This 35-minute video is a real treat:
What is the degree of mutual intelligibility between the North African dialects of Arabic, from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, and the Maltese language […] In this video, we’ll take a look at how well Libyans, Tunisians, Algerians, and Moroccans can understand Maltese with Sean (Maltese speaker) reading a couple of short paragraphs and proverbs to Lameese, Donia, Yasser, and Jihane, who represent Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, respectively.
It’s hosted by Bahador Alast, who apparently has a whole series of such videos (e.g., Yemenite vs Samaritan vs Modern Hebrew). I know enough basic Arabic vocabulary that I was able to follow what was going on, and I expect it to be of considerable interest to drasvi (if he hasn’t seen it already).
Also, Jongseong Park sent me his new video (19:00) about the Tham Lanna script of northern Thailand:
The terminology is quite complicated as the writing system that developed in the Lanna kingdom spread to surrounding areas and was adopted by many Tai groups such as Tai Lü and Khün. Unicode groups them all together as Tai Tham, and I used this name throughout the video, though I did use Tham Lanna in the title. It is most commonly called the Lanna script from what I’ve seen.
I went to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand last month and turned my trip into a bit of a treasure hunt to find as many examples of this script as I could. I didn’t do any prior research so I didn’t know how common it would be, and was pleasantly surprised to see lots of examples throughout the city. I was vaguely hoping to find examples of palm leaf manuscripts produced by Buddhist monks because that was what I associated with this script, but hadn’t expected to see it on signs.
Enjoy!
Once I tried playing a speech in Maltese to a cousin who had lived in Italy for a while.
He listened for a while, laughed, and said “That’s how Algerians in Italy talk!”
(Exaggeration, obviously…)
Thanks for sharing the Tham Lanna video!
A former colleague of mine is from Algeria and also is fluent in Italian having worked previously in Italy. She claimed to have no problem understanding Maltese if I recall correctly.
Just in case anyone didn’t notice, Maltese / Arabic mutual intelligibility is also being discussed right now over at Language Log, including a citation to bulbul’s study from a few years ago.
Interesting synchronicity, what with me up to my neck in Maltese data in preparation for the next AIDA.
I have seen many videos like this which typically contradict my findings (thanks to MMcM for the plug) and anecdotal evidence, such as that of Jongseong’s colleague. For me, it just goes to show that the non-verbal aspects of communication do a lot of the heavy lifting.
Bahador Alast’s channel is definitely full of really interesting videos that compare languages that share similarities through common descent, borrowings, or both.
But it’s also worth reminding ourselves that the examples are chosen to emphasize these resemblances. One of their videos purport to show similarities between Korean and Tamil, using cherry-picked examples of coincidentally similar-sounding vocabulary to insinuate a relationship between the two languages that no serious linguist today would argue in favour of.
Even if not cherrypicked, this is a different sort of test than you would have if the various Maghrebi-dialect speakers were listening to a recording of a conversation between two Maltese-speakers who were not deliberately trying to avoid being understood by outsiders but who were also not doing any of the comprehension-promoting things (slower tempo, clearer enunciation and less elision …) that you tend to do when you are self-consciously aware that you’re speaking to/for an outsider audience.
Yeah, he was obviously stacking the deck and I didn’t take it as a serious/scientific exploration of the intelligibility issue, but I still enjoyed the heck out of it.
the non-verbal aspects of communication do a lot of the heavy lifting: Stan Carey has some stories of “conversations” without mutually intelligible language, relying on gesture and “a shared context, goal, or object of attention”.
@LH, yes, it is, thanks!
One confounding factor is of course presence of foreign vocabulary in Maltese.
Which comparison is more informative and fair:
– a Maghrebi Arabic speaker vs. core Maltese (that is a recording with mostly Semitic words)
– a Maghrebi Arabic speaker who has grown up with Rai Uno and speaks fluent English vs. Maltese
– a Maghrebi Arabic speaker who does not know Romance vs. Maltese?
Not to meantion that each has a well-trained ear for dialects and langauges because of her experience with the literary language and other dialects (meanwhile people vary a lot in their performance with other dialects – I don’t know if this is due to interpersonal differences or to differences in exposure).
I have a Maltese colleague who works in a department with several North African students (when we talked about it these were mainly Libyan, but that was before present chaos in Libya). She said she could tell what the students were talking about (sometimes derogatory comments about her) but she couldn’t follow their conversations in any detail. I imagine the same applies in the reverse direction. (Having said that, it doesn’t work all the time: Portuguese speakers can make a lot of sense of Spanish, but Spanish speakers can’t make much sense of European Portuguese. I gather it’s similar with Danish and Swedish).
Agolle Kusaal speakers find it easier to understand the Toende dialect than vice versa (despite Toende speakers being fewer, and their dialect not being felt to be particularly prestigious by Agolle speakers.)
It may be to do with the fact that the Toende dialect is more conservative phonologically (on balance), which would parallel the Portuguese/Spanish asymmetry (and Danish/Swedish too, if Danes find it easier to understand Swedish than vice versa.)
If this carried over into Maltese vs Tunisian Arabic, you might expect Maltese to understand Tunisians better than the reverse, I imagine. Mind you, I don’t know how far Tunisian Arabic has gone its own idiosyncratic way: maybe even farther than Maltese in some respects.
One thing I didn’t really have time to get into in the video about Tham Lanna was to what extent Northern Thai (Lanna) was mutually intelligible with Central Thai.
As I said in the video, I’ve seen the relationship compared to that between Portuguese and Spanish. But the exclusive use of Central Thai in education means that educated Northern Thai speakers will have no problem understanding Central Thai, and Northern Thai itself seems to be becoming more influenced by Central Thai.
I don’t speak either language so I can’t tell, though in Chiang Mai I did often hear women use Northern Thai chao as the polite particle instead of Central Thai kha among themselves (though not when greeting foreigners). So if they weren’t speaking full-fledged Northern Thai, there was at the very least some code mixing going on.
Comparing the Tham Lanna and Thai scripts also allowed me to see some of the systematic correspondences between the sounds of Northern Thai and Central Thai, including how the original voiced stops and affricates became voiceless unaspirated in the former but voiceless aspirated in the latter. These also affected their respective tone systems. But I didn’t have time to get into all this in the video.
Bahador Alast from 2022.
Danish and Swedish: Yes, it’s the Danes who have mangled all the consonants so the Swedes don’t have a chance. That said, Swedes are perfectly able to understand Danish if there is mutual interest and the Danish side is a bit accommodating. Tax office staff, not so much.
(The least obvious sticking point is that Danish hvis = ‘if’ is a grammaticalized pronoun(!) from Low German. Swedish uses om which comes from a preposition = ‘about,’ G um; Danish uses that as a complementizer and adverb as well, but not in top-level conditionals).
TIL that the Swedish om is a conflation of the preposition and an alteration of ON ef, which Old Danish also had as æf/æm/om; my sources don’t say if the latter was what became the complementizer in Modern Danish, as in jeg ved ikke om han kommer. AFAICT, the merger is complete in Mainland North Germanic, but Trond may be able to dig up a dialect where it isn’t.
Danish hvis = ‘if’ is a grammaticalized pronoun(!) from Low German.
You’re such a tease! Wiktionary: “From Middle Low German wes, genitive to wê (‘who’), wat (‘what’), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷís.” I wonder how you get from ‘whose’ to ‘if’?
As soon as I saw the title of Hat’s post, which popped up in the Recent comments in the sidebar, I was sure it was about Bahador Alast, and there it was. I stumbled again across that channel the other day searching for content on some minor Iranian languages. This man’s singleminded focus on getting people together for mutual intelligibility trials is big in YouTube search results now, but I can’t help but see it as junk content. For the most part, people don’t understand each other, videos are light on facts compared to a decent book, and the exercise is sometimes awkward for the people involved except Bahador Alast who seems to be having an unreasonably good time.
I can’t help but see it as junk content.
Just because you don’t care for it doesn’t make it “junk content.” Many of us enjoy it; we might even be having (god forbid) an unreasonably good time.
To refer to something as “junk content” doesn’t mean that people don’t like it, just as referring to “junk food” doesn’t mean the average person doesn’t think it is tasty. And the very problem with a lot of such YouTube language content is that its popularity to casual audiences leads to the algorithm prioritizing it above information-dense content on the languages in question, sometimes making the latter hard to find even with elaborately crafted search terms.
@hat, I thought that would get a rise. Look here.
In case of insufficient Danish, the short of it is that “he took of what he could” ceased to be distinguished from “he took if he could”. (MLG wes is the genetive of wat, but it seems to have lost most of its possessive force once loaned into East Norse).
The inherited homonym hvis is still the possessive to hvem* (and more rarely to other relatives because inanimate, but you can still say bilen hvis lygter ikke virker; in fact that’s the only possessive available).
TIL that 500 years ago the copycat Swedes would use ves (as it’s now spelled, hwes is the attested form) the same way as in Danish. That’s dead as a doornail now.
__________
(*) By which I mean that in Jeg ved ikke hvis det er you are talking about a person, not a car. Children start out with the logicaller hvems.
Thanks!
Apparently “if” itself may (or may not) ultimately derive from a relative pronoun:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/jabai
Latin si too (from a demonstrative):
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/si#Latin
No idea about Welsh o(s), pe.
The proto-Western-Oti-Volta construction seems to have been just to form the protasis of a conditional by nominalising a clause (which is done by placing the particle *nɪ after the subject), in other words, by simply saying “him coming back” for “if he comes back.”
Subsequently, Kusaal, Mampruli and Dagbani developed a specific protasis-clause type by replacing the post-subject nominaliser particle with a particle probably cognate with the Kusaal noun ya’a “opportunity, chance opening”, whereas Mooré and Farefare instead replaced the nominaliser particle with particles that look cognate to Kusaal saŋa “time”, which in turn seems ultimately to derive from the Arabic ساعة.
Interesting how loanwords can even end up as basic grammatical function-words/particles. (Welsh paid “don’t …” is probably a Latin loanword, and eisiau “want” certainly is.)
which in turn seems ultimately to derive from the Arabic ساعة.
As does the name Saatchi.
Interesting how loanwords can even end up as basic grammatical function-words/particles.
They are even loaned directly, like Arabic wa “and” being loaned into Turkic and Iranian languages.
The ordinary Kusaal words for “but”, “until”, “except”, “even”, “very” are all loanwords, and “because” is a calque. But then, English “because”, “except” and “very” also involve loanwords … and at least Kusaal hasn’t borrowed any personal pronouns. Unlike some languages one might name …
The interesting thing with the Kusaal loans is that the language has perfectly good ways of expressing these meanings with homegrown materials too: none of the loans had to be borrowed to fill a gap.
There are a number of pan-regional words around too, like tɔ “OK” and nfa “bravo!” Come to think of it, their European equivalents are very easily borrowed too.
Nfa only seems to be actually parsable in Gulimancema (“I congratulate!”), which is odd, as Gulimancema doesn’t otherwise seem to be a major source of loanwords to its neighbours. It may be that the Gulimancema “congratulate” verb is actually a back-formation from the exclamation. “I ‘bravo’ you.”
The interesting thing with the Kusaal loans is that the language has perfectly good ways of expressing these meanings with homegrown materials too: none of the loans had to be borrowed to fill a gap.
Do you mean that they had conjunctions that were replaced by the loans or that they used different constructions and loaned the conjunction in order to imitate a construction from the source language? The latter would be like Turkic; the native construction is with coverbs / participles for clauses (having come he said = he came and said; eating he drank = he ate and drank) or with a comitative for noun phrases (Peter Paul-with came = Peter and Paul came). wa was loaned to imitate the Arabic / Persian constructions with “and”.
Do you mean that they had conjunctions that were replaced by the loans or that they used different constructions and loaned the conjunction in order to imitate a construction from the source language?
The latter. Formally, the borrowed conjunctions are treated as clause-initial adverbs; there are only three native clause-initial linking particles, ka “and, that”, ye “that” and bɛɛ “or.” Clause-linking particles otherwise follow the subject.
Taking “but” as an example, for “but he’s gone home” you can say
Amaa o kulya.
but he go.home
where amaa is a loan from Hausa (and ultimately Arabic), or
O lɛɛ kul.
he but go.home
You can even have both amaa and lɛɛ … and it’s also possible to add ka “and”:
Amaa ka o kul.
Ka o lɛɛ kul.
You’d expect this in the middle of a narrative, say (where it would actually mean “But he went home.”)
“Because” is bɔzugɔ, which is made from homegrown materials but “really” means “why?” (bɔ “what?” plus zug “head”, here used as a postposition “on [account of.]”)
So e.g.
Bɔzugɔ, o kulya, m pʋ nyɛ oo.
because he go.home I not see him.NEGATIVE
“Because he’s gone home, I can’t find him.”
But you can also nominalise “he’s gone home” by putting the particle n after the subject, and then add the postposition zug to make the adverbial phrase “on account of him having gone home”:
On kul la zug, m pʋ nyɛ oo.
he.NOMINALISER go.home the on I not see him.NEGATIVE
Both constructions are idiomatic and common. David Spratt’s introductory notes on Kusaal (from around 1975) tell learners not to use the bɔzugɔ construction because it’s not “proper Kusaal”, but nobody seems to have got round to telling the Kusaasi not to use it …
Kusaal saŋa “time”, which in turn seems ultimately to derive from the Arabic ساعة
Is the ŋ a reflex of the ʿayn ع and if so, is it known at what stage in the borrowing chain the change might have occurred? Or is the ŋ just a general hiatus breaker applied in Kusaal or at some other point in the borrowing chain?
(Naturally, I am interested because of the pronunciation of Hebrew ʿayin ע as [ŋ] by some Western European Jewish communities and [ɲ] by some Italian Jewish communities. For LH readers who don’t know what this means, the Stack Exchange thread here may provide an introduction.)
Is the ŋ a reflex of the ʿayn ع
/ŋ/ is not a general hiatus-breaker in Kusaal (though it is a general hiatus-breaker in the Gurma languages.) Though Kusaal /ŋ/ is written single, it’s actually always geminated between vowels, and always represents underlying *ng or *mg in native vocabulary.
The noun saŋa “time” is very irregular in Kusaal: it makes its plural as sansa, and its stem form is san-, as in sansi’a “a certain time.”
The plural sansa is not only odd because of the final -a (contrast a regular noun from this class: baŋ “fetter, ring”, plural baans /bã:s/) but because it is actually realised [sansa]: elsewhere, the cluster /ns/ only occurs word-internally in compounds (like sansi’a) or across the boundary between a prefix and the rest of a stem, as in sinsaa “a kind of tiny ant.” (Unfortunately, the standard orthography does not differentiate this from /s/ following a nasalised vowel.)
The weird morphology of saŋa screams “loanword”, and there is no plausible Oti-Volta etymology for the word.
Mampruli has saha “time”, which is rather easier to relate to e.g. Hausa sa’a “time, hour”, which is obviously from Arabic. I don’t really know where Kusaal got the final n of the stem san- from; perhaps it’s from the very common but apparently meaningless noun-deriving suffix *-m, or represents incorporation of the locative enclitic -n, giving a hypothetical *saan “at the time”, to which noun-class suffixes would have been added later.
Kusaal /h/ only occurs in loanwords; [h] is actually quite common, but as an allophone of /s/ rather than /ŋ/.
The “if” particle in Mooré is sã, always followed by n (written as a separate particle), and in Farefare it’s sãn. I’m just guessing that this is the same etymon, but the meaning and the analogy with Kusaal ya’a “chance, opportunity” and ya’a “if” looks significant.
It occurs to me that if Kusaal had borrowed saŋa in that very shape from some intermediate language, it would explain the unexpected final -a, and the strange plural sansa and the stem/combining form san- would all make sense as analogical remodelling on the basis of indigenous nouns like baŋ. Working noun loanwords into the noun-class system by analogy is usual in Oti-Volta languages.
The imperfect adaptation would suggest a relatively late loan, and on external grounds that is more plausible than a loan early enough to undergo stem morphological derivation to add final -n.
So although the /ŋ/ doesn’t have an obvious Kusaal-internal explanation, once it’s already there in the loanword the odd morphology makes sense.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of a plausible candidate for Kusaal to have borrowed a form *saŋa from. (And I haven’t got my books with me at present.)
Thank you for your full answer, DE.
In Javanese, both glottal stop and ʿayn sometime appear as ng /ŋ/ : Ngahad ‘Sunday’, from أحد ʾaḥad ; Dulkangidah ‘eleventh month of the Islamic calendar’, from ذو القعدة ḏū l-qaʿdah . These examples are from the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics. I hope to find some more.
Gurma languages add /ŋ/ at the beginning of full words which would otherwise begin with a vowel. In native vocabulary, that usually happens from loss of proto-Oti-Volta *s, as in Gulmancema ŋúlūbū “navel” beside e.g. Mbelime sūdìfɛ̀, Waama súrífā; but it also happens with Arabic loans that begin with alif. (I can’t find any Gulimancema loans from Arabic words beginning with ayin.)
Contrary to my inaccurate statement above, though, Gurma languages don’t introduce /ŋ/ to repair hiatus internally, though; you just get vowel fusion, as in Gulimancema bīilī “breast”, beside e.g. Mbelime bēsīdè.
Should rhinoglottophilia be generalized to, IDK, rhinogutturophilia?
saŋa … Ngahad ‘Sunday’,
Does syllable-initial /ŋ/ work the same as syllable-final baŋ, or medial saŋa? Does saŋa break down as ŋa with prefix sa-?
Asking because Māori (and several other Pacifica languages) have syllable-initial /ŋ/; but all syllables are open, so medials like in Whangārei [ɸaŋaːˈɾɛi] are supposed to break as Wha-ŋā-rei.
Of course under the influence of English nobody does that, it’s Whaŋ-ā-rei. English speakers struggle with (for example) Ngāi Tahu.
Are there varieties of English where initial g- tends to ŋ- ? If that’s implausible, then why?
Cf. Dame Ngaio /ˈnaɪoʊ/ Marsh.
Oti-Volta, at any rate, doesn’t really have any non-velar “gutturals” apart from /h/ (which seems only ever to arise from proto-Oti-Volta *s.)
Nawdm and some Western Oti-Volta languages have a [ʔ]; in WOV, for sure, and I suspect in Nawdm, this is just one of the realisations of vowel glottalisation rather than a consonant synchronically, but historically it probably arose as a kind of hiatus repair. At any rate, it definitely has more than one source. But its occurence does not correlate either with nasalisation or with the absence of nasalisation: the consonants whose loss gave rise to hiatus all seem to have been oral approximants. (But I’m still working on all this.)
Having said that, the Eastern Oti-Volta languages Byali and Mbelime show secondary nasalisation of vowels after /h/ when it derives from POV *g, but not when it derives from *k. However, these languages are part of the Atakora Sprachbund, which is allergic to voiced stops but not to nasals, so there was probably a prior change *g > *ŋ here.
Does syllable-initial /ŋ/ work the same as syllable-final baŋ, or medial saŋa? Does saŋa break down as ŋa with prefix sa-?
Kusaal does not permit word-initial /ŋ/ at all, and written ŋ always represents geminate /ŋŋ/ between vowels.
Word-final ŋ represents single /ŋ/, but this is actually because of a general rule that when consonant clusters are left word-final by the characteristic Kusaal “apocope” of final short vowels, the second consonant of the cluster is deleted too. (In fact, the only clusters possible here are /pp tt kk mm nn ŋŋ ll mn/, and the standard orthography writes /pp tt kk ŋŋ/ single in any case, thus concealing the sound change.)
So it is not possible to segment Kusaal saŋa as sa-ŋa.
Gulimancema is different: it allows initial ŋ. However, it actually only permits /ŋ/ word-initially.
Unlike Kusaal, some other Western Oti-Volta languages permit initial /ŋ/; but as with Kusaal, non-initial /ŋ(ŋ)/ is always secondary, representing underlying *mg or *ng.
What all this amounts to is that in proto-Oti-Volta, *ŋ only occurred word-initially: it was not alone in this, as the same was true of all the palatals and labial-velars (except *w), and also of *v and *z.
@de
Is there an obvious reason why all these consonants appear only word initially, eg., (1) did they have allophones that appeared in other positions or do you think it could have arisen from (2) initial consonant mutation or (3) some initial X+C1 sequence being changed to a new consonant C2 with deletion of X (maybe this is not distinguishable from (2))?
Proto-Oti-Volta had non-initial *n, but internal reconstruction shows that this had always arisen by dissimilation from *m because of a preceding labial or labial-velar consonant. This is pretty weird, and may suggest that pre-proto-Oti-Volta had non-initial *n and perhaps *ŋ as well, which have been lost, but with nasalisation of the preceding vowel.
There are cases where POV intrinsically nasal vowels correspond to contrastively nasalised vowels elsewhere in Volta-Congo, as with Mooré tã “three”, Twi ɛsã, suggesting that not all POV nasal vowels can be explained in this way. But Oti-Volta seems to be more phonologically conservative than pretty much any other Volta-Congo group that preserves nasalisation (proto-Bantu didn’t), so it’s not impossible that e.g. the proto-Volta-Congo root for “three” was actually something like *taŋ-.
The absence of non-initial labial-velars and palatals might mean that they arose from *Cw or *Cy clusters initially, I suppose, but that raises all kinds of new problems.
There are a lot of open questions about POV non-initial consonants. Prior to my own work, the issues had hardly been addressed at all. Manessy, the doyen of the field, unfortunately espoused the doctrine that all Gur CVC roots were actually CV with a C derivational suffix, which had the unhappy result that he largely felt free to ignore root-final consonants in comparisons.
Manessy thus missed even very obvious correspondences, like non-initial /l/ in Western Oti-Volta, Buli/Konni and Yom/Nawdm corresponding to /r/ in Waama and /n/ in Gurma and in the all the rest of Eastern Oti-Volta. Because of his erroneous views on Gur root structure, Manessy just wasn’t able to see what the data were telling him.
David Eddyshaw: what is the possible Latin etymology of “paid”? Do you have a reference handy?
What you describe for Gurma languages (“Gurma languages add /ŋ/ at the beginning of full words which would otherwise begin with a vowel”) is also true of Northern Samoyedic (Nganasan, Nenets, Enets): Yet another instance of the little-known West Africa/Northern Siberia SPRACHBUND…
I was thinking that in English, but not Hiberno-English, the consonant h really only appears word-initially, apart from compounds like behind, behalf, rehire, firsthand.
@Etienne:
Patior.
There is a homophonous verb peidio “suffer, endure”, which is obviously from Latin. GPC treats peidio “stop, leave alone” as a separate entry, which it lists first; it does not give a certain etymology, but says ?yr un gair â’r f. ddil. “?the same word as the foll. v.” There are apparently no potential Celtic cognates.
Kusaal kɛ “leave alone” has undergone a similar semantic shift to Welsh peidio “leave alone”: similar, that is, apart from the completely opposite polarity: it’s now the standard verb for “let”: Kɛl ka o kul “Let him go home.” (Kusaal “let not” is mit, which originally meant “beware”: Mit ka o kulɛ “Let him not go home.”)
I just now discovered that English “let” (as in “allow, cause”) and the obsolete “let” (as in “hinder, prevent”) are actually of different origins. Pity: I was hoping that it was yet another odd polarity switch.
Except in tennis.
As Wimbledon is going on, I’ll mention that the noun “let” meaning “hindrance” survives in tennis and some related games, according to the OED.
The noun still survives in the set expression “without let or hindrance”, too.
So Kusaal kɛ “leave alone” has ended up meaning “allow”, whereas Welsh peidio “leave alone” has ended up meaning “don’t enable.”
I guess this illustrates Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “freedom to” and “freedom from.” Evidently the Welsh are more socialist and the Kusaasi more libertarian …
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/
The noun still survives in the set expression “without let or hindrance”, too.
I thought that was obsolete, but I see it’s still ticking along. (Actually, the phrase I thought of was “without let or bar”, but that’s really rare.)
I was thinking that in English, but not Hiberno-English, the consonant h really only appears word-initially, apart from compounds like behind, behalf, rehire, firsthand.
(And from Latin and Romance, like “enhance”, “inhibit” (but not “exhibit”), “comprehend”.)
Also in a few borrowings where it’s not at the beginning of a morpheme. I can think of “maharajah”, anyway.
And in interjections, such as “Aha” and “Ahem”.
In American English, pronouncing the “h” in “vehicle” is stigmatized but not rare.
Patior
In what inflection? 2sg imperative patere?
For non-initial “h”, there’s also “mayhem”, though one etymology suggested at Wiktionary was a compound at one stage.
Etymonline says to see “maim”, where it gives distinctly different etymologies.
OED (entry revised 2001):
And I learn of the existence of Mayhem Parva:
Snobbery with Violence is a good title for a certain kind of British mystery.
The OED on “maim”:
In what inflection? 2sg imperative patere?
I don’t think you can say much more than it’s from the root pat-. (Patere would have given Welsh padr.)
By the Middle Welsh period, there was only one regular verb conjugation, historically continuing the a-stems, though there are plenty of relics of a previous Irish-like division into an a-conjugation and an i-conjugation.
Post-root i /j/ is common in verb loanwords anyway (e.g. helpio “help”, and this seems to go all the way back to common Brythonic, so its presence in peidio probably doesn’t mean a lot. Moreover, though peidio (1st sg present/future peidiaf) is standard, there are also peido, peidaf.
But FWIW, cf synio “suppose, think” (1st sg present/future syniaf), which is from the Latin fourth-conjugation sentire. Offhand, I can’t think of any other Welsh verbs borrowed from fourth conjugation Latin verbs, or third conjugation i-stems, but there must be a few.
Unlike Old Irish, Welsh doesn’t have deponent verbs, though it does have an “impersonal” form in -r, cognate with all those Indoeuropean middles in -r-. Visitors to Wales most often see it in notices saying Siaredir Cymraeg yma “Welsh is spoken here.” It’s obsolete in Welsh as she is currently spoke, but still commonly heard in borrowings from Literary Welsh.
The use of peidio â “refrain from” as the standard way to make negative commands is a Modern Welsh thing. Middle Welsh just negated the imperative with a preceding negative particle na (as may Literary Welsh.) All part of the ongoing push towards syntax rather than morphology in marking grammatical distinctions.
Sorry. missed the close-italics tab after “Cymraeg.” And it should go Siaredir Cymraeg yma. I missed the edit window timeout.
All part of the ongoing push towards syntax rather than morphology in marking grammatical distinctions.
In Modern Welsh ? Or generally across the known universe of languages ? I hadn’t noticed such a trend. What interest groups are pushing this, and why ?
It’s not gonna happen with German anytime soon. People here speak English, or try to, when they want to take a vacation from morphology.
To take up your examples, though: in what sense is “making negative commands using peidio” syntactic marking, but “negating the imperative with a preceding negative particle na” morphological marking ?
I missed the edit window timeout.
Fixed!
@Hat:
Diolch!
@Stu:
In Modern Welsh is what I meant. (Though slso Romance vs Latin, Germanic languages vs proto-Germanic, Modern Persian versus Old Persian …)
No doubt there are languages currently creating new morphology from grammaticalised subordinate words, though none comes to mind. Mandarin, I suppose. Coptic is a fine historical example.
Paid â chanu “refrain from singing” versus na chân “sing not.” Periphrasis. The main verb is no longer imperative, but has been replaced by a verbal noun, which appears as the complement of the preposition â. Seems pretty syntactic to me.
Come to think of it, Welsh does have a couple of deponent verbs, at least as relics: ebr “quoth” and gŵyr “knows.”
It’s in the mind of the beholder. New morphology being created is prone to be thought of as a fast speech phenomenon, marginal and underdescribed. Hence Arkadiev’s observation that French is getting kinda polysynthetic is startling.
True. Polysynthetic French certainly counts.
If humanity survives the current Coprocratic Era, perhaps the French will even end up writing in their spoken language.
Some already do. They’re called Haitians.
(Is Haitian Creole polysynthetic by Arkadiev’s criteria?)
I don’t think so. It doesn’t do the French thing of having elaborate head-marking pronominal prefix chains on its verbs, and it’s SVO rather than having constituent order based on discourse factors, like French (e.g. Ilssont fous cesRomains.)
Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “freedom to” and “freedom from.”
So for Trumpists, “free speech” means freedom to say whatever they like; and freedom from getting fact-checked.
Meedom of speech to go with Me-ocracy.
Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want
Mutual Intelligibility of Spoken Maltese, Libyan Arabic and Tunisian Arabic Functionally Tested: A Pilot Study
by Slavomír Čéplö, Jiří Milička, Petr Zemánek, and Christophe Pereira
This paper presents the results of a pilot project designed to functionally test the mutual intelligibility of spoken Maltese, Tunisian Arabic and Benghazi Libyan Arabic. We compiled an audio-based intelligibility test consisting of three components: a word test where the respondents were asked to perform a semantic classification task with 11 semantic categories; a sentence test where the task was to provide a translation of a sentence into the respondent’s native language and a text test where a short text was listened to twice and the respondents were asked to answer 8 multiple-choice questions. We collected data from 24 respondents in Malta, Tunis and Benghazi which we analyzed to determine that there exists asymmetric mutual intelligibility between the two mainstream Arabic varieties and Maltese where speakers of Tunisian and Benghazi Arabic are able to understand about 40% of what is being said to them in Maltese, whereas that ratio is about 30% for speakers of Maltese exposed to either variety of Arabic. Additionally, we found that Tunisian Arabic has the highest level of mutual intelligibility with either of the other two varieties. Combining the intelligibility scores with edit distance data, we were able to sketch out the variables involved in enabling and inhibiting mutual intelligibility for all three varieties of Arabic and provide a rough analysis of the linguistic distance between them as branches of North African Arabic.
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(https://inalco.academia.edu/christophepereira)
Is there an obvious reason why all these consonants appear only word initially, eg., (1) did they have allophones that appeared in other positions
I should perhaps have mentioned that this is a feature of all the modern Oti-Volta languages too, not just proto-Oti-Volta: they all have consonants which only appear initially in roots or prefixes.
Thus, in Kusaal, /k͡p g͡b z v w h/ only appear root- or prefix-initially, and although /k t p/ can appear medially or finally, they always represent underlying *gg *dd *bb when non-initial. (Kusaal has no palatals apart from /j/ and its nasalised counterpart: POV *c *ɟ have become /s z/.)
Comparative evidence for the stops shows that the historical developments were actually rather like Welsh: original single *k *t *p after vowels became /g d b/, while original *g *d *b became approximants, and subsequently disappeared completely in Kusaal (though not always in Moorë, which still has /j w/ for the latter two.)
Kusaal tone sandhi has some structural similarities to Welsh initial mutations too: in both cases, the relevant changes originated as contact phenomena, of a kind still evident word-internally, but loss of final vowels has ruined the transparency by deleting conditioning segments/tones, and there has been enough analogical remodelling that the results are better described with new synchronic rules rather than appealing to the historical development.
…and I expect it to be of considerable interest to drasvi – wonderfully, I either didn’t notice this thread or have forgotten it entirely. Thanks (again)! (my favourite conversation about Tunisian and Maltese is ‘…A tourist asked me for directions in really bad Arabic and I said ‘wow! you speak Arabic so well!’ and he said ‘it isn’t Arabic! it’s Maltese.’.
Of course, phonologically (and well, not only…) it’s a bit weird. A book in Maltese is the only book I ordered abroad since Russian cards are blocked, with all appropriate adventures and assistance of a friend of a friend in Armenia.)
Don’t know where to post this. Sometimes I post random Russian things in Okh Blya, and sometimes in the thread I’m reading and commenting at the moment (as you know, I often comment a lot in one thread and ignore others).
I’m going to fix my door. The problem is that holes for screws that hold the hinges are pits more than ‘holes’ and they hold nothing. And the reason why I know how to do that has a lot to do with lexicon (for I’m not particularly good at woodworks and have no idea how people do it normally). I learned the word for [wooden] dowel pin, the Russian word for them – those wooden cilinders that support shelves in cabinets and sometimes fasten wooden pieces. They look useful, so I wondered what’s their name and then I saw someone selling them or referring to them… Being able to buy them entails known the name and knowing the name means you can more comfortably google or ask for where to buy them (of course, you can ask for ‘those wooden cilinders’, but we people are irrational). The plan is to drill 1cm wide holes, hammer 1cm thick dowels in (perhaps with some wood glue, but that’s redundant), and then drill holes for screws in the dowels – and the plan is rather ‘perfect’ than ‘good’: the fix is going to be quick and reliable at once iff the wood is hard enough.
So, words.
There are two similar words
špunt
štift
which I know for about as long as I know how to read. Both are easy:
štift – as I learned as a toddler from context it refers to metal rods (toddlers learn such things from manuals to things they assemble, such as tiny metal motorised tower cranes…). As an adult I also know that those rods are not necessarily tiny:) From some Germanic Stift or stift and in English they are called ‘pins’.
špunt in Russian (in Czech it is ‘plug’) means several things, but the most widely known is tongue-and-groove fitting in woodworks. Again some Germanic Spund or spunt ‘plug’ (and in German also the ‘tongue’ in tongue and groove).
But where does
škant ‘wooden dowel pin’ comes from!?
The weird thing is that
štift is a metal rod used to join.
škant is a wooden rod used to join
špunt is a tongue used to join, buy etymologically (and in one Russian meaning I’m anaware of, mentioned in WP) is a plug – that is again a rod.
Google is horrifying. It says it ‘has to do’ with English ‘shaft’! Brilliant. Yes, it does. ‘Shaft’ is a š-…-t rod.
And some dictionary says ‘from French scantle‘. “Scantle” is English, but various derivations of esc(h)anteler (eschantillon, échantignole etc. have to do with wood) and the meaning is partly appropriate.
From here one reconstructs a root *š-…-t ‘rod’ with infixes pun, kan, tif where vowels u-a-i can be obtained from p, t, k (/p/ labialises the vowel to /u/…)‘Shaft’ has same root. What about šrift ‘font’ < Schrift?
Well, I think some Russian thread would have been more appropriate – the comment is long. But I won’t move it.
Links for špunt: ru.WP:Шпунт_(значения) – Russian meanings, Wiktionary:Spund – etymology, de.WP:Spund – the second German meaning (for specifically tongue and groove)
štift, wiktionary: German Stift, PWG *stift
Also, https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/échantillon#fr (other French forms can be found by clicking links, but the (semantically) appropriate ones are those i listed in the first comment. eschantillon also gave German Shablone and then numerous Slavic words, like šablon)
Having posted this I’ll drill it and screw it.
(Also: the Russian meaning of štift is more or less https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stift_(Maschinenbau). As for Ru škant ‘wooden dowel pin’ is enough)
@drasvi
The earliest corpus hit for shkant is from 1953 and the author puts the word in inverted commas:
Я, наоборот, предлагаю продольный плот из бревен 7-8 м. длины, в количестве 10-11 шт., связанных через «шканты».
I’ve learned the word шкант in a woodworking context, I think around middle school; it is indeed a neat word. I don’t think I’ve previously associated it with штифт, but I admit that they do feel kinda similar (and both Germanish, or maybe rather Continental-West-Germanic-ish).
I only know шпунт from Neznayka, where the context suggests “a doohickey”; I think I’ve technically found out multiple times what specific kind of doohickey it was, and then forgot again each time. The main meaning given on Wikipedia is of course not even a doohickey in the relevant sense at all.
Well, I think some Russian thread would have been more appropriate
No need to apologize — those words are fascinating! I think шпунт is the only one I knew.
@LH, I meant ‘some Russian thread’ on your site:) I re-calculated my expectations regarding the effect of the comment and decided that I may distract from my beloved Maghrebi Arabic dialects.
Distract some admirers, that is. ‘All that is gold does not glitter’*, as it was foretold and admirers are not many.
*seriously, on the lnaguage exchange site where I participated, when someone asks “what dialect I should learn”, there some 20 responces from Egyptians (usually short and simple and enthusiastic: “Learn Egyptian! Learn Egyptian!”), several from Levantine speakers (more thoughtful about virtues of Egyptian and Levantine) and a couple long, detailed thoughtful comments from Algerians and Tunisians… About Levantine and Egyptian again.
@LH, I meant ‘some Russian thread’ on your site:)
I knew that; I was implying it doesn’t matter which thread.
Of course this is not because Maghrebi speakers are ‘more educated’. For some reason many Tunisians who register on this specific site are actual linguists and linguistics students and come simply to help learners or to learn a more exotic language, while majority of Egyptians are students of something technical who want to learn English and to chat. (In turn, Tunusian students I know do speak English more or less as well or as badly as I do and I think with better accent. Have no idea where do they pick it – perhaps they’re simply ‘good at languages’ and pick it instead of ‘studying’ it? ُEgypt in turn is focused on English rather than French but is not so polyglotic)
And by the way, practically such sites can be very, very useful for some languages. When the demand is below the supply (and where 0 is lesser than both). A plenty of speakers who really, really really want to help. Sadly, I don’t know which of such sites is good. Not the one I’m speaking about, their programmers works hard on making it inconvenient for everything but paid lessons and also for everyone but mobile users and their admins are epic assholes.
The weird thing about English is that Russian is full of such German words for hardware pieces and tools and everything, but…. much unlike international words like ‘hegemony’ they simply are not used in English.
Does English scant or its derivations (scantle) have ANY appropriate meaning for ‘wooden pin’ (small like mine or big as in PP’s example where they are link ten logs in a 8 meter long raft)?
If it does, it is not unthinkable (but still unexpected) that someone Germanised an English loan. If it doesn’t I don’t understand where the author of the dictionary took this scantle from.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scantle does derive it from French and some French derivations are eschantillon “1. Pièce de bois d’un certain calibre. …” and échantignole “(Charpenterie) Pièce de bois taillée en biseau ou cornière fixée sur un arbalétrier pour maintenir une panne.”.
If there is a German or Dutch word derived differently from this French word, that would have made even more sense.
(also the door is fixed. Drilled, hammered and screwed. Was really, really quick and yes, perfect, but only when I used one škant per a hole (or a pit:)) while an attempt to use more than one for two larger holes was not really successful and took hours. And there are other issues with the door. So my next word is brynza “bryndza”: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/brânză)
@J1M, LH, I know the word шпунт and I’m sure, I read it in many contexts where I could guess the meaning. But it is one of those words whose meaning I never remember.
It is also confusing. For example, in the “tongue and groove” sense (which is not the only meaning as WP says) –
– ru.wiktionary says it is the tongue
– ru.wikipedia says the tongue which is inserted in the groove (which is also called шпунт) and also the whole method (tongue and groove). One of its references is an encyclopaedia from the first decade of 1900s says it is a triangular groove in the bow or stern or keel into which planks of the “шпунт belt” are inserted.
(authors of WP and Wiktionary are confused too: there are “шип — паз” in Wiktionary, “шиповое соединение” and “шпунт” in WP, these two are contrasted. “шип — паз” in Wiktionary doesn’t mention them, but the picture there is that from WP:шпунт
I simply don’t use it. I call grooves “grooves”. Выемки, желобки, пазы, бороздки. I don’t have many words for things inserted in them – I guess I call them выступы, protrusions.)
@J1M as for associating them… Two words from the list štift, škant, špunt are simply vaguely German, but the three are impressive. Two refer to things with same function and same shape (a rod, metal or wooden) and the third either has this function or is a plug ( a rod again, neither metal nor wooden).
LH, штифт is simply a pin but I came across this word most often between 3 and 5. When I was still thinking about finding some time to think about when I will assemble something from the Soviet derivation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano. I’m not surprised that you don’t know the word.
Steampunk:)
Discussion of Latin fugere in another thread
https://languagehat.com/fuge-quo-descendere-gestis/
reminded me that I was trying to think of Welsh verbs derived from Latin 3rd conjugation i-stems (like peidio.) Welsh has ffoi, 1st sg present/future indicative ffoaf “flee”, but unfortunately the verb is an intra-Welsh formation from the noun ffo “flight, escape” (< Latin fuga.)
Ffi ffai ffo ffum!
This is of course a Welsh giant, warning off Welsh-speakers so that he can drink the blood of Englishmen, grind their bones to make his bread, and so forth, without having to worry about compromising his patriotism.
Ysbaddaden, probably. Bendigeidfran was only really dangerous to Irishmen, but the Big Y had an antisocial rep generally.
There was a well-known and much-loved bot on Twitch, a_n_i_v, that got banned for quoting the giant from “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Some assholes thought it would be funny to submit multiple reports of threatening behavior. The dev probably could have gotten the ban reversed, but he was too pissed off. Eventually, he created a new bot, a_c_a_c, but it only appears in channels where the streamer is known to be friendly, so it has collected a lot less training data, making it less amusing.
Ah, that explains why the giant in “Gentle Giant” is gentle.
(my own associations with giants are different. ”Very large humans” no more no less. Though I remember from Kabyle tales that some eat Kabyle children. Kabyles are not nicer to them. That all is sad*)
*Thinking of the song карлики и женщины by Бахыт-Компот, I think, believed by most performers to be purely absurdist – but, I think, based on actual battles between women and dwarf gladiators in Rome (the repulsive ancient state which for some reason many of us like).
Карлики и женщины, / дураки вы, что ли, совсем?/ мир огромен и красив,/ места хватит всем.
Can’t be German because /ʃk/- is a phonotactic gap in German – *sk- > [sx] > [ʃ], every other *sC- > /ʃC/-, so there’s no native source for /ʃk/-. The only word with schk- I can think of is Schkeuditz, a place close to Leipzig.
So, either some North Sea mixup, or a new creation based perhaps on Stift, Spund and Kante “edge”.
Or it’s straight from Albanian, where *sk- > shk- is regular…
Named after Shkanterbeg, the less-known engineer brother of the national hero 😉
Could be Shkandinavian.
Don’t want to sidetrack discussion into the actual substance of any controversy afflicting a personality associated with the current U.S. government, but this alleged controversy does raise the interesting question of “Can Maltese Understand Uzbek?” https://nypost.com/2025/07/08/us-news/trump-vetter-in-chief-sergio-gor-was-born-in-uzbekistan-report/
There are obviously lots of mathematically possible A-B combinations for “someone who claims to have been born in country A turns out to have actually been born in country B,” but Malta; Uzbekistan is perhaps not the most obvious one.
Oh, I forgot I once heard Skandal with /ʃk/-; and Biskotten seem to have -/ʃk/- (at the beginning of the stressed syllable, so arguably the phonological word) wherever they aren’t Löffelbiskuits.
Skandal with /ʃk/-
I think I’ve also encountered that. Perhaps this originated as a hypercorrection by (far) Northern German speakers who pronounce initial “Sp-, St-” as /sp-, st-/ instead of Standard /ʃp-/ /ʃt/- and are used to switch from /s/ to /ʃ/ before consonant when moving to a more Standard register.
So, talking about German pronunciation: When singing Opera (with a capital O), are you supposed to voice intervocalic /s/. (Like in diesen heil’gen Hallen, or zu sein). Also, please narrow-IPA Verräther ([ɐ] or [r], and in general post-vocalically).
(Obviously I haven’t been looking for a thread to bung this question into sideways, why do you ask?)
I admit that I would have applied the shibilant-before-unvoiced-stop “rule” to Skandal without thinking. I probably never heard it “in the wild,” and I don’t know if I’d have noted it as different if I did
(far) Northern German speakers who pronounce initial “Sp-, St-” as /sp-, st-/ instead of Standard /ʃp-/ /ʃt/-
Aha. This explains why a friend of mine, whose grandmother was an East Frisian war bride, pronounced initial “sp-” and “st-” with /s/ and looked at me funny when I attempted some such German word with /ʃp-/ or /ʃt-/.
(I say “pronounced” because my friend later spent a few years closer to the center of Germany and undoubtedly learned better.)
Yes, unless it’s word-final.
The h is purely cosmetic and was abolished in 1901. (But stage pronunciation does aspirate /p t k/ at every opportunity.) Both er are [ɐ] normally, but in sufficiently capital Opera they might both end up as [ɛɐ̯ʀ] or [ɛɐ̯r]. The ä is [ɛː] in stage pronunciation, and as an inconsistent hypercorrectivism it occurs elsewhere; otherwise it’s [æː] (West) or [eː] (Rest).
Don’t forget to sing that word with some extra drama; it means “traitor”.
Thanks! And it has a nice chromatic raise on the second syllable, Mozart knew what he was doing. 1791 was before 1901.
In diesen heil’gen Mauern, kann kein Verräther lauern. And full Auslautverschärfung on Hand and Land, I’ll make sure to aspirate them too.
One of my favorite bits of Mozart to sing.
JWB, more technical Uzbek (school math, ‘contents’ on packs of juice etc.) has a very strange effect on me. It is full of Arabic words (and also Persian – Persian loans are less bookish, though, Greek words borrowed from Russian, etc) and when I come across such an Arabic word in Uzbek I remember how I learned this Arabic word.
Up to hearing the voice. I almost jump.
(Say, lazily reading whatever is written on the side of a pack of juice I’m staring at, I come across nisbiy namligi 75%, hear my friend’s voice saying ɣurfatun saɣira nisbiyya and jump).
I don’t know how much of it a Maltese can understand:) Of course international “relative ……. 75%” is immediately understood – if you understand nisbiy.
JWB,
‘was born in Uzbekistan — not Malta as he has claimed he’s from‘
er.
You know, discrepancy between the place where your friend has grown up and where she was delivered to us is not so uncommon. For this reason I normally and pointedly do not understand ‘be from’ as birthplace. (And I often have no slightest idea where some of my friends were born – there is often a variety of choices. Say, I know a Moroccan couple in Bergen who went to Spain for this. A Tunisian friend of mine was I think born either in Morocco or Tunisia. And so on for everyone)
The quotation sounds to me exactly as absurd as ‘she says she’s married to [religion, ethnicity, country name] but in reality she is [ethnicity, country, religion]’ would. Many people marry people of same ethnicity and religion, but in my mind ‘to be married to an X’ and ‘to be an X’refer to two distinct parameters. For this reason we express these two facts differently.
true, for sure, as a general rule! but about gor specifically, i’d want to defer to maltese folks’ opinions about someone who spent at most a decade there (and possibly as little as three years – the Post doesn’t try to settle the matter). all i can say is that he’d be laughed at if he claimed to be from boston or new york on a similar basis, especially after “giv[ing] friends and colleagues an earful about his family’s Maltese roots” (which is a quite different claim from either “born in” or “raised in”). he also seems to have “refus[ed] to identify his country of birth other than to say it was not Russia”, which is apparently technically true in terms of the name of the state with jurisdiction over his birthplace when he was born, but only meaningfully so for those comfortable saying, for example, that russia was not the country of anatoly karpov’s birth but was the country of yusuf akçura’s.
Under “How to Irritate Immigrants” (with a nod to the other thread) you can list the question “where are you from?” Extra points for insisting “but where are you really from?” after the victim has tried respectful evasion. All the same I’m not going to bitch about it too much, because descendants of East Asian immigrants in the U.S. get asked the same, and that’s even worse.
rozele, a decade in Malta, from when he was 3 to 13? Growing up there and attending a local school?
School is a machine of assimilation and an extremely efficient one.
As for me, I’m afraid, he is Maltese.
A friend of mine, Agzam (half-Uzbek, half-Kashgari) who went to a Russian school in Tashkent says (with disappointment) that Uzbeks – I think he means those in Moscow – simply don’t recognise or count him as one of them. And I don’t think there’s much cultural difference between him and my ethnically Russian friends (call this culture ‘Russian’ or what).
(a Muslim atheist – if he’s an atheist, of course – assimilated to Christian atheists rather than a Christian atheist. Does this make sense? :-))
@Y, if an immigrant is irritated by “where are you from?”, as for me, that’s her problem. Hers or of those assholes who have made her feel inferiour. An immigrant normally still has all of her childhood’s identity, and ‘I’m a Norwegian from Bergen but my sister Safaa, she’s Moroccan from Casablanca’ is not how Siham-who-gave-birth-in-Spain thinks of herself, I believe.
She may have more than one identity, though.
And who then will we address this question to? Only tourists? Won’t that imply that tourism is ‘appropriate’ and emigration or having two homes is shameful? I don’t like that.
A child of immigrants is a different story.
Does this make sense?
that makes perfect sense to me, at least.
but i’m agnostic about gor’s 3 vs. 10 years in malta (especially because of the combination of boasting and evasiveness). and the key years are different for different people – he certainly seems quite marked by high school in southern california (i assume either orange county or the inland empire, because that’s who tends to dodge with “the los angeles area” and have his politics).
drasvi, the hypothetical immigrant I was speaking of is based on me. For the most part it’s not a matter of people making me feel inferior, but rather of them presuming that that is not a personal question. Sure, I get curious about people’s accents too, foreign or otherwise, but I don’t presume to ask them about it unless I feel familiarity has been clearly established. Ask any cat.
(I only once was asked where I was from as a lead to “go back there”, but that was in a situation that I don’t usually put myself in.)
Asking people a question like that based on their looks (the second-plus generation Asian-Americans I referred to) is even ruder.
‘a personal question’
@Y, I understood that.
I object to making as much information as possible ‘personal’ as a way of dealing with conflicts. And I’m personally more comfortable with a culture where only a few topics are ‘intimate’ (even as an adressee of questions personal for or in my culture but less so for the asker or in her culture). The idea that aforementioned lady in Bergen will talk to her relatives in Casablanca and Tunisia and Spain in whatsupp every day but hide this from people in Bergen (basically, ‘wear’ two personalities) horrifies me.
And I think in my view if the asker is naïve (unspoiled), let she be so and the world will be better.
However I’m not extreme in that view. I refuse to recognise the asker as a tactless asshole, but I do recognise that if something feels ‘personal’ to someone, this feeling is to be respected.
rozele, let’s say: i have no reason to think he is not sincere.
As for his ‘Russian’ [cultural] background, yes, it’s almost same culture as Agzam’s or mine,
– and also almost as that of Russian-speaking people from Kiev who identify as Ukrainians and support Ukrainian independence (they’re more similar to me than I am to villagers in north or south Russia, than they are to some other Ukrainians!)
– but has nothing to do with birthplace.
absolutely! i was pointing out specifically the weird evasive move he was doing about (not) naming his birthplace, which to me mainly served to make me ask “why is he evasive in this particular way?” (which i don’t have a theory about) – i wasn’t saying anything at all about his russianness or uzbekness or anything other nationality/cultural affiliation.
a decade in Malta, from when he was 3 to 13? Growing up there and attending a local school?
An English language school however. He probably made some Maltese friends but it would be unusual for a foreign born child in that environment to become truly fluent in Maltese, not hearing it either at home or at school other than one Maltese language class a day.
Certainly “Gor’s” whole story is pretty fishy, and the circumstantial evidence would naturally lead one to suspect he’s an FSB agent or FSB adjacent. The other odd aspect of the story is how reticent the mainstream press seems to be to do any serious investigation of a very powerful individual in the White House who has lied about where he was born and won’t adhere to normal vetting procedures. Who is Gor’s father? Other than Gor’s mother having an Israeli passport and being conveniently dead by age 52 no one seems to provide details. Some Russian sources claim Gor’s father had been a KGB agent working in the West at one point, but without as far as I can tell any real evidence for that claim. The American right-wing seems to have been succesful enough pushing their “Russian Hoax” campaign that journalists are now intimidated to investigate the myriad and obvious ties between Trump, his inner circle and Russian organized crime/intelligence networks.
Asking about and alluding to someone’s origin is an issue of politeness, and has its own rules, which are culture-dependent. In current German culture it’s fine (a case recently experienced at my workplace) to give a colleague a friendly ribbing for not understanding Rhenish culture because they were born and raised in Swabia, but it would be an absolute no-no to do the same based on their Turkish family background.
So … complimenting the English of the President of an English-speaking nation would be … awkward.
I notice quite a few Americans seem to speak decent English — although its President not so much.
Fuga in Romanian:
Fuga, fuga prin porumb
Cat de greu e sa prinzi mistreţul
Fuga, fuga prin proumb
Ending refrain to the song “Mistreţul” by Timpuri Noi
(Play your G harmonica)
@AntC:
The abyss-dwelling Laura Loomer’s recent comments about Zohran Mahdani managed to combine not only the standard tropes that he is a communist jihadist but also that he was disgusting and “African” (because he eats rice with his hands):
Apparently there has been a lot of this from the Illinois Nazis, not merely from this particular specimen of glorious American womanhood.
So this was actually highly diplomatic language from the National Hate Group Party president. Krasnov was making nice.
Puts me in mind of an excellent line from the film of LA Confidential: “Don’t start trying to do the right thing, boyo. You haven’t the practice.”
Could have been worse. He might have complemented President Boakai on his natural rhythm.
Mamdani, begging his pardon.
Just discovered that the K stands for “Kwame.” Cool!
Someone or other thought Mr. Gor “notable” enough to make sure Russian wikipedia had coverage of him. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80,_%D0%A1%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%B6%D0%B8%D0%BE
His parents reportedly arrived in Malta with their toddler Сергей some 25 years before Malta overtly began its program of selling citizenship (and thus access to the entire EU*) to anyone with 650,000 Euros in hand, a program which I believe may have been of particular interest to various displaced persons from formerly Soviet spaces. Maybe they were farsighted or ahead of the curve. It sounds like his parents may have come to Malta from the Uzbek SSR a few years before the USSR collapsed/dissolved, which could have given Mr. Gor a perfectly nice-sounding narrative of “I was born in the USSR but my parents fled in search of freedom when I was so young that I don’t really remember being there.”
*I should be clear that I have no moral objection to cynical scams perpetrated on the EU. That’s what the EU is for.
I should perhaps note that I skimmed the original story about Gor reasonably quickly and did not dig deeper before linking to it, so had not focused on how it was in fact likely that his parents might have been from the monolingual-Russophone subset of the population of the Uzbek SSR, thus undermining the question I posed. I hadn’t, for example, seen that “Gor” was a clipping of Gorokhovsky.
But the US by now has quite a lot of immigrants who were born in the then-USSR in the 1980’s but left as fairly small children and they are generally not suspected of being agents of the FSB. Coming to the US after a sojourn in some third country is the exception rather than the rule but not all that uncommon. So as noted above this may be more about why the man would be evasive and how the evasiveness itself raises suspicions, although one can easily imagine non-sinister motivations.
Oh, and just re rozele’s suspicions that “los angeles area” was a euphemism for some location outside Los Angeles County, Gor is said to have attended high school within the city limits of Los Angeles proper, albeit out in the San Fernando Valley (Canoga Park H.S., class of 2004). I don’t know that much about Canoga Park but it’s the setting for the opening scene’s of Frank Zappa’s “Joe’s Garage.”
“ Gor is said to have attended high school within the city limits of Los Angeles proper, albeit out in the San Fernando Valley (Canoga Park H.S., class of 2004). I don’t know that much about Canoga Park…”
Canoga Park is a more lower middle-class and working class area in the San Fernando Valley with a very large Mexican population, including many families from Durango. It’s where my mom and some of her siblings first arrived in California ( in my mom and my aunt’s case, by way of El Paso, Texas ) and lived in before moving on to Santa Barbara ( also a very large Mexican population, also many families from Durango.) I have many relatives there and none of them speak like Valley Girls.
I myself think of it as L.A. or part of L.A. but I’ve heard my mom and relatives speak of “going to Los Angeles” (when speaking in Spanish) when they mean going to downtown L.A. or somewhere else on the other side of the Hollywood Hills and the Santa Monica mountains.
Edited to add: It’s also in the western part of the Valley next to the more upscale Woodland Hills ( so you notice a bit of a contrast ) so it is quite a way from Downtown L.A. and close enough to the center of the Valley to not usually be in danger from wildfires in the hills.
At least when I lived in LA, most Angelenos did not think of the Valley as part of Los Angeles proper, whatever that amorphous concept might encompass. It was sort of the equivalent of “Jersey” to a New Yorker.
DE, you are trying to insult someone by associating him with my ethnicity.
And the method is similar to her slur for Muslims, ‘little Muhammad’. Even a reference to Communists is there…
No, I understand that (a) you’re a good person (b) have nothing against me (c) wouln’t have used an ethnic slur to insult an actual (ethnically) Russian man (d) aren’t comparing me to pets (even though until I take a shower and change clothes I’m going be dirtier than any pet I can think of…) (e) we Russians are ‘bad guys’
I’m fine with your usage. (and am much less friendly to this lady)
But the logic?:-p
DE, you are trying to insult someone by associating him with my ethnicity.
Why do you say things like this when you don’t mean them?
DE, you are trying to insult someone by associating him with my ethnicity
Do you mean “Krasnov”? That’s not an attempt to make out that Trump is an ethnic Russian. Google it.
(It appears to be a mere conspiracy theory: and T’s actions are in fact perfectly explicable without assuming that he is a secret asset of Putin’s regime. Likewise, I don’t think that Netanyahu has compromising material on him either. Or that Trump is secretly Jewish.)
Just as criticism of Trump’s hate-based government does not mean that I think all Americans are evil, and criticism of Netanyahu’s murderous regime does not make me an antisemite, so too an oblique reference to an (imaginary) dark op by Putin does not make me anti-Russian.
Do feel free to slag off Keir Starmer (who?) in your reply. I won’t take it personally.
By “Los Angeles proper” I meant rather boringly and technically (as an outsider) “places within the official municipal boundaries of the entity known as the City of Los Angeles” and also “places where the local public schools are run by the Los Angeles Unified School District.” My late first wife grew up in the Seventies and Eighties in Woodland Hills, which as noted is close to Canoga Park, but if she ever said anything about Canoga Park it hasn’t stuck in my memory. And I imagine Woodland Hills’ own demographics may have shifted on any number of dimensions by now compared to her childhood — her parents moved up to the Bay area in the late Nineties after they retired and I have had little occasion to go to WH since then. The Zappa version of Canoga Park was that in which a bunch of naive teens might have started a garage band circa 1964 which they would then be recalling from the jaded perspective of 1979 having spent the intervening years in the jadedness-inducing rock music business.
By “Los Angeles proper” I meant rather boringly and technically (as an outsider) “places within the official municipal boundaries of the entity known as the City of Los Angeles”
But nobody knows the official municipal boundaries except officials. LA is not a normal city; everybody knows what’s part of NYC, but LA is an amorphous blob full of holes.
The Zappa version of Canoga Park was that in which a bunch of naive teens might have started a garage band circa 1964 which they would then be recalling from the jaded perspective of 1979 having spent the intervening years in the jadedness-inducing rock music business.
And prison, and a muffin factory.
Do we need a word “jading” for jadedness-inducing?
For Uzbek food in the San Fernando Valley (farther east than Canoga Park), you may want to try https://eattheworldla.substack.com/p/cheburechnaya-tashkent-uzbek-russian-los-angeles .
ETA: this is now reminding me that it’s been some time since I last lunched at the kosher Uzbek restaurant on W 47th St. amongst the diamond dealers (Taam Tov).
Huh. I was thinking I must have eaten there, though I didn’t remember the name, but then it turned out I was thinking of Gan Eden, another kosher Uzbek restaurant on W 47th St.
thanks, knowers of (greater) los angeles – i may or may not be wiser, but i like being better-informed!
and i think the semantics are very interesting, especially in contrast to nyc: most people within the five boroughs would say they live in new york, even though (f’rinstance) little neck is much more closely tied to long island than nyc, and i’d absolutely argue that jersey city is much more a part of nyc than most of staten island is. to my ear “new york area” is a hedge that implies westchester or northern new jersey, or possibly western long island east of the queens line. but one way to tell if a brooklynite or queensian (i realize i don’t know if there’s a conventional demonym!) is a new yorker (born or acculturated) or a transient resident is whether they say “going into the city” to talk about manhattan – though i can’t picture anyone but maybe a staten islander saying “going into new york”.
I’d think that how fine-grained you get depends on who you’re talking to and where. I imagine someone from Canoga Park or Glendale or San Pedro visiting New York might say they’re from “LA”, but would never do that locally.
(Maybe not Santa Monica or Pasadena or Long Beach? Hard for me to judge.)
From WP as quotes in Mark’s post on LL (in turn linked here). JWB comments on it there.
(As we know, Normans specifically turned out to be tolerant to languages and religions, but of course without Christian conquest no one would have been Christianised)
No, I don’t think Maltese is the only Arabic without diglossia.
First the relationships of Christian and Jewish dialects with Classical are different.
Second, I don’t think we can speak of ‘diglossia’ in each and every Muslim dialect.
(of course, the Arab world as a whole is diglossic. When we treat every variety as a part of the Arabic system, regardless of how often speakers hear the literary register and whether they are literate, for example … And of course all Muslims accept the Quraan as revelation)
‘…over the centuries, there was a lot of under-the-table cultural and commercial contact.’
Very, very, very, very, very, very, very sad there is not more about this:(
I really would love to know more.
Also JWB in his comment doesn’t apply ‘diglossia’ to the ‘prestige’ of Classical.
Which makes one curious about the diachrony of Arabic sociolingustics.
I’m not sure I understand what drasvi’s last comment is trying to say about my May 2024 LL comment (which had not been at the front of my mind recently). But my point was that Maltese-speakers are, unlike e.g. Tunisian-vernacular-Arabic-speakers, *not* habitually encountering either Classical Arabic or Modern Standard Arabic as tongues distinct from yet clearly related to their own vernacular, and that no doubt has all sorts of consequences. (Put another way, instead of any high-prestige form of Arabic Maltese-speakers are instead likely to know English, Italian, or both — but the fact that those are sufficiently ancestrally distinct from Maltese, such that Maltese cannot be conceptualized as an informal or vulgar dialect of either, means things will play out differently than in the “Arabic” world proper.
Is there a parallel in Europe where Romanian through the Middle Ages existed and evolved without Latin being a prestige language among relevant local elites but the western Romance languages rather self-consciously co-existed with Latin in a way that created various complex feedback effects? Of course the earlier history of Romanian is underdocumented to undocumented and by the time we have the modern self-conscious nationalist promotion of the language we probably also have some Latinity creeping into the relevant local elites.
JWB, you in that comment avoid speaking about ‘diglossic’ relationship between vernacular and Classical. Instead you speak of its prestige.
I think usually researchers interpret Classical as the highest register of diglossic continuum: see for example the picture in the dictionary of Egyptian Arabic by M.Hinds and E.Badawi, (p ix, the definitions are on p viii. not a very easy-to-read picture:/ but it does illustrate my idea. Some of Arabic terminology there may be peculiar to Egypt. Also vernacular is and has been for quite a while taken more seriously in Egypt than elsewhere).
But what drew my attention is what follows from your definition: namely that they only have this 'diglossia' since 19th century.
The role of the literary language is changing and has been changing. Means of communication change fast, the role of literacy changes – how diglossia can be 'same'? It isn't.
So what part of the history we call so and more importantly how do we account for changes?
But studies of diglossia are normally very synchronous sociolinguistics, not historical.
JWB, I’m not objecting to your comment.
However I do object to WP. Have Jews been as diglossic as Muslims? Have all Muslim Arab-speaking bedouin tribes (with varying degrees of book leaarning among them – some of them specialising in it) been diglossic?
What about enclaves?
I mean I agree, because you’re not in the business of inventing a criterion which will explain ‘how all Arabics are Arab[ic] and Maltese isn’t’:) It’s harder than some seem to think.
Mair (Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6, linked in same post) was confused by French Arabe Littéral for “العربية الفصحى”.
Perhaps I must explain myself as well: when I speak of the ”literary language” or contrast ‘literary’ to ‘vernacular’ I simply follow Russian usage which follows French*.
I mean nothing too specific: simply ‘that thing which we contrast to vernacular’, its use in literature being one of its functions. Football commenters comment games in literary Russian:)
*It is not only Russian and French, though.
“Football commenters comment games in literary Russian”.
And this is pure Pushkin:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ13BZ1wnQk
Of course the earlier history of Romanian is underdocumented to undocumented and by the time we have the modern self-conscious nationalist promotion of the language we probably also have some Latinity creeping into the relevant local elites
Most obviously in the replacement of the traditional Cyrillic alphabet with a Latin alphabet, which only happened succesfully (after several failed attempts) in the 1860s.
Obligatory mention of the colleague who, 10 years ago at least, answered “Texas” whenever asked where he was from – regardless of context, even when he was in Texas.
Would he say that to another Texan, though?
@Y / David M.: I think many Texans do think that Texas is the right level of generality in quite a lot of contexts. Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-cFtSPIF4Q
Have Jews been as diglossic as Muslims?
i don’t know a ton about judeo-arabics, but i’m quite certain there’s not a single answer for this (the halabi situation being very different from the djerbi one from the various yemeni ones, for instance), with some of the variables being within the jewish communities (e.g. is it sefardi, amazigh, or an entirely arabic-speaking community? or are there overlapping/adjacent sefardi and non-sefardi communities?) and some not (e.g. is the surrounding context strictly arabic-speaking, or more multilingual? are there other dhimmi in the mix?). but i also think “diglossia” can be a shaky framework once it’s extended in time or space. for instance, i don’t think it’s a particularly good way of thinking about the relationships in 19th/20th century yidishland among different hebrew lects and registers (dovid katz proposes a 3-way division), and among them and various yiddish registers. it gets kinda procrustean pretty quick.
but my understanding is that in the “golden age” of al-andalus, the intelligentsia (for lack of a better word – people like yehuda halevi, abraham ibn ezra, or shmuel hanagid/ismail ibn naghrilla) would have been moving between an andalusi vernacular arabic, a vernacular ibero-romance, a classicizing literary arabic, and a classicizing literary hebrew as languages of communication and composition, plus reading several classical hebrews and aramaics, and several classical arabics. so you get halevi writing the Kuzari in literary arabic, “My heart is in the east” in literary hebrew, love poems that are classical arabic qasidas in literary hebrew, and love poems that are andalusi muwashshahat in literary hebrew with ibero-romance refrains. and shmuel hanagid reportedly having latin and something amazigh as well as the arabic repertoires necessary for both a vizier and a frontline military officer and the hebrew and aramaic repertoires necessary for both a halakhic posek and commentator and a modernist poet.
most andalusi jews, though, would likely have a more restricted repertoire: vernacular andalusi arabic, vernacular ibero-romance, and some liturgical familiarity with classical and classicizing hebrews – maybe more*, but certainly not less. it’s not very clear to me what their level of familiarity with any classical or classicizing arabic would’ve been: i would guess pretty minimal (partly by thinking about working-class italian jews’ relationship to latin), but i wonder how knowable it is. one question about poets like halevi, ibn ezra, and hanagid is whether their popularity was just with the elites, or with ordinary people as well – if the latter, we can guess that everyday jews (and maybe at least some everyday muslims and christians) had some familiarity with classicizing literary hebrew and with both classical and modernist arabic poetic forms (though not necessarily more than the linguistic and poetic familiarity it took for 20thC arabic-speakers to enjoy music sung in english).
.
* especially if we accept the fairly plausible idea that a lot of the jews who came to al-andalus in and after 711 were amazigh, and thus that there could be some meaningful founder effects as they served as the founding nuclei of communities that grew rapidly through affiliation of various kinds (the usual pattern of jewish ethnogenesis).
LH has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehek_language
already been in the Hattery?
(find the pdf which the article in is based on here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Berber+Text+%28s%29%3F+Egyptian , the part abot the papyrus is on p 333. I’m not liinking the file for its address isn’t necessarily static… There are two earlier publications about the papyrus, the author says: Botti 1899, and Roccati, Alessandro, 2008. “Alien Speech: Some Remarks on the Language of the Kehek.” (and I think Roccati, Alessandro, and Giuseppina Lenzo, 2011. Magica Taurinensia: il grande papiro magico di Torino e i suoi duplicati.?), but I didn’t know anything about it and curuous what Berberologists can say about it)
I think many Texans do think that Texas is the right level of generality in quite a lot of contexts.
This has been my experience as well.
LH has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehek_language already been in the Hattery?
No, and thanks for that — what an interesting bit of linguistic detritus! It sounds like it’s only barely attested, and in a form that makes it difficult to know much about the language. Odd that only English Wikipedia has an article…
“though it’s nature as a fragmentary text makes it hard to identify as anything other than Afro-Asiatic” (WP) is a ridiculous thing to say. There are points about the text that look specifically Berber; there is nothing about the text that looks generally Afroasiatic. From memory of the article itself, the word for “snake” is very clear, and is an argument for Berber affiliation; the rest is difficult to interpret.
Yes, it repeats a word ṯꜣ-r-mꜥ-tꞽ really often (and isn’t the first line a title? the second is, in Egyptian)
In the author’s opiinion it recembles a word for ‘snake’ from another papyrus, wꜥ-ṯꜣ-hꜣ-r-mꜥ.
ṯꜣ he says, when objecting to Roccati’s ‘Semitic’ interpretation, would, if it were Semitic, reflect “an underlying Semitic fricative phoneme” and then (without comments, I think) transcribes it as /z/ and compares to northern Berber √ZRM (azrəm, “large serpent” – I don’t know how basic is this word) .
Nothing about any other word. (He also has some ideas about Berber verbal prefixes and suffixes and compares it to reconstructed Berber phonology)
___
(there’s more in the article about ‘Libyan’ names, which gives some context and which I’ll read I think)
s3-m-m “poison” for Proto-Semitic
If this is potentially related, it would be something about the text that looks generally Afro-Asiatic
Seems to me that the text is far too obscure to say that it “looks Afro-Asiatic.” Wherein does this supposed Afro-Asiatic look consist? Some circular argument seems to be going on here. Why not “Nilo-Saharan” or “Niger-Congo”? Or an isolate? No words have been positively identified (just one fairly plausible guess), and no morphology, and the script is highly defective – unsuitable, really, for any language but the Egyptian it was designed for.
It seems quite probable on external grounds that the language might be Afroasiatic, but there’s no way to deduce any such thing from the actual text.
If it can be interpreted as Berber or Berber-related, well and good. Otherwise, “Afro-Asiatic” is surely pure guesswork.
It’s WP. Perhaps influenced by the genre ‘xxx must be Indo-European based on the distribution (of morphemes or signs for phonemes)’
Well, it (kinda) worked for Linear B, I suppose …
There just doesn’t seem to be anything like enough material to do anything similar here, though.
@PP, and the verbal prefix, if verbal and if it’s a prefix:)
Which is вилами на воде писано.
and the verbal prefix
Obviously Niger-Congo, then …
(Or possibly Nilo-Saharan, of course. Or Sumerian …)
(Middle) Egyptian, of course, though certainly Afro-Asiatic, doesn’t have verbal prefixes … (Just sayin’.)
DE, for Mahdani cf h mobile in Kalilh* Gibran.
(*a honest typo, but so hilarious given my claim it’s ‘mobile’ that i won’t change it:))
DE, I mean this
https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/70770 (or https://www.jstor.org/stable/26849625)
Semito-Berber prefix. He thinks he is (may be) seeing it in the text..
“Egyptian…doesn’t have verbal prefixes …”
A stray language from the Egyptian group would be funnier than Berber:)
“…phonemic inventory shows promising similarity to that of reconstructed proto-Berber, much more so than it does, for example, to Egyptian, Semitic, or even Nilo-Saharan phonemic inventories…” – p 339. A comparison to Egyptian transcription of Semitic and NiSa would have been more informative: as a Finnish speaker noted, Russian has 7 s-sounds (Arabic has 3 x’s, I say).
phonemic inventory shows promising similarity to that of reconstructed proto-Berber, much more so than it does, for example, to Egyptian, Semitic, or even Nilo-Saharan phonemic inventories…
How on earth could one conclude that, given that the writing system is based specifically on Egyptian?
There is no “Nilo-Saharan phonemic inventory”, on account of the fact that there is no “Nilo-Saharan.” And the “system” given in the WP “Kehek” article would do fine for any number of languages. However, it bears no actual resemblance to proto-Berber:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Berber_language#Consonants
I suspect the WP “Kehek” consonant table is just a mistake, though. It has a whole column for “pharyngeals” – which is completely blank …
What the article presumably implies that the Egyptian transliteration failed to make all the phonemic distinctions of the language being written.
That seems quite likely on first principles, but not only allows for a conveniently large amount of latitude in identifying (say) Berber cognates, but also means that the statement about the phonemic system resembling proto-Berber is based on a wholly circular argument. You can only say that if you have already shown that the language being (defectively) represented is, in fact, Berber.
Note that the transcription j is an Egyptological convention, and at least by this period the sound was not in fact [j]. Cf jnk = Coptic ⲁⲛⲟⲕ “I.”
I suppose it could be an interesting quantitative question how much of a corpus would be necessary to be able to say something about the affiliations of a language in a case like this. For comparison, I am thinking of Linear A, which we can also pronounce, albeit imperfectly, because we know how to read Linear B. The Linear A corpus is substantial, and so we can understand enough about its phonemic inventory to draw reasonably firm inferences about what the language’s (or languages’) genetic affiliations are not—but much less about what they actual are