The Italian Language Today, by Anna Laura Lepschy and Giulio Lepschy (2nd edition, 1988) is a useful guide for anyone who has been through a basic to intermediate Italian course. The book has 2 parts: part one The Linguistic Situation in Italy has 4 sections: Italian today; a historical view; Italian dialects; varieties of…… Continue reading The Italian Language Today
Tag: Sound change
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
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
‘Syntactic doubling’ of Italian consonants
Single Italian consonants become pronounced as double (long) consonants (‘geminates’) if they follow: a stressed vowel some short unstressed words The Italian name for this process is raddoppiamento syntattico (‘syntactic (re)doubling’), or sometimes rafforzamento fonosyntactico (‘phonosyntactic stregntening’). ‘Syntactic’ refers to the fact that the doubling crosses word boundaries, unlike in word-internal geminate consonants as in [gattto] ‘cat’…… Continue reading ‘Syntactic doubling’ of Italian consonants
Why did two Spanish sibilants end up as /θ/ and /x/?
I’ve often wondered why standard European Spanish (Castilian) pronounces the letters written<c> and <j> as /θ/ and /x/. Penny (2002) and Alkire and Rosen (2010) explain that this comes from the history of sibilants in Spanish. Old Spanish sibilants In the 15th century, Old Spanish had 7 sibilants (table 1). Table 1. Old Spanish sibilants…… Continue reading Why did two Spanish sibilants end up as /θ/ and /x/?
Hungarian and Finnish share more words than you might think
Hungarian and Finnish are both members of the Uralic family of languages but separated around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. https://languagemiscellany.com/2024/01/the-uralic-languages/ Some Hungarian and Finnish words still sound (and look) quite similar. Indeed, Hajdu (1975) points out that it is possible to construct complete (albeit artificial) sentences using words of similar form, for example: Kala…… Continue reading Hungarian and Finnish share more words than you might think
How modern Greek spells some English consonants
Modern Greek uses digraphs to spell some voiced consonants that do not appear in modern native Greek words. Greek spellingTransliterationSoundμπmp[b]ντnt[d]γκgk[g]γγgg[g]τζtz[dz] Notes These combinations are pronounced as stops [b, d, g] at the start of words or after a consonant, but often as nasal followed by stop [mb, nd, ng] in the middle of words. Before…… Continue reading How modern Greek spells some English consonants
Numbers in Japanese and Chinese
Japanese has 2 series of words for numbers: words borrowed from Chinese many centuries ago (Sino-Japanese numbers); and native Japanese numbers Table 1 shows the numbers from 1 to 10, as well as the words for zero, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100 million, 1012 and 1016. For comparison, I have included the pronunciations of the numbers…… Continue reading Numbers in Japanese and Chinese
Where did Russian words come from?
In this post, I look at 35 words that Russian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages. In future posts, I will look at another 99 words inherited by Russian directly from PIE and 36 words inherited from other sources, mainly Proto-Balto-Slavic or Proto-Slavic: 43 verbs inherited by…… Continue reading Where did Russian words come from?
Phonemes and allophones
Phonologists and phoneticians typically distinguish phonemes from allophones. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another word. For example, the English word mat is distinct from pat because mat starts with the phoneme /m/ whereas pat starts with the phoneme /p/. A phoneme is not always pronounced in the…… Continue reading Phonemes and allophones