Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Travis B.]

For anyone who needs a laugh, here’s a (sadly accurate) piece of linguistic humour I’d like to share with you: The Linguist Parallel Parking Challenge. Yes, it includes conlangers! (From the same site, I also enjoyed Linguistic Sub-Fields Explained for the Research Novice and Important Idioms in Contemporary Science; I should note the latter is more widely applicable outside linguistics.)

Thanks for the link; I liked those!

As did I!

[Kuchigakatai]

I should probably add as a disclaimer that I have an intense dislike of the idea of "free verse". If you want to write prose in a poetic style, that's very nice, but don't call it a poem — that's just being silly, or pretentious if you say others just "don't understand" or whatever. Of course, I'm perhaps old-fashioned, in that I like the idea of good, well-constructed literature (both poetry and prose) that can be consumed by all of society. That's what Shakespeare did, isn't it?

I have a similar view. Where we differ is that I wouldn't even object to free verse so much (it's possible to focus on word choice as the style in free verse I guess, and to use linebreaks in interesting ways, and even use what is basically loose accentual verse if the lines are of similar length), if only the same people who propose free verse in English didn't also dismiss forms with patterns, which were used alright by their ancestors and are perfectly in use all around the world... Spanish speakers call free verse poetry and poets write quite a bit of it, but assonance/consonance and syllable counts have not been dismissed the way they are in the English world, and they still write some of it...

I think iambic meters are still present with some popularity in English though? At least when I've been shown poems by random people I've known, they were sometimes in iambs... And then there's that unstressed "off-rhyme" thing the article I linked to mentionned...

But what I'd point out is that any of these could be used to explain why you have the assimilation. The phonemic theory has no particular advantage here.

Do you know any specific linguists or works who attack phonemes this way? I know there are, and my use of phonemes is so old and entrenched in my thinking that I've been curious to read more about that...

[linguistcat]

All the talk about Chinese and phonology makes me feel better about not being able to simplify things for a project.

[Linguoboy]

If I were to call out the academy for unfairly dismissing one thing, it would probably be fantasy; no academic wants to admit this, but considering actual cultural relevance, the most influential Twentieth Century author was arguably J.R.R. Tolkien (on this same thread, James Joyce is a near cultural nonentity in most of the English-speaking world), and changes in society have created new modes of fiction and mythopoesis that are both extremely interesting and deeply satisfying in ways what I've heard called "literary fiction" aren't.

Oh come now.. Tolkien is most influential with nerds (like most of us on the board). If you're going by mass popularity, Tolkien is far eclipsed by (say) Agatha Christie. Fantasy is pretty popular, but mysteries are far more so. Mysteries and romance both outsell fantasy/sf.

Not to mention the fact that Game of Thrones came with a huge splash and died with an ignominous sucking sound while 101 police procedurals keep grinding on on channels throughout the world. Fantasy films and television are mainstream, but I'm not sure they'll ever displace mystery and romance.

Maybe I am biassed, but I think mysteries trace back to Poe, and of course Sherlock Holmes, which are both from the Nineteenth Century.

And high fantasy doesn't trace back to William Morris?

Moreover, I think you both overestimate Tolkien's influence and underestimate Joyce's. What most writers take from Tolkien is the setting and some of the themes. But when it comes to style, conventions, sensibility, etc. I don't see a whole lot or commonality. In the contemporary high fantasy I've read, most of the characters share the motivations and sensibilities of the contemporary Westerners who read them; they'd be as foreign to someone from the actual Middle Ages as any protagonist found in literary fiction. Essentially, most of it is literary modernism in Ren Faire drag--and literary modernism was an innovation established by Joyce, not Tolkien. Just look at how Tolkien's own works were modified to make them into mass-market movies (and I don't mean just having more than two named female characters who actually get more than five minutes of screen time).

[Ares Land]

Oh come now.. Tolkien is most influential with nerds (like most of us on the board). If you're going by mass popularity, Tolkien is far eclipsed by (say) Agatha Christie. Fantasy is pretty popular, but mysteries are far more so. Mysteries and romance both outsell fantasy/sf.

All of these are somehow neglected by academia. I think the pecking order is crime fiction > science fiction > fantasy > romance.
(Crime fiction gets some recognition; nobody respects romance.)

I think neither Ulysses nor LotR is the most influential work of fiction in the 20th century though: that honor should go to 1984.

[zompist]

All of these are somehow neglected by academia. I think the pecking order is crime fiction > science fiction > fantasy > romance.
(Crime fiction gets some recognition; nobody respects romance.)

Mmm, I'd like to see some quantification on this. The idea of academics interested solely in "literary fiction" seems like straw man to me, or maybe based on high school teachers (or their equivalent). For the hell of it, I just Googled "doctoral dissertations on tolkien". Browse through a few pages of that, and it's clear that this is a pretty common thing.

I know what you mean when you say "nobody respects romance"— but I suspect you're thinking of elderly male professors. There's a tendency to dismiss romance because it's aimed at women. In the US, 58% of graduate students are women, and women earn the majority of PhDs. Traditional male biases still survive, but it's not a safe prediction for the future.

Also, this is "be careful what you wish for" territory. Nothing kills a teenager's interest in a book like making it required reading.

I think neither Ulysses nor LotR is the most influential work of fiction in the 20th century though: that honor should go to 1984.

Ok, maybe, if your criteria is "affected ideas in the non-literary world". Though I think Orwell would have competition from The Jungle, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and (ugh) Ayn Rand. Orwell is an excellent stylist, but I don't think 1984 has had much literary influence.

In terms of "had the most imitators in fiction or other genres", a good case could be made for Dashiell Hammett as well as for Christie.

[Raphael]

All of these are somehow neglected by academia. I think the pecking order is crime fiction > science fiction > fantasy > romance.
(Crime fiction gets some recognition; nobody respects romance.)

Mmm, I'd like to see some quantification on this. The idea of academics interested solely in "literary fiction" seems like straw man to me, or maybe based on high school teachers (or their equivalent). For the hell of it, I just Googled "doctoral dissertations on tolkien". Browse through a few pages of that, and it's clear that this is a pretty common thing.

I know what you mean when you say "nobody respects romance"— but I suspect you're thinking of elderly male professors. There's a tendency to dismiss romance because it's aimed at women. In the US, 58% of graduate students are women, and women earn the majority of PhDs. Traditional male biases still survive, but it's not a safe prediction for the future.

Where would either of you place horror in that pecking order? Personally, I have this idea that horror should theoretically be seen as the genre of genre fiction that is closest to literary fiction, on the grounds that literary fiction is theoretically supposed to be about exploring the human condition, and our deepest fears strike me as a pretty important part of the human condition. But the kind of people who generally see genre fiction as trash seem to see horror as the trashiest of the trash.

[zompist]

Where would either of you place horror in that pecking order? Personally, I have this idea that horror should theoretically be seen as the genre of genre fiction that is closest to literary fiction, on the grounds that literary fiction is theoretically supposed to be about exploring the human condition, and our deepest fears strike me as a pretty important part of the human condition. But the kind of people who generally see genre fiction as trash seem to see horror as the trashiest of the trash.

My first two random thoughts: 1. It would be hard to square the dismissal of horror with the literary preeminence of Kafka. 2. As a literary genre, isn't horror just a subgenre of fantasy/sf? I think it reached its full flowering in cinema and TV.

Your point about fear is good. At its best, genre is a powerful way to explore ideas about humanity and society, which literary fiction is supposed to be good at. I'm tempted to rant more about why so much literary fiction is boring, but I know it isn't; it's just a matter of taste. I recall reading an engaging book of essays by Nick Hornby, who really liked lit fic and made it sound appealing. He tried an Iain Banks sf book and couldn't get through it. So it's like most subfields of art: it all looks the same and is rather forbidding till you get to know the conventions and find the good bits.

[Linguoboy]

Where would either of you place horror in that pecking order? Personally, I have this idea that horror should theoretically be seen as the genre of genre fiction that is closest to literary fiction, on the grounds that literary fiction is theoretically supposed to be about exploring the human condition, and our deepest fears strike me as a pretty important part of the human condition. But the kind of people who generally see genre fiction as trash seem to see horror as the trashiest of the trash.

If you want your horror to be respected by the academy, it has to be labeled "psychological horror". Oh, and be sure get someone to lard their blurb with Jungian jargon to back that up if you can.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I am now reevaluating many earlier thoughts.

[Nortaneous]

Re: phonemes, Sikaritai has been alleged to have intramorphemic contrastive syllabification.

Which page? I can’t find it. (Unless you mean the contrast between complex nuclei and hiatus… but that’s pretty normal, isn’t it?)

17-18: /kód.á/ [kódá] "later" vs. /kó.dɛ/ [kóɾɛ] "lake".

/t/ only appears word-initially, so you might think these could instead be /kó.tá/ and /kó.dɛ/, but /d/ can appear in coda position, and can be followed stem-finally by a vowel-initial suffix: /pid-ó-wa/, presumably [pidówa].

The supposed [dʒ] allophone of /i/ may also have to do with syllabification somehow, although it's not stated as such in the paper. But otherwise it wouldn't be obvious to me why /brɛiáwa/ (sic, should be /bdɛiáwa/) is pronounced [bɾɛ.já.wa], but /pɛ́íá/ is [pɛ́.dʒá]... (p. 108)

Old SIL manuscripts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The SIL manuscript phonemic analysis of Obokuitai, IIRC, is obviously wrong (posits place-restricted diphthongs and bizarre toneless vowels to avoid /kʷ/), so it wouldn't surprise me if the Sikaritai one also has problems.

(This is a later addendum: With some further research, the Wikipedia article on Rhyme seems to suggest it was partly introduced from Arabic, through Spain, which I had not heard before. It seems to have also developed independently in Ireland, and there seems to be some contention over which was the source (I might even guess it was both converging). I wish I could comment further on that, but I don't know either Old Irish or Classical Arabic at all.)

That's the first I've heard of it, but aren't there unrelated reasons to suspect early contact between Ireland and some Semitic group? Maybe it wasn't entirely independent.

[Pabappa]

i would lean towards analyzing that as gemination unless that language also allows true [dd] or other geminates that can contrast with bare forms. its common for gemination to appear when a consonant ends a syllable and then the next syllable begins with a vowel. e.g. japanese and mandarin both did it, and [ʔ] is inserted in some other languages, which could easily evolve towards gemination.

[Ares Land]

Mmm, I'd like to see some quantification on this. The idea of academics interested solely in "literary fiction" seems like straw man to me, or maybe based on high school teachers (or their equivalent). For the hell of it, I just Googled "doctoral dissertations on tolkien". Browse through a few pages of that, and it's clear that this is a pretty common thing.

Tell you what, I tried my theory on Lolita and Lord of the Rings (both highly respected doorstoppers published ca 1955).
As it happens, my assumptions were wrong. You'll find more doctoral dissertations on Tolkien than on Nabokov! Definitely not what I expected.

At its best, genre is a powerful way to explore ideas about humanity and society, which literary fiction is supposed to be good at. I'm tempted to rant more about why so much literary fiction is boring, but I know it isn't; it's just a matter of taste. I recall reading an engaging book of essays by Nick Hornby, who really liked lit fic and made it sound appealing. He tried an Iain Banks sf book and couldn't get through it. So it's like most subfields of art: it all looks the same and is rather forbidding till you get to know the conventions and find the good bits.

I read both genre and literary fiction in about identical proportions. Honestly, most of both is boring crap. For every novel lovingly describing the writer's trip to the supermarket and the impressive breasts of the girl at checkout, I can give you a Fascists! In! Space! novel or a Promising Youth Living In Squalor Who Befriends The Totally Not Elves While Nothing Much Happens seven-volumes fantasy saga. (*)

Sturgeon law equally applies no matter the genre. We nerds are just, as you say, very good at picking the good ones in fantasy and science fiction

Where would either of you place horror in that pecking order? Personally, I have this idea that horror should theoretically be seen as the genre of genre fiction that is closest to literary fiction, on the grounds that literary fiction is theoretically supposed to be about exploring the human condition, and our deepest fears strike me as a pretty important part of the human condition. But the kind of people who generally see genre fiction as trash seem to see horror as the trashiest of the trash.

It's hard to deny the literary worth of some horror writers: Kafka, as zompist said, or Edgar Allan Poe or Maupassant. Of course some people are very good at denying any possible connection between Poe and Clive Barker.
I think horror moved way way up the pecking order because of Stephen King. The thing is, King put out works of excellent literary quality on a yearly basis. Denial got increasingly harder. Not to mention that some of his work can be safely handled, such as The Shawshank Redemption, or 11/22/63. Yet another factor is that it's now people my age running the literary show, and my generation grew up on Stephen King.

(*) I wish I made those up, but all three are actual real life examples and got rave reviews.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I feel pleasantly reassured at having some of my apparently bad assumptions challenged on these points. It is very much a novel feeling.

[Zju]

But what I'd point out is that any of these could be used to explain why you have the assimilation. The phonemic theory has no particular advantage here.

Do you know any specific linguists or works who attack phonemes this way? I know there are, and my use of phonemes is so old and entrenched in my thinking that I've been curious to read more about that...

I'd also like to know more in-depth how underlying speech sound can be analysed with something else than phonemes. How are Chinese onsets and rhymes not phonemes, for instance?
I think we can all agree that there are some fundamental speech sound units in each language, so I don't know how anyone can entertain the idea that it's just strings of sounds that we're memorising.

[Kuchigakatai]

I'd also like to know more in-depth how underlying speech sound can be analysed with something else than phonemes. How are Chinese onsets and rhymes not phonemes, for instance?

It is possible to map the rhymes into phonemes of vowel nucleus and consonants, but the rhymes have such complementary distributions and allophony that it is pretty ambiguous how to go about it.

Take -ian [jɛn]~[iɛ̯n]. If we think of syllables as CGVC, and an inventory of /i ɨ y u ə a/ coming from the (x)-i (s)-i -ü -u -e -a [i ɨ y u ə a] consonant-less rhymes, this rhyme -ian [jɛn]~[iɛ̯n] could be analyzed as either /jən/ or /jan/, so which is it? "/an/" is [æn], and it's conceivably /j-/ could raise the nucleus, but /jə/ is also clearly [jɛ]~[iɛ̯] (vs. /ja/ [ja]~[ia̯]), so it's conceivably also /jən/. One argument goes it's /jan/ because, when -r is attached, it becomes -ian+r [jɑɹ], not [jəɹ]. But what if you don't have erhua, as many speakers don't?

Take -iong [jʊŋ]~[iʊ̯ŋ]. If we think of syllables as above, is this reasonably /juŋ/, or /jəŋ/, whose gap is otherwise there, or perhaps even /yŋ/, whose gap is also otherwise there? Maybe it's /juŋ/ because it shares the most features with it (notably both labialization and a glide /j/). This is an easy case maybe, but everything in the distribution looks this way.

And once these problems start piling up, the ambiguities start getting weirdly interdependent: does the famous problem of palatal consonants really involve a [tɕ] allophone of /ts tʂ k/ before /i/, or is it rather /i/ that has an allophone [ɨ] after the /ts tʂ/ consonant series, which would imply that either /tɕ/ is its own phoneme, or rather [tɕ] is an allophone /k/ which has less features in common with [tɕ] than /ts tʂ/ (/k/ being a plosive not an affricate)? And there's no alternations to help you (e.g. k-o but tʃ-i in many languages), as with /janr/ [jɑɹ] before, because this is Mandarin and there's no relevant morphology here.

The complementary distribution is disturbingly annoying whatever you choose! [tɕ] only appears before rhymes involving [ i y], and [ts tʂ k] only appear before rhymes involving [e ɛ ə a ɔ o ʊ u], and [ɨ] (also reasonably notated [z̩] or [ʐ̩]) only appears after [ts tʂ]-like consonants.

[Zju]

I was more alluding that one could analyse [jɛn]~[iɛ̯n] as a fancy unitary phoneme - a triphthong: /jɛn̯/. Yes, it has obvious constituent parts in its realisation, but we don't analyse English /eɪ/ as two phonemes, do we? Why couldn't each possible Chinese rhyme be its own, independent phoneme?

As for the palatals, [tɕ] being an allophone /k/ surely isn't that much of an issue - I'd be surprised if there isn't any other language that has a palatal allophone of /k/ while also having /ts/. Even then, crosslinguistically not all features are constrastive in all positions, e.g. in languages, which have voicing assimilation, voicing isn't contrastive in front of an obstruent.

But back to the topic - what are some theories or papers that analyse speech sounds in terms of something else than phonemes?

[zompist]

I was more alluding that one could analyse [jɛn]~[iɛ̯n] as a fancy unitary phoneme - a triphthong: /jɛn̯/. Yes, it has obvious constituent parts in its realisation, but we don't analyse English /eɪ/ as two phonemes, do we? Why couldn't each possible Chinese rhyme be its own, independent phoneme?

[...] But back to the topic - what are some theories or papers that analyse speech sounds in terms of something else than phonemes?

You've just answered your own question! Treating the entire rhyme of a Chinese syllable as one phonological object is quite reasonable, and it's what Chinese scholars have done for millennia, but it's not using classical phonemes. And if you can take an entire rhyme as a phonological object, why not take an entire syllable as one? That would probably be pretty reasonable for Japanese.

If you're looking at Chinese tiān and not sure if it's five phonemes or four or two or one, it's hard to maintain that "phonemes" are a well defined concept! And if they're not, it's hard to maintain that they're an essential theoretical tool and that alternatives are not imaginable.

[Zju]

What I don't understand is how exactly are Chinese rhymes and "classical phonemes" different? What is it that one of them has and the other lacks? As far as this scheme is concerned, tiān is two phonemes and a tone, so phonemicity is well-defined.

English, on the other hand, has a gajillion of rhymes, so they clearly can't all be individual phonemes.

And if you can take an entire rhyme as a phonological object, why not take an entire syllable as one? That would probably be pretty reasonable for Japanese.

Not that I have taken any classes, but from what I know you stop at the smallest segmentable levels, so if syllables can be segmented, they are different phonemes. But -ian, as we saw, doesn't exactly have an unambiguous segmentation, so it would be just a single phoneme.


Another question: say that you're making tables of a language's paradigms, e.g.:

NOM -ok
ACC -en
GEN -in
LOC -ut

But then you stumble upon a noun class that doesn't mark its nominative and doesn't have a locative. How would you denote that, if you had to have a row for the locative? (sorry for the contrived example, the question is for the general case). Would it be:

NOM -
ACC -um
GEN -un
LOC

or rather:

NOM
ACC -um
GEN -un
LOC -

or rather something else?

[bradrn]

Another question: say that you're making tables of a language's paradigms, e.g.:

NOM -ok
ACC -en
GEN -in
LOC -ut

But then you stumble upon a noun class that doesn't mark its nominative and doesn't have a locative. How would you denote that, if you had to have a row for the locative? (sorry for the contrived example, the question is for the general case). Would it be:

NOM -
ACC -um
GEN -un
LOC

or rather:

NOM
ACC -um
GEN -un
LOC -

or rather something else?

I’d say something like:

NOM -∅
ACC -um
GEN -un
LOC ——

And then note in text that this noun has a defective paradigm.