Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[zompist]

i believe the anecdote but i think the kissa word is actually one where the k really spells /k/ and not the palatal sound. i remember being surprised because i thought IPA [ɕ] would be a prefect sound for onomatopeia of urination.

Quite possible... my Swedish dictionary doesn't give pronunciations and my Swedish textbook only gives general rules.

[Nachtswalbe]

Yes, of course there are plenty of endangered languages in the world today, and Malayalam is not one of them! But I still have certain concerns about its future, and I'm not the only one. As soon as those languages die, Malayalam is only one of those languages that is next in line.

I cannot overstate how abysmal the language attitudes among Malayalees in general are. In India in general, English is a lot more than just a practical means of communicating with the outside world; it's the language the middle class (and upper class, at least to some extent) uses for communication and thus a symbol of upward social mobility. I'd go so far as to say that most Malayalees consider it trendy and superior to their own language. It's rare that Malayalees say anything positive about their language amongst themselves (EDIT: or indeed in general, but especially amongst themselves). Most literate Malayalees read and write in English more often than in Malayalam. Malayalees rarely write online in Malayalam, even in spaces where all the users present are Malayalees and literate in Malayalam, and even when they do write in it, they almost always use Roman script when they know perfectly well how to read and write in Malayalam. My dad says that one time when he was reading a newspaper or magazine or something in Malayalam, in Kerala, someone criticized him just for reading in Malayalam rather than English. Needless to say, writing in Malayalam, especially for a career, is heavily frowned upon in Kerala. Whenever middle-class Malayalees gather in Kerala for any kind of social occasion, even if not a single person in the room has ever set foot outside of Kerala, they all speak exclusively in English to each other. There are plenty of middle-class Malayalees who know and use swearwords in English, but few are able to swear in their own language.

English-medium schools have been increasingly popular in Kerala since the 1950s, and I've even been told that nowadays, children are made to memorize an entire poem in English on their very first day of school, even though they don't understand a word of it, before they've learned anything about reading or writing in either English or Malayalam. Even in primarily English-speaking countries, Malayalee parents worry a lot about whether their children speak English well enough, and it's not until those same children are in their late teens at the earliest that they even begin to worry about whether they speak Malayalam. The last time I went to Kerala, I interacted with two little girls who spoke to me in Malayalam but counted exclusively in English (I'm not sure they even know how to count in Malayalam), and that was almost fifteen years ago. It has been impossible to find a job that pays reasonably well without some proficiency in English for a longer time than the (modern) state of Kerala has existed.

Venkatesh Rao wrote a similar thread on Kannada and argues that the Indian languages among others will be left for only "stupid people thinking stupid thoughts"

[Nachtswalbe]

Prediction: tailwinds of digitization, auto-translation, robust street use, and demographics notwithstanding, most 2nd tier languages are going to die of stupidification because they are below critical mass of creatives working in high culture and keeping it close to low culture

[Linguoboy]

i believe the anecdote but i think the kissa word is actually one where the k really spells /k/ and not the palatal sound. i remember being surprised because i thought IPA [ɕ] would be a prefect sound for onomatopeia of urination.

Quite possible... my Swedish dictionary doesn't give pronunciations and my Swedish textbook only gives general rules.

FWIW, Wiktionary gives:

kyssa /ˈɕʏsˌa/
kissa /ˈkɪsˌa/

Interestingly, the same pronunciation seems to apply to kissa in the sense of "female cat". I suppose this makes a certain sense, given that like kissa "piss", it's also onomatopoeic in origin (from the sound "kiss, kiss" used to call a cat).

On the subject of foreign borrowings leading to the creation of new phonemes, learning German was what taught me how to undo the pen-pin merger. (I still have it generally but I selectively ignore it for certain proper names or when speaking to people for whom it might cause confusion.) It also led to me pronouncing /x/ in a number of proper names and borrowings, such as Bach, chutzpah, and Gouda.

On the subject of proper names, I learned to produce [æ] before /r/ in order to properly pronounce the name of a New Yorker in my linguistics programme who complained no one could get it right and now I do the same for ever Barry, Harry, and Larry I know from the Northeast. I will always say the name of Forest Park with the traditional St Louis card-cord merger and my birthplace of "Baltimore" will never have a /t/ for me or more than one distinct vowel.

[Travis B.]

On the subject of foreign borrowings leading to the creation of new phonemes, learning German was what taught me how to undo the pen-pin merger. (I still have it generally but I selectively ignore it for certain proper names or when speaking to people for whom it might cause confusion.) It also led to me pronouncing /x/ in a number of proper names and borrowings, such as Bach, chutzpah, and Gouda.

I learned the Ach-Laut as [x] without much difficulty for pronouncing German names and words. Pronouncing the Ich-Laut required a bit more work, but realizing that the /h/ in human, Hugh, hue, etc. has the sound meant that I just had to learn to remove the [j] glide.

On the subject of proper names, I learned to produce [æ] before /r/ in order to properly pronounce the name of a New Yorker in my linguistics programme who complained no one could get it right and now I do the same for ever Barry, Harry, and Larry I know from the Northeast. I will always say the name of Forest Park with the traditional St Louis card-cord merger and my birthplace of "Baltimore" will never have a /t/ for me or more than one distinct vowel.

I have learned to spelling-pronounce /æ/ before /r/, but I still tend to pronounce the vowel kinda high, as I really have no near-open front vowel in any environment. One way or another, though, this is unnatural to me.

[anteallach]

Does anyone else have phonologically odd words (especially ones which are not interjections or onomatopoeia) in their lects? I noticed that in the word pizza, I have a geminate (as [ˈpʰiʔtːsə(ː)]), as in Standard Italian or Neapolitan, which is odd, because geminates in my lect are derived almost solely through cluster reduction (which may follow vowel elision), and this is a rare case of a geminate in my lect for which that is not the case.

Speaking of geminates, I have the "teen" oddity: thirteen, fourteen, eighteen (this one making some sort of sense) and nineteen all have geminate /tt/.

One which is probably a personal idiosyncracy is colonel. I grew up with both rhotic and non-rhotic influences, and thanks to the weird spelling I didn't realise this word was "supposed" to have /r/. So for me it is the only word (except for a few loanwords from languages with front rounded vowels) which contains the NURSE vowel with no hint of rhoticity.

[Travis B.]

Does anyone else have phonologically odd words (especially ones which are not interjections or onomatopoeia) in their lects? I noticed that in the word pizza, I have a geminate (as [ˈpʰiʔtːsə(ː)]), as in Standard Italian or Neapolitan, which is odd, because geminates in my lect are derived almost solely through cluster reduction (which may follow vowel elision), and this is a rare case of a geminate in my lect for which that is not the case.

Speaking of geminates, I have the "teen" oddity: thirteen, fourteen, eighteen (this one making some sort of sense) and nineteen all have geminate /tt/.

I have that too, now that I think of it.

[Travis B.]

Does anyone else confuse other English-speakers' can and can't? Often other English speakers' can't sound to me like can because they elide the /t/ and have a longer vowel than my can't, where I pronounce the vowel as markedly short, and, except before a word starting with a vowel, I reduce the /n/ to vowel nasalization and realize the /t/ as a glottal stop. Not infrequently I have to rely on context to tell apart other English-speakers' can and can't.

[zompist]

Does anyone else confuse other English-speakers' can and can't?

I think this has come up before. What I perceive is this:

unstressed can = [kn̩], can't = [kæ̃]
stressed can = [kæ̃(n)], can't = [kæ̃(t)]

That is, if you ask someone to repeat the word, it becomes less distinguishable.

[Nortaneous]

Does anyone else confuse other English-speakers' can and can't?

I think this has come up before. What I perceive is this:

unstressed can = [kn̩], can't = [kæ̃]
stressed can = [kæ̃(n)], can't = [kæ̃(t)]

That is, if you ask someone to repeat the word, it becomes less distinguishable.

except in dialects that resolved this by either having /ɑ/ in can't or /ɛ/ in can

[Travis B.]

Does anyone else confuse other English-speakers' can and can't?

I think this has come up before. What I perceive is this:

unstressed can = [kn̩], can't = [kæ̃]
stressed can = [kæ̃(n)], can't = [kæ̃(t)]

That is, if you ask someone to repeat the word, it becomes less distinguishable.

except in dialects that resolved this by either having /ɑ/ in can't or /ɛ/ in can

I don't have trouble distinguishing the two when I watch British TV (with invariably SSBE-speaking actors) for this very reason. It's really other Americans I have trouble with.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Does the -pela suffix in Tok Pisin come from English "fellow" or is it an Austronesian word?

[bradrn]

Does the -pela suffix in Tok Pisin come from English "fellow" or is it an Austronesian word?

I’m almost certain it’s English: e.g. Pisin ‘yu’ singular vs ‘yupela’ plural. (And Wikipedia seems to agree with me here, for what that’s worth.)

[Ryan of Tinellb]

Does anyone else confuse other English-speakers' can and can't? Often other English speakers' can't sound to me like can because they elide the /t/ and have a longer vowel than my can't, where I pronounce the vowel as markedly short, and, except before a word starting with a vowel, I reduce the /n/ to vowel nasalization and realize the /t/ as a glottal stop. Not infrequently I have to rely on context to tell apart other English-speakers' can and can't.

Only when Billy Joel is singing “the Downeaster ‘Alexa’”: A good captain can(’t) fall asleep. I had an argument with my friend about it when we didn’t agree.

[Pabappa]

Oh, interesting, .... I'd always assumed the line was "...can fall asleep." It makes perfect sense either way. But I checked a bunch of lyric sites now .... incidentally, it seems LyricWiki is gone .... and none of them agree with me.

[Travis B.]

In the dialect here, in a couple words, all right (one word) and already, /lr/ is commonly reduced to /r/. However, this results in vowel weirdness because the most common result is that the sequence [ɒːʁˤ] results, which is not normally allowed in NAE phonology. (Compare with [ɜːʁˤ] in words like never.) Some people, such as my mother, sometimes "fix" this by changing it to [ɔːʁˤ]. However, occasionally it instead is pronounced as [aːʁˤ], as I heard my daughter pronounce all right today and I also sometimes do. Note that this is not START, as that would be [ɑːʁˤ], which for some reason I don't really hear in this case. (And note that the variety here is emphatically not cot-caught-merging either.) Does anyone else have this in your lects?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

That's an interesting process, but I'm too idiolectally boring (phonologically, at least) to have anything remotely comparable.

I think I mostly still articulate the /l/ in all right when speaking at a normal speed (my "r" also isn't as uvular, though; I'm pretty sure it's still [ɹʷ]), though it gets elided (I'm cot-caught and father-bother mergered, though, so I end up with a "sorry-starry" rhyme, though coda-r still blocks the merger, and the merger also doesn't occur in derived forms — gory and starry don't rhyme), but do drop it when speaking very fast, in which it just falls together with the sorry-starry vowel (in which case I might even represent it graphically as alright).

[Travis B.]

(in which case I might even represent it graphically as alright).

The thing about all right IMD is that it functions as one word except in certain cases (where then the /l/ is not elided), but the standard way to write it is as two words, such that I would prefer to write it as alright in most cases, as many people do anyways.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

(in which case I might even represent it graphically as alright).

The thing about all right IMD is that it functions as one word except in certain cases (where then the /l/ is not elided), but the standard way to write it is as two words, such that I would prefer to write it as alright in most cases, as many people do anyways.

I do exactly the same thing. It tends to function as one word for me, too, but I usually still represent it orthographically as two because at some point I was taught it was correct (and I developed a perception of "correctness" early in life, and a tendency to wish to use language "correctly"). I actually did use the one-word spelling — without comment even from some teachers — as a very young child, so the variation appears to have made some inroads among educated speakers.

[Travis B.]

I do exactly the same thing. It tends to function as one word for me, too, but I usually still represent it orthographically as two because at some point I was taught it was correct (and I developed a perception of "correctness" early in life, and a tendency to wish to use language "correctly"). I actually did use the one-word spelling — without comment even from some teachers — as a very young child, so the variation appears to have made some inroads among educated speakers.

For me I have always had a strong distinction between the formal literary language and everyday speech. In the formal literary language I cared very much about "correctness" - except when it came to silly rules that were out of touch with reality like "no split infinitives" or "no standing prepositions at the ends of clauses". In everyday speech, though, I couldn't care less, and made a point of speaking to everyone in dialect, even non-native English-speakers. Note though that in IRC a long time back I tried cultivating a fully informal written English, full of "hafta"s, "gotta"s, "shouldna"s, "I onno"s, and so on, but I abandoned the project when I realized that many non-native English-speakers couldn't understand it.