Occasional Tales

The mystery of the missing thesis. I dropped by Blackwell's last night to check out the latest issue of the Transactions of the Philological Society of which I've been a member for about ten years now. I downloaded an article by Don Ringe which was addressing the old problem of the genitive plural in Gothic which is, unexpectedly, -ē rather than -ō. I was wondering what I'd said about it, which is why I was looking for a copy of my thesis. What actually caught my eye was the old myth of trimoraic vowels as an explanation for different reflexes of the same vowel. I don't know who first suggested the idea, but I believe it's been around for quite some time. Although there are trimoraic long vowels, I believe that such entities as distinctive sounds in a language are very rare. I think they're found in Estonian, but it seems more likely they're a surface (phonetic) phenomenon rather than a phonemic one. The point about the assumption that there were trimoraic ...

I just can't stop myself. Every so often I find that I keep using the same sort of phraseology over and over again. When I was an undergrad, I suddenly became very aware that I was using a lot of participial clauses which I attributed to learning Classical Greek. I don't know whether I really was using more participial clauses at that time than might've been usual, but I found them noticeable. My current mania is for inserting clauses slightly out of their normal order. For example, Winter in Beijing, apart from rare occasions , was almost always dry. where I might place "apart from rare occasions" at the start of the sentence or at the end where I'd probably treat is as an afterthought. Perhaps I've found this construction more noticeable recently because Mill tends to insert clauses into the sentence in a similar fashion. In all likelihood, I've used this device all along, but it took someone else making extensive use of it to bring it to my attentio...