…Вона блює і співає

Чемно нагадую шановному панству, що пропозал «Ukrainian Language» пройшов фазу Commitment, і прямо зараз (вже тиждень, ага) модератори маринують процес відкриття сайту.
Сподіваюся, що відкриття буде найближчими днями.

Як тільки сайт буде відкрито, він буде у фазі Private Beta (зазвичай, 2-4 тижні), і брати в ньому участь зможуть лише ті, хто виконав Commitment.
Створити кілька запитань/відповідей у цей час — це гарантія швидкого отримання високої репутації — одразу від моменту створення сайту. Ті, хто спізняться, муситимуть чекати оці самі 2-4 тижні, поки сайт не буде переведено до фази Public Beta.

Тому не гальмуйте і приєднуйтеся.

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Перепост допису bytebuster: Ukrainian Language
Пропозал «Ukrainian Language» перейшов до фази Commitment.
Нас має бути 200 юзерів. Приєднуйтеся.



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Ура! Моє питання на Chinese.StackExchange отримало золотий беджик за 10,000 переглядів! А от upvotes щось малувато.

Давайте так: я вам розповім баєчку, а ви підете і плюсонете моє питання та відповідь на нього? :)
А сама історія така:

Originally posted by bytebuster463 at Фу дао

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Авжеж, лінґвістиков!
difference between Isolating (analytics) vs inflexed (fusional) vs agglutinative languages

It's not easy to grasp these concepts. I spent a lot of time perusing wikipedia articles but still can't really understand what makes a language: inflexed, isolating or agglutinative,

Background
These are languages that I know, and I would love the answer to post some examples in these languages :
- Polish - English - Spanish - French - Italian - Russian - Vietnamese - Chinese

As far as I understand the first 6 are inflexed languages(with Russian and Polish highly inflexed), and the last two are highly isolating.

Now, Wikipedia says that an inflexed language uses inflectional morphemes:

Inflectional morphemes modify a verb's tense, aspect, mood, person, or
number, or a noun's, pronoun's or adjective's number, gender or case,
without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech).
Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to
the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited.

Now I don't see a problem to appoint the Vietnamese các/nhũng and đã as the equivalent morphemes for respective English s and ed from the Wikipedia's excerpt. Namely:

a dog dies -> con chố chết

dogs died -> các con chó đã chết

"The only thing" that I see differs supposedly inflexed and supposedly isolating languages is that languages like English, Polish or have many versions of a same morpheme, like for example there at least more than 5 morphemes to express the past tense in Polish and English, while Vietnamese has only one, namely đã.

Polish to English to Vietnamese example:

Ja jem -> I eat -> tôi ăn
Ja jadłem -> I ate -> tôi đã ăn
Ja jadę -> I go -> tôi đi
Ja jechałem -> I went -> tôi đã đi

But then one could say that grammatical classifiers so abondant in Chinese and Vietnamese are morphemes that varies greatly depending on situation. Is it that linguistics was mainly developed in Europe and nowadays all world linguists try to look at other languages from the European standpoint?

1. Unfortunately I can't give any example of an agglutinative language as I don't know a word in any such language. But I would love the answer to address the distinction inflexed-agglutinative and isolating-agglutinative too
2. What are the problems with my reasoning with Polish English and VietnamesE?

---

bytebuster: @Eleshar's answer sums it up very well: “Good luck with separating some of the forms into morphemes”.

Still, there's one important difference that makes impossible to draw a straight parallel between classifiers (of isolating languages) and morphemes of inflexed languages.

This is because in fusional languages, the modifier morphemes conjugate as well!

Here's the story.

When Lewis Carroll was traveling to Russia, he saw an interesting Russian word: защищающихся. It means, "people who defend themselves". He wrote this word in his diary according to the English phonology: zаshchееshchауоushchееkhsуа

Let's dig into this word:

защищающихся
  └─┘        щит            1. /schit/  n. shield         
├───┘        защит[а]       2. /zaschita/ n. defence, lit. "behind shield"
├────┘       защища[ть]     3. /zashchishchat'/ v. defend
├──────┘     защищающи[й]   4. /zashchishchajushchij/ adj. one who defends
├───────┘ └┘ защищающи[й]ся 5. /zashchishchajushchijsya/
                                    adj. one who defends self
└──────────┘ защищающихся   6. /zashchishchajushchikhsya/
                                    adj. one who defends self +GEN

(in square brackets I put morphemes that do not exist in the final word)

While steps (2), (4), and (5) can be directly understood in terms "morpheme → morphologic change", several steps can't be translated that easy. Look what happens here:

1. At step (3), the root vowel shifts: /t/ → /sch/; an impossible thing for isolating languages;
2. At step (6), the inflection particle inflects itself: "-ий-" /ij/ → "-их-" /ikh/

---

So, even if a morpheme-to-morpheme parallel can be drawn between an arbitrary pair of isolating and fusional languages, there's still a considerable amount of cases where this parallel does not work.

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Q: What is the main spoken language in Kiev: Ukrainian or Russian?

I'm aware that there are both native Ukrainian and Russian speakers among Ukrainians, with the west being more Ukrainian-speaking and the east/south more Russian-speaking.

What about Kiev today? I suppose the vast majority is bilingual as in most of the country, but what is the main everyday language in the city?

Someone told me most people mainly use Russian in everyday life and at home (which is what's relevant to this question), and Ukrainian in official contexts. Is this accurate?

---

A: Моя відповідь така: (де ваші плюсіки, га?)

TL;DR: it is Russian; its dominance is drastically decreasing nowadays; a foreigner who wants to speak on the streets of Kyiv should consider historical, political, and cultural aspects for their choice of language.

---

Long story.

1. Russian is the most used language in streets and families of Kyiv;
   Calculation Method: if you simply take a group of people and count languages they speak in their family, you will notice that:

• Nearly 100% of those who speak Ukrainian would also have a good grasp of Russian.
  So every Ukrainian speaker would count for both Ukrainian + Russian columns of your research.
  A good amount of the above also count for other languages, e.g., Ukrainian+Russian+Hebrew or Ukrainian+Russian+Crimean Tatar.
• While far from 100% of Russian speakers would count to other languages.
  "Russian speaker" quite often means "Russian-only speaker".
  Dare to claim that I have never seen a single "Ukrainian-only speaker".

2. Tendency: Russian dominance is drastically decreasing since the moment of Russian invasion to Ukraine's Crimea and Donets'k/Luhans'k regions.
   Even the older people (like myself) who were raised in Russian school, Russian University, Russian official language in their offices, now attempt to speak Ukrainian in their families.
   There is no opposite process.

3. Age: The younger the more leaning toward Ukrainian.

4. "As a foreigner, what language should I choose to speak in Kyiv?" — since this is Travel.SE, the OP may be also interested how to choose the language to use in Ukraine.
   I would recommend to read Which languages to brush up on for Ukraine trip? question and its answers. This answer summarizes it very well:
   

   If your goal is to make an impression on locals I would definitely go with Ukrainian. At the moment, Russian language is associated with Russian invasion even though a lot of people still speak Russian.
   For me speaking Russian in Ukraine is like going to WWII occupied France⁽¹⁾ and trying to speak German with French people. I am not telling that you will get in trouble with Russian, but you could be more considerate to the local population.

---

Source: I'm a citizen of Ukraine, half of my roots are from Kyiv.

---

⁽¹⁾ For clarity and best accuracy, consider partially-occupied France in the period between 10 May – 25 June 1940 or France just after its liberation in 1944.

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Підтримайте мою номінацію на Pro-Tem Moderator на сайті Politics.StackExchange
Якщо хто не в курсі. StackExchange — це група сайтів, мета яких — Питання і Відповіді. Є система голосування, завдяки якій автори набирають репутацію.
Кожний сайт сімейства присвячений якійсь тематиці. Я беру активну участь на сайтах Linguistics.StackExchange та Politics.StackExchange.
Модерацію зведено до мінімуму; більшість задач вирішуються методом голосування: чим більше «плюсів» і менше «мінусів», тим вище питання в списку питань або відповідь у списку відповідей на конкретне питання.
Але є інститут модераторів, які розв'язують задачі, які «прості» юзери розв'язувати не можуть. Частіше за все це пов'язано з конфліктами або адміністративними діями (управління системою tags — тематичних ярликів, якими.позначаються питання).

Особисто я беру участь в Politics.SE саме тому, що вважаю, що англомовний користувач про нашу війну нічого не знає. При цьому, без лояльних союзників перемога або неможлива, або супроводжуватиметься неприйнятними жертвами з нашого боку. А середній іноземець про нашу війну нічого не знає. Хоча саме від його, середнього іноземця, думки залежить вплив на Сенаторів його країни і військова допомога нам. Для цього на англомовних сайтах потрібні впливові (з високою репутацією) люди, які можуть доносити свою думку до середньостатистичного бюргера.
А для цього треба виконувати суспільні обов'язки. Наприклад, займатися модераторством.

Якщо не розумієте важливість наявності союзників, можете подивитися перипетії, якими супроводжується небажання світової спільноти визнавати очевидний Геноцид вірменського народу турками у 1915 році. Хоча після мільйону жертв 5-мільйонного народу, які ще потрібні докази.

За мотивами чудової діаграми з Хабра «Как определить язык по виду иероглифов/закорючек?» запилив англомовний варіант і опублікував отут на Linguistics.StackExchange.



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Q: Balto-Slavic Infinitive and PIE 3rd p., sg, present endings

---

Моя відповідь:


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 // Друзі, допоможіть цьому юному дарованію вашими upvotes! Ну, дуже грамотно розписує штудент, аж приємно читати! (Запитання теж грамотне, йому теж ваших голосів бракує)

Q: Why did Russia inherit the USSR status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power?

Russian Federation was certainly the biggest component after the collapse of USSR. However, I don't quite understand why the very valuable geopolitical position as a permanent member of UN Security Council with veto power was inherited by Russia alone, rather than, for example, shared in some proportion by the countries that used to be the components of USSR, or completely vacated.

More generally, how exactly international agreements and memberships involving USSR have been decided after the collapse of USSR?

A: I've been researching this question for a few years as well, and wrote a university research paper on it a few years ago and writing my thesis topic on it too.

Contrary to what one of the commentators said above, Russia getting U.S.S.R's veto power is NOT the same as UK getting veto power from the commonwealth. Not even close! Russia was only ONE of the Federations (similar to states in the U.S.) of Soviet Union not the parent country.

If you look at the precedence from all the other countries that have split up, whichever country gets out from the parent country umbrella has to reapply for even the "general" UN Membership let alone be admitted to the Security Council or even think about the veto. Regardless of whether the other former U.S.S.R. Federations wanted to "give" Russia the veto power that so many other countries in the world want to have, it wasn't there's to "give". When Russia declared it was no longer part of U.S.S.R, it would've technically needed to first apply for the general membership before even thinking about veto power.

To put it in perspective, if hypothetically China was to split up, the biggest province in China couldn't just "assume" the veto power of all of China.

In the case of United Kingdom, the reason it got to keep its veto power is because it was the parent country. The colonies is what split from it, not the other way around. Russia on the other hand, was not U.S.S.R, U.S.S.R was the parent country, and Russia and the other former Soviet Federations declared it as "dissolved" -- as in -- no longer exists!

This means that Russia technicaly should've needed to reapply for the General membership.

Once they got that, it would've needed to apply for Security Council (which is not easy to obtain), and once they got, only then could they have appealed for the veto power.

However, I'm sure other countries that want the veto power around the world would've put Russia in the back of the line. So, the big question still remains, exactly how did Russia end up with U.S.S.R's veto power without anyone in the world questioning it.

Stay tuned... thesis research in progress.

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Question: Is honorific “uncle” common across the languages of the world?

In Russian and English (and as far as I know Chinese) it's customary for kids to use honorific "uncle" when addressing elders by name (as a kid, you'd rather call an adult "uncle John" than "John", even if he's not your uncle).

In Russian, kids would also refer to a male stranger as "uncle".

Is is common across the languages of the world?

As a side question, is it ever used in languages which don't have a generic word for "uncle" (as opposed to "father's brother" and "mother's brother")? If yes, which "uncle" would they use?

---

Answer:

In Thai, calling people as they were your relatives, is a linguistic norm. Here are some details first:

( Read more... )

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