The weekend before christmas I went to Karlsruhe to visit some very nice friends. I decided to go back not on the direct way but make it an all-over-Germany roundtrip from my home in Leipzig via Frankfurt to Karlsruhe and back via Cologne, Bremen, Kiel and Magdeburg. It was amazingly cold that weekend, down to -18°C at night, but it was nice weather, nevertheless. On Saturday, Dec. 19th, sometime around noon, I boarded the ICE to Frankfurt - well, it didn't really go to downtown Frankfurt, I had to get off at South Station and take the suburban train to downtown to get on my ICE to Karlsruhe there. Amazingly, the train was in time, when it departed from Leipzig. When we arrived in Fulda, our delay was about 10 minutes, and suddenly, after Fulda, large crowds of people were standing in the car where I was. I wondered why they don't sit down - the train wasn't that full. But I found out that they actually waited for the restroom - the only one in the whole train that wasn't frozen. When I walked towards the door just shy of Frankfurt, an old lady was loudly complaining in her Berlin-ish dialect. She was just standing in front of the restroom door and obviously desperately wanted to go there. The conductor stood next to the door, because his office was just there, and looked a little bit annoyed. "Ick bin von da ersten Klasse, ick werd ja wohl jetzt mal uff dit Klo dürfen." Well, the conductor told her that because of the temperatures most of the lavatories are frozen and he then asked where she wanted to get off the train. "Frankfurt Süd". This was kind of a funny situation - not for her, of course -, because we just entered that station while she said that. The conductor told her to hurry up to get her luggage from the first class coaches at other end of the train because the train wouldn't stop for too long. I don't know if she managed to get off there... Actually, some minutes before we arrived in Frankfurt, the conductor said we are 10 minutes late, but he wasn't right, the train arrived just in time. I even got the suburban train that I was supposed to take. Of course, the other ICE to Karlsruhe was 20 minutes late in Frankfurt, so I had plenty of time. Finally on that train, we stopped not long after Frankfurt, for quite a while. The conductor announced that we are going to have a detour via Biblis because of a burning vehicle on the track ahead. Well, I wasn't that annoyed, I got a ride through Biblis and Ludwigshafen for free, cities I've never seen before. It was dark already when we entered Biblis, but still. The train arrived in Karlsruhe 65 minutes late, but the trip wasn't too bad.

Backwards, I took the overnight ICE train Basel - Kiel, which departed from Karlsruhe around half past one in the night. It would bring me to Kiel in 10 hours - and it did! Even one minute early, I arrived in Kiel, after a wonderful train ride through western Germany. Actually, there was another detour on that trip. Although the Mannheim-Frankfurt trackage was open again, shortly before Frankfurt the conductor announced something that really caused me to laugh. "Meine Damen und Herren, es ist Winter! Deshalb ist in Bingen die Oberleitung unten." So, that happens every winter? They could fix that... But we got a detour via Rüdesheim and skipped the scheduled stop at Bingen. And I had breakfast in the service car with a nice view over the Rhine river. Although that detour caused a delay of around 25 minutes, the train managed to be in time again when we arrived in Hamburg. I didn't see much of Kiel, actually, because I only had a 20 minutes stop-over there until my regional train to Lüneburg departed. It was a nice modern motor car, actually two of them in the beginning, but one was coupled off at Lübeck. The short trip from Lüneburg to the famous Uelzen depot styled by Hundertwasser was conducted by a Metronom express train. I was kind of amazed. This train runs every hour with train sets consisting of eight double-deck coaches, and the train was crowded, nevertheless, although it was Sunday afternoon. How full must these trains be in the rush-hour... In Uelzen I had a couple of minutes to visit the station building until my - of course delayed - regional train to Magdeburg departed. Through the Altmark county I arrived in Magdeburg when it was dark. A funny Intercity train with old Interregio equipment to Leipzig waited for people on the neighboring track, it only ran from Magdeburg to Leipzig on that day for some reason. I finally arrived in Leipzig in time and had a 17 hours trip from Karlsruhe behind me.

Reading through László Honti's 1998 work on Ob-Ugrian I tumbled over a weird sound, a so called "labialized velar approximant", written by him as ɣʷ. You may ask "A what?" I did. Well, here is the answer. Honti reconstructs it - together with its non-labialized counterpart, for Proto-Ob-Ugrian, and notes that it never occurs at the beginning of words. Also the non-labialized one does not. (In fact, the labialized one only occurs in suffixes denoting first person plural, and only "very rarely" in lexemes - he doesn't even give examples.) But, /w/, a labiovelar approximant, does occur at the beginning of words - and only there. Furthermore, Honti states that the two velar approximants both come from Finno-Ugrian *w. Now, if we look at the actual languages, we see that these weird velar approximants seem to have changed back to [w] in some dialects of both Khanty and Mansi, the two daughter languages of Proto-Ob-Ugrian.

So, why doesn't he simply assume that *w was retained in Ob-Ugrian, but changed to a velar approximant in one dialect - a shift that spread over to other dialects then and eventually to one dialect of the other language? It is not unusual that even rare sound changes spread over to neighboring dialects and even different languages, just look at the very unusual back-shift of the r sound, beginning in French in the late medievals, and nowadays found not only in French but also in Portugese, German and Danish. And, what in the hell is the difference between a labialized velar approximant and a labiovelar approximant? Interpreting the respective definitions, there is none.

The question remains, why Honti reconstructed it the way he did. Was it just because he likes the letter ɣ so much? Or to have something unusual in "his" reconstructed language? Who knows. Since I'm not an expert on Uralic languages, it might even be the right assumption, but, at least, he refused to give a good rationale which makes it not at all convincing.

Th.

"Nächste Haltestelle: Augustusplatz. Zentraler Umsteigepunkt. Zugang zur Innenstadt." tönt es durch die Straßenbahn im vormittäglichen Verkehr. Damit es auch jeder versteht, gibt es das ganze noch auf Englisch und Französisch. "Zentraler Umsteigepunkt." - "Central transfer point." - "Point central de correspondance." Da frag ich mich doch, was an diesen Worten der Straßenbahnfahrer heut morgen nicht verstanden hat. Zugegeben, die Bahn hatte etwa eine Minute Verspätung - skandalös!

Die Bahn fuhr in die Haltestelle ein, die Ampel stand auf Halt. Noch. Kaum waren die Türen auf und der Menschenstrom der Exfahrgäste ergoss sich über den Haltestellenbereich, sah ich den Fahrer ungeduldig in den Spiegel schauen. Die Ampel vor ihm hatte gerade so schön auf Freie Fahrt umgeschalten, das muss man doch nutzen! Also schnell die Türen zu und los gehts. Dumm nur, dass noch nicht alle Aussteigewilligen ihren Fußmarsch durch die Tür beendet hatten. Einer kam noch durch die sich mit nervtötendem Pfieep - Pfieep - Pfieep schließende Tür. Klong! Die Glocke in der Fahrerkabine zeigte an, das alle Türen zu sind. Pling! Da hatte doch wirklich so eine infame Kreatur hinten im Wagenzug auf den Türöffner gedrückt, um des Aussteigens willen - und die Kreuzung war doch gerade so schön frei. 'Ach was solls, es kommt ja wiedermal eine Haltestelle', dachte sich wohl der Fahrer. Und eh die verdutzte junge Frau es sich versah, fuhr sie mit zum Roßplatz. Sehr begeistert schien sie nicht...

Th.

Sumerian is a well-studied language, there are lots of publications, a huge online text corpus, a wonderful online dictionary and much more. But still, looking into all these publications, there remain lots of open questions - questions that might not seem to be open to the Sumerologist, but the more to the linguist. One of them addresses the verb forms. All publications - at least those I have gone through - describe the verbal complex as having lots of prefixes, some suffixes, reduplication and all these things linguists really fancy. But since nearly all publications on Sumerian are written by Sumerologists rather than by linguists they all skip the fact that the whole complex of prefixes might come after the verb stem - in imperatives: amaĝur dug₄anab "tell it to my mother!" (from Šu-Suen B) with the morphemes -na ("to her") and -b ("it") that are normally used as "prefixes". How can prefixes be after the stem? They simply can't per definition. If they do, they are not to be called prefixes. Obviously, they are suffixes, attached to something that precedes them, and right, in very most cases there is a "prefix" that begins the so called "prefix chain" and is not part of the agreement morphology. Might that be a kind of auxiliary? Who knows. At least, this assumption holds for the data we have - different from the "prefix" assumption people had so far.

Now, the question remains whether or not the whole preverbal part is a word separate from the verb itself. Given that it is impossible to insert something between them, and that there are indeed writings like AB-BE₂ where one sign, here BE₂, includes a part of the preverbal complex and the verb stem e itself, there seems to be no other way than saying that the preverbal part forms at least a single grammatical word with the verb stem. Of course, Sumerian is a dead language, and I don't know anything at all about its phonology that is beyond speculation. Therefore I cannot assume that they also form a single phonological word.

Well, the whole issue of studying or doing research in a long-extinct language is based on speculations, reconstructions and, of course, simple guessing. There is simply no other way to do it. Although this is impossible (or at least not recommended at all) in natural sciences, this seems to be a usual way to do research in humanities. And why not. It's better to have results of a good and reasonable guessing than nothing at all.

Thogo.

Last Friday I was sitting in the CLEX train to Chemnitz. Short before the terminal I listened to the travel connections, announced by the train conductor, obviously natively Erzgebirgisch speaking, but trying hard to hide his origin by overpronouncing the schwas: "Sie hörän Ihrä nächstän Reisämöglichkeitän!". Why? Is he ashamed of our language? Doesn't it sound much worse if someone tries to hide a dialect and fails? These were the thoughts I had while the conductor announced the trains to Dresden and Zwickau.

Then he came to the Vejprty bound train crossing the Ore Mountains, home to the Erzgebirgisch language. "Regionalbahn nach Wibbordi, deutsch Weibord, über Flöha..." I wanted to stop listening. He tried hard to pronounce ö and ü. He failed, of course.

But suddenly he went on and announced the intermediate stops in Erzgebirgisch, " ..., Zschoop, Wolngstaa, Annebarg, Baarnstaa." Wow! Suddenly he was not longer ashamed of Erzgebirgisch. Did he only forget to be ashamed? No. He continued announcing the tram to Stollberg - without calling the destination "Stullbarg". So why the code switching? Was it just because the places he announced were in the core Erzgebirgisch area and he was simply so used to the names that he didn't feel that they are quite different in Saxon or German? At least, he revealed his mother tongue - not that anyone would have thought he were from somewhere else.

Don't try to hide your language - even if you speak a language that is underrespected -, you won't succeed.

Thogo.