Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[alice]

Pronouncing final /i/ as [e] is primarily a singing thing in NAE, not something in normal everyday speech.

I can remember noticing this away back in 1984, in a song by - wait for it - Howard Jones, who was from High Wycombe.

[Salmoneus]

Speaking of regional accents, I recently finished binge-watching TNG, and I have a curiosity about a certain feature of Patrick Stewart's accent. He has a very prominent [æ] vowel in places where even as an American I'd expect [ɑ]. Anyone know if this is part of his native accent (Wikipedia says he's from Yorkshire) or if this is a "hyper-Americanism" he picked up while living in the States?

The main cases I can think of where this happens are in foreign borrowings, particularly from Italian and Spanish. In BE these are mapped to /æ/ whereas in AE they map to /ɑ/. A prominent example is in Silence of the Lambs, where Anthony Hopkins says "with f[æ]va beans and a nice Chi[æ]nti". It's the only giveaway in that movie that his native variety is not American.

(As an aside, now I really want to hear someone say "Chianti" in a broad Chicago accent.)

I was going to say:
In general the rule now is that old, everyday borrowings - like 'chianti' or 'pasta' have /{/, but newer or rarer borrowings, or ones that haven't been recognised as borrowings, have /A/. So personally I'd have /kij{nti/ but /fAv@/. I'd think of /f{v@/ or /l{v@/ as old-person pronunciations, or pronunciations by people who don't actually know those words.

But now I'm thinking:
Is that true, or is it more about syllable structure? /A/ is probably only possible in borrowings in open syllables? So lahva but maggma. Don't right now have time to think of counter-examples...

[anteallach]

Speaking of regional accents, I recently finished binge-watching TNG, and I have a curiosity about a certain feature of Patrick Stewart's accent. He has a very prominent [æ] vowel in places where even as an American I'd expect [ɑ]. Anyone know if this is part of his native accent (Wikipedia says he's from Yorkshire) or if this is a "hyper-Americanism" he picked up while living in the States?

The main cases I can think of where this happens are in foreign borrowings, particularly from Italian and Spanish. In BE these are mapped to /æ/ whereas in AE they map to /ɑ/. A prominent example is in Silence of the Lambs, where Anthony Hopkins says "with f[æ]va beans and a nice Chi[æ]nti". It's the only giveaway in that movie that his native variety is not American.

(As an aside, now I really want to hear someone say "Chianti" in a broad Chicago accent.)

I was going to say:
In general the rule now is that old, everyday borrowings - like 'chianti' or 'pasta' have /{/, but newer or rarer borrowings, or ones that haven't been recognised as borrowings, have /A/. So personally I'd have /kij{nti/ but /fAv@/. I'd think of /f{v@/ or /l{v@/ as old-person pronunciations, or pronunciations by people who don't actually know those words.

But now I'm thinking:
Is that true, or is it more about syllable structure? /A/ is probably only possible in borrowings in open syllables? So lahva but maggma. Don't right now have time to think of counter-examples...

I think it's to do with vowel length: TRAP is usually used where we expect a short vowel, and PALM where we expect a long one, which has a lot to do with closed vs. open syllables but there's a bit more to it than that. (I say "expect" because we don't always get this right.) It's a similar pattern to DRESS vs. FACE for loanwords spelt with e or LOT vs. GOAT for o.

[Pabappa]

do any languages have a distinction between "i *played* (an instrument)" vs "i *played* (recorded media)"?

like, "i played Carmina Burana" can mean either you have it on CD/mp3/etc or that youre on the piano or whatever. spanish & french seem to also merge these two into one ... english has "playback" for the specific case of recorded media, but its hardly ever used.

[Kuchigakatai]

Spanish distinguishes them: tocar un instrumento vs. poner una canción.

[mèþru]

I think French has a word that can refer explicitly to the second without the first but no word for the other way around

[Vijay]

In Malayalam, you "knock" a drum, "blow" a flute, "read" all other musical instruments I can think of, and I believe "put" recorded media. (This last part is like Spanish).

[akam chinjir]

English has "put on" for the second case but not the first.

Isn't it a bit odd to have a word that covers both cases the way "play" does? (Maybe we get it because recorded media are relatively new.)

[akam chinjir]

Hmm, thinking about it more, and maybe it's not so odd after all. "Play" is ergative, in the sense that you can say both "music is playing" and "so-and-so is playing music" (with the subject of the intransitive having the same semantic role as the object of the transitive). It doesn't seem odd to say that music is playing when it's recorded music, and if you're going to say that, it makes sense to ask who is playing the music; with recorded music, the person who put it on is maybe the best candidate.

[Vijay]

It could still be cross-linguistically unusual, though.

[akam chinjir]

Yeah.

[ˈdʲeɰʌ̜ ʔɾul̪]

In Polish, you play ([za]grać) instruments, but you "drop" (puścić/puszczać) any recorded media.

[hwhatting]

German is like English here - spielen "play" works for both, while auflegen "put on" only works for music from media (and strictly only for records or CDs and, with a stretch, tapes - I wouldn't use it if I play music from the radio). There is also a difference of aspect (like with English "put on") - auflegen refers only to the act of starting the music, not to continuous playing.

[Pabappa]

OK thank you. And offsite someone told me abouyt Turkish, which uses the same verb but has a causative infix, i think -dir-, for the indirect form, as to play something on a device is to make the device play.

[MacAnDàil]

I quite like the sound change i>iç_# in French. I noticed it about a decade ago, but didn't have any confirmation, so I thought it was maybe me just mishearing things. I don't particularly find the [eɪ] pronunciation agreeable.

[malloc]

The wikipedia article on vowel length says that ancient Greek had the word ἀάατος meaning "inviolable". Why doesn't the privative ἀ- prefix have the <ν> that normally occurs before vowels? In other words, why wasn't the word ἀνάατος instead?

[Estav]

The wikipedia article on vowel length says that ancient Greek had the word ἀάατος meaning "inviolable". Why doesn't the privative ἀ- prefix have the <ν> that normally occurs before vowels? In other words, why wasn't the word ἀνάατος instead?

The privative alpha may take the form a- rather than an- before a vowel in words where historical [w] or [h] was lost. I don't know if that's the case here (Wiktionary says ἀάω is "From earlier *ἀϝάω", indicating a medial but not initial digamma, but it doesn't elaborate on its etymology).

Homer’s Iliad: The Basel Commentary, Book 14, by Martha Krieter-Spiro (the linked Google Books scan seems to be a translation of a 2015 German commentary), says "the meaning, etymology, word formation and prosody [of ἀάατος] are disputed" and that the expected form ἀνάατος (or with contraction, ἄνατος) is attested in later sources.

There also seems to be a 2010 article about this word, "Homeric ἀάατος: Etymology and Poetics", by Alexander Nikolaev, that is available online from academia.edu; I have only skimmed it so far. Nikolaev rejects all previous etymologies of ἀάατος and proposes that it is from "*n̥-seh₂-u̯n̥to ‘not having sunlight’, ‘not lit by the sun’" (p. 5) (and so, a different word from ἀνάατος/ἄνατος, the "inviolable" word, which Nikolaev discusses on p. 2).

[Frislander]

In Malayalam, you "knock" a drum, "blow" a flute, "read" all other musical instruments I can think of, and I believe "put" recorded media. (This last part is like Spanish).

On a related note traditionally at the University of Cambridge you "read" your subject rather than "study" it (this usage is declining though as Cambridge assimilates to the majority of British universities linguistically).

[Linguoboy]

On a related note traditionally at the University of Cambridge you "read" your subject rather than "study" it (this usage is declining though as Cambridge assimilates to the majority of British universities linguistically).

I always liked that usage; I'll be sorry to see it go.

One of the most common errors I hear from Anglophones learning German is studieren to mean "study" in the sense of "revise; swot". For all I know it may be shifting now under influence from English, but traditionally Germans lernen (or colloquially pauken, lit. "drum").

[Raphael]

On a related note traditionally at the University of Cambridge you "read" your subject rather than "study" it (this usage is declining though as Cambridge assimilates to the majority of British universities linguistically).

I always liked that usage; I'll be sorry to see it go.

One of the most common errors I hear from Anglophones learning German is studieren to mean "study" in the sense of "revise; swot". For all I know it may be shifting now under influence from English, but traditionally Germans lernen (or colloquially pauken, lit. "drum").

This makes me wonder: How would you translate studieren into English?