Natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a linguistic theory claiming that: all lexical items (lexemes) in any human language are made up of a small number of simple concepts (‘semantic primes’); the semantic primes cannot be broken down into more basic concepts; the semantic primes are universal: the same semantic primes underlie every language. Also, for each…… Continue reading NSM Natural Semantic Metalanguage
Tag: Morpheme
Suppletive aspectual pairs in Russian
Most Russian verbs are a pair of linked verbs marking one of 2 ‘aspects’: ‘perfective’ or ‘imperfective’. Different aspects are different ways of depicting the event or state described by the verb. Speaking very roughly, the perfective aspect depicts an event or state as a single undivided whole, whereas the imperfective looks inside the event…… Continue reading Suppletive aspectual pairs in Russian
Libfixes
I first read about libfixes on Daniel Hieber’s blog Linguistic Discovery. What is a libfix? A libfix is a part of word that has become a new affix. An English example is -gate which was part of the name of a building (Watergate) which became a label for the scandal that brought down US president…… Continue reading Libfixes
Vowel harmony in case-marked forms of Hungarian personal pronouns
There is an oddity in how Hungarian vowel harmony works with personal pronouns. Many Hungarian suffixes undergo vowel harmony: when a case marker is suffixed to a noun, the suffix undergoes vowel harmony, but when a personal pronoun is suffixed to a case marking prefix, the prefix determines the vowel in the suffix. The same…… Continue reading Vowel harmony in case-marked forms of Hungarian personal pronouns
Idiomatic negative adjectives in Japanese
In Japanese, the negator nai often combines with verbs to derive idiomatic adjectives which can appear only in a negative form. Table 1 lists some of them. Table 1. Adjectives formed with the negator -nai AdjectiveComponentsMeaningtamara-naibear-negcannot standyarikire-nai finish-negcannot stand, unbearabledoozi-nai upset-negnot upsetniekira-nai decisive-negindecisivewarikire-naisatisfy-negnot satisfiedkamawa-nai care-negnot carekudara-naiworth-negworthless, uninterestingtsumara-naiinterest-negboring, uninterestingkakase-nailack-negnecessarykakasa-nai miss-negnever lacksoguwa-nai fit-negunsuitableyuruga-nai shake-negfirm, solidhakarisire-nai measure-negimmeasurablenorikire-nairide-negnot in…… Continue reading Idiomatic negative adjectives in Japanese
Albanian suppletive verbs
Sometimes, an inflected form of a verb was originally an inflected form of another verb. For example, went—the past tense form of the English verb go—was originally the past tense of the now obsolescent verb wend. This phenomenon is called suppletion and I have discussed it before at https://languagemiscellany.com/2024/11/borrowing-verb-forms-from-another-verb/ Albanian has a surprisingly large number of verbs with…… Continue reading Albanian suppletive verbs
Leipzig glossing rules
Books and papers on linguistics often contain examples in a foreign language. To aid understanding, examples typically provide both: an interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, giving information about the meanings and grammatical properties of individual words and parts of words. an idiomatic translation of the foreign language text. A useful set of standardised conventions for writing glosses…… Continue reading Leipzig glossing rules
Some Mandarin names for countries
For a few countries, Mandarin uses names made up of a morpheme that sounds like the first syllable in the country’s native name, followed by the symbol 国 (guó) meaning country. Table 1 lists some of those countries, with the Mandarin character (simplified, rather than traditional), the official pinyin transcription and the literal meaning of…… Continue reading Some Mandarin names for countries
Sounds of Vietnamese
Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) is in the Vietic subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family. Vietnamese is spoken as a first language by around 85 million people, mainly in Vietnam, where it is the official language. It has several times as many native speakers as all other Austroasiatic languages combined. This post covers: syllable structure word structure consonants vowels reduplication…… Continue reading Sounds of Vietnamese
A regular dissimilation from Latin
The English suffix -al is one of the derivational suffixes that forms adjectives from nouns. It is a non-native suffix, related historically to the Latin derivational suffix -alis. One oddity of this suffix is that it has different form -ar when applied to some words (or bases) containing /l/. An example is lunar. This type…… Continue reading A regular dissimilation from Latin