Ваша оценкаЦитаты
sarcastronaut11 сентября 2016 г.Читать далееAnother area where languages often display erratic behaviour is what linguists call 'gender', by which they don't necessarily mean distinctions based on sex, but any classification imposed on nouns according to some of their essential properties. 'Masculine' versus 'feminine' is indeed one of the most common distinctions, but many languages choose instead (or in addition) to divide nouns into 'human' versus 'non-human', or `animate' (humans and animals) versus 'inanimate', or sometimes even `edible' versus 'non-edible'. (Which class humans then fall into depends, of course, on local custom.)
3103- sarcastronaut11 сентября 2016 г.
Many people outside the field of linguistics are under the impression that there is an established consensus among linguists over the question of innateness. The reality, however, could not be more different. Let five linguists loose in a room and ask them to discuss innateness — chances are you will hear at least seven contradictory opinions, argued passionately and acrimoniously.
360 
robot19 июля 2024 г.The original negation marker in English was ne, as in French. The modern word ‘not’ started out as a full-bodied ne-a-wiht ‘not-ever-thing’, or in other words ‘nothing-whatsoever’. This phrase was added to the simple ‘no’, in order to create an emphatic ‘no way’, ‘not a jot’ type of ‘no’. By the tenth century, ne-a-wiht had already contracted to just nawiht, but it still retained its former meaning, so that a phrase like ic ne seo nawiht still meant ‘I not see nothing whatsoever’.Читать далее
Later on, however, as this emphatic type of ‘no’ started being used more and more often, attrition set in. In form, nawiht was reduced to nawt, and alongside this erosion of sounds, there was also an inflationary weakening of meaning. By the thirteenth century, a manual for female recluses called the Ancrene Wisse (‘Guide for Anchoresses’) already uses the formerly emphatic combination ne … nawt in nearly half of all ‘no’ statements, thus showing that ne … nawt was no longer as emphatic as it had once been. And later on, the ne … nawt combination became even more common, so that I ne see nawt lost all pretence of emphasis, and came to mean just ‘I don’t see’. Together with this attrition in meaning, the form nawt (sometimes also spelt nowt or nought) was eroded further to not, and to cap it all, the original negation marker ne started being dropped from the pair, to leave only I see not. ‘Not’ is thus a prime example of both material and social decline. It started as a paunchy ne-a-wiht ‘nothing whatsoever’, a word rich in length and weighty in meaning, but its form was reduced to not (or even just n’t), and its meaning eroded to the plainest of no’s.254- sarcastronaut15 сентября 2016 г.Читать далее
Before the nineteenth century, musing about the history of languages and the relationships between them was the pastime of dilettanti, who often had rather rusty axes to grind. In 1690, for instance, a certain Pere Louis Thomassin wrote in all seriousness that French and Hebrew were so close to each other that 'one may truthfully say that, basically, they are no other than one and the same language'. Even as late as 1765, well into the enlightened eighteenth century, the article on 'language' in Diderot's respected Encyclopedie affirmed that French was closely related to Hebrew. The linguists of the time were thus not much more advanced than the Madame from Versailles, who was overheard by Voltaire as saying: 'What a dreadful pity that the bother at the Tower of Babel should have got language all mixed up; but for that, everyone would always have spoken French.'
226 - sarcastronaut12 сентября 2016 г.Читать далее
In a session of the Academie Francaise in November 1843, an argument erupted between two distinguished Victors, the philosopher and educationalist Victor Cousin and the novelist Victor Hugo. The discussion began with a somewhat arcane debate on the merits and demerits of writing double consonants, but it soon developed into a heated exchange about the state of the language in general, with Cousin proclaiming that the recent changes French was undergoing were nothing but decay. When Hugo questioned his reasoning, Cousin replied that he even knew exactly when the rot began. 'The decay of the French language,' he declared, 'started in 1789,' to which Hugo famously retorted: 'A quelle heure, s'il vous plait?'
222