Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
In this study, the grammar and basic lexicon of the Sayan languages (Turkic), spoken in Russia and Mongolia, are compared by means of the features found in WALS (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013). The...Show moreIn this study, the grammar and basic lexicon of the Sayan languages (Turkic), spoken in Russia and Mongolia, are compared by means of the features found in WALS (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013). The main goal of this thesis is to provide a comparative study on four Sayan languages, namely Tuvan, Tofa, Soyot, and Dukha. Tuba, the fifth Sayan language, became extinct before it was described and studied and, therefore, it is excluded from the linguistic study. The data in this study came from the grammars by Anderson & Harrison (1999 and 2006, Tuvan), Rassadin (1971, 1978 and 2010, Tofa and Soyot) and Ragagnin (2011, Dukha). Another question that will be discussed in this thesis is the reason why Tuvan is not moribund, while its sister and daughter languages are. To answer this question, I looked at the history of the Sayan peoples and their current social status. Of all Sayan languages, Tofa showed the least Mongolian influences. This is probably because the Tofa people moved away from the Tuva Basin before the Mongols had a linguistic influence on the Tuvan language. Together with data from the grammars and historical information, a Sayan tree diagram is reconstructed. From the history and the current social status of the Sayan peoples could be concluded that the number of speakers and isolation together form the reason why Tuvan is not extinct and flourishes, while the other Sayan languages struggle to survive.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
Syncope, or the dropping of vowels from within a word, is one of the most distinctive features of the Lycian languages within the Anatolian branch. The exact conditions for this syncope have long...Show moreSyncope, or the dropping of vowels from within a word, is one of the most distinctive features of the Lycian languages within the Anatolian branch. The exact conditions for this syncope have long evaded linguists. This study aims to clarify the rules and restrictions regarding syncope in Lycian. The first chapter will briefly describe the Lycian language, as well as Lycia, the country where it was spoken. The second chapter will define the place of Lycian within the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. Before undertaking the description of a certain feature in a certain language, it is wise to first narrowly define that feature. This will be done in the third chapter. The fourth chapter will first give an overview of the previous scholarship on syncope in Lycian, after which a detailed analysis will be attempted. This analysis will shed light on the stress patterns of Lycian and show that syncope had worked in a specific period in the past of the language, but that it had since ceased to operate. The fifth and last chapter will summarise the conclusions. This study found that verbs were stressed on the root, or on the suffix, and that nouns were stressed penultimately. Both pre- and post-tonic syllables were syncopated if they were short at the time that syncope took place. In many cases syncope was reversed by paradigmatic levelling.Show less
This thesis tries to resolve the problematic development of PIE *s after r,u,k,i in Lithuanian. First it summarizes how the ruki-rule works in other branches of PIE and why one would expect it to...Show moreThis thesis tries to resolve the problematic development of PIE *s after r,u,k,i in Lithuanian. First it summarizes how the ruki-rule works in other branches of PIE and why one would expect it to work in Lithuanian as well. Then it gives an overview of the development of PIE *s after r,u,k,i in Lithuanian and goes deeper into the opinions of several scholars on how to solve the irregularities. The two main positions are that either the ruki-rule did or it did not work in Lithuanian and examples that prove the opposite are usually explained by both sides as being new formations, borrowings or possibly of different origin. However, the evidence that ruki did take place is much bigger. The last chapter researches a selection of words that show *s after r,u,k,i to possibly find out how these can be explained. Unfortunately, a proper explanation for all the words could not be found, only for some examples new, significant points were obtained. Therefore it could very well be that the variation in s after r,u,k,i is due to older dialects, where the ruki-rule perhaps did not take place, but this cannot be proven. Therefore the author prefers the explanation that the ruki-rule originally did take place in Lithuanian, but that there are cases where it appears it didn't because of flection, borrowings, or association with suffixes in -s.Show less
