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It is odd to me that I've gone so long without making a language-themed post here, but it's odd for me to have gone so long without actively studying a language. My enthusiasm for Albanian barely lasted a week, and that was back in January. I can remember brief spells of Irish, French, and--most recently--Serbian since then, but nothing sustained or intensive.
I did pull out some of my Vietnamese books recently on account of reading some short stories from Đoàn Lê and one from Robert Olen Butler, but I've never really cared for Vietnamese and it's likely to remain little more than a curiosity for me. The most interesting thing I discovered about it this time around is that (a) initial clusters apparently survived long enough to make it into Rhodes' dictionary and (b) they explain some puzzling variations in the modern language. For instance, Middle Vietnamese *mlạt yields both nhạt and lạt in Hanoi dialect, where they are in free variation.
Of course, I don't have to be studying a specific language to come across interesting things to post about, but most of these feel too slight to merit an entry of their own. For instance, the other night another penny dropped for me and I realised that predecessor and decease were etymologically related. (The Latin root is decedo, "I go" (cedo) "away" (de-), "I depart".) Ancestor is part of the same family (Latin antecessor with syncope and epenthesis via Old French).
So any suggestions for linguistic subjects would be welcome. I like thinking about this stuff, but I miss the discipline of actually trying to explain it to someone else.
I did pull out some of my Vietnamese books recently on account of reading some short stories from Đoàn Lê and one from Robert Olen Butler, but I've never really cared for Vietnamese and it's likely to remain little more than a curiosity for me. The most interesting thing I discovered about it this time around is that (a) initial clusters apparently survived long enough to make it into Rhodes' dictionary and (b) they explain some puzzling variations in the modern language. For instance, Middle Vietnamese *mlạt yields both nhạt and lạt in Hanoi dialect, where they are in free variation.
Of course, I don't have to be studying a specific language to come across interesting things to post about, but most of these feel too slight to merit an entry of their own. For instance, the other night another penny dropped for me and I realised that predecessor and decease were etymologically related. (The Latin root is decedo, "I go" (cedo) "away" (de-), "I depart".) Ancestor is part of the same family (Latin antecessor with syncope and epenthesis via Old French).
So any suggestions for linguistic subjects would be welcome. I like thinking about this stuff, but I miss the discipline of actually trying to explain it to someone else.
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