More on Amy's language

Random points on Amy's language.

She seems to have only one definite article in German: die. (I wonder whether this particular choice, from among der die das, is influenced by the fact that the plural definite article (all genders) is die and/or by the fact that stressed the in English sounds like thee.) She does have a lexical item das, but it seems to be strictly demonstrative: that.

She typically has zero copula, so she'd feel right at home in, say, Russian. For example, she'd say Ich satt or I full at the end of a meal, or Das — Amy Biicher ("that — Amy books" = "those are Amy's books"). (With her /i:/ für /y:/ she sounds like somebody from East Prussia!) That also extends to the present continuous(?) construction in English, e.g. Mummy still s'eeping! "Mummy is still sleeping".

She pronounces Poppy Pig as something like Poppy Ti'. I wonder why she has no problems with [p] in "Poppy" but has no [p] in "pig". My current guess is that she acquired "pig" at an earlier stage in her language development when her main stop was [t] (and both [p] further front and [k] further back tended to become [t]) and that she is substituting that word in the older phonological form even though she could now pronounce it properly. (Or maybe the velar at the end of the word is pulling the bilabial further back? Though it sounds like a glottal stop to me when she says it.) Conversely, "Rabbit" (from Winnie-the-Pooh) sounds like "rebbip"; here, the [t] is assimilated to the preceding bilabials into a bilabial [p].)

Another example from right now: Tannce open my tartan peas? < "Kanns(t du) [= can (you), in German] open my curtain, please?" followed by Tann ich ... < "(Dann) kann ich ..." ("(then) I can ..."). I forgot which verb she used, but the word order is also curious, since German has the verb before the subject usually only if something comes even earlier, such as "then". (Aka "V2 order".)

Amy has "eat" as a noun, as in My eat — hot. This is almost certainly from German, where "das Essen" is not only a verbal noun ("the (act of) eating") but also "the food".

What do you do on a see-saw?

What's the verb in English for what you do on a see-saw?

"Rock"? "See-saw"? "Swing"? "Go back and forth"?

(In German, the noun is "Wippe" and the verb, transparently enough, is "wippen".)

I CAN HAS A GRK BUK NAO PLZ?

I ordered some address labels for parcels from Amazon, and decided to order something together with it (that I had been planning to get sooner or later anyway) in order to take advantage of the "free shipping for orders over €20" offer they have.

After having a look through my wishlist and reading some of the reviews, I settled on a minigrammar and a dictionary of Ancient Greek.

Labels and books arrived today, so I have some reference material for Ancient Greek now. Whee!

(Well, I already had a grammar—in Modern Greek; a school textbook—and at one point during my mission I had an Ancient Greek–French dictionary that a missionary's parents had sent to her not knowing it was Ancient Greek rather than Modern and which she gave to me, but I left it somewhere during a move since it wouldn't fit in my luggage.)

Also, this puts me one step closer to my potential Ancient-Greek-like-Polish and Ancient-Greek-like-German conlangs (one reason, besides inertia, that I hadn't done anything with them is that my knowledge of and resources for Ancient Greek are too few and it would probably end up looking too much like Modern Greek, as I saw while developing Greek Sans Flexions).