Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Linguoboy]

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I was talking to two natives of Louisiana French, and they both agreed that Wikipedia is wrong and there is in fact a distinction between "nous" (we), "on" (some sort of impersonal) and "nous-autres" (we all, all of us). They say the 1PL form in the paradigm table should really be "nous mangeons", with on mange and nous-autres mange (yes, not "mangeons") as secondary variants. I want to correct the Wikipedia article. Do you know of any sources where this is explained this way?

J'mange
Tu manges
Il/Elle mange
Nous mangeons (On mange, Nous-autres mange)
Vous mange
Ils mange/mangeont

EDIT: although they're now emphasizing to me that nearly every town has a distinct dialect anyway...

I don't. This isn't true of the dialect of Vermilion, which is what I learned, and it doesn't correspond to the system given on the LSU Department of French Studies website: https://www.lsu.edu/hss/french/undergra ... sujets.php.

I would recommend finding out which variant they speak and seeing if you can find any published works which describe it

[Vijay]

Isn't it a draft grammar sketch?

Yes, that's why I was trying to say I wasn't sure whether he'd written anything beyond that draft (that was accessible).

I would think it is either an error or an unintentional lack of clarity, e.g. implicit reference to phonemic and phonetic levels.

And that's why I asked whether it might just be a typo.

[keenir]

Can I just say I recently acquired a copy of Whittaker’s book on Aztec script and I’m in love with it? It’s unusual, it’s clever, it’s bonkers (the color of the ink is a meaningful distinction in some cases.) I want to make a conscript like it now…

Just got a copy as well; thanks for the recc, Man In Space!

[Pabappa]

i dont usually bring up obscene topics so this feels a bit weird ... but i have nowhere else to ask.

in English, men's names like Dick and Peter have been turned into synonyms for the penis.

is there any known example (in any language) of a female name being turned into a synonym for the vagina?

edit: Fanny might be an example, depending on how the sense evolution went. stilll .... anyone know any others?

[Moose-tache]

I can't find any, although ther must be someone somewhere who calls it a "susie" or something. the imagery of cats seems to be pretty cross-cultural.

Question: where does the Russian word for cotton "xlopok" come from? I understand the etyomology of every other word for cotton in eastern Europe and the near east, but that one stumps me.

[Pabappa]

some scholars derive proto-Slavic initial /x/ from PIE clusters /sk/ and /ks/, ... but that assumes it's a native derivation from a word that underwent semantic shift. the -ok suggests it might in fact be native, but I cant help you beyond that.

[Richard W]

Question: where does the Russian word for cotton "xlopok" come from? I understand the etyomology of every other word for cotton in eastern Europe and the near east, but that one stumps me.

It's probably just a look-alike, but there is the Sanskrit word karpā́sa 'cotton'. Unfortunately, it looks more like a wanderwort than an inherited word, so *skalp looks like a non-starter.

[vlad]

Question: where does the Russian word for cotton "xlopok" come from? I understand the etyomology of every other word for cotton in eastern Europe and the near east, but that one stumps me.

Wiktionary relates it to:

Bulgarian (Rupian) хлъпка "knobble (??) of fleece, wool, cotton", "large snowflake, small lump of snow"
Macedonian лопка "snowball"
Czech chlup "hair"
Slovak chlp "hair"

[Richard W]

I'm looking for snappy names for a pair of writing systems for Pali. They use the same alphasyllabary (the Thai script), but one is an abugida and the other is an alphabet. I think of them as 'abugidic Thai script (Pali)' and 'alphabetic Thai script (Pali)', but I fear that too many people confound abugidas and alphasyllabaries. Apart from the similar situation for the Lao script, the only precedents for such a contrast I can think of are Tamil Brahmi and the Bhattiprolu script, which offer no useful precedents for script.

A native who understands the systems can't offer anything better than 'traditional' and 'syllabic'. 'Syllabic' for 'alphabetic' makes no sense to me, and I'm leery of calling an essentially 20th century system 'traditional'. Alternative names that have occurred to me are 'academic' for the abugida and 'popular' for the alphabet, but I get the impression that the alphabet has started making inroads into academia. In long hand I can describe them as 'with implicit vowels' and 'without implicit vowels', but they're not very snappy.

[bradrn]

Found an interesting article on how readers distinguish Thai letters: http://wrdingham.co.uk/thai/tellthai_preface.htm. I recommend this to anyone who wants to make a conscript, as a concrete example of the principle that letters tend to avoid being too close together.

[quinterbeck]

Found an interesting article on how readers distinguish Thai letters: http://wrdingham.co.uk/thai/tellthai_preface.htm. I recommend this to anyone who wants to make a conscript, as a concrete example of the principle that letters tend to avoid being too close together.

Is that the website of the Richard W who posts here (the same one who posted above you and there referred to the Thai script), or some other Richard W??

I am amused at the idea that this may have escaped your notice!

[bradrn]

Found an interesting article on how readers distinguish Thai letters: http://wrdingham.co.uk/thai/tellthai_preface.htm. I recommend this to anyone who wants to make a conscript, as a concrete example of the principle that letters tend to avoid being too close together.

Is that the website of the Richard W who posts here (the same one who posted above you and there referred to the Thai script), or some other Richard W??

I am amused at the idea that this may have escaped your notice!

This didn’t escape my notice — I’m almost certain it’s the same person, but I didn’t want to say anything in case I was wrong.

[Richard W]

Same one.

[fusijui]

Question: where does the Russian word for cotton "xlopok" come from? I understand the etyomology of every other word for cotton in eastern Europe and the near east, but that one stumps me.

Wiktionary relates it to:

Bulgarian (Rupian) хлъпка "knobble (??) of fleece, wool, cotton", "large snowflake, small lump of snow"
Macedonian лопка "snowball"
Czech chlup "hair"
Slovak chlp "hair"

It's a great word, very satisfying somehow. I wonder at the similarity to kapok, now that I'm reminded of it...

[Travis B.]

It's a great word, very satisfying somehow. I wonder at the similarity to kapok, now that I'm reminded of it...

Kapok though comes from Malay kapuk, so I somehow doubt that it is related. (It was borrowed into Russian as капок.)

[fusijui]

It's a great word, very satisfying somehow. I wonder at the similarity to kapok, now that I'm reminded of it...

Kapok though comes from Malay kapuk, so I somehow doubt that it is related. (It was borrowed into Russian as капок.)

Yes, definitely... I was thinking more of onomatopoiea-type relatedness, not direct inheritance/development. I may be nuts, but have a very low Nyland score!

[bradrn]

I’ve been thinking about sesquisyllabicity lately, and I’d be curious to know: exactly which languages are sesquisyllabic? Mon–Khmer, of course, as well as various other languages around that area. English native vocabulary is also straightforwardly sesquisyllabic, with a postsyllable inventory of /m̩ n̩ l̩ ɹ̩/ (vocalised to [əm ən u ə] for me). What else? Arguably some northern Vanuatuan languages have sesquisyllabic words — I’m thinking particularly of Mwotlap here, with alternations like /mitij/~/nimtiy/. Possibly also Sulka, though that case is more readily analysable as a straightforward syncope rule. Have I missed any?

[Richard W]

I've got a question on Arabic word boundaries. Orthographically, Arabic writes some prefixed prepositions, conjunctions and articles and suffixed pronouns (possessor or object) as part of the main word. Are these sequences felt as a single word or not? From my experiences with Biblical Hebrew, I feel the suffixed pronouns as part of the same word. Sometimes the similarly prefixed items in Biblical Hebrew act like part of the same word.

[Kuchigakatai]

I’ve been thinking about sesquisyllabicity lately, and I’d be curious to know: exactly which languages are sesquisyllabic? Mon–Khmer, of course, as well as various other languages around that area. English native vocabulary is also straightforwardly sesquisyllabic, with a postsyllable inventory of /m̩ n̩ l̩ ɹ̩/ (vocalised to [əm ən u ə] for me). What else? Arguably some northern Vanuatuan languages have sesquisyllabic words — I’m thinking particularly of Mwotlap here, with alternations like /mitij/~/nimtiy/. Possibly also Sulka, though that case is more readily analysable as a straightforward syncope rule. Have I missed any?

I've seen Classical Tibetan clusters transcribed as e.g. sbyor [s(ə)byor] 'to unite', bklags [b(ə)klaks] 'read (past tense)', rgyud [r(ə)gjut] 'Tantra', which looks pretty sesquisyllabic. There's likely other Sino-Tibetan like this. Which you probably count as around the Mon-Khmer area, but still.

I've got a question on Arabic word boundaries. Orthographically, Arabic writes some prefixed prepositions, conjunctions and articles and suffixed pronouns (possessor or object) as part of the main word. Are these sequences felt as a single word or not? From my experiences with Biblical Hebrew, I feel the suffixed pronouns as part of the same word. Sometimes the similarly prefixed items in Biblical Hebrew act like part of the same word.

Yeah, it'd be interesting to find out how acceptable it is to e.g. coordinate two verbs around the same suffixed pronoun vs. repeating the suffixed pronoun in each verb... or whether there's any difference at all in the grammar of one-consonant prepositions (spelled attached) and those longer ones that happen to be spelled with more letters.

I think it's safe to say the article is part of the word it attaches to. The assimilations it can undergo (l+s > ss, l+t > tt...) are by no means normal otherwise in Arabic, classical or modern.

[Nortaneous]

There's likely other Sino-Tibetan like this. Which you probably count as around the Mon-Khmer area, but still.

Sesquisyllabicity is a widespread feature of a large linguistic area, yes, and it was more widespread in the past - Old Chinese and Proto-Kra-Dai, probably also Proto-Hmong-Mien etc. A handful of Austronesian languages too, like Jarai.

The development of sesquisyllabicity in Gta' is probably unrelated.