I seem never to have posted about Livonian, which surprises me, since I’ve always found it one of the more interesting dead-or-dying languages. Alastair Gill at BBC Travel writes about its current situation, opening with Davis Stalts talking about his seafaring grandfather, who “seldom spoke in Latvian to his grandson: he would relate his stories in a language full of extended vowels, dipthongs and tripthongs.”
It was only when Stalts reached the age of nine or 10 that he started to understand that aside from a few relatives, nobody else around him spoke like this. “I remember thinking, what’s going on? Why does nobody speak this language? Only some very old people.”
In fact, Stalts’ grandfather was one of the last native speakers of Livonian, a language now considered by linguists to be on the verge of extinction. Unlike Latvian, which is an Indo-European language from the Baltic group, Livonian belongs to the group of Finno-Ugric tongues, most of which are spoken by ethnic minorities in modern-day Russia. Like its cousins Finnish and Estonian, it has a complex grammar […].
Today’s Livonian population is estimated at just around 200, making them Europe’s smallest ethnic minority. But it wasn’t always this way. For centuries this Finno-Ugric race of fishermen thrived on Latvia’s remote western shores, with as many as 30,000 people speaking the language in medieval times. The Livonians carefully preserved their distinct heritage as the region passed from German to Russian hands, and eventually, in the early 20th Century, became part of an independent Latvian republic.
But the war years and subsequent decades of Soviet occupation brought harsh repressions, executions and deportations for Latvians and Livonians alike – for Stalin, anyone with a strong sense of national identity was a threat. […] By the time Latvia regained independence in 1991, the Livonian community was fragmented, and extensive intermarriage with Latvians had seen the use of the language dwindle. Grizelda Kristiņa, the last true native speaker of Livonian, died in 2013, leaving just a handful of Livonians who were able to communicate in the language.
But there’s an ongoing revival effort:
Aware that time is running short, many Livonians are reconnecting with their linguistic heritage in an attempt to prevent it from being lost forever. And a couple of families are making the effort to bring up their children immersed in their ancestral language, ensuring that several members of the next generation grow up as something close to native speakers.
Since fewer than 30 of today’s Livonians are able to converse in their native tongue, music has become an important way of connecting to their ancestral heritage. Several folk groups and vocal ensembles perform old songs celebrating the traditional Livonian way of life.
Stalts and his girlfriend Monta Kvjatkovska, who is also Livonian, are attempting to get the younger generation involved, too. The couple have formed NeiUm, which he describes as a more “avant-garde” project: “We sing in Livonian, mixed with some electronic music with ethnic vibes.”
Needless to say, I applaud their efforts. And if you want something more scholarly, Christopher Moseley of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies compares the situation of Livonian with that of Manx Gaelic: “I’d like to concentrate on some specific aspects of Manx and Livonian: their decline as speech communities, the development of orthographic norms, and language revival.” Thanks, mapache!
Right… and unlike Latvian and Russian.
Yeah, I cropped the sentence because the examples were even stupider than the generalization.
Synchronicity. Livonian is one the languages besides Basque that I most missed from yesterday’s Marine Lexicon site.
My favorite opening sentence of any scholarly work, from Kiparsky’s “Livonian stød” (2006):
The whole paper is worth reading through. The speculations about the relation of Livonian stød to the Latvian Stoßton at the end are very interesting.
I would like to know which words called Thomsen’s attention to stød in his brief encounter.
I am slightly puzzled by “smallest ethnic minority,” unless we are to understand that the dynamics of assimilation and intermarriage have been such that outside the 200-odd speakers there’s no one who self-identifies as “Livonian” in an ethnic sense even if they don’t have some facility with the language? That’s not how it usually works, but maybe?
According to the parts quoted in the OP, ~200 Livonians, ~30 speakers.
Here are some relevant websites on Youtube:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=livonian+youtube
On the second one, the last native speaker speaks the language.
Language Hat: where the aggressive imperialism of the mighty Latvian language was finally exposed.
Probably most of those would have been Salaca Livonians in the Vidzeme region, though. I cannot imagine the coastal Courland Livonian villages ever having had more than some thousands of speakers altogether, nor have I heard of Livonian presence in most of Courland. (They kind of make a local analogue to coastal Swedes in Finland or Estonia, now that I think of it.)
One very likely candidate might be me’r ‘sea’. Others you might easily run into include e.g. a’b ‘help’, si’ddõ ‘to tie’, si’nni ‘blue’, tē’ḑ ‘star’.
Yes, describing having 17 cases as complex is fair enough, but how on earth are having no gender for nouns and having no future tense supposed to be examples of complexity?
@Xerîb: It’s not related to Livonian in any way, but I noticed something interesting about the URL in your post. A World-Wide Web address that starts with “web” is generally a sign of a very early Web presence, which is not surprising for Stanford. When I was an undergraduate, the main MIT address was http://web.mit.edu/; the http://www.mit.edu address was instead owned by the Student Information Processing Board, although around 2000, as the Web 1.0 became more standardized, SIPB agreed to turn their address into a redirect to the Institute’s main site.
Livonians are the indigenous people in the region (well, they lived there for the last couple of thousand years at least) and the Latvians (or rather various Baltic tribes which later became Latvians) are later intruders.
IIRC, the Latvians settled the Livonia region (ie, the Baltic coast of Latvia from Riga upwards) only after the German Knights conquered both Livonia and Latvian tribes in the 13th century.
Perhaps the Knights found easier to give orders to Indo-European Latvians than to Finno-Ugric Livonians.
From the wiki-article, an indication that language death was building up for quite some time, plus the impact of various exogenous shocks of the misfortune of being located in Europe (“the Dark Continent of the 20th Century,” as it is said): “As reported in the Estonian newspaper Eesti Päevaleht,[35] Viktors Bertholds was born in 1921 and probably belonged to the last generation of children who started their (Latvian-medium) primary school as Livonian monolinguals; only a few years later it was noted that Livonian parents had begun to speak Latvian with their children. During World War II, Bertholds, unlike most Livonian men, managed to avoid being mobilized in the armies of either occupation force by hiding in the woods.”
A brief encounter with a Livonian sailor, eh? Say no more, say no more!
Livisches Wörterbuch mit grammatischer Einleitung
Kettunen, Lauri Einari
https://fennougrica.kansalliskirjasto.fi/handle/10024/89823
Enjoy:
“We are a cognitive scientist and language scientist from the Puzzle of Danish group at Aarhus University and Cornell. Through our research, we have found that the uniquely peculiar way that Danes speak seems to make it difficult for Danish children to learn their native language – and this challenges some central tenets of the science of language.”
I’m almost stunned that race can still be used like that in English.
True – but, to be fair, so was everyone else.
Maybe Manx should actually start that afresh…
Livonia sounds like a perfect name for the setting of a Ruritanian novel. (I think I’m reading about Evallonia at the moment, maybe that’s why…)
Yes, and Courland was right next door! (Or Kurland, but that doesn’t sound so Ruritanian.)
I have wondered whether the name Livonia influenced the creation of another fictional state—Doctor Doom’s small eastern European dominion of Latveria. The name Latvia was obviously an influence, but the existence of the additional Baltic regional names Livonian and Lithuania may have suggested that “L——ia” was just a characteristic name type. Stan Lee (and Jack Kirby, who may or may not have contributed to the naming) were both children of eastern European Jewish immigrants, and they were probably more familiar with the historical geography of the region than most of their readers.
It also occurs to me that there was also the eastern European state of Lapathia (previously ruled by the tyrannical Asimov dynasty, until their overthrow in 1925) in The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints, one of the lesser Three Investigators titles, written by M. V. Carey (rather than the creator of the series Robert Arthur or the prolific William Arden). Carey liked to include paranormal elements in her mysteries, although there was (almost) always a realistic explanation in the end. (The villains were typically trying to scare somebody.)
Latveria… I sense influence of Karelia.
Not L-initial because too far from the Baltic I guess, but for my money the best such Ruritania-adjacent country is Vulgaria (discovered by Roald Dahl).
Miroslav Krleža had a wonderful Ruritanian novel set in a state called Blitva.
The name is similar enough to Litva (Croatian for Lithuania), with a litral meaning of ‘silverbeet’.
The second half of Latveria < Bulgaria?
P.S. Why English Hungary but Bulgaria?
Bulgary would sound too close to buggery (which is by the way ultimately derived from Bulgaria).
@Y: I don’t know, but the development in German is parallel to English, with “Ungarn” versus “Bulgarien.” “Hungaria” is attested in medieval Latin, but that may represent a levelling that was never really present in the (Germanic) vernacular. The difference might go all the way back to the exonyms used for the tribes in the Dark Ages, e.g., “Ungri” versus “Bulgari.” (Both those names are likely of Turkic, but if so, Ungri, indicating an Oghuz group, is an obvious misnomer for the Magyars.)
J.Pysynen: Probably most of those would have been Salaca Livonians in the Vidzeme region, though. I cannot imagine the coastal Courland Livonian villages ever having had more than some thousands of speakers altogether, nor have I heard of Livonian presence in most of Courland. (They kind of make a local analogue to coastal Swedes in Finland or Estonia, now that I think of it.)
I also understood this to be about the Courland Livonians, but that’s because I hought 30 000 would be too few for the Vidzeme population.
e.g., “Ungri” versus “Bulgari.”
In Russian, венгры vs. болгары; apparently the specific modern form венгры (with an alternate epenthesis) is borrowed from Polish, but the historical form is угры, with the same ending.
(As a side-note, I also tried to figure out if the “Ugric” in “Finno-Ugric” refers to the Hungarians or the Yugra. Apparently it’s probably originally the former but more recently usually interpreted as the latter, and in this particular context might have been chosen as a term that could be either. The languages of the two groups are each other’s closest relatives, but the names might not be related.)
You can listen to Davis’ grandfather Oskar Stalts speaking Livonian here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97oZ-6cPPfo&t=457s); Davis is the little boy dancing with his sister (Julgi Stalte, now a musician and the lead singer of Tulli Lum, a Livonian-Estonian band that sings mainly in Livonian). The voiceover is in Estonian.
The song Julgi is singing (from about 00:21 onwards) is a Livonian knee-bouncing song:
dilda, dilda, dilda, dildarišši
sin pūoga um delvõrišši
(x2)
ding dong mōnika,
pitkā vīzõs jālgas,
kripš-kräpš kājnalõs,
vaimi vaimi veis kilgs
Rough translation (not exactly the same as what Oskar says from 01:21 onwards):
‘dilda, dilda, dilda, dildarišši
your son is a mischievous one
(x2)
ding dong, a peasant
wearing a long shoe
a kripš-kräpš ( = whetstone) under his arm
a sharp, sharp knife at his side’
Latvian as the encroaching major world language in this case reminds me of the fairly area somewhere in the Caucasus where Avar is the lingua franca for speakers of the lesser languages of the area. There are (or have been) a lot of tiny languages out there.
@Y: I don’t know, but the development in German is parallel to English, with “Ungarn” versus “Bulgarien.”
The first is historically a plural of the ethnonym Ungar; that kind of country designation is old and mostly used for German tribes (Sachsen, Bayern and neighbouring people (the Hungarians regularly invaded Germany in the 10th century and also were immediate neighbours of the German-speaking area). The names in -ien are the German equivalent of latinate names in -ia.
Hungary does match Italy, but other examples seem to be obsolete (Araby, Muscovy, Barbary).
Some French/Italian provinces: Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Picardy, Lombardy, Tuscany (but Umbria, Campania)
It does seem odd and arbitrary when you look at a list like that. Here’s the OED on Brittany:
@hat
The Bretons, Normans and Lombards are tribes, so that would fit in to Hans’ ethonym vs latinate toponym distinction. I am not sure about the Picards ????.
The Bulgars are a tribe too.
Where does the wheat come in?
I once saw a mention of “vulgar wheat.”
Bulgar, meaning streamed wheat groats, is from Turkish bulgur; some people prefer that spelling even in English. The Turkish term is apparently by metathesis from Arabic burgul, which was borrowed from Persian.
In 10th or 11th grade we used a nice historical atlas, and on one of its pages the Kingdom of the Volga Bulgars was floating in the middle of nowhere out on the steppe. I’ve spent the remainder of my life figuring out who they were. This is a work in progress. There’s nothing very good in English and I don’t read Russian. The Wiki article is “multiple issues” , though it’s far better than the wretched Wiki article of 5 years ago.
John, I feel about the same about them. I think it is what is called “forest steppe” (лесо-степь in Russian), but I honestly do not know its exact limits, proportion of agruiculturalism and pastoralism and limits of forests in Middle Ages too.
And I just discovered something that I should have known but did not know: in the Turkic (and possibly medieval Muslim – and maybe before that Ugric?) world Volga (that is, Itil) flows from the east. The sequence of rivers called in Russian Belaya(“White [river]”)-Kama-Volga is Itil, while what I call Volga is its tributary. It is logical.
Latvian as the encroaching major world language in this case reminds me of the fairly area somewhere in the Caucasus where Avar is the lingua franca for speakers of the lesser languages of the area. There are (or have been) a lot of tiny languages out there.
DE wrote in the neighbouring thread (about cases) “Their usage would be passed on in secret by grandmothers (but never to firstborn children.) Teaching them at school would (obviously) be forbidden.” and BBC described Livonian as being complex because of its 16 cases – maybe it is worth noting here that for a long time Tabasaran (a Lezgic langauge from the same region) adorned the section “most complex langauge” of the Guinness Book as a lnaguage with most noun cases, until its (the section’s) abolition in 1998.
The have endless locatives. I do not know if it is correct to analyze them as “cases” or not, but they have many sorts of locative forms. (there was an objection that if those are counted as cases then some other related languages e.g. Tzez have several times more of them).
—
Unfortunately, they do teach them in school which maybe can explain recent deline in use of some of them:)
@J. W. Brewer:
This comment made me go check publication dates, because I was sure I’d seen Vulgaria mentioned in Lawrence Durrell’s Esprit de Corps — which predates Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by over a decade.
It turns out neither Dahl nor Durrell were being particularly original; lots of people seem to have independently come up with the name, the earliest I’ve found being Emerson, Henabery and Loos for the script of Reaching for the Moon (1917).
I guess in Greek Bulgaria must be Vulgaria…
The have endless locatives. I do not know if it is correct to analyze them as “cases” or not, but they have many sorts of locative forms. (there was an objection that if those are counted as cases then some other related languages e.g. Tzez have several times more of them).
AFAIK the situation is essentially that in North Caucasian languages the likes of “from out of in under there” are suffixes (instead of e.g. prepositions, as in SAE languages), and thus look like cases. (And there’s a lot of them; all those mountains mean that three-dimensional thinking can be quite useful.)
The problem with counting them as cases is that those suffixes (not unlike the corresponding SAE prepositions) are compositional, like in Turkish; IIRC in some of the relevant languages they had somewhat fused together by sound change/sandhi, which does make the similarity to cases greater. Perhaps Tabarasan is among that subset and Tsez isn’t.
Meanwhile the Uralic situation seems to be legitimate cases, of the European variety, except even more of them – constructions that share the same case in IE languages often get separated into different ones in Uralic, but they’re all different things instead of just a lot of variants of locatives. IIRC 16 is actually nowhere near as high as it gets, and Finnish and/or Hungarian (forgot which) is said to have as many as 27.
(I wonder if there are any languages that mark cases by something other than suffixes. Offhand I can’t think of any, though some English prepositions are close enough to cases to suggest that suffixes are clearly not the only option.)
Random fun fact: constructions like “afraid of X” that are too unique to exactly match any pre-existing case tend to get lumped with some random one (depending on the specific language and/or construction) – and in North Caucasian languages the “some random one” can be one of the locative variants.
The Uralic case record is indeed Hungarian. Second place goes to Komi dialects with 18; Finnish dialects with a maximum of 17 is already shared bronze. The median is probably under 10 (less than this in every Samic or Samoyedic variety and every Ob-Ugric variety aside from Eastern Khanty).
Quite a few Samic languages mark, in most inflection classes, the genitive–accusative singular primarily by consonant gradation with no overt suffix anymore, say Northern nom.sg. giella : gen.sg. giela ‘language’.
About cases, there is agreement. And… Before 18th century (and later in folk poetry ) in Russian you could say:
to Yuri to Ontsiforov
what is left of my vessels of silver [ones]
to Danube to bank
(examples from some random text offered by google: к Юрью к Оньцифорову, изъ моихъ судовъ изъ серебрьныхъ, к Дунаю к берегу).
Which makes prepositions cases:((((
“Emerson, Henabery. and Loos”: That’s JOHN Emerson, if you please, the movie director husband of Anita Loos (“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”). Emerson was a pen name; his ignoble real name was Clifton Paden. He apparently a pretty good director and a talented jerk, as per film generally, though not as bad as history’s most famous John Emerson, who was Dred Scott’s owner. Loos was a much more interesting and fun person.
The “Vulgaria” joke is not a hard one to come up with, and I am reluctant to claim precedence for my namesake.
And yes, I know that that’s a misuse of “namesake”.
Loos is VERY interesting and her wiki is well done.
And yes, I know that that’s a misuse of “namesake”.
Nah, it just means “A person who or thing which has the same name as another” (OED, 2003).
German has Namensvetter, “cousin-by-name”.
Russian has тёзка (< Slavonic тьзъ)
Oh that’s right, it’s grammar policing that’s forbidden here, not contemporary usage. Forgot where I was for the moment, as oldsters often do
According to the OED, the Bulgars are Finnish.
While we’re at it, there’s Borzok, the country of origin of Ossip Gregorovius in Cortazar’s Rayuela.
And Sicily.
Also Tartary.
German actually has an equivalent in -ei (end-stressed, feminine, taking the article) from Old French -ie: Türkei, Mongolei, Mandschurei, Slowakei, Lombardei, largely forgotten Walachei (part of Romania), very recently obsolete Tschechei, long obsolete Tartarei. Also Barbarei for lowercase barbary.
Burgundy is just das Burgund, though (also end-stressed), likely because the ending in Bourgogne is less easy to recognize.
Bulgary and Macedony both enjoyed some usage in English writing in the 1600s, but not since then.
but other examples seem to be obsolete (Araby, Muscovy, Barbary).
Muscovy was nearly brought back in the form of Reichskommissariat Moskowien, but fortunately German advance was stopped at the gates of Moscow.
@SFReader: That’s the equivalent of “Muscovia,” not “Muscovy.”
Muscovy
And then there is the Muscovy duck:
Etymology
Common name “Muscovy”
“Muscovy” is an old name for the region of Russia surrounding Moscow, but these ducks are neither native there nor were introduced there before they became known in Western Europe. It is not quite clear how the term came about; it very likely originated between 1550 and 1600, but did not become widespread until somewhat later.
In one suggestion, it has been claimed that the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands traded these ducks to Europe occasionally after 1550;[15] this chartered company became eventually known as the “Muscovy Company” or “Muscovite Company” so the ducks might thus have come to be called “Muscovite ducks” or “Muscovy ducks” in keeping with the common practice of attaching the importer’s name to the products they sold.[15] But while the Muscovite Company initiated vigorous trade with Russia, they hardly, if at all, traded produce from the Americas; thus, they are unlikely to have traded C. moschata to a significant extent.
Alternatively—just as in the “turkey” (which is also from North America, not Turkey) and the “guineafowl” (which are not limited to Guinea)—”Muscovy” might be simply a generic term for an exotic place, in reference to the singular appearance of these birds. This is evidenced by other names suggesting the species came from lands where it is not actually native, but from where much “outlandish” produce was imported at that time (see below).
Yet another view—not incompatible with either of those discussed above—connects the species with the Muisca, a Native American nation in today’s Colombia. The duck is native to these lands also, and it is likely that it was kept by the Muisca as a domestic animal to some extent. It is conceivable that a term like “Muisca duck”, hard to comprehend for the average European of those times, would be corrupted into something more familiar. Likewise, the Miskito Indians of the Miskito Coast in Nicaragua and Honduras heavily relied on it as a domestic species, and the ducks as well may have been named after this region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscovy_duck#Etymology
At the same source:
Although the Muscovy duck is a tropical bird, it adapts well to cooler climates, thriving in weather as cold as −12 °C (10 °F) and able to survive even colder conditions.[8][9] In general, Barbary duck is the term used for C. moschata in a culinary context.
Barbary, Muscovy, one of them places.
the “guineafowl” (which are not limited to Guinea)
This would be “Guinea” in the older sense of the more southerly latitudes of all of West Africa; the adoption of the name for three particular countries has its parallel in the limitation of “Sudan” to one (or, for now, two) particular states, from its general meaning of the entire savanna zone.
The etymon for “guineafowl” (Kusaal kpa’uŋ, plural kpi’ini) is straightforwardly reconstructable to Proto-Oti-Volta, by the way. I just felt it incumbent on me to say that.
Muscovy
AFAIK this is still the accepted historical term (or, at least, one of the accepted historical terms) for the Grand Principality of Moscow (the immediate predecessor of the Tsardom of Russia).
Regarding the duck, I wonder if there’s any evidence for something to the effect of “musky duck” (as eventually featured in the scientific name).
Barbary duck
Perhaps best known, I suspect, as the purported main ingredient (diluted to irrelevance, as usual) in the Oscillococcinum homeopathic pills.
the adoption of the name for three particular countries
…one of which isn’t even within historical Guinea, being on the opposite side of the Gulf of Guinea.
And the fourth one is not even in Africa – Papua New Guinea.
PS. It just occurred to that all these countries could theoretically name their currency guineas with all the prestige and recognition it would get them.
Unfortunately they don’t.
The only country which uses guinea for their currency is, for some obscure reason, Egypt (Arabic name for Egyptian pound – جنيه مصرى Genēh Maṣri)
The continued importance of guineas in British finance as late as 1975 was brought home to me when I was the external examiner of a doctoral thesis at Oxford. The fee was £15.75 (not a princely sum even in 1975, but not small change as it would be today). I thought it was a very peculiar amount until I converted it to guineas.
@Athel Cornish-Bowden: I’ve read about British lawyers invoicing amounts in guineas long after the coins must have been out of circulation. Wikipedia has this to say:
I really should get back to daily visits. I almost missed this, and I posted about Livonian long ago: http://laxmahispajispaji.blogspot.com/2007/06/bangrlivi-jei-sanbau-livonian-or.html?m=1
The turkey is a foreign bird everywhere and is credited to Peru, Ethiopia, Macedonia, Calicut, Egypt, probably elsewhere in one language or another. It is also sometimes confused with the guinea foul.
Yusuf Gürsey, originally from the country that the bird is not from, has made a study of this:
https://ygursey1.blogspot.com/2013/11/happy-meleagris-gullapavo-day-or-how.html
Garrigus Carraig: Google Translate “detected” that the Lojban text was Corsican, but wasn’t able to make sense of it.
Back when I was reading sci.lang twenty years ago, Gürsey was one of the most knowledgeable, prolific, and pleasant people there.
the Lojban text
…apparently the Lojban word for “Livonian” is bangrlivi, which, erm, I didn’t think Lojban was particularly known for its consonant clusters? (And the Lojban word for “the Livonians” seems to be the even more unpronounceable natmrlivi.)
I’m guessing it’s a shorthand of some kind, but if so I can’t tell what it’s a shorthand for.
I couldn’t have put it better myself. He was tremendously helpful to people who asked about Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. He never pretended to know things that he didn’t, and he was very patient with some quite tiresome people. Unfortunately he only make rare appearances today.
bangrlivi, which, erm, I didn’t think Lojban was particularly known for its consonant clusters? (And the Lojban word for “the Livonians” seems to be the even more unpronounceable natmrlivi.
In general you are right: the native-word (so to speak) phonotactics allow at most three consonants in a row; in a compound like bofsnipa ‘sticky patch’, not only must /fs/ be phonotactically licit (a fairly low bar that mostly blocks geminate and voicing-diverse clusters), but /sn/ must be a phonotactically licit onset (much more restrictive).
But in borrowings like these, the /r/ is syllabic, so phonologically and morphologically they are bang-r-livi, natm-r-livi. These join combining forms of bangu ‘language’ and natmi ‘nation’ with the opaque borrowing livi. That way there is no confusion between them. In addition, as Jim Carter said, an educated human being knows what a Borneo is, but a naive or mechanical listener needs help, and is better off with depl-r-borne’o ‘island:Borneo’.
But in borrowings like these, the /r/ is syllabic
Perhaps; but as far as I’m concerned the hard part of a (na)tmrC or (even more so) (de)plrC cluster – even if the r is syllabic – is (usually) not the final C, whatever it is.
I thought that the creators of Lojban tried to make it at least reasonably pronounceable to speakers of major world languages; but if so then this particular setup feels like a major failure in this regard. I have to strain to pronounce those clusters, and I speak what is probably the most consonant-clustery language out of the ones used in the creation of Lojban. I’m not sure I want to imagine how hard would it be for speakers of English, Spanish, or Chinese.
American (rhotic) English, which is the variety of English that was used to create Lojban roots, is actually fine with syllabic /r/ as in butter, whereas syllabic /r/ is unknown in Russian and the other four source languages[*]. However, although natmrlivi and *natmyrlivi are technically distinct, pronouncing the first as the second will not cause any violent confusion, as the second is (I think) morphologically impossible.
Of the four syllabic consonants /m/, /n/, /r/, /l/, only /r/ and marginally /l/ have a morphological role: syllabic /l/ is used in place of /r/ when it is either preceded or followed by an ordinary /r/. A somewhat similar “gluing” role is served by /n/ and /r/ in native compounds, but in that case they are never syllabic.
[*] Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic. Czech and Slovak do have syllabic /r/ and /l/ in roots, as in the Czech tongue-twister Škrt plch z mlh Brd pln skvrn z mrv prv hrd scvrnkl z brzd skrz trs chrp v krs vrb mls mrch srn čtvrthrst zrn ‘A stingy dormouse from the foggy Brdy mountains, which are full of manure spots, first of all proudly shrank a quarter-handful of seeds, a delicacy for mean does [female deer], from the brakes through a bunch of Centaurea flowers into the scrub of willows.’ Sanskrit also has these syllabic consonants, but in Hindi they have become /ri/, /li/ in both native words and learnèd borrowings.
Chinese
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua
Well, that’s not syllabic /r/ but adding r-coloring to syllable finals.
whereas syllabic /r/ is unknown in Russian
I wouldn’t say this: зубр, литр, тигр, сидр, добр, кобр – and that’s just offhand. But it seems to be word-final only, might be limited to words that would have otherwise been monosyllabic, and (as far as I can tell) is never preceded by another sonorant, which is really what made those particular clusters especially hard to pronounce.
EDIT: the word контрпример “counterexample” is one to the first two claims, though I can’t think of any for the last one.
It’s really amazing how the first subsection of the etymology section of the Wikipedia article on the Muscovy duck, the one about “Muscovy”, has never heard of the second subsection, which explains the species name moschata and lists a large number of languages that interpret it correctly as “musk duck”.
Oh no, both sides are “Guinea”. The physical map of the world in my school atlas still had Oberguinea for all of West Africa and Niederguinea for the entire west coast from Cameroon to Angola, if not Namibia.
(I’ve never encountered those terms anywhere else, though… unlike Vorderindien – “Front India”, India/Bangladesh/?Pakistan – and Hinterindien – “Rear India”, Indochina.)
On the phonetic level, more or less, yes; but phonologically, Russian is – like French – in denial about this /r/ being syllabic (also рь, л, ль as in кремль or корабль). It operates with extrasyllabic post-coda consonants.
Wait, is the m syllabic, too? I wouldn’t have a problem with [nat.mr̩.li.vi]…
adding r-coloring to syllable finals
What I had in mind was forms like bangrlivi, which Mandarin speakers would treat exactly like erhua.
What about Пётр? A lot more familiar to most of us than the examples you mention.
What about Пётр?
That works too; I just forgot about it. I suspect that I was thinking of mono/sesqui-syllabic words because my thought process was stuck in examples similar to the first few; there’s also театр.
Wait, is the m syllabic, too? I wouldn’t have a problem with [nat.mr̩.li.vi]…
In retrospect that’s about the only way I can pronounce it at all. I think of this pattern as South Caucasian, but in retrospect it’s more of a West/Southwest Slavic thing; a starting natmrli- wouldn’t really look out of the way in, say, Czech or Croatian.
[EDIT: Google Translate thinks that natmrlivi is Bulgarian and translates it as “gloomy”.]
It operates with extrasyllabic post-coda consonants.
Except when they’re inside a word (…I really should have thought of контрпример), in which case things get tricky.
@jfom
How does tr sound in pronouncing contrprimer? In similar words in French, like contretemps I think I hear con[tr]temps, where the difference is that the r in [tr] is more pronounced (or maybe there is no stop between the t and the r, so the r gets more “playing time”) than when in final position (e.g., contre, centre)
What I had in mind was forms like bangrlivi, which Mandarin speakers would treat exactly like erhua.
But again, it’s not syllabic r, it’s adding r-coloring to syllable finals — it would in fact be erhua.
The WP article linked above does point out that 二 èr ‘two’ and 耳 ěr ‘ear’, along with a bunch of homonyms, are genuinely syllabic in Standard Chinese and not erhua effects: they are pronounced [ɚ]. However, there is never an initial consonant in such syllables. I don’t know the raison d’etre of the 儿 ér ‘child’ in érhuà, but I’d guess it’s simply onomatopoeic: ‘[ɚ]-language’.
No; it’s 儿 “son/child” > diminutive > nominalizer. In the process of grammaticalization, this morpheme lost its sylllabicity. Simplifications of resulting clusters, in particular -nr > -r, are already happening.
Fine, but huà is already a noun: it doesn’t need a nominalizer. A diminutive doesn’t make sense either.
huà
6. Suffix denoting “change into …”. Akin to English -ize and -ization.
民主化 ― mínzhǔhuà ― democratize
化
So I was away for a week.
Puzzle of Danish — so it’s true. Was there supposed to be a link there?
Moskusand, moskusokse, moskushjort. We don’t generally talk about musk as such (whereas English seems to have broadened the word’s application), so moskus itself is a term of art for perfumers.
Tyrkiet, Mongoliet, Manchuriet, Slovakiet, Lombardiet, Tjekkiet, Tjekkoslovakiet, and yes, Burgundiet (quondam nation, now of course Bourgogne). Neuter, you’ll notice. Common gender Slovakien and Tjekkien may be gaining on the neuters, since they are in current use and attracted by countries like Belgien, with stress moved antepenultimately.
So I was away for a week.
Did you fill out the requisite forms? I don’t have them on file. Your pay may be docked.
Lars M.: Moskusand, moskusokse, moskushjort. We don’t generally talk about musk as such (whereas English seems to have broadened the word’s application), so moskus itself is a term of art for perfumers.
Up here the otherwise rare moskus has been extracted from moskusokse and is commonly used as the name of the animal, as seen authoritatively in e.g. Moskusen på Dovre, an information article by the office of the governor of Trøndelag. Probably as a result, the perfume term is usually musk from English, and people are likely to understand moskusand as named after the shaggy animal.
docked — is it OK if I just don’t send in the timesheet, then?
@Trond, we don’t have any of the critters in the wild here, so there is no non-technical referent for moskus — it still feels like a cranberry morpheme. (People may be raising any of them on farms, I’ve heard about camels, kangaroos and ostriches, so why not).
TIL that the “barbary ducks” (berberiænder) sold here are farmed muscovy ducks, mainly from France. So I’ve eaten a few breast filets in my time — nice dark meat but much leaner than domestic ducks.
Moskusen på Dovre — rukket, is that the same as Sw råkat?
No. This is the strong verb å rekke – rakk – har rukket., cognate to Eng. ‘reach’. It means something like “achieve with limited time or resources”. In the example above, “The musk ox was introduced to Dovre and may not belong here, but we’ve had time to grow fond of it.”
Another example: Vi håpa å rekke fram til Oppdal før kvelden, men bensinen rakk ikke lenger enn til Kongsvoll. Vi hadde ikke rukket å fylle på Dombås. “We hoped to reach (get to) Oppdal before the night, but the gas didn’t reach (last) longer than Kongsvoll. We hadn’t reached (found time) to fill at Dombås.”
Sw. råkat is “hit (upon)” -> “happened to”, which would fit well here, but alas.
Sorry, I should have added another step: fossilizing noun marker. Not intended to copy Esperanto, but to decrease homonymy.
Danish has række – rakte – rakt — weak with irregular present, probably umlaut because *-ja. ODS says “commingled with a related strong verb known from Nw and Sw dialects.” We use nå for most of the sense of Nw rekke, though: Vi håbede at nå frem til Oppdal før aften, men benzinen rakte ikke længere end til Kongsvoll. Vi havde ikke nået at fylde på (i) Dombås — and indeed for vi er nået at blive så glade for den.
er nået (til) — ‘have reached’.
har nået (at) — ‘have completed in time’.
Yes, I should have thought about that. We can use nå in most of the senses as well. Å rekke toget = å nå toget = to catch the train in time.
the strong verb å rekke – rakk – har rukket., cognate to Eng. ‘reach’.
No, they’re two different verbs. The Norwegian verb is from Proto-Germanic *rakjaną and is cognate with Eng. retch; Eng. reach is, per the OED (updated December 2008):
So purely West Germanic. (And, alas, purely weak; I was hoping for a “rutch.”)
Thanks, interesting. I thought it was irregular in English, but apparently not. But even if the two are formally unrelated, I’ll claim semantic descendance. The Norw. senses are so similar to the German lookalike that they must have been borrowed.
*rakjaną looks like the ancestor of the Danish weak verb, going rekr (rekja) – rakti – raktr in ON. At Wikt it links to Nw rekkja which is not listed, but Nynorsk Ordbog only gives the weak declension. I don’t know if Trond’s strong one is analogical (stranger things have happened) or has a different ancestry.
The weak class I *raikijaną that gave reach is probably not it.
But yeah, sense-wise MLG rêken is in the mix for Danish and probably Norwegian, though it’s too near my bedtime to start tangling out which come from where. The form of the weak verb does not seem to be influenced by that, however.