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: Plural
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
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)
Irish challenge (3)
This post is the 3rd instalment of the Irish leg of my current Celtic challenge. It covers those parts of chapters 1 and 2 of Teach Yourself Irish that I didn’t cover in the 2nd instalment. The 1st instalment covered Irish spelling and pronunciation. Questions and answers Yes and no Irish has no words for…… Continue reading Irish challenge (3)
Odds and ends: English
This post deals with some small aspects of English, grouped under the following headings: Spelling pronunciation meanings mass noun or count noun? word or phrase word histories 1. Spelling 1a. Bookkeeper Bookkeeper (and related bookkeeping) is one of the few English words with 3 double letters in a row: oo-kk-ee. https://whenyouwrite.com/ points out: an English…… Continue reading Odds and ends: English
Notes on English inflection
In this post I discuss some features of English inflection: English identifies 6 combinations of person (eg 1st person singular, 3rd person plural) but mostly distinguishes only 2 categories: (a) 3rd person singular versus (b) all others. the most prominent inflectional ending in English is -s, which serves as both:- the 3rd person singular ending…… Continue reading Notes on English inflection
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?
The future of German noun plurals
Native German nouns typically form their plurals with a variety of markers, including vowel changes (‘Umlaut’), -(e)n, -(e) and (-er). The marker -s is used for some words borrowed from other languages and for items such as acronyms, abbreviations and some proper names. Janda (2021) predicts (perhaps surprisingly) that -s will ultimately become the regular…… Continue reading The future of German noun plurals
The Ashes are starting. Are they singular or plural?
The Ashes cricket series between the national teams of England and Australia starts in less than 7 hours. In between wondering about the cricket, I found myself contemplating verb agreement. Sports teams and singular or plural verbs As is reasonably well known, verb agreement works differently in different varieties of English when the subject of…… Continue reading The Ashes are starting. Are they singular or plural?
None is responsible, all can be absolved
I came across the following statement after the acknowledgements in linguist Neil Smith’s 1989 book The Twitter Machine: Reflections on Language: ‘None of the above has seen any part of this book, and can accordingly be absolved of all responsibility for errors and idiocies.’ Unfortunately, the 2nd clause (‘can accordingly be absolved…’) needs an explicit…… Continue reading None is responsible, all can be absolved