Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Nortaneous]

Guy on another website claims he can understand a significant portion of Korean due to speaking Japanese, which I find... somewhat hard to believe, but maybe not impossible?

doesn't sound like the same post I saw, but if it is, I think he means Korean and Japanese share some basic vocabulary and a large Chinese loan stratum, which seems reasonable (tho the basic vocabulary is usually attributed to an early sprachbund that also includes Ainu)

[dɮ the phoneme]

Guy on another website claims he can understand a significant portion of Korean due to speaking Japanese, which I find... somewhat hard to believe, but maybe not impossible?

doesn't sound like the same post I saw, but if it is, I think he means Korean and Japanese share some basic vocabulary and a large Chinese loan stratum, which seems reasonable (tho the basic vocabulary is usually attributed to an early sprachbund that also includes Ainu)

I'm pretty sure it is the same post; he made the dubious claims about the relationship of Japanese/Korean in private messages, not in the post. But yeah, if there is any genuine mutual ineligibility this is certainly were it would come from.

[Linguoboy]

It only just occurred to me that "barbell" is just "bar" plus "bell" (as in "dumbbell").

[Kuchigakatai]

On the scale of linguistic crackpottery as set out by our very own WeepingElf, I’d rate this at ~1.5 nl (Nylands),

Do you happen to know the post where this scale was proposed?

[bradrn]

On the scale of linguistic crackpottery as set out by our very own WeepingElf, I’d rate this at ~1.5 nl (Nylands),

Do you happen to know the post where this scale was proposed?

Oh, not proposed as such, but you can find it in e.g. the Quote Thread:

If you have an Academia account, see here. (That seems to be an amateur work, but the other sources I googled were similar.)

Who has hacked your account?! I always had experienced you as healthily skeptical (i.e. skeptical but not pedantic) about such things, but this is definitely the work of a crackpot. He makes his first mistake on page 2, where he deduces the name "Philistines" from a "Proto-Celtic" root *pell- - but Proto-Celtic had no *p! Further down in the text, he derives the Phoenician abjad from the "Danubian script" which he claims to have been a logography for PIE - in fact, this "script" is not only undeciphered, but most relevant scholars doubt that these markings were a script at all. And then, in Chapter 2, he draws the Olmecs into it! That alone is worth at least 500 millinylands!

It’s a memorable post, and I thought it was relevant here.

[WeepingElf]

In fact, I have no idea who came up with this, but I am pretty sure that I wasn't the one. But I have a good memory and sometimes remember things everybody else has forgotten

[fusijui]

In fact, I have no idea who came up with this, but I am pretty sure that I wasn't the one. But I have a good memory and sometimes remember things everybody else has forgotten

I feel like the Nyland Scale was in use before this, but whether you invented it or not, WeepingElf, you did the most to popularize this valuable tool, and I appreciate it!

[Nortaneous]

Guy on another website claims he can understand a significant portion of Korean due to speaking Japanese, which I find... somewhat hard to believe, but maybe not impossible?

doesn't sound like the same post I saw, but if it is, I think he means Korean and Japanese share some basic vocabulary and a large Chinese loan stratum, which seems reasonable (tho the basic vocabulary is usually attributed to an early sprachbund that also includes Ainu)

I'm pretty sure it is the same post; he made the dubious claims about the relationship of Japanese/Korean in private messages, not in the post. But yeah, if there is any genuine mutual ineligibility this is certainly were it would come from.

There was some dissertation on Proto-Korean-Japonic going around recently which I couldn't get through much of but which people seemed to take seriously. I wouldn't write the possibility off entirely, but Korean is sufficiently phonologically eroded that lexical cognates would be difficult - maybe there's grammatical stuff, though. (I noticed correspondences in verbal inflection between Latin, Finnish, and Hungarian before I knew what "Indo-European" was.)

[Richard W]

I'm having problems understanding the linguistics phrase "learned borrowing". My prototypical example was someone looking a word up in a foreign language dictionary, and then using it in his native language to seem more impressive. The word would then propagate amongst the learned. What is members understanding of the term?

Also, if one uses a foreign language for a certain activity, and then use words from that language when talking about it in one's own language, is the adoption of such words by others as a result a process of normal language contact?

[Ares Land]

I'm having problems understanding the linguistics phrase "learned borrowing". My prototypical example was someone looking a word up in a foreign language dictionary, and then using it in his native language to seem more impressive. The word would then propagate amongst the learned. What is members understanding of the term?

Also, if one uses a foreign language for a certain activity, and then use words from that language when talking about it in one's own language, is the adoption of such words by others as a result a process of normal language contact?

I think, prototypically, learned borrowings are a case of picking up technical/specialized vocabulary from a foreign language, then generalizing. For instance: angst and ennui borrowed from French and German litterature or philosophy. (*)

That said, picking up words in a Latin dictionary to sound more impressive did happen. This happened a lot in French; I think it was Rabelais who mocked the hipsters of his day that walked jouxtant la Séquane instead of le long de la Seine.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Are there any texts reconstructed in earlier forms of Proto Slavic than Late Proto Slavic of 800-900 AD?

[Zju]

Long shot, but there was a paper about semantics that may or may not have been posted on the old forum years ago. It included a description of a study, in which speakers of four languages (English, Spanish, Chinese and I don't recall the fourth) were asked to name various containers like jugs or jars. The containers were a few dozen and labeled with numbers. The authors of the study then plotted them as points on a 2D chart and encircled all the points that bear the same name in a language. None of the resulting regions matched between any two languages, not even closely, and in fact the whole chart was one mess of a Venn diagram.

Does anyone happen to know the name of the study or paper?

[bradrn]

I’m sure I came across that paper a month or two ago, but I can’t find it now. Could the fourth language have been Korean by any chance?

EDIT: You might be misremembering Bowerman and Choi’s (2001) article in Language acquisition and conceptual development (ed. Levinson). (This is the paper I came across earlier.) No containers, Spanish, or Chinese, but it does have lovely Venn (well, Euler) diagrams of containment verbs in English and Korean, and was mentioned by zompist a while ago.

[Moose-tache]

I have a question for everyone: where is the line between metonymy and linguistic sophistry?

I recently ran across this sentence in a paper about metonymy: "The sign said that fishing was prohibited." I had to read it several times before I understood why this sentence was in this paper. Presumably, the authors believe "the sign said" to be a metonym of "the person who wrote the sign said." This made me wonder, if the literal definition of the word "say" in English includes situations like this, is this still metonymy, or is it just words doing their usual thing? Here's an exercise. Which is these sentences do you think are metonymic, and which ones are simply the verb "say" in its literal meaning?

1) He said go to Hell.
2) The cow says moo.
3) That sequence of phonemes says "goat."
4) The letter A says "ah."
5) The billboard said "free money."
6) The Bible says a lot about sin.
7) Her scream said it all.
8) Van Gogh says everything with shape and color.

To me, 1 through 6 feel like literal uses, and 7 and 8 are simply metaphors (i.e. Van Gogh isn't "saying" colors, but I still don't read "Van Gogh" as shorthand for "the works of Van Gogh).

I understand that once you get into things like "Bach gives me chills," and "The White House has been silent," metonymy is clearly happening. But is it really as wide-spread as linguists would have us believe? Or do they simply insist that words' literal meanings and usage are more restrictive than they really are?

[Moose-tache]

Are there any texts reconstructed in earlier forms of Proto Slavic than Late Proto Slavic of 800-900 AD?

I haven't come across any such thing in my Balto-Slavic research. Part of this is probably the verbs. There is no reconstructable verbal system for PBS*, so any reconstruction of pre-Slavic is basically conlanging. Your best bet is arranging the sound changes from PBS to PS in chronological order (or as close to it as you can), and then picking a point along this continuum.

* I mean, the person endings are reconstructable, but what tense/aspect distinctions were made and how were they distinguished is a question no one has been able to answer in relation to anything before the earliest attested languages, since so little commonality survives from the two branches. There are things in the modern languages that go back to PIE, but they are often absent from the other branch, and when they do survive they are greatly different in meaning and usage. For example, the s-future of Baltic and the s-imperfect of Slavic both have predecessors in PIE, but good luck figuring out what a language would look like that had both simultaneously.

[Qwynegold]

But if my impression is right, the pattern requires a sonorant at the beginning, and then a geminate consonant that is one of /p t k s/,

This is correct.

I don't really know anything of use. But I think the reason why C₁C₂ː is so common in loan words is because we insert an epenthetic vowel after word-final consonant, and then geminate the originally word-final consonant. Japanese does the same thing, except without gemination after a cluster, cf. hip → hippu. My theory is that the reason for doing this is to keep the originally final consonant in coda, making the word sounding more similar.

I don't know if there are native words of the kind your looking for, but here are some words that I don't know the etymology of:
hirttää (hirsi-VZ)
lanttu
punkki
rankka
tunkkainen
turkki
vanttera
vartta (varsi-PTV.SG)

And some that are native shortenings of other words:
kanssa (apparently actually from kansassa)
mankka (from magnetofoni)
purkka (from purukumi)

[zompist]

Here's an exercise. Which is these sentences do you think are metonymic, and which ones are simply the verb "say" in its literal meaning?

1) He said go to Hell.
2) The cow says moo.
3) That sequence of phonemes says "goat."
4) The letter A says "ah."
5) The billboard said "free money."
6) The Bible says a lot about sin.
7) Her scream said it all.
8) Van Gogh says everything with shape and color.

FWIW, I'd say 1-2 are literal, 7-8 are metaphorical, and the rest are a loosening of normal semantic restrictions, i.e. that only people can "say" something. That is, I don't think 5 "really" refers to "the makers of the billboard", it refers to the text of the billboard. We can think of a sentence or a text meaning something, and express that as "saying something", without having a speaker or writer in mind.

I don't quite get the sense of outrage... if your feeling is "but these are just natural uses of the word!"... yes, of course, but extending words by metaphor, metonymy, or loosening semantic restrictions are all natural and common. Doesn't mean we can't point it out.

Do your toes also curl in disdain at the idea of a dictionary? Here's what mine has under "say":

1. To utter aloud; pronounce. 2. To express in words. 3. To state; declare. [...] 7. To indicate; show: The clock says that it's 5:00 p.m. [...]

You could maintain, I suppose, that the dictionary is just wrong, and that the base meaning of "say" includes written expression-- i.e. sense 1 and 2 are not distinguished. Only, well, I think that's wrong. If I asked you, "Did he say that, or just write it somewhere?" you'd understand what I meant, which means you do distinguish 1 and 2.

I think linguists are interested in how much of language is metaphorical. In the Conlanger's Lexipedia I took a very dry historical passage, and showed that almost every word in it was a metaphor, usually a long-dead one. I think that's contrary to people's expectations, and so worth pointing out.

[KathTheDragon]

Here's an exercise. Which is these sentences do you think are metonymic, and which ones are simply the verb "say" in its literal meaning?

1) He said go to Hell.
2) The cow says moo.
3) That sequence of phonemes says "goat."
4) The letter A says "ah."
5) The billboard said "free money."
6) The Bible says a lot about sin.
7) Her scream said it all.
8) Van Gogh says everything with shape and color.

FWIW, I'd say 1-2 are literal, 7-8 are metaphorical

I feel like even 2 could be seen as a metaphor, as cows do not literally say the word "moo", they produce a sound that we represent by the onomatopoeia "moo".

[Vijay]

I agree.

Basque is at least a respectable target for insane proposals. A well-known language from a well-established family… not so much.

Santali is not nearly as well-known as Basque is. I don't think even my parents know what Santali is, and my dad can probably count to 100 or maybe even 1000 in Basque. Claiming somewhat obscure Indian languages as the origin of all languages seems pretty common in India.

(The Tamil term is a calque off the English, and both the words for 'face' and 'book' are Sanskrit loanwords)

It only just occurred to me that "barbell" is just "bar" plus "bell" (as in "dumbbell").

I never really thought of the first part of that compound.

Does anyone happen to know the name of the study or paper?

There's a thread for precisely this question.

[Kuchigakatai]

From back in September last year:

I counted the syllables shown in Wikipedia's Pinyin table article: 417 possible syllables in total.* This is pretty interesting because if you multiply that times 4 or 5 tones, you get 1668 or 2065 syllables. I've sometimes come across a claim that Mandarin dictionaries list words using about ~1300 syllable+tone combinations, which would mean dictionaries include entries using about 78% or 62% of all possible syllable+tone combinations (depending on whether the "~1300" count doesn't include neutral tones, or does).

I remember in my younger days counting up all the entries, doing the same calculation, and getting a similar ratio. Some gaps are on their way to being filled (e.g. the rhyme /ei/ with the dental series due to innovations/dialect borrowings like 嘚 and 忒) but many will probably never be.

What's the ratio for English, do you suppose? I notice a lot of gaps when I'm looking for examples but I've never tried recording them systematically.

Just saw a claim in a paper that English has an inventory of roughly 8000 syllables. Source: Pellegrino, François, et al., "A Cross-Language Perspective on Speech Information Rate" (2011), in: Language, page 549. No idea what the number of possible syllables is to get a ratio, but at least I've found the other number. The various tables and graphs in the article are very interesting actually.

Here's the other syllable inventory sizes given (all lower than English, which has 7931):

French: 5646
German: 4207
Italian: 2719
Japanese: 416
Mandarin: 1191
Spanish: 1593