Cross-linguistic Morpheme Analysis

[Frank Antonson]

Chester,

I am so glad that you seem to understand this so well. I am over my head, but in awe.

What I can principally offer is fun with Reed-Kellogg in whatever language.

Frank

 

[Frank Antonson]

When I think about it, though, since I am close to retirement and may be able to look forward to much more free time, some understanding of this macrofamily COULD be something for me to "tackle".

Chester, you continue to amaze me with your scholarship.

 

[Frank Antonson]

Chester,

About the website <Livemocha.com> -- membership is free and well worth it. I have not actively been studying a language there lately, but last year I refreshed my Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German and began to learn Italian, Icelandic, and Hindi.
What might be more important to you is that you can get involved with a circle of enthusiastic want-to-be linguists from all over the world, speaking all kinds of languages.

Frank

 

[chester_100]

If you have a plan to work on Hindi, you will be so close to Persian. Working on German and French will be just awesome.
The macrofamily seems to be a perpetual horizon.

And the circle of enthusiastic want-to-be linguists from all over the world is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I’m not yet familiar with the mechanism of that website, but I’m very curious.
Demystifying the cryptic history of language is indeed inviting.
Wish I had more time.

 

[Frank Antonson]

I sure wish I had more time as well.

I chose Hindi and Icelandic because I thought they were about as far apart as Indo-European languages could get.

On Livemocha it takes a while to build a group of friends of the kind one wants, but there is usually a very wide choice.

The last I looked there were 34 languages to choose from. It is when you start the process of learning one that you begin to find friends available.

Let me know if you go on the site. I will "friend" you.

 

[chester_100]

I’ve already done that. But as I said it’s sort of confusing: I mean, is there something like a Forum there too where people can send posts publicly? Or just private messages? I would be honored to have you as my friend.

Yes, Hindi, or better said Sanskrit, is an important element of Indo-European languages. Some people believe it might be one of the very first proto-languages.

Please share your knowledge with me about Hindi, and I’ll try to find the correlations existing across Indo-Iranian languages. Here’s an example:

Ahriman is a word belonging to this family, and its pronunciation reminds me of Indian dialects. Upon closer investigation, I found out that RIMAN means deception and its morphological structure involves rim (maliciousness) + man (self).
As I’ve already mentioned, man in Farsi means I.
Can we propose that the English word man has historically something to do with the Perso-Indian root? To come up with an answer we need an Indian expert. Do you think if it’s possible to find one in that website?

 

[Frank Antonson]

Chester,

I barely began to study Hindi on Livemocha.com. and I am not nearly the linguist that you are.

What I know about those proto-languages is basically that about two hundred words of proto-indo-European have been reconstructed, along with its case system (I think there are 7 cases). The information, however, may be outdated. I'll have to look back into it. I'm sure there are scholars working intensely on the matter.

Regarding Livemocha.com, I don't think there is a forum. You have your work reviewed by a circle of friends -- and others. What you do in return is review others' submissions.

A friend that I have on that site (who is also on this site as "knowledge") is "Learn Languages". She knows Urdu and other languages. She actually diagrammed a sentence in Urdu for me. If you find her, tell her I sent you.

I have many other friends on that site as well, and I usually selected them from those that approached me who were native speakers of obscure languages. I'll have to go back and look at the list. I haven't used the site as much this year as I did last year.

 

[Frank Antonson]

Chester,

I have begun to take a sort of inventory of the Livemocha friends I have. It occurred to me that I could contact them all if we had a specific project that we would like them to help with.

I'll get back to you when I've gone through the list. You can see how active they have been and how recently they have been on the site. You can also see how serious they are about learning languages.

I had thought at one point of trying to assemble a sort of "League of Extraordinary Linguists".

 

[Frank Antonson]

Okay,

The result of my "inventory". Twenty-six friends who are actively engaged in studying multiple languages. They are native speakers of 17 languages: English, Mandarin, Ukranian, Russian, Croatian, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Indonesian, Portuguese, Tagalog, Hungarian, Farsi, and Cantonese. Arabic, Spanish.
I am reasonably certain they would all respond to a message sent from me. That all have English as a sort of "lingua franca".

This is not to mention the various viewers on this website.

 

[chester_100]

Chester,

I barely began to study Hindi on Livemocha.com. and I am not nearly the linguist that you are.

What I know about those proto-languages is basically that about two hundred words of proto-indo-European have been reconstructed, along with its case system (I think there are 7 cases). The information, however, may be outdated. I'll have to look back into it. I'm sure there are scholars working intensely on the matter.

Regarding Livemocha.com, I don't think there is a forum. You have your work reviewed by a circle of friends -- and others. What you do in return is review others' submissions.

Most probably that’s true because I spend 15 mins tying to find one, but I couldn’t. Instead, there was a list of members whose interests were similar to mine.

A friend that I have on that site (who is also on this site as "knowledge") is "Learn Languages". She knows Urdu and other languages. She actually diagrammed a sentence in Urdu for me. If you find her, tell her I sent you.


That’s really a good idea.

I have many other friends on that site as well, and I usually selected them from those that approached me who were native speakers of obscure languages. I'll have to go back and look at the list. I haven't used the site as much this year as I did last year.

Did your interaction with the speakers of those obscure languages involve word or morpheme analysis?

 

[chester_100]

A League of Extraordinary Linguists maybe with extraordinary language knowledge! That’s enticing.

The language research group you mentioned is really comprehensive. I’d love to have access to their findings online.
Do they all belong to one language group?
And yes I’ve seem some calculations measuring members’ activities. Yet I have no idea what they are all about.
Thank you.

 

[Frank Antonson]

The only thing that the group has in common is that they are all my Livemocha friends.

Probably none of them thinks of themselves as linguists -- just people who want to learn languages.

One, for example, whose username is Branka, a Croatian and English native speaker, is spending an unbelievable amount of time studying languages on that site.

Today, I began to study a language again, because I remembered how interesting it is -- along with the community you find. I chose Swedish for now.

The language lessons are set up as "parallel texts" so that if you go from one language to another, the material is the same. I should probably start to diagram the material.

 

[Frank Antonson]

Chester,

You will understand the site best when you start to study some language on it -- either one you already know or one that is not too exotic.

Remember, it is free. You will need to get a headset with a microphone on it, though. They don't cost much.

Frank

 

[chester_100]

Oh I see. First I thought they were members of a research group. I have a microphone but I want to be more focused on writing exercises, if the microphone is for listening/ speaking practices.
So the measurements are made based on a user's saved results of some tests. That's interesting and encouraging.
Well one of the languages I wanted to study was Sanskrit whose teaching materials are not available there.

 

[chester_100]

Which one of these is the proto form?

v Osteo
¨ ΟΣΤΌ (Greek)
¨ Osto khan (Persian)

 

[Frank Antonson]

I can't answer that without some research.

About Livemocha...The points are an accumulation of actions of all sorts from submitting exercises, written or spoken, to completing lessons, to reviewing others' work, to chatting.

I know what you mean about Sanskrit. Latin is not there either. Nor is Swahili. Over the past year, however, I have seen the number of languages offerred go from about 11 to about 31.

I have a friend there -- an 80-yr-old Frenchman -- who desperately wanted to learn Hungarian. Eventually it appeared as a choice and made him a happy man.

 

[mmasny]

Wow! That’s an intricate language galaxy.

The morphological reconstruction reminds of some of the characteristics of Farsi:


v No inflectional morpheme for the third person.
v ʔaba:we have this word in Persian.It has remaned unchanged!!!
v ʔ[a]b∇:we also have this one which is pronounced /aab/.
v /mi/: reminds me of /man/ = I.
v /tuː/:I have already mentioned this one in my contrastive picture where I called it a prehistoric cognate.
v /mæ/: this one has remained unchanged in modern Persian.
v /q̕o/:and this one is, in Persian, pronounced /kee/ = who.
v /borV/:very intersting!!! This is in Persian pronounced /barf/ and means snow.

Thanks a lot mmansy!

I need to scrutinize it more, because I find the phonology perplexing.
I hope other members discover modern forms of the proto-forms in that list and share them with us, and also hope what Frank hopes about it.

I'll name some things that I can recognize and think they can be interesting.

-/k̕a/ "diminutive" - /k/ suffixes are live diminutive morphemes in Polish. Of course, I can't be sure they are etymologically identical to /k̕a/. I'll try to do some research.

- /t̕i/ and/or /si/ (nominative) - as in most Indo-European languages it remains clearly distinguishable in Polish - ty (thou/you)

- /mæ/ (inclusive 'we') - there's no distinction between inclusive and exclusive 'we' in Polish, but interestingly the word is my.

- *ʔemA 'mother' - mama/matka = mum/mother

What really interests me is this:
/mi/ - h₁eǵom /ʔegʲom/
What made our Proto-Indo-European ancestors add the 'g' sound before the /m/ root?
Speaking of Polish and generally Slavic languages, our common /azъ/ or /jazъ/ root denoting first person nominative seems not to be fully understood etymologically. But this information is more than 50 years old, so it doesn't have to be very true.

 

[chester_100]

-/k̕a/ "diminutive" - /k/ suffixes are live diminutive morphemes in Polish. Of course, I can't be sure this is etymologically the same morpheme. I'll try to do some research.

That's another very interesting similarity. Persian employs that morpheme for the same purpose, but its distribution is limited.
Since it's a consonant, we need a vowel to make it phonologically adaptable. Is there any vowels in Polish to do that too?
Example:
Pesar+ a + k (little + boy)

Your point concerning the reason why such consonant clusters were used is really interesting too. I believe we need some comparative historical research.

Chester

 

[mmasny]

Unfortunately, I'm not a student of lingustics so I have little knowledge of Polish works on morphological history of the Polish language. I have one book at home, but there's little about these things there.

Yes, we employ vowels to make those of course. But there are more ways than one to do that and I am not sure about their roots' being identical.
Examples:
lasek = las + ek (little wood, las = wood) masculine
piąstka = piąst + ka (little fist, pięść = fist) feminine
sitko = sit + ko (little sieve, sito = sieve) neuter

The above seem all the same to me. Below go examples of the -ik/-yk suffix, which could be different historically from them:
planik = plan + ik (little plan, plan = plan) masculine, maybe a little neological, but certainly natural
piecyk = piec + yk (little oven, piec = oven) masculine

I'm having problems coming up with feminine and neuter counterparts right now.

 

[chester_100]

Unfortunately, I'm not a student of lingustics so I have little knowledge of Polish works on morphological history of the Polish language. I have one book at home, but there's little about these things there.I understand. A linguist trying to reconstruct old structures is usually hindered by a paucity of resources.

Yes, we employ vowels to make those of course. But there are more ways than one to do that and I am not sure about their roots' being identical.
Examples:
lasek = las + ek (little wood, las = wood) masculine
piąstka = piąst + ka (little fist, pięść = fist) feminine
sitko = sit + ko (little sieve, sito = sieve) neuter

Wow! Apparently the vowels can occur either before or after the morpheme.
The above seem all the same to me. Below go examples of the -ik/-yk suffix, which could be different historically from them:
planik = plan + ik (little plan, plan = plan) masculine, maybe a little neological, but certainly natural
Yes, because as it seems plan is originally Latin. It might have been borrowed from English though; just guessing!
Such unusual structures sound humorous in Farsi.

piecyk = piec + yk (little oven, piec = oven) masculine

I'm having problems coming up with feminine and neuter counterparts right now.</div>As you know very well, linguistic gender became obsolete in Persian long ago, I think in the Middle Persian.

Ch