Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Space60]

I'm beginning to think that everyone has their own pronunciation of "ugh".

I would have thought it was [ʊx], and some dictionaries agree, but MW seriously thinks it's [əg] and others have [ʌg]. I don't think I'd recognize Zaarin's [ɐʔ] as "ugh"... maybe "uh" or "eh".

As for /iu/... /ju/ is very common and I think easily turns into [iw]. Definitely in "ew!" and "pew-pew!", but also in a drawn-out "cute" or "beautiful".

"Ugh" rhyming with "bug" is a spelling pronunciation and I commonly hear it used when people are reading the word, but not when "ugh" is used in typical conversation.

[Whimemsz]

Linguistic quackery on the Language Log!

Yeah they've published some other quackery in the past year or so too (that I noticed, I'm not a regular reader anymore). It's a shame...

[Zaarin]

Linguistic quackery on the Language Log!

This post is a gem. So Lithuanian's word for death comes from the tomb of Beowulf, the Greek word for reed mats comes from the burial practices of Xinjiang, and the Indo-Europeans sat on their alphabet for thousands of years just to keep the Semites from getting it!

[Whimemsz]

I think most or all of the quackery posts have been "sponsored" in some way by Victor Mair (this is the one in particular I was thinking of). I don't know what the hell happened. Maybe this latest one will lead to more editorial oversight.

EDIT: And reading through the comments of that old post, I note that there's ONE GUY who actually takes the time to go into a bunch of detail on why the post makes no sense and all the unfounded assumptions, but does so perfectly politely, and Mair reacts by being the biggest passive-aggressive drama queen possible, effusively praising other posters for their "constructive" comments while completely ignoring the critical guy, again and again. Jesus. Screw Victor Mair and screw Language Log for permitting this BS.

[mae]

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[Vijay]

I thought he wrote posts like that himself not so long ago.

[zompist]

Wow, those are both awful. The alphabet one is just sad, but the other one seems like someone who should know better. Taking a modern reading of a dozen characters and trawling through dictionaries to find matches, and not even coming up with a grammatical sentence... well, let's just say that their next project will be deciphering the Voynich Manuscript.

[Neon Fox]

Linguistic quackery on the Language Log!

This post is a gem. So Lithuanian's word for death comes from the tomb of Beowulf, the Greek word for reed mats comes from the burial practices of Xinjiang, and the Indo-Europeans sat on their alphabet for thousands of years just to keep the Semites from getting it!

As of a minute ago, this comment had appeared at the top:
[Update by Mark Liberman: Knowledgeable commenters have serious objections to the content of this guest post (e.g. John McWhorter, Sally Thomason), and others cite apparently racist content and publication location in other writings by John Day (e.g. Suzanne Kemmerer, Jamie). It was a serious mistake to have given this work a platform on this blog, which tries to present reputable linguistic perspectives in a public-facing way. I'm not going to delete it, since the comments are worth preserving, but it's important to put this warning up front. We'll try to avoid such mistakes in the future.]

[missals]

I honestly wish they'd remove Mair's posting rights. Even if it would kill the blog, it being that he's practically the only one who posts anymore. (Though they could invite a new crop of posters.) The first outright crackpot he platformed on the blog - the one involving that laughable "translation" of a Jié text - was bad enough, and his behavior in the comments was atrocious. One person had the gumption to politely but systematically break down all of the ways the post was completely inane and intellectually bankrupt, and Mair just got into a huff defending it and just insulted and then ignored the critic.

Mair seems to have lost sight of the fact that the kinds of papers he gives a platform to in The Sino-Platonic Papers are not acceptable in mainstream academia, and that the point is to keep them separate. Or perhaps he's simply lost the ability to discern what kind of ideas belong in mainstream academia and what kind belong in a "highly venturesome" ghetto like The Sino-Platonic Papers. Or maybe he's forgotten that the central conceit of that publication - hosting mountains of chaff in the hopes of finding a few brilliant grains that wouldn't have been made it into a mainstream journal - inevitably involved there being much, much more chaff than grain.

[mae]

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[missals]

I haven't heard of the Sino-Platonic Papers before. I guess it's not a very reputable journal?

It's a project Mair has run since the 1980s - it's a journal, but not really a traditional one, that focuses on "the intercultural relations of China with other peoples". It encourages submissions by "younger, not yet well established, scholars and independent authors"; its submissions page also notes:

[C]hallenging and creative studies on a wide variety of philological subjects will be entertained. This series is not the place for safe, sober, and stodgy presentations. Sino-Platonic Papers prefers lively work that, while taking reasonable risks to advance the field, capitalizes on brilliant new insights into the development of civilization.

Basically, it's a place to spitball ideas, including ones that aren't fully-fleshed-out or might be considered borderline crackpot in a normal academic context. Which I think is fine, it's a clearly demarcated space where the rules are laxer, in the hopes of gaining truly radical and valuable insights.

Just based on the titles, there do seem to be some pretty normal papers published there: e.g. "A Study on the Origin of Chinese Lost-wax Casting from the Perspectives of Art, Technology, and Social Agency" - or "Roman Views of the Chinese in Antiquity". But a lot of it, like I said, is some kind of crackpot stuff, like, uhhh, "Patterns of Sound Correspondence between Taiwanese and Germanic/Latin/Greek/Romance Lexicons, Part I". And that's to be expected, if your aim is to offer a supra-academic generosity and openness of mind.

But perhaps Mair has let things get out hand, since, as the two Language Log guest posts he sponsored indicate, he apparently now thinks these kinds of things are appropriate to publish on a serious, public-facing academic blog, as if he can no longer tell the difference between ambitious but grounded speculation and legitimate crankdom. The two guest posts he sponsored were some well and truly deranged, stupid gibberish, well beyond even most of the stuff in The Sino-Platonic Papers.

[mae]

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[Zaarin]

Linguistic quackery on the Language Log!

This post is a gem. So Lithuanian's word for death comes from the tomb of Beowulf, the Greek word for reed mats comes from the burial practices of Xinjiang, and the Indo-Europeans sat on their alphabet for thousands of years just to keep the Semites from getting it!

As of a minute ago, this comment had appeared at the top:
[Update by Mark Liberman: Knowledgeable commenters have serious objections to the content of this guest post (e.g. John McWhorter, Sally Thomason), and others cite apparently racist content and publication location in other writings by John Day (e.g. Suzanne Kemmerer, Jamie). It was a serious mistake to have given this work a platform on this blog, which tries to present reputable linguistic perspectives in a public-facing way. I'm not going to delete it, since the comments are worth preserving, but it's important to put this warning up front. We'll try to avoid such mistakes in the future.]

It was there when I read it. Slapping a disclaimer on it doesn't make the paper's conclusions less hilarious.

[Space60]

Does anyone call the place where you go to urinate and defecate a washroom? I knew a guy from the Midwestern United States who did. I say bathroom or restroom, never washroom.

[Vijay]

It's apparently the most common term in Canada.

[Kuchigakatai]

It is certainly the only term used in Vancouver.

If you come here and call it a restroom, you might as well be wearing the American flag as a cape too.

[Vijay]

What about a bathroom? Or toilet or water closet or something?

[Space60]

What about a bathroom? Or toilet or water closet or something?

For me, the "toilet" is the device inside the room. If someone in the United States said they were going to the toilet it will sound odd to people like they are giving too much information.

[Xwtek]

I wonder why does my previous mandarin speaker says "b dibaca p dan p dibaca b" (b is pronounced as p and p is pronounced as b). Even though they're actually /p/ and /pʰ/, respectively. Is it possible that /pʰ/ is registered as lenis one instead of /p/. Or is it just a byproduct that javanese pronounce /b/ as slack voiced and /p/ as stiff voiced?

[Qwynegold]

I'm looking for info on phonotactics of various languages, but can't find anything detailed. Specifically I want to find out if the following consonant sequences are allowed (medially): mn, mt, mk, mtʃ*, ms, mh, mr, nh, ŋm, ŋn, ŋp, ŋt, ŋtʃ*, ŋf, ŋs, ŋr.
*Or some other coronal affricate.

The languages I'm interested in are these:
Akan
Ancient Greek
Bambara
Bengali
Burmese
English*
Filipino/Tagalog
French
Fula
German
Hausa
Hindustani
Hungarian
Italian
Javanese
Kazakh
Korean
Latin
Malay/Indonesian
Marathi
Modern Standard Arabic
Oromo
Persian
Portuguese
Punjabi
Russian
Sanskrit
Spanish
Swahili
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Yoruba
*English is complicated, because even though I can come up with words that contain some of these sequences (like hamster or angry), I don't know how common it is for speakers to insert an epenthetic consonant in the middle, like [hæmpstɚ], [æŋɡrɪ].

If anyone knows resources where I can look up any of these things, or knows any of these languages yourself, please tell me.