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Language discussion thread

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I think I might be partly to blame for the name discussion... due to my Little bit of complaining about Valgren being referred to as 'Andersen' :eek:

Something I find amusing about the Danish riders is that, other than those examples Netserk already mentioned we got Cort; who's never referred to as 'Nielsen', Lars Bak; whose middle name 'Ytting' sometimes, sometimes not, gets included - once it was because Chris Anker declared it to be 'Lars Ytting Bak day', and Jakob Fuglsang who I've never seen referred to as 'Jakob Diemer Fuglsang'.

Also, fun fact: There's a Danish writer named Helle Helle.

Talking about names: Can someone explain the Spanish naming tradition, where they have another surname after the surname by which they're known.
 
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RedheadDane said:
I think I might be partly to blame for the name discussion... due to my Little bit of complaining about Valgren being referred to as 'Andersen' :eek:

Something I find amusing about the Danish riders is that, other than those examples Netserk already mentioned we got Cort; who's never referred to as 'Nielsen', Lars Bak; whose middle name 'Ytting' sometimes, sometimes not, gets included - once it was because Chris Anker declared it to be 'Lars Ytting Bak day', and Jakob Fuglsang who I've never seen referred to as 'Jakob Diemer Fuglsang'.

Also, fun fact: There's a Danish writer named Helle Helle.

Talking about names: Can someone explain the Spanish naming tradition, where they have another surname after the surname by which they're known.

I cant tell you the detail, but it is apparantly the opposite in Portuguese. Can it be comfirmed?

On another note am I right in saying the locak spanish dialects (Galician, Basque and Catalan) similar to Portuguese. I.e in Portuguese and Catalan: Volta.
 
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RedheadDane said:
Talking about names: Can someone explain the Spanish naming tradition, where they have another surname after the surname by which they're known.

There are probably nuances that others could explain, but since no-one better qualified has answered your question...
Essentially the first surname is the father's (first) surname, the second is the mother's (first) surname. So Alberto Contador Velasco is possibly the son of José Contador Sánchez and María Velasco Rodríguez, and if he and his wife, Macarena Pescador, ever have a son, he will presumably be called Cristobal Vicente Contador Pescador.

Which suggests that when Sebastian Henao Marín suddenly started being known as Sebastian Henao Gómez, some discovery had been made about the identity of his maternal grandfather.
 
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Armchair cyclist said:
RedheadDane said:
Talking about names: Can someone explain the Spanish naming tradition, where they have another surname after the surname by which they're known.

There are probably nuances that others could explain, but since no-one better qualified has answered your question...
Essentially the first surname is the father's (first) surname, the second is the mother's (first) surname. So Alberto Contador Velasco is possibly the son of José Contador Sánchez and María Velasco Rodríguez, and if he and his wife, Macarena Pescador, ever have a son, he will presumably be called Cristobal Vicente Contador Pescador.

Which suggests that when Sebastian Henao Marín suddenly started being known as Sebastian Henao Gómez, some discovery had been made about the identity of his maternal grandfather.
This is correct, there is a very extensive wikipedia article about the subject (with even a seperate paragraph about "Flamenco artists" :D ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_naming_customs

lemon cheese cake said:
RedheadDane said:
Talking about names: Can someone explain the Spanish naming tradition, where they have another surname after the surname by which they're known.

I cant tell you the detail, but it is apparantly the opposite in Portuguese. Can it be comfirmed?
This is also true, in Portuguese the first surname is usually the maternal surname and the 2nd is the paternal surname. But in Portugal it is also possible to have 4 surnames :eek:
 
Thanks for that explanation. :)
(Assuming this Cristobal Vicente Contador Pescador is partly made-up, with the first two names being the imaginary boy's called names)
Also makes sense compared to the Portuguese tradition; the Spanish riders are known by their first surname, as that's the paternal one, whereas the Portuguese riders are known by the second surname, as that's the paternal one.
Except, for some reason, for Bruno Pires, who is known by his maternal name. But of course; it's his choice what he wants to be called.
 
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RedheadDane said:
Thanks for that explanation. :)
(Assuming this Cristobal Vicente Contador Pescador is partly made-up, with the first two names being the imaginary boy's called names)
Parents' names are made up too :p

Also makes sense compared to the Portuguese tradition; the Spanish riders are known by their first surname, as that's the paternal one, whereas the Portuguese riders are known by the second surname, as that's the paternal one.
Except, for some reason, for Bruno Pires, who is known by his maternal name. But of course; it's his choice what he wants to be called.
Pires might be his paternal surname. In both Spain and Portugal it is possible to switch the position of the paternal and maternal surname but it is not very common :)
 
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RedheadDane said:
LaFlorecita said:
Pires might be his paternal surname. In both Spain and Portugal it is possible to switch the position of the paternal and maternal surname but it is not very common :)

No, it isn't. At least not according to Wikipedia and as you know; Wikipedia is always correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Pires
Wikipedia puts that line above every page about a Spanish or Portuguese person; I doubt Wikipedia knows if Pires' parents decided to switch the names or not.
 
Sometimes there is a stylistic choice in the surname chosen. Ayrton Senna da Silva, for example, elected to go by his mother's family name because "Silva" is such a common surname in Brazil. His sister also chose to do so, for similar reasons (and of course, once Ayrton became world famous it perhaps would have become necessary in part anyway). Therefore his nephew, who later became a racing driver, was officially Bruno Senna Lalli. He also went by his mother's surname, after much deliberation (whether it would be seen as cashing in on the family connection, or if going with his father's surname would be seen as trying to hide it).
 
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LaFlorecita said:
Pires might be his paternal surname. In both Spain and Portugal it is possible to switch the position of the paternal and maternal surname but it is not very common :)

Yes, that's true. Parents can chose the order their surnames appear on their sons' names. However, few people are aware of that, and it's a general rule that the maternal name comes in first. I don't know anyone in real life that has opted the 'paternal name first, maternal name last' order. That's usually a choice of people with fancy surnames or from families with important names that want to make sure it [the name] last's trough time.
 
Oude means old. It's the same word - Dutch lost the L's in syllable codas so you get things like oud(e) vs German alt and English old, or zou vs German soll and English shall.

Apparently, Kwaremont is a "Flemishization" of a French name, Quaremont, from earlier *Quadremont, "square hill".
 
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hrotha said:
Oude means old. It's the same word - Dutch lost the L's in syllable codas so you get things like oud(e) vs German alt and English old, or zou vs German soll and English shall.

Apparently, Kwaremont is a "Flemishization" of a French name, Quaremont, from earlier *Quadremont, "square hill".
iirc that vocalization only happened to syllables of the type /ol/ or /al/ followed by some (dental/alveolar) plosive consonant (typically -d or -t).
I don't think Dutch zou is an exception, as it is related historically to Germ. sollten and Eng. should (rather than shall).

from what i can tell, some English words followed that development, others didn't.
Germ. alt = Eng. old
but Germ. sollt(en) vs. Eng. should [shud]
and Germ. wald vs. Eng. wood [wud]
 
Thanks for the clarification! Yeah, I misrepresented the extent of L-dropping in Dutch and got the conjugation of zullen wrong - that's what you get when you only look at a language for a few months at a time. :D

English wood is different, though. It comes from Old English wudu, a variation of widu (with rounding of the stressed vowel influenced by the preceding /w/), which was subject to regular lengthening in Middle English (wode) due to having an open stressed syllable (hence the spelling with <oo>, although the vowel was shortened again later on, just like in good, foot, etc). It is a cognate to Old High German witu and unrelated to Modern German Walt, whose Modern English cognates include wolds.

The issue is complicated because English is pretty inconsistent with L-dropping and L-vocalization.
 
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Also, just to make it a bit more complex; they don't drop the l everywhere. In the East of the Netherlands they will actually say 'olde' instead of 'oude' (if they are speaking their dialects, rather than standard Dutch). But to be fair, those dialects are closer to some dialects of north-western Germany (e.g. Westphalian), than they are to standard Dutch. The way to view it that makes most sense to me is to say that German and Dutch (and Luxembourgish) are really one language with, but with a lot of dialectical variations. Only some dialects spoken on the western fringes of this language drop the l. But since the West is the area of the Netherlands where all the big cities are (e.g. Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam), standard Dutch is based on the dialects of that area (namely Hollands). So consequently standard Dutch, which everybody in the Netherlands and Belgium is taught in school nowadays, drops the l, because it's based on the Hollandic dialect of Dutch, which is where the l is dropped.

I'm actually wondering if other western dialects of Dutch, besides Hollands, also have l vocalization. I suspect Zeeuws, West-Vlaams et cetera also do it, but I'm not familiar enough with those dialects to say for sure. :p
 
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hrotha said:
Thanks for the clarification! Yeah, I misrepresented the extent of L-dropping in Dutch and got the conjugation of zullen wrong - that's what you get when you only look at a language for a few months at a time. :D

English wood is different, though. It comes from Old English wudu, a variation of widu (with rounding of the stressed vowel influenced by the preceding /w/), which was subject to regular lengthening in Middle English (wode) due to having an open stressed syllable (hence the spelling with <oo>, although the vowel was shortened again later on, just like in good, foot, etc). It is a cognate to Old High German witu and unrelated to Modern German Walt, whose Modern English cognates include wolds.

The issue is complicated because English is pretty inconsistent with L-dropping and L-vocalization.
ok, that's interesting.
so English appears to follow German in terms of retaining the -l in OHG *al/ol+t/d syllables, with should being some kind of exception (not surprising though as it's coherent with would/could). Would you concur?
 
On the whole, yeah. Should and would are very frequent function words and thus subject to special developments and additional "erosion", so to speak, and therefore it's no surprise that they're more advanced on the L-dropping front. As for could, the <l> is not etymological, but rather analogical with should and would (Old English cūðe, also subject to analogical replacement of /ð/ with the usual /d/ of the past tense), so it's a bit of a different case. I imagine the <l> was added merely to the spelling after it had been dropped elsewhere, so it was never pronounced.
 
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interesting detail, Maaaaaaaarten, though i'm inclined to disagree with the one-language view (albeit mainly instinctively).
Of course in certains areas of the lexicon/phonology there is a clear continuum, but on the whole, especially if you take the morphosyntax into the equation, from what I can tell there's no basis to postulate a continuum.
Maybe you could make a case that varieties such as Plattdeutsch and Mestreechs/Limburgisch constitute 'bridge' varieties, but I'd venture to guess that Plattdeutsch is (in the morphosyntax) still considerably closer to standard High German than to, say, Twents.

impressive knowledge, hrotha.
yeah, auxiliary verbs behave funny. Tendency towards regularization through analogy as you point out for the could/should/would paradigm, but also a tendency towards suppletion, which I guess is sort of the opposite of regularization.
 
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sniper said:
interesting detail, Maaaaaaaarten, though i'm inclined to disagree with the one-language view (albeit mainly instinctively).
Of course in certains areas of the lexicon/phonology there is a clear continuum, but on the whole, especially if you take the morphosyntax into the equation, from what I can tell there's no basis to postulate a continuum.
Maybe you could make a case that varieties such as Plattdeutsch and Mestreechs/Limburgisch constitute 'bridge' varieties, but I'd venture to guess that Plattdeutsch is (in the morphosyntax) still considerably closer to standard High German than to, say, Twents.

I'm not an expert on it either, but I'm quite sure that dialects like Twents and Gronings show some similarities to 'German' dialects spoken across the border. I think these dialects often categorized together though the names used for this group can change a bit (e.g. Nederduits, Nedersaksisch etc. in Dutch, Low Saxon, Low German etc. in English) The terminology is a bit confusing but to my knowledge these dialects are generally grouped together with little regard for the border between the Netherlands and Germany.

Another thing to take into account is that all these dialects have been under the influence from the standard language for a long time now. Because people move around a lot more nowadays and because everybody is forced to use standard Dutch in a lot of instances, the non-standard languages spoken in the Netherlands have been influenced a lot by standard Dutch. The dialect continuum idea might be more representative of the situations a 100 years ago. I know for a fact for instance, from talking to my grandmother who is from Groningen, that Gronings nowadays is much more like standard Dutch than it was, say, 60 years ago. My grandmother actually told me once that quite some time ago when she was on a holiday with her parents and they met some Germans who were somewhere from northwest Germany, they actually could communicate just fine when they spoke their own dialects. The people from Groningen talked Gronings and the people from, probably East Frisia or something, talked their own dialects and they could understand each other quite well. But yeah, that was the Gronings from more than half a century ago, not the Gronings you find nowadays. My grandmother says there are very few people left who still speak Gronings like they did when my grandmother was young (she's 80 now).
 
Yes, Maaaaaaaarten, that's a very good point. Mass public education and mass media have thoroughly transformed the linguistic landscape of Europe. Neighbouring West Germanic dialects in the Netherlands and Germany have been pulled apart as they look at more distant variants as their standard, which has largely reduced dialects to an accent with some local words and idioms.
 
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sure, Maaaaaaaaarten's view of Dutch and German as a dialect continuum may be tenable if you look at the phonology and lexicon.
But if you take the morphosyntax (for instance the pronominal system) into account, my layman impression is that Twents will then turn out to be closer to mainstream Dutch than to Plattdeutsch. And Plattdeutsch in turn will be closer to High German.
A quick search gave me a case in point: the second person singular pronoun is IEJ in Twents (JIJ in Hollands Dutch), and DU in Plattdeutsch (DU in High German).
 
Bear in mind that jij & co. as 2nd person sg. pronouns are a relatively recent* development which originated as a plural pronoun being used to express courtesy, exactly like English you. All things considered, that's not necessarily a morphological difference that runs very deep between German and Dutch dialects - although that might well still be the case, since I'm in no way qualified to judge.

*High Middle Ages, apparently. A long time ago, but after the different branches of West Germanic had split off.
 

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