This post is the 8th instalment of the Irish leg of my current Celtic challenge. It covers chapter 7 of Teach Yourself Irish. For previous instalments, please see https://languagemiscellany.com/tag/irish/ It covers: asking and telling the time verbs: present tense questions go leor (‘enough, plenty, fairly’) nouns ending in -ín other words and phrases Mutation (lenition…… Continue reading Irish challenge (8)
Tag: Morphology: derivational
Derived adjectives in Hungarian
As an agglutinating language, Hungarian uses several suffixes to derive adjectives from nouns, verbs and other parts of speech. This post summarises the main suffixes. I will look in a future post at suffixes that form verbs and nouns. Hungarian has a pervasive system of vowel harmony. Leaving aside many details:- vowels are classified as…… Continue reading Derived adjectives in Hungarian
Russian verbs of motion
In Russian, verbs referring to motion include 14 pairs of verbs. Each of those verbs differs from its pair in a systematic way. Sometimes, the label ‘determinate’ is used for one member of each pair and the name ‘indeterminate’ is use for the other member: the determinate verbs refer to motion in one direction (not…… Continue reading Russian verbs of motion
Irish challenge (7)
This post is the 7th instalment of the Irish leg of my current Celtic challenge. It covers chapter 6 of Teach Yourself Irish. For previous instalments, please see https://languagemiscellany.com/tag/irish/ It covers: past, present and future of tá time expressions adjectives weather nouns other words and phrases Mutation is indicated below using bold type. Past, present,…… Continue reading Irish challenge (7)
Odds and ends: German
This post covers some small details of German. Rare suffix for males It’s quite common for languages to form the word for a female person or female animal by adding a suffix to the word for the corresponding male. Well-known suffixes of this kind include English -ess and German -in. (adding the German suffix -in…… Continue reading Odds and ends: German
Days of the week in East Asia
Japanese and Korean name 5 days of the week using words for traditional elements (fire, water, wood, metal, earth) and use the words for moon and sun in naming Sunday and Monday. Both languages combine those components with a 2nd component meaning day of the week. Table 1 shows the Japanese and Korean names in…… Continue reading Days of the week in East Asia
Italian places and their inhabitants
Italian place names generally have related adjectives. Many of them are formed in fairly predictable ways by just adding a suffix to the place name (eg romano from Roma, Milanese from Milano and Napoletano from Napoli). Common suffixes used in place names include (in the masculine plural form) -ani, -tani, -esi, -ensi, -i, -ali, -giani,…… Continue reading Italian places and their inhabitants
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
Avoiding dissimulation that would create new similarity even closer
I’ve mentioned before a dissimulation affecting the English suffix -al. A regular dissimilation from Latin – Language Miscellany I’ve recently come across an explanation of a further detail of this process. As I reported before: the derivational English suffix -al forms adjectives from nouns and is related historically to the Latin derivational suffix -alis.…… Continue reading Avoiding dissimulation that would create new similarity even closer