btw, interesting to hear about progress on the Elamite script
Apparently this is a Rosetta Stone / Behistun Inscription-type monument, with both Elamite Linear Script and Akkadian. Fascinating!
This will be very interesting! Most of these relations you listed here, aren’t even considered “possession” by some languages. The feet can be considered a thing that are part of you, but not possession, the food comes from “you” but is not “yours” to sell or hold or to put a label on, “property of Ned Flanders”, except it really is possession, and then saying “Your food is excellent” would imply the speaker went and stole it.
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There’s a man living his dream :3
By the way, there’s something I’ve wanted to say for a couple of days:
chameleon literally means ground-lion, and was a calque from Akkadian into Greek. What an awesome name.
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It’s from Akkadian? I didn’t know that, that’s awesome!
In calque.
Akkadian 𒌨𒈤𒊭𒆠 splits into 𒌨𒈤 (nesu, lion), 𒊭 (sa, of), and 𒆠 (qaqqari, ground).
It was then calqued to Greek χαμαιλέων which splits into χαμαί (khamai, on the ground) and λέων (leon, lion).
From whence it became Latin chamaeleon.
Calques are one of my favourite things in etymology, ever since I read a list of them that were noted in the Mesoamerican Sprachbund.
Calques are what make Rhaeto-romance kinda funny, but also kinda annoying. Theres e.g. the German “vorstellen” ‘to imagine’ whicht consists of “vor” ‘in front of’ and “stellen” ‘put’. ‘to imagine’ in German means ‘to put something in front of one’; or ‘to handle smth’ is “mit etwas umgehen”, ‘to go around with something’. Now, Rumantsch says stuff like “metta avant!” and “cun quai stost ir intuorn”. And someone like me, who comes from other romance languages understands that as “put forward!” and “you have to go around with this” which makes no sense at all, at first. It’s like english phrasal verbs calqued into french.
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Do you know of any calques into English?
Oh, wait, I already know one: brainwash comes from Chinese 洗腦
洗 = wash, 腦 = brain
same with long time no see and add oil in Hong Kong-English.
Many many grammatical, philosphical, and also ecclesiastical terms are calques from Greek into Latin, and then into German and the other languages.
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@Sanonius Sorry to put upon you, but the resource @Vsotvep linked sometime earlier relies a lot on the “principal parts of a verb” to explain how participles conjugate. Any chance you could explain what a principle part of a verb is, or should I stop being lazy and look it up?
OK, participles.
The present participle ends in -ns and inflects like egēns.
The future participle ends in -ūrus and inflects… eh. “Periphrastic” stuff.
The perfect participle ends in -tus or -sus. I don’t know how it inflects yet. Sometimes it’s combined with esse.
The gerundive ends in -ndus.
I’m going to read through https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Latin/Participles_Lesson_1 for a better idea.
That wikiversity page is quite good. It’s important to distinguish clearly between the participle perfect passive as a verbal adjective and the perfect passive as a tense. Latin builds the perfect passive periphrastically using the PPP and the auxiliary verb esse. Similarly, English builds the perfect active using the past participle and the auxiliary verb to have. Other language can make a perfect passive without a periphrastic construction relying on a participle + auxiliary verb, like Greek. The opposite of periphrastic is synthetic.
Remember your vocabulary challenge with the inscribed rings: What you wanted to say was: “inscribed rings”; NOT: “the rings are inscribed”. So the correct solution is: anuli inscripti. “The rings are inscribed” is *anuli inscripti sunt."
Caesar built a bridge: Caesar pontem fecit.
The bridge was built by soldiers: pons a militibus factus est
We see the built bridge: videmus pontem factum.
We see that the bridge was built: videmus pontem factum esse
The latter is a case of the Accusativus cum infinitivo. Once you are absolutely sure to know what accusative and infinitive and participle mean, I’ll show you that.
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So here’s the difficult thing with Japanese and prepositions: Japanese does not really have individual words for them. Instead they are conveyed with particles (kind of like a suffix that tells the grammatical purpose of whatever comes before). What complicates it, is that “through” does not have a particle that’s clearly connected with it.
If there is a particle that translate “through” best, then it’s を, but it is used only for transitions (going “through” an area, passing “through” time). For the other sentences the translation does not really have a part meaning "through.
I looked through the window.
窓から見た。
This is probably what normally would be the meaning of this sentence, but the Japanese literally means “[I] looked from [the] window”, with the particle から marking the point of origin. If you want to be more explicit about the looking through part, you could say:
窓越しに見える。
Here 越し is the nominalisation of the verb 越す: to pass through, so 窓越し is “passing through the window”. 見える means to be visible, so this sentence literally means “[It] is visible [in the way of] passing through the window.”
The oar slid through the water.
オールは水を切った。
If we were to literally translate the English sentence it would be オールは水を滑った, “The oar is gliding through the water”, but this would be very weird. Instead, we say that the oar “cuts through” the water. However, the verb 切る (to cut) is transitive, so を not really means “through” here, because it is not used as a transition: in this sentence を marks the direct object of 切る; the water is the thing that is being cut.
The elephant smashed through the spear-wall.
象は前線部隊を破った。
象は前線部隊を突破した。
I have no idea what a spear-wall would be in Japanese, so 前線部隊 means “frontline” instead. The elephant (象) breaks (破った or 突破した) the front line.
The procession passed through the streets.
行進した。
Now this one was the weirdest, since a procession already passes through streets kind of by definition of what a procession is: the noun 行進 that means “parade” is also used for the verb 行進する “to parade”. Of course we could use a different verb to mean parading / passing through a street, but it all becomes kind of superfluous (which in Japanese means it should be left out). Hence, after the translation, the only thing left is 行進した; “[it] paraded”
The flour filtered through the sieve.
小麦がざるを通った。
小麦 is flour, and ざる is sieve. The verb 通る means to go through. So this sentence is kind of basic. Here the particle を is used to mark a transition, since 通る is intransitive.
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This is what I love so much about languages. Some concepts don’t even make sense in other languages. It has happened to me that I was listening to a politician on the radio, for example in one language, and a friend would ask me, what they were saying, or how you would say that in our, or another, language. And often I would have to admit, that the politician didn’t say anything, but just uttered noise and the core of the message was just “we’ll look into that and try our best to handle the situation.”
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I didn’t know this expression, but apparently it refers to the sequence of english do-did-done-doing, out of which forms you can build all tenses. In latin you may have stumbled across this:
laudare, laudo, laudas, laudavi, laudatum or shortened laudo, laudavi, laudatum. When learning Latin, the teacher will make you learn these sequences for every verb by heart. Most are regular and the irregular ones are so common, that you will get to know them anyway.
The goal is the same: to know the basic forms out of which you form all tenses. They are:
- the infinitive present active laudare. With this, you know which class the verb belongs to and how to do the subjunctive imperfect active.
- the first person singular of the indicative present active: laudo. That way you know whether there’s an -i- before the -o- or not.
*the second person singular of the indicative present active: laudas. That way and together with the first two forms, you know exactly in which conjugation class it belongs. Now you now how to do present active and passive, as well as the subjunctive present active and passive, and the imperatives. - the first person singular of the indicative perfect active: laudavi. It shows you how to do the perfect active, the pluperfect active, and the subjunctive pluperfect active.
- the supinum or PPP neuter singular (the forms look identical): laudatum. It is needed for the perfect passive and also the base for many word formation processes, such as laudator from laudat-.
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Weird Greeks, it’s neither a lion nor lives on the ground…
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You guys are way too fast for me.
You can just translate it as “I looked out the window” then から makes sense!
We did already have this discussion, ya know