Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Kuchigakatai]

I am constantly impressed with the localization of Western logos and brand names in Arabic. The latest is this ad for CNN:
https://i.imgur.com/9j4Werx.png

They made the <byẗ> of <ʔlʕrbyẗ> /al-ʕarabijja(tʊ)/ 'Arabic' resemble Latin <CNN>. Wonderful.

[aporaporimos]

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.

I especially like how two constructions are contrasted by translating one into English and the other into French; you need to know three languages to make sense of it! Probably a reasonable expectation for the original intended audience, but still.

[Moose-tache]

Since I brought it up, I'm also very impressed with the 7-up localization in Arabic. The shape of the logo has a 7 in it, which is an iconic part of the brand image. But it's a meaningless symbol in Arabic, and kind of looks like a six if anything, so making a proper localization was always going to be tricky. What they did was keep the shape of the seven, but make it out of the letters for 'ap, as in sivin 'ap. The result is just wonderful:



Seriously, whoever's doing this graphic design work should get some kind of award.

[Ryusenshi]

Apparently, nobody knows what the name 7 Up means, because the inventor died before telling anyone.

Today in "Words that Ryusenshi got wrong": I present millenarian. When I encountered it, I thought it had something to do with the new millennium, maybe? Like, with people hoping the year 2000[%] would bring large changes to the world, hopefully for the better? It took me a really long time to find that it had nothing to do with the year 2000, and everything to do with the Book of Revelation, where a thousand-year event takes place, and that some American Protestant denominations had made this event a cornerstone of their theology (for most Christian denominations, it's a fairly obscure passage with unclear meaning and probably not to be understood literally). And then this word millenarian had its meaning broadened to include all sorts of cults who claim that an apocalyptic event will take place, followed by an era of prosperity (even if they have nothing to do with the Revelation millennium period). And then the meaning was broadened again, and the word millenarian was applied to anything even remotely "utopian".

[%] Yes, I know the millennium technically started in 2001.

[chris_notts]

I realised today that I have a kind of incipient ɪ ~ ə harmony / neutralisation. Certain instances of ə are raised when there's a high vowel in a neighbouring syllable. A good example is "diplomacy" vs "diplomatic", where I tend to have: dɪˈpləʊmɪsi (with ə raising) but dɪpləˈmatɪk (without ə raising). The internet, on the other hand, claims the correct pronunciation for the first is dɪˈpləʊməsi.

Not sure whether this is common and just not recorded in dictionaries, or if it's just me.

[Qwynegold]

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?)

Oof! It has <aa> but not <a>, and no <i> at all.

[Kuchigakatai]

I like that standard Swedish inflectional suffixes don't change the pitch accent of a word, but derivational suffixes often do. This is what you'd expect across languages really, but I find the homographs produced interesting.

kull [kʰɵl:˥˨] 'a litter, group of baby offspring of an animal'
kullen [kʰɵ˥˨l:ɛn˩] 'the litter' (definite singular inflection)
kulle [kʰɵ˧˩l:ɛ˥˨] 'a hill'
kullen [kʰɵ˧˩l:ɛn˥˨] 'the hill' (def. sg.)

Kull 'litter', like most Germanic monosyllabic words, has the single-falling accent (a.k.a. the acute pitch accent or tone 1), while kulle, like many words with a derivational suffix (in this case -e), has the double-falling accent (a.k.a. the grave pitch accent or tone 2). This sort of thing extends to borrowings too:

karat [kʰa˧r̝ɑ:t˥˨] 'carat'
karaten [kʰa˧r̝ɑ:˥˨tɛn˩] 'the carat'
karate [kʰa˧r̝ɑ:˧˩tɛ˥˨] 'karate'
karaten [kʰa˧r̝ɑ:˧˩tɛn˥˨] 'the karate'

Here, karat is a French (or German) borrowing and karate a Japanese borrowing, and the former has the single-falling accent while the latter has the double-falling one. The -e of karate (from 空手 kara+te "empty+hand") was apparently reinterpreted as the native derivational suffix -e.

[Pabappa]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditema_tsa_Dinoko <--- i just found this beautiful script. It's a bit too abstract to use practically, but I think that's the point .... it's meant for a type of art that hides the written word behind a collage of similar shapes. Similar to the Tangram-like script I developed for Late Andanese, but with a much wider array of symbols since Bantu languages have many more phonemes than Late Andanese.

_____________________

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bravo#Italian <--- four competing etymologies. One of which is that it is a misreading of the handwritten word /brana/, which would be interesting because it would mean that a new word entered the language without anyone ever having heard it before, simply because they saw it in print. Sure that happens today, but for it to happen in medieval Europe when not many people were literate would be remarkable. Ive been searching for words like this in a sleepy way, letting them come to me rather than actively seeking them out .... one example is messuage and I think I found another one and posted about it here a few years back. However, I think the misreading theory is unlikely for bravo.

________________

http://www.replicatedtypo.com/wp-conten ... re-351.png Sexually promiscuous cultures speak languages with more vowels because they keep their mouths open

[Space60]

I will see people spell the word "yeah" as "yea" in text messages. "Yea" is a different word with the same meaning but a different pronunciation. It should be used as a spelling of "yeah"

[Kuchigakatai]

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bravo#Italian <--- four competing etymologies. One of which is that it is a misreading of the handwritten word /brana/, which would be interesting because it would mean that a new word entered the language without anyone ever having heard it before, simply because they saw it in print. Sure that happens today, but for it to happen in medieval Europe when not many people were literate would be remarkable. Ive been searching for words like this in a sleepy way, letting them come to me rather than actively seeking them out .... one example is messuage and I think I found another one and posted about it here a few years back. However, I think the misreading theory is unlikely for bravo.

The source given there, namely Du Cange's Enlightenment-era dictionary, does try to make a case for it (so it's not a miscitation), but I'd say Italian bravo and French brehain / Latin branus maybe influenced each other due to phonetic similarity at most, and that they're ultimately unrelated... I'll edit it to call it less likely than the others.

I'm amused that the word has ameliorated to mostly positive meanings in Italian now, and that the negative meanings are now obsolete. In Spanish it is still mostly used negatively, the main meaning being 'angry like a dog that's always angry' (and metaphorically humans that are also like that). Wiktionary there lists the more positive meanings 'skillful' and 'good/excellent', but I've never come across the word used like that. The meaning 'brave/courageous' is limited to the expression a la brava, I'd say, and otherwise the adjective is not used that way. Interestingly, this means I disagree with meanings #2, #3 and #4, but surprisingly I perfectly accept the one you'd think is most uncommon, #5.

[Kuchigakatai]

Also, the link there to a 2013 entry of the Oxford University Press blog has a wonderful defence of long-form etymological dictionaries. This is, by the way, exactly why I say that Coromines and Pascual's etymological dictionary of Spanish is so great, with its page-long discussions of single words (sometimes spanning two pages and a half, and mind you these are large pages with the text in a small font size!).

In my gleanings, I suggested that, if being made to choose between barbarus and pravus as the etymon of brave, I might prefer the first. Today I should say more clearly that neither strikes me as particularly convincing. Nor is, to my mind, (b)rabidus quite fanciful! If it were, such different etymologists as the rather conservative Norwegian Johan Strom and the passionately nonconformist Swiss researcher Hugo Schuchardt would not have supported it. The bad thing about etymological dictionaries (and here I find myself in full agreement with Maher) is that most of them offer too little discussion. Tentative opinions solidify into dogmas and are offered to the public as truths. Popular books copy them unthinkingly, and untested ideas become common knowledge. In the first edition of his dictionary, Friedrich Kluge (every historical linguist’s role model) put a question mark at the etymology of German brav from barbarus. Later he found this derivation solid, and the question mark disappeared. The French dictionary of Ernst Gamillscheg (an extremely knowledgeable author) also does without a question mark (brave from barbarus). In Italy, Prati said “unclear, but not from barbarus, rather from pravus.” By contrast, Devoto believed that the ways of barbarus and pravus crossed and produced bravo. Much sorrow and little wisdom come from reading even the best dictionaries.

And in the next paragraph mentions English "gravy" as an example of a misreading becoming established:

The great seventeenth-century lexicographer Charles Du Cange, a marvel of diligence and perspicacity, whom one is tempted to call a genius, observed that the Medieval Latin noun branas means the same as brava. In 1950, George G. Nicholson took up this idea and suggested that brav– is indeed a learned misreading (note: a misreading, not a mispronunciation) of bran-, influenced by pravus. Strangely, such “catastrophes” are possible. Engl. gravy, from late Middle English graué, seems to be a misreading of Old French grané, because u and n were easily confused in manuscripts. In printed texts, grané often appeared as gravé. Nicholson’s article, lost in a three-volume Festschrift, does not seem to have attracted anyone’s attention (a common case in etymological studies). I ran into it while looking through every Festschrift I could lay hands on. It will be a great joke if such was the history of bravus: a tame ghost, the result of a linguistic miscarriage, conquering the world. Once again, I reserve judgment.

[Kuchigakatai]

I've met Chinese people who have the problem that some character of their name is hard to find. And this means that when they sign up to things by writing their name by hand, electronically they end up with an X, an * or a ? in their name.

It's funny because more often than not it's a variant of a very common character that just has a different radical, like 謌, a variant of 歌 gē 'song' with the 言 radical...

[Raphael]

In some languages - for instance, apparently most European languages - personal names and the words they or their components were derived from diverged long ago, so that people who haven't memorized the etymology of a name usually have to look up its meaning somewhere if they want to know it.

There seem to be other languages in which many given names still consist of the modern forms of the words from which they were derived, making their meaning easily recognizable for speakers of the language. Is that true? And are there any patterns behind when languages develop in the former way, and when they develop in the latter way?

[Kuchigakatai]

I think it's just areal cultural stuff. Names with obscure etymologies are common in Europe and the Middle East, but in East Asia most everyone seems to know the meaning/origin of their own name. You can even ask a South Korean about their name and they'll give you both the meanings of each name and the related Chinese characters if there's any.

[Raphael]

I think it's just areal cultural stuff. Names with obscure etymologies are common in Europe and the Middle East, but in East Asia most everyone seems to know the meaning/origin of their own name. You can even ask a South Korean about their name and they'll give you both the meanings of each name and the related Chinese characters if there's any.

Thank you! But is it really mainly cultural, that is, people from some cultures tend to be more interested in knowing the etymological meanings of their names, or linguistic, that is, in some languages, given names tend to be closer to, or even identical with, the modern forms of the words from which they are derived?

(I mean, even in English, there are people today with names like "Faith" or "Hope", not to mention all those easily understandable surnames like "Smith" or "Archer" or "Black" or "White".)

[Whimemsz]

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?)

Oof! It has <aa> but not <a>, and no <i> at all.

These are all standard Northern Athabaskan orthographical conventions; <i> is usually reserved for schwa in such cases, which has high front allophones in the relevant languages. Koyukon actually does have a schwa but it's spelled <e>. There's no <i> because there's no short (or reduced) equivalent to long/full /i:/ that would necessitate it. Likewise there's no short/reduced counterpart to long/full /æ:/, so no need for the symbol <a>. Use of doubled <aa> for /æ:/ is I assume to prevent people from pronouncing <a> like it's English and winding up with /eɪ/~/e:/ or /ɑ:/ or /ə/ or whatever; English doesn't have <aa> and so it can be associated by speakers with a new vowel (/æ:/ is sort of present in some Alaskan English but its distribution is complicated and it is spelled the same as a number of other vowels [I don't actually know what Athabaskan-influenced English sounds like, which is what many older Koyukon speakers -- i.e., pretty much all of them -- would speak], and English phonotactics and spelling rules would prevent a final <-a> from being interpreted as /æ:/). Possibly it's also just to help people remember that it represents a sound that is phonetically longer than the vowels spelled with a single letter (except <o>). <uu> is a poor solution for short/reduced /o/ for the same reason: it would suggest a long rather than a short vowel. <u> is already in use for short/reduced /ʊ/, and /o/ is generally quite close to /ʊ/, and merges with it in many Koyukon dialects, so using a symbol that is close to <u> also makes sense, especially for a pan-Koyukon orthography.

Anyway, to the basic point, using <ee> and <oo> for /i:/ and /u:/ is not at all strange or bad. As I kind of just alluded to, you're trying to create an alphabet for people who are only literate in English, and mostly don't have a particularly advanced English reading level or an advanced education. They're mostly not even aware of the continental values of vowel letters, they're only familiar with English spelling. If you can spell /i:/ and /u:/ as <ee> and <oo> without causing any other orthographical problems or creating any ambiguity, this is a good solution! You reduce the amount of work required for existing speakers as well as potential new speakers to learn the alphabet and start using it. That linguists are used to these letters representing other sounds should be entirely irrelevant when designing the alphabet: the goal of the alphabet is to help the speech community.

[zompist]

But is it really mainly cultural, that is, people from some cultures tend to be more interested in knowing the etymological meanings of their names, or linguistic, that is, in some languages, given names tend to be closer to, or even identical with, the modern forms of the words from which they are derived?

(I mean, even in English, there are people today with names like "Faith" or "Hope", not to mention all those easily understandable surnames like "Smith" or "Archer" or "Black" or "White".)

I don't think there's much mysterious here. East Asia is dominated by a culture which has used the same language for four thousand years, and a writing system which easily preserves particular words while adapting to changing pronunciations. (I'm leaving out a lot of details, of course, and not all Chinese-based names are still transparent.)

The Middle East and Europe have pretty much always been a multilingual stew, with multiple sources of prestige. So we get a lot of names whose original meanings are unknown to most people.

In short, name transparency is largely a matter of historical accident. A more interesting cultural variable, perhaps, is whether names form a fixed stock, or are reinvented continuously. In North American Native American languages and in the ancient Middle East, the latter was common, so it wasn't uncommon to have a unique and also transparent name.

[Linguoboy]

I think it's just areal cultural stuff. Names with obscure etymologies are common in Europe and the Middle East, but in East Asia most everyone seems to know the meaning/origin of their own name. You can even ask a South Korean about their name and they'll give you both the meanings of each name and the related Chinese characters if there's any.

Thank you! But is it really mainly cultural, that is, people from some cultures tend to be more interested in knowing the etymological meanings of their names, or linguistic, that is, in some languages, given names tend to be closer to, or even identical with, the modern forms of the words from which they are derived?

In East Asia, it's a function of a writing system. You don't really have "meaningless" syllables in Chinese; every character has an associated meaning (or meanings)[*]. And since all names are written with characters, you have to know the "meaning" of your name in order to write it.

Not at characters are created equal, of course. There are common characters, which are used in contemporary compounds and familiar to every literate speaker. There are uncommon variations of common characters, which are often used to make names more distinctive. And then there are uncommon characters with obscure meanings, which vary from the merely obsolete (i.e. recognisable from other names or use in poetry, etc.) to the truly recherché.

(An example of one of these: The second element of a classmate of mine's name was written with the mountain radical and the phonetic 旦. The meaning is "a hill that appears taller than a mountain because it is closer". This is not a character any modern speaker would know without having looked it up! Even major dictionaries, like Lin Yu-tang, don't list it.)

Since Korea and Japanese both have phonemic scripts, they theoretically have more freedom than this. In practice, though, they follow much the same name-giving traditions. Even though Koreans commonly write their names in Han'geul, I've never met one who couldn't tell you the corresponding Sino-Korean characters. Native Korean names do exist, but they are rare. (As of 2015, they represented less than 8% of all names given to newborns.) The idea that a given name should be bisyllabic is deeply ingrained in Korean culture and there just aren't a whole lot of native Korean two-syllable words with appropriate meanings. (The most common of these names is 사랑 /salang/ "Love".)

[*] There are a number of characters whose original meaning has been bleached from being used so much in transcriptions of foreign borrowings. But, for this very reason, they aren't used for native names or even for the native-style names that non-native speakers adopt. The common transcription of my given name uses two of them, but I simply chose an entirely new name with only a passing resemblance to my Western name.

[Kuchigakatai]

Thank you! But is it really mainly cultural, that is, people from some cultures tend to be more interested in knowing the etymological meanings of their names, or linguistic, that is, in some languages, given names tend to be closer to, or even identical with, the modern forms of the words from which they are derived?

Funnily the answer is yes. That is, people in East Asia have long had an appreciation for ancient Chinese (even if just platonically) and have used modern pronunciations for morphemes in that language. See the two replies above...

Actually, I just realized that what I said above applies to Koreans and the Chinese more than the Japanese, since the latter seem to have a lot of native names of ultimately unknown etymology, like Satoshi or Kazuma, although many are still analyzable, like 光 Hikari 'light (common word)', or the surname 神谷 Kamiya, from kami+ya(tsu) "god + valley".

Since all traditional native names are traditionally, typically written in Kanji, those names tend to be written in many ways, some of them very nonsensical, like 一馬 'one horse' which is one of various ways of writing Kazuma. Here the -ma is identified with the Chinese word 馬 'horse' (read "ma" in Japanese), with kazu- nonsensically matched to 一 'one' (which normally has the native reading hito and the Sino-Japanese readings ichi/itsu). Forced readings of kanji used in names are known as "nanori" (名乗り na-nori "name-take", or thing taken for a name).

[Raphael]

Thank you for your feedback, everyone!

A more interesting cultural variable, perhaps, is whether names form a fixed stock, or are reinvented continuously. In North American Native American languages and in the ancient Middle East, the latter was common, so it wasn't uncommon to have a unique and also transparent name.

Hm. Interesting!