(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2019]

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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by shimobaatar »

Parlox wrote:Does anyone know of a good searchable proto-germanic to english word list?
If the list of lemmas on Wiktionary isn't what you're looking for, could you describe in more detail what you're hoping to find?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by GamerGeek »

shimobaatar wrote:
Parlox wrote:Does anyone know of a good searchable proto-germanic to english word list?
If the list of lemmas on Wiktionary isn't what you're looking for, could you describe in more detail what you're hoping to find?
List of PG words with English translations listed along with them that you can search for. The Lemmas page(s) don't give translations or search.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by shimobaatar »

GamerGeek wrote:
shimobaatar wrote:
Parlox wrote:Does anyone know of a good searchable proto-germanic to english word list?
If the list of lemmas on Wiktionary isn't what you're looking for, could you describe in more detail what you're hoping to find?
List of PG words with English translations listed along with them that you can search for. The Lemmas page(s) don't give translations or search.
That's what I'm assuming was meant, but I'd like to hear what Parlox has to say, since they asked the original question.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by GamerGeek »

shimobaatar wrote:
GamerGeek wrote:
shimobaatar wrote:
Parlox wrote:Does anyone know of a good searchable proto-germanic to english word list?
If the list of lemmas on Wiktionary isn't what you're looking for, could you describe in more detail what you're hoping to find?
List of PG words with English translations listed along with them that you can search for. The Lemmas page(s) don't give translations or search.
That's what I'm assuming was meant, but I'd like to hear what Parlox has to say, since they asked the original question.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Parlox »

Im sorry that my question cause confusion, i will try to explain it clearer,
I am looking for a dictionary for proto-germanic that has a option for searching for a specific word.
:con: Gândölansch (Gondolan)Feongkrwe (Feongrkean)Tamhanddön (Tamanthon)Θανηλοξαμαψⱶ (Thanelotic)Yônjcerth (Yaponese)Ba̧supan (Basupan)Mùthoķán (Mothaucian) :con:
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by shimobaatar »

Parlox wrote:Im sorry that my question cause confusion, i will try to explain it clearer,
I am looking for a dictionary for proto-germanic that has a option for searching for a specific word.
No worries, we're just trying to make sure we know how to help you. Nothing like that comes to mind for me immediately, but I'll keep my eyes peeled.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

So what's with the IE nouns with nominative -ō and the other forms in -on (or otherwise with an /n/ present), such as this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstr ... pean/léymō

Cf. Latin "imago, imaginis", "caro, carnis", etc.

Why are these "n-stems" yet there's no /n/ present in the nominative?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sumelic »

I think the vowel length at least is explained by "Szemerényi's law". I'd post a link but the BB format on this site screws up links with non-ASCII characters, as you can see. But it's not hard to find more info by Googling it. I can't explain it myself.

Here's a blog post I found about n-stems: http://phoenixblog.typepad.com/blog/200 ... stems.html
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Thank you! That sounds familiar, so I must have read it before, but I've been reading Sihler lately, and there's a lot of information...

So that would explain r- and n-stem nouns whose nominatives originally ended in -s, but the -s was deleted and the coda vowel was lengthened. But then you'd think it would be *leymōn or *imagōn. However, Wikipedia says this:

"According to another synchronic PIE phonological rule, word-final *n was deleted after *ō, usually by the operation of Szemerényi's law". I guess that explains that.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

k and ğ seem to alternate in inflected word forms in Turkish. I suppose there was a lenition k -> ğ. What were the conditions where the sound change happened?
My meta-thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5760
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sumelic »

I think it just happened intervocalically. It doesn't occur in verbs in modern Turkish, apparently: I don't know if this was an morphology-based exception to the historical sound change or if there was some phonological motivation for it in earlier stages of the language.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

Sumelic wrote:I think it just happened intervocalically. It doesn't occur in verbs in modern Turkish, apparently: I don't know if this was an morphology-based exception to the historical sound change or if there was some phonological motivation for it in earlier stages of the language.
Thank you
It seems to be a dead sound change and doesn't affect anymore.
I have to continue searching.
My meta-thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5760
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sumelic »

Omzinesý wrote:
Sumelic wrote:I think it just happened intervocalically. It doesn't occur in verbs in modern Turkish, apparently: I don't know if this was an morphology-based exception to the historical sound change or if there was some phonological motivation for it in earlier stages of the language.
Thank you
It seems to be a dead sound change and doesn't affect anymore.
I have to continue searching.
Well, it's not an active absolute phonological constraint in modern Turkish, but I have read that it is still fairly productive in a specific context, before vowel-initial noun suffixes. A number of languages have processes like this that are active in morphological derivation, but that don't affect sequences within morphemes; e.g. the phonologies of contemporary Japanese speakers generally permit the sequences /ti/ and /di/ to exist, due to loanwords from languages like English, but the affrication rule producing /tʃi/ and /dʒi/ from these sequences in native morphology is still considered to be active (although I don't know how easy it is to establish this rule's productivity, considering that C-V sequences mainly arise in Japanese morphology in the context of verb inflexion, and Japanese verbs tend to be on the "closed class" side).

I found a discussion of the synchronic situation with Turkish k/ğ that you might be interested in, if you haven't seen it already: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~inkela ... ersion.pdf
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Axiem »

I would ask a question more completely, but I'm not able to quite coherently form one. Because I keep changing my thoughts to different aspects of Mto, one of the languages I'm working on (/want to work on; this is mostly to figure out a handful of name/phonotactics things) ends up having a writing system similar to modern Japanese, with "ideographic" (for lack of a better word) characters for most of it, with a syllabary/alphabet of some sort for the rest, along with teaching and dealing with foreign words.

This is all based on my understanding; do please correct me if I err.

In Japanese, you can often take these kanji and smash them together to create new words: e.g. 電話 combines "electricity" with "talk" to get "telephone". These root characters have various readings, either native or from Chinese. In some cases, there's both a single character to represent the Japanese-origin word, and then a two-character compound for the Chinese; the example I learned when I took Japanese of this was 女 was the Japanese word "onna", and 女性 was the Chinese-borrowed word "josei", both of which mean "woman".

It kind of seems to me, then, that this smash-characters-together-for-new-words thing came from Chinese, but I am wondering if this is just the underlying way the language words from a sounds perspective (kind of like how we use Latin/Greek roots, but with the roots being shorter and more around one syllable), or if they introduction of a writing system like that had a large influence into allowing those combinations to occur.

That is, you might find in a manga such as Naruto the invention of the technique 螺旋丸, which is a brand new word for a technique that romanizes as "Rasengan". The characters have meaning that is imparted into the meaning for the technique itself—but it seems like the characters themselves allow this? Or would someone be able to puzzle through the roots of a word like that (having heard it only) and figure out the roots?

Am I making sense? Is there a coherent question/thought in here?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sumelic »

Disclaimer: I don't know Japanese, so this is just based on what little I have read about it.

My impression is that many compounding patterns used in contemporary Japanese did come from Chinese. I don't think it's really possible to separate the influence of the spoken language and the characters: historically in the Sinosphere, these things have been heavily conflated. The writing system encourages analyzing Sinitic words into constituent morphemes (archetypically monosyllabic in Chinese, although not so much in Japanese), and this in turn facilitates the recombination of these morphemes to form new words.

I think Japanese also has old native compounds, though, because I've read that the "rendaku" voicing rule is less common in Sino-Japanese compounds than in compound words formed from native vocabulary. Presumably native compound words can also be written with a combination of the kanji of the elements, if the native words have associated kanji.

As for whether it is possible to understand the meaning of a compound just from hearing it, that's probably variable and very dependant on what the specific word is. I'm sure that there are some compounds that are/would be confusing, but I greatly doubt this is true for all of them, and I don't know the relative percentages. Some compound elements in English are homophonous and have to be distinguished by context or seeing the written form, like (for me) "ero-" in "erogenous" vs. "aero-" in "aeronautics".
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Axiem »

Sumelic wrote:The writing system encourages analyzing Sinitic words into constituent morphemes (archetypically monosyllabic in Chinese, although not so much in Japanese), and this in turn facilitates the recombination of these morphemes to form new words.
To a certain extent, I think I'm trying to figure out which came first—which may be a chicken/egg sort of scenario, I admit. But what aspects of Chinese would lend itself to a writing system like this as opposed to (say) Latin?

I'm slightly less concerned with the Japanese aspect of it, it's mostly that such is where I have knowledge. My curiosity lies with how this happened in Chinese to begin with, such that it would then be imported.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by TwistedOne151 »

My understanding is that in Standard German (under the most recent spelling reform), the rules for s and ß word-internally between vowels, vis-a-vis voiceless and voiced [z], and the doubling of consonants as indicator of vowel length, is:
for voiceless , ß after a long vowel and ss after a short vowel;
for voiced [z], single s after a long vowel.
But then, how do you indicate a short vowel before voiced [z]? Or does that just not occur in German? Thanks.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sumelic »

TwistedOne151 wrote:My understanding is that in Standard German (under the most recent spelling reform), the rules for s and ß word-internally between vowels, vis-a-vis voiceless and voiced [z], and the doubling of consonants as indicator of vowel length, is:
for voiceless , ß after a long vowel and ss after a short vowel;
for voiced [z], single s after a long vowel.
But then, how do you indicate a short vowel before voiced [z]? Or does that just not occur in German? Thanks.


Correct -- at least, for native vocabulary. I don't know German well enough to say how /z/ is handled in loanwords. In fact, IIRC, the distribution of [z] and in "textbook" German is such that it is even possible to analyze the language as having a single phoneme that is voiced in syllable onsets, and voiceless in codas. (I remember reading this somewhere, but I don't mean to maintain that this is a good analysis. It might have been in the same source mentioned in the following Wordreference thread: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads ... n.2147755/)
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by All4Ɇn »

Sumelic wrote:I don't know German well enough to say how /z/ is handled in loanwords
German tends to keep the spelling in loanwords the same for the most part. Grizzlybär is a good example of a loanword with a short vowel followed by [z]
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Creyeditor »

Grizzly has a /s/ for me: /gʁɪsl̥iː/.
I think minimal pairs like reisen vs. reißen are enough evidence against a one phoneme analysis if you do not wan to invoke highly abstract structures or contrastive syllable structure. Keep in mind that /s/->[z] and /z/->[z] is not a bad analysis at all in standard rule based phonology. Contrasts can be neutralized in certain positions. 'z' can be a phoneme and an allophone of /s/ at the same time. Somethigng like this (simplified).
/s/ -> [z] /#_V
/z/ -> /_.
(and if you believe in strict division between phonology and phonetics you also need
/s/ -> /_(otherwise)
/z/ -> [z] /_(otherwise)
)


Wiese btw cited in the WR-thread has to assume contrastive syllabification at some point something like /raɪ̯.zn̩/ vs. /raɪ̯s.n̩/, if devoicing applies syllable finally.
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