This post is the 6th instalment of the Welsh leg of my current Celtic challenge. It covers chapter 5 of Colloquial Welsh. For earlier instalments, please see Welsh Archives – Language Miscellany For a few words and phrases, there are differences between north (N) and south (S) Wales.I’ve used bold type below to highlight words…… Continue reading Welsh challenge (6)
Tag: Word: borrowed
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
Cognate, etymon, reflex
An important concept in historical linguistics is cognacy. Words are said to be cognates if they descend directly from the same word in an earlier stage of the same language or in an ancestral language. For example, the German word Feuer (‘fire’) and English fire are cognates. They both derive from the corresponding word *fōr in the Proto-Germanic language.…… Continue reading Cognate, etymon, reflex
North, south, east and west
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Romance languages acquired 2 sets of words for points of the compass: some languages spoken in areas with Atlantic coastlines had nautical terms borrowed from English, via French into Spanish and Portuguese. other languages had words used in the Mediterranean, originating in Italian and spreading to Provençal, Catalan…… Continue reading North, south, east and west
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 (3)?
In earlier posts, I looked at 78 words that Russian inherited directly from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the presumed ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages. Those words were: 27 adjectives, 3 adverbs and 5 numerals. https://languagemiscellany.com/2026/01/where-did-russian-words-come-from/ 43 verbs https://languagemiscellany.com/2026/02/where-did-russian-words-come-from-2/ In this post, I look at 56 nouns inherited by Russian directly from PIE. In future posts,…… Continue reading Where did Russian words come from (3)?
Shaetlan—the language of Shetland
Shaetlan, the language of Shetland, has now been awarded an ISO 3-letter code: scz https://iso639-3.sil.org/code/scz For more on ISO language codes, please see Russian: an official language at the ISO – Language Miscellany Shaetlan has sometimes been regarded as ‘just a dialect’ of English or as a ‘just a dialect’ of Scots, but the awarding…… Continue reading Shaetlan—the language of Shetland
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
Importing a foreign consonant into Finnish
I found an interesting little example about foreign loan words in Finnish in New Perspectives in Historical Linguistics, Paul Kiparsky, in The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics, edited by Claire Bowern and Bethwyn Evans (2014). The example is on foreign words containing /f/. I summarise below what Kiparsky says about 2 strategies for dealing with…… Continue reading Importing a foreign consonant into Finnish