Rare/unusual natlang features

[Vijay]

*t, d > l is pretty common. That happens in Romani, too, and I believe some Dardic languages and Armenian IIRC.

[Linguoboy]

*t, d > l is pretty common. That happens in Romani, too, and I believe some Dardic languages and Armenian IIRC.

There are even sporadic examples from Irish, e.g. Munster léas "ear of corn" < Old Irish días "ibid."

[Richard W]

*t, d > l is pretty common. That happens in Romani, too, and I believe some Dardic languages and Armenian IIRC.

There are even sporadic examples from Irish, e.g. Munster léas "ear of corn" < Old Irish días "ibid."

And it's not unknown in English.

[Kuchigakatai]

Happens a lot to old intervocalic /ɖ/ in Middle and Modern Indo-Aryan too.

PIE *dek'm 'ten'
> Sanskrit dáśa, Pali dasa, Hindi दस das

PIE *swek's 'six' + *dek'm 'ten'
> 'sixteen': Sanskrit ṣóḍaśan, Pali soḷasa, Hindi सोलह solah

There's plenty of /d/ ~ /l/ confusion in Latin/Romance too...
- PIE *deh2i-wēr 'brother-in-law' > Latin laevir/lēvir, Sanskrit devṛ́.
- Latin mālus 'mast' has an uncertain etymology, but one strong candidate is (very late western) IE *masdos > *ma:dos > mālus, with cognates in Germanic and Irish.
- Latin mīles 'soldier' is even more controversial, but one candidate is PIE *mey-s-dheh1-o- > *misdhó- 'payment, reward', with Greek μισθός 'payment, reward' and Sanskrit mīḍhá 'contest, reward' as cognates, among others.
- The Twelve Tables' Old Latin dingua vs. Classical Latin lingua.
- Livius Andronicus' Old Latin dacruma vs. Classical Latin lacruma/lachrima.
- Latin olēre 'to smell of sth' vs. odōrem 'a smell'.
- Latin sedēre 'to sit' vs. solium 'a seat'.
- Latin laxāre vs. Portuguese deixar, Spanish dejar.
- Latin /l:/ and its corresponding /ɖ(:)/ in Asturian, Sardinian, Corsican and various Italo-Romance varieties from Foggia to Sicily...

[Travis B.]

- The Twelve Tables' Old Latin dingua vs. Classical Latin lingua.

Yes, Classical Latin lingua is cognate with English tongue.

[Nortaneous]

English certainly has examples. In Britain, vacuum cleaners are very very often called "hoovers", after the brand name, after the brand's founder's name.

That's just a genericized brand name - the brand name just happens to be from a surname. The eponymic route of person -> word is a little different from the genericizing route of (person ->) brand name -> word. A better example is "guy", but most true examples of person -> word that I can think of are in food names: the Dagwood, Melba toast, Earl Grey...

[MacAnDàil]

*t, d > l is pretty common. That happens in Romani, too, and I believe some Dardic languages and Armenian IIRC.

There are even sporadic examples from Irish, e.g. Munster léas "ear of corn" < Old Irish días "ibid."

And it's not unknown in English.

Can you give examples please?

[Kuchigakatai]

How rare are eponyms for common nouns cross-linguistically? I was leafing through a dictionary of Pitkern, and an astounding number of nouns and verbs had an eponymic etymology noted. Which got me wondering if eponyms are not just an overenthousiastic case of folk etymology on the part of the language informants.

Fair point. But given that various generations each have their own social groups, I would expect such terms to die out or be replaced frequently, rather than survive for +- 150 years.

Those little anecdotal etymologies are always a nice read nonetheless.

Aha! I was able to find these ancient Roman eponyms of the gods' names I derived some years ago, mostly from the Oxford Latin Dictionary for Latin plus other sources for the comments about Romance.

Classical Latin used the names of the gods as eponyms. In general, any statue could be referred to directly by the represented god's name, say, "the Ceres at that corner", but besides that, the following lists include substitutions like that for particular things.

Apollo
- the Sun (often so with the name Phoebus adapted from Greek too)
- the temple of Apollo at Actium (built by Augustus)
- the planet Mercury

Ceres
- wheat
- bread
- food

Diana
- hunting
- the Moon

Flora
- the time when flowers blossom in Spring
- (From the 18th century, what we call the "flora" of a place in English. This was originally a reference to the ancient goddess by Enlightenment scientists/philosophers.)

Janus
- the month of January
- as Janus Quirinus (Quirinus = the name of Romulus' god form), a specific shrine in Rome's forum whose doors would open during times of major wars
- any of the three archways on the eastern side of Rome's forum, frequented by loan sharks and merchants
- (also any door, but etymologically the name of the god comes from this old word for "door", not the other way around)

Juno
- the planet Venus
- the Roman Emperor's wife
- any man's wife, often as a joke
- as Juno inferna "Juno from below", the goddess Proserpina (~ Greek Persephone) who is the wife of Orcus/Pluto
- in the plural (Junones), a woman's personal protective spirit (men instead were said to be protected by their genius, i.e. the spirit of their gens or patrilineal lineage)
- as Juno Moneta, a mint (building to forge coins in), a stamp or mold to make coins with, or the money produced itself ("Moneta" was a traditional title of Juno's among the Romans. The original meaning of this title is lost, as Romans falsely reinterpreted it as a translation of the name of the Greek goddess Mnemosyne (literally "Memory"), the mother of the Muses, due to the verb monere 'to remind sb of sth'. Greeks apparently used to say Mnemosyne was Hera/Juno's aunt.)

Jupiter
- the sky
- the air
- wind
- the planet Jupiter
- the Nile river (by being identified with the Egyptian god Osiris)
- any powerful god, e.g. Juppiter stygius "Jupiter of the Styx river" and Juppiter niger "black Jupiter" for Orcus/Pluto, Juppiter antiquus "ancient Jupiter" for Saturn
- the Roman emperor as a 2nd-person title in panegyrics
- (also attested once in Plautus in a moment where a man sarcastically says hi to another as a joke: "Somebody's talking nearby, and I don't know who it is." "O, my Jupiter-on-Earth, your feasting partner is talking to you!" "O Saturio, it's great you've visited me now..." --Persa I.3)

Liber (~ Greek Dionysius, Bacchus)
- wine

Mars
- war
- battles
- a style of battling, e.g. mars pedestris '(the concept of) fighting on foot'
- a leader's force of arms
- a person's war spirit
- the advantage of fortune of a faction in war
- an army, or at a smaller size a troop
- a fleet of ships
- the planet Mars
- contentions of law at a city's forum
- a person's own prowess to do something
- also attested once in reference to Emperor Diocletian

Mercury
- the planet Mercury

Minerva
- the occupation of spinning or weaving
- a person's mind in terms of their memory, intelligence, taste, personal habits or tendencies
- as Minerva Palatina "Minerva of the Palatine Hill", the high Roman state, e.g. Palatinae cultor Minervae (Martial V.5.1) "worshipper of Palatine Minerva" in reference to one Sextus who was a librarian for the Emperor

Neptunus
- the sea, as either its surface or its depths
- fish from the sea
- (This word survives into Old French as netun, by then the name of a bestiary sea monster and also a mischievous spirit of rivers and seas at night. The Trésor de la langue française says this word is eggcorned as nuiton likely after nuit 'night', and then eggcorned again as luiton probably after luitier 'to struggle', remodelled as luitin probably after hutin 'quarrelsome, troublemaker', becoming modern lutin by now 'night imp, pixie' (a small mischievous demon). The Trésor mentions the existence of a sermon by 7th-century French bishop St. Eligius telling people to stop believing in pagan spirits like Orcus, Neptune and Diana.)

Orcus (also known by his adapted name from Greek, Pluto, or as Dis Pater "The Rich Father", but these two names are not used eponymously)
- death
- the underworld, e.g. fauces Orci 'the entrance of the underworld' (lit. "Orcus' jaws")
- (This word survives in French/Italian as ogre/orco, a man-eating giant. In Spanish, it survives as huerco, at first a synonym of the Devil, nowadays the literary figure of a depressed man crying in the dark; in Mexico, also any teenager or young man; in the traditional Spanish of the southwestern United States, also little boys.)

Saturn
- the planet Saturn

Venus
- a woman who inspires love in one
- Julius Caesar, who claimed descent from her through Aeneas
- the planet Venus
- the best throw in dicing with tali, when each of the four shows a different face
- vegetables
- sexual charm, the quality of attracting sexual love
- (without sexual connotation) charm, grace
- sexual appetite, sex (attested as both a concept abstraction and intercourse itself), for both humans or animals

Vesta
- her sacred fire, kept alive by the Vestal Virgins
- any hearth

Vulcan
- fire, flames
- (In the the Middle Ages, it became popular in Romance languages and Arabic to refer to the volcanos of northeastern Sicily with the name of this god, due to the ancient belief that Mt. Etna was Vulcan's forge. The Ancient Romans did not distinguish mountains from volcanos, referring to either type of geological feature as a mons 'mount'. In fact, they didn't distinguish lava from fire either, and even modern European languages didn't gain a word for "lava" until the 18th century with the development of vulcanology and its closer observations of active volcanos.)

[Richard W]

There are even sporadic examples from Irish, e.g. Munster léas "ear of corn" < Old Irish días "ibid."

And it's not unknown in English.

Can you give examples please?

In our part of Stevenage, we've heard /l/ for intervocalic <t>. I'm not sure how widespread it is - it could be very local.

[MacAnDàil]

I had never heard of this part of Hertfordshire, nor this sound change. It does indeed appear to be particularly local, which perhaps makes it all the more interesting.

[Richard W]

I had never heard of this part of Hertfordshire, nor this sound change. It does indeed appear to be particularly local, which perhaps makes it all the more interesting.

Hertfordshire is merely its geographical location. It's chiefly London overspill, built in the 1950's.

[Nortaneous]

The complete plosive/affricate inventory of Kobon: /mb nd tɕ ndʑ ŋg/. If you decide to call [x~kx~kʰ] /k/ and ignore prenasalization (which is suppressed word-initially and postconsonantally), you get /b d tɕ dʑ k g/, which is still a little weird. Phonetic [t] only exists word-finally as an optional allophone of /d/ after a lenis obstruent, and even there, it's aspirated. Phonetic [p] only exists word-initially (as an optional allophone of /b/) and word-finally (for /ɸ/.)

cf. Ontena Gadsup, which has no phonemic plosives except /ʔ/ because the plosives fricated in every position except {N ʔ}_

[zyxw59]

Russian "царь" and German "Kaiser" are both eponyms from Caesar.

[Raholeun]

When reading a history of the House of Burgundy the other day, there was another interesting eponym. Apparently an inn in Bruges that was named after its owners, the Van der Beurze family, became synonymous with late medieval stock trading. Beurze* then gave rise to Dutch "beurs", French "bourse", Russian "биржа" etc.

*Van der Beurze in turn has its etymology in the Late Latin word for "hide pouch", or "purse" bursa (perhaps also meaning "wine flask", which I found rather fitting for an inn.

[anteallach]

And it's not unknown in English.

Can you give examples please?

In our part of Stevenage, we've heard /l/ for intervocalic <t>. I'm not sure how widespread it is - it could be very local.

I haven't encountered this, but given the instability of intervocalic /t/ in English -- flaps, glottal stops, non-sibilant (post)alveolar fricatives -- it wouldn't surprise me that much.

The Danish approximant usually transcribed [ð] sounds lateral to John Wells. (See here, specifically the fourth bullet point. Some of the other stuff he says about Danish could go in this thread too...)

[RichardFromMarple]

The Russian word вокзал - vokzal for a railway station is said to come from the London district of Vauxhall.

Supposedly a delegation from the Russian government investigating railway operations visited London & looked at a line being built in the area, & assumed that Vauxhall was the word for a station rather than the locality.

[Nortaneous]

North Mekeo has six consonants: /b m v k ŋ ɫ/.

[dɮ the phoneme]

According to Mutonyi (2000), in Bukusu and closely related languages, noun class is marked by a “prefix structure” which consists of a prefix and a preprefix. The agreement markers on adjectives and numerals look like the prefix, while the markers on possessive pronouns and the object markers on verbs looks like the preprefix. Verbal subject agreement on the other hand is not transparently related to any of the above. And apparently this is the situation reconstructed for Proto-Bantu.

[bradrn]

According to https://math.stackexchange.com/question ... n-topology, Palikur (an Amazonian language) uses a highly elaborate system of noun classifiers which classifies nouns according to their topology. This isn’t terribly unusual, but what is unusual is the number of suffixes and the way they compose:

The numerical terms also have suffixes that cover nine arithmetic operators (such as multiplication) and many other mathematical symbols which topologists use, for example, the concept of a set of all points in a or b (a ᑌ b) is –mat. the concept of a set of all points in a and b (a ᑎ b) is –nam; the concept that a is not a subset of b (a ᑕ b) is –put; the n° of elements in a set (n(a)) is -at. Other suffixes indicate four types of symmetry. Palikur also has a word for lattice, ka-yakni-bet-ape (HAVING-CENTRAL.VERTEX-AGG-ALL) ‘having a set of central vertices, all intersected.’ In all, this extremely unusual language has almost a hundred topologically related suffixes.

[Zju]

North Mekeo has six consonants: /b m v k ŋ ɫ/.

Source on that? Wikipedia lists additional /t n s ʔ/ for just Mekeo.