Today I learned ...

A forum for discussing linguistics or just languages in general.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by eldin raigmore »

Today I learned that the Verdi opera (English title “The Power of Fate”, Italian title “La Forza del Destino”), which was based on a Spanish-language novel titled “La Fuerza del Sino”, has a Peruvian protagonist!
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Keenir »

In the June 2023 issue of Scientific American magazine, there are two very interesting articles:

* Both the Cherokee numerals and the Inupiat(sp) numerals {"base 20 with a subbase of 5") are being given their own part of the upcoming Unicode 15.0 (the latter numeral system are also getting a Google font)

* There is a lot of information being given on PGA {Present-Day Great Adamanese - a mix of Jero, Sare, Bo, Khora} , both collectively and with some of the individual languages within the family. The article's author points out that PGA languages use body parts in their grammar more than any other language {the magazine's table of contents words that to make it sound like this is unquestionably how early humans spoke}

...that may or may not be because the article gives the impression that, after being settled 10,000 years ago, the Andaman islands were never visited or influenced until the British arrived in the 1800s and wrote two books on two of the languages of the North Andaman Islands. (to be fair, it was a single short paragraph that mentioned the islands' precolonial history very much in passing)

There are only two classes of word:
1. Free. 'pertain to nature and can exist without markers.
and
2. Bound. 'nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs that always occur with markers for zones of the human body.' (with the example given that, if you're bleeding, your "i am bleeding" statement has to include if the blood is coming from your finger, your lip, or elsewhere)

'To say, for instance, "I will visit you tomorrow," one would use ngamikhir, for "your tomorrow." But in the sentence "I will finish this tomorrow," the word would be thambikhir, "my tomorrow."'

I found the article very interesting and informative. Thus I thought to mention it here.
At work on Apaan: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4799
Khemehekis
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Khemehekis »

TIL that Irish Gaelic distinguishes "discrimination" (unfair treatment) from "discrimination" (different treatment).

https://www.focloir.ie/en/dictionary/ei/discrimination
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Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
Khemehekis
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Khemehekis »

Today I learned that Irish Gaelic distinguishes two different kinds of fruit: torthaí is fruit as a collective concept ("Eat lots of fruit"), and toradh is fruit as an individual fruit or specific kind of fruit ("Strawberries are Sandy's favorite fruit"). This parallels the distinction Arabic makes in its two different words for "food".

And, having done the F's, I'm one-third of the way with working through an alphabetized Landau Core Vocabulary with the Gaelic language.
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Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
Knox Adjacent
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Knox Adjacent »

Are you sure torthaí isn't just an inflected form of toradh?
Khemehekis
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Khemehekis »

Knox Adjacent wrote: 09 Jun 2023 09:47 Are you sure torthaí isn't just an inflected form of toradh?
Considering they both begin with tor-, they could be. Maybe Salmoneus would know.
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Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
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Acipencer
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Acipencer »

Torthaí (pronounced /ˈtˠɔɾˠhiː/) is just the plural form toradh (pronounced /ˈtˠɔɾˠə/), meaning fruit.
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Salmoneus »

Annoyingly, I actually DID know that (remarkable, as I only know a handful of Irish words, unfortunately), but didn't see the thread quickly enough!

I'm not sure where Khemekhis is getting this distinction from; none of the dictionaries on teanglann.ie mention it.

EDIT: just for completeness, the stress in torthaí is on the second syllable in Munster, and the /h/ sounds like it's dropped in Connacht (my impression of the sound clip on teanglann, which matches the IPA on wiktionary). The value of the first vowel is continually frustrating to me - I can listen to that Connacht clip and 'switch' in my brain whether it sounds like /O/ (which everyone calls it) or like /V/ (which it normally sounds like to me), so I don't know what's really going on. [likewise, I hear a lot of broad <á> as /O:/, and not just in the dialects/contexts where it's meant to be]. The Munster clip theoretically has reduction to schwa, but it's still rounded-sounding to me (more so than in Connacht!), presumably due to the surrounding broad consonants. And what the hell is that sound in Ulster, it sounds more like /A/ to me...

[Irish is not a good language to be interested in if, like me, you have no ear whatsoever...]
Khemehekis
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Khemehekis »

Salmoneus wrote: 18 Jun 2023 20:46 Annoyingly, I actually DID know that (remarkable, as I only know a handful of Irish words, unfortunately), but didn't see the thread quickly enough!
I thought you would.
I'm not sure where Khemekhis is getting this distinction from; none of the dictionaries on teanglann.ie mention it.
I got it from https://www.focloir.ie/en/dictionary/ei/fruit -- this is the dictionary I'm going through for Irish Gaelic semantics with my Landau Core Vocabulary.

(You've got to love a foreign-language dictionary that has an entry for "air guitar".)
EDIT: just for completeness, the stress in torthaí is on the second syllable in Munster, and the /h/ sounds like it's dropped in Connacht (my impression of the sound clip on teanglann, which matches the IPA on wiktionary). The value of the first vowel is continually frustrating to me - I can listen to that Connacht clip and 'switch' in my brain whether it sounds like /O/ (which everyone calls it) or like /V/ (which it normally sounds like to me), so I don't know what's really going on. [likewise, I hear a lot of broad <á> as /O:/, and not just in the dialects/contexts where it's meant to be]. The Munster clip theoretically has reduction to schwa, but it's still rounded-sounding to me (more so than in Connacht!), presumably due to the surrounding broad consonants. And what the hell is that sound in Ulster, it sounds more like /A/ to me...
Interesting. The focloir.ie dictionary also has recordings of words in those three dialects. In the Munster dialect recording on that site, the TH in torthaí sounds like a /h/ to me.
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Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

My Kankonian-English dictionary: 87,413 words and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!
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Omzinesý
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Omzinesý »

Some languages can at a classifier to the head noun as a derivational affix although usually it is added just to numerals.

This language is Karu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karu_language
My meta-thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5760
Salmoneus
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Salmoneus »

I knew this before but had forgotten it: the shift of Germanic strong verbs to weak verbs happened almost entirely between 1200 and 1600, in multiple languages (though to different extents). In English since 1600, strong verbs becoming weak have been approximately equal to weak verbs becoming strong.

It's notable that this period is precisely between the two periods when one might naively expect this sort of simplification to occur (the influx of Norse and Norman language-learners in the preceding centuries, and the vast expansion of the speakerdom through colonisation in the following centuries).
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by eldin raigmore »

TIL I learned that Alexandre Dumas père was a quadroon. His father’s mother was a slave in Haiti.
TIL I also learned that Alexandre Dumas fils (his son) was a famous playwright who wrote plays I’ve never seen but have sort-of heard of.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by eldin raigmore »

BTW I also learned recently that catadromous fish must hatch in saltwater then swim up-river and live most of their lives in freshwater before swimming back down to the ocean to spawn.
Just the opposite of what anadromous fish do!
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Lambuzhao »

Salmoneus wrote: 17 Jul 2023 00:34 … the vast expansion of the speakerdom through colonisation in the following centuries).
[O.O]
:mrgreen:
[+1]
Salmoneus
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Salmoneus »

eldin raigmore wrote: 20 Jul 2023 04:56 TIL I learned that Alexandre Dumas père was a quadroon. His father’s mother was a slave in Haiti.
TIL I also learned that Alexandre Dumas fils (his son) was a famous playwright who wrote plays I’ve never seen but have sort-of heard of.
On the first point: yes, that's what people would call him if we were living in Georgia before the Civil War. Please reduce the racist language.

On the second point: have you not seen La Traviata? You should.
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Visions1 »

According to this interpretation of the data, Basque ain't doing so hot.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshum ... s_awfully/

What Romans can't kill, nothingness can, I guess.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by eldin raigmore »

Today I learned what “hysterokinetic” means!
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Arayaz »

[A week or so ago]IL: ° and º are different characters! The former is the degrees sign, the latter marks masculine nouns in dictionaries of Romance languages.
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by WeepingElf »

Üdj wrote: 23 Sep 2023 04:01 [A week or so ago]IL: ° and º are different characters! The former is the degrees sign, the latter marks masculine nouns in dictionaries of Romance languages.
The primary use of º are masculine ordinals, e.g. = primero 'first'. There is also ª for feminine ordinals, e.g. = primera.
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Re: Today I learned ...

Post by Nel Fie »

Today I learned that in 'Are'are, an Oceanic language from the Solomon Islands, a word for "lightning" is [ʔeiwanawana]. It's a compound of 'ai for "tree" and wana for "glow".

So "lightning" seems to literally translate as "glowing tree" or "tree-shaped glow", which I thought was rather poetic, as well as rather appropriate for the season.

(Source: A Sketch grammar of 'Are'are, by Kateřina Naitoro, 2013)
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