From Malcolm.Ross at anu.edu.au Mon Jul 2 10:57:31 2001 From: Malcolm.Ross at anu.edu.au (Malcolm Ross) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 06:57:31 EDT Subject: History of terms for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I am interested in the diachronic origins of terms for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow'. In Germanic, Slavic and Oceanic Austronesian languages, at least, we find terms for 'yesterday' derived from 'evening' (Slavic, Oceanic) and for 'tomorrow' from 'morning' (Germanic, Oceanic). I have three questions: 1) Is there a Slavonic specialist who can tell me how Russian /vchera/ 'evening' is related to /vecher/ 'evening'? I take it /vchera/ is a case-marked form of /vecher/, but I haven't managed to locate the details. 2) Are there similar developments in other language families? I assume there are, and I would be grateful for examples. 3) Has anyone written anything about these developments? Perhaps I have been looking in the wrong places, but almost everything I have found about the linguistics of time is either about aspect and tense (like Comrie's excellent works) or has a strong philosophical bias. The development of lexical items seems too mundane to command attention. Please reply to my e-mail address and I will summarise for the list whatever replies I receive. Thank you. Malcolm Ross -- _____________________________________ Dr Malcolm D. Ross Senior Fellow Department of Linguistics Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies Australian National University CANBERRA ACT 0200 From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Jul 9 11:55:15 2001 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 07:55:15 EDT Subject: History of terms for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Mon, 2 Jul 2001 06:57:31 EDT, Malcolm Ross wrote: >1) Is there a Slavonic specialist who can tell me how Russian >/vchera/ 'evening' is related to /vecher/ 'evening'? I take it >/vchera/ is a case-marked form of /vecher/, but I haven't managed to >locate the details. Russ. , Pol. etc. are from C.S. *, according to Vasmer an archaic instrumental (in accented *-ó:) of * (> Russ. , Pol. etc.), with reduction of to as is common in Slavic (a vowel reduction postdating the PIE Nullstufe). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From Michele.Goyens at arts.kuleuven.ac.be Mon Jul 9 11:55:51 2001 From: Michele.Goyens at arts.kuleuven.ac.be (Michele Goyens) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 07:55:51 EDT Subject: No subject Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Malcolm.Ross at anu.edu.au Wed Jul 11 10:14:12 2001 From: Malcolm.Ross at anu.edu.au (Malcolm Ross) Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 06:14:12 EDT Subject: Summary: Terms for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In early July I sent the message below to LINGUIST and to HISTLING. I am very grateful to the many people who sent me information. They were (I hope I haven't omitted anyone) Ignasi Adiego, Henning Andersen, Peter Austin, Claire Bowern,Daniel Collins, Ivan A. Derzhanski, Michele Goyens, Matejka Grgic, Charles Gribble, Jared Grigg, Joachim Grzega, Alik Guilmy, Christian Kay, Harold Koch, Konstantin Krasukhin, Joost Kremers, Johanna Laakso, Anthony M. Lewis, Alexis Manaster-Ramer, Bart Mathias, David Nash, Johanna Nichols, Jurgis Pakerys, Marc Picard, Robert L. Rankin, Robert R. Ratcliffe, Nick Reid, Laurent Sagart, Raphael Salkie, Marian Sloboda, Larry Trask, Shigeru Tsuchida, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal, Rémy Viredaz, Alexey Vorobyov, Cecil Ward, Andrew Wilcox. I am sorry that I have not been able to reply to everyone individually. Below the message is a 'summary': it is a mixture of extracts from the e-mails I received and, where I received similar information from several people, my attempts to summarise the information received. There can be no doubt that there is a crosslinguistic tendency for terms for 'yesterday' to be derived from 'evening' and for terms for 'tomorrow' to be derived from 'morning'. A few people asked if I was going to write a paper on this, and some gave me detailed references to pursue. I am not intending to write a paper, but if anyone else is interested in doing so and would like fuller information, I am happy to share it, as well as my own work on Oceanic languages. _____________________________________ ORIGINAL MESSAGE I am interested in the diachronic origins of terms for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow'. In Germanic, Slavic and Oceanic Austronesian languages, at least, we find terms for 'yesterday' derived from 'evening' (Slavic, Oceanic) and for 'tomorrow' from 'morning' (Germanic, Oceanic). I have three questions: 1) Is there a Slavonic specialist who can tell me how Russian /vchera/ 'evening' is related to /vecher/ 'evening'? I take it /vchera/ is a case-marked form of /vecher/, but I haven't managed to locate the details. 2) Are there similar developments in other language families? I assume there are, and I would be grateful for examples. 3) Has anyone written anything about these developments? Perhaps I have been looking in the wrong places, but almost everything I have found about the linguistics of time is either about aspect and tense (like Comrie's excellent works) or has a strong philosophical bias. The development of lexical items seems too mundane to command attention. _____________________________________ SUMMARY OF REPLIES INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES IN GENERAL 1. A number of people drew my attention to Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, Chicago/London, The University of Chicago Press, under "Tomorrow" (14.48, p.999) and "Yesterday" (14.49, p.1000). Buck draws attention to the facts that most of the words he cites for 'tomorrow' are derived from words for 'morning' and some of those for 'yesterday' from words for 'evening'. He assumes the semantic developments 'in the morning' 'on the following morning' 'tomorrow' and 'in the evening' 'in the past evening' 'yesterday'. He attributes a 'tomorrow' < 'morning' derivation to almost all the items he cites: Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, Irish, Welsh, Gothic, Old Norse, Danish, Swedish, English, Dutch, German, Lithuanian, Latvian, Church Slavonic, Serbocroat, Czech, Polish, Russian and Sanskrit (but not Latin). He attributes a 'yesterday' < 'evening' derivation only to the items he cites from Modern Greek (psés), Lithuanian, Latvian, Church Slavonic, Serbocroat, Czech, Polish and Russian. Most other words are attributed to a Proto Indo-European root *^ghes. 2. Rémy Viredaz kindly provided the following additional cases from a range of Indo-European languages: Yiddish nekhtn, Bavarian n”chten, Swabian n”hti 'yesterday', Middle High German nehten 'gestern Abend' (Nibelungen +), an old dative, now widespread in Northern and Central Germany (L. SainÈan, MÈmoires de la SociÈtÈ de Linguistique de Paris, 12, 1903, 135). Tsakonian epphÈri 'yesterday', cf. Ancient Greek hespÈra: 'evening' (ibid.). Latin mane 'in the morning' > e.g. Italian domani, French demain, 'tomorrow' (but also e.g. Old French main 'morning') (see W. Meyer-L¸bke, Romanisches Etymologisches W–rterbuch, # 2548 and 5294). Vedic pra:t·r 'early', 'in the morning', 'the next morning', 'tomorrow'. Vedic dos.·: 'dark, evening' and 'in the evening': Modern Dardic languages do:s. (with retroflex s.) 'tomorrow', Nuristani languages e.g. Kati du:s, 'tomorrow' (M. Emeneau, in Ancient Indo-European Dialects, 1966, 138, or R. L. Turner, A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages, 1966, both after G. Morgenstierne); similarly, Old Iranian daosha(s)-tara- 'Western' (implying a meaning 'evening' from the basic word): Middle and Modern Persian do:sh 'the last night, the evening before', Ossetic: Iron dyson / Digor ÊdosÊ 'yesterday night, yesterday evening' (M. Mayrhofer, Altindoarisches Etymologisches W–rterbuch, I, 1992, 750). SLAVONIC 1. I received responses to by question on Russian /vchera/ and /vecher/ from Henning Andersen, Daniel Collins, Konstantin Krasukhin, Johanna Nichols and Miguel Carrasquer Vidal. I have attempted to pull complementary portions out of their responses, which all draw attention to the same etymology. Johanna Nichols wrote: Russian /vecher/ 'evening' and /vchera/ 'yesterday' are related, but not inflectionally. That is, /vchera/ isn't any case form of /vecher/, either synchronically (in Russian or any other Slavic language) or for late Proto-Slavic. The two roots are cognate, but the vowel alternation is one of (derivational) ablaut. OCS has /v'chera/ and /vecher"/ (' = front jer, " = back jer; these are reflexes of short *i and *u respectively). Henning Andersen wrote: Common Slavic vIchera is related to CS vecherU as follows: (i) minor sound change of e to front jer (since lost) conditioned by the following palatal consonant. Kortlandt has argued that this is a regular sound change, there are a good handful of examples. (ii) More importantly, the form is the old instrumental, PIE *-o-H(1), which yields the regular Li. -uo (final -u (cf. vilku\, but ger-u/o-j-u. In Common Slavic the o-stem instr. is renewed on the pattern of u-stems and i-stems (South Slavic -omI//emI) or replaced by the u-stem ending (West and East Slavic -UmI//-ImI). Since Slavic merges PIE long *a and *o, the renewal may have been motivated by this phonetic change. I believe you can find CS vIchera thus accounted for in Vaillant's Grammaire com. des langues slaves (Section on instr. of ostems, possibly chapter on adverbs). Stang argues some place that the stress of the adverb Russ. krugo/m (contrast regular instr. kru/gom) reflects the accent of the earlier instr. in CS -a!, which bore the accent in all masc. and neut. nouns that did not have an accented long (acute) stem vowel. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: Russ. , Pol. etc. are from C.S. *, according to Vasmer an archaic instrumental (in accented *-ó:) of * (> Russ. , Pol. etc.), with reduction of to as is common in Slavic (a vowel reduction postdating the PIE Nullstufe). Daniel Collins wrote: Russian /vchera/ (which has cognates in all the Slavic languages) is thought by some etymologists to be an archaic o-stem instrumental singular ending *o: , which was adverbialized prior to the addition of the morpheme *-mi reflected in the attested o-stem instrumental case ending (Vasmer, Machek). Baltic continues to reflect this archaic form of instrumental; Lithuanian o-stem -u is a reflex of *o: under acute accent (Endzelins). The vocalism in the first syllable (*vikero:) does not have a regular ablaut relation to the other case forms (nominative singular *vekeros etc.) and seems to reflect allegro reduction. An alternative explanation is that vchera is a genitive of time; however, that leaves the accent unexplained. 2. Several people also pointed out that the Slavonic terms for 'tomorrow' are derived from 'morning'. Daniel Collins wrote: Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic zautra = za 'during' + utra genitive singular 'morning'. Charles Gribble wrote: 'Tomorrow' is related to 'morning' also in Slavic: Russ. {zavtra} is *za utra, Serbo-Croatian {sutra} is *s utra, Bulgarian {utre} is from *utro, etc. Marian Sloboda wrote: Slovak has /zajtra/ and for "morning" there is an etymologically different stem (the word is /rano/ connected with "early"). Czech also /zi:tra/--/rano/, but has also a word /jitro/ (which is not used much, but can be seen in older texts (from 19th, first half of the 20th century). Matejka Grgic wrote: Slovene /vc^eraj/ = yesterday and /vec^er/ = evening, /jutri/ tomorrow and /jutro/ morning. BALTIC Jurgis Pakerys wrote: Lithuanian: 1) vakar "yesterday", cf. vakaras "evening" 2) rytoj "tomorrow", cf. rytas "morning" Latvian: 1) vakar "yesterday", cf. vakars "evening" 2) rit "tomorrow", cf. rits "morning" (long /i/ in both words) Johanna Nichols wrote: Lithuanian /vakar/ 'yesterday' and /vakaras/ 'evening' have the same vowel grade and different morphology for the adverb (no ending). ... judging from the facts here there was a single Balto-Slavic root from which adverb and noun were both derived. CELTIC Cecil Ward wrote: The modern Celtic words for "tomorrow" all do seem to come from a root meaning "morning". Possibly "in (the) morning". As for "yesterday", the modern words all come for the old IE root ghdhyes- but have been influenced by the word for "today". They have all become combined with the definite article. Larry Trask wrote: Welsh 'tomorrow' is etymologically a prepositional phrase meaning 'in the morning', from 'morning', with mutation. Irish 'tomorrow' has a similar origin. GREEK Andrew Wilcox wrote: As for Mod. Greek, the Tegolpoulos-Fytrakis dictionary (standard serious "family dictionary") gives etymology of 'avrio (=tomorrow) as Ancient Grk. 'avos (=morning). No etymology for chthes (=yesterday) is given except to note that it is unchanged since Anc. Greek. Konstantin Krasukhin wrote: Greek AURION "tomorrow" can be connected with Proto-Indo-European *AUS-R; cf. Greek EOS < *AUSOS, Latin AURORA < *AUSOSA etc. ROMANCE This is my summary of responses from Michele Goyens, Laurent Sagart, Larry Trask, Marc Picard and Anthony M. Lewis. Late or low Latin /de mane/ 'starting from the morning', lit. 'from morning' is the source of French /demain/, Provencal /deman/, Italian /domani/. Latin /maane/ > Romanian /miine/. Spanish /mañana/ and Portuguese /manha/ each mean both 'morning' and 'tomorrow'. On the other hand, French /hier/ "yesterday" (and its cognates in other Romance languages) derives from the Latin adverb /heri/ "yesterday", from IE *ghes-, and thus cognate with /yesterday/ and German /gestern/. FINNIC Johanna Laakso wrote: In the Finnic languages, the word for 'tomorrow' is obviously related with 'morning', although the relationship is not quite transparent for modern speakers. Finnish _huomenna_ is an essive form (old locative case, typically appearing in crystallized idioms like this) of _huomen_, which is by now obsolete; the word _huomen_ 'morning' only appears in the greeting _hyvää huomenta_ 'good morning!' and in derivatives like _huominen_ 'of tomorrow' (adj.), while the normal word for 'morning' is _aamu_. In other Finnic languages, other derivatives of the same stem may appear, as in Estonian, where _homme_ 'tomorrow' is an opaque form (perhaps, originally illative?) of the same stem, while another derivative, _hommik_ (< Proto-Finnic *hoomenikko), is used for 'morning'. However, the word for 'yesterday', Fi. _eilen_ ~ Est. _eile_ (< Proto-Finnic ?*eklen) is a Proto-Finnic innovation of an obscure origin; the attempts by some etymologists to connect it with the word for 'former, situated before' are not very convincing. There is a word for 'evening' (Proto-Finnic *ekta-kV-), which is phonologically not very far away, but the relationship between these two words, however, remains obscure. AUSTRALIAN Nick Reid wrote: In Ngan'gityemerri (non-Pama-Nyungan, NT, Australia) /kultyi/ 'evening' and /kultyinimbi/ 'yesterday', where -nimbi is a nominal case suffix marking 'direction from' and 'cause'. The lexeme for 'tomorrow' is also a root plus agentive/instrumental suffix /ngunyine-ninggi/ though in this case the root is obscure (to me anyway). Peter Austin has written an article which shows the correspondence between day terms and day period terms (tomorrow=morning, yesterday=evening) in Australian Aboriginal languages. Harold Koch provided evidence form his database of the 'evening'/'yesterday' and 'morning'/'tomorrow' connections in Arandic languages and of the 'evening'/'yesterday' connection in Western Desert languages. CHINESE Larent Sagart wrote: Then there is Classical Chinese xi1 'evening; last night', discussed in my book of 1999 "The roots of Old Chinese" (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), on p. 160. I assumed the development 'evening' > 'yesterday evening' for this word because it appears to contain a root meaning 'night'. In the same book, I also supposed that the classical and modern Chinese word for "yesterday" (Mandarin zuo2) also contains the root for 'night' and also came to mean 'yesterday' out of a basic meaning 'evening', through 'yesterday evening' in both cases. The Mandarin word for 'to-morrow' ming2 tian1, and its classical Chinese precursor ming2 ri4 also have a good chance of being from an original meaning 'morning, dawn', since ming2 means 'bright' ri4 means 'sun, day', and tian1 means 'sky, day'. I do not know of any published references on this, though. SIOUAN Bob Rankin wrote: In the Siouan language, Kansa, (and other, related languages) 'tomorrow' is /gasi~/. 'Tomorrow' in the sense of 'on tomorrow' or 'during tomorrow' is /gasi~da~/. 'Morning' is /gasi~xci/, literally 'real morning', where /-xci/ is a common intensifier, often translated 'real' or 'very'. In Lakota (Teton Dakota) 'evening' has the root /xta/ and 'yesterday' is /xtaleha~/. The second part, /-leha~/ is a locative deictic 'now, thus far, at this place'. /hi~ha~na/ 'tomorrow' is paralleled by /hi~ha~na-xci/ 'forenoon', literally 'real morning' with the /xci/ intensifier noted in Kansa, above. In my transcription /~/ nasalizes the preceding vowel and /c/ is a voiceless, unaspirated palato-alveolar affricate = c-hachek; /j/ is the voiced counterpart of /c/ = j-hachek. TURKIC Alik Guilmy wrote: for example, in Tatar language (Turkic group): 'kich' (evening) - 'kiche' (yesterday) 'irte' (morning) - 'irtege' (tomorrow) Larry Trask wrote: Turkic languages also show some of this, though I am no Turkicist, and I can't readily interpret the data I have here: Kurtulus Oztopcu et al. (1996), Dictionary of the Turkic Languages, London: Routledge. I see here that words for 'tomorrow' and 'morning' are typically closely related. Some examples: 'morning' 'tomorrow' Kazakh tangyerteng yerteng Kyrgyz tang erteng erteng Tatar irt” irt”g” Turkmen ertir ertir Uyghur ”tig”n ”t” Turkish has none of this, but Turkish 'morning' is the same word as Azerbaijani 'tomorrow'. However, this item, with its final /h/, cannot be native Turkic, and must be borrowed, probably from Persian. We also have links with 'evening' and 'yesterday': 'evening' 'yesterday' Kazakh kesh keshe Kyrgyz kech kechee Tatar kich kich” The words for 'yesterday' appear to be case-suffixed forms of the word for 'evening'. Again, Turkish shows none of this. BASQUE Larry Trask wrote: I'm afraid Basque 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' are morphologically unanalyzable and etymologically opaque: they cannot be related to 'evening' or to 'morning' or indeed to anything else at all. BANTU Raphael Salkie wrote: In Shona (Bantu, the majority language of Zimbabwe) the word for TOMORROW is "mangwana", and the word for MORNING is "mangwanani". I've always assumed that the similarity with Spanish is just a coincidence... JAPANESE Bart Mathias and Shigeru Tsuchida note the following words: /asa/ 'morning', /asita/ 'tomorrow' ('morning' in earlier Japanese), /asu/ 'tomorrow' (a little bookish), /asatte/ 'the day after tomorrow'. Shigeru Tsuchida wrote further: ONO Susumu, a specialist in Japanese, suggests that the root as-, which appears common in the above three words, might have had a meaning of `dawn' (under the item asu in his dictionary ``Kogo-Jiten'' [Old (Japanese) Dictionary] (Tokyo: Iwanami Publishing Co. 1974 first ed.)(Old Japanese around 8 to 9 centuries.) According to the above dictionary, there were two series of words indicating time in Old Japanese: daytime-oriented, and nighttime- oriented. (In the following, F indicates a voiceless bilabial fricative, which has become h in initial position and has been lost in medial position in Modern Japanese.) Day-centric: asa --> Firu --> yuFu morning daytime evening Night-centric: yuFumbe --> yoFi --> yonaka --> akatuki --> asita evening night midnight dawn morning Asa (Dc) and asita (Nc) both meant substantially the same `morning', but asita (Nc) meant, by implication, the morning after having passed a night when something happened, and thus in the middle age the emphasis began to shift to `tomorrow morning', and finally `tomorrow' in modern Japanese. (Likewise, yuFumbe (Nc) `evening' now means `last night' in modern Japanese.) One reason why there are more words in the night-centric series may be in the fact that in those days we had a matrilocal society in Japan, a man visiting a girl at night to copulate. Thus yoFi was the time when it became dark and a man visited a girl; yonaka was the time when the man stayed with his girl-friend; akatuki was the time when it was still dark, but the man had to leave for his house. SEMITIC Robert Ratcliffe wrote: In Classical Arabic the words for 'yesterday' ('amsu) and 'tomorrow' (ghadan) have related words meaning 'evening' ('umsiiya(t)) and 'morning' (ghadaa(t)) respectively. I am not sure how these forms are related derivationally or historically. 'Yesterday' and 'tomorrow' are adverbial formations, which I suppose are based on noun forms no longer in use, and the noun forms for evening and morning are apparently secondary nominal formations which (I suppose) have replaced the earlier words under the pressure of ambiguity. (By the way these are not the normal (= taught in the textbook) words for evening and morning which are masaa' and SabaaH.) In modern spoken Arabic, these forms are largely replaced by words originally meaning 'early' (tomorrow) (Egyptian bukra), and 'past' (yesterday) (Egyptian imbaariH). Ivan A Derzhanski also noted that the nouns seem to be derived from the adverbs in Arabic, not vice versa. Joost Kremers wrote: .... the word for "tomorrow" in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) is "bukra", which in Classical Arabic (from which ECA derives) means "early morning". Rémy Viredaz wrote: Kurdish s at be (with schwa) 'tomorrow', from Arabic s.aba:h. 'morning' (with emphatic s. and pharyngeal h.), Kurdish s at ba 'morning' (H. Adjarian, MÈmoires de la SociÈtÈ de Linguistique de Paris, 16, 1910-11, 365). -- _____________________________________ Dr Malcolm D. Ross Senior Fellow Department of Linguistics Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies Australian National University CANBERRA ACT 0200 From lillian.balsvik at iba-stud.uio.no Wed Jul 11 14:36:25 2001 From: lillian.balsvik at iba-stud.uio.no (Lillian Balsvik) Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 10:36:25 EDT Subject: open syllable lengthening Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In "The Development of Qunantity as Evidence of Western European Linguistic Interdependence", Alf Sommerfelt writes on open syllable lengthening (OSL): "This change coincided with a change in poetry and the introduction of the dance song, the ballad" (p. 82 in _Diachronic and Synchronic Aspects of Language, Selected Articles_ 1962). He writes this right after discussing OSL in Norwegian, but I'm not sure whether he means that these two changes coincided in all languages where OSL applied or only in Norwegian. Sommerfelt does not say that one of these changes is caused by the other. I am left wondering, however, if he had some private theory that these two changes were interrelated. I am rather puzzled by this, and being fully aware that it is a bit too late to ask Sommerfelt himself, I pass this on to members of HISTLING. Lillian Balsvik From paul at benjamins.com Thu Jul 12 18:37:53 2001 From: paul at benjamins.com (Paul Peranteau) Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 14:37:53 EDT Subject: New Books: Robinson; Graffi Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- John Benjamins Publishing has brought out two new books related to the study of Historical Linguistics: Whose German? The ach/ich alternation and related phenomena in 'standard' and 'colloquial'. Orrin W. ROBINSON (Stanford University) Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 208 US & Canada: 1 58811 007 9 / USD 64.00 (Hardcover) Rest of world: 90 272 3715 8 / NLG 140.00 (Hardcover) The author addresses a number of issues in German and general phonology, using a specific problem in German phonology (the ach/ich alternation) as a springboard. These issues include especially the naturalness, or lack thereof, of the prescriptive standard in German, and the importance of colloquial pronunciations, as well as historical and dialect evidence, for phonological analyses of the "standard" language. Other important topics include the phonetic and phonological status of German /r/, the phonetic and phonological representation of palatals, the status of loanwords in phonological description, and, especially as regards the latter, the usefulness of Optimality Theory in capturing phonological facts. The book addresses itself to scholars from the fields of German and Germanic linguistics, as well as those concerned more generally with theoretical phonology (whether Lexical or Optimal). It may even appeal to the orthoëpists and lexicographers of modern German. * * * * * * * * 200 Years of Syntax. A critical survey. Georgio GRAFFI (University of Verona) Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 98 US & Canada: 1 58811 052 4 / USD 114.00 (Hardcover) Rest of world: 90 272 4587 8 / NLG 250.00 (Hardcover) This book argues convincingly against the widespread opinion that very few syntactic studies were carried out before the 1950s. Relying on the detailed analysis of a large amount of original sources, it shows that syntactic matters were in fact carefully investigated throughout both the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Moreover, it illustrates how the enormous development of syntactic research in the last fifty years has already condemned even several recent ideas and analyses to oblivion, and deeply influenced current research programs. The wealth of research undertaken over the last two centuries is presented here in a systematic way, taking as its starting point the relationship of syntax with psychology throughout this period. The critical ideas expressed in the text are based on a detailed illustration of the different syntactic models and analyses rather than on the polemics between the different schools. John Benjamins Publishing Co. Offices: Philadelphia Amsterdam: Websites: http://www.benjamins.com http://www.benjamins.nl E-mail: service at benjamins.com customer.services at benjamins.nl Phone: +215 836-1200 +31 20 6304747 Fax: +215 836-1204 +31 20 6739773 From j.t.faarlund at inl.uio.no Thu Jul 19 16:49:12 2001 From: j.t.faarlund at inl.uio.no (Jan Terje Faarlund) Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 12:49:12 EDT Subject: No subject Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Please post the following bookinformation: Grammatical Relations in Change Edited by Jan Terje Faarlund University of Oslo The eleven selected contributions making up this volume deal with grammatical relations, their coding and behavioral properties,and the change that these properties have undergone in different languages.The focus of this collection is on the changing properties of subjects and objects, although the scope of the volume goes beyond the central problems pertaining to case marking and word order.The diachrony of syntactic and morphosyntactic phenomena are approached from different theoretical perspectives, generative grammar, valency grammar, and functionalism. The languages dealt with include Old English, Mainland Scandinavian, Icelandic, German and other Germanic languages, Latin, French and other Romance languages, Northeast Caucasian, Eskimo, and Popolocan. This book provides an opportunity to compare different theoretical approaches to similar phenomena in different languages and language families. Contents Werner Abraham: How far does semantic bleaching go: About grammaticalization that does not terminate in functional categories John Ole Askedal: ‘Oblique subjects’, structural and lexical case marking: Some thoughts on case assignment in North Germanic and German Jan Terje Faarlund: The notion of oblique subject and its status in the history of Icelandic Elly van Gelderen: Towards personal subjects in English: Variation in feature interpretability Alice C.Harris: Focus and universal principles governing simplification of cleft structures Lars Heltoft: Recasting Danish subjects: Case system,word order and subject development Alana Johns: Ergative to accusative: Comparing evidence from Inuktitut D.Gary Miller: Subject and object in Old English and Latin copular deontics Muriel Norde: The loss of lexical case in Swedish Lene Schøsler: The coding of the subject object distinction from Latin to Modern French Annette Veerman-Leichsenring: Changes in Popolocan word order and clause structure Studies in Language Companion Series,56 2001.Hb viii,322 pp.+index 90 272 3058 7 NLG 220.00 1 58811 034 6 USD 100.00 ******************************************** Professor Jan Terje Faarlund Universitetet i Oslo Institutt for nordistikk og litteraturvitskap Postboks 1013 Blindern N-0315 Oslo (Norway) Tel. (+47) 22 85 69 49 (office) (+47) 22 12 39 66 (home) Fax (+47) 22 85 71 00 From B.Blake at latrobe.edu.au Mon Jul 23 11:54:11 2001 From: B.Blake at latrobe.edu.au (Barry Blake) Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 07:54:11 EDT Subject: ICHL: Final Circular Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Final circularWord 6 Type: application/msword Size: 11264 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Malcolm.Ross at anu.edu.au Mon Jul 2 10:57:31 2001 From: Malcolm.Ross at anu.edu.au (Malcolm Ross) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 06:57:31 EDT Subject: History of terms for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I am interested in the diachronic origins of terms for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow'. In Germanic, Slavic and Oceanic Austronesian languages, at least, we find terms for 'yesterday' derived from 'evening' (Slavic, Oceanic) and for 'tomorrow' from 'morning' (Germanic, Oceanic). I have three questions: 1) Is there a Slavonic specialist who can tell me how Russian /vchera/ 'evening' is related to /vecher/ 'evening'? I take it /vchera/ is a case-marked form of /vecher/, but I haven't managed to locate the details. 2) Are there similar developments in other language families? I assume there are, and I would be grateful for examples. 3) Has anyone written anything about these developments? Perhaps I have been looking in the wrong places, but almost everything I have found about the linguistics of time is either about aspect and tense (like Comrie's excellent works) or has a strong philosophical bias. The development of lexical items seems too mundane to command attention. Please reply to my e-mail address and I will summarise for the list whatever replies I receive. Thank you. Malcolm Ross -- _____________________________________ Dr Malcolm D. Ross Senior Fellow Department of Linguistics Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies Australian National University CANBERRA ACT 0200 From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Jul 9 11:55:15 2001 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 07:55:15 EDT Subject: History of terms for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Mon, 2 Jul 2001 06:57:31 EDT, Malcolm Ross wrote: >1) Is there a Slavonic specialist who can tell me how Russian >/vchera/ 'evening' is related to /vecher/ 'evening'? I take it >/vchera/ is a case-marked form of /vecher/, but I haven't managed to >locate the details. Russ. , Pol. etc. are from C.S. *, according to Vasmer an archaic instrumental (in accented *-?:) of * (> Russ. , Pol. etc.), with reduction of to as is common in Slavic (a vowel reduction postdating the PIE Nullstufe). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From Michele.Goyens at arts.kuleuven.ac.be Mon Jul 9 11:55:51 2001 From: Michele.Goyens at arts.kuleuven.ac.be (Michele Goyens) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 07:55:51 EDT Subject: No subject Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Malcolm.Ross at anu.edu.au Wed Jul 11 10:14:12 2001 From: Malcolm.Ross at anu.edu.au (Malcolm Ross) Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 06:14:12 EDT Subject: Summary: Terms for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In early July I sent the message below to LINGUIST and to HISTLING. I am very grateful to the many people who sent me information. They were (I hope I haven't omitted anyone) Ignasi Adiego, Henning Andersen, Peter Austin, Claire Bowern,Daniel Collins, Ivan A. Derzhanski, Michele Goyens, Matejka Grgic, Charles Gribble, Jared Grigg, Joachim Grzega, Alik Guilmy, Christian Kay, Harold Koch, Konstantin Krasukhin, Joost Kremers, Johanna Laakso, Anthony M. Lewis, Alexis Manaster-Ramer, Bart Mathias, David Nash, Johanna Nichols, Jurgis Pakerys, Marc Picard, Robert L. Rankin, Robert R. Ratcliffe, Nick Reid, Laurent Sagart, Raphael Salkie, Marian Sloboda, Larry Trask, Shigeru Tsuchida, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal, R?my Viredaz, Alexey Vorobyov, Cecil Ward, Andrew Wilcox. I am sorry that I have not been able to reply to everyone individually. Below the message is a 'summary': it is a mixture of extracts from the e-mails I received and, where I received similar information from several people, my attempts to summarise the information received. There can be no doubt that there is a crosslinguistic tendency for terms for 'yesterday' to be derived from 'evening' and for terms for 'tomorrow' to be derived from 'morning'. A few people asked if I was going to write a paper on this, and some gave me detailed references to pursue. I am not intending to write a paper, but if anyone else is interested in doing so and would like fuller information, I am happy to share it, as well as my own work on Oceanic languages. _____________________________________ ORIGINAL MESSAGE I am interested in the diachronic origins of terms for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow'. In Germanic, Slavic and Oceanic Austronesian languages, at least, we find terms for 'yesterday' derived from 'evening' (Slavic, Oceanic) and for 'tomorrow' from 'morning' (Germanic, Oceanic). I have three questions: 1) Is there a Slavonic specialist who can tell me how Russian /vchera/ 'evening' is related to /vecher/ 'evening'? I take it /vchera/ is a case-marked form of /vecher/, but I haven't managed to locate the details. 2) Are there similar developments in other language families? I assume there are, and I would be grateful for examples. 3) Has anyone written anything about these developments? Perhaps I have been looking in the wrong places, but almost everything I have found about the linguistics of time is either about aspect and tense (like Comrie's excellent works) or has a strong philosophical bias. The development of lexical items seems too mundane to command attention. _____________________________________ SUMMARY OF REPLIES INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES IN GENERAL 1. A number of people drew my attention to Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, Chicago/London, The University of Chicago Press, under "Tomorrow" (14.48, p.999) and "Yesterday" (14.49, p.1000). Buck draws attention to the facts that most of the words he cites for 'tomorrow' are derived from words for 'morning' and some of those for 'yesterday' from words for 'evening'. He assumes the semantic developments 'in the morning' 'on the following morning' 'tomorrow' and 'in the evening' 'in the past evening' 'yesterday'. He attributes a 'tomorrow' < 'morning' derivation to almost all the items he cites: Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, Irish, Welsh, Gothic, Old Norse, Danish, Swedish, English, Dutch, German, Lithuanian, Latvian, Church Slavonic, Serbocroat, Czech, Polish, Russian and Sanskrit (but not Latin). He attributes a 'yesterday' < 'evening' derivation only to the items he cites from Modern Greek (ps?s), Lithuanian, Latvian, Church Slavonic, Serbocroat, Czech, Polish and Russian. Most other words are attributed to a Proto Indo-European root *^ghes. 2. R?my Viredaz kindly provided the following additional cases from a range of Indo-European languages: Yiddish nekhtn, Bavarian n?chten, Swabian n?hti 'yesterday', Middle High German nehten 'gestern Abend' (Nibelungen +), an old dative, now widespread in Northern and Central Germany (L. Sain?an, M?moires de la Soci?t? de Linguistique de Paris, 12, 1903, 135). Tsakonian epph?ri 'yesterday', cf. Ancient Greek hesp?ra: 'evening' (ibid.). Latin mane 'in the morning' > e.g. Italian domani, French demain, 'tomorrow' (but also e.g. Old French main 'morning') (see W. Meyer-L?bke, Romanisches Etymologisches W?rterbuch, # 2548 and 5294). Vedic pra:t?r 'early', 'in the morning', 'the next morning', 'tomorrow'. Vedic dos.?: 'dark, evening' and 'in the evening': Modern Dardic languages do:s. (with retroflex s.) 'tomorrow', Nuristani languages e.g. Kati du:s, 'tomorrow' (M. Emeneau, in Ancient Indo-European Dialects, 1966, 138, or R. L. Turner, A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages, 1966, both after G. Morgenstierne); similarly, Old Iranian daosha(s)-tara- 'Western' (implying a meaning 'evening' from the basic word): Middle and Modern Persian do:sh 'the last night, the evening before', Ossetic: Iron dyson / Digor ?dos? 'yesterday night, yesterday evening' (M. Mayrhofer, Altindoarisches Etymologisches W?rterbuch, I, 1992, 750). SLAVONIC 1. I received responses to by question on Russian /vchera/ and /vecher/ from Henning Andersen, Daniel Collins, Konstantin Krasukhin, Johanna Nichols and Miguel Carrasquer Vidal. I have attempted to pull complementary portions out of their responses, which all draw attention to the same etymology. Johanna Nichols wrote: Russian /vecher/ 'evening' and /vchera/ 'yesterday' are related, but not inflectionally. That is, /vchera/ isn't any case form of /vecher/, either synchronically (in Russian or any other Slavic language) or for late Proto-Slavic. The two roots are cognate, but the vowel alternation is one of (derivational) ablaut. OCS has /v'chera/ and /vecher"/ (' = front jer, " = back jer; these are reflexes of short *i and *u respectively). Henning Andersen wrote: Common Slavic vIchera is related to CS vecherU as follows: (i) minor sound change of e to front jer (since lost) conditioned by the following palatal consonant. Kortlandt has argued that this is a regular sound change, there are a good handful of examples. (ii) More importantly, the form is the old instrumental, PIE *-o-H(1), which yields the regular Li. -uo (final -u (cf. vilku\, but ger-u/o-j-u. In Common Slavic the o-stem instr. is renewed on the pattern of u-stems and i-stems (South Slavic -omI//emI) or replaced by the u-stem ending (West and East Slavic -UmI//-ImI). Since Slavic merges PIE long *a and *o, the renewal may have been motivated by this phonetic change. I believe you can find CS vIchera thus accounted for in Vaillant's Grammaire com. des langues slaves (Section on instr. of ostems, possibly chapter on adverbs). Stang argues some place that the stress of the adverb Russ. krugo/m (contrast regular instr. kru/gom) reflects the accent of the earlier instr. in CS -a!, which bore the accent in all masc. and neut. nouns that did not have an accented long (acute) stem vowel. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: Russ. , Pol. etc. are from C.S. *, according to Vasmer an archaic instrumental (in accented *-?:) of * (> Russ. , Pol. etc.), with reduction of to as is common in Slavic (a vowel reduction postdating the PIE Nullstufe). Daniel Collins wrote: Russian /vchera/ (which has cognates in all the Slavic languages) is thought by some etymologists to be an archaic o-stem instrumental singular ending *o: , which was adverbialized prior to the addition of the morpheme *-mi reflected in the attested o-stem instrumental case ending (Vasmer, Machek). Baltic continues to reflect this archaic form of instrumental; Lithuanian o-stem -u is a reflex of *o: under acute accent (Endzelins). The vocalism in the first syllable (*vikero:) does not have a regular ablaut relation to the other case forms (nominative singular *vekeros etc.) and seems to reflect allegro reduction. An alternative explanation is that vchera is a genitive of time; however, that leaves the accent unexplained. 2. Several people also pointed out that the Slavonic terms for 'tomorrow' are derived from 'morning'. Daniel Collins wrote: Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic zautra = za 'during' + utra genitive singular 'morning'. Charles Gribble wrote: 'Tomorrow' is related to 'morning' also in Slavic: Russ. {zavtra} is *za utra, Serbo-Croatian {sutra} is *s utra, Bulgarian {utre} is from *utro, etc. Marian Sloboda wrote: Slovak has /zajtra/ and for "morning" there is an etymologically different stem (the word is /rano/ connected with "early"). Czech also /zi:tra/--/rano/, but has also a word /jitro/ (which is not used much, but can be seen in older texts (from 19th, first half of the 20th century). Matejka Grgic wrote: Slovene /vc^eraj/ = yesterday and /vec^er/ = evening, /jutri/ tomorrow and /jutro/ morning. BALTIC Jurgis Pakerys wrote: Lithuanian: 1) vakar "yesterday", cf. vakaras "evening" 2) rytoj "tomorrow", cf. rytas "morning" Latvian: 1) vakar "yesterday", cf. vakars "evening" 2) rit "tomorrow", cf. rits "morning" (long /i/ in both words) Johanna Nichols wrote: Lithuanian /vakar/ 'yesterday' and /vakaras/ 'evening' have the same vowel grade and different morphology for the adverb (no ending). ... judging from the facts here there was a single Balto-Slavic root from which adverb and noun were both derived. CELTIC Cecil Ward wrote: The modern Celtic words for "tomorrow" all do seem to come from a root meaning "morning". Possibly "in (the) morning". As for "yesterday", the modern words all come for the old IE root ghdhyes- but have been influenced by the word for "today". They have all become combined with the definite article. Larry Trask wrote: Welsh 'tomorrow' is etymologically a prepositional phrase meaning 'in the morning', from 'morning', with mutation. Irish 'tomorrow' has a similar origin. GREEK Andrew Wilcox wrote: As for Mod. Greek, the Tegolpoulos-Fytrakis dictionary (standard serious "family dictionary") gives etymology of 'avrio (=tomorrow) as Ancient Grk. 'avos (=morning). No etymology for chthes (=yesterday) is given except to note that it is unchanged since Anc. Greek. Konstantin Krasukhin wrote: Greek AURION "tomorrow" can be connected with Proto-Indo-European *AUS-R; cf. Greek EOS < *AUSOS, Latin AURORA < *AUSOSA etc. ROMANCE This is my summary of responses from Michele Goyens, Laurent Sagart, Larry Trask, Marc Picard and Anthony M. Lewis. Late or low Latin /de mane/ 'starting from the morning', lit. 'from morning' is the source of French /demain/, Provencal /deman/, Italian /domani/. Latin /maane/ > Romanian /miine/. Spanish /ma?ana/ and Portuguese /manha/ each mean both 'morning' and 'tomorrow'. On the other hand, French /hier/ "yesterday" (and its cognates in other Romance languages) derives from the Latin adverb /heri/ "yesterday", from IE *ghes-, and thus cognate with /yesterday/ and German /gestern/. FINNIC Johanna Laakso wrote: In the Finnic languages, the word for 'tomorrow' is obviously related with 'morning', although the relationship is not quite transparent for modern speakers. Finnish _huomenna_ is an essive form (old locative case, typically appearing in crystallized idioms like this) of _huomen_, which is by now obsolete; the word _huomen_ 'morning' only appears in the greeting _hyv?? huomenta_ 'good morning!' and in derivatives like _huominen_ 'of tomorrow' (adj.), while the normal word for 'morning' is _aamu_. In other Finnic languages, other derivatives of the same stem may appear, as in Estonian, where _homme_ 'tomorrow' is an opaque form (perhaps, originally illative?) of the same stem, while another derivative, _hommik_ (< Proto-Finnic *hoomenikko), is used for 'morning'. However, the word for 'yesterday', Fi. _eilen_ ~ Est. _eile_ (< Proto-Finnic ?*eklen) is a Proto-Finnic innovation of an obscure origin; the attempts by some etymologists to connect it with the word for 'former, situated before' are not very convincing. There is a word for 'evening' (Proto-Finnic *ekta-kV-), which is phonologically not very far away, but the relationship between these two words, however, remains obscure. AUSTRALIAN Nick Reid wrote: In Ngan'gityemerri (non-Pama-Nyungan, NT, Australia) /kultyi/ 'evening' and /kultyinimbi/ 'yesterday', where -nimbi is a nominal case suffix marking 'direction from' and 'cause'. The lexeme for 'tomorrow' is also a root plus agentive/instrumental suffix /ngunyine-ninggi/ though in this case the root is obscure (to me anyway). Peter Austin has written an article which shows the correspondence between day terms and day period terms (tomorrow=morning, yesterday=evening) in Australian Aboriginal languages. Harold Koch provided evidence form his database of the 'evening'/'yesterday' and 'morning'/'tomorrow' connections in Arandic languages and of the 'evening'/'yesterday' connection in Western Desert languages. CHINESE Larent Sagart wrote: Then there is Classical Chinese xi1 'evening; last night', discussed in my book of 1999 "The roots of Old Chinese" (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), on p. 160. I assumed the development 'evening' > 'yesterday evening' for this word because it appears to contain a root meaning 'night'. In the same book, I also supposed that the classical and modern Chinese word for "yesterday" (Mandarin zuo2) also contains the root for 'night' and also came to mean 'yesterday' out of a basic meaning 'evening', through 'yesterday evening' in both cases. The Mandarin word for 'to-morrow' ming2 tian1, and its classical Chinese precursor ming2 ri4 also have a good chance of being from an original meaning 'morning, dawn', since ming2 means 'bright' ri4 means 'sun, day', and tian1 means 'sky, day'. I do not know of any published references on this, though. SIOUAN Bob Rankin wrote: In the Siouan language, Kansa, (and other, related languages) 'tomorrow' is /gasi~/. 'Tomorrow' in the sense of 'on tomorrow' or 'during tomorrow' is /gasi~da~/. 'Morning' is /gasi~xci/, literally 'real morning', where /-xci/ is a common intensifier, often translated 'real' or 'very'. In Lakota (Teton Dakota) 'evening' has the root /xta/ and 'yesterday' is /xtaleha~/. The second part, /-leha~/ is a locative deictic 'now, thus far, at this place'. /hi~ha~na/ 'tomorrow' is paralleled by /hi~ha~na-xci/ 'forenoon', literally 'real morning' with the /xci/ intensifier noted in Kansa, above. In my transcription /~/ nasalizes the preceding vowel and /c/ is a voiceless, unaspirated palato-alveolar affricate = c-hachek; /j/ is the voiced counterpart of /c/ = j-hachek. TURKIC Alik Guilmy wrote: for example, in Tatar language (Turkic group): 'kich' (evening) - 'kiche' (yesterday) 'irte' (morning) - 'irtege' (tomorrow) Larry Trask wrote: Turkic languages also show some of this, though I am no Turkicist, and I can't readily interpret the data I have here: Kurtulus Oztopcu et al. (1996), Dictionary of the Turkic Languages, London: Routledge. I see here that words for 'tomorrow' and 'morning' are typically closely related. Some examples: 'morning' 'tomorrow' Kazakh tangyerteng yerteng Kyrgyz tang erteng erteng Tatar irt? irt?g? Turkmen ertir ertir Uyghur ?tig?n ?t? Turkish has none of this, but Turkish 'morning' is the same word as Azerbaijani 'tomorrow'. However, this item, with its final /h/, cannot be native Turkic, and must be borrowed, probably from Persian. We also have links with 'evening' and 'yesterday': 'evening' 'yesterday' Kazakh kesh keshe Kyrgyz kech kechee Tatar kich kich? The words for 'yesterday' appear to be case-suffixed forms of the word for 'evening'. Again, Turkish shows none of this. BASQUE Larry Trask wrote: I'm afraid Basque 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' are morphologically unanalyzable and etymologically opaque: they cannot be related to 'evening' or to 'morning' or indeed to anything else at all. BANTU Raphael Salkie wrote: In Shona (Bantu, the majority language of Zimbabwe) the word for TOMORROW is "mangwana", and the word for MORNING is "mangwanani". I've always assumed that the similarity with Spanish is just a coincidence... JAPANESE Bart Mathias and Shigeru Tsuchida note the following words: /asa/ 'morning', /asita/ 'tomorrow' ('morning' in earlier Japanese), /asu/ 'tomorrow' (a little bookish), /asatte/ 'the day after tomorrow'. Shigeru Tsuchida wrote further: ONO Susumu, a specialist in Japanese, suggests that the root as-, which appears common in the above three words, might have had a meaning of `dawn' (under the item asu in his dictionary ``Kogo-Jiten'' [Old (Japanese) Dictionary] (Tokyo: Iwanami Publishing Co. 1974 first ed.)(Old Japanese around 8 to 9 centuries.) According to the above dictionary, there were two series of words indicating time in Old Japanese: daytime-oriented, and nighttime- oriented. (In the following, F indicates a voiceless bilabial fricative, which has become h in initial position and has been lost in medial position in Modern Japanese.) Day-centric: asa --> Firu --> yuFu morning daytime evening Night-centric: yuFumbe --> yoFi --> yonaka --> akatuki --> asita evening night midnight dawn morning Asa (Dc) and asita (Nc) both meant substantially the same `morning', but asita (Nc) meant, by implication, the morning after having passed a night when something happened, and thus in the middle age the emphasis began to shift to `tomorrow morning', and finally `tomorrow' in modern Japanese. (Likewise, yuFumbe (Nc) `evening' now means `last night' in modern Japanese.) One reason why there are more words in the night-centric series may be in the fact that in those days we had a matrilocal society in Japan, a man visiting a girl at night to copulate. Thus yoFi was the time when it became dark and a man visited a girl; yonaka was the time when the man stayed with his girl-friend; akatuki was the time when it was still dark, but the man had to leave for his house. SEMITIC Robert Ratcliffe wrote: In Classical Arabic the words for 'yesterday' ('amsu) and 'tomorrow' (ghadan) have related words meaning 'evening' ('umsiiya(t)) and 'morning' (ghadaa(t)) respectively. I am not sure how these forms are related derivationally or historically. 'Yesterday' and 'tomorrow' are adverbial formations, which I suppose are based on noun forms no longer in use, and the noun forms for evening and morning are apparently secondary nominal formations which (I suppose) have replaced the earlier words under the pressure of ambiguity. (By the way these are not the normal (= taught in the textbook) words for evening and morning which are masaa' and SabaaH.) In modern spoken Arabic, these forms are largely replaced by words originally meaning 'early' (tomorrow) (Egyptian bukra), and 'past' (yesterday) (Egyptian imbaariH). Ivan A Derzhanski also noted that the nouns seem to be derived from the adverbs in Arabic, not vice versa. Joost Kremers wrote: .... the word for "tomorrow" in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) is "bukra", which in Classical Arabic (from which ECA derives) means "early morning". R?my Viredaz wrote: Kurdish s at be (with schwa) 'tomorrow', from Arabic s.aba:h. 'morning' (with emphatic s. and pharyngeal h.), Kurdish s at ba 'morning' (H. Adjarian, M?moires de la Soci?t? de Linguistique de Paris, 16, 1910-11, 365). -- _____________________________________ Dr Malcolm D. Ross Senior Fellow Department of Linguistics Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies Australian National University CANBERRA ACT 0200 From lillian.balsvik at iba-stud.uio.no Wed Jul 11 14:36:25 2001 From: lillian.balsvik at iba-stud.uio.no (Lillian Balsvik) Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 10:36:25 EDT Subject: open syllable lengthening Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In "The Development of Qunantity as Evidence of Western European Linguistic Interdependence", Alf Sommerfelt writes on open syllable lengthening (OSL): "This change coincided with a change in poetry and the introduction of the dance song, the ballad" (p. 82 in _Diachronic and Synchronic Aspects of Language, Selected Articles_ 1962). He writes this right after discussing OSL in Norwegian, but I'm not sure whether he means that these two changes coincided in all languages where OSL applied or only in Norwegian. Sommerfelt does not say that one of these changes is caused by the other. I am left wondering, however, if he had some private theory that these two changes were interrelated. I am rather puzzled by this, and being fully aware that it is a bit too late to ask Sommerfelt himself, I pass this on to members of HISTLING. Lillian Balsvik From paul at benjamins.com Thu Jul 12 18:37:53 2001 From: paul at benjamins.com (Paul Peranteau) Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 14:37:53 EDT Subject: New Books: Robinson; Graffi Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- John Benjamins Publishing has brought out two new books related to the study of Historical Linguistics: Whose German? The ach/ich alternation and related phenomena in 'standard' and 'colloquial'. Orrin W. ROBINSON (Stanford University) Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 208 US & Canada: 1 58811 007 9 / USD 64.00 (Hardcover) Rest of world: 90 272 3715 8 / NLG 140.00 (Hardcover) The author addresses a number of issues in German and general phonology, using a specific problem in German phonology (the ach/ich alternation) as a springboard. These issues include especially the naturalness, or lack thereof, of the prescriptive standard in German, and the importance of colloquial pronunciations, as well as historical and dialect evidence, for phonological analyses of the "standard" language. Other important topics include the phonetic and phonological status of German /r/, the phonetic and phonological representation of palatals, the status of loanwords in phonological description, and, especially as regards the latter, the usefulness of Optimality Theory in capturing phonological facts. The book addresses itself to scholars from the fields of German and Germanic linguistics, as well as those concerned more generally with theoretical phonology (whether Lexical or Optimal). It may even appeal to the ortho?pists and lexicographers of modern German. * * * * * * * * 200 Years of Syntax. A critical survey. Georgio GRAFFI (University of Verona) Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 98 US & Canada: 1 58811 052 4 / USD 114.00 (Hardcover) Rest of world: 90 272 4587 8 / NLG 250.00 (Hardcover) This book argues convincingly against the widespread opinion that very few syntactic studies were carried out before the 1950s. Relying on the detailed analysis of a large amount of original sources, it shows that syntactic matters were in fact carefully investigated throughout both the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Moreover, it illustrates how the enormous development of syntactic research in the last fifty years has already condemned even several recent ideas and analyses to oblivion, and deeply influenced current research programs. The wealth of research undertaken over the last two centuries is presented here in a systematic way, taking as its starting point the relationship of syntax with psychology throughout this period. The critical ideas expressed in the text are based on a detailed illustration of the different syntactic models and analyses rather than on the polemics between the different schools. John Benjamins Publishing Co. Offices: Philadelphia Amsterdam: Websites: http://www.benjamins.com http://www.benjamins.nl E-mail: service at benjamins.com customer.services at benjamins.nl Phone: +215 836-1200 +31 20 6304747 Fax: +215 836-1204 +31 20 6739773 From j.t.faarlund at inl.uio.no Thu Jul 19 16:49:12 2001 From: j.t.faarlund at inl.uio.no (Jan Terje Faarlund) Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 12:49:12 EDT Subject: No subject Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Please post the following bookinformation: Grammatical Relations in Change Edited by Jan Terje Faarlund University of Oslo The eleven selected contributions making up this volume deal with grammatical relations, their coding and behavioral properties,and the change that these properties have undergone in different languages.The focus of this collection is on the changing properties of subjects and objects, although the scope of the volume goes beyond the central problems pertaining to case marking and word order.The diachrony of syntactic and morphosyntactic phenomena are approached from different theoretical perspectives, generative grammar, valency grammar, and functionalism. The languages dealt with include Old English, Mainland Scandinavian, Icelandic, German and other Germanic languages, Latin, French and other Romance languages, Northeast Caucasian, Eskimo, and Popolocan. This book provides an opportunity to compare different theoretical approaches to similar phenomena in different languages and language families. Contents Werner Abraham: How far does semantic bleaching go: About grammaticalization that does not terminate in functional categories John Ole Askedal: ?Oblique subjects?, structural and lexical case marking: Some thoughts on case assignment in North Germanic and German Jan Terje Faarlund: The notion of oblique subject and its status in the history of Icelandic Elly van Gelderen: Towards personal subjects in English: Variation in feature interpretability Alice C.Harris: Focus and universal principles governing simplification of cleft structures Lars Heltoft: Recasting Danish subjects: Case system,word order and subject development Alana Johns: Ergative to accusative: Comparing evidence from Inuktitut D.Gary Miller: Subject and object in Old English and Latin copular deontics Muriel Norde: The loss of lexical case in Swedish Lene Sch?sler: The coding of the subject object distinction from Latin to Modern French Annette Veerman-Leichsenring: Changes in Popolocan word order and clause structure Studies in Language Companion Series,56 2001.Hb viii,322 pp.+index 90 272 3058 7 NLG 220.00 1 58811 034 6 USD 100.00 ******************************************** Professor Jan Terje Faarlund Universitetet i Oslo Institutt for nordistikk og litteraturvitskap Postboks 1013 Blindern N-0315 Oslo (Norway) Tel. 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