Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Travis B.]

Grown-ups have a lot of funny ideas about how they should talk to babies and what sounds they can (or do) produce or understand more easily. These ideas are often wrong. In some cultures, adults have a special speech style just for talking to babies ("widdle cuddly-wuddly"), and that speech style is called "baby talk" in some studies (as well as nonlinguistic sources).

I am definitely aware of how actual language acquisition commonly does not match adults' ideas of how language acquisition operates, and that adults often have their own registers for speaking to babies (and IIRC I too have seen it called "baby talk").

[Pabappa]

I think its usually called "motherese". /mex/ would be more likely as a product of adult speech, so yes, it couldve been an adults adaptation of a baby's /mama/, but I privately believe people are just too aggressive with PIE etymologies and that its likely it was just /ma/ all along.

[MacAnDàil]

Is it possible that baby talk doesn't mean how babies talk but rather how adults talk to babies?

Naturally how babies learn language should be universal, so if the same phones are treated differently by babies learning two different languages implies that they are actually being treated differently by adults and older children when they speak to said babies in said languages.

I disagree because babies can hear from about 3 months in the womb, and can recognise the most common voices (generally the parents) before birth.

[Space60]

Grown-ups have a lot of funny ideas about how they should talk to babies and what sounds they can (or do) produce or understand more easily. These ideas are often wrong. In some cultures, adults have a special speech style just for talking to babies ("widdle cuddly-wuddly"), and that speech style is called "baby talk" in some studies (as well as nonlinguistic sources).

I am definitely aware of how actual language acquisition commonly does not match adults' ideas of how language acquisition operates, and that adults often have their own registers for speaking to babies (and IIRC I too have seen it called "baby talk").

Various pronunciations originate in baby talk like "bobba" for "bottle", "wawa" for "water" and "basketty" for "spaghetti". It is a bad idea I would say for parents to use those pronunciations when speaking to their babies as it makes it take longer for them learn the correct pronunciation.

[Travis B.]

I disagree because babies can hear from about 3 months in the womb, and can recognise the most common voices (generally the parents) before birth.

That does not mean it is not universal - it just means the process of language acquisition begins prenatally.

[akam chinjir]

It is a bad idea I would say for parents to use those pronunciations when speaking to their babies as it makes it take longer for them learn the correct pronunciation.

I was under the impression that this sort of idea had been studied and found not to be true.

[dɮ the phoneme]

In spoken Japanese I've sometimes heard something like [ḵ] or maybe even [q] for /k/. It's at best sporadic, but it still seems like an odd unconditional shift.

[MacAnDàil]

I disagree because babies can hear from about 3 months in the womb, and can recognise the most common voices (generally the parents) before birth.

That does not mean it is not universal - it just means the process of language acquisition begins prenatally.

Sure, the process of language acquisition begins before birth, but it does not necessarily involve speaking to the unborn child. It can also involve simply speaking in the presence of the unborn child. I would therefore say that babytalk is not necessarily relevant to crosscultural variation in babbling. On the other hand, I am as of yet unaware of statistics on the frequency of speaking to unborn children.

[Estav]

In spoken Japanese I've sometimes heard something like [ḵ] or maybe even [q] for /k/. It's at best sporadic, but it still seems like an odd unconditional shift.

Is it unconditional? Descriptions of Japanese that I've read mention extensive conditioned allophony between palatalized and non-palatalized versions of consonants; e.g. the Wikipedia article on Japanese phonology includes the transcription [ɡẽŋʲkʲi]. I would expect backing or uvularization of /k/ to be less common or absent in the environments that condition palatalization (i.e. I'd expect it to be most common in syllables like /ka/ or /ko/, and least common in syllables like /ki/ or /kja/).

[Nortaneous]

heard it too, mostly before /a/, think it's a speech style thing

[Vijay]

How the hell did anyone in Beijing understand Mao Zedong speaking?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJcol3SJ6ww

[Linguoboy]

How the hell did anyone in Beijing understand Mao Zedong speaking?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJcol3SJ6ww

Weren't most of the Party leadership Southerners in those days?

[Vijay]

How the hell did anyone in Beijing understand Mao Zedong speaking?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJcol3SJ6ww

Weren't most of the Party leadership Southerners in those days?

Maybe. Is that how they spoke Mandarin, too?

[dɮ the phoneme]

In spoken Japanese I've sometimes heard something like [ḵ] or maybe even [q] for /k/. It's at best sporadic, but it still seems like an odd unconditional shift.

Is it unconditional? Descriptions of Japanese that I've read mention extensive conditioned allophony between palatalized and non-palatalized versions of consonants; e.g. the Wikipedia article on Japanese phonology includes the transcription [ɡẽŋʲkʲi]. I would expect backing or uvularization of /k/ to be less common or absent in the environments that condition palatalization (i.e. I'd expect it to be most common in syllables like /ka/ or /ko/, and least common in syllables like /ki/ or /kja/).

Yeah, now that I think about it I don't know that I've ever heard it before /i/. Then again, the palatalized consonants might as well be analyzed as distinct phonemes IMO, with neutralization before /i/, so maybe /k/ per se just doesn't exist there and it's a moot point.

It's also something I associate mainly with male speakers, but I'm not sure if that actually reflects usage.

[Pabappa]

All that said, I'm curious which "stereotypically British" names you're thinking of. American and English names seem pretty similar to me, with the major difference being the absence or relative rarity in England of some American names (typically immigrant names and those given to slaves).

i thought of another one .... placenames. it seems that common stereotype is to associate ____-ington names with upper class Britishmen , the type who wear monocles and furrow their eyebrows when trying to figure out the purpose of some basic object theyve never encountered. maybe this is because theyre descended from people who owned land in that town, or even the whole town?

Similarly, there's probably not too many von ____ names in the USA because, as far as I know, that marks nobility, and the rich nobles in Germany werent the ones fleeing into America to work on farms.

[Salmoneus]

All that said, I'm curious which "stereotypically British" names you're thinking of. American and English names seem pretty similar to me, with the major difference being the absence or relative rarity in England of some American names (typically immigrant names and those given to slaves).

i thought of another one .... placenames. it seems that common stereotype is to associate ____-ington names with upper class Britishmen , the type who wear monocles and furrow their eyebrows when trying to figure out the purpose of some basic object theyve never encountered. maybe this is because theyre descended from people who owned land in that town, or even the whole town?

Similarly, there's probably not too many von ____ names in the USA because, as far as I know, that marks nobility, and the rich nobles in Germany werent the ones fleeing into America to work on farms.

In reality, however, placename surnames in Britain are more likely to be associated with the lower classes. The aristocracy did not emerge naturally from the towns, but was imposed by the norman invasion, and the lands of the aristocracy were intentionally made discontinuous, so that they couldn't too strongly associated with any one place. Aristocratic names are therefore more likely to be Norman (many of which are indeed originally placenames, but not of English places) - Neville, Sackville, Percy, Despenser, Devize, Beaufort, Pierrepoint, Fitzroy, etc. There have of course always been local names that have made it into their ranks - the Cliffords were a powerful family for centuries - but it's not the norm.

I can't think of many -ington names in Britain. "Carrington" is one; "Remington" is another. They're both probably at least as common in the US as the UK - the page on Remingtons gives almost all American people (and companies founded by the people). Barrington, I suppose. These names are not particularly working-class, because a) placenames usually outrank profession names, and b) the -ington form suggests relatively prosperous areas in the south. But they're also not particularly aristocratic either.

[Pabappa]

OK thanks...maybe its just the place names themselves like Kensington & Wellington, which we also have in the USA but not as large cities. And the surname Washington seems to be mostly American now, even though it comes from a place in Britain.

[Nortaneous]

Similarly, there's probably not too many von ____ names in the USA because, as far as I know, that marks nobility, and the rich nobles in Germany werent the ones fleeing into America to work on farms.

"Von" is a particle - it's detachable, and, America being America, they would've done so. (Gustav Holst's father, a harp teacher in England, adopted the "von" as a marketing gimmick.)

When Germany and Austria abolished their systems of nobility, Austria abolished the nobiliary particles, but Germany reinterpreted "von" as part of the name (like the Dutch "van", which wasn't a marker of nobility and was often kept in America), which is why Wernher von Braun kept it.

[Travis B.]

Similarly, there's probably not too many von ____ names in the USA because, as far as I know, that marks nobility, and the rich nobles in Germany werent the ones fleeing into America to work on farms.

In Wisconsin we have a disproportionately large population of German descent, and German names are extremely common here, yet von-names are quite rare here. Contrast this with Dutch van-names, which do not mark nobility, which are seemingly equally or more common even though there are far more Wisconsinites of German descent than there are of Dutch descent.

[Kuchigakatai]

Many French speakers have trouble remembering the correct gender of the three words pronounced /ɛʁ/ [ɛːʁ]: l'air 'air' (masculine), l'ère 'era' (feminine) and l'aire 'area' (feminine).