I had always heard of the inter-community disputes in Belgium framed as "Flanders vs. Wallonia" so Walloon being Romance always seemed natural to me. What did surprise me some years ago was that the predominately French-speaking Brussels technically isn't part of Wallonia, and that its historical dialect is Germanic rather than Romance. Several Wikipedias have whole articles on how Brussels turned into a French-speaking city. And that's not even getting into the intricacies of the administrative divisions and the distinctions between the Walloon region and the French Community of Belgium...overscore wrote:I had no idea Walloon is a Romance language. For a long time I had thought it's a dialect of Dutch.
Now I'm even more confused about the demographic and political situation in Belgium.
You could also technically truncate it even further into 食っちゃった, although this form may sound a bit odd, since -ちゃった is perceived as a more effeminate and/or childish form of -ちまった, while 食う is already a more vulgar and masculine variant of 食べる (at least when applied to humans eating, as opposed to animals).overscore wrote:Today I learned there's a verbal inflection for situations where you need to express "accidentally did so-and-so". So here's how it works. first you pick the verb, let's say 食う (to eat). then you put it in the "did do" tense thingy: 食って. then you add しまう conjugated in the correct tense: しまった. then you paste these two together and get the final logical product: 食ってしまった. fuse the sounds around a little bit and you get spoken japanese: 食っちまった (I accidentally ate it).
Also, I wouldn't really call the て form a tense, since its primary function is to link the verb to another verb in any tense. It can have the implication that the action it refers to takes place prior to the one referred to by the following verb, but it could just as well mean that the two actions were simultaneous. And of course there are cases where the second verb is only implied, as well as some more idiosyncratic ones: less than a week ago I watched the first episode of the currently airing anime アニメガタリズ, where a character with stereotypical お嬢様 (upper class girl) mannerisms used the て form for asking questions (少しよろしくて? or 何か問題でもあって?).
There are some features of Sino-Japanese vocabulary that make them appear like Wu Chinese, like the preservation of the voiced consonants and the [nʲ]/[ɲ] in the beginning of the syllables, other widespread features aren't present in modern Wu, most notably the syllable-final -t and -k, reflected in Japanese as -つ/ち and -く/き, respectively (the syllables ending in -p ended up turning into long vowel syllables due to Japanese sound shifts: Vpu -> Vfu -> Vu -> [ō, ū, yō or yū, depending on the historical vowel represented by V]). A lot of Sino-Japanese words look more like Min words than Wu ones, though this may have to do with Min varieties being relatively more conservative than any direct contacts with Japan.overscore wrote:The bulk of the inventory in Japanese looks like Wu Chinese.