Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Tropylium]

By the way, whats up with yo₂? Do we believe that there really was a labialized version of /yo/? That one has been tough for me to accept.

This would also be trivial if we went Altaistic and interpreted /i₁ i₂ e₁ e₂ o₁ o₂/ as qualitatively distinct /i y e ø ə o/.

[Nortaneous]

There's no indication that Rurutu has a uvular/velar pronunciation for /r/ in the sources I can find, fwiw.

Which sources? The paper on Ra'ivavaean is the only thing I could find on 'Austral'.

[Pabappa]

By the way, whats up with yo₂? Do we believe that there really was a labialized version of /yo/? That one has been tough for me to accept.

This would also be trivial if we went Altaistic and interpreted /i₁ i₂ e₁ e₂ o₁ o₂/ as qualitatively distinct /i y e ø ə o/.

Thanks, I was actually just thinking about this again yesterday. The other posters convinced me that /jʷo/ is phonetically possible even in a language with no other [jʷ], but Im still not convinced that it would originate from the sound changes that are postulated to have created the [ʷo]. [ʷo] comes mostly or entirely from hypothetical proto-Japanese /ua uə/, so I would have expected a disyllabic reflex here such as /yuwo/.

I wonder if it could be shown that all supposed [jʷo] originates from a later stage of the language and in fact comes from simple [jə] that chganged due to vowel harmony.

[mae]

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[anteallach]

Not a clue. I know very little about Afrikaans: all I know about this particular topic is that when a word ends in the diminutive suffix ⟨-tjie⟩ (or possibly ⟨-tje⟩), it’s pronounced with /k/.

I thought -tje was Dutch and -tjie was Afrikaans. But then proper names are so very often exceptions in any case.

As I said, I don’t know Afrikaans. I don’t know if ⟨-tje⟩ even is a diminutive, or if it’s just a set of letters at the end of a word which happens to resemble the diminutive.

It appears that <i>Nortje</i>, the name I originally asked about, is a re-spelling of a French name <i>Nortier</i>, so the <i>tje</i> isn't a diminutive in that case.

[anteallach]

Awesome. I've always loved Polynesian languages, especially those with no velar sounds. And a language with a small consonant inventory but yet one distinctive sound, which for me in this case is /v/, makes it even better.

That language has a sound a little more distinctive than /v/:

The phoneme g is a voiced "non-aspirated" uvular affricate. Schooling (1981:49) says, "The term 'non-aspirated' is used to indicate that even though there is some frication, there is no breathiness."

It's from Proto-Polynesian *l and *r. (Cf. Rennellese *l > ŋg.)

So:
/p t k ʔ/
/ɢʁ/
/f v h/
/m n ŋ/
/a e o i u/

But that may not exist in the Rurutu dialect.

Are there any other languages with a /ɢʁ/ phoneme?

[Nortaneous]

Are there any other languages with a /ɢʁ/ phoneme?

claimed by PHOIBLE for Farsi and Khalkhal; also appears as an allophone of /gʟ/ before /a o u/ in Ekari according to this (PDF)

[Linguoboy]

So one thing I am finding very intuitive about Hawai'ian is the dual. While I'm not 100% consistent in distinguishing "you", "you two", and "y'all", I do it more often than not and I always take note of it. (I never use "y'all" when "you two" applies but I sometimes replace either with "you".) Transferring this to first person--where I often replace "we"/"us" with more precise phrases like "me and him" or "you and I"--isn't difficult. I'm having a little more trouble doing it consistently with third person however.

[Kuchigakatai]

A Latin quartet:

tribūlis 'fellow tribesman' (nominative singular)
tribūlīs 'fellow tribesmen' (accusative plural)
trībulīs 'threshing sledges' (dative/ablative plural of trībulum)
tribulīs 'caltrops (a spiny plant)' (dative/ablative plural of tribulus)

Mind your weapon of choice:

pila 'ball (used in games)' (nominative singular)
pīla 'heavy javelins' (nominative/accusative plural of pīlum)

(Pīla can also be a feminine nominative singular meaning 'mortar' or 'pillar, column', and the meaning 'heavy javelin' itself is a metaphor of the other meaning of neuter-gender pīlum: 'mortar pestle'.)

[Xwtek]

/ɢʁ/ is not really my favorite sound, though I admit it's interesting both because it stands out so much from the rest and because it shows somewhat of a parallel to the development of uvular R from /r/-like sounds in Europe.

There is also similar development in Lampung and Anak Dalam. Similar development must've happened in Philippine languages because of the R>g shift there.

[Xwtek]

is a i u > 0 \ C_(#) realistic? I know that Japanese do drop /i/ and /u/ on similar environments

Can anyone check the sentence what's wrong with the sentence?

[bradrn]

is a i u > 0 \ C_(#) realistic? I know that Japanese do drop /i/ and /u/ on similar environments

Can anyone check the sentence what's wrong with the sentence?

is a i u > 0 \ C_(#) realistic?
Perfectly fine, except it needs an initial capital letter (but that’s more correct style than anything else).

I know that Japanese do drop /i/ and /u/ on similar environments
This should be I know that Japanese drops /i/ and /u/ in similar environments. You have an extra auxiliary verb do where one isn’t needed, and for a third-person subject in the present perfective, you need the agreement suffix -s. If you really do want the auxiliary verb, you can still include it, but you have to move the agreement suffix onto the auxiliary instead: I know that Japanese does drop /i/ and /u/. This has the effect of emphasising the sentence — for a real-world example, see my previous sentence, four words in. As for the preposition, in English we generally say that something is in an environment rather than being on an environment.
(Also, it needs a full stop at the end, but again, that’s more a stylistic issue.)

Can anyone check the sentence what's wrong with the sentence?
This sentence is actually ungrammatical as well: you don’t need to say the sentence twice. What’s wrong with the sentence is a headless relative clause, which of course means that it doesn’t need a head: this sentence should just be Can anyone check what’s wrong with the sentence?.

One last note: I just saw your original post in the Sound Change Quickie thread, and didn’t even notice the errors until I saw this post now and started looking for them! So I wouldn’t worry too much about ungrammaticality — I can’t recall a single instance where I couldn’t understand you because of your grammar.

[Kuchigakatai]

One last note: I just saw your original post in the Sound Change Quickie thread, and didn’t even notice the errors until I saw this post now and started looking for them! So I wouldn’t worry too much about ungrammaticality — I can’t recall a single instance where I couldn’t understand you because of your grammar.

I wholly agree.


By the way, is Wikipedia right when it says that त्रिपिटक Tripiṭaka is pronounced [trɪˈpɪʈɐkɐ] in Sanskrit? Shouldn't it be [ˈtrɪpɪʈɐkɐ] because all syllables are light, cf. उपनिषद् Upaniṣad [ˈʊpɐnɪʂɐd]?

[zompist]

By the way, is Wikipedia right when it says that त्रिपिटक Tripiṭaka is pronounced [trɪˈpɪʈɐkɐ] in Sanskrit? Shouldn't it be [ˈtrɪpɪʈɐkɐ] because all syllables are light, cf. उपनिषद् Upaniṣad [ˈʊpɐnɪʂɐd]?

I'd think the same, but my grammar (Gonda) mentions that words retain their own stress accent in compounds. So if the word is conceptualized as tri-piṭaka, you'd accent the पि (with I assume a secondary accent on त्रि).

[mae]

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[Xwtek]

Some very normal (regular!) sound changes exhibited by the Malayo-Polynesian language Merap:'

Can you list the sound changes?

[bradrn]

Some very normal (regular!) sound changes exhibited by the Malayo-Polynesian language Merap:

*tulad 'animal' > klũə̃
*murip 'alive' > mpruyc
*nəpujuk 'jump' > ləʔʄəwəʔ
*punti 'banana' > toyʔ
*sulun 'fingernail' > l̥əwŋʷ
*bəsuR 'satiated' > məhəwh

That reminds me of Sakao:

I had a whole rant typed up over Sakao, but I accidentally refreshed the page, so here's an abbreviated version (which is probably for the better, honestly).

…

- And lastly, here are some cognates, to demonstrate how ridiculous the phonetic evolution is:
"four" - Sakao: /jɛð/ - Tolomako: /βati/
"to blow" - Sakao: /hy/ - Tolomako: /suβi/

Zompist wrote an overview of what happened on this page.

[mae]

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[Pabappa]

Apparently Malagasy has some pretty wild sound changes too, but are masked by the orthography. I thought it was like a typical MP language, even a Polynesian one, but according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malagasy_ ... Vocabulary it has suppressed vowels all over the place and has also merged vowel sequences, even across a historic /h/, into new single vowels. (unless graphic "oa", "ao", were single vowels all along).

The Malagasy wiktionary is one of the best overperformers relative to its language's number of speakers, so words like https://mg.wiktionary.org/wiki/kisoka can be looked up and IPA pronunciation given. it seems that wikitonary may be using a more conservative transcription of the suppressed vowels than Wikipedai does, but the basic system of suprpessing/devoicing vowels is still there ... e.g. sokaiko /sukaikʷ/

[Xwtek]

The Malagasy wiktionary is one of the best overperformers relative to its language's number of speakers

On the other hand, Indonesian wiktionary is bad despite the number of speakers. First, there is no IPA given, and unfortunately Indonesia does have some of the words pronounced irregularly (although uncommon) like bank /baŋ/, (my dialect) cas /cɛs/, (my dialect) pasca /paska/, and bus /bɪs/. Second, the definition of the word just a copy and paste from KBBI.

Also, I noticed that I used the modal particle evidentially. In sentence:

"The snakes should have coordinated with the city before doing orgy. Now, everyone is panicked"

I hesitated to use:

"The snakes should have been coordinating with the city before doing orgy. Now, everyone is panicked"

instead because the latter implies that the snake is evidently coordinating with the city unless anything weird happened instead of implying that it's better to do the action, but it's not done instead. I'm not sure about this, so which sentence do you think it's the better one?