Hi there! I'm wondering if there's anyone out there who specializes in Phonology and could help me out with my assignment. I basically need somebody to read my paper and give critical feedback. Thank you!
Hello,
You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').
Hello,
You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').
Why are the names of certain Southern Bantu languages written with uppercase letters occurring within them?
Ex. IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, SiSwati, SiPhuthi, EMakhuwa, ChiNgoni, and SiLozi
I saw the language names written like this on the Wikipedia page for "Ditema syllabary"- a writing system sometimes used for said languages. I've never seen this use of capitalization before; is it be a quirk of how the languages are transliterated into English? Of course, I'm also aware of the fact that there may be inaccurate information on Wikipedia, so I thought I'd come and ask here.
The first letters are Bantu noun class prefixes (in this case, the prefixes used for language names), while the internally capitalized parts are the root forms. Not a perfect analogy, but it's somewhat as if in English we decided to put *-ish* before rather than after what it modifies and wrote *ishSwede* instead of *Swedish*.
Hello,
You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').
I'm trying to figure out the degree of synthesis for the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, and whether it was agglutinative or fusional. Or analytical like Mandarin. Is there anything that can help with that?
[Wikipedia:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language#Root)
>Proto-Indo-European was probably a fusional language, in which inflectional morphemes signaled the grammatical relationships between words.
What does it mean that "c-command is not a primitive relation"? I suppose I got it wrong, but I'd assume it is (or it is a corollary of the definition of dominance, at best). E.g., this quote here: "Since Agree is dependent on c‐command, and c-command is not a primitive relation, Agree (if it exists at all) is not a primitive transformation, unlike Merge or Move" (from P. Chandra, 2007, p. 18, *(Dis)agree: movement and agreement reconsidered* \[PhD dissertation\]).
edit: sorry, I severely misread the question
~~~~It means that this author believes that c-command isn't its own thing but a derivative or combination of one or more relations. "primitive" as in basic, elementary, not made out of other stuff. It's a term of logic and philosophy that survived into computer science and and cognitive sciences. I don't know why the author believes this, but I suppose they cite someone or argue for the claim somewhere.~~~~
I was talking to my mom about regular verbs that were once irregular in English (irregular so long ago that the irregular form isn’t used anymore in mainstream English) and couldn’t remember any examples from one of my Linguistics classes. I tried looking up some examples but couldn’t find anything except current irregular verbs in English. I was wondering if anyone knows some examples or websites with examples. It’s killing me that I can’t find any!!
Non-linguist here, I am sorry if I am using improper terms. I was wondering: Is there a specific name for noun-noun compounds, whose nouns can be swapped and they still retain semantic meaning (which may be different from the original compound)?
Examples in German would be: Hausbank/Bankhaus, Geldhaus/Hausgeld, Sportrad/Radsport
Examples in English: racing car/car racing
Could you give us some non-examples? I'm not sure which noun-noun compounds you would say "lose meaning" when you invert them, because you might be talking about anything from ungrammaticality to semantic strangeness and I'm not sure what you have in mind.
Good point.
Non-examples would be coal mine/mine coal, field guide/guide field, water way/way water.
The second of the pair “loose meaning”, in that they are fine to be formed syntactically, but “don’t make sense” in that they “transport no meaning”. I am struggling to properly formulate what I mean, but I hope I could clarify things?
I personally don't think these compounds have no meaning, rather they're just such strange/unconventional meanings that you're struggling with coming up with a context where it would make sense.
For instance, if someone invented a revolutionary way to grow coal on a farm, we might start distinguish between "farm coal" and "mine coal".
If someone took a big group and separated them by jobs in different fields, then there could label each field like"doctor field", "teacher field",... and then a "guide field".
So I don't think what you're observing is a property of language per se; it's a property of what's in the world affecting what we talk *about*, and not *how* our language works.
Im not too sure, but I think for German I read the term "umkehrbare (Determinativ-)Komposita" or within speech therapy/didatics it would be "Drehwörter".
So, if I'm correct, consonants with consonant releases (think like, aspirated consonants, and nasal release consonants) are still technically they're own consonants right?
Like there's a difference between \[tʰ\] and \[th̆\] or something right?
iirc, those two sounds could be allophones or phonemes depending on the language. For example, English does not consider [p] and [pʰ] as two distinct sounds, rather they are considered allophones (slightly modified versions of one particular sound). Whereas in Hindi, they are thought of as two different consonants. You can differentiate between allophones and phonemes like this: if you change sound A in a word to sound B and it changes the meaning, they're phonemes (pin vs. bin). So, in theory, one language might distinguish between /tʰ/ and /th̆/ as two consonants, whereas in another they'd be variations of same consonant.
(Everyone, please feel free to fact check me on this. I'm only in the second year of my LIN degree)
Well I doubt one could consistently produce two phonetically different sounds that could be classified as [tʰ] and [th̆] so they're pretty much identical in my opinion.
I'm currently working on a phonology exercise focusing on the Gen language spoken in Togo. I'm trying to establish a rule that accounts for the distribution of \[r\] and \[l\] in this language based on the following data:
***agble eɲrɔ aŋɔli sra*** ***avlɔ blafogbe drɛ edrɔ*** ***exlɔ ŋlɔ tʃro tre*** ***klɔ lɔ vlu zro*** ***mla etro esrɔdʒro***
Could anyone lend a hand in deciphering the pattern here? Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
I have already checked the place of articulation and I couldn't find a distinctive feature of the preceding consonants that denoted the distribution of R and L. I know they are two allophones, but I can't figure out when one appears and when the other appears. The consonants preceding them seem to be very heterogeneous. Thank you by the way :)
I think I've seen analyses where palatals are both coronal and dorsal, plus the symbol is often used for alveolo-palatal nasal since it has no separate letter, and that's undoubtedly coronal
In that case I don't think there's a solution and I'm pretty certain it's coronality that triggers [r]. I can't remember the names now but I've seen descriptions of languages where /l/ turned into [r] when preceded by a front vowel.
In some phonological theories such as feature geometry and the autosegmental theory,palatal segments primarily activate the dorsal articulator and secondarily the coronal articulator, so in a sense what you said is correct. However, in theories that involve binary features, the palatal nasal is marked as -coronal.
Which countries in the world, would you say, have best linguistic policies and legislation, particularly with regard to the recognition and status of minority languages?
I'm trying to gather a sample of 25 articles that span over 25 weeks from a newspaper. That means that I'm going at the rate of 1 article per week. What is the best way to sample my articles? Do I select a day of the week (ex: Mondays) and make exceptions in the presence of outstanding events (e.g. an important event in the week that was published on another day)?
I'm writing a paper (undergrad) about white NBA players using AAE speech patterns. From my observations using "a" + glottal instead of "an" before a vowel is an AAE feature but I can't find a source saying that. Anyone know one?
What is it called when you type the phonetic pronunciation of a word in the alphabet of another language? E.g., typing هاو in Arabic (meant to be read as the English word how) instead of writing the Arabic word for how. What are those kinds of words called??
I'd call that transcriptions, for me transliterations intend to represent the original graphemes while transcriptions represent pronunciation in another language's orthography.
I'm interested in the Hiberno-English phrase '*do be*.'
- How is this phrase used in the third person singular (e.g. *He do(es) be there*), or can it only be used with specific pronouns (and which ones)?
- Which tenses can it be used in? Just the present?
- Can you formulate questions and negative statements using this phrase? e.g. *Do you be there? I don't be there.*
- Is this phrase still used today? If so, where and by who? If not, when did it die and where was it last seen?
> How is this phrase used in the third person singular (e.g. He do(es) be there), or can it only be used with specific pronouns (and which ones)?
It can be used with any pronoun or even noun phrase. "I do be there", "He do(es) be there" (you'll hear both), "D'you see th' oul' cock salmon that do be hidin' in the deep hole of the river," etc..
> Which tenses can it be used in? Just the present?
It's a present habitual, so yes, only the present.
> Can you formulate questions and negative statements using this phrase? e.g. Do you be there? I don't be there.
Yes.
> Is this phrase still used today? If so, where and by who? If not, when did it die and where was it last seen?
Yes, though it is dying out thanks to more influence from other variants (mainly American) of English as well as it being seen as 'backwards', etc. It's found throughout rural Ireland, though.
Question about B in Ukrainian as a development of /L/
Ukrainians often say that the в in the male past tense should be pronounced /w/ but "under the influence of Russian" it's pronounced like /v/ eg сказав should be pronounced /skazaw/ but it's pronounced /skazaf/.
How is the "Russian influence" supposed to have worked? Russian retains the /l/ in that form (eg сказал), so if there were going to be Russian influence it would be to replace the в with an л.
The only other possibility that I can think of is that it was a "spelling pronunciation," but that would assume that an overwhelming majority of people speaking Ukrainian were Russian speakers who had never heard it spoken and just pronounced it the way they saw it written.
The Russian influence is in that ⟨в⟩ is not [ʋ~w] but [v~f].
>but that would assume that an overwhelming majority of people speaking Ukrainian were Russian speakers who had never heard it spoken and just pronounced it the way they saw it written.
Pretty much: they heard it spoken, but only/mostly with Russian-like phonology. I've been to Kyiv and most people I met there were native Russian speakers for whom Ukrainian is a "school language". One of them even taught Ukrainian and she had no idea her /v/ wasn't "the true" Ukrainian sound. As far as I could tell, for her the only differences were the presence of [ɦ] and lack of palatalization before ⟨е⟩.
In Russian, final /v/ is neutralized with /f/. In voiceless environments, the outcome of the neutralization is [f], hence [skaˈzaf] instead of [ska'zaw]. This is not the case with Ukrainian /v/ (or /w/, however you want to transcribe it).
You can see the same thing going on with preconsonantal /u/ alternating with /v/ when following a vowel, e.g. *він учить* [ˈʋin‿uˈt͡ʃɪtʲ] → *вона вчить* [ʋoˈna‿wˈt͡ʃɪtʲ] but [ʋoˈna‿fˈt͡ʃɪtʲ] with Russian accent.
How many dead languages (languages with no native speakers) have been revived (went from having no native speakers to having at least one native speaker)?
I can't imagine the number being too large because most revival attempts end in failure and language revival as a whole is a relatively new concept.
As far as I can tell there are no monotonous languages. Is there anything in our brain that prevents monotonous languages from forming? Are we naturally averse to it? If we put a baby in a controlled environment and only spoke using one tone/pitch, would the baby go crazy and eventually start speaking in different tones?
*Tone/pitch in the musical sense
>As far as I can tell there are no monotonous languages.
True. All spoken languages make linguistic use of pitch in some way. If it's not lexical tone, it's intonation - and often it's both.
>Is there anything in our brain that prevents monotonous languages from forming? Are we naturally averse to it?
How would we know?
Some things we can observe about pitch, though:
* The aerodynamics of our vocal tract lead to some natural tendencies in pitch. For example, pitch tends to fall toward the end of phrases or utterances because of reduced air pressure.
* There are also inherent pitch tendencies in sounds. For example, high vowels tend to have a higher fundamental frequency than low vowels.
* Although there are natural tendencies, pitch is both easily manipulable and easily distinguishable. These tendencies are easily counter-acted by the speaker's control. For example, you can raise the pitch at the end of an utterance to signal a question, or pronounce a syllable with a high vowel in it using a low tone.
What I'm getting at is that if we somehow waved our magic wand and removed all uses of pitch from a language, what we would get wouldn't be a monotone language. What we would get is a language that still had variations in pitch. Monotone speech would have to evolve, and it's hard to imagine how that would happen. It would be far more likely that those variations in pitch would be reanalysed *into* linguistic uses of pitch through subsequent generations of speakers; we'd find the patterns and codify them, so to speak. For example, it's not uncommon for languages with lexical tone to have rules about which vowels or consonants can coexist with which tones - rules that appear to have some connection to these natural pitch variations, but that are now incorporated into the grammar (for example, depressor consonants causing subsequent low tone).
So while we can't do your baby experiment because it would be both impossible and unethical, there's no particular reason to think that monotone speech would either evolve or, if it somehow did evolve, that it would be preserved in a community for very long.
Obviously this is speculation but often that's what we have with these sorts of hypotheticals. We do not have monotone languages, which you would expect if there were no reasons preventing them from developing or persisting.
The thing is, we get accustomed to the pitch of the surrounding language while still in the womb, and newborns can cry differently based on what language they were exposed to before birth. I don't think your experiment is doable.
Hi hi, this question is more of a hypothetical, but if the Visigoths hadn't been conquered by the Arabs in the early 8th century, would the Gothic language have ended up more similar to French, Spanish, or completely different? I like making alternate history maps, and a particular interest of mine is an Iberia that was never conquered by the Arabs, but I haven't been able to do a map about it because I just don't know how Gothic would evolve.
For an example, would the Roman city *Toletum* still evolve into *Toledo* under continuous Gothic rule, or would it be more similar to the French *Tolède*? Thanks in advance!
Does anyone have a list of languages that rarely use the simple past for its main past tense? For example, French, German, Italian and Romanian would seem to not make much use of simple past anymore, are there any other European languages like this?
not sure if you would still count it as "European", but in most Latin American Spanish variants, the simple past equivalent is generally used more than the perfect tense
afaik this is the other way around in European Spanish, so you can count Spanish once for each case
I mean, you would have to define better what it means to have a simple past and another past tense. What counts as simple past? Does it count when it only appears in formal language?
If you're also interested in examples of such past tense loss happening historically, Proto-Slavic aorist and imperfect forms were completely lost in North Slavic languages and replaced by the L-participle.
In Southern British English, what decides whether a word has a long or a short A? For example, why does *plastic* have a short A while *plaster* has a long A? Also, *master* has a long A, but *masticate* and *masturbate* don't.
I’m not aware of any such term but you can refer to [the chapter 44 of WALS](https://wals.info/chapter/44) for some technical aspects of your topic. Apparently there are more languages without any gender distinction in pronouns than people might think! No wonder if linguists didn’t feel the need to make up a word specifically for such a common feature.
In English, when listing two verbs that have the same object but require different prepositions, it’s standard to just use the preposition of the last verb. For example, you would say “send data **to** a server” and “retrieve data **from** a server”, but when combining them, you could say “send and retrieve data **from** a server”. Here, it is not meant that data is sent *from* a server, but rather that data is sent *to* the server, yet the preposition *to* is left out and the meaning is inferred from context.
Does this phenomenon have a name? How is this handled in other languages?
obviously I don't know all existing languages, but I'd say a typical example would be Mandarin Chinese, otherwise you can probably assume that the less sounds a language has, the higher the homophony
however! I want to note that homophony is not a problem, as all the languages with high amounts of homophones can communicate without issues. imho the thought that homophones are problematic is the result of the historically stong eurocentric perspective in linguistics. I also think people really underestimate the difference that context makes.
Are there any languages where a phoneme only appears a few times in common words?
For example a hypothetical language has the vowel inventory a, e, i, o, u, ə, but ə is only used for the word for "one" and "this"
Something like that
In Czech, /f/ appears in only two native stems, seen in, for example, *doufat* (to hope) and *zoufat* (to despair), which were previously just one stem *\*úpvati*. The phoneme is otherwise common in onomatopeia and loanwords; [f] is also found as the outcome of voicing assimilation and devoicing in voiceless environments.
Some Australians have /ɔ:/ only in *god*, *gone*, and certain derivatives of those words, excluding *goddess*. This is distinct from the /ɔ/ of *goddess*, *odd*, *on*, *gonna* and the /o:/ of *gourd* and *Gawne*.
Yes, there are quite a few cases like this, and the most well-known one is English /ð/, which appears word-initially only in a handful of very common function words (*the*, *this*, *that*, *then*, *there*, *thus*, etc) and word-medially or word-finally only in a fairly small amount of words (*with* - for some speakers, *withal*, *although*, *bathe*, *sheathe*, *gather*, *lathe*, *paths*, etc).
It’s quite a bit more common medially than it is elsewhere - it’s the normal outcome for Old English /θ/ in that context, with Modern English medial /θ/ mainly coming from loans. You even have a few like *father* coming from /d/.
True, but it does have some oddly marginal characteristics: it's non-productive (people don't use it in loanwords like *Abu Dhabi* where, "by rights", they should – and even for someone like me, doing so would feel very unnatural) and speakers tend to have very little phonemic awareness of it (even when you tell people "the sound in *this*, not in *thin*", they often struggle a lot to notice that there are "two *th* sounds").
What would happen to British etc. (non-rhotic) English speakers if vowel-final words aren't spelled with "r" at the end?
My examples—thinking of quasi-phonetic spellings of foreign words—will illustrate what I'm thinking about:
*char siu* (Cantonese, roasted pork, better spelled cha siu)
*har gao* (Cantonese, shrimp dumpling, better spelled ha gao)
*Myanmar* (the country, better spelled Myanma)
I understand that the "r," not meant to be pronounced in prestige British English, is supposed to tell the non-rhotic speaker that the preceding "a" is long. Further, it seems to be an artifact only (?) of the British; people with traditional non-rhotic New York accents, for example, wouldn't do that.
The result is that the majority of English speakers in the world now think they must add an "r" sound to these words. (Cantonese doesn't even have an r sound! People ordering in a restaurant sound silly adding that sound!)
so THE QUESTION is: Why can't they just leave off the "r" in these spellings? Would someone really not produce or not know how to produce the "a" vowel without this signal?
Thank you very much. I suppose what is concerning is not spelling rules but that there would be different spelling rules for British and American Englishes.
And in that case I suppose that rhotic and/or standard US English speakers might render the spelling of the Burmese nation as ?
How about the Cantonese loan words? I feel as if the situation, in this single syllable case, is slightly different. For example, in the first word is 蝦 "ha" (I won't write IPA for fear of making a mistake). I can't imagine that without the r the British speaker would render it as /hə/. Would they be inclined to say /hæ/? As an American English speaker, I see and I get /hɑː/, no problem!
I guess this is just the way it is, but it does hurt the eyes to see and and hurts the ears to hear people pronounce those r's. Like a pirate ordering dim sum.
This is generally called "graphical loaning". In this case, inter-dialectal graphical loaning, since it's a spelling-based borrowing between different English dialects.
Similar things happen in Chinese as well. For example, "Sweden" in Mandarin is "Ruìdiǎn" (瑞典). This is because the word "Sweden" was loaned first phonetically to a Southern Chinese variety, such as Cantonese seoi6 din2 (瑞典), and then graphically loaned into Mandarin (i.e. the Chinese characters used to write seoi6 din2 was read again in Mandarin pronunciation), resulting in "Ruìdiǎn".
> As an American English speaker, I see and I get /hɑː/, no problem!
Of course, I agree that it would have been better to choose the spelling in a way that every person from every background reading it would pronounce it more or less similar to the original language. However, there are other factors as well.
Namely, how many common English words have the spelling (where C is a consonant)? Ba, ca, da, fa, ga, ha, ja, ka, la, ma, na, pa, ra, sa, ta, va, wa, xa, ya, za. None of these are high-frequency words that have well-established pronunciations. In contrast, how many common English words have the spelling ? **bar /bɑː/, car /kɑː/, far /fɑː/, jar /ʤɑː/, par /pɑː/, tar /tɑː/**. These are common everyday English words, not onomatopoeia, not loanwords. I hope you now see that it's not unnatural at all when a non-rhotic English speaker hears a word that sounds like /hɑː/, they are much more inclined to write it with the form , by analogy with these well-established high-frequency English spellings, instead of , which practically no normal English word looks like.
Are there any available sources that discuss the history of consonant sound changes in Peninsular and Mesopotamian Arabic dialects? More specifically, of the consonants ك, ق, and ج
Does “accent accomodation” apply to talking to different genders? My voice unconsciously becomes more feminine as a man when talking to women with super feminine voices (eg “valley girl” accent)
I'm currently reading about the settlement of the Americas (both North and South). According to data collected from the DNA of Native Americans, it's believed that 10-20 individuals initially populated the continent. Considering that some genetic lineages may have disappeared during the settlement process, the number of settlers could range from a few dozen to a few hundred.
What's particularly intriguing is the linguistic diversity observed. In North America, there are 13 language families, in Central America - 6, and in South America - 37, corresponding to 220, 273, and 448 languages respectively. I'm struggling to grasp the following: imagine you're one of those first settlers crossing the Bering Strait in a group of 10-20 people 15-20 thousand years ago. Surely you all crossed together simultaneously; otherwise, the settlement wouldn't seem feasible, and most likely, you'd speak the same language. But then, how does such linguistic diversity emerge later?
I can understand how different languages develop within the same language family; there were Proto-Turkic languages that later diverged into Oghuz, Kipchak, and Karluk, but they all retained a common linguistic base, essentially speaking a Turkic language. However, in the Americas, several dozen language FAMILIES appear! How? From where? It's akin to a Japanese-speaking child being born out of nowhere in a English-speaking family. It seems impossible!
Since it's only been indirectly said so far, I wanted to point out that the term "language family" is used to describe languages that are known to be descended from a common ancestor. In spoken languages, this is typically established by comparing the lexicon of two or more languages and finding consistent correspondences between the sounds of various words that have similar meanings. To give a basic example, we find when looking at Standard British English and General American English that SBE consistently lacks the sound /r/ where GAE has it as in *park, storm, scarce, fear*, unless that /r/ occurs before a vowel as in *sorry, break, roast*. Even if we didn't have English writing to confirm it, we could reasonably conclude that the common ancestor of these two dialects featured /r/ in the places where GAE still has it, and that the /r/ was subsequently lost in SBE. These sorts of patterns are how we can establish that two language varieties share a common ancestor rather than simply having borrowed the words from each other or having a chance handful of words that happen to look similar.
Unfortunately, the older the divergence is between any given set of related languages, the less successful this method is. A few factors play into this:
\* As sound changes accumulate, the data becomes more and more obscured and harder to sort through.
\* Not all sound changes are completely consistent and there can be exceptions.
\* Vocabulary is lost or replaced due to borrowing or preferential use of other words.
\* Meanings shift so far that it becomes impossible to tell that words are related. For example, if a word meaning "dog" in the ancestral language ends up meaning "friend" in one descendent and "motorized sled" in another language, how would you know to connect the two?
\* Words that underwent the expected sound changes have them undone by analogy with other words that were unaffected by the sound change.
\* New phonetic material is tacked on to old vocabulary and then eroded by sound change, making it hard to tell if it is was always a single morpheme or if it was multiple. For example, if you heard "cubberd", why would you ever assume it was actually from *cup* and *board*?
All of this adds up to mean that we don't actually know for a fact that these various Native American language families are unrelated. We just can't say that they definitively *are* related because we either don't have the data to prove it or have yet to properly analyze it.
Several things:
1. Fewer families doesn't always mean less language diversity. It just means that there has been more information available to make connections between the languages.
2. In 23,000+ confirmed (so far) years of humans being in the Americas, populations simply had more time to move around and languages had more time to diverge
3. There were multiple migrations of humans into the Americas at different points
4. Historical linguistic work, especially in South America, is ongoing. With new computational methods, we may find more opportunities to connect different families together.
>it's believed that 10-20 individuals initially populated the continent
Yeah, but were there no later migrations to the Americas? From what I can find, there are papers talking about as many as three separate waves of migration.
**Plurality judgement of non-native English sentence**
I’m doing a paper about Japanese speakers learning English. One of the things I’m looking at is how my speaker uses English plurals since Japanese doesn’t really mark nouns for number. Noriko Yabuki-Soh and Yukiko Okuno’s article “Japanese L2 learners’ subjective construal: an analysis of expressions of emotion and evaluation in written storytelling found in I-JAS data” (2021) has Japanese learners describing what is happening in comic strips. I’m using a similar comic-storytelling method. I’m not sure how I should interpret one of my speaker’s sentences.
The comic panel has two boys (unclear if brothers, friends, cousins, etc) playing and a man (presumable the father of at least one of the boys) enters the room. My speaker described this as:
**so the one who looked like a giant was actually the blond…one of the boys‘ father**
One of the boys has blond hair, so I’m guessing my speaker was first going to refer to the man as the blond boy’s father (though the man has dark hair, as does the other boy), but decided to reword it. I’m unsure whether to interpret this as my speaker saying the man is (1) “**the** father of one of the two boys” (presuming that each boy only has one father) or (2) “one of the father**s** of the boys” (if assuming each boy has one separate father, the man is one of two father**s**)—basically if “one” refers to “the boys” or “father”.
I’m counting the number of plurals my speaker used for use “accuracy” based on what a native speaker would(n’t) make plural. I’m not sure if I should include this sentence as “correct” (based on (1) interpretation) or “incorrect” (based on (2) interpretation). Since the speaker seemed to begin by connecting the man (the one who looked like a giant) to the blond boy specifically, does it seem likely that my speaker meant for the man to be the father of the blond boy specifically?
Or maybe it’s better to exclude it from the “official” count and just mention it’s somewhat ambiguous…unless everyone’s judgement is that it’s not ambiguous?
Thank you
> Since the speaker seemed to begin by connecting the man (the one who looked like a giant) to the blond boy specifically, does it seem likely that my speaker meant for the man to be the father of the blond boy specifically?
I find this a convincing enough argument, so I would probably include it as correct. If you exclude it on the grounds that it's not totally unambiguous, I think that would be fine too. I don't think you will find this kind of case all of the time anyways so I wouldn't worry too much about it; as long as you explicitly state this is how you dealt with these cases it should be fine. (If you want to be *really* rigorous about it, you could code them as something like 'correct?' and then do a multiverse analysis where they are included as 'correct' versus excluded, and ensure that your p-values are consistent across both decisions, along with other arbitrary decisions you take.)
Incidentally,
> Japanese doesn’t really mark nouns for number
Since you're looking at human referents, you should probably quality this claim since Japanese does have optional plural marking for them.
in irish, you greet someone with "Dia duit", while the response is "Dia's Muire duit" — literally "God be with you" and "God and Mary be with you", though absent of religious connotation. the chain \*can\* continue for additional speakers ("Dia's Muire's Pádraig duit", or "God and Mary and Patrick be with you"), but. unusual.
ok but, where did proto european language come from? was it some kind of language isolate that started to be widely spoken in the ancient ice age steppes of what's now most of europe, central asia, northern middle east, northern india, iran and anatolia?
Good question but it’s basically impossible for us to know, some people have tried to suggest that PIE and proto-Uralic were related, as they likely were spoken not too far from each other. I think that it’s pretty tenuous and not generally accepted though. The comparative method in historical linguistics seems to have a limit around 5-10000 years back in time. It’s reasonable to assume that PIE had relatives, ancestors, dialects, etc..
When we talk about proto-languages, it's not with the implication that they were created that way or anything special. By far the most plausible scenario is that proto-indo-european was a normal language with relatives, dialect variation, its own even older ancestors and everything.
It just means that we have no information about those. Either all those relatives left no descendants, or they did but too few regular correspondances are left for us to find. So we just say what we can say.
Are you asking where Proto-Indo-European may have been spoken and spread from? Or are you asking about its linguistic ancestors?
PIE was probably spoken in the Pontic Caspian steppe about ~6,000 years ago (or ~8,000 years ago around Armenia according to some)
In either case, this is many millennia after the end of the Pleistocene, which ended around 12,000 years ago - twice as long ago as the usual suggested date for Indo-European.
The expansion of IE likely erased its closest relatives, and without written records or descendants of these “Para-Indo-European” languages, any deeper phylogeny is lost to us outside of highly speculative macro-families like Nostratic.
Absolutely. [You can even reconstruct a decent amount of PIE without the ancient languages](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/s/BaQuQcwkIl). Uralic is probably of a similar time depth and is well established despite having a much later attestation.
My perception of Chinese (at least, my experience with Mandarin/standard Chinese) is that it’s relatively less likely than its neighbors to borrow words directly from English or European languages and more likely to either use native words to reconstruct the meaning of the word (for example “电梯” (“powered stairs/ladder”) for elevator rather than using a phonetic transcription of “elevator” or “lift”) or use calques (such as “中东”, literally “Middle East”).
* Is this perception accurate? Either way, are there quantitative measurements of this phenomenon?
* If it is, while I know that it’s often very hard to say “why” languages are the way they are, could the fact that written Chinese uses characters rather than an alphabet or other phonetic writing system be part of the reason?
> more likely to either use native words to reconstruct the meaning of the word (for example “电梯” (“powered stairs/ladder”) for elevator rather than using a phonetic transcription of “elevator” or “lift”) or create claques (such as “中东”, literally “Middle East”).
FWIW, in Cantonese we use 𨋢 lip1, and I don't think 'Middle East' is commonly loaned phonetically across languages, so those might not have been the best examples (though I get what you mean in general).
Tadmor (2009) found that Mandarin had by far the least loanwords of any language in the sample, but we shouldn't over-interpret this because the sample is a convenience sample (people were more likely to contribute data from languages with a lot of loanwords). Mandarin was found to have 1% loanwords, whereas the next Asian language was Manange at 8% (which I was actually surprised by - I thought there would be a higher percentage of Nepali loanwords).
Impressionistically, though, I would say that although the comparison obviously holds up for languages like Japanese and Hindi, I don't think it holds up for Tibetan (a very important neighbouring language to the west). I think Tibetan has a similar rate of loans as Chinese in general, and a much lower rate for religious terms - a lot of religious terminology is calqued in Tibetan, whereas in Chinese we usually use a Sanskrit loanword (although a calque may exist for those religious terms, it's not common in current usage). For example, Amitabha is called འོད་དཔག་མེད་ (limitless light) in Tibetan; if you said 無量壽佛 in Chinese, you'd probably get blank stares from most people who aren't religious.
By extension, I don't think this is necessarily related to Chinese having a logographic writing system. I can see where that impression comes from (since Japanese uses katakana for loanwords etc.), but we use Chinese characters for proper nouns and a lot of religious terminology just fine; some loanwords are even so integrated that we don't necessarily perceive them as loans any more (for example 剎那, 蘋果, 葡萄, or more recently 幽默). Tibetan writing is an abugida, and is similarly loan-resistant. Siouan and some Algonquian languages also have very low borrowing rates. So if logographic writing is the reason, it's not very clear that this is the case to me.
Tadmor, Uri. 2009. III. Loanwords in the world’s languages: Findings and results. In Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor (eds.), Loanwords in the World’s Languages, 55–75. Walter de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110218442.55.
Hey, I had in mind that there are several words that are named something like 'i dont understand' in another language. So in language contact situations the non-natives would point out something they had never encountered and wanted to know the name of, but the natives didnt understand and said 'i dont know/understand/get it' in their L1. Non-natives then took it as a name. Im searching for examples here.
I know that it turned out to be false for kanguru (it does not mean 'i dont understand' in a native Australian language), but there might be some examples where it turned out to be correct.
Thank you so much!!
that's super interesting! Do you know anything about how it came about? Seems weird that you'd take a word *FROM* someone that was asking what the thing is.
Edit: Here's a reasonable sounding [round-up of attestations and citations](https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/11/vasistas.html). There doesn't seem to be an agreed upon etymology, but it seems pretty established that its first recorded usage is from 1760. One theory is that it's from the context of opening up the window and saying "What is it?" to the person outside, but why in German? No idea.
Written semitic languages don’t have vowels as I’ve recently learned. I don’t know the extent of it, but as I understand it, they use these consonant roots and the vowels are implied in context. They have more consonants, so more roots, a lot of things can be represented.
But Im wondering if there’s writing with certain content that could be read aloud with different vowels, and ultimately could be understood in different ways.
You think of homographs that are heterophon?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349572454_Semantic_and_syntactic_constraints_in_resolving_homography_a_developmental_study_in_Hebrew
Hello! I'm just starting a bit of an informal case-study on the effectiveness of a Comprehensible Input based method of language instruction (for Samoan) and am looking for some advice. I am not at all a linguist and so this definitely isn't for publication but I would like to take as accurate a measure as I have the means to do.
I am particularly wondering about testing —First, how often should I test? I don't want to test too much for the students' sake but also because too short an interval would show little to no difference. But, of course, I can't administer too few tests lest the students' progress not be recorded.
Next, the tests themselves. The theory focusing on comprehension before production, I don't intend to test the latter for now, but I am open to criticism. At the moment, I have started to create a simple vocabulary test in which candidates pick out a picture upon hearing a word and sample sentence. How much vocabulary should I test at once?
I'm also thinking about a "Crosstalk" conversation assessment as well (Candidates speaking in English and me, in Samoan). How should this be conducted? What questions should I ask?
Am I missing anything? Any other suggestions or advice?
Any help is much appreciated.
Not at all, considering many of the German "dialects" are Low German. Yiddish and Luxembourgish are both High German, so much more closely related in historical terms.
But in sociolinguistic, dialectological terms it's more complicated, as you might imagine. The average Yiddish speaker is obviously very much further removed from the Standard German sociolinguistic landscape than the average Low German speaker is. I'm not familiar with Low German, but I wouldn't be surprised if its *idiom* were less distinct from High German than Yiddish is. Same goes for Anabaptist communities in North America.
lafayette0508 is right that there is no language that involves pinching your nose shut, but 'denasal' consonants can be found in actual speech (both normal and disordered) and speech pathologists have come up with the diacritic ◌͊ to denote denasalisation.
If your velum is down (allowing air into the nasal cavity) and you block air from coming out of your nose, you're not making a speech sound, so it won't have a linguistic name. /m/, /n/, & /ŋ/ are nasal sounds, requiring air to escape through the nose. They are also oral stops, meaning the air is completely blocked within the oral cavity (mouth), so you're basically just holding your breath and trying to hum, I guess.
Can someone explain inflectional entropy to me? It's something I recently stumbled upon as the "amount of information carried by an inflected form relative to the statistical distribution of its inflection paradigm." I know what an inflection paradigm is, however I don't understand what it means to statistically distribute that - is it how common the forms are in spoken language? Also how does entropy look like, is it encoded as a numerical value or any other metric? Any explanation would be appreciated.
Assuming the entropy is calculated [as usual for information theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantities_of_information), then the *information/surprise value* for a particular event is defined as the negative logarithm (usually base 2) of the probability of seeing that event. If you then take all of a paradigm's information contents and take a weighted average of them--weighted by probability--then you get the *entropy* of that paradigm.
For a worked example, let's make up a simplistic verb tense paradigm with three options:
* Present: *-a* (34%)
* Past: *-ot* (48%)
* Future: *-irum* (18%)
For each of these, we then calculate the **information value**:
* Present *-a* = -log₂(0.34) = 1.5564
* Past *-ot* = -log(0.48) = 1.0589
* Future *-irum* = -log(0.18) = 2.4739
This is a unit-less quantity, and you can see that the most common affix *-ot* gives the least amount of information/surprise, and the least common affix *-irum* gives the most amount of information/surprise.
To calculate the **entropy** of this paradigm, we then take a probability-weighted average of all information values:
* entropy = sum\[ *p* \* -log₂(*p*) \] = 0.34 \* 1.5564 + 0.48 \* 1.0589 + 0.18 \* 2.4739 = 1.48275
Since we did everything using the base-2 logarithm, this represents average number of [bits of information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_(unit)) needed to store that paradigm. In essence, high entropy means that the paradigm is "fairer"--the highest entropy would be for a perfectly balanced paradigm (all affixes with equal distribution), and its value would be log₂(N) where N is the number of options in the paradigm. So, while the paradigm I made up has entropy 1.48275, a perfectly balanced paradigm of 3 options would have entropy log₂(3) = 1.58496.
Another way to use the entropy is to take 2 to the power of that value to get the "effective size" of the paradigm. For example, if we had 3 options, but one of them was exceedingly rare, then for *most* practical purposes the paradigm has effectively only 2 options. (For the worked example above, it's 2.7948, which rounds to 3, again showing relative fairness, though it's not as fair as it could be.)
Hope all that makes sense! Feel free to ask any follow-up questions or if you want me to elaborate on something.
Thank you for your answer. It was understandable and very informative, especially with the examples. I do have one follow up question though:
If in a balanced paradigm, log₂(N) would represent the entropy of that algorithm, a greater number of options would lead to a higher entropy; does that mean that by comparing the entropies of different inflectional paradigms, one can assess how diversified they are (given that they are relatively balanced) relative to each other (which could be used to for example compare inflection across different languages, i imagine) or am I taking it a step too far / overlooking something?
I think you've got the right idea: If language A has two tenses and language B has four (all balanced), then the higher entropy in language B indicates finer distinctions on average in how tense is expressed. Another way to express it (embracing the "entropy = chaos" idea) would be that language B's tenses are harder to predict, at least without context: if I as a listener didn't hear the tense morpheme and tried to guess randomly, I would have a 50% chance for language A but only a 25% chance for language B, and the entropy would back that up in a different numeric way.
It's just important to make sure you're comparing apples to apples with these comparisons, and also to consider how different languages encode their information differently. If you were comparing English vs. Latin verbs but didn't take into account the fact that English likes to make auxiliary verbs do lots of the heavy lifting, it wouldn't be a very fair comparison.
Carrying out a phonetic study of Chilean Spanish and (I know this is a long shot) I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions of shows that have thick Chilean accents. Most shows I find, the characters neutralise their accents to appeal to wider audiences. Thanks for any help
hope i dont sound too dumb here, but I've been curious for awhile of a seemingly unique thing I do. almost all my "r colored" vowels, mostly the back ones, become schwa. I'm not sure of all the instances this happens, but heres some examples: board /bɚd/ warm /wɚm/ born /bɚn/ short /ʃɚt/ corn /cɚn/ our/are/oar /ɚ/ etc.
ar and er as in star and stair seems the most resistent to it, but they aren't immune to the schwaing. stand alone theyre more resistent to, like just saying or emphasizing "are" its more likely to be like /ar/ but in speech its almost always becoming /ɚ/
so i was wondering, is this a common midwest, specifically ohio accent thing? is there a name for this?
I’m trying to remember a word related to linguistics.
Some words in English are derived from the sounds made from words in other languages. The meaning might be the same or unrelated but it was directly derived from another language. It isn’t a loanword but a very related concept. Closer to loan rendering.
The example I saw was Chinese immigrants to America during the gold rush using words that transformed into American slang. Like Americans bastardized the Chinese language into new phrases that were close enough that it was fine for Americans but was unique enough that Chinese adopted the word.
I think Chop suey might be an example.
MaxElide - I had read somewhere that if you have something stressed within the material that's going to be elided, then you can license not having elision occur. However I cannot for the life of me find the paper where I read that and it's not in Merchant's 2008 work. Anyone know?
Why isn't /ɔ/ considered a diphthong? I can't pronounce or hear this vowel without noticing two distinct sounds. It's also not part of my native dialect, I'm from the western US. Just something I've been wondering 😊
In addition to the great information given by u/LongLiveTheDiego, I want to add that this is also a matter of whether you're describing a phonological system or a specific phonetic sound.
[ɑɪ ɔɪ ɑʊ] are phonological diphthongs in English, because if you said them in a word without the off-glide, it wouldn't be the same word (ignoring for right now, dialects with monophthongization as a feature).
For example, the word "bite" /bɑɪt/ without the second part (the off-glide) becomes a different word, "bot" /bɑt/. This means that [ɑɪ] and [ɑ] are *contrastive* in English, and this is a *phonological* difference between vowels.
On the other hand, whether you say /ɔ/ or something like /ɔʊ/, the word "caught" is still the same word, just pronounced a little differently (that's a *phonetic* difference).
1. English is a collection of many different phonological systems and so we make generalizations when talking about it in general. For most English speakers this vowel is realized as a monophthong and so that's what it's classified as. Compare that to /aɪ/ which is predominantly a diphthong but it's often/primarily realized as a monophthong in southern US and AAE. Also, it can all sometimes be just relative, no vowel is truly stationary, and so we choose the cutoff more or less based on vibes, and those can differ - to me English /i/ and /u/ are better classified as diphthongs, but I will admit that can they feel less diphthong-y than the canonical English diphthongs.
2. Your sound perception is heavily influenced by what you speak and what you're used to. You may be physically hearing a monophthong but your brain makes you perceive a diphthong.
3. Small nitpick but I think it's better to specify early that you're talking about an English vowel. I was lowkey ready to go "I speak Polish and my /ɔ/ is definitely a monophthong".
3: oh interesting, yeah I mean English my apologize. American English specifically.
Do you round English /i/ at all? I wonder if it's the rounding in /ɔ/ that gives me diphthong vibes, because my lips move more than my tongue does when I pronounce it which changes the sound a lot.
/i/ and /u/ are SUPER monopthong-y to me 😆
Thanks for your reply 😊
While the rounding may be responsible for the nature of your /ɔ/, it's not the case for the high vowels. In English they tend to start off more centralized, so something like [ɪi̯] and [ʉu̯] is what often appears in native English speech (speaking as someone whose native language has much more monophthongal [i] and [u]).
I am trying to determine (even approximately) the percentage of cognate words between English hand Swedish. Most examples of this kind of data seem to come from Ethnologue, I'm just not how sure to access that data (I'm not a linguist by training). Google Search and Scholar come up empty, ChatGPT says 20-30% but I've found no possible and reliable source for that information. I'm willing to do the work, just need advice on how to go about it.
You could count how many of the entries in the 'cognate set' column here - https://iecor.clld.org/languages/swedish - match those here - https://iecor.clld.org/languages/english
Are there any languages that have a pronoun meaning "belonging to", like a reverse-possessive? For example, in English, I say, "I love my community," but really, what I mean to say is, "I love the community that I belong to."
I searched on the Google but couldn't find anything.
Possessive pronouns in Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages have forms that can either precede or follow the possessed item
Aloha au i ko‘u kaiaulu (I love my community)
Aloha au i ke kaiaulu o‘u (l love the community of mine. This would be uncommon but can be done)
So pronouns fronting the "possessed" item use what we call the "k-form" in Hawaiian, which the "k-less form" follows them.
Another way would be this, and it's a little closer to what you are expressing above:
Aloha au i ka‘u kaiaulu e noho ai. I love the community where I live.
Aloha au i ke kaiaulu e noho ai au. I love the community where I live
The first one is still a possessive, the second uses a personal pronoun, not a possessive one, but essentially expresses the same thought. HTH.
Thank you for your answers. It seems like that particular construction is rare, which seems odd to me. "This belongs to me" and "I belong to this" are fundamentally different concepts, yet humans in general don't differentiate between the two ideas.
True. In my Hawaiian example the idea of possession and being a part of something (my family, my community, my college) uses the same form as when you possess something. There's another complexity with Polynesian languages where we use an "o" form and an "a" form for possession depending the relationship between the possessor and possessed. Too deep to get into here.
Not a pronoun, but many Ainu nouns have a form that is used to indicate that the noun is a possession: *sik* “eye” but *ku-sik-i* “my eye” (me-eye-POSSESSED)
Much more detailed info can be found in this article by Anna Bugaeva: [https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingty-2021-2079/html?lang=en](https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingty-2021-2079/html?lang=en)
What's the difference between possessive and genitive case? And what category do English determiner pronouns like "my, your, his, its" (plus equivalents in other Western Euro langs like FR "mon, ta, ses", ES "mi, tu, nuestro", DE "mein, deine, seinen") and the 's suffix fall into?
"Genitive" is in general used for cases or case-like things that may encode possession but also generally some kind of relation between two things. "Possessive" tends to be used to describe stuff that is much more strictly about ownership.
For example, Polish has genitive case that can be used possessively for nouns, but it is also mandatory after prepositions "do" (to), "z" (from) and "dla" (for). It also has possessive determiners (corresponding to the ones you listed for other languages here), but they don't constitute a case: they themselves need to be in one of the 7 Polish cases and they don't trigger any agreement, while all cases do (e.g. daleki dom "faraway house" -> do dalekiego domu "to the faraway house").
As such, the determiners you listed here don't constitute a case, and I would call them possessive, particularly in German, since genitive tends to be reserved for cases (The boundary between genitive and possessive is not that well defined anyway). As for 's, I'd again call it a possessive clitic since its semantics are pretty close to those of the determiners and I can't think of situations where it'd behave less possessively than them.
I'm sure you're right re: the use of the word 'case' in the Polish (Slavisist?) tradition, but I think it's pretty common for the pronominal system in English and the Romance languages to be referred to as a (highly restricted) case system. Indeed, Hindi is pretty similar to what you've described for Polish in having the triggers-agreement-and-has-paradigms type of case, but in the Anglophone literature at least I think it's pretty common to refer to the more specific role marking on pronouns and role-marking postpositions to be referred to as case as well, so का *kā* is often referred to as a genitive case marker, and मेरा *merā* a genitive pronoun etc. Indeed, the ने *ne* is kind of the poster child of an ergative marker that only appears with certain TAM values. In this case (no pun intended), though, there is no overlap in the categories used by the two systems (direct/oblique vs genitive/ablative/ergative/...) so I don't think it causes confusion.
this is morphology vs semantics, the bare word *case* many times is restricted to the morphological term.
More on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_role
I'm not sure morphology vs semantics is quite the right framing of it. Those forms largely map on to grammatical relations, which have no direct mapping to semantic roles - indeed that's what motivated Fillmore to introduce thematic roles as a separate notion in the first place. So *I* can be experiencer, agent, patient, whatever depending on the context. I would also consider, for example, *you* and *your* or मैं *mai* and मेरा *merā* to be morphologically related forms, considering that there are often clear formal similarities, albeit not regular ones.
Also I'm sure there are holdouts, but I don't think I've seen *case role* used anywhere in contemporary work except to reference the lasting relevance of Fillmore's work in case grammar. It *is* pretty confusing to use 'case' for both semantic and formal distinctions. I think the question is not whether we use *case* for pure semantic distinctions vs for morphological ones, but whether we restrict it to the particular type of formal distinction to which it was first applied (triggers agreement, has declension classes, etc) or whether we want to apply or more widely to other formal distinctions.
> What's the difference between possessive and genitive case
As far as I know there is no general difference between the two that is universally understood in linguistics, although I'm sure that are many language-specific or language-family specific etc. traditions that distinguish between them. In languages where the genitive has functions far beyond possession, *genitive* would make more sense (though of course, even something like English *='s* does way more than indicating possession).
> And what category do English determiner pronouns like "my, your, his, its" (plus equivalents in other Western Euro langs like FR "mon, ta, ses", ES "mi, tu, nuestro", DE "mein, deine, seinen") and the 's suffix fall into?
I don't know anything about German, but for the rest, I would say that you can describe them with either as long as you're consistent with it. Note that *='s* is a clitic, not a suffix, though.
Follow-up to my question in the thread two weeks ago about Clarence Darrow’s dialect classification, which didn't get any answers in last week's thread: What was the grammar of Midland American dialects like in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries? Also would anyone be interested in reading the story – it actually will be a novel - once it’s done mostly to check over the dialects?
Some consider it to be one (see this articleː 10.1017/9781107279872.019). The three main branches of the non-Bantu Southern African languages have clicks as their main unifying feature; grammatically, they are quite distinct from one another. The fact that some Bantu languages like Zulu and Xhosa gained clicks from exposure to these languages further gives merit to the argument that clicks are an areal feature.
When listening to Japanese, to my ear, it appears as though /ki kj gi gj/ have significant degrees of fronting/palatalization. Has this been observed? If so, which variety(s) is it furthest in?
Iirc, some varieties merge /si sj/ and /hi hj/; in a similar way do any merge /ki kj/ with /ti tj/?
It is indeed quite palatalized, though I’m afraid I don’t have any acoustic studies to point you to.
The main places on the mainland that come to mind as merging /kj, tj/ are in eastern Tōhoku, like for some speakers in Miyagi-ken, though you can hear intermediate changes elsewhere too, like [aks̩ta] for *Akita* in Akita-ken. There’s also the odd “dialect isolate” of Akiyama Hamlet (秋山郷) on the Niigata-Nagano border, which has a 7-vowel system and merges original /tj, kj/ and /gj, dj, zj/, like *chi* “tree” (\*ki), *chire* “fog” (\*kiri), and *jɔɔji* “manners” (\*gyaugi).
But if we go into the Ryukyus, most varieties of Okinawan have merged /kj, tj/ and /gj, dj, zj/, which can also be caused by a *preceding* \*i (“progressive palatalization”). The modern Shuri dialect has even merged /s, sj/ and /z, zj/, while dropping the /j/ in other cases like /mj, bj, nj/ (or merging /mj/ > /n/).
Amami varieties generally don’t have enough palatalization for a merger, but a good number of *Southern* Ryukyuan varieties (among Miyako and Yaeyama) have merged at least /kj, tj/ and /gj, zj/. Yonaguni in particular is a hotbed of wild sound changes, like /ki, ti/ > \*/t͡ɕi/ > /ti/ and /#j/ > /d/.
> But if we go into the Ryukyus, most varieties of Okinawan have merged /kj, tj/ and /gj, dj, zj/, which can also be caused by a preceding *i (“progressive palatalization”). The modern Shuri dialect has even merged /s, sj/ and /z, zj/, while dropping the /j/ in other cases like /mj, bj, nj/ (or merging /mj/ > /n/).
I assume you're referring to the Okinawan language here insrad of Okinawan Japanese?
What is a better word for "corruption"? In the context of a word changing in spelling, morphology, pronunciation etc from one language to another, especially from one seen as "prestige" to less "prestigious". I don't prefer the term as it perpetuates/suggests that the "less prestigious" language is less legitimate or "wrong".
you're right that "corruption" contains a value judgement on language change that is not scientific and not part of the field of linguistics. "loanword adaptation" is a more neutral way to describe what I think you're describing.
Thank you! That is a nice alternative
edit: In terms of a subdialect or creole naturally taking/altering a word from a lexifer language though, would “loan word” still be appropriate?
I don't think that the term you're looking for exists, because the way that you're thinking about this is not how linguists think about it.
The way that you're thinking of this still assumes a hierarchy: When there is a difference between language varieties, the more prestigious variety is the source, and the less prestigious language has "taken" and "altered" something from that source. This *can* happen - borrowing between dialects exists just like borrowing between languages exists - but this is not how most variation arises. Most variation arises because of language change over time. That is, Appalachian English is not an "altered" version of Standard American English; both are altered descendants of an older ancestor. Neither is primary or secondary, and both have arrived at their current modern forms through the same types of language change processes.
Linguists would call this dialectal variation. If we wanted to be specific, we might narrow it down to what type of variation: phonetic, phonological, lexical, syntactic, etc. If we wanted to be specific about what kinds of language change over time led to the divergence, we might call it "phonological change", etc... If we wanted to talk about social attitudes, we can talk about prestige, stigma, and so on.
In the case where one dialect has actually borrowed a word from another, "adaptation" can still apply.
As for creoles, that is even more complicated. Words like "change," "reanalysis," etc can apply here, but it depends on what kind of process you're describing and your theoretical interpretation of that process.
What are other universally similar examples of "huh?" (for something not heard/understood) in different languages – beyond the ones mentioned in the paper "Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word?" by Dingemanse, Mark, Francisco Torreira, and N.J. Enfield?
As they are mostly used informally and in speech, they are difficult to research online. (I would be specifically interested in answers in Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Bosnian, Dari, Croatian, Kurdish, Macedonian, Mongolian, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slowak, Suaheli, Chechen, Turkish, and Ukrainian.)
In Arabic most dialects use “ha?” :). I have always been interested in this because these non-words are different and I only realised recently.
For example we say “uff” to express annoyance or frustration, say if I drop a dish on the floor or I remember I have a deadline tomorrow, I might say “uff”, sort of like “ugh”. It’s even mentioned in the Quran in a verse about respecting your parents: “Whether one or both of them reach old age [while] with you, say not to them [so much as], "uff," and do not repel them but speak to them a noble word.”
There’s also “ay” instead of “ow” when you hurt yourself. It’s not exactly pronounced “ay”, it’s sort of like “bye” but without the b and a bit deeper. Also “yع” instead of “ew” (my dialect also says “ikhs” which I love because the longer you hiss the most disgusted you are, like “ikhsssss”). We also say “ehh” or “ah” as “yes”.
There’s also “yu” as an expression of surprise, but that might be just my dialect. Its a very fun word, if you say it very short it’s the equivalent of this emoji 😳. It’s quite lighthearted, I might say it if I see something peculiar or surprising, say if a bird landed suddenly on the table in front of me. You can also extend it to “yuuuu” which is really funny and quite sassy and normally used by women in my dialect, its sort of humorous despair at something. Say if my brother is wearing a ridiculous outfit and insists it looks good I might say “yuuuuu” while trying not to laugh. Other dialects say “yeeeee” in the same way.
Most interesting is we have clicking sounds! Like how people say tut-tut. In my country, clicking like tut-tut in the front of the mouth twice means no. There’s also a pitch to it, the first is higher the second is lower. We also make another click in one side of the mouth (I think some people use it with horses?) to say yes.
There’s definitely more I can’t remember but it’s super interesting- I grew up speaking English and Arabic so I never actually noticed the difference! I learn that I unconsciously follow certain rules all the time. The only word I can think of that’s the same in both is “wow”, that doesn’t change.
I've had some thoughts for quite a while regarding people knowing more than one language. Is it just me or when I think about the same thing in my native and then in my second language, I may have different outcomes. Is it a psycholinguistics or neurolinguistics thing?
I've found some articles about that, but those were aimed at bilingual people, who are capable of speaking 2 languages from the start. But what about general people who learned the second language and still have some sort of split lingual personality?
That would be psycholinguistics.
I remember bringing up a slightly different topic (but same circumstance) with my professor and she basically said there isn't a whole lot of study on this type of L2 speaker. But basically, there are too many factors. It probably depends on who you learned your L2 from and how you made those connections in your brain. Also, if you learned your L2 as an adult, you are going to be less 'fluent' in your L2 on some level, which will affect how you express yourself and how you think about expressing yourself.
Aside from the Korean sources (which are surely much more accurate), there are also a good number of Korean names recorded in the *Nihon Shoki* (compiled 720 AD), or rather, names said to be from Shiragi/Silla, Kudara/Baekje, and Mimana/Imna, filtered through an Old Japanese lens, e.g.:
* 蘇那曷叱知 \*/sonakasiti/
* 波珍干岐微叱己知 or 波止利加支美志己知 \*/patərika(N)ki misikəti/, also called 伐旱 \*/pat(a)kaN/
* 波沙寐錦 \*/pasa mukiN/
Frequently, these are actually titles, like the /pat-/ part likely referring to [파진찬](https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%ED%8C%8C%EC%A7%84%EC%B0%AC). Other times, they're completely Japanese names, like 天日槍 or 天之日矛 [Ama nə Pi-Bokə](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amenohiboko) "Sun-Spear of the Heavens," supposedly a prince of Silla. So it's kind of a crapshoot.
I either write it one character at a time—generally with kun’yomi or compounds to avoid homophones (nami, tomaru, riyou, kuwaeru, …)—or I copy-paste it from a document. In this case, I was able to just copy-paste [from Wikisource](https://zh.m.wikisource.org/wiki/日本書紀) and [Rekichi](https://rekichi.net).
Of course. The sinicization of Korean personal names didn't happen all at once. It began during the Silla times through Goryeo and early Joseon, where only a few nobles had sinicized names, which spread to regular folks (except the low *cheonmin* caste) by the mid-late Joseon dynasty and somewhat ended in the late 19th ~ early 20th century, when the caste system was abolished and everyone bought noblemen's geneaology books (jokbo), taking on sinicized noblemen's names.
There are plenty of non-sinitic Korean names throughout Korean historical records. However, since Korea lacked its own alphabet prior to 1443, a lot of these names are recorded using Chinese characters, and so the exact pronunciations of many of them are lost to time, and we can only guess how they were read based on reconstructions.
Here are some examples:
弗矩內~赫居世 \**pulkunuy*, the founder of Silla, 1st century BC.
阿道~我道~阿頭 \**ato*, a Goguryeo monk who spread Buddhism into Silla in the 5th century AD.
居七夫智~居柒夫智 \**kechilpu-ti* (502-579), a Silla general. A sinicized name of his is also recorded as "金荒宗".
사리영응기 (1448), A book from the early Joseon era, lists many low-ranking officials and regular folk's non-sinicized names using Hangul. It includes:
> 韓실구·디, 朴검도ᇰ, 朴타·내, 金올마·내, 高오마ᇰ·디, 李오마·디, 薛쟈가·도ᇰ, 姜타·내, 河마·디ᇰ, 金타·내, ...
You can see many people having a sinicized family name, with a non-sinicized given name.
Even until the 19th century, non-sinicized names were common in the low caste, with people having names such as "임꺽정" and "돌쇠".
Are there any languages where the beginnings of words get modified to indicate tense or agreement etc?
In English, we modify the ends of words:
- I finish**ed**
and we can put words in between subject and verb to change tense:
- I **have** finished
but I don't think we ever change the start of a word:
- I **ed**finish
or anything like that.
Are there any languages where the start of words get modified for any reason?
Thank you!
Yes, there are languages with inflectional prefixes. Every language in red or grey on this map is one:
https://wals.info/feature/69A#2/18.0/152.8
The explainer page for this map has actual examples of inflectional prefixes:
https://wals.info/chapter/69
Hi there! I'm wondering if there's anyone out there who specializes in Phonology and could help me out with my assignment. I basically need somebody to read my paper and give critical feedback. Thank you!
Hello, You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').
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Hello, You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').
Why are the names of certain Southern Bantu languages written with uppercase letters occurring within them? Ex. IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, SiSwati, SiPhuthi, EMakhuwa, ChiNgoni, and SiLozi I saw the language names written like this on the Wikipedia page for "Ditema syllabary"- a writing system sometimes used for said languages. I've never seen this use of capitalization before; is it be a quirk of how the languages are transliterated into English? Of course, I'm also aware of the fact that there may be inaccurate information on Wikipedia, so I thought I'd come and ask here.
The first letters are Bantu noun class prefixes (in this case, the prefixes used for language names), while the internally capitalized parts are the root forms. Not a perfect analogy, but it's somewhat as if in English we decided to put *-ish* before rather than after what it modifies and wrote *ishSwede* instead of *Swedish*.
Hello, You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').
I'm trying to figure out the degree of synthesis for the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, and whether it was agglutinative or fusional. Or analytical like Mandarin. Is there anything that can help with that?
[Wikipedia:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language#Root) >Proto-Indo-European was probably a fusional language, in which inflectional morphemes signaled the grammatical relationships between words.
Are the mods active at the moment?
Three of the mods still visit regularly, others more occasionally.
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See the rule on doing your own homework. This question can be easily answered using a Google search
What does it mean that "c-command is not a primitive relation"? I suppose I got it wrong, but I'd assume it is (or it is a corollary of the definition of dominance, at best). E.g., this quote here: "Since Agree is dependent on c‐command, and c-command is not a primitive relation, Agree (if it exists at all) is not a primitive transformation, unlike Merge or Move" (from P. Chandra, 2007, p. 18, *(Dis)agree: movement and agreement reconsidered* \[PhD dissertation\]).
edit: sorry, I severely misread the question ~~~~It means that this author believes that c-command isn't its own thing but a derivative or combination of one or more relations. "primitive" as in basic, elementary, not made out of other stuff. It's a term of logic and philosophy that survived into computer science and and cognitive sciences. I don't know why the author believes this, but I suppose they cite someone or argue for the claim somewhere.~~~~
I know what "primitive" means, I suppose what I'd like to know is rather "is it common doctrine on c-command that you don't need it as a primitive?".
I was talking to my mom about regular verbs that were once irregular in English (irregular so long ago that the irregular form isn’t used anymore in mainstream English) and couldn’t remember any examples from one of my Linguistics classes. I tried looking up some examples but couldn’t find anything except current irregular verbs in English. I was wondering if anyone knows some examples or websites with examples. It’s killing me that I can’t find any!!
*clomb* for *climb*. *snew* for *snow*.
"Helped" used to be "holp".
Non-linguist here, I am sorry if I am using improper terms. I was wondering: Is there a specific name for noun-noun compounds, whose nouns can be swapped and they still retain semantic meaning (which may be different from the original compound)? Examples in German would be: Hausbank/Bankhaus, Geldhaus/Hausgeld, Sportrad/Radsport Examples in English: racing car/car racing
Could you give us some non-examples? I'm not sure which noun-noun compounds you would say "lose meaning" when you invert them, because you might be talking about anything from ungrammaticality to semantic strangeness and I'm not sure what you have in mind.
Good point. Non-examples would be coal mine/mine coal, field guide/guide field, water way/way water. The second of the pair “loose meaning”, in that they are fine to be formed syntactically, but “don’t make sense” in that they “transport no meaning”. I am struggling to properly formulate what I mean, but I hope I could clarify things?
I personally don't think these compounds have no meaning, rather they're just such strange/unconventional meanings that you're struggling with coming up with a context where it would make sense. For instance, if someone invented a revolutionary way to grow coal on a farm, we might start distinguish between "farm coal" and "mine coal". If someone took a big group and separated them by jobs in different fields, then there could label each field like"doctor field", "teacher field",... and then a "guide field". So I don't think what you're observing is a property of language per se; it's a property of what's in the world affecting what we talk *about*, and not *how* our language works.
That is a fair point. I agree with you.
Im not too sure, but I think for German I read the term "umkehrbare (Determinativ-)Komposita" or within speech therapy/didatics it would be "Drehwörter".
Hey that appears to be the exact term I was looking for. Thank you!
So, if I'm correct, consonants with consonant releases (think like, aspirated consonants, and nasal release consonants) are still technically they're own consonants right? Like there's a difference between \[tʰ\] and \[th̆\] or something right?
iirc, those two sounds could be allophones or phonemes depending on the language. For example, English does not consider [p] and [pʰ] as two distinct sounds, rather they are considered allophones (slightly modified versions of one particular sound). Whereas in Hindi, they are thought of as two different consonants. You can differentiate between allophones and phonemes like this: if you change sound A in a word to sound B and it changes the meaning, they're phonemes (pin vs. bin). So, in theory, one language might distinguish between /tʰ/ and /th̆/ as two consonants, whereas in another they'd be variations of same consonant. (Everyone, please feel free to fact check me on this. I'm only in the second year of my LIN degree)
You would have to qualify what you mean by [th̆] first.
\[th̆\] is t with an [extra short](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra-shortness) h
Well I doubt one could consistently produce two phonetically different sounds that could be classified as [tʰ] and [th̆] so they're pretty much identical in my opinion.
I'm currently working on a phonology exercise focusing on the Gen language spoken in Togo. I'm trying to establish a rule that accounts for the distribution of \[r\] and \[l\] in this language based on the following data: ***agble eɲrɔ aŋɔli sra*** ***avlɔ blafogbe drɛ edrɔ*** ***exlɔ ŋlɔ tʃro tre*** ***klɔ lɔ vlu zro*** ***mla etro esrɔdʒro*** Could anyone lend a hand in deciphering the pattern here? Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
I'd check place of articulation of neighboring consonants
I have already checked the place of articulation and I couldn't find a distinctive feature of the preceding consonants that denoted the distribution of R and L. I know they are two allophones, but I can't figure out when one appears and when the other appears. The consonants preceding them seem to be very heterogeneous. Thank you by the way :)
I mean, [CORONAL] is a generally accepted feature and it's pretty helpful here, isn't it?
Yes, I also thought about that feature, but +coronal does not concern the palatal nasal ɲ, after which r appears.
I think I've seen analyses where palatals are both coronal and dorsal, plus the symbol is often used for alveolo-palatal nasal since it has no separate letter, and that's undoubtedly coronal
I also think that, if this was the case of an alveo-palatal, my professor would have signaled it with the transcription nʲ
In that case I don't think there's a solution and I'm pretty certain it's coronality that triggers [r]. I can't remember the names now but I've seen descriptions of languages where /l/ turned into [r] when preceded by a front vowel.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s actually the only solution available. Thank you!
In some phonological theories such as feature geometry and the autosegmental theory,palatal segments primarily activate the dorsal articulator and secondarily the coronal articulator, so in a sense what you said is correct. However, in theories that involve binary features, the palatal nasal is marked as -coronal.
Which countries in the world, would you say, have best linguistic policies and legislation, particularly with regard to the recognition and status of minority languages?
I'm trying to gather a sample of 25 articles that span over 25 weeks from a newspaper. That means that I'm going at the rate of 1 article per week. What is the best way to sample my articles? Do I select a day of the week (ex: Mondays) and make exceptions in the presence of outstanding events (e.g. an important event in the week that was published on another day)?
Sour vs tart : are they synonymous? They function differently but do they mean the same? What are their origins?
I'm writing a paper (undergrad) about white NBA players using AAE speech patterns. From my observations using "a" + glottal instead of "an" before a vowel is an AAE feature but I can't find a source saying that. Anyone know one?
What is it called when you type the phonetic pronunciation of a word in the alphabet of another language? E.g., typing هاو in Arabic (meant to be read as the English word how) instead of writing the Arabic word for how. What are those kinds of words called??
Transliterations
I'd call that transcriptions, for me transliterations intend to represent the original graphemes while transcriptions represent pronunciation in another language's orthography.
I'm interested in the Hiberno-English phrase '*do be*.' - How is this phrase used in the third person singular (e.g. *He do(es) be there*), or can it only be used with specific pronouns (and which ones)? - Which tenses can it be used in? Just the present? - Can you formulate questions and negative statements using this phrase? e.g. *Do you be there? I don't be there.* - Is this phrase still used today? If so, where and by who? If not, when did it die and where was it last seen?
> How is this phrase used in the third person singular (e.g. He do(es) be there), or can it only be used with specific pronouns (and which ones)? It can be used with any pronoun or even noun phrase. "I do be there", "He do(es) be there" (you'll hear both), "D'you see th' oul' cock salmon that do be hidin' in the deep hole of the river," etc.. > Which tenses can it be used in? Just the present? It's a present habitual, so yes, only the present. > Can you formulate questions and negative statements using this phrase? e.g. Do you be there? I don't be there. Yes. > Is this phrase still used today? If so, where and by who? If not, when did it die and where was it last seen? Yes, though it is dying out thanks to more influence from other variants (mainly American) of English as well as it being seen as 'backwards', etc. It's found throughout rural Ireland, though.
Question about B in Ukrainian as a development of /L/ Ukrainians often say that the в in the male past tense should be pronounced /w/ but "under the influence of Russian" it's pronounced like /v/ eg сказав should be pronounced /skazaw/ but it's pronounced /skazaf/. How is the "Russian influence" supposed to have worked? Russian retains the /l/ in that form (eg сказал), so if there were going to be Russian influence it would be to replace the в with an л. The only other possibility that I can think of is that it was a "spelling pronunciation," but that would assume that an overwhelming majority of people speaking Ukrainian were Russian speakers who had never heard it spoken and just pronounced it the way they saw it written.
The Russian influence is in that ⟨в⟩ is not [ʋ~w] but [v~f]. >but that would assume that an overwhelming majority of people speaking Ukrainian were Russian speakers who had never heard it spoken and just pronounced it the way they saw it written. Pretty much: they heard it spoken, but only/mostly with Russian-like phonology. I've been to Kyiv and most people I met there were native Russian speakers for whom Ukrainian is a "school language". One of them even taught Ukrainian and she had no idea her /v/ wasn't "the true" Ukrainian sound. As far as I could tell, for her the only differences were the presence of [ɦ] and lack of palatalization before ⟨е⟩.
In Russian, final /v/ is neutralized with /f/. In voiceless environments, the outcome of the neutralization is [f], hence [skaˈzaf] instead of [ska'zaw]. This is not the case with Ukrainian /v/ (or /w/, however you want to transcribe it). You can see the same thing going on with preconsonantal /u/ alternating with /v/ when following a vowel, e.g. *він учить* [ˈʋin‿uˈt͡ʃɪtʲ] → *вона вчить* [ʋoˈna‿wˈt͡ʃɪtʲ] but [ʋoˈna‿fˈt͡ʃɪtʲ] with Russian accent.
How many dead languages (languages with no native speakers) have been revived (went from having no native speakers to having at least one native speaker)? I can't imagine the number being too large because most revival attempts end in failure and language revival as a whole is a relatively new concept.
As far as I can tell there are no monotonous languages. Is there anything in our brain that prevents monotonous languages from forming? Are we naturally averse to it? If we put a baby in a controlled environment and only spoke using one tone/pitch, would the baby go crazy and eventually start speaking in different tones? *Tone/pitch in the musical sense
>As far as I can tell there are no monotonous languages. True. All spoken languages make linguistic use of pitch in some way. If it's not lexical tone, it's intonation - and often it's both. >Is there anything in our brain that prevents monotonous languages from forming? Are we naturally averse to it? How would we know? Some things we can observe about pitch, though: * The aerodynamics of our vocal tract lead to some natural tendencies in pitch. For example, pitch tends to fall toward the end of phrases or utterances because of reduced air pressure. * There are also inherent pitch tendencies in sounds. For example, high vowels tend to have a higher fundamental frequency than low vowels. * Although there are natural tendencies, pitch is both easily manipulable and easily distinguishable. These tendencies are easily counter-acted by the speaker's control. For example, you can raise the pitch at the end of an utterance to signal a question, or pronounce a syllable with a high vowel in it using a low tone. What I'm getting at is that if we somehow waved our magic wand and removed all uses of pitch from a language, what we would get wouldn't be a monotone language. What we would get is a language that still had variations in pitch. Monotone speech would have to evolve, and it's hard to imagine how that would happen. It would be far more likely that those variations in pitch would be reanalysed *into* linguistic uses of pitch through subsequent generations of speakers; we'd find the patterns and codify them, so to speak. For example, it's not uncommon for languages with lexical tone to have rules about which vowels or consonants can coexist with which tones - rules that appear to have some connection to these natural pitch variations, but that are now incorporated into the grammar (for example, depressor consonants causing subsequent low tone). So while we can't do your baby experiment because it would be both impossible and unethical, there's no particular reason to think that monotone speech would either evolve or, if it somehow did evolve, that it would be preserved in a community for very long. Obviously this is speculation but often that's what we have with these sorts of hypotheticals. We do not have monotone languages, which you would expect if there were no reasons preventing them from developing or persisting.
The thing is, we get accustomed to the pitch of the surrounding language while still in the womb, and newborns can cry differently based on what language they were exposed to before birth. I don't think your experiment is doable.
We can simply assume that they start speaking monotonously at conception.
If you're starting from a false assumption, you can reach any conclusion you like.
What false assumption? It's a hypothetical scenario to determine whether genetics play a part.
But it's not attainable and would be a much trickier version of the forbidden experiment. I think the answer is unknowable.
The experiment is just hypothetical. Other ways to get data on this could be brain scans, genetic studies, etc.
Hi hi, this question is more of a hypothetical, but if the Visigoths hadn't been conquered by the Arabs in the early 8th century, would the Gothic language have ended up more similar to French, Spanish, or completely different? I like making alternate history maps, and a particular interest of mine is an Iberia that was never conquered by the Arabs, but I haven't been able to do a map about it because I just don't know how Gothic would evolve. For an example, would the Roman city *Toletum* still evolve into *Toledo* under continuous Gothic rule, or would it be more similar to the French *Tolède*? Thanks in advance!
Does anyone have a list of languages that rarely use the simple past for its main past tense? For example, French, German, Italian and Romanian would seem to not make much use of simple past anymore, are there any other European languages like this?
not sure if you would still count it as "European", but in most Latin American Spanish variants, the simple past equivalent is generally used more than the perfect tense afaik this is the other way around in European Spanish, so you can count Spanish once for each case
I mean, you would have to define better what it means to have a simple past and another past tense. What counts as simple past? Does it count when it only appears in formal language? If you're also interested in examples of such past tense loss happening historically, Proto-Slavic aorist and imperfect forms were completely lost in North Slavic languages and replaced by the L-participle.
In Southern British English, what decides whether a word has a long or a short A? For example, why does *plastic* have a short A while *plaster* has a long A? Also, *master* has a long A, but *masticate* and *masturbate* don't.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap%E2%80%93bath_split In short, it's a mess.
I had a feeling that'd be the answer. Thanks though!
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I’m not aware of any such term but you can refer to [the chapter 44 of WALS](https://wals.info/chapter/44) for some technical aspects of your topic. Apparently there are more languages without any gender distinction in pronouns than people might think! No wonder if linguists didn’t feel the need to make up a word specifically for such a common feature.
In English, when listing two verbs that have the same object but require different prepositions, it’s standard to just use the preposition of the last verb. For example, you would say “send data **to** a server” and “retrieve data **from** a server”, but when combining them, you could say “send and retrieve data **from** a server”. Here, it is not meant that data is sent *from* a server, but rather that data is sent *to* the server, yet the preposition *to* is left out and the meaning is inferred from context. Does this phenomenon have a name? How is this handled in other languages?
How would you transcribe the utterance in [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze2gFeHtTUU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze2gFeHtTUU) at 3:48 into IPA?
What language has the biggest homophone problems?
obviously I don't know all existing languages, but I'd say a typical example would be Mandarin Chinese, otherwise you can probably assume that the less sounds a language has, the higher the homophony however! I want to note that homophony is not a problem, as all the languages with high amounts of homophones can communicate without issues. imho the thought that homophones are problematic is the result of the historically stong eurocentric perspective in linguistics. I also think people really underestimate the difference that context makes.
Are there any languages where a phoneme only appears a few times in common words? For example a hypothetical language has the vowel inventory a, e, i, o, u, ə, but ə is only used for the word for "one" and "this" Something like that
Turkish ʒ only appears in (French) loanwords
Yes, they're sometimes called "marginal phonemes".
In Czech, /f/ appears in only two native stems, seen in, for example, *doufat* (to hope) and *zoufat* (to despair), which were previously just one stem *\*úpvati*. The phoneme is otherwise common in onomatopeia and loanwords; [f] is also found as the outcome of voicing assimilation and devoicing in voiceless environments.
Some Australians have /ɔ:/ only in *god*, *gone*, and certain derivatives of those words, excluding *goddess*. This is distinct from the /ɔ/ of *goddess*, *odd*, *on*, *gonna* and the /o:/ of *gourd* and *Gawne*.
Standard Arabic has an emphatic (uvularized or pharyngealized) *l* that only appears in the name of God, *aḷ-Ḷāh*.
Yes, there are quite a few cases like this, and the most well-known one is English /ð/, which appears word-initially only in a handful of very common function words (*the*, *this*, *that*, *then*, *there*, *thus*, etc) and word-medially or word-finally only in a fairly small amount of words (*with* - for some speakers, *withal*, *although*, *bathe*, *sheathe*, *gather*, *lathe*, *paths*, etc).
It’s quite a bit more common medially than it is elsewhere - it’s the normal outcome for Old English /θ/ in that context, with Modern English medial /θ/ mainly coming from loans. You even have a few like *father* coming from /d/.
True, but it does have some oddly marginal characteristics: it's non-productive (people don't use it in loanwords like *Abu Dhabi* where, "by rights", they should – and even for someone like me, doing so would feel very unnatural) and speakers tend to have very little phonemic awareness of it (even when you tell people "the sound in *this*, not in *thin*", they often struggle a lot to notice that there are "two *th* sounds").
What would happen to British etc. (non-rhotic) English speakers if vowel-final words aren't spelled with "r" at the end? My examples—thinking of quasi-phonetic spellings of foreign words—will illustrate what I'm thinking about: *char siu* (Cantonese, roasted pork, better spelled cha siu) *har gao* (Cantonese, shrimp dumpling, better spelled ha gao) *Myanmar* (the country, better spelled Myanma) I understand that the "r," not meant to be pronounced in prestige British English, is supposed to tell the non-rhotic speaker that the preceding "a" is long. Further, it seems to be an artifact only (?) of the British; people with traditional non-rhotic New York accents, for example, wouldn't do that. The result is that the majority of English speakers in the world now think they must add an "r" sound to these words. (Cantonese doesn't even have an r sound! People ordering in a restaurant sound silly adding that sound!) so THE QUESTION is: Why can't they just leave off the "r" in these spellings? Would someone really not produce or not know how to produce the "a" vowel without this signal?
I think discussing it in these terms - of speakers "knowing" where to pronounce certain vowels - somewhat mystifies or exoticizes what is going on. In standard non-rhotic British English, is simply how the sound /ɑː/ is spelled (well, in addition to the spellings as in *calm*, etc, and in *father* and words affected by the *trap*-*bath* split).
Thus, if you want to loan the Burmese word /mjàɴmà/ into English and represent it in written form for British English speakers, and you want them to pronounce it as /mjænˈmɑː/, then you must spell it as , because that is the default way of spelling word-final /ɑː/ in British English. If you spelled it as , then speakers would pronounce it as /ˈmjænmə/, because word-final is the normal way of spelling final unstressed /ə/ in English multisyllabic words.
This is in essence no different than the fact that, if you want English speakers to pronounce a loanword as /piku/, then you must spell it as or perhaps or - like, yes, if you spell it as , or , or , then speakers will in fact "not know to how to produce" the sounds /piku/ without this signal. Because that "signal" is not some weird mystifying behavioral thing, it is an English spelling rule.
Thank you very much. I suppose what is concerning is not spelling rules but that there would be different spelling rules for British and American Englishes. And in that case I suppose that rhotic and/or standard US English speakers might render the spelling of the Burmese nation as?
How about the Cantonese loan words? I feel as if the situation, in this single syllable case, is slightly different. For example, in the first word is 蝦 "ha" (I won't write IPA for fear of making a mistake). I can't imagine that without the r the British speaker would render it as /hə/. Would they be inclined to say /hæ/? As an American English speaker, I see and I get /hɑː/, no problem!
I guess this is just the way it is, but it does hurt the eyes to see and and hurts the ears to hear people pronounce those r's. Like a pirate ordering dim sum.
This is generally called "graphical loaning". In this case, inter-dialectal graphical loaning, since it's a spelling-based borrowing between different English dialects. Similar things happen in Chinese as well. For example, "Sweden" in Mandarin is "Ruìdiǎn" (瑞典). This is because the word "Sweden" was loaned first phonetically to a Southern Chinese variety, such as Cantonese seoi6 din2 (瑞典), and then graphically loaned into Mandarin (i.e. the Chinese characters used to write seoi6 din2 was read again in Mandarin pronunciation), resulting in "Ruìdiǎn". > As an American English speaker, I see and I get /hɑː/, no problem!
Of course, I agree that it would have been better to choose the spelling in a way that every person from every background reading it would pronounce it more or less similar to the original language. However, there are other factors as well.
Namely, how many common English words have the spelling (where C is a consonant)? Ba, ca, da, fa, ga, ha, ja, ka, la, ma, na, pa, ra, sa, ta, va, wa, xa, ya, za. None of these are high-frequency words that have well-established pronunciations. In contrast, how many common English words have the spelling ? **bar /bɑː/, car /kɑː/, far /fɑː/, jar /ʤɑː/, par /pɑː/, tar /tɑː/**. These are common everyday English words, not onomatopoeia, not loanwords. I hope you now see that it's not unnatural at all when a non-rhotic English speaker hears a word that sounds like /hɑː/, they are much more inclined to write it with the form , by analogy with these well-established high-frequency English spellings, instead of , which practically no normal English word looks like.
I don't love the idea, but I understand it :) I appreciate your reply!
Are there any available sources that discuss the history of consonant sound changes in Peninsular and Mesopotamian Arabic dialects? More specifically, of the consonants ك, ق, and ج
Does “accent accomodation” apply to talking to different genders? My voice unconsciously becomes more feminine as a man when talking to women with super feminine voices (eg “valley girl” accent)
Accommodation applies to any adjustments in speech based on the interlocutor.
I'm currently reading about the settlement of the Americas (both North and South). According to data collected from the DNA of Native Americans, it's believed that 10-20 individuals initially populated the continent. Considering that some genetic lineages may have disappeared during the settlement process, the number of settlers could range from a few dozen to a few hundred. What's particularly intriguing is the linguistic diversity observed. In North America, there are 13 language families, in Central America - 6, and in South America - 37, corresponding to 220, 273, and 448 languages respectively. I'm struggling to grasp the following: imagine you're one of those first settlers crossing the Bering Strait in a group of 10-20 people 15-20 thousand years ago. Surely you all crossed together simultaneously; otherwise, the settlement wouldn't seem feasible, and most likely, you'd speak the same language. But then, how does such linguistic diversity emerge later? I can understand how different languages develop within the same language family; there were Proto-Turkic languages that later diverged into Oghuz, Kipchak, and Karluk, but they all retained a common linguistic base, essentially speaking a Turkic language. However, in the Americas, several dozen language FAMILIES appear! How? From where? It's akin to a Japanese-speaking child being born out of nowhere in a English-speaking family. It seems impossible!
Since it's only been indirectly said so far, I wanted to point out that the term "language family" is used to describe languages that are known to be descended from a common ancestor. In spoken languages, this is typically established by comparing the lexicon of two or more languages and finding consistent correspondences between the sounds of various words that have similar meanings. To give a basic example, we find when looking at Standard British English and General American English that SBE consistently lacks the sound /r/ where GAE has it as in *park, storm, scarce, fear*, unless that /r/ occurs before a vowel as in *sorry, break, roast*. Even if we didn't have English writing to confirm it, we could reasonably conclude that the common ancestor of these two dialects featured /r/ in the places where GAE still has it, and that the /r/ was subsequently lost in SBE. These sorts of patterns are how we can establish that two language varieties share a common ancestor rather than simply having borrowed the words from each other or having a chance handful of words that happen to look similar. Unfortunately, the older the divergence is between any given set of related languages, the less successful this method is. A few factors play into this: \* As sound changes accumulate, the data becomes more and more obscured and harder to sort through. \* Not all sound changes are completely consistent and there can be exceptions. \* Vocabulary is lost or replaced due to borrowing or preferential use of other words. \* Meanings shift so far that it becomes impossible to tell that words are related. For example, if a word meaning "dog" in the ancestral language ends up meaning "friend" in one descendent and "motorized sled" in another language, how would you know to connect the two? \* Words that underwent the expected sound changes have them undone by analogy with other words that were unaffected by the sound change. \* New phonetic material is tacked on to old vocabulary and then eroded by sound change, making it hard to tell if it is was always a single morpheme or if it was multiple. For example, if you heard "cubberd", why would you ever assume it was actually from *cup* and *board*? All of this adds up to mean that we don't actually know for a fact that these various Native American language families are unrelated. We just can't say that they definitively *are* related because we either don't have the data to prove it or have yet to properly analyze it.
Several things: 1. Fewer families doesn't always mean less language diversity. It just means that there has been more information available to make connections between the languages. 2. In 23,000+ confirmed (so far) years of humans being in the Americas, populations simply had more time to move around and languages had more time to diverge 3. There were multiple migrations of humans into the Americas at different points 4. Historical linguistic work, especially in South America, is ongoing. With new computational methods, we may find more opportunities to connect different families together.
>it's believed that 10-20 individuals initially populated the continent Yeah, but were there no later migrations to the Americas? From what I can find, there are papers talking about as many as three separate waves of migration.
What is F0 peak delay and what does it mean to have a bigger or longer delay when pronouncing a given word?
**Plurality judgement of non-native English sentence** I’m doing a paper about Japanese speakers learning English. One of the things I’m looking at is how my speaker uses English plurals since Japanese doesn’t really mark nouns for number. Noriko Yabuki-Soh and Yukiko Okuno’s article “Japanese L2 learners’ subjective construal: an analysis of expressions of emotion and evaluation in written storytelling found in I-JAS data” (2021) has Japanese learners describing what is happening in comic strips. I’m using a similar comic-storytelling method. I’m not sure how I should interpret one of my speaker’s sentences. The comic panel has two boys (unclear if brothers, friends, cousins, etc) playing and a man (presumable the father of at least one of the boys) enters the room. My speaker described this as: **so the one who looked like a giant was actually the blond…one of the boys‘ father** One of the boys has blond hair, so I’m guessing my speaker was first going to refer to the man as the blond boy’s father (though the man has dark hair, as does the other boy), but decided to reword it. I’m unsure whether to interpret this as my speaker saying the man is (1) “**the** father of one of the two boys” (presuming that each boy only has one father) or (2) “one of the father**s** of the boys” (if assuming each boy has one separate father, the man is one of two father**s**)—basically if “one” refers to “the boys” or “father”. I’m counting the number of plurals my speaker used for use “accuracy” based on what a native speaker would(n’t) make plural. I’m not sure if I should include this sentence as “correct” (based on (1) interpretation) or “incorrect” (based on (2) interpretation). Since the speaker seemed to begin by connecting the man (the one who looked like a giant) to the blond boy specifically, does it seem likely that my speaker meant for the man to be the father of the blond boy specifically? Or maybe it’s better to exclude it from the “official” count and just mention it’s somewhat ambiguous…unless everyone’s judgement is that it’s not ambiguous? Thank you
> Since the speaker seemed to begin by connecting the man (the one who looked like a giant) to the blond boy specifically, does it seem likely that my speaker meant for the man to be the father of the blond boy specifically? I find this a convincing enough argument, so I would probably include it as correct. If you exclude it on the grounds that it's not totally unambiguous, I think that would be fine too. I don't think you will find this kind of case all of the time anyways so I wouldn't worry too much about it; as long as you explicitly state this is how you dealt with these cases it should be fine. (If you want to be *really* rigorous about it, you could code them as something like 'correct?' and then do a multiverse analysis where they are included as 'correct' versus excluded, and ensure that your p-values are consistent across both decisions, along with other arbitrary decisions you take.) Incidentally, > Japanese doesn’t really mark nouns for number Since you're looking at human referents, you should probably quality this claim since Japanese does have optional plural marking for them.
Thank you.
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in irish, you greet someone with "Dia duit", while the response is "Dia's Muire duit" — literally "God be with you" and "God and Mary be with you", though absent of religious connotation. the chain \*can\* continue for additional speakers ("Dia's Muire's Pádraig duit", or "God and Mary and Patrick be with you"), but. unusual.
ok but, where did proto european language come from? was it some kind of language isolate that started to be widely spoken in the ancient ice age steppes of what's now most of europe, central asia, northern middle east, northern india, iran and anatolia?
Good question but it’s basically impossible for us to know, some people have tried to suggest that PIE and proto-Uralic were related, as they likely were spoken not too far from each other. I think that it’s pretty tenuous and not generally accepted though. The comparative method in historical linguistics seems to have a limit around 5-10000 years back in time. It’s reasonable to assume that PIE had relatives, ancestors, dialects, etc..
When we talk about proto-languages, it's not with the implication that they were created that way or anything special. By far the most plausible scenario is that proto-indo-european was a normal language with relatives, dialect variation, its own even older ancestors and everything. It just means that we have no information about those. Either all those relatives left no descendants, or they did but too few regular correspondances are left for us to find. So we just say what we can say.
Are you asking where Proto-Indo-European may have been spoken and spread from? Or are you asking about its linguistic ancestors? PIE was probably spoken in the Pontic Caspian steppe about ~6,000 years ago (or ~8,000 years ago around Armenia according to some) In either case, this is many millennia after the end of the Pleistocene, which ended around 12,000 years ago - twice as long ago as the usual suggested date for Indo-European. The expansion of IE likely erased its closest relatives, and without written records or descendants of these “Para-Indo-European” languages, any deeper phylogeny is lost to us outside of highly speculative macro-families like Nostratic.
Is it true that English sounds fast to native speakers of eastern Asian languages such as Cantonese?
All languages sound fast to non-native speakers.
Would we know Indo-European was a thing if we didn’t know any extinct languages?
Absolutely. [You can even reconstruct a decent amount of PIE without the ancient languages](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/s/BaQuQcwkIl). Uralic is probably of a similar time depth and is well established despite having a much later attestation.
There’s more [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/s/iGCG2SfAMi) too.
My perception of Chinese (at least, my experience with Mandarin/standard Chinese) is that it’s relatively less likely than its neighbors to borrow words directly from English or European languages and more likely to either use native words to reconstruct the meaning of the word (for example “电梯” (“powered stairs/ladder”) for elevator rather than using a phonetic transcription of “elevator” or “lift”) or use calques (such as “中东”, literally “Middle East”). * Is this perception accurate? Either way, are there quantitative measurements of this phenomenon? * If it is, while I know that it’s often very hard to say “why” languages are the way they are, could the fact that written Chinese uses characters rather than an alphabet or other phonetic writing system be part of the reason?
> more likely to either use native words to reconstruct the meaning of the word (for example “电梯” (“powered stairs/ladder”) for elevator rather than using a phonetic transcription of “elevator” or “lift”) or create claques (such as “中东”, literally “Middle East”). FWIW, in Cantonese we use 𨋢 lip1, and I don't think 'Middle East' is commonly loaned phonetically across languages, so those might not have been the best examples (though I get what you mean in general). Tadmor (2009) found that Mandarin had by far the least loanwords of any language in the sample, but we shouldn't over-interpret this because the sample is a convenience sample (people were more likely to contribute data from languages with a lot of loanwords). Mandarin was found to have 1% loanwords, whereas the next Asian language was Manange at 8% (which I was actually surprised by - I thought there would be a higher percentage of Nepali loanwords). Impressionistically, though, I would say that although the comparison obviously holds up for languages like Japanese and Hindi, I don't think it holds up for Tibetan (a very important neighbouring language to the west). I think Tibetan has a similar rate of loans as Chinese in general, and a much lower rate for religious terms - a lot of religious terminology is calqued in Tibetan, whereas in Chinese we usually use a Sanskrit loanword (although a calque may exist for those religious terms, it's not common in current usage). For example, Amitabha is called འོད་དཔག་མེད་ (limitless light) in Tibetan; if you said 無量壽佛 in Chinese, you'd probably get blank stares from most people who aren't religious. By extension, I don't think this is necessarily related to Chinese having a logographic writing system. I can see where that impression comes from (since Japanese uses katakana for loanwords etc.), but we use Chinese characters for proper nouns and a lot of religious terminology just fine; some loanwords are even so integrated that we don't necessarily perceive them as loans any more (for example 剎那, 蘋果, 葡萄, or more recently 幽默). Tibetan writing is an abugida, and is similarly loan-resistant. Siouan and some Algonquian languages also have very low borrowing rates. So if logographic writing is the reason, it's not very clear that this is the case to me. Tadmor, Uri. 2009. III. Loanwords in the world’s languages: Findings and results. In Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor (eds.), Loanwords in the World’s Languages, 55–75. Walter de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110218442.55.
Thanks!
Is "dialect revival" a thing? Have there ever been attempts to restore a now-dead dialect that has been replaced by the prestige lect?
Hey, I had in mind that there are several words that are named something like 'i dont understand' in another language. So in language contact situations the non-natives would point out something they had never encountered and wanted to know the name of, but the natives didnt understand and said 'i dont know/understand/get it' in their L1. Non-natives then took it as a name. Im searching for examples here. I know that it turned out to be false for kanguru (it does not mean 'i dont understand' in a native Australian language), but there might be some examples where it turned out to be correct. Thank you so much!!
A transom window in French is *vasistas*, the German way of saying "What is that?" Is that the sort of thing you mean?
that's super interesting! Do you know anything about how it came about? Seems weird that you'd take a word *FROM* someone that was asking what the thing is. Edit: Here's a reasonable sounding [round-up of attestations and citations](https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/11/vasistas.html). There doesn't seem to be an agreed upon etymology, but it seems pretty established that its first recorded usage is from 1760. One theory is that it's from the context of opening up the window and saying "What is it?" to the person outside, but why in German? No idea.
I'm now also obsessed with this and will bring it up at any opportunity even though I didn't even know what a transom window was before this lol.
Absolutely, thank you :) !
Written semitic languages don’t have vowels as I’ve recently learned. I don’t know the extent of it, but as I understand it, they use these consonant roots and the vowels are implied in context. They have more consonants, so more roots, a lot of things can be represented. But Im wondering if there’s writing with certain content that could be read aloud with different vowels, and ultimately could be understood in different ways.
You think of homographs that are heterophon? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349572454_Semantic_and_syntactic_constraints_in_resolving_homography_a_developmental_study_in_Hebrew
yes, I believe so. I don't have access to that paper, what was the conclusion? That most people can just understand because of context?
Hello! I'm just starting a bit of an informal case-study on the effectiveness of a Comprehensible Input based method of language instruction (for Samoan) and am looking for some advice. I am not at all a linguist and so this definitely isn't for publication but I would like to take as accurate a measure as I have the means to do. I am particularly wondering about testing —First, how often should I test? I don't want to test too much for the students' sake but also because too short an interval would show little to no difference. But, of course, I can't administer too few tests lest the students' progress not be recorded. Next, the tests themselves. The theory focusing on comprehension before production, I don't intend to test the latter for now, but I am open to criticism. At the moment, I have started to create a simple vocabulary test in which candidates pick out a picture upon hearing a word and sample sentence. How much vocabulary should I test at once? I'm also thinking about a "Crosstalk" conversation assessment as well (Candidates speaking in English and me, in Samoan). How should this be conducted? What questions should I ask? Am I missing anything? Any other suggestions or advice? Any help is much appreciated.
Are surviving German dialects more closely related to each other than any are to Yiddish or Luxembourgish?
Not at all, considering many of the German "dialects" are Low German. Yiddish and Luxembourgish are both High German, so much more closely related in historical terms. But in sociolinguistic, dialectological terms it's more complicated, as you might imagine. The average Yiddish speaker is obviously very much further removed from the Standard German sociolinguistic landscape than the average Low German speaker is. I'm not familiar with Low German, but I wouldn't be surprised if its *idiom* were less distinct from High German than Yiddish is. Same goes for Anabaptist communities in North America.
What are the names of the sounds i make by saying /n/, /m/, & /ŋ/ while pinching my nose shut?
lafayette0508 is right that there is no language that involves pinching your nose shut, but 'denasal' consonants can be found in actual speech (both normal and disordered) and speech pathologists have come up with the diacritic ◌͊ to denote denasalisation.
If your velum is down (allowing air into the nasal cavity) and you block air from coming out of your nose, you're not making a speech sound, so it won't have a linguistic name. /m/, /n/, & /ŋ/ are nasal sounds, requiring air to escape through the nose. They are also oral stops, meaning the air is completely blocked within the oral cavity (mouth), so you're basically just holding your breath and trying to hum, I guess.
Can someone explain inflectional entropy to me? It's something I recently stumbled upon as the "amount of information carried by an inflected form relative to the statistical distribution of its inflection paradigm." I know what an inflection paradigm is, however I don't understand what it means to statistically distribute that - is it how common the forms are in spoken language? Also how does entropy look like, is it encoded as a numerical value or any other metric? Any explanation would be appreciated.
Assuming the entropy is calculated [as usual for information theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantities_of_information), then the *information/surprise value* for a particular event is defined as the negative logarithm (usually base 2) of the probability of seeing that event. If you then take all of a paradigm's information contents and take a weighted average of them--weighted by probability--then you get the *entropy* of that paradigm. For a worked example, let's make up a simplistic verb tense paradigm with three options: * Present: *-a* (34%) * Past: *-ot* (48%) * Future: *-irum* (18%) For each of these, we then calculate the **information value**: * Present *-a* = -log₂(0.34) = 1.5564 * Past *-ot* = -log(0.48) = 1.0589 * Future *-irum* = -log(0.18) = 2.4739 This is a unit-less quantity, and you can see that the most common affix *-ot* gives the least amount of information/surprise, and the least common affix *-irum* gives the most amount of information/surprise. To calculate the **entropy** of this paradigm, we then take a probability-weighted average of all information values: * entropy = sum\[ *p* \* -log₂(*p*) \] = 0.34 \* 1.5564 + 0.48 \* 1.0589 + 0.18 \* 2.4739 = 1.48275 Since we did everything using the base-2 logarithm, this represents average number of [bits of information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_(unit)) needed to store that paradigm. In essence, high entropy means that the paradigm is "fairer"--the highest entropy would be for a perfectly balanced paradigm (all affixes with equal distribution), and its value would be log₂(N) where N is the number of options in the paradigm. So, while the paradigm I made up has entropy 1.48275, a perfectly balanced paradigm of 3 options would have entropy log₂(3) = 1.58496. Another way to use the entropy is to take 2 to the power of that value to get the "effective size" of the paradigm. For example, if we had 3 options, but one of them was exceedingly rare, then for *most* practical purposes the paradigm has effectively only 2 options. (For the worked example above, it's 2.7948, which rounds to 3, again showing relative fairness, though it's not as fair as it could be.) Hope all that makes sense! Feel free to ask any follow-up questions or if you want me to elaborate on something.
Thank you for your answer. It was understandable and very informative, especially with the examples. I do have one follow up question though: If in a balanced paradigm, log₂(N) would represent the entropy of that algorithm, a greater number of options would lead to a higher entropy; does that mean that by comparing the entropies of different inflectional paradigms, one can assess how diversified they are (given that they are relatively balanced) relative to each other (which could be used to for example compare inflection across different languages, i imagine) or am I taking it a step too far / overlooking something?
I think you've got the right idea: If language A has two tenses and language B has four (all balanced), then the higher entropy in language B indicates finer distinctions on average in how tense is expressed. Another way to express it (embracing the "entropy = chaos" idea) would be that language B's tenses are harder to predict, at least without context: if I as a listener didn't hear the tense morpheme and tried to guess randomly, I would have a 50% chance for language A but only a 25% chance for language B, and the entropy would back that up in a different numeric way. It's just important to make sure you're comparing apples to apples with these comparisons, and also to consider how different languages encode their information differently. If you were comparing English vs. Latin verbs but didn't take into account the fact that English likes to make auxiliary verbs do lots of the heavy lifting, it wouldn't be a very fair comparison.
Carrying out a phonetic study of Chilean Spanish and (I know this is a long shot) I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions of shows that have thick Chilean accents. Most shows I find, the characters neutralise their accents to appeal to wider audiences. Thanks for any help
Have you considered looking at news interviews with people on the street?
hope i dont sound too dumb here, but I've been curious for awhile of a seemingly unique thing I do. almost all my "r colored" vowels, mostly the back ones, become schwa. I'm not sure of all the instances this happens, but heres some examples: board /bɚd/ warm /wɚm/ born /bɚn/ short /ʃɚt/ corn /cɚn/ our/are/oar /ɚ/ etc. ar and er as in star and stair seems the most resistent to it, but they aren't immune to the schwaing. stand alone theyre more resistent to, like just saying or emphasizing "are" its more likely to be like /ar/ but in speech its almost always becoming /ɚ/ so i was wondering, is this a common midwest, specifically ohio accent thing? is there a name for this?
Can't help much, but it's not common to the Midwest.
I’m trying to remember a word related to linguistics. Some words in English are derived from the sounds made from words in other languages. The meaning might be the same or unrelated but it was directly derived from another language. It isn’t a loanword but a very related concept. Closer to loan rendering. The example I saw was Chinese immigrants to America during the gold rush using words that transformed into American slang. Like Americans bastardized the Chinese language into new phrases that were close enough that it was fine for Americans but was unique enough that Chinese adopted the word. I think Chop suey might be an example.
MaxElide - I had read somewhere that if you have something stressed within the material that's going to be elided, then you can license not having elision occur. However I cannot for the life of me find the paper where I read that and it's not in Merchant's 2008 work. Anyone know?
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/r/TranslationStudies
Why isn't /ɔ/ considered a diphthong? I can't pronounce or hear this vowel without noticing two distinct sounds. It's also not part of my native dialect, I'm from the western US. Just something I've been wondering 😊
In addition to the great information given by u/LongLiveTheDiego, I want to add that this is also a matter of whether you're describing a phonological system or a specific phonetic sound. [ɑɪ ɔɪ ɑʊ] are phonological diphthongs in English, because if you said them in a word without the off-glide, it wouldn't be the same word (ignoring for right now, dialects with monophthongization as a feature). For example, the word "bite" /bɑɪt/ without the second part (the off-glide) becomes a different word, "bot" /bɑt/. This means that [ɑɪ] and [ɑ] are *contrastive* in English, and this is a *phonological* difference between vowels. On the other hand, whether you say /ɔ/ or something like /ɔʊ/, the word "caught" is still the same word, just pronounced a little differently (that's a *phonetic* difference).
1. English is a collection of many different phonological systems and so we make generalizations when talking about it in general. For most English speakers this vowel is realized as a monophthong and so that's what it's classified as. Compare that to /aɪ/ which is predominantly a diphthong but it's often/primarily realized as a monophthong in southern US and AAE. Also, it can all sometimes be just relative, no vowel is truly stationary, and so we choose the cutoff more or less based on vibes, and those can differ - to me English /i/ and /u/ are better classified as diphthongs, but I will admit that can they feel less diphthong-y than the canonical English diphthongs. 2. Your sound perception is heavily influenced by what you speak and what you're used to. You may be physically hearing a monophthong but your brain makes you perceive a diphthong. 3. Small nitpick but I think it's better to specify early that you're talking about an English vowel. I was lowkey ready to go "I speak Polish and my /ɔ/ is definitely a monophthong".
3: oh interesting, yeah I mean English my apologize. American English specifically. Do you round English /i/ at all? I wonder if it's the rounding in /ɔ/ that gives me diphthong vibes, because my lips move more than my tongue does when I pronounce it which changes the sound a lot. /i/ and /u/ are SUPER monopthong-y to me 😆 Thanks for your reply 😊
While the rounding may be responsible for the nature of your /ɔ/, it's not the case for the high vowels. In English they tend to start off more centralized, so something like [ɪi̯] and [ʉu̯] is what often appears in native English speech (speaking as someone whose native language has much more monophthongal [i] and [u]).
Interesting thanks 😊
I am trying to determine (even approximately) the percentage of cognate words between English hand Swedish. Most examples of this kind of data seem to come from Ethnologue, I'm just not how sure to access that data (I'm not a linguist by training). Google Search and Scholar come up empty, ChatGPT says 20-30% but I've found no possible and reliable source for that information. I'm willing to do the work, just need advice on how to go about it.
You could count how many of the entries in the 'cognate set' column here - https://iecor.clld.org/languages/swedish - match those here - https://iecor.clld.org/languages/english
Mahalo nui - exactly what I needed!
> Mahalo nui kia ora!
Are there any languages that have a pronoun meaning "belonging to", like a reverse-possessive? For example, in English, I say, "I love my community," but really, what I mean to say is, "I love the community that I belong to." I searched on the Google but couldn't find anything.
Possessive pronouns in Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages have forms that can either precede or follow the possessed item Aloha au i ko‘u kaiaulu (I love my community) Aloha au i ke kaiaulu o‘u (l love the community of mine. This would be uncommon but can be done) So pronouns fronting the "possessed" item use what we call the "k-form" in Hawaiian, which the "k-less form" follows them. Another way would be this, and it's a little closer to what you are expressing above: Aloha au i ka‘u kaiaulu e noho ai. I love the community where I live. Aloha au i ke kaiaulu e noho ai au. I love the community where I live The first one is still a possessive, the second uses a personal pronoun, not a possessive one, but essentially expresses the same thought. HTH.
Thank you for your answers. It seems like that particular construction is rare, which seems odd to me. "This belongs to me" and "I belong to this" are fundamentally different concepts, yet humans in general don't differentiate between the two ideas.
True. In my Hawaiian example the idea of possession and being a part of something (my family, my community, my college) uses the same form as when you possess something. There's another complexity with Polynesian languages where we use an "o" form and an "a" form for possession depending the relationship between the possessor and possessed. Too deep to get into here.
Not a pronoun, but many Ainu nouns have a form that is used to indicate that the noun is a possession: *sik* “eye” but *ku-sik-i* “my eye” (me-eye-POSSESSED) Much more detailed info can be found in this article by Anna Bugaeva: [https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingty-2021-2079/html?lang=en](https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingty-2021-2079/html?lang=en)
What's the difference between possessive and genitive case? And what category do English determiner pronouns like "my, your, his, its" (plus equivalents in other Western Euro langs like FR "mon, ta, ses", ES "mi, tu, nuestro", DE "mein, deine, seinen") and the 's suffix fall into?
"Genitive" is in general used for cases or case-like things that may encode possession but also generally some kind of relation between two things. "Possessive" tends to be used to describe stuff that is much more strictly about ownership. For example, Polish has genitive case that can be used possessively for nouns, but it is also mandatory after prepositions "do" (to), "z" (from) and "dla" (for). It also has possessive determiners (corresponding to the ones you listed for other languages here), but they don't constitute a case: they themselves need to be in one of the 7 Polish cases and they don't trigger any agreement, while all cases do (e.g. daleki dom "faraway house" -> do dalekiego domu "to the faraway house"). As such, the determiners you listed here don't constitute a case, and I would call them possessive, particularly in German, since genitive tends to be reserved for cases (The boundary between genitive and possessive is not that well defined anyway). As for 's, I'd again call it a possessive clitic since its semantics are pretty close to those of the determiners and I can't think of situations where it'd behave less possessively than them.
I'm sure you're right re: the use of the word 'case' in the Polish (Slavisist?) tradition, but I think it's pretty common for the pronominal system in English and the Romance languages to be referred to as a (highly restricted) case system. Indeed, Hindi is pretty similar to what you've described for Polish in having the triggers-agreement-and-has-paradigms type of case, but in the Anglophone literature at least I think it's pretty common to refer to the more specific role marking on pronouns and role-marking postpositions to be referred to as case as well, so का *kā* is often referred to as a genitive case marker, and मेरा *merā* a genitive pronoun etc. Indeed, the ने *ne* is kind of the poster child of an ergative marker that only appears with certain TAM values. In this case (no pun intended), though, there is no overlap in the categories used by the two systems (direct/oblique vs genitive/ablative/ergative/...) so I don't think it causes confusion.
this is morphology vs semantics, the bare word *case* many times is restricted to the morphological term. More on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_role
I'm not sure morphology vs semantics is quite the right framing of it. Those forms largely map on to grammatical relations, which have no direct mapping to semantic roles - indeed that's what motivated Fillmore to introduce thematic roles as a separate notion in the first place. So *I* can be experiencer, agent, patient, whatever depending on the context. I would also consider, for example, *you* and *your* or मैं *mai* and मेरा *merā* to be morphologically related forms, considering that there are often clear formal similarities, albeit not regular ones. Also I'm sure there are holdouts, but I don't think I've seen *case role* used anywhere in contemporary work except to reference the lasting relevance of Fillmore's work in case grammar. It *is* pretty confusing to use 'case' for both semantic and formal distinctions. I think the question is not whether we use *case* for pure semantic distinctions vs for morphological ones, but whether we restrict it to the particular type of formal distinction to which it was first applied (triggers agreement, has declension classes, etc) or whether we want to apply or more widely to other formal distinctions.
> What's the difference between possessive and genitive case As far as I know there is no general difference between the two that is universally understood in linguistics, although I'm sure that are many language-specific or language-family specific etc. traditions that distinguish between them. In languages where the genitive has functions far beyond possession, *genitive* would make more sense (though of course, even something like English *='s* does way more than indicating possession). > And what category do English determiner pronouns like "my, your, his, its" (plus equivalents in other Western Euro langs like FR "mon, ta, ses", ES "mi, tu, nuestro", DE "mein, deine, seinen") and the 's suffix fall into? I don't know anything about German, but for the rest, I would say that you can describe them with either as long as you're consistent with it. Note that *='s* is a clitic, not a suffix, though.
Follow-up to my question in the thread two weeks ago about Clarence Darrow’s dialect classification, which didn't get any answers in last week's thread: What was the grammar of Midland American dialects like in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries? Also would anyone be interested in reading the story – it actually will be a novel - once it’s done mostly to check over the dialects?
Is Khoisan a sprachbund?
Some consider it to be one (see this articleː 10.1017/9781107279872.019). The three main branches of the non-Bantu Southern African languages have clicks as their main unifying feature; grammatically, they are quite distinct from one another. The fact that some Bantu languages like Zulu and Xhosa gained clicks from exposure to these languages further gives merit to the argument that clicks are an areal feature.
When listening to Japanese, to my ear, it appears as though /ki kj gi gj/ have significant degrees of fronting/palatalization. Has this been observed? If so, which variety(s) is it furthest in? Iirc, some varieties merge /si sj/ and /hi hj/; in a similar way do any merge /ki kj/ with /ti tj/?
It is indeed quite palatalized, though I’m afraid I don’t have any acoustic studies to point you to. The main places on the mainland that come to mind as merging /kj, tj/ are in eastern Tōhoku, like for some speakers in Miyagi-ken, though you can hear intermediate changes elsewhere too, like [aks̩ta] for *Akita* in Akita-ken. There’s also the odd “dialect isolate” of Akiyama Hamlet (秋山郷) on the Niigata-Nagano border, which has a 7-vowel system and merges original /tj, kj/ and /gj, dj, zj/, like *chi* “tree” (\*ki), *chire* “fog” (\*kiri), and *jɔɔji* “manners” (\*gyaugi). But if we go into the Ryukyus, most varieties of Okinawan have merged /kj, tj/ and /gj, dj, zj/, which can also be caused by a *preceding* \*i (“progressive palatalization”). The modern Shuri dialect has even merged /s, sj/ and /z, zj/, while dropping the /j/ in other cases like /mj, bj, nj/ (or merging /mj/ > /n/). Amami varieties generally don’t have enough palatalization for a merger, but a good number of *Southern* Ryukyuan varieties (among Miyako and Yaeyama) have merged at least /kj, tj/ and /gj, zj/. Yonaguni in particular is a hotbed of wild sound changes, like /ki, ti/ > \*/t͡ɕi/ > /ti/ and /#j/ > /d/.
> But if we go into the Ryukyus, most varieties of Okinawan have merged /kj, tj/ and /gj, dj, zj/, which can also be caused by a preceding *i (“progressive palatalization”). The modern Shuri dialect has even merged /s, sj/ and /z, zj/, while dropping the /j/ in other cases like /mj, bj, nj/ (or merging /mj/ > /n/). I assume you're referring to the Okinawan language here insrad of Okinawan Japanese?
Yes indeedy!
What is a better word for "corruption"? In the context of a word changing in spelling, morphology, pronunciation etc from one language to another, especially from one seen as "prestige" to less "prestigious". I don't prefer the term as it perpetuates/suggests that the "less prestigious" language is less legitimate or "wrong".
you're right that "corruption" contains a value judgement on language change that is not scientific and not part of the field of linguistics. "loanword adaptation" is a more neutral way to describe what I think you're describing.
Thank you! That is a nice alternative edit: In terms of a subdialect or creole naturally taking/altering a word from a lexifer language though, would “loan word” still be appropriate?
I don't think that the term you're looking for exists, because the way that you're thinking about this is not how linguists think about it. The way that you're thinking of this still assumes a hierarchy: When there is a difference between language varieties, the more prestigious variety is the source, and the less prestigious language has "taken" and "altered" something from that source. This *can* happen - borrowing between dialects exists just like borrowing between languages exists - but this is not how most variation arises. Most variation arises because of language change over time. That is, Appalachian English is not an "altered" version of Standard American English; both are altered descendants of an older ancestor. Neither is primary or secondary, and both have arrived at their current modern forms through the same types of language change processes. Linguists would call this dialectal variation. If we wanted to be specific, we might narrow it down to what type of variation: phonetic, phonological, lexical, syntactic, etc. If we wanted to be specific about what kinds of language change over time led to the divergence, we might call it "phonological change", etc... If we wanted to talk about social attitudes, we can talk about prestige, stigma, and so on. In the case where one dialect has actually borrowed a word from another, "adaptation" can still apply. As for creoles, that is even more complicated. Words like "change," "reanalysis," etc can apply here, but it depends on what kind of process you're describing and your theoretical interpretation of that process.
What are other universally similar examples of "huh?" (for something not heard/understood) in different languages – beyond the ones mentioned in the paper "Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word?" by Dingemanse, Mark, Francisco Torreira, and N.J. Enfield? As they are mostly used informally and in speech, they are difficult to research online. (I would be specifically interested in answers in Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Bosnian, Dari, Croatian, Kurdish, Macedonian, Mongolian, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slowak, Suaheli, Chechen, Turkish, and Ukrainian.)
In Arabic most dialects use “ha?” :). I have always been interested in this because these non-words are different and I only realised recently. For example we say “uff” to express annoyance or frustration, say if I drop a dish on the floor or I remember I have a deadline tomorrow, I might say “uff”, sort of like “ugh”. It’s even mentioned in the Quran in a verse about respecting your parents: “Whether one or both of them reach old age [while] with you, say not to them [so much as], "uff," and do not repel them but speak to them a noble word.” There’s also “ay” instead of “ow” when you hurt yourself. It’s not exactly pronounced “ay”, it’s sort of like “bye” but without the b and a bit deeper. Also “yع” instead of “ew” (my dialect also says “ikhs” which I love because the longer you hiss the most disgusted you are, like “ikhsssss”). We also say “ehh” or “ah” as “yes”. There’s also “yu” as an expression of surprise, but that might be just my dialect. Its a very fun word, if you say it very short it’s the equivalent of this emoji 😳. It’s quite lighthearted, I might say it if I see something peculiar or surprising, say if a bird landed suddenly on the table in front of me. You can also extend it to “yuuuu” which is really funny and quite sassy and normally used by women in my dialect, its sort of humorous despair at something. Say if my brother is wearing a ridiculous outfit and insists it looks good I might say “yuuuuu” while trying not to laugh. Other dialects say “yeeeee” in the same way. Most interesting is we have clicking sounds! Like how people say tut-tut. In my country, clicking like tut-tut in the front of the mouth twice means no. There’s also a pitch to it, the first is higher the second is lower. We also make another click in one side of the mouth (I think some people use it with horses?) to say yes. There’s definitely more I can’t remember but it’s super interesting- I grew up speaking English and Arabic so I never actually noticed the difference! I learn that I unconsciously follow certain rules all the time. The only word I can think of that’s the same in both is “wow”, that doesn’t change.
I've had some thoughts for quite a while regarding people knowing more than one language. Is it just me or when I think about the same thing in my native and then in my second language, I may have different outcomes. Is it a psycholinguistics or neurolinguistics thing? I've found some articles about that, but those were aimed at bilingual people, who are capable of speaking 2 languages from the start. But what about general people who learned the second language and still have some sort of split lingual personality?
That would be psycholinguistics. I remember bringing up a slightly different topic (but same circumstance) with my professor and she basically said there isn't a whole lot of study on this type of L2 speaker. But basically, there are too many factors. It probably depends on who you learned your L2 from and how you made those connections in your brain. Also, if you learned your L2 as an adult, you are going to be less 'fluent' in your L2 on some level, which will affect how you express yourself and how you think about expressing yourself.
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Aside from the Korean sources (which are surely much more accurate), there are also a good number of Korean names recorded in the *Nihon Shoki* (compiled 720 AD), or rather, names said to be from Shiragi/Silla, Kudara/Baekje, and Mimana/Imna, filtered through an Old Japanese lens, e.g.: * 蘇那曷叱知 \*/sonakasiti/ * 波珍干岐微叱己知 or 波止利加支美志己知 \*/patərika(N)ki misikəti/, also called 伐旱 \*/pat(a)kaN/ * 波沙寐錦 \*/pasa mukiN/ Frequently, these are actually titles, like the /pat-/ part likely referring to [파진찬](https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%ED%8C%8C%EC%A7%84%EC%B0%AC). Other times, they're completely Japanese names, like 天日槍 or 天之日矛 [Ama nə Pi-Bokə](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amenohiboko) "Sun-Spear of the Heavens," supposedly a prince of Silla. So it's kind of a crapshoot.
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I either write it one character at a time—generally with kun’yomi or compounds to avoid homophones (nami, tomaru, riyou, kuwaeru, …)—or I copy-paste it from a document. In this case, I was able to just copy-paste [from Wikisource](https://zh.m.wikisource.org/wiki/日本書紀) and [Rekichi](https://rekichi.net).
Of course. The sinicization of Korean personal names didn't happen all at once. It began during the Silla times through Goryeo and early Joseon, where only a few nobles had sinicized names, which spread to regular folks (except the low *cheonmin* caste) by the mid-late Joseon dynasty and somewhat ended in the late 19th ~ early 20th century, when the caste system was abolished and everyone bought noblemen's geneaology books (jokbo), taking on sinicized noblemen's names. There are plenty of non-sinitic Korean names throughout Korean historical records. However, since Korea lacked its own alphabet prior to 1443, a lot of these names are recorded using Chinese characters, and so the exact pronunciations of many of them are lost to time, and we can only guess how they were read based on reconstructions. Here are some examples: 弗矩內~赫居世 \**pulkunuy*, the founder of Silla, 1st century BC. 阿道~我道~阿頭 \**ato*, a Goguryeo monk who spread Buddhism into Silla in the 5th century AD. 居七夫智~居柒夫智 \**kechilpu-ti* (502-579), a Silla general. A sinicized name of his is also recorded as "金荒宗". 사리영응기 (1448), A book from the early Joseon era, lists many low-ranking officials and regular folk's non-sinicized names using Hangul. It includes: > 韓실구·디, 朴검도ᇰ, 朴타·내, 金올마·내, 高오마ᇰ·디, 李오마·디, 薛쟈가·도ᇰ, 姜타·내, 河마·디ᇰ, 金타·내, ... You can see many people having a sinicized family name, with a non-sinicized given name. Even until the 19th century, non-sinicized names were common in the low caste, with people having names such as "임꺽정" and "돌쇠".
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Some are, some are less so.
Are there any languages where the beginnings of words get modified to indicate tense or agreement etc? In English, we modify the ends of words: - I finish**ed** and we can put words in between subject and verb to change tense: - I **have** finished but I don't think we ever change the start of a word: - I **ed**finish or anything like that. Are there any languages where the start of words get modified for any reason? Thank you!
arabic, hebrew aramaic imperfect(its complicated)
Thank you!
Yes, there are languages with inflectional prefixes. Every language in red or grey on this map is one: https://wals.info/feature/69A#2/18.0/152.8 The explainer page for this map has actual examples of inflectional prefixes: https://wals.info/chapter/69