Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 July 3

= July 3 =

Distinction between loanwords and shared vocabulary
For the purpose of establishing a predecessor of certain languages, e.g. Balto-Slavic_languages, how do linguists know whether a particular word is indicative of common descent or is merely a loanword from another language branch, e.g. an Arab loanword in a Turkic language? Brandmeistertalk  11:04, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm no expert, but philologists can track language changes back to the original proto-indo-european using recognised rules. 2A00:23D0:20:6101:D919:2B35:1D8B:3621 (talk) 11:08, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * This is basically asking "how do linguists do etymology", isn't it? Once one can trace a given word, what distinguishes a loan is that it appears to appear abruptly, as in, there will be no ancestral form before a given point within the given language. Instead, a (more or less) identical form will exist in a language with which the given language was in contact at the given point. Apologies in case this is obvious and I missed your point. :)
 * - 2A02:560:58DB:A900:9C8F:819:52D:236C (talk) 13:25, 3 July 2022 (UTC)


 * See also Loanword and Cognate for further reading, but they basically give the same explanation as above but less concisely. Alansplodge (talk) 14:02, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * "Appears to appear" is an expressive expression. Card Zero  (talk) 15:54, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I had had only one "appear" to begin with, but apparently decided that that "appear" appeared lonely.
 * - 2A02:560:58DB:A900:9C8F:819:52D:236C (talk) 18:09, 3 July 2022 (UTC)


 * It is not always possible to unravel the threads with certainty, but sometimes it is easy. The morphology of Arabic words is so different from that of typical Turkic words, that a word like istiklal is immediately recognizable as hailing from Arabic, just like it is obvious that the English word schizophrenia has no Anglo-Saxon origin. If a word has recognizably similar equivalents in most of the siblings of a language branch, it is an indication that it has a common origin in the common ancestor. For example, English beam, German Baum and Icelandic baðmur suggest a common Proto-Germanic progenitor. These words diverged as the languages diverged, but the changes tend to be systematic. A well-known example is Grimm's law; for more about systematic divergences in the Indo-European family, see Indo-European sound laws. If a word in language A seems equivalent to a word in language B in the same branch, having a similar sound and a related meaning, but no reconstruction is possible of a progenitor that would have developed into these terms in accordance with the known sound laws, it is a strong indication that something else is going on. The similarity may be accidental, or the term may have developed in language A and then have been borrowed later by language B, too late for the sound laws for language B to have effect. An example is English day and Spanish día – they seem similar and mean the same, but they cannot descend from one and the same Proto-Indo-European word without violating Grimm's law. In the current common understanding, it is a chance resemblance like one would expect to see every know and then, also between completely unrelated languages (like Turkish yaban and Japanese yaban). For more, see Comparative method. --Lambiam 14:04, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Let's not forget the distinction between a loanword like schizophrenia in English, which comes from the German schizophrenie, from the etymology which includes its decomposition into Greek forms that harken back to PIE roots. To underline the point: the Greek word σχιζοφρένεια is a loanword from German. Mathglot (talk) 23:41, 4 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Note that there are sometimes cases where it’s not entirely clear who borrowed from whom – e.g., the Latin vitula was probably derived from a Germanic word (whence also English fiddle), not the other way round as some claim. Prejudices/assumptions regarding who is the “more culturally advanced” society may have played a rôle in that. Cheers ❖hugarheimur 11:34, 6 July 2022 (UTC)


 * I guess phonetic correspondences and the general route of loanwords could indicate which hypothesis would be the most probable. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:00, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Has v. have
Are the following correct: What is the rule governing such? 2603:6081:1C00:1187:9DD6:9EAC:AE3A:D57B (talk) 20:37, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Each have...
 * Each one has...


 * The phrase beginning with each ... is grammatically singular in number. So the first one is wrong. Card Zero  (talk) 21:16, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * The first one as a phrase modulo caps is legititimately plural if preceded by a pair, *Alic and Bob each have ...* Well, what have they in "each", not a relative pronoun? See each. Rhyminreason (talk) 22:16, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * The first one as a phrase modulo caps is legititimately plural if preceded by a pair, *Alic and Bob each have ...* Well, what have they in "each", not a relative pronoun? See each. Rhyminreason (talk) 22:16, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

The little-known gerundial infinitive
"Where it began I can't begin to knowin'"

I've been trying to figure out if there's any English dialect where is a grammatical utterance, and how you would analyze it. If I let the words flow past my head, just occasionally there's a flash where it almost seems to make sense, then it goes away again.

One thought I had is that knowin' is being used adjectivally as a present participle rather than as part of the present progressive tense. But I can't make that work with other adjectives: *I can't begin to hungry, for example, makes no sense.

Any ideas? --Trovatore (talk) 21:10, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

Your body's heck-a-slammin&apos; If love is good, let's get to rammin'"
 * It reminds me of phrases containing get to, such as "let's get to eatin'" or "let's get to fightin'".
 * "Your face is jammin&apos;
 * Also it's a gerund, a nounish verb, and hungry isn't. And only just now I've noticed the title of this thread. Card Zero  (talk) 21:29, 3 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Other versions of the lyrics say "know when" rather than "knowin'". --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:38, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * So I can't begin to know when the place was. That makes more sense. I looked for lyrics on an album sleeve as a source, but this Japanese album cover is the best I could find, and it says I can't begin to know it. Card Zero  (talk) 21:47, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Some thoughts, for whatever they're worth: The phrase "can't begin to" is really quite narrow in usage. A corpus search yields this list of most likely next words: tell, imagine, understand, describe, explain, express, fathom, comprehend, thank, know. So definitely asking for a verbal, and of a particular type at that; they're all to do with talking or thinking or the like. "I can't begin to walk over there" or "I can't begin to have a new pair of shoes" are surely more grammatical than "I can't begin to hungry", but still some way from qualifying as idiomatic or making much sense, I'd say. The familiar phrasal reading of "can't begin to" fits badly enough in those examples that a more literal take may be preferrable - like, something is stopping the speaker from starting to walk specifically, rather than stopping them from walking as such? Either way, they grate. "Can't begin to knowin'" seems less problematic to me than those, on the whole - the sense is clear, and it just takes a bit of creativity to account for the superficially non-standard grammar.


 * - 2A02:560:58DB:A900:9C8F:819:52D:236C (talk) 22:59, 3 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Having just listened to various renditions sung by Neil Diamond, I think we can rule out the reading know when. The ending of the line is pronounced just like that of growing in the next line. The object of transitive begin can be a verbal noun, which can be either the nominal infinitive, as in begin to VERB, or the gerundial noun, as in begin VERBing. Regardless of its understandability, the mixed construction begin to VERBing seems non-standard in any lect I am aware of. --Lambiam 09:49, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks all. I appreciate Lambiam's confirmation of the words (these are the ones I have in the official-looking score I'm learning it from for my barbershop group), and Card Zero's comparison with "get to" may indeed be the reason I have an occasional flash of thinking the grammar is almost acceptable, but honestly I can't really make it work with "begin". It seems the simplest explanation is just that Diamond privileged rhyme and meter over grammar, even dialectal grammar.

On a tangent, I am a bit curious about the analysis of progressive verb forms as "present participle" versus "gerund". Our articles seem to favor "present participle", and this is indeed the version that makes more sense to me. However I'm not sure it's the standard account &mdash; I'm fairly certain you could find a number of grammars taught in schools that would describe it as a gerund.

Possibly this relates to the way Spanish and Italian form the progressive, using the gerundio, albeit with stare-derived verbs rather than esse-derived ones? The gerundio is not a noun, though; it's more of an adverb. Is it fair to say that gerund and gerundio are false friends? --Trovatore (talk) 20:58, 4 July 2022 (UTC) Thanks all.


 * Since in English the verbal noun on -ing always has the same form as the verb form on -ing that can be used like an adjective, some grammarians are hesitant to assign different names according to the different roles. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language uses the term gerund-participle, which I find a bit awkward. I don’t think of the gerundio as an adverb; it feels more to me like a participle, used as the complement of a copula. For example, yo estaba pensando qué hacer means "I was thinking what to do"; it does not refer to a way of being like an adverb would. --Lambiam 22:34, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Well, it's clearly adverbial in a sentence such as camminando per strada trovai un soldo. It's true it's not so much an adverb of manner; it's closer to an adverb of place or time, but more general.  Unfortunately "adverb" is used as a big "miscellaneous" box where we put words that often have clearly distinguishable roles, and really ought to have different names. --Trovatore (talk) 01:03, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * If you're more familiar with Spanish than Italian, your intuitions might be colored by the fact that the present participle is (so they tell me; I'm a little skeptical) no longer productive in Spanish. It is (just barely) productive in Italian.  So trovai un soldo camminando per strada means I was walking in the street; trovai un soldo camminante per strada means it was the coin doing the walking, Sorcerer's-apprentice style.  Admittedly the second isn't something you'd be very likely to say, but you could say it and be understood, I think. --Trovatore (talk) 01:08, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * In English one can say, Walking through the city, I'd watch ..., which sentence starts with an adverbial clause, but that does not make its head an adverb. In parsing sentences, we distinguish grammatical roles of the constituents and assign labels to them, but natural language is unruly and may make fun of such labelling attempts. Then we classify lexical units and label them according to the ways they can be used to build grammatical constituents of various grammatical roles. As grammar is usually taught, these two levels of labelling are at least partially conflated, which is not helpful. Another miscellaneous box (or perhaps garbage bin) is "conjunction"; one way of analyzing walking through the city above is to invent a "null conjunction" synonymous with the "conjunction" while. --Lambiam 08:11, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * It's poetic license, nothing more, nothing less. --jpgordon&#x1d122;&#x1d106;&#x1D110;&#x1d107; 15:00, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Consider the common toast: "Here is to knowing you." To this we have "...begin to knowin' ". As such, to my mind, it's not even close to being ungrammatical poetic license (for anything besides "to knowing" would be nearly incomprehensible). It's perfection. It simply means "having knowledge" and as far as I can tell it's used appropriately. --Modocc (talk) 21:01, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Hmm. No, I don't think that's grammatical in any dialect I'm familiar with. --Trovatore (talk) 22:09, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Nonsense because you truncated the sentence. "Where it began I can't begin to [having knowledge]." Knowledge of "Where it began". Modocc (talk) 22:14, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
 * No, I don't think that's any better, sorry. --Trovatore (talk)
 * Also Ngram shows that "to knowing" is in use: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=to+knowing&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cto%20knowing%3B%2Cc0 Modocc (talk) 22:22, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
 * There are lots of possible grammatical sentences that contain the two words "to knowing" in sequence. I've been studying the song for a couple of days, and I think I'm almost halfway to knowing it well.  That sentence is OK.  The one in the song, less so, I think. --Trovatore (talk) 06:46, 8 July 2022 (UTC)
 * You have begun knowing it. :) It is one of my favorite romantic songs for my Karen touched me deeply. She passed away last summer and my mom passed last week. Neil Diamond could not begin to knowing where it began, though he knew it was growing strong. Of course, with romance, place barely matters when we have the time and means to connect. Modocc (talk) 13:54, 8 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I certainly offer you condolences for your losses, and I also appreciate the song. --Trovatore (talk) 17:02, 8 July 2022 (UTC)