Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Raphael]

Newbie question: Do linguists classify the English alphabet as having 26 or 52 letters?

(I ask because I could imagine someone whose first language uses a non-Latin writing system wanting to learn English, hearing that they'll have to learn 26 letters, and then feeling cheated when they discover that they actually have to learn 52 letter forms (and that's before we get to numbers, punctuation, currency symbols, etc.).)

[Travis B.]

Well 52 letter symbols isn't much compared to the complexity that is English orthography...

[Kuchigakatai]

Newbie question: Do linguists classify the English alphabet as having 26 or 52 letters?

(I ask because I could imagine someone whose first language uses a non-Latin writing system wanting to learn English, hearing that they'll have to learn 26 letters, and then feeling cheated when they discover that they actually have to learn 52 letter forms (and that's before we get to numbers, punctuation, currency symbols, etc.).)

26 letters, multiplied ×2 for the cases (lowercase and uppercase).

The Latin alphabet in its English form is pretty well entrenched around the world though, and taught or learned early. I've heard the Iranian government actually actively tries to prevent or delay people getting exposed to the Latin alphabet though (I heard this from immigrants who had to learn the alphabet after coming here to Canada as adults; they literally didn't know their A-B-Cs, much like Western people when they go to Japan or Myanmar), so maybe you can find some such people who felt cheated about being told it had "26 letters" there.

[Richard W]

(I ask because I could imagine someone whose first language uses a non-Latin writing system wanting to learn English, hearing that they'll have to learn 26 letters, and then feeling cheated when they discover that they actually have to learn 52 letter forms (and that's before we get to numbers, punctuation, currency symbols, etc.).)

It's a common oversimplification. For an Indic script, dependent vowels, subscript forms and conjuncts etc. are normally not counted separately. When Thai vowels are counted, the closed and open vowels are counted as one even though they be written differently.

[Raphael]

Ah, thank you, folks!

[Travis B.]

I noticed today that my daughter sometimes says /ˈhædəd/ - and the thing is she's eleven, so it is not like is just some feature of early language learning.

[dɮ the phoneme]

What the hell is this sound? For the life of me I can't figure it out. At the very least it's voiceless and lateral. I'm fairly confident that it's velar as well, and perhaps the ejective velar lateral fricative? It seems to have a lot of articulatory force behind it. And, most strangely, I can distinctly feel air escaping on only one side of my tongue (the right side usually).


Here's a recording and a spectrogram (not of the same recording).

[bradrn]

What the hell is this sound? For the life of me I can't figure it out. At the very least it's voiceless and lateral. I'm fairly confident that it's velar as well, and perhaps the ejective velar lateral fricative? It seems to have a lot of articulatory force behind it. And, most strangely, I can distinctly feel air escaping on only one side of my tongue (the right side usually).


Here's a recording and a spectrogram (not of the same recording).

I can’t be entirely sure, but to me this sounds a bit like a lateral velaric egressive sound, though with uncertain POA.

[dɮ the phoneme]

I would believe that. I can kind of feel myself contracting my cheek muscles to some degree when I articulate it. As a side note, despite being voiceless, it almost looks like it has formants... I wonder if some part of the tongue or cheek vibrating is mimicking the vibration of the vocal folds?

[bradrn]

I would believe that. I can kind of feel myself contracting my cheek muscles to some degree when I articulate it.

Hmm, that doesn’t sound like velaric egressive at all… could it be buccal speech instead? (Which would make sense given my immediate reaction to the recording: ‘my god, that sounds exactly like a quacking duck!’)

[Linguoboy]

So I knew gender assignments for borrowed words were a disaster in German but Himmel Herrgott! I was curious about burrito, which is masculine in Spanish but which my intuition told me would be neuter in German (which it was). This got me curious about other Spanish food terms, so I looked them up and my guessing was less accurate.

M → N
Burrito
Ceviche [also → F]
Turrón

M → M
Gazpacho
Huarache
Taco

M → F
Ceviche [also → N]
Chorizo [by analogy with Wurst "sausage"]
Gazpacho [by analogy with Suppe "soup"]
Guacamole [because of the "feminine" -e ending or by analogy with Soße "sauce"]

F → F
Enchilada
Paella
Sangria [rare]
Tortilla

F → M
Cava [by analogy with Sekt "sparkling wine"]
Sangria [by analogy with Wein "wine"]
Tequila [because of der Mezcal?]

[2+3 Clusivity]

What the hell is this sound? For the life of me I can't figure it out. At the very least it's voiceless and lateral. I'm fairly confident that it's velar as well, and perhaps the ejective velar lateral fricative? It seems to have a lot of articulatory force behind it. And, most strangely, I can distinctly feel air escaping on only one side of my tongue (the right side usually).


Here's a recording and a spectrogram (not of the same recording).

The sounds vary over the recording imho. It's very duck call-like. Scrooge McDuck dialogue comes to mind. I'd venture a voiced (one-sided) lateral trill maybe with a secondary articulation.

[dɮ the phoneme]

What the hell is this sound? For the life of me I can't figure it out. At the very least it's voiceless and lateral. I'm fairly confident that it's velar as well, and perhaps the ejective velar lateral fricative? It seems to have a lot of articulatory force behind it. And, most strangely, I can distinctly feel air escaping on only one side of my tongue (the right side usually).


Here's a recording and a spectrogram (not of the same recording).

The sounds vary over the recording imho. It's very duck call-like. Scrooge McDuck dialogue comes to mind. I'd venture a voiced (one-sided) lateral trill maybe with a secondary articulation.

It's definitely voiceless: I feel no vibration in my throat when pronouncing it, and (though there is some weird stuff going on in the low frequency range) the spectrogram lacks a defined voicing bar.

[Qwynegold]

What the hell is this sound? For the life of me I can't figure it out. At the very least it's voiceless and lateral. I'm fairly confident that it's velar as well, and perhaps the ejective velar lateral fricative? It seems to have a lot of articulatory force behind it. And, most strangely, I can distinctly feel air escaping on only one side of my tongue (the right side usually).


Here's a recording and a spectrogram (not of the same recording).

Can you take a new shot of the spectrogram, where we can see higher frequencies (like up to 10.000 Hz or something)? So we can see if it's a fricative or not. To me the last syllable sounds like [akx] with some kind of phonation or something.

[quinterbeck]

Can anyone point me to examples of how prenasalised stops behave in consonant clusters? For example, I'm thinking of how I might realise cross-syllable clusters such as:

/am.ⁿde/
/ek.ᵐbo/
/is.ⁿda/

I don't know how plausible such sequences are, but if they occur, I'm interested to see what kind of surface forms they produce. I had a look at index diachronica, but the examples were all in V_V or #_ environments

[Travis B.]

Can anyone point me to examples of how prenasalised stops behave in consonant clusters? For example, I'm thinking of how I might realise cross-syllable clusters such as:

/am.ⁿde/
/ek.ᵐbo/
/is.ⁿda/

I don't know how plausible such sequences are, but if they occur, I'm interested to see what kind of surface forms they produce. I had a look at index diachronica, but the examples were all in V_V or #_ environments

Mind you, many of the languages that have prenasalized stops only allow open syllables.

[quinterbeck]

Mind you, many of the languages that have prenasalized stops only allow open syllables.

I thought that was the case, but I'm interested to see if coda + prenasalised stop does occur anywhere

[bradrn]

Can anyone point me to examples of how prenasalised stops behave in consonant clusters? For example, I'm thinking of how I might realise cross-syllable clusters such as:

/am.ⁿde/
/ek.ᵐbo/
/is.ⁿda/

I don't know how plausible such sequences are, but if they occur, I'm interested to see what kind of surface forms they produce. I had a look at index diachronica, but the examples were all in V_V or #_ environments

Sadly, it would seem that most grammars don’t go into detail on this point, and most languages with prenasalised consonants have only open syllables, but I eventually managed to find an example: Fula allows prenasalised consonants in the syllable onset, which are allowed in clusters only after a resonant or /s/, e.g. /ᵑɡíl.ŋɡa/, /ᵐbàr.ᵐbár.ni/ (note that this is reduplicated). On the other hand, Mbódɔ̀mɔ̀ has exactly one word with such clusters, namely [dàl.ŋɡɛ̀l]. I’m interested in this topic myself for my own language, so I’ll have to keep looking into this.

[Richard W]

Mind you, many of the languages that have prenasalized stops only allow open syllables.

I thought that was the case, but I'm interested to see if coda + prenasalised stop does occur anywhere

Tok Pisin should offer examples, with words like olgeta 'all' and asbin 'winged bean', but finding pronunciation in a variant with the voiced stops mostly consistently prenasalised proved difficult.

[Nortaneous]

Mind you, many of the languages that have prenasalized stops only allow open syllables.

I thought that was the case, but I'm interested to see if coda + prenasalised stop does occur anywhere

Iatmul - the OPD has words like "kwunatndɨ"