Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[mèþru]

Never heard [s], live in an area with many immigrants who don't have [θ] in their native language's inventory (including both my parents, of which one is not capable of pronouncing it and the other is)

[Zju]

So would having [fɪf] for 5th make the fifth ordinal irregular and the fourth one regular - as in, having-/f/-suffix-for-cardinals regular? Just how rare is having an irregular cardinal higher than some regular cardinals?

[Linguoboy]

So would having [fɪf] for 5th make the fifth ordinal irregular and the fourth one regular - as in, having-/f/-suffix-for-cardinals regular? Just how rare is having an irregular cardinal higher than some regular cardinals?

Not that rare, I don't think. Catalan, for instance, has vuit > vuitè followed by deu > desè.

Irish has a trí > tríú but a ceathair > ceathrú and a fiche > fichiú. So if you consider the regular ending to be -ú which causes depalatalisation and syncopation, fichiú is irregular. If you consider it to be -(i)ú (with both a broad and a slender variant), then ceathrú is irregular. And if the only regular ending is -ú with no change to the root, both are irregular.

Whatever you consider to be the regular ordinal ending in Welsh, it gets thrown out the window in the teens when you have the equivalent of "the third on ten", "the fourth on ten", etc.

German is regular from 4 to 6 but then siebent has the the variant siebt. Starting with 20 the "regular" ending switches from -t to -st.

That's just the cases I know off the top of my head for the languages I speak.

[Salmoneus]

Worth noting that in English, sixth and eighth very often are irregular in spoken English, and arguably standard twelfth (in that usually English suffixes assimilate in voice, rather than vice versa), and indeed for many (most?) speakers 'twentieth', 'thirtieth', etc.

[zompist]

I'm surprised by the AHD's calm declaration that the commonest pronunciation of "8th" is [etθ]. And they really think '12th' is [twɛlfθ]. And '6th' is [sɪksθ].

Proof that the AHD editors are native speakers of Elkarîl, I guess.

I'm not even sure what I have for '12th'. The l is velarized, and you get one of the final consonants but not both.

[bbbosborne]

Proof that the AHD editors are native speakers of Elkarîl, I guess.

lol


i'm pretty sure i drop the /θ/s completely and just pronounce /f/s

[Salmoneus]

I'm surprised by the AHD's calm declaration that the commonest pronunciation of "8th" is [etθ]. And they really think '12th' is [twɛlfθ]. And '6th' is [sɪksθ].

Proof that the AHD editors are native speakers of Elkarîl, I guess.

I'm not even sure what I have for '12th'. The l is velarized, and you get one of the final consonants but not both.

Woah, weird. Do you code-switch into Estuary? To me, /twEof/ (etc) is almost too cockney to take seriously...

I mostly have the irregular 6th, unless speaking clearly, but I have the regular 8th, and I think that's standard for people around me, though I have heard the irregular form. It wouldn't even have occured to me there was a different way of saying 12th, outside of normal dialectical changes.

[Zaarin]

I'm not even sure what I have for '12th'. The l is velarized, and you get one of the final consonants but not both.

I have [twɛɫθ] unless I'm speaking very carefully.

[bbbosborne]

why do some native american languages with /ts/ spell it with a goddamn cent sign instead of something sensible like <c>?

[Travis B.]

I have fifth /fɪθ/ [fɘθ], sixth /sɪksθ/ [sɘʔksː] (or in quicker speech, just [sɘʔks]*, or in careful speech, [sɘʔksθ]), eighth /eɪθ/ [eθ], and twelfth /twɛlθ/ [tʲʰwɜɤ̯θ]. I was under the impression, though, that my pronunciations were essentially standard phonemically.

* Interestingly enough, this contrasts with six /sɪks/ because that is [sɘʔksʲ].

[zyxw59]

For fifth and twelfth I think I have free variation between /fɪf twɛlf/ and /fɪθ twɛlθ/.
Sixth is definitely /sɪksθ/, but realized as something like [sɪkss̪], with a definite shift of my tongue between the two sibilants.
Eighth is /eɪtθ/, realized as /eɪʔθ/.

[anteallach]

I'm surprised by the AHD's calm declaration that the commonest pronunciation of "8th" is [etθ]. And they really think '12th' is [twɛlfθ]. And '6th' is [sɪksθ].

Proof that the AHD editors are native speakers of Elkarîl, I guess.

I'm not even sure what I have for '12th'. The l is velarized, and you get one of the final consonants but not both.

I have all those consonant clusters in careful speech. In normal speech, though, fifth and twelfth are going to lose the [f], and sixth the [s]. OTOH eighth remains [ɛɪt̪θ]; I don't think I ever lose the stop there.

[Nortaneous]

f > 0 / _θ
fiθ siksθ ejtθ twelθ

on the subject of numbers: θɚttijn forttijn etc.

[anteallach]

f > 0 / _θ
fiθ siksθ ejtθ twelθ

on the subject of numbers: θɚttijn forttijn etc.

/tt/ in 13,14,18,19 but not 15,16,17? That's what I have.

Other oddity: /d/ for expected /t/ in seventy.

[alynnidalar]

why do some native american languages with /ts/ spell it with a goddamn cent sign instead of something sensible like <c>?

I suspect it's because their orthographies were not developed by linguists, or if they were, they were developed sufficiently long ago that modern conventions didn't exist.

[akam chinjir]

why do some native american languages with /ts/ spell it with a goddamn cent sign instead of something sensible like <c>?

I suspect it's because their orthographies were not developed by linguists, or if they were, they were developed sufficiently long ago that modern conventions didn't exist.

The cent sign was also easy to type on American typewriters, I think.

[Linguoboy]

why do some native american languages with /ts/ spell it with a goddamn cent sign instead of something sensible like <c>?

I suspect it's because their orthographies were not developed by linguists, or if they were, they were developed sufficiently long ago that modern conventions didn't exist.

The latter. Kenneth L. Pike was most certainly a linguist and he recommends this usage in his 1947 manual Phonemics: a technique for reducing languages to writing which was adopted by many ethnographers doing descriptive work among NA peoples. (c was given its IPA value, i.e. unvoiced palatal stop.) Since dental and alveolar affricates are much more common in the languages of North America than a palatal stop, several of them did exactly what bbbosborne suggests and starting substituting c. (Confusingly, the Siouanist Dorsey used it for a dental fricative instead and other linguists without access to American typewriters [e.g. LaFlesche] were forced to substitute ç.)

[Zaarin]

I have a quick question about ezafe: how are multiple possessives handled? Like in English? So say one want's to say "Rostam's daughter's husband," is that ROSTAM-e DAUGHTER-e HUSBAND? Since ezafe also marks adjectives, what about something like "Shah Rostam's golden crown"? ROSTAM-e SHAH-e GOLD-e CROWN? (I'm working on a language that has a similar construct, but I've been a bit confused how to approach strings of possessors.)

[Vijay]

-e is like 'of' in English when connecting nouns, adjectives come after nouns in Persian rather than before with the ezafe connecting them, and 'King X' in Persian seems to just be 'X Shah' with no ezafe. So AFAICT it would be HUSBAND-e DAUGHTER-e ROSTAM and CROWN-e GOLD-e ROSTAM SHAH.

[Zaarin]

-e is like 'of' in English when connecting nouns, adjectives come after nouns in Persian rather than before with the ezafe connecting them, and 'King X' in Persian seems to just be 'X Shah' with no ezafe. So AFAICT it would be HUSBAND-e DAUGHTER-e ROSTAM and CROWN-e GOLD-e ROSTAM SHAH.

Thank you.