Tag: Determiner

Welsh challenge (4)

This post is the 4th instalment of the Welsh leg of my current Celtic challenge. It covers chapter 3 of Colloquial Welsh. For earlier instalments, please see Welsh Archives – Language Miscellany Possession Welsh has no transitive verb meaning have. Instead, the verb mae is used with the preposition gyda (‘with’), or in speech often…… Continue reading Welsh challenge (4)

Welsh challenge (2)

This post is the 2nd instalment of the Welsh leg of my current Celtic challenge. It covers chapters 1a and 1b of Colloquial Welsh. The 1st instalment covered Welsh spelling and pronunciation, and mentioned the important process of consonant mutation. Learning Welsh and Irish – Language Miscellany In some places, I mention differences between northern…… Continue reading Welsh challenge (2)

Possessives in Maori

The Maori language (te reo Māori) of New Zealand (Aotearoa) has 2 entire series of possessive particles. In this post, I: summarise the form of the 2 series of possessive particles summarise when each series is used; and point out that other Central Pacific languages also have more than one series of possessive particles, giving…… Continue reading Possessives in Maori

Faithful to the English language?

The latest season of the UK version of the TV reality game show The Traitors has just finished. I suspect most viewers didn’t spot an interesting piece of morphosyntax. The game The game is played between 22 people. 19 of them are selected to be ‘faithful’ and the other 3 are selected to be ‘traitors’.…… Continue reading Faithful to the English language?

An apparent mismatch between an article and the noun it modifies

Sometimes a definite or indefinite article appears not to match the match the gender and/or number of the noun modified by it (in languages which have grammatical gender and/or mark number). Fábregas and Scalise (2012) give 2 interesting examples of such mismatches, one Italian and the other Spanish. Italian example Testa is a feminine noun…… Continue reading An apparent mismatch between an article and the noun it modifies

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

Greenberg’s list of universals

How much do languages differ and how similar are languages? An early attempt to consider these questions was a conference on language universals held in New York in 1961. Papers based on those prepared for the conference were published in 1963 in Universals of Language, edited by Joseph H Greenberg. (a 2nd, paperback, edition, appeared…… Continue reading Greenberg’s list of universals

A tell-tale sign of a constructed language?

Martin Haspelmath’s book Indefinite Pronouns (1997) is a detailed examination of the structure and use of indefinite pronouns in many languages. The book looks at 40 languages in detail and gives an overview for 100 more languages. Among many other interesting things in this book, one detail caught my eye. The book identifies a structural…… Continue reading A tell-tale sign of a constructed language?

Does English really have case?

Old English had a complex inflection system, distinguishing various morphological cases in nouns, pronouns and adjectives. Complex cases systems also existed in Latin and still exist in, for example, German and Russian. Over time, most case distinctions have vanished from English. In a 1995 paper Does English Really Have Case? in the Journal of Linguistics,…… Continue reading Does English really have case?