimate masculine nouns. I think I recall that some have analyzed Polish (or perhaps it was Czech?) has having even more masculine subclasses than that.

Perhaps a better term for this would be innovation of marginal noun classes that may or may not be considered full-fledged "genders" depending on your analysis.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

Post by Salmoneus »

Creyeditor wrote: 05 Jan 2023 23:54
qwed117 wrote: 05 Jan 2023 20:44
Sequor wrote: 05 Jan 2023 09:10
qwed117 wrote: 05 Jan 2023 02:47The languages that I refer to "doing this" and "not doing this" is the more strict hab- [suffix] + verb + -[coronal obstruent], which German and Dutch do not do. Dutch has a circumfix ge- -t, and German has -t. French eroded the coronals in the suffixes to the point where it's just -u -i -e iirc.
I have to say I remain confused... How does ich habe diskutiert not count as "hab-[suffix] + verb + -[coronal obstruent]"?
My understanding is that the pure -t suffix is a lot rarer than the ge- -t circumfix and the -en suffix. :). If it isn't, then maybe it should be considered a central European feature.
The -t suffix is the most productive one. ge- -t only attaches to roots with initial stress (IINM) but that includes a lot of native roots, so idk.
Two other points I'd make on the topic:

- it's still the same -t suffix. The participle is still marked with the t- suffix. It's just that a subset of verbs are double-marked by an additional ge- prefix. Saying it's not the same is kind of like saying that some Latin verbs don't use the same suffix for the perfect because they also have reduplication. The presence of an additional marking doesn't change the commonality of the first marking.

- "the perfect is formed through an auxiliary verb etymologically meaning "hold" or "grab" and the passive participle of the verb" is a really interesting linguistic phenomenon to look into. "The passive participle is formed with a suffix containing some coronal obstruant and NOT a coronal sonorant, AND there is no additional prefix for any participle" is... not? I mean, if you're going at the coincidental-phoneme-class-by-coincidental-phoneme-class level, you can define any "linguistic area" you want! There'll always be single-phoneme coincidences here and there.

And, incidentally, AIUI the coronal sufixes in Germanic and Romance ARE cognate.


----

I meant to add another element to the perfect pathway I gave above, incidentally: that the participles, which initially agreed with the noun, gradually stopped agreeing - first for participles with 'to be', and later for those with 'to have'.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

Post by Omzinesý »

Porphyrogenitos wrote: 02 Jan 2023 03:54 I once recall someone remarking that interdentals aren't all that uncommon in Europe, they just seem to be distributed rather oddly around the periphery of the continent—Greek, Albanian, Spanish, Welsh, English, Icelandic, Sami, some Finnish dialects, and presumably some other Uralic languages in Russia.
No Finnish dialect has interdentals. Some apparently had at historical times.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

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Omzinesý wrote: 06 Jan 2023 00:38 No Finnish dialect has interdentals. Some apparently had at historical times.
I believe he's referring to the Kven language, which does have /ð/ as a phoneme.
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Re: Peripheral Euro features

Post by Xonen »

Acipencer wrote: 26 Jan 2023 00:31
Omzinesý wrote: 06 Jan 2023 00:38 No Finnish dialect has interdentals. Some apparently had at historical times.
I believe he's referring to the Kven language, which does have /ð/ as a phoneme.
Strictly speaking, the Pyssyjoki dialect of Kven (see here):
Spoiler:
Image
The grapheme <đ> is standard in Kven, but I'm not sure if speakers of other dialects actually attempt to pronounce it even when reading aloud... I'd expect them to have an attitude similar to that of North Saami speakers, namely that you can (and should) always use the pronunciation of your own dialect, regardless of how well it matches the orthography. In this case, it would simply mean treating <đ> as a silent letter. Of course, the extent of written material available in Kven is quite limited anyway, and especially the older speakers probably aren't that familiar with it to begin with.

In any case, and whether or not we're counting Kven as a dialect of Finnish, both /θ/ and /ð/ have indeed been attested in Finnish as late as a few decades back. There are recordings:
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– No siit tehðäm makkarà ja siit tehðä syltty ja, ja sitte, tääls sanòtam pretùks semmost ko siit verès tehdðä.

– Mitäs se o?

– Se_o sitä ko, palttu, palttu sanotan kirjakiälel. Semmost ko, vert otèta ja panna siihe vet joukko ja, pannuis sillalk kypsennetä sit ko se rukkisil jauhol viäl tehðä semmoθeks, sakkiaks ja... pannuis kypsetetän – kyl se hyvä sitt_on kon_aikalais siihe saa sia rasvà tällät joukko. Kyl sem-, se oo sè sorttist kon_olet nähnyk ku nykysi nois, kaupois o semmoθθis ko on kon on niinkon oikken tommost, täämöst kauhia josa, muavii sillal_ympär_o, siin_o semmost punàst. Se o vähä samà sorttist mut... ei tua ol nii hyvä makùst – kyl täälk kaupassaki sitä usse myyðy o. Mut kyl se omàtekone ol parèmppa.
(https://www.kotus.fi/aineistot/puhutun_ ... mala_homma)
/θ/ and /ð/ may even have been the majority pronunciation in previous centuries. The current standard pronunciations (/ts/ and /d/, respectively), are kind of an odd case, really, in that they're both largely spelling pronunciations with very limited support in traditional dialects.
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