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
Tag: Dative
NSM Natural Semantic Metalanguage
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
Some things I like about Hungarian
Hungarian differs from most European languages in several ways, partly because it is not a member of the Indo-European family of languages. Hungarian is a member of the Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. https://languagemiscellany.com/2024/01/the-uralic-languages/ This post covers some fascinating features of Hungarian: vowel harmony front and back vowels in deictic words possessive word…… Continue reading Some things I like about Hungarian
Saying where things are in Japanese
Like English, Japanese often uses a basic locative construction to answer a question about where something or someone is. But Japanese uses different constructions for some questions of that kind, although English would use the basic locative construction in those cases too. Kita (2006) summarises 4 such cases. Basic locative construction Japanese often uses a…… Continue reading Saying where things are in Japanese
How to need and how to have
The way languages express needing something is linked in a surprising way to how they express having something. In their paper Having “need” and needing “have” Stephanie Harves and Richard Kayne (Linguistic Inquiry, 2012) summarise the facts and suggest an explanation. How to have: H-languages English and some other languages use a transitive verb like…… Continue reading How to need and how to have
German ‘ohne’ and English ‘without’ as not-with
Does the German word ohne (‘without’) correspond to a single mental concept? A recent paper argues that it does not. Instead, it has 2 components. One component corresponds to what the paper calls the cum concept (English with). The other corresponds to a negation or antonymity concept, which the paper calls anti. The paper also…… Continue reading German ‘ohne’ and English ‘without’ as not-with
How many cases are there in Hungarian and Finnish? (2)
I have written before about the major cases in Finnish and Hungarian. https://languagemiscellany.com/2022/03/how-many-cases-are-there-in-hungarian-and-finnishIn this post, I cover the local / spatial cases in those languages. These cases express such concepts as location, movement to or from a place. Finnish Finish has 6 of these cases, made up of 2 series, each containing 3 cases. Cases…… Continue reading How many cases are there in Hungarian and Finnish? (2)
How many cases are there in Hungarian and Finnish?
The Uralic languages are well known for having a large number of grammatical cases. The two Uralic languages with the most speakers are Hungarian and Finnish. Finnish has 15 cases and Hungarian has between 17 and 27 grammatical cases, depending on how some items are analysed. In contrast, looking only at some examples in languages…… Continue reading How many cases are there in Hungarian and Finnish?