Talk:Chaha language
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[edit] Few notes
First of all, thank you very much, Mike Gasser, for enlarging this article. I have several notes on what you've wrote that I would like to raise here in order to improve this article:
- 1. -i in käfʷäč-i-m is not the "impersonal suffix", as it is written under the section on Morphophonology, but rather the "heavy" object suffix for the 3rd person masculine singular. See: Polotsky 1938, pp. 160ff [500ff]; Leslau 1950, p. 20 [=Leslau 1992, p. 125]; Polotsky 1951, pp. 29-31 [544-546]; Wolf Leslau, "The impersonal in Chaha", in: To Honor Roman Jakobson, Mouton: The Hague 1967, pp. 1150-1162 [=Leslau 1992, pp. 430-442].
- 2. It is not true that "In the imperative/jussive form of one class of verbs, the first consonant in the root is depalatalized if this is possible", as it is stated under Palatalization. In fact, the palatalization in the perfect and imperfect of verbs of "type B" (or D-stem verbs, that is, verbs that are historically of the geminating stem) is related to the vowel ē in the imperfect of these verbs in Ge'ez (e.g. nǎṣṣǎrǎ - yənēṣṣər "look, watch").
- This vowel is due to the collision of two geminating factors: (1) the second radical is always geminated in the imperfect in Ge'ez, and (2) the second radical is always geminated in the D-stem. The solution to this collision in Ge'ez is the vowel ē. In South-Ethiopic Semitic languages (i.e., Amharic, Argobba, Gurage, etc.) the perfect is also geminated like the imperfect, unlike Tigre and Tigrinya where this doesn't happen. Now the same collision of two geminating factors also occurs in the perfect of such languages as Amharic and Chaha. in Amharic, many type B verbs have a palatalized first radical (*CēCCäCä > ČäCCäCä), though this palatalization has moved also to the imperative/jussive due to analogy.
- In Chaha, this analogy didn't occur, so that in the imperative/jussive the non-palatalized radicals of type B are preserved. Now, in any case, it is not true that only the first radical is different in the Perfect/Imperfect and in the Imperative/Jussive in palatalization: sometimes the second radical is palatalized in the Perfect/Imperfect (e.g. täfäqʸärä-m "play, converse, chat", gʸäkʸätä-m "accompany, see off, escort") but not in the Imperative/Jussive (täfäqär!, gäkət!).
- The whole issue has been explained much better by: Polotsky 1938, pp. 151-152 [491-492].
yhever 19:23, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
- Thanks, Yhever. I knew some of this (the relationship between Type B verbs and e or palatalization of the corresponding verbs in Chaha) but not other stuff, like how the second radical in these verbs could also be affected. (Of course one challenge with Chaha is explaining any of this in the article without writing an entire book, as Banksira was forced to do.) In any case, please edit the article as you see fit; you're the expert! — MikeG (talk) 05:06, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Chaha
The article, as it is now written, deals almost only in Chaha. Therefore, I think it is better to change its name to "Chaha language". Furthermore, I think the other dialects are different enough to justify seperate articles. yhever 00:06, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
- Are they usually thought of as separate languages or just as dialects? Either way, if this is only on Chaha, then it should be moved their and a general page on the group be made here (more moved to Sebat Bet Gurage languages. — ዮም | (Yom) | Talk • contribs • Ethiopia 00:50, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
- I agree with yhever that we should have "Chaha language" like we have "Inor language" and that this article should be renamed "Chaha language", with a few minor changes. (We discussed this somewhere awhile back.) It's only Ethnologue that considers SBG to be a language, it seems. If there's a Wikipedia convention, I'd say it is to treat "dialects" that are mutually unintelligible as "languages" (Bavarian, Sicilian, Ryukyuan languages, etc.). We can always say in the "Chaha language" article and articles on Ezha, etc. that they are sometimes considered dialects within a dialect cluster. So "Sebat Bet Gurage languages" would make sense, yes. -- MikeG (talk) 14:44, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
