I read something interesting on Wikipedia last night, about the development of a certain indigenous Caribbean language:
A few decades prior to the arrival of the first conquistadores, people who spoke a Cariban language expanded into the Lesser Antilles and killed or displaced and also mixed with the Arawak peoples who already inhabited the islands. The resulting language—Kalhíphona or Island Carib—was Carib in name but largely Arawak in substance. This happened because Carib men took Arawak wives, who then passed their language on to the children. For a time, Arawak was spoken by women and children and Carib by adult men, but as each generation of Carib-Arawak boys reached adulthood, they acquired less Carib until only basic vocabulary and a few grammatical elements were left.
However, this whole claim is uncited, and the main page about Island Carib presents a more uncertain and controversial picture, with the possiblity that there never even was an invasion but rather a peaceful assimilation of the Arawaks into Carib identity.
This is similar to a story told by Herodotus 6.138 about the Pelasgians on the island of Lemnos:
The Pelasgians are a non-Greek people who inhabited Greece before the Greeks. Eventually, the Pelasgians from Athens were driven away by the Greek Athenians and settled Lemnos.
The Pelasgians who inhabited Lemnos at that time and wanted to take revenge on the Athenians, knew the Athenian festivals very well and laid an ambush with fifty-oar galleys to attack the Athenian women on their way to celebrate the festival of Artemis in Brauron. They captured them and brought them to Lemnos and made them their side-wives.
When these women became mothers of many children, they taught them the Attic language and an Athenian lifestyle. These children did not want to mingle with the children from Pelasgian women; and when one of them got beaten by one of these, they (the Greek children) all rushed to help and avenge each other. So, the children thought it was right to rule over the Pelasgian children.
When the Pelasgian men figured that out, they held council and decided on something horrible: If these children already have in mind to help each other against the children from their rightful wives and already try to rule over them now, what are they going to do once they’re grown up? So they decided to kill the children of the Attic women. This they did, and they killed the mothers too.
Note that many countries in Europe / Western Asia / Northern Africa already have names in Latin. The Netherlands is called Batavia for example, Russia is Ruthenia, France is Gallia, Switzerland is Helvetia, etc.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached a thousand posts.
I made a disproportionate 436, almost half. Sanonius made 186, Vsotvep 148, stone_defender 42, S_Alexander 32, Haze 25, and Ayaros 21. A further 110 posts were provided by other contributors.
I opened the thread with this message:
I thought it would be a good idea for us to create a thread where we could discuss what languages we’re trying to learn right now, and give each other updates and encouragement on our progress.
Whilst it can’t be said that this goal was quite achieved, we managed to keep on finding new topics of discussion about language, linguistics, and etymology. Now that we’ve reached this symbolic milestone, I expect to post less, and that the thread’ll die down to a background rate of a few posts per month.
According to the OP’s wikitable, Ayaros, stone_defender, Samraku, sulcino, yebellz, and Vsotvep were learning Japanese; Aumpa was learning French, RubyMineshaft Esperanto, and myself, of course, Latin. Sanonius just wrote “bugcat”… >__< I hope that we’ve all made some progress. I certainly think I have.
Thank you @bugcat for curating this thread so carefully and providing us with very interesting topics to talk about. I have been having lots of fun here so far.
As cool as Esperanto is, I really don’t understand why it defines so many words as “female version of _____”, like patrino and virino, and many adjectives as “opposite of _____”. But there’s a study I read, and of course I can’t provide a link, that children who speak Esperanto natively come up with new basic words that are not just female and opposite versions, but words in their own right.
Oh yes, that’s right. With exceptions, though - when people migrated to other Germanic regions, they often named their new villages, so in those cases, names can be misleading.
And some (many?) native speakers are not able to use the accusative correctly, because they are otherwise not used to having grammatical cases at all…
I was recently looking at some fourth-declension neuter nouns in Latin, like cornú (horn), pecú (herd), and genú (knee).
These are interesting because their form doesn’t decline in the singular, with the exception of the genitive: nom. cornú --> gen. cornús.
To make things more interesting, the genitive singular of pecú has apparently never been attested in ancient sources. Wiktionary also claims that in “later times”, cornú didn’t even decline in the genitive.
Sri Lanka was apparently known as Taprobana and the Danube as the Istros.
I’ve been reading about Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrobius), a fifth-century Latin scholar, and his “dialogue work” Saturnalia.
I became interested today in the role of the preposition up in altering the meaning of English verbs.
There are four kinds of verbs in this regard:
Verbs which cannot take up, eg. colour, juggle, or wear.
Verbs which can only take up in a directional sense, eg. walk, sail, or march; or more subtly pick up or boil up, or in a semi-directional sense as in speak up.
Verbs which use up to mean “use the whole stock of”, eg. eat up or drink up.
Verbs whose meaning is modified by up.
Phrase
Meaning
box up
package in a box
curl up
usual, or to curl oneself up
dress up
to dress in an ostentatious or fanciful way
fire up
turn on
gather up
gather together
hole up
to hide in a stronghold or secret place
listen up
emphatic of listen
pick up
take from the floor, or attain a skill
play up
talk up, or misbehave
rake up
usual, or to uncover unpleasant past affairs
rip up
rip apart
rise up
usual, or to revolt
shoot up
to shoot the inhabitants of a building
talk up
to exaggerate the merits of something
throw up
vomit
tie up
to restrain by tying
This is surely an incomplete list.
Verbs are often also modifed in meaning by other prepositions such as out and around.
In most of these, I sense a directional up, even if metaphorically. To dress up is to +1 the way you dress otherwise, to talk up is to talk in the direction of your superior, to throw up is to throw your food upwards.
Interesting is rise up. In what other direction would you want to rise?
I could do a list of Greek compound verbs. Here, kata- is what you use for “use the whole stock of”, but it also means 'downward.
