(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2019]

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All4Ɇn
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by All4Ɇn »

Does anyone know the origin of Ukrainian's word for food їжа? What is it's relationship to the word for eat (їсти)
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Post by ixals »

All4Ɇn wrote: 02 Apr 2018 02:15 Does anyone know the origin of Ukrainian's word for food їжа? What is it's relationship to the word for eat (їсти)
The root for "to eat" *ěd- + *-ja as a deverbal suffix > *ěďa > їжа. Compare Lower Sorbian jěza which means the same. And guess what vocabulary I'll add to Cissian now, heh
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Post by All4Ɇn »

ixals wrote: 02 Apr 2018 15:00The root for "to eat" *ěd- + *-ja as a deverbal suffix > *ěďa > їжа. Compare Lower Sorbian jěza which means the same. And guess what vocabulary I'll add to Cissian now, heh
Thanks so much! Speaking of Ukrainian, does anyone know how exactly Ukrainian has maintained it's own completely unique names for the months of the year while the rest of Europe has adopted the Latin names?
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All4Ɇn wrote: 02 Apr 2018 15:22Speaking of Ukrainian, does anyone know how exactly Ukrainian has maintained it's own completely unique names for the months of the year while the rest of Europe has adopted the Latin names?
I don't know the answer to that (but I'd like to know, too!), but there are many more languages in Europe without Latin month names. Belarussian, Czech, Croatian, Polish, Lithuanian and Finnish, I think.
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Post by shimobaatar »

All4Ɇn wrote: 02 Apr 2018 15:22 Speaking of Ukrainian, does anyone know how exactly Ukrainian has maintained it's own completely unique names for the months of the year while the rest of Europe has adopted the Latin names?
I know this doesn't answer your question, but for what it's worth, Ukrainian isn't alone in Europe in having maintained month names that aren't based on the Latin ones. For instance, I recall Finnish having its own month names. Wiktionary seems to suggest that some other Balto-Slavic languages, like Czech, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Polish, Silesian, Kashubian, and others also have non-Latin month names, as is the case with some of Finnish's relatives, including Veps, Võro, and many of the Sami languages. Additionally, a number of Germanic languages, and also Romanian, seem to have colloquial month names that aren't based on the Latin names. Scottish seems to have its own month names, and Basque seems to have at least some which aren't Latin-based.

(Looks like I was beaten to it. [:P] )
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Irish has a mixture - some are Latin (Eanáir, Feabhra, Márta, Iúil) and some are native (Bealtaine, Meitheamh, Lúnasa, Meán Fómhar, Deireadh Fómhar, Samhain) and some are mixed (Aibreán, Mí na Nollaig)
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Post by All4Ɇn »

Well I guess I'm showing my bias towards Western Europe. Thanks for the all replies. I'm definitely glad to see other languages having additional names as well. Not surprised by Finnish or Basque but I'm definitely surprised by Polish!
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Post by eldin raigmore »

Lambuzhao wrote: 29 Mar 2018 12:36
elemtilas wrote: 29 Mar 2018 02:18
Sorry girl, Henry James beat you to it!
Ah yes. Portrait of a Tremendosity. James' finest work. [:P]
Thanks 🙏, you two, and all other responders to my last question! I learned a lot!
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Post by eldin raigmore »

vandlival wrote: 07 Oct 2010 01:06 Do you know some where i can find documentation on adverbs , or languages wich do not difference them from nouns or verbs?
Everything official I have read suggest that when adverbs are not differentiated from something, they are not differentiated from adjectives. In such languages, there are nouns, and verbs, and modifiers. For some languages, modifiers are divided into those which modify noun phrases, and those with modify anything else but a noun phrase. The ones with modify noun phrases are called adjectives; All other modifiers are called adverbs.

There are also languages that don’t distinguish between adjectives and nouns; and languages which don’t distinguish between adjectives and verbs. (That is, in these languages, either adjectives are thought of as a kind of noun, Or adjectives are thought of as a kind of verb. )

But, while I have never seen anything “official” about languages which think adverbs are a kind of noun, I have read about it on the Conlang Listserv mailing list at Brown.edu. Some senior conlanger —— perhaps And Rosta? —— was following a school of linguisticians Who, according to him as near as I could understand, thought something very much like that. If you try to find that, you will probably find somebody who can turn you on to the documentation you were looking for.
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Post by Axiem »

Are there languages without /h/, and if so, how do they represent laughing sounds, such as the ones that in English we spell <hahahah>?
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Post by sangi39 »

Axiem wrote: 06 Apr 2018 19:16 Are there languages without /h/, and if so, how do they represent laughing sounds, such as the ones that in English we spell <hahahah>?
Many of the Australian Aborigine languages lack fricatives both phonemically and phonetically, but I have no idea how they represent the sound of laughter.
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Post by spanick »

Axiem wrote: 06 Apr 2018 19:16 Are there languages without /h/, and if so, how do they represent laughing sounds, such as the ones that in English we spell <hahahah>?
Well Italian just represents it as <ahah> and French as <haha> and they’re just pronounced /a.a/. I’m guessing phonetically it’s actually something like [a.ʔa].
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Post by Creyeditor »

A lot of languages write laughing (at least on the internet) with k's, e.g. kwkwkwkw.
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Post by Xonen »

Axiem wrote: 06 Apr 2018 19:16 Are there languages without /h/
Yes. The prototypical example for English speakers would probably be French, which (like all modern Romance languages) has lost original Latin /h/ but has mostly kept the letter in spelling - which is why you get loanwords like honor, hour and even the name of the letter <h>, from French hache. The same goes for Spanish, but spelling pronunciations in English seem to be quite common, so habanero can be pronounced either with or without the /h/ (of course, that particular word doesn't come from Latin to begin with, and I'm not quite sure where Spanish gets the <h>, but anyway). In fact, I'm having trouble thinking of a Spanish loanword where not pronouncing an <h> would be obligatory in English... Wiktionary lists /ˈɑːstə/ as the only pronunciation for hasta, but I think I can hear /h/ in what is probably the most famous instance of someone using that word in English (but then again, said someone is a native speaker of neither English nor Spanish, nor exactly known for his uncanny ability to pronounce other languages without an accent).

how do they represent laughing sounds, such as the ones that in English we spell <hahahah>?
Depends. Spanish and Russian use the letter for /x/ (i.e. <jajaja> and <хахаха>, respectively), which is the closest thing they have to /h/. Some other strategies have already been pointed out here, and I'm sure there are many more.
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Post by Evni Öpiu-sä »

Let's assume someone is fluent in spoken and written English but who knows no other languages. How would they spell the word [øykre]? The word is the name of my conlang in the conlang itself. I will use your answer when speaking (writing) about my conlang in English.

I edited my post to make it sound more suitable.
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Post by cedh »

Certain variants of English (IIRC mostly in Australia, New Zealand, and parts of England) have something like [ə͡ʉ] for the GOAT vowel. If the hypothetical speaker speaks one of these dialects, I'd expect something like okray. Otherwise, oykray (with CHOICE) or akray (with FACE) would probably be more likely. Of course, the /k/ could also be written as c, but to me the variants with k tend to suggest stressed "long" vowels in the first syllable, while the variants with c and an initial single orthographic vowel suggest final stress or at least "short" first-syllable vowels (ocray [ˈɒ.kɹe͡ɪ] with LOT, and acray [əˈkɹe͡ɪ] with COMMA).

That said, I'm not a native speaker of English.
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Post by All4Ɇn »

American English speaker here. I'd probably say ookray
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Post by Reyzadren »

Eyckrare, though this looks like some branded item from a shopping mall.

Alternatively, you can just use a romanisation system that you would later use for other regular words in your conlang, such as: Oeykre, etc.
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Post by Axiem »

Evni Öpiu-sä wrote: 07 Apr 2018 15:33 How would he spell the word [øykre]?
(Women speak English too. Fluently, even!)

As an American, the answer is "I wouldn't". Neither [ø] nor [y] occur in my dialect of English, so it's not like I have ready-made characters to use for them. As well, straight [e] isn't particularly common; it's more often a diphthong of [ei] or [eɪ] depending on what part of America you're from (the latter to my ear sounds more southern than the former)

Though as someone who knows a little bit about linguistics, and maybe knows what umlauts are and what they mean in German, I would probably do öükré, using non-standard-English orthography to emphasize the foreignness of the sounds.



Though really, if that's the name of your conlang, then you should probably figure out the romanization scheme of your conlang, and just use whatever the name romanizes to. That's going to be a lot more understandable to people than having a completely different romanization scheme just for the name of the language, compared to everything else written in the language.
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Post by LinguistCat »

Axiem wrote: 08 Apr 2018 05:05 As an American, the answer is "I wouldn't". Neither [ø] nor [y] occur in my dialect of English, so it's not like I have ready-made characters to use for them. As well, straight [e] isn't particularly common; it's more often a diphthong of [ei] or [eɪ] depending on what part of America you're from (the latter to my ear sounds more southern than the former)
I think Evni meant if an American who is not linguistically inclined were to hear [øykre] and were asked to write it out, to the best of their ability given English spelling convention, how might they write it?
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