LINGUIST List 6.172

Thu 09 Feb 1995

Qs: Articles, Yoshihiro Masuya, Function words, Vowel-shifts

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Q: Articles
2. , yoshihiro masuya
3. Kai von Fintel, Function words
4. Timothy Miller, German/English/Umulating/Vowel-shifts

Dear Linguists,

A system of articles is an innovative feature of a number of languages. Are
there any examples of languages that have lost their articles? I would also
be interested in creoles, especially, say, if both (all) source languages
had articles, but the pidgin/creole turned out lacking them. Please respond
to:

oysteinrhi.hi.is,

in real life:
0ystein Alexander Vangsnes

I used to carry on a regular correspondence with Yoshihiro Masuya, in Kobe in
Japan. Unfortunately, when I left my Utrecht home-base for a sabbatical at
MIT, I didn't take his address with me. Masuya didn't use to be on e-mail, and i
have looked at the public domain sources in vain, so he probably still isn't.

Does anyone have Masuya's snail-mail address? Or better still, any news about
him and his family after the earthquake?

Please reply to me, not to the list. Thanks. frits

I would like the help of LINGUIST readers in finding examples of
function words that have as part of their meaning an unusually specific
component. I vaguely remember a case of a language having "honorific"
pronouns that mean something like "you shit". Or a language whose
prepositional system incorporates reference to the river that speakers
of the language live next to. In general of course, we find that
function morphemes are "semantically bleached" and do not have
comparatively rich meanings.

Please reply to fintelmit.edu and I will post a summary.

 ----------------------------------
Kai von Fintel (fintelmit.edu)
Dept. of Linguistics & Philosophy
MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139

)From my very cursory look into similarities in English and German, I have
found that Old High German and Old English/Saxon independantly went
through some very similar changes, such as umlauting and vowel shifts.

To my knowlege, neither Old High German nor Old Saxon had umulating and
they developed it independantly. Furthermore, they both independantly
made very similar vowel shifts (/i/ -) /ai/, /u/ -> /au/, /e/ -> /i/,
etc.).

What structural similarities or instabilities did Old High German and Old
Saxon share that caused the independant introduction of these features?