Search results for query: *

Forum search Google search

  1. Linguistic Question: Why don't Romance languages have declensions?

    True, situations within which it might occur are imaginable. I guess a better observation is that it 'em is a bound form and never occurs freely. Person 1: I gave it all away. Person 2: Who'd you give it to? Person 1: Them. Person 1: I gave it all away. Person 2: Who'd you give it to...

  2. Linguistic Question: Why don't Romance languages have declensions?

    It seems to me, as a Semitist, to be so logical as not to necessitate contact influence from Hebrew or Arabic or whatever. I guess the more mysterious question is why more IE languages don't do this.

  3. Linguistic Question: Why don't Romance languages have declensions?

    Punic has a personal infinitive (it's called an infinitive construct, as in Biblical Hebrew).

  4. Linguistic Question: Why don't Romance languages have declensions?

    Technically, if we want to be pedantic, the free form hem fell out of use, but a reflex of it survives in some rather restricted contexts as an enclitic pronoun. You might say, book'em, Danno, but you couldn't (or perhaps wouldn't) say **subpoena'em or **amortize'em.

  5. Linguistic Question: Why don't Romance languages have declensions?

    True, but in the case of the language that we are using to communicate here, the pronouns they, them, and their are all of Scandinavian origin (the original hi, hem, and hir have fallen out of use). Although ultimately I endorse the vuestra merced -> vuesarced -> vuested -> usted hypothesis...

  6. Linguistic Question: Why don't Romance languages have declensions?

    With the loss of word-final nasals and sibilants, you're left with short vowels, which are elided in many contexts. Also, the use of a fixed syntax and other case markers (such as prepositions) rendered declensions redundant.

  7. Can the Caliphate establish a lasting presence in Gaul?

    So more or less in the sense that Novak and Ridwan intended then. They're not exactly known for being anti-Muslim bigots.

  8. AHC: Syrian Muslims identified themselves as Mhallamis (and speaking Syriac)

    Most of these, as the Wiki page indicates, are relatively recent converts to Islam. The Mhallamīye are properly those (in most cases,formerly) Central Neo-Aramaic speakers in the region of Mardin who converted to Islam sometime in the 19th century, but there's a global diaspora of them just as...

  9. What if the Caliphate adopted Aramaic?

    There was undoubtedly an ethnic component as well... during this period, up until the Abbasid revolution, to become Muslim was to become an Arab, to the extent of adopting the Arabic language and even entering the tribal system by adoption. It was wholly an ethnic religion, and that's how the...

  10. What if the Caliphate adopted Aramaic?

    As I said in my post upthread, the necessity of reading the Qur'an in Arabic, the impossibility of accepting translated versions, and the scholarly class that this engendered, ensured that Arabic would retain its high status. The colloquial versions of Arabic in the Levant and Mesopotamia are...

  11. What if the Caliphate adopted Aramaic?

    And, as I'm sure you're aware, Pahlavi is virtually useless as an administrative language, which would necessarily be easy to learn and understand, whereas Pahlavi is difficult to learn by design.

  12. What if the Caliphate adopted Aramaic?

    Certain dialects (Syriac, for example) were indeed high status. A colleague of mine recently identified a Judeo-Syriac manuscript (perhaps the first), indicating that this language wasn't necessarily limited in its scope of usage. Plus, there's the evidence of the magic bowls--entire Arab...

  13. What if the Caliphate adopted Aramaic?

    Tell that to the Nabataeans, since that's precisely what they did for centuries. Where do you think the Arabic script came from? One might almost argue that Arabic, and particularly the spoken dialects, are mixed lects (Aramaic substrate, Arabic superstrate). The two languages are actually...

  14. WI New Zealand is colonized 38,000 BC?

    You've opened a rather interesting discussion about proto-languages. Most comparative and historical linguists believe that related languages diverge sufficiently after 10,000 years to lose any semblance that could be identified using our current techniques. Granted, that is a somewhat...

  15. Kingdom of Ormus

    I know that the Portuguese planned to resettle the Mandaeans there. I have some sources back at home and will try to provide them once I'm back from out of town.

  16. WI Michael Moore was assassinated?

    I think I've detected a fatal flaw in this scenario. I hate to be a nitpicker, but you really should have given it more thought before proposing it. I'm speaking, of course, of McDonald's signature "fun, kid-orientated [sic] option", namely the Happy Meal ®. The "super size" option was...

  17. Substantial mestizo population in British America?

    Many Americans do, in fact, claim some degree of native ancestry (rightly or wrongly). The problem is that an individual creole identity has never really arisen here.

  18. How Do You Do Research?

    What does "American learning culture" have to do with anything? Most of my colleagues are Europeans and Israelis and they're quite comfortable with technology and electronic resources, as the link to the Semitisches Tonarchiv I posted earlier demonstrates. That site isn't hosted in the US, and...

  19. No Israel - Effects on Middle East

    Technically, it would be Palestine, the Transjordanian portion of which (today's Hashemite Jordanian Kingdom) was separated from the Cisjordanian portion (today's State of Israel). I doubt you'd have Palestinian national aspirations, which are almost entirely a product of the Nakba. Likewise...

  20. How Do You Do Research?

    Wrong. YouTube has become quite a common resource for language documentation, as language communities seek easy and inexpensive ways to give their languages a higher profile online. A "curated" example of this might be SemArch, the Semitisches Tonarchiv at Heidelberg, to which I've contributed...
Top