Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[bradrn]

I was surprised to learn just now that Koyukon, featured in the children's show Molly of Denali, uses ee oo for /i: u:/. I had thought that the kids' show was simply using a nonstandard spelling to make it easier for kids to pick up, but it is in fact the proper orthography.

That’s a pretty horrible orthography! You should post that in If natlangs were conlangs.

[bradrn]

This is the Linguistic Miscellany Thread, so here’s a couple of interesting linguistic miscellanies I found recently:

• Recently I was looking in the Grammar Pile to figure out some details about the grammar of Salishan languages, when I found an old Salishan grammar which looks like it’s been written in Latin, of all things! Some of the sample sentences appear to be in French and English as well, giving a pretty eclectic mix of languages. Here’s a sample (from page 86 in the PDF/page 76 in the document):
  

  3. Infinitivum, quo Selici carent, etiam hoc tempore suppletur: kozuìs kikskóli, dixit mihi ut operer, il m’a dit de travailler.
  
  Frequentius tamen infinitivum dependens a verbo præcedenti suppletur per substantivum abstructum æquivalens: hòists lu szkalkoèlts, cessavit verba sua, id est loqui; gamènchs smemszút, amat ludere, il aime à jourer.
  
  Idem decendum cum infinitivum est absolutum, seu sine personâ cui referatur et sine numero: hinc si dicas malum est mentire, vertes, teie lu sòikoist, id est malum et mendacium.
  
  Infinitivum vorò præteriti temporis resolvitur per perfectum indicativi: tntels koguìzltgu (ad litt. putavi mihi dedisti), hoc est te dedisse mihi.
  
  In verbo negativo præponitur præsenti particula negativa tam et præterito ta (vide supra), verum interdum adhibetur etial ta pro tam in præsenti, sed tunc significatio diversa est, etenim cum ta dicat tempus præteritum et verbum adhibeatur in [præsenti, sequitur sensum phrasis habere aliquid mixtun præteriti et præsentis. Igitur sensus expressionis negativæ, tam kuièsʼazgam, erit angl. I am not looking at you; scilicet, hic et nunc sine ulla relatione a parte anti.
  
  Sed ta kuièsʼazgam, erit gallice, je ne t’ai pa regardé, ni te regarde, id est, je ne te regarde jamais.
  
  Verba impersonalia etiam intransitiva usurpantur in sensu relativo ad quem, supposita 3a personâ indefenitâ tamquam agente:
  

  kaèttipeìlils (ad lett.) pluit nobis ille, la pluie nous a pris; tamquam iesttipeilim, pluo alicui, (vide Verba Relativ. supra), quod ex iesttipèism, pluo, ex impersonali èsttipèisi, pluit.

• An interesting article about metaphors in programming, inspired by Metaphors We Live By. Includes PROCESSES ARE PEOPLE, DATA ARE OBJECTS, various things ARE CONTAINERS, SOFTWARE SYSTEMS HAVE ORIENTATIONS. Also interesting is the associated Hacker News discussion, in which various people (presumably non-linguists) completely fail to understand how these are metaphors.

[Richard W]

Recently I was looking in the Grammar Pile to figure out some details about the grammar of Salishan languages, when I found an old Salishan grammar which looks like it’s been written in Latin, of all things!

Go back far enough, and that is the language one should expect. The oldest (not very - 1854) widely available Thai dictionary, by Pallegoix, is nominally in Latin, but also gives the meanings in French and English,

An interesting article about metaphors in programming, inspired by Metaphors We Live By. Includes PROCESSES ARE PEOPLE, DATA ARE OBJECTS, various things ARE CONTAINERS, SOFTWARE SYSTEMS HAVE ORIENTATIONS. Also interesting is the associated Hacker News discussion, in which various people (presumably non-linguists) completely fail to understand how these are metaphors.

There is quite a widespread view that dead metaphors are no longer metaphors (just as former MPs are no longer MPs).

[bradrn]

Recently I was looking in the Grammar Pile to figure out some details about the grammar of Salishan languages, when I found an old Salishan grammar which looks like it’s been written in Latin, of all things!

Go back far enough, and that is the language one should expect. The oldest (not very - 1854) widely available Thai dictionary, by Pallegoix, is nominally in Latin, but also gives the meanings in French and English,

True, but I had thought that you would have to go back longer than 1861 (when the grammar was written) to expect Latin as a ‘default’ language.

An interesting article about metaphors in programming, inspired by Metaphors We Live By. Includes PROCESSES ARE PEOPLE, DATA ARE OBJECTS, various things ARE CONTAINERS, SOFTWARE SYSTEMS HAVE ORIENTATIONS. Also interesting is the associated Hacker News discussion, in which various people (presumably non-linguists) completely fail to understand how these are metaphors.

There is quite a widespread view that dead metaphors are no longer metaphors (just as former MPs are no longer MPs).

But the whole point of that article was that those metaphors are very much alive and used today!

[Pabappa]

Surprised they didnt mention abort along with the birth and parent metaphors, but i suppose the word "abort" is not restricted just to termination of pregnancy. also, "kill" is a common command, as is "killall".

[bradrn]

Surprised they didnt mention abort along with the birth and parent metaphors, but i suppose the word "abort" is not restricted just to termination of pregnancy. also, "kill" is a common command, as is "killall".

I didn’t notice either of those, but now that you mention it I am quite surprised that they missed those. Possibly they forgot to search for that word — they mentioned that they just used grep to find some examples, rather than looking in detail through each man page. Certainly I can easily find some examples:

… Function invocations that exceed this nesting level will cause the current command to abort.
… if it does not exactly match the public key provided to this option, curl will abort the connection before sending or receiving any data.

[Richard W]

But the whole point of that article was that those metaphors are very much alive and used today!

A dead metaphor is one that is no longer felt as such, not one that is no longer used.

[bradrn]

But the whole point of that article was that those metaphors are very much alive and used today!

A dead metaphor is one that is no longer felt as such, not one that is no longer used.

Oh, I didn’t know that! I had thought that a dead metaphor is one which is no longer used, except perhaps for a few fossilised expressions. (Although, now that I think about it, that’s pretty much the same thing as what you said…)

[Kuchigakatai]

Recently I was looking in the Grammar Pile to figure out some details about the grammar of Salishan languages, when I found an old Salishan grammar which looks like it’s been written in Latin, of all things! Some of the sample sentences appear to be in French and English as well, giving a pretty eclectic mix of languages. Here’s a sample (from page 86 in the PDF/page 76 in the document):

There's a bunch of languages around the world whose oldest grammatical works are in Latin, as Richard mentioned. I believe Old Tupi (Old Nheengatú) is another one.

I can also tell you transcribed the passage yourself from an image, because your Latin has typos. (etiam > etial, mixtum > mixtun, indefinitâ > indefenitâ) (What does the text have in "a parte anti"?)

It's interesting that in the fourth paragraph there he remarks that a verb that is in the past in relation to another verb (his example being a complement clause: "I thought you had given it to me") is conjugated in a past tense, as if he was writing for people who assumed Latin was the natural way for things to be (well, of course, but...). This is a bit interesting because most modern Western European languages use a finite past tense too ("I thought you had given", "pensé que me lo habías dado"...), and it's Latin that's different with its use of a past infinitive ("I thought you to-have-given me").

Also interesting is the associated Hacker News discussion, in which various people (presumably non-linguists) completely fail to understand how these are metaphors.

I think a bunch of people there are insisting in a slightly different definition than the one in linguistics without being aware of it. For them, it seems metaphors only count as metaphors if they're interesting for the interpretation of unusual wording, presumably because that's the definition they acquired in high school. gen220 gives the most telling example:

To me, prose is a metaphor if it deliberately plays with the double-meaning, or uses it as an analogy to explain an example.
"I killed the process" isn't a metaphor to me.
"I killed the process, but its life wasn't too exciting anyway, it was just a spin-lock" would be a metaphor.

The key word here is "play". In the second sentence, the metaphor is extended to "its life wasn't too exciting".

I once made a fairly exhaustive list of metaphors of water and fire/heat in computing, but sadly it was a Facebook post and I can't recover it... It listed things like:
- "Cascading" Style Sheets
- the "Waterfall" process
- the control "flow" of a program
- the "(re-)hydration" of objects with data coming from a database
- "streaming" audio or video
- "burning" CDs
- languages or programs said to be "blazing" fast (a more general and common metaphor, I know)
- "smoke" testing
- letting a virtual machine or interpreter (like PyPy) "warm up" as it runs a long program (meaning loading its RAM process and cache appropriately)
- seeing that a hard drive "got fried"

I find it very cute that those short 3-second messages on Android are called "toasts", since the metaphor is that the temporal messages are like toasts coming out of an oven.

[Richard W]

It's interesting that in the fourth paragraph there he remarks that a verb that is in the past in relation to another verb (his example being a complement clause: "I thought you had given it to me") is conjugated in a past tense, as if he was writing for people who assumed Latin was the natural way for things to be (well, of course, but...). This is a bit interesting because most modern Western European languages use a finite past tense too ("I thought you had given", "pensé que me lo habías dado"...), and it's Latin that's different with its use of a past infinitive ("I thought you to-have-given me").

Unless my Latin is at fault, the literal translation is putavi mihi dedisti, whereas the typical Western European would have a literal translation putavi mihi dederas (at least as far as tenses go). To me it reads as though the role of a pluperfect is fulfilled by using the past tense rather than an infinitive; there seems not to be a past infinitive, and no sequence of tenses or pluperfect.

[Kuchigakatai]

Yes, that's what I understood too.

[bradrn]

I can also tell you transcribed the passage yourself from an image, because your Latin has typos. (etiam > etial, mixtum > mixtun, indefinitâ > indefenitâ) (What does the text have in "a parte anti"?)

Yes, I was afraid that was the case. I noticed I made lots of typos in the French bits, so I’m not surprised I have typos in the Latin as well.

As for “a parte anti”: what do you mean by that? I don’t speak Latin, but it looks a bit like that’s referring to the previous part; do you just want me to say what’s in the previous part as well? (It is in the Grammar Pile, and I did say the exact page, so if that’s what you’re asking for you should be able to just look at it yourself.)

Also interesting is the associated Hacker News discussion, in which various people (presumably non-linguists) completely fail to understand how these are metaphors.

I think a bunch of people there are insisting in a slightly different definition than the one in linguistics without being aware of it. For them, it seems metaphors only count as metaphors if they're interesting for the interpretation of unusual wording, presumably because that's the definition they acquired in high school. gen220 gives the most telling example:

To me, prose is a metaphor if it deliberately plays with the double-meaning, or uses it as an analogy to explain an example.
"I killed the process" isn't a metaphor to me.
"I killed the process, but its life wasn't too exciting anyway, it was just a spin-lock" would be a metaphor.

The key word here is "play". In the second sentence, the metaphor is extended to "its life wasn't too exciting".

Yep, that’s exactly what I meant.

(Amusingly enough, in high school English class I had the opposite problem: the English teacher was asking for a list of metaphors in a particular passage, and a classmate included a couple of metaphors resulting from SPACE IS TIME (I think). I spent a couple of minutes trying to persuade her that, no, those aren’t the sorts of metaphors the teacher wants in English class, but I don’t remember succeeding in this argument.)

I once made a fairly exhaustive list of metaphors of water and fire/heat in computing, but sadly it was a Facebook post and I can't recover it... It listed things like:
- "Cascading" Style Sheets
- the "Waterfall" process
- the control "flow" of a program
- the "(re-)hydration" of objects with data coming from a database
- "streaming" audio or video
- "burning" CDs
- languages or programs said to be "blazing" fast (a more general and common metaphor, I know)
- "smoke" testing
- letting a virtual machine or interpreter (like PyPy) "warm up" as it runs a long program (meaning loading its RAM process and cache appropriately)
- seeing that a hard drive "got fried"

I find it very cute that those short 3-second messages on Android are called "toasts", since the metaphor is that the temporal messages are like toasts coming out of an oven.

That’s an excellent one! I always wondered where ‘burning’ came from, but that interpretation makes sense. (Although I don’t think that ‘warm up’ is just related to computing.)

[zyxw59]

I don't think of "burning CDs" as metaphorical at all — the CD burner uses a laser to activate heat-sensitive dyes in the disk.

[Yalensky]

I was surprised to learn just now that Koyukon, featured in the children's show Molly of Denali, uses ee oo for /i: u:/. I had thought that the kids' show was simply using a nonstandard spelling to make it easier for kids to pick up, but it is in fact the proper orthography.

That’s a pretty horrible orthography! You should post that in If natlangs were conlangs.

Especially bizarre in that alongside the cute and Englishy ee and oo there's the technical and esoteric-looking barred u! (Perhaps used because it was easy to make on a typewriter. But then again, why not uu?)

[Pabappa]

Are there hard-and-fast rules for determining the tonal contour of Japanese words borrowed from Chinese? I see no detectable pattern, and for example https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%83%8 ... 3#Japanese has a tone pattern almost the opposite of the original. This word in particular seems to be a modern coinage, because the first kanji in the compound has a pronunciation that it doesn't seem to have when it's used in bare form. This suggests that the tone pattern is also new, and doesn't, for example, reflect what Chinese speakers used 1200 years ago. Also, quite a lot, and perhaps most, of the Chinese loans I see on Wiktionary have no tone pattern listed at all, though I can't say if that means they are all flat (heiban-gata) words or if the tones simply aren't listed in Wiktionary.

[dewrad]

Does anyone know of any good resources on syntactic ergativity, as opposed to morphological ergativity? I want to write a section about it as the next post in my ergativity series, but none of my sources (mainly Dixon, McGregor, Oxford Handbook of Ergativity) seem to have much information about it. (It would be nice to get something not too theoretical, although given the state of most syntactic research today, I fear that this may be impossible.)

Chapter 11 of Analysing Syntax by Paul Kroeger is good, and reasonably accessible.

[bradrn]

Does anyone know of any good resources on syntactic ergativity, as opposed to morphological ergativity? I want to write a section about it as the next post in my ergativity series, but none of my sources (mainly Dixon, McGregor, Oxford Handbook of Ergativity) seem to have much information about it. (It would be nice to get something not too theoretical, although given the state of most syntactic research today, I fear that this may be impossible.)

Chapter 11 of Analysing Syntax by Paul Kroeger is good, and reasonably accessible.

That looks like it could be very useful, except that I can’t find any way to get access to it. But if I do find a way to get it, then I’ll definitely read it.

[alynnidalar]

I find it very cute that those short 3-second messages on Android are called "toasts", since the metaphor is that the temporal messages are like toasts coming out of an oven.

I always interpreted that one as deriving from a toast, as in, raising a glass/cheers, briefly lifting something and saying a short message. But toast popping up makes sense too!

Speaking of metaphors, that reminds me of a few more about position--"raising" or "throwing" an exception. (and another data-as-food metaphor: if you ignore an exception, you "swallow" it)

[Linguoboy]

Are there hard-and-fast rules for determining the tonal contour of Japanese words borrowed from Chinese?

According to this article, about half of all Sino-Japanese words have no lexical accent at all. However, of those that do, 95% take it on the antepenult. (The article goes on to argue that antepenultimate accent is the default for borrowed words in Japanese, and perhaps for the lexicon in general.) This is exactly what we see in the example you link to.

There's no discernible relationship between accentuation of Sino-Japanese words and their tonal contours in Chinese. (BTW, what are you considering to be the "original" tones of these words, given that they were borrowed from different varieties of Chinese during different historical periods?)

[Moose-tache]

I am constantly impressed with the localization of Western logos and brand names in Arabic. The latest is this ad for CNN: