Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Vijay]

I eventually came to realize that most of the Persian-language songs I found from countries where no form of Persian is widely spoken (or official) are basically just covers of Iranian songs. However, India and Pakistan do have some original songs that are in (Classical) Persian. Some of these countries' most famous poets like Iqbal, Ghalib, and Amir Khusro wrote poetry in Persian as well as in Urdu (and perhaps also some other languages).

[Linguoboy]

I eventually came to realize that most of the Persian-language songs I found from countries where no form of Persian is widely spoken (or official) are basically just covers of Iranian songs. However, India and Pakistan do have some original songs that are in (Classical) Persian. Some of these countries' most famous poets like Iqbal, Ghalib, and Amir Khusro wrote poetry in Persian as well as in Urdu (and perhaps also some other languages).

I had a a friend in college whose area of study was basically Persian poetry by South Asian authors. He tried to teach me a couplet or two but they never really stuck (maybe because I wasn't familiar the melodies he would sing them to).

[Kuchigakatai]

I'm happy to distinguish inflectional and derivational morphology, though I'd also endorse that page's statement that "in many respects inflection and derivation form a continuum, and therefore there is no sharp functional distinction between the two."

However, this doesn't seem to make sense of your earlier comments, e.g.

If such a language allows every and any semantically noun-y word (people, places, things) to be both a syntactic noun "X" and a syntactic verb meaning "be an X, be the X", why should the syntactic verb be considered a derived separate word at all, instead of an inflection of sorts? Rather, you could talk about a Noun-y Lexical Class that when used in a particular sentence is either a (Morpho)Syntactic Noun or a (Morpho)Syntactic Verb.

If you're making a hard distinction between inflection and derivation, where only the latter changes syntactic category, I can't make sense of the idea that this "syntactic verb" is formed from a noun by inflection.

There's no earlier comment of mine where I say that though (that only derivation can change syntactic category).

I don't have any problem with analyzing processes in terms of productivity. Well, I'd throw in the caveat that when we make statements like "every noun can become a verb meaning 'be an X'", we're probably thinking in prototypes, and the generalization is probably far from true. "Be a fork", fine, but is there also "be a destruction", "be a harmony", "be a greenness"?

I don't see the gain in calling some of these "lexical words". Mac's idea of polysemy seems most helpful here. Lexicographers would just list "poke through" as one of the senses of saht. But lexicographers can also be pedantic and state things that don't need stating, so they might also list "be a fork" as a sense. (In English, it bugs me that dictionaries often include a sense for a noun X of "something that looks like an X". But maybe they would retort that linguists see universal rules where speakers don't necessarily do so...)

So, I'm happy to agree that some category-changing processes are highly productive. The participle example is good, but I don't think it shows that "be a fork" is an "inflection" rather than a "derivation". Rather, it shows that there's a fuzzy intersection between these concepts. Participles themselves are fuzzy, behaving sometimes like verbs, sometimes like adjectives, sometimes like nouns.

Hmm, okay. I imagine that in such a language, "be destruction" (as in, "these events were in the end the destruction of Carthage"), "be harmony" and "be greenness" could possibly be allowed, yes. Also, Mac's polysemy wouldn't always work for languages with morphological endings, although it would for Salmoneus' original examples involving isolating languages.

I don't contest that inflection and derivation are ultimately a continuum at any rate.

I think there are two differences between adjectives and verbs in Mandarin:

Do these criteria distinguish adjectives from a verb (assuming it's really a verb) like xǐhuān 喜歡 like?

Ahh... goddammit.



Those stative verbs are really similar to adjectives, yes. They actually make the two differences I listed irrelevant, since they're just as allergic to aspect markers as adjectives, and they have a similar behaviour regarding the negators 不 bu4 and 沒有 mei2you3. The only difference at that point would be that these stative verbs can take direct objects, but that seems like an irrelevant thing to mention at this point (plus, intransitive verbs are real).

I suppose the differences could still be salvaged if we consider 喜歡 xi3huan1 and its friends to be "adjectives" of some sort though, as weird as it'd be to consider words meaning "to like" (while able to take direct objects even), "to be", etc. as "adjectives" (or "adjectival verbs" at any rate).

(By the way, I made an edit to difference #2 in my previous post, since I failed to include the more common usage of 沒有 mei2you3 with adjectives...)

[Estav]

Those stative verbs are really similar to adjectives, yes. They actually make the two differences I listed irrelevant, since they're just as allergic to aspect markers as adjectives, and they have a similar behaviour regarding the negators 不 bu4 and 沒有 mei2you3. The only difference at that point would be that these stative verbs can take direct objects, but that seems like an irrelevant thing to mention at this point (plus, intransitive verbs are real).

I suppose the differences could still be salvaged if we consider 喜歡 xi3huan1 and its friends to be "adjectives" of some sort though, as weird as it'd be to consider words meaning "to like" (while able to take direct objects even), "to be", etc. as "adjectives" (or "adjectival verbs" at any rate).

I think that it would not be unprecedented for a word meaning "to like" to be an adjective, as Japanese 好き suki (a word commonly used to express the concept of "like") belongs to the category called "na-adjectives" (which aren't even the verby adjectives/adjectival verbs; those are i-adjectives, while na-adjectives are more nouny). It seems that in most cases, 好き doesn't take a direct object, but instead is used in a double-subject construction. (A transitive use is apparently possible for some speakers, but it sounds like it's fairly marginal.) I don't know Japanese at all, though, so my description here is just based on what I've read about it.

[Xwtek]

When pronouncing voiceless stop, I always try to aspirate it. However, when speaking quickly I tend to drop the aspiration, especially in unstressed syllable. How to correct that?

[Travis B.]

When pronouncing voiceless stop, I always try to aspirate it. However, when speaking quickly I tend to drop the aspiration, especially in unstressed syllable. How to correct that?

If you are speaking about English pronunciation, normally in English only initial fortis plosives and fortis plosives at the starts of stressed syllables are aspirated. So it is actually correct to not aspirate English fortis plosives before unstressed syllables and syllable-finally. (Note that some people pronounce final fortis plosives as ejectives.)

[Raphael]

How do you call it in English when you try to take a step, and your foot somehow comes down wrong, and, as a result, something in your foot hurts for a while? "To twist one's ankle"?

[TomHChappell]

How do you call it in English when you try to take a step, and your foot somehow comes down wrong, and, as a result, something in your foot hurts for a while? "To twist one's ankle"?

Colloquially, my ‘lect and every ‘lect I remember ever hearing, says “I twisted my ankle”.
Formally/technically, I have read “the patient pronated their foot”.

[Raphael]

How do you call it in English when you try to take a step, and your foot somehow comes down wrong, and, as a result, something in your foot hurts for a while? "To twist one's ankle"?

Colloquially, my ‘lect and every ‘lect I remember ever hearing, says “I twisted my ankle”.
Formally/technically, I have read “the patient pronated their foot”.

Ah, thank you!

[Vijay]

How do you say it in German?

[Raphael]

How do you say it in German?

"Ich habe mich vertreten."

Not sure about the proper linguistic analysis of that. The prefix "ver-" often, including in this case, means doing something in a wrong way, and "treten" means "to step" or "to kick".

[Vijay]

Except that apparently, vertreten by itself means 'to represent' or 'to substitute'.

[Raphael]

Except that apparently, vertreten by itself means 'to represent' or 'to substitute'.

Yes, that, too.

[Linguoboy]

Except that apparently, vertreten by itself means 'to represent' or 'to substitute'.

So two things here:

It's not unusual for German derived verbs to have at least two clusters of meanings, one more concrete and one more metaphorical. For instance, übersetzen has the literal meaning of to put something over something else. This usage is rather limited, though there is a slightly extended concrete usage of "to take from one shore to the other; to ferry over" that's a bit more frequent. However, there's also a family of metaphorical meanings related to a calque of Latin traduco "translate". Since über is potentially separable as a prefix, these meaning clusters are also distinguished syntactically: Wir haben zu der Insel übergesetzt vs Wir haben "zu der Insel" übersetzt.

But ver- is always inseparable, so the same possibility doesn't exist. Furthermore, the prefix ver- has a complex origin, continuing at least three or four different Germanic prefixes. So it's entirely possible that the metaphorical usage of vertreten to mean "represent" has a distinct etymological origin from the concrete usage of "step falsely". Sure, there's a possibility of confusion ("Sie hat sich selbst vor Gericht vertreten") but, as is so often the case, context makes the meaning clear (just as it does with, for instance, non-metaphorical usages of "translate" in English).

[Vijay]

Danke!

Can vertreten mean 'to step falsely' (or whatever) without the sich, too?

[Linguoboy]

Can vertreten mean 'to step falsely' (or whatever) without the sich, too?

No, there's a different verb for that: fehltreten.

[Raphael]

The drink that Americans usually call "Scotch": Does anyone in Scotland call it that?

[mèþru]

Nope, it's just whisky in Scotland. Do Germans call any of their own food "the German"?

[Vijay]

Does anyone call it "the German"?

[Linguoboy]

I mean, do people in Frankfurt call "Frankfurters" something different?

(Though, to be fair, people in Berlin do call Berliners "Pfannkuchen".)