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As usual, minority-language reporting is filled with weird formulations. > Their language, also called Kusunda, is unique: it is believed by linguists to be un

As usual, minority-language reporting is filled with weird formulations. > Their language, also called Kusunda, is unique: it is believed by linguists to be unrelated to any other language in the world. Scholars still aren't sure how it originated. Languages with no known relatives are called isolates, and there are a lot of those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_isolate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_isolate And languages do not normally "originate", unless they are constructed, like Esperanto, or arise in unusual circumstances, like spontaneous sign languages in isolated deaf communities. > And it has a variety of unusual elements, including lacking any standard way of negating a sentence, words for "yes" or "no", or any words for direction. As pointed out in other comments, not having words for "yes" or "no" is not very surprising. As for a "standard way" of negating a sentence, I wonder what that means. Kusunda has negative verbal suffixes, which vary based on some grammatical features, but so do many other languages. Location and direction is also usually specified by suffixes like in, e.g., Hungarian or Finnish. See a grammatical overview for details: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83v8d1wv https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83v8d1wv

Tainnor 4y ago
Thanks. Most people know exactly nothing about linguistics, but because everyone speaks a language, they feel qualified to talk about it. The results are mostly ridiculous to anyone actually trained in the field.
- dang 4y ago
  I'm sure all that's true (we see the same things in diet threads too - you eat food? no way, me too!) - but still, please don't post empty putdowns like this to HN. It just makes things worse. When you know more than others, the thing to do is to share some of what you know, so we all can learn. That's what macleginn did in the GP comment, making the thread much better. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - vt85 4y ago
    [dead]
  - Tainnor 4y ago
    I get your point, but the reasoning for my "putdown" can be found in GGP's comment, so I feel like you're getting hung up on a minor issue here. I was merely corroborating the first sentence of GGP's comment. Certainly, if the bar for comments here is "it has to make the reader substantially more knowledgeable", not a lot of comments would remain. Even in this very comment section, I can find other "empty putdowns" or not very substantiated comments.
    - dang 4y ago
      Maybe so, but that would be a reason to post fewer empty putdowns, not more.
CSSer 4y ago
The Hungarian and Finnish location and direction suffixes thing sounds a lot like latin case. Do you know off-hand if it’s related?
- macleginn 4y ago
  "Relatedness" is a very thorny notion here because we cannot discount the possibility of long-range contact influence in Western Eurasia. Many ancient Indo-European languages had some kind of ablative or locative case, and accusative was often used in a directional sense. However, localtive-case systems of Hungarian and Finnish are much more developed than anything we see in Indo-European (Latin has at most 3 cases with locative/directional semantics; Hungarian has 9; Finnish has 8), so it's a different system anyway.
- beeforpork 4y ago
  It's not related. But suffixing is a very common way of expressing stuff also in unrelated languages, e.g., your Finnish locative works just like it does in Japanese or Tamil (structurally, not literally: it is a different ending) -- and those three are totally unrelated. Structurally, Finnish endings are also quite different from Latin as the ending is always the same (almost, except for vowel changes), while Latin has an array of endings for the same function and you need to learn about declension classes of nouns to understand how to select the right one. Finnish 'cases' are more like suffixes like '-ne' or '-que' in Latin. E.g., '-ssa' or '-ssä' is 'in (location)': 'Amerikassa' 'in America', 'Sveitsissä' 'in Switzerland'. In Japanese the ending for 'in' is '-de' and in Tamil, it is '-il'.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Finnish 'cases' are more like suffixes like '-ne' or '-que' in Latin. E.g., '-ssa' or '-ssä' is 'in (location)': 'Amerikassa' 'in America', 'Sveitsissä' 'in Switzerland'. In Japanese the ending for 'in' is '-de' and in Tamil, it is '-il'. This seems to confuse inflectional suffixes with analytic particles. Certainly -ne and -que in Latin are not suffixes; they are clitics, exactly analogous to the English articles a(n) and the (not usually considered "prefixes"). They are not part of the word after which they appear. In contrast, the -i in humi "on the ground" is a part of the word, which mutated into that form to express a locative use. (As a side note, that is not at all the norm in Latin - location is usually expressed with a preposition, as in sub monte "under [at the foot of] the mountain". Humus is one of only a handful of words that preserve the locative case.) I believe the situation for Japanese de is similar, with de being either a clitic or a fully independent word. I have no knowledge of Tamil or Finnish.
tuukkah 4y ago
In Finnish, "not" is an auxiliary verb, so "do" + "not" and similar combinations are just one word: "I do not" => "En" "(It) does not" => "Ei" etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_verb#Finnish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_verb#Finnish
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  That's interesting - since basically every auxiliary verb I can think of for english (Am, is, are, was, were, will, have, has, had, may, might, can, could, shall, should, must, ought to, would) has a contraction form with "not" (although some are fairly colloquial, or considered out of date): (amn't, isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't, willn't, haven't, hasn't, hadn't, mayn't, can't, couldn't, shalln't, shouldn't, mustn't, oughtn't to, wouldn't)
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > amn't Amn't is neither standard nor historically supported; the word naturally developed into the modern word ain't, which is stigmatized. Standard English essentially requires "I'm not" instead. Where avoiding the inflectional form is impossible, the standard awkwardly provides first-person aren't. > willn't Not sure what you were thinking here; there is a negative form of will, but it's won't. > shalln't And this is shan't.
    - spullara 4y ago
      My daughter invented amn't when she was 3 based on the rules that she understood.
    - blix 4y ago
      There ain't no such thing as 'Standard English.'
      - simonh 4y ago
        I don’t think that a supportable position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_English

Tainnor 4y ago

Thanks. Most people know exactly nothing about linguistics, but because everyone speaks a language, they feel qualified to talk about it. The results are mostly ridiculous to anyone actually trained in the field.

dang 4y ago
I'm sure all that's true (we see the same things in diet threads too - you eat food? no way, me too!) - but still, please don't post empty putdowns like this to HN. It just makes things worse. When you know more than others, the thing to do is to share some of what you know, so we all can learn. That's what macleginn did in the GP comment, making the thread much better. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- vt85 4y ago
  [dead]
- Tainnor 4y ago
  I get your point, but the reasoning for my "putdown" can be found in GGP's comment, so I feel like you're getting hung up on a minor issue here. I was merely corroborating the first sentence of GGP's comment. Certainly, if the bar for comments here is "it has to make the reader substantially more knowledgeable", not a lot of comments would remain. Even in this very comment section, I can find other "empty putdowns" or not very substantiated comments.
  - dang 4y ago
    Maybe so, but that would be a reason to post fewer empty putdowns, not more.

CSSer 4y ago

The Hungarian and Finnish location and direction suffixes thing sounds a lot like latin case. Do you know off-hand if it’s related?

macleginn 4y ago
"Relatedness" is a very thorny notion here because we cannot discount the possibility of long-range contact influence in Western Eurasia. Many ancient Indo-European languages had some kind of ablative or locative case, and accusative was often used in a directional sense. However, localtive-case systems of Hungarian and Finnish are much more developed than anything we see in Indo-European (Latin has at most 3 cases with locative/directional semantics; Hungarian has 9; Finnish has 8), so it's a different system anyway.
beeforpork 4y ago
It's not related. But suffixing is a very common way of expressing stuff also in unrelated languages, e.g., your Finnish locative works just like it does in Japanese or Tamil (structurally, not literally: it is a different ending) -- and those three are totally unrelated. Structurally, Finnish endings are also quite different from Latin as the ending is always the same (almost, except for vowel changes), while Latin has an array of endings for the same function and you need to learn about declension classes of nouns to understand how to select the right one. Finnish 'cases' are more like suffixes like '-ne' or '-que' in Latin. E.g., '-ssa' or '-ssä' is 'in (location)': 'Amerikassa' 'in America', 'Sveitsissä' 'in Switzerland'. In Japanese the ending for 'in' is '-de' and in Tamil, it is '-il'.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Finnish 'cases' are more like suffixes like '-ne' or '-que' in Latin. E.g., '-ssa' or '-ssä' is 'in (location)': 'Amerikassa' 'in America', 'Sveitsissä' 'in Switzerland'. In Japanese the ending for 'in' is '-de' and in Tamil, it is '-il'. This seems to confuse inflectional suffixes with analytic particles. Certainly -ne and -que in Latin are not suffixes; they are clitics, exactly analogous to the English articles a(n) and the (not usually considered "prefixes"). They are not part of the word after which they appear. In contrast, the -i in humi "on the ground" is a part of the word, which mutated into that form to express a locative use. (As a side note, that is not at all the norm in Latin - location is usually expressed with a preposition, as in sub monte "under [at the foot of] the mountain". Humus is one of only a handful of words that preserve the locative case.) I believe the situation for Japanese de is similar, with de being either a clitic or a fully independent word. I have no knowledge of Tamil or Finnish.

tuukkah 4y ago

In Finnish, "not" is an auxiliary verb, so "do" + "not" and similar combinations are just one word: "I do not" => "En" "(It) does not" => "Ei" etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_verb#Finnish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_verb#Finnish

horsawlarway 4y ago
That's interesting - since basically every auxiliary verb I can think of for english (Am, is, are, was, were, will, have, has, had, may, might, can, could, shall, should, must, ought to, would) has a contraction form with "not" (although some are fairly colloquial, or considered out of date): (amn't, isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't, willn't, haven't, hasn't, hadn't, mayn't, can't, couldn't, shalln't, shouldn't, mustn't, oughtn't to, wouldn't)
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > amn't Amn't is neither standard nor historically supported; the word naturally developed into the modern word ain't, which is stigmatized. Standard English essentially requires "I'm not" instead. Where avoiding the inflectional form is impossible, the standard awkwardly provides first-person aren't. > willn't Not sure what you were thinking here; there is a negative form of will, but it's won't. > shalln't And this is shan't.
  - spullara 4y ago
    My daughter invented amn't when she was 3 based on the rules that she understood.
  - blix 4y ago
    There ain't no such thing as 'Standard English.'
    - simonh 4y ago
      I don’t think that a supportable position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_English