You can't do typology without those enthusiastic leaps.

in no connection to Dixon or Australia or mother-in-law languages; only to the field-researchers of dialects:
http://giraffka.livejournal.com/24175.html

Tatyana: The original post looks fairly short; any chance of a translation?

The text IS short and relatively easy if requiring footnotes; the following comments makes it interesting...OK, I'll try to summarize.

Post:

Belinsky and Gogol, you say*

I'm writing down after the most folklorish-looking old babushka imaginable, right until in the middle of the local tales of Xmas fortune-telling she says:
..Once on cold Baptismal Night
Girls were reading fortunes...**

* allusion to the line by mid-19cent Russian poet Nekrasov (Oh when the rural peasant/ will bring from market[fair] books by Belinsky and Gogol!)
** This verse is a quotation from ballad , classic of formal Russian poetry. Baptismal Night - eve of the Baptism of the Lord' day (a week after Epiphany), traditionally a night for fortune-telling rituals.

And after that various philologists supply tales of similar experiences, historical as well as faculty legends.

Oops, sorry, somehow my link got lost.
Vasily Zhukovsky wrote his main poem Svetlana in 1808, those were the beginning lines.

So, I've been pretty busy so I might have missed the relevant bit, but did anyone ever explain how these languages get learnt? Is it just that in the societies that use them, they get used often enough that children are exposed to them and learn them naturally? Were there people who grew up in mother-in-lawless families and spoke them awkwardly or had to learn them when they got married, like they would a second language?

Presumably they learned them the way they learned the ordinary language, by hearing adults speak it. I assume they would, when very young, mingle words from the two varieties indiscriminately, but would be corrected by their elders ("We don't use that word when Auntie's here!") and quickly learn the difference.

Comment on the nuclear vs. non-nuclear verbs - I remember Brendan O'Hehir saying that one (of the many) odd features of Old Irish was that the whole range of what he called purely verbal notions was derived from like five or six verb roots. Then there was all the rest, denominative vrbs. It sems an odd development, that a language would just let a whole chunk of its lexicon atrophy. Then again, I remember that Yup'ik seems to have the same very minimal range of roots, and a whole lot of derived terms.

I just opened up my Thurneysen to see if I could find anything relevant and my eye lit upon one of my very favorite bits of Old Irish: ceso femmuin m-bolgaig m-bung 'although I reap blistered seaweed' (Corm. 1059; p. 327 in Thurneysen). I note for the amusement of the general public that the f in femmuin is silent.

Some of this stuff is learnt during the period of isolation as part of initiation. I don't know if that's the case for Jalnguy though.

Plenty of languages have 'light verbs' with elemental semantics - think of the myriad of uses of English 'take' or 'have', for instance (I can 'take' something from one place to another, but I can also 'take' notes, 'take' a shower, 'take' care of something, etc.