This post is the 9h instalment of the Irish leg of my current Celtic challenge. It covers chapter 8 of Teach Yourself Irish. For previous instalments, please see https://languagemiscellany.com/tag/irish/ It covers: adjectives forming adverbs from some adjectives lenition after masculine plural nouns preposition: le (‘with’) preposition de (‘of’, ‘from’) expressing quantity words and phrases Mutation…… Continue reading Irish challenge (9)
Tag: Noun
Language sketch: Esperanto
The artificial language artificial language Esperanto was created by a Polish Doctor Ludovic Zamenhof in 1887. He initially called the language simply la Lingvo Internacia (‘the international language’), but he wrote using the pseudonym Dr Esperanto and Esperanto quickly became the language’s accepted name. Alphabet Esperanto uses a Latin alphabet of 28 letters: 22 letters…… Continue reading Language sketch: Esperanto
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)
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
Antecedents of reflexives and pronouns
Theories about ‘binding’ try to explain when a noun phrase must, may or must not refer to the same item as an earlier noun phrase in the same sentence (an antecedent). Binding theories typically identify 3 types of noun phrases: anaphors, such as herself in example 1 below. An anaphora must have an antecedent in…… Continue reading Antecedents of reflexives and pronouns
Some World Atlases about languages
I’ve recently discovered 2 useful atlases, each devoted to a specific feature of languages: the World Atlas of Transitivity Pairs (WATP) the World Atlas of Classifier Languages (WACL) They provide more detail than is found in more general databases, such as the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS), which I’ve mentioned in some other posts…… Continue reading Some World Atlases about languages
Mainland Southeast Asian languages
Mainland Southeast Asia is home to speakers of around 280 languages spread across 5 families: the Mon-Khmer branch of Austroasiatic (including Vietnamese and Khmer) Sino-Tibetan (including Mandarin and other Sinitic languages, and Burmese and other Tibeto-Burman languages) Tai-Kadai (including Thai and Lao) Hmong-Mien (languages of southwest China) Austronesian (languages spoken mainly in Oceania, but represented…… Continue reading Mainland Southeast Asian languages
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
Disyllabic compound nouns in east and southeast Asia
In Chinese, many basic words are made up of one syllable, but many other words are compounds of 2 monosyllabic words. Many of those compounds were also borrowed into Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese, even though none of those three languages has any known genetic relationship to Chinese. The following table lists a few of…… Continue reading Disyllabic compound nouns in east and southeast Asia