16
votes
Why do some languages lack family name markers?
The use of grammaticalized family-name markers as in the Slavic etc. cases is relatively infrequent, so the better question is, why or how do such constructions arise in some languages? The ordinary ...
- 76.8k
12
votes
Why do some languages lack family name markers?
First of all, family names are far from being universal. In many places of the world they are pretty recent introductions. The existence of family names is also not determined by linguistic factors (...
- 29k
5
votes
How did Shiloah (שילוח) become Siloam and Silwan?
I don't think any of these qualify as morphological changes.
Koine Greek lacked a /ʃ/ phoneme, so Hebrew shin was regularly transcribed with sigma /s/. The final mu is, I think, a relic of mimation: ...
- 60.1k
4
votes
Accepted
Origin of the family name affix "tom"
Dutch tom is clearly cognate to High German zum which is a contraction of zu dem "to the". The German preposition zu can be used both in a static sense ("at") and in a directional ...
- 29k
4
votes
Accepted
Is the name "Melisande" related to the Latin for "honey", "Mel"?
It depends what you mean by "derived from". Lines of descent are often not as straightforward as dictionaries make them look!
The name "Melisande" and its variants do seem to stem ...
- 60.1k
3
votes
How do you form demonyms in Sumerian as well as Akkadian?
Most Afro-Asiatic languages would indicate this with a nisba suffix (or as Huehnergard calls it, a "relative adjective"). And indeed, Akkadian has (or at one point had) that suffix too, ...
- 60.1k
3
votes
How do you form demonyms in Sumerian as well as Akkadian?
Sumerian has very few words that can be described as "adjectives". Someone's homeland would instead be indicated by just combining nouns: lú adabki "the man from Adab". So if you ...
- 60.1k
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