50 words for snow

[wosny]

I have some jars of home made strawberry "jam-elly" which has jam with fruit in the top half of the jar and just clear jelly in the bottom half. It was due to a bit of a failure in my jam making technique, but in general the two things are cooked in different ways, jam has the sugar added to the fresh fruit and jelly has the sugar added to the

Comments

[aksioma_tg]

In Russian we have a word for 24 hours (like day AND night), for example. It doesn't exist in English.
But I really wish a preposition like "by" existed in Russian. It is so easy to say "a book by..", "music by...", whatever. It always gives me a hard time to translate these frases.

[wosny]

I am not sure when prepositions were developed, I think originally in languages such as Latin or Greek it was implied by the end of the noun... I am just remembering very vaguely Latin declensions, "by, with or from a table" However I am excedingly grateful for the simpler grammar that separate prepositions bring!

[aksioma_tg]

Well, we have prepositions (sure!), but not this one.

[muckefuck]

Latin has prepositions. (Who do you think came up with the word!) It just also has more situations where the declension of the noun alone expresses meanings which more analytical languages (like English and French) express by means of prepositions, word order, or both.

[mamculuna]

All kinds of languages go through phases of having the prepositional meaning in the words and having separate words to carry that meaning. But Latin also has separate prepositions! I don't know what Indo-European did about that kind of information--would be interesting to find out.

[muckefuck]

So far, I haven't come across any languages which lack adpositions (or affixes which perform the same function) altogether, although they do vary widely in number and frequency of use.

[mamculuna]

But (and I'm vaguely remembering something from a long-ago class and avoiding technical terms that I'd probably use incorrectly now)--isn't there a historical cycle of languages tending towards having those meanings attached to words and then gradually moving toward separate words (I'm thinking of Latin with all the case endings vs. French and Spanish that use mostly separate prepositions), and then possibly eventually going back to the combined forms?

And what about IE--do we think that relied more on case endings or on separate words? Or are there theories about about that?

[muckefuck]

You're talking about the "typological cycle" proposed by von Humboldt a century ago. There's a fair bit of evidence for it, but there are also prominent counterexamples. Finnish, for instance, is not significantly less agglutinative than the model proposed for Proto-Uralic. (Estonian is a different story altogether.) But this doesn't just concern prepositions but all types of function words (for instance auxiliary verbs vs verbal inflections) and--as I say above--it can be word order which takes on many of the functions played by inflections in more fusional languages.

As for PIE, most of the grammatical models I've seen are agglutinative. (Of course, this is what you tend to end up with when using a comparative reconstruction approach, since fusional irregularities tend to get smoothed out through morphological leveling.)

[ubykhlives]

Indeed. Tok Pisin probably only has two true adpositions, bilong and long, everything else being done with noun phrases (e.g. long namel bilong "in the middle of"). Dan Everett and Barbara Kern assert in their grammar of the Amazonian language Wari' that it has only one preposition, though it's inflected to agree with its object in person, number and gender.