Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Boşkoventi]

shop till people

It took me a minute to figure out what you were saying here, i.e. "shop till people" = "cashiers" (people who work tills in shops). "Till" in that sense is rare this side of the Pond ... at first I thought you were saying "... shop until people ...". :-$

Again with your main point, "whether you wouldn't like any cash back" vs. "whether you would like any cashback". Again, nothing to do with my first impression -- "if you wouldn't like" vs. "if you would like" ??? ... oh, no, you're talking about the difference between "cash back" (phrase) vs. "cashback" (compound noun).

* You may be right, though I'm not sure it's defeating/defusing the marketing executives' efforts. Even though we know it's bullshit/bollocks, somehow "cashback" sounds like a different (better!) sort of thing, as though it were more than just giving you some "cash back".

Garden pathing so hard ...

[Linguoboy]

Use of the present perfect construction for durative events extending up through the present (e.g. "I've been living here since 1988/for 30 years") seems to be a peculiarly English innovation. Or can anyone think of examples from other languages?

[zompist]

Mandarin:

Wǒ zài nàli zhù le liǎng ge yuè le.
I at there live pfv two MW month perf
I’ve lived there for two months.

From Li & Thompson p. 285. There are some nuances suggesting that the path from the standard meaning of perfect is a little different, but both languages start from there at least.

[akam chinjir]

WALS (https://wals.info/chapter/68) implies that's a fairly normal use of a perfect, actually. I have some vague memory of reading or learning somehow that the way English can combine the perfect with the continuous is distinctive, though. (But for my money not as distinctive as Mandarin's two le 了!)

[Vijay]

We use the present perfect in this context in Malayalam, too.

[kodé]

WALS (https://wals.info/chapter/68) implies that's a fairly normal use of a perfect, actually. I have some vague memory of reading or learning somehow that the way English can combine the perfect with the continuous is distinctive, though. (But for my money not as distinctive as Mandarin's two le 了!)

Yes, this is the so-called "Universal" or U-Perfect, and while it's not as common as an experiential or resultative perfect, it extends beyond English. It's been analyzed as a combination of the "perfect time span", basically a device for extending reference time pastward, with imperfective viewpoint. This is in fact how the U-perfect looks in Bulgarian: perfect + imperfective. I wrote a paper on this once; if anyone's interested, I'll put up the link, but I'm not sure if it would be a tad gauche to do so unbidden.

[Moose-tache]

Use of the present perfect construction for durative events extending up through the present (e.g. "I've been living here since 1988/for 30 years") seems to be a peculiarly English innovation. Or can anyone think of examples from other languages?

The present perfect would be "I have lived here." "I have been living here" is the present perfect progressive. I don't know of any living languages that have this distinction morphologized, so I couldn't say how normal it is, but certainly the plain present perfect is normal in this case.

[Linguoboy]

Has The Economist decided to revisit its longstanding policy on diacritical usage? In a recent article on the EU summit, I spotted both "Sipilä" and "Orbán".

[Zju]

Is there a language that has less phonemes than letters in alphabet?

[mèþru]

Finnish, for instance

[Pabappa]

Spanish might qualify since it has h, k, q, w, x, and v, all of which are redundant. This beats the counterweight of ch,ll,rr (phonemes without letters) by 6 to 3. 6 to 2 if you go with dialects lacking the ll sound. 6 to 0 if you use the old system where the digraphs were counted as separate letters anyway. On the other hand, diphthongs can be counted as independent phonemes, some might include /w/ as separate from /u/, and add borrowed sounds like /S/ and /tl/.

Edit: i forgot x!

[Frislander]

Cheyenne also: the /ʃ/ vs. /x/ and also the devoiced vowels are both allophonic, but they mark them in the orthography.

[Linguoboy]

Is there a language that has less phonemes than letters in alphabet?

Thai (and other Southeast Asian scripts). These generally retain letters representing distinctions in Indo-Aryan (e.g. retroflexion) which were not borrowed along with the vocabulary.

Standard Thai, for instance, has 44 consonants, 15 vowels, and 32 diacritics. Contrast that to Lao, which has a very similar phonology but 27 consonants, 33 vowels, and four tone diacritics.

[Nortaneous]

Many Brahmic scripts - Tocharian B has 17-20 consonants, 6 vowels (+ 4 diphthongs), and no length contrast, but orthographically it has 13 vowel signs (long vowels are used to mark stress on /a i u/), 44 consonant letters (including an incomplete series of characters for Cɨ sequences), the anusvara (for /n/), visarga, jihvamuliya, upadhmaniya, and so on.

[Vijay]

Malayalam. All those sounds borrowed from Sanskrit! Some of them are phonemic but by no means all.

[Zju]

In dialects where θ → f, how is fifth realised?

[mèþru]

I know people who ideolectically can't pronounce dental fricatives and people with foreign accents generally say fif

[dewrad]

In dialects where θ → f, how is fifth realised?

[fɪf]

[bbbosborne]

or maybe [fɪfs]?

[dewrad]

or maybe [fɪfs]?

That would be "fifths". I live in an area with th-fronting, and I’ve never heard anything but [fɪf].