The Historical Linguistics Thread
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? dhok posts: 235
, Alkali Metal, Norman, United States
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Since the Greek spreadsheet was so unwieldy, but had little data, I've scrapped it. I'm starting on Latin, now, with this frequency list. Etymologies are pulled from de Vaan, 2008 (the Leiden Etymological Dictionary series.) Greek etymologies, when I get to them, will probably end up being pulled from a combination of Beekes and Chantraine.

This time around, can we please write Greek in its native alphabet? Maybe write the Slavic languages in Cyrillic, too (edit: probably not OCS, it's always transliterated...). It's silly not to transliterate Hittite or Sanskrit, but any IEist worth their salt will be able to sound out Greek and Cyrillic. (I'm already breaking my vow to put in headwords first and listing cognates...though most of them are off the top of my head. It should be possible to pull a citation up in the finished spreadsheet for any cognate square, I think. Is there any way to put mouseover text into a Google Docs spreadsheet? [EDIT: Oh, wait, I can put in comments.])

Because there are so many languages with cognates for some words, when I have more than one language in a branch to choose from, I'm only going to use one unless there's a good reason to (so if there's a Greek cognate no need for Phrygian)- is this a good idea?
? Morrígan Witch Queen of New York
posts: 303
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Yeah, I think the thing with cognates sounds good. Mallory and Adams actually transliterates Greek and normally-Cyrillic, but every other text I have uses the native orthographies. I'll be trying to reproduce the what the text uses; the final composite will prefer native-orthography representations.
? dhok posts: 235
, Alkali Metal, Norman, United States
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My dictionary sources seem to transliterate OCS, but not Greek. Since OCS has a number of weirder characters that most people who know Russian Cyrillic won't have come across, this sounds like a good model.

However, we should also be cognizant, for a "Latin/Greek/Sanskrit Vocabulary for Philologists", of what languages people will actually know. It's easier to see cognates between Greek and Avestan than between Greek and modern Persian, for example, but...how many of us actually know any Avestan? (While there are a larger number of people, even classicists, who know some basic Persian.) For the Latin spreadsheet, for example, it might be wise to have a "modern Romance descendents" box. And maybe German and English should be included in addition to Gothic, or Russian in addition to OCS (though the Slavic languages are close-knit enough that an OCS reflex is usually pretty transparent).

On the other hand, if we have too many boxes for cognates, we just increase clutter.

Do we have a standardized way to cite verbs? My intuition is to cite the 1s pres. ind. act. for Greek and Latin and the 3s for everything else. Doing otherwise gets unwieldy- in Old Irish you cite the 3s pres. ind. act, but in Sanskrit you generally cite the root followed by whatever forms are relevant, in many languages you just cite the infinitive, I don't even know what you do for Tocharian...

(Exceptions might reasonably be made, of course, for modern languages. The Spanish reflex of video is ver, not veo or ve, and to do otherwise is silly.)

Also, why does nobody care about Armenian?
? Nessari ?????? ?????? ????????
posts: 932
, Illúbequía, Seattle, Cascadia
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Because is it the Kitchen Sink of soundchanges Natlang of IE.

Also mosmus
? KathTheDragon Beware the Dragon
posts: 92
, Baroness of United Kingdom
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Morrígan, will you mark which nouns are heteroclitic this time around? Your previous spreadsheet is somewhat lacking in that information.
? Nessari ?????? ?????? ????????
posts: 932
, Illúbequía, Seattle, Cascadia
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Are there any examples which are hard to remember? Inanimate stems ending in -r (or possibly n) is a fairly distinct marker in and of itself.
? KathTheDragon Beware the Dragon
posts: 92
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Well, the spreadsheet didn't mark which stems were inanimate either. I'd really like to just be able to scroll through and see.
? Nessari ?????? ?????? ????????
posts: 932
, Illúbequía, Seattle, Cascadia
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You can't tell from the stem's final sound and the gloss if an IE stem is inanimate?

You need to work on your PIE skills.
? Morrígan Witch Queen of New York
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I will include any such information which is noted in the text.
? KathTheDragon Beware the Dragon
posts: 92
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Glosses don't help much, Nessari. There are lots of inanimate nouns that are not neuter. Also, I stress 'scroll through'. Skimming is much easier than reading each entry fully.

Thanks, Morrígan.
? Nessari ?????? ?????? ????????
posts: 932
, Illúbequía, Seattle, Cascadia
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If you'd learn more about PIE, you'd know why I said what I said.
? KathTheDragon Beware the Dragon
posts: 92
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Well, clearly oyu seem to know what I need to know, so why don't you tell me?
? Rhetorica Your Writing System Sucks
posts: 1292
, Kelatetía of Space
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...Because there's something inherently funny about obnoxious smugness—if you're trying to ruin the community, anyway. Bad Ness!

A quick bit of Wikipedia-ing says that neuter came from an inanimate class, and both masculine and feminine came from an animate class (and another source says that feminine came from a mixing of the two. Said other source may help you figure it out.)
? KathTheDragon Beware the Dragon
posts: 92
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I'm familiar with IE morphology, thanks. The question is, how am I supposed to tell whether an isolated stem forms an animate or inanimate noun?
? dhok posts: 235
, Alkali Metal, Norman, United States
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quoting Rhetorica, Duchess of Space:
...Because there's something inherently funny about obnoxious smugness—if you're trying to ruin the community, anyway. Bad Ness!

A quick bit of Wikipedia-ing says that neuter came from an inanimate class, and both masculine and feminine came from an animate class (and another source says that feminine came from a mixing of the two. Said other source may help you figure it out.)

To expand upon this: the prevailing theory is that feminines come from collective neuters, at least morphologically. (The main piece of evidence for this is that both singular feminines and plural neuters ended in *-eh₂ [-ā in the "classical" reconstruction]). However, the languages that have a masculine/feminine/neuter division (essentially everyone but Hittite) treat the neuter differently from the masculine or feminine-for example, the nominative and the accusative are always the same in neuters in just about all IE languages (I can't think of an exception), and in Greek, plural neuters (ie "collectives") took singular verbs (I think Vedic Sanskrit did this too from time to time?)
? kodé man of few words
posts: 110
, Deacon in this fucking hole we call LA
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quoting Nessari, Illúbequía, Seattle, Cascadia:
Because is it the Kitchen Sink of soundchanges Natlang of IE.

Also mosmus

BOOOO-URNS.
? dhok posts: 235
, Alkali Metal, Norman, United States
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So, I've been working on the Basic Vocab for Philologists again. For the Latin spreadsheet, I just got every word out of the Dickinson list as a spreadsheet column. One thing I would like to do is add any words that are also found in Wheelock's that aren't in the frequency list, although I don't know how to do that, since the columns aren't in identical format.

For Greek, the biggest frequency list is Dickinson's, although that's only about 500 words. Any words that are in Cheadle that are not also in Dickinson will be included as well, but this is a good place to start, and five hundred words takes a while, anyways.

So, I have the basic lists up for both Latin and Greek, with glosses and etymologies to come.

As for Sanskrit...we're working on it. It's almost certainly going to require some wrestling with the corpora, which is looking to be a bit of a task. There's an easy way to get a frequency list for any given text with Heidelberg's database, but getting one out of a combination of texts isn't so easy. (If I really can't figure it out, I may just try to get a frequency list out of the Mahabharata, which is so massive it might do by itself...)

(Also thinking about eventually making similar spreadsheets for modern languages- at the very least, German, the Romance languages and Russian. I wonder if there's a way to put all this on Anthologica...?)
? KathTheDragon Beware the Dragon
posts: 92
, Baroness, United Kingdom
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Morrígan, I don't suppose you have a link to your old PIE lexicon spreadsheet handy?
? Morrígan Witch Queen of New York
posts: 303
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This should be it; I haven't gotten around to working on the new version lately, seems like its been at least a month

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0yPt9F6jiAbNEtwTlA2ZWg3MXc/view?usp=sharing
? KathTheDragon Beware the Dragon
posts: 92
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Much thanks!
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