LL-L: "Grammar" LOWLANDS-L, 24.JAN.2001 (07) [D/E]
Lowlands-L
sassisch at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 25 00:48:07 UTC 2001
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L O W L A N D S - L * 24.JAN.2001 (07) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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A=Afrikaans, Ap=Appalachean, D=Dutch, E=English, F=Frisian, L=Limburgish
LS=Low Saxon (Low German), S=Scots, Sh=Shetlandic, Z=Zeelandic (Zeeuws)
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From: Reuben Epp [repp at silk.net]
Subject: LL-L: "Grammar" LOWLANDS-L, 24.JAN.2001 (03) [E]
> From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
> Subject: Grammar
>
> I don't recall anybody mentioning adjectives in relation to the "dill"
> problem.
>
> John Feather johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk
I understand the following sayings to be approximately synonymous:
1. Ain't that just peachy.
2. Ain't that just dandy.
3. Ain't that just dilly.
Reuben Epp
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From: Colin Wilson [lcwilson at starmail.com]
Subject: LL-L: "Grammar" LOWLANDS-L, 24.JAN.2001 (03) [E]
At 08:50 24/01/01 -0800, john feather wrote:
>In BE, I think, "pickle" as a delectable is normally a
>mixture of fruits, vegetables or both. Is there are definable difference
>between "pickle" and "chutney"?
There's a functional difference, as far as I know.
Chutney (Hindustani, _chatni_) is meant as a *condiment* to be served
with other foods, and has become known in Britain through cultural contacts
with the Indian sub-continent in the last two hundred years or so. It
isn't necessarily meant to be kept for any length of time.
A pickle, on the other hand, is something that's been prepared in
salt and/or vinegar and/or spices with the express aim of *preserving*
it, and a pickled food (e.g fish) can be the main element in a meal.
Pickles have been made in Britain and other parts of Europe for
many centuries.
Colin Wilson.
*********************************************************************
Colin Wilson the graip wis tint, the besom wis duin
the barra wadna row its lane
writin fae Aiberdein, an sicna soss it nivver wis seen
the ile capital o Europe lik the muckin o Geordie's byre
*********************************************************************
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From: Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com]
Subject: "Grammar"
John Feather quoted and wrote:
> "First sound change grinds off the morphology and thus
> forces the grammar to respond by substituting word order rules
> in order to counter the threat of ambiguity. Next sound change
> degrades the positionally fixed independent function words of
> the language into a new morphology, which makes the word
> order rules redundant and leads to their loss, And so on
> indefinitely."
>
> Unfortunately there is no indication of the timescale of
> this cyclic process and only a couple of examples based on
>Latin are cited.
The speed varies greatly: Icelandic and Lithuanian are two that
still have much of the old morphology; English and Swedish etc.
scrapped much of theirs very quickly during language contact in
the Middle Ages. Tocharian (an Indo-European written language
in what is now Western China 500-700 AD) got rid of its
inherited nominal endings and developed another new set derived
from postpositions by 500 AD. Creoles in their creation strip
off morphology in a single generation.
And of course I'm just coming up with examples from
Indo-European languages, which I'm familiar with; there are
another 10,000 known languaes (altho few have the millenia-long
documented history that makes Indo-European a favorite of
historical linguistics).
Stefan
Ian wrote:
> I should clarify that I was saying that there is a
> *morphological* tendency towards *regularization* (not always
> quite the same as 'simplification'), which results in fewer
> irregular verbs and the loss of case distinction. Of course,
> syntactically this often means word order becomes more rigid.
To which let me add the tendency towards greater irregularity.
Yes, English is slowly reducing its number of the old strong
verbs (sing sang sung, drink drank drunk etc.); of the verbs
that were irregular in Proto-Indo-European, English retains only
"to be" and do/did/done. But the new and highly regular system
had irregularities from the start (think/thought etc.), and
phonological change is deregularizing the regular verbs:
keep/kept, bend/bent, set/set, hear [hir]/heard [hrd] (is this
irregular in Scots?). Some varieties of English tend to drop
final -t and -d: that phonological erosion will force new
changes in the grammar.
Compare the forces of phonological erosion and of regularization
to geology: erosion wears down old mountains; tectonic and
volcanic processes thrust different ones up, both going on, at
varying rates, all the time. Complexity tends to get shifted
around.
You alluded to deregularization; I just wanted to make this
second competing force explicit.
Ian also wrote:
> 'Double' forms such as 'upon' and 'into' are gradually being
> lost, but that doesn't mean a reduction in the number of core
> prepositions.
And the extended prepositions you mention keep arising: "on"/"up
on top of", "behind"/"in back of", etc., plus non-compounds like
"concerning", "regarding", etc. The play of erosion and
retinkering never stops, does it.
Stefan
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From: Roger Thijs [roger.thijs at euro-support.be]
Subject: "Grammar"
> From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
> Subject: Grammar
>
> >
> Likewise, Dutch has _zout_ 'salt' > _zout_ 'salty' (*_sout_ > *_sout_
in
> Afrikaans?), and Westerlauwer ("West") Frisian has _sâlt_ 'salt' >
_sâlt_
> 'salty', apparently as the only options for 'salty'.
Voor mij is:
de soep al dan niet te fel _gezouten_
terwijl
de zee _zilt_ (of _ziltig_) is.
Groetjes,
Roger
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From: Felix Hülsey [huelseyf at Smail.Uni-Koeln.de]
Subject: LL-L: "Grammar" LOWLANDS-L, 21.JAN.2001 (01) [E/German]
Hello all,
Niels Winther [niels.winther at dfds.dk] wrote:
>(...) The flexibility and great advantage
>of the (A his B) strategy is that it can be extended to any needed
>nesting level. In W.Jutish (A his B her C their D its E) is perfectly
>possible. Try *(A's B's C's D's E)! especially if some of the nouns
>have a final 's'. The fact that all words in (A's B) constructions
>carry stress also adds to the awkward pronunciation.
(...)
>In summary: (A his B) drills down like (A's B) and have the extended
>nesting capabilities of (B of A).
>
>Is the multiple nesting capability exploited where the (A his B)
>construction is known in other Germanic languages?
>Do you know of any interchanging use of (A his B) (B of A)?
Yes, Afrikaans has both possibilities: Both _die fiets van my broer_ and
_my broer se fiets_ are perfectly acceptable. The se-construction is of
course derived from Dutch _m'n broer z'n fiets_ and was generalized: where
Dutch has _m'n zuster haar/d'r fiets_, in Afrikaans it is _my sussie _se_
fiets_.
Two factors have probably contributed to this generalization:
1) in Dutch, "haar/d'r" is used for feminine only whereas "z'n" is male and
neutral, so "z'n" -> "se" has the advantage of numbers.
2) in Afrikaans, grammatical gender gradually disappeared (except for the
pronouns denoting living creatures).
Nesting is possible in Afrikaans:
_My oom se pa se huis_ sounds perfect to me, but I wouldn't go too far.
Perhaps a native speaker could tell us where to draw the line here. E.g.,
what about _my oom se pa se huis se dak is stukkend_? Doesn't seem too awful.
An advantage of the se-construction is the fact that it can easily be
affixed to quite long phrases, even whole clauses, like in:
_Die man wat daar by die straathoek staan en wag se vriendin sal
waarskynlik nie meer kom nie_
Of course,
_Die vriendin van die man wat daar by die straathoek staan en wag, sal
waarskynlik nie meer kom nie_
is correct too, but sounds a bit clumsy to me, probably because of the
distance between the subject (_die vriendin_) and the corresponding verb
clause. The word order in the se-example is more natural/logical.
When writing those examples down, I wondered if there might be a subtle
difference in meaning between both constructions; perhaps an
alienable-inalienable thing?
Let's ask the native speakers again: Which one, if any, of the following
examples do you prefer and why?
1)_my pa se trein was laat_
or
_die trein van my pa was laat_
-> where the train is not really owned by my pa?
2)_die buurvrou se kinders is stout_
or
_die kinders van die buurvrou is stout_
-> different "possessive" relationship than in 3):
3)_die bure se motor is stukkend_
or
_die motor van die bure is stukkend_
I don't think I've ever read anything about this problem, so I'm looking
forward to your answers!
Greetings from Cologne,
Felix Hülsey
huelseyf at smail.uni-koeln.de
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