Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Rounin Ryuuji]

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.

I haven't always had this distinction in my mind. I tended to take it at face value when I was told certain forms were "incorrect" as a child, and so didn't really develop distinctive dialect features to begin with. For whatever reason, nobody made a big deal about infinitive splitting (probably because it's been so common in speech for the past few hundred years that people don't notice it), and some prepositions do end up at the end of phrases in set expressions (like "begin with", or the dozens of phrasal verbs, which are themselves splittable, as He threw it out).

If I'm remembering right, the first uproar about it was over an Eighteenth Century novel called Evelina (roughly [ɛ.və'lai.nə] in period pronunciation), where Frances Burney made liberal use of infinitive-splitting. Our modern way of writing longform prose narration was still very young then. The text of Evelina includes a few archaic spellings, like inchanted, too. I think the uproar itself might've been more that the novel was originally a fairly controversial art form (one person called novels, among other things that we might call harmless, or even desirable for people to experience, like the theatre, "engines of Satan"), many early novelists (Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and also Jane Austen come immediately to mind) were women, and many of their works include violence and sexual scandal.

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.

The conservative spellings have the advantage of cross-generational recognisability, and being broadly understandable. I simply take for granted that "have to" probably sounds something like ['hæf.tə] unless the "have" is emphasised — "you have to" would presumably be [juʊ hæv tʰuː] if I spoke it aloud (note that "you" can also be reduced to [jʊ~jə], and "to" to [tʰə], depending on the speed of speech, and the cadence most natural for where this appears in a larger sentence). It also helps when we pronounce a certain contraction differently (my colloquial "I don't know" is ['ai.də.noʊ], not something like what I guess is ['ai ʔə.noʊ]) — I'm not sure I would've known what I onno was.

[Travis B.]

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.

I haven't always had this distinction in my mind. I tended to take it at face value when I was told certain forms were "incorrect" as a child, and so didn't really develop distinctive dialect features to begin with.

I was one of those kids who liked to use "big words" and formal language, but I always recognized that certain words were pronounced differently by myself and other people here than in other parts of the country (and certain morphological forms are present which are not in Standard English, like in "I was broughten up to speak this way"), and in particular by the time I reached high school I realized there were considerable differences, particularly with regard to morphophonology, between how people here spoke and the standard language. I was never told to speak in a more standard fashion, and if anything, the pressure I experienced was to favor speaking in lower registers. I also came to strongly identify as a Wisconsinite in particular, and thus this lent itself to favor speaking in the dialect here in southeastern Wisconsin over speaking in a more standard fashion. Other North Americans seem to understand it anyways even though it may sound strongly accented to them (from what I gathered from when I lived out in Maryland). This does result in occasionally having to repeat myself, though, when speaking with 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.

The conservative spellings have the advantage of cross-generational recognisability, and being broadly understandable. I simply take for granted that "have to" probably sounds something like ['hæf.tə] unless the "have" is emphasised — "you have to" would presumably be [juʊ hæv tʰuː] if I spoke it aloud (note that "you" can also be reduced to [jʊ~jə], and "to" to [tʰə], depending on the speed of speech, and the cadence most natural for where this appears in a larger sentence). It also helps when we pronounce a certain contraction differently (my colloquial "I don't know" is ['ai.də.noʊ], not something like what I guess is ['ai ʔə.noʊ]) — I'm not sure I would've known what I onno was.

I came to the conclusion that Standard English spelling has the advantage over informal spellings that it is not so closely tied to any given dialect's pronunciation, especially with English as a lingua franca where many L2 speakers of English may have little contact with informal English pronunciation by native speakers. Also, even the informal spelling I used was in many ways conventional, e.g. the /h/ in "hafta" may be dropped, and "I onno" may even be pronounced [ˈaːːnɵ(ː)], as the goal was to bring about change in English orthography rather than to write in away that directly reflected actual pronunciation.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

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.

I haven't always had this distinction in my mind. I tended to take it at face value when I was told certain forms were "incorrect" as a child, and so didn't really develop distinctive dialect features to begin with.

I was one of those kids who liked to use "big words" and formal language, but I always recognized that certain words were pronounced differently by myself and other people here than in other parts of the country (and certain morphological forms are present which are not in Standard English, like in "I was broughten up to speak this way"), and in particular by the time I reached high school I realized there were considerable differences, particularly with regard to morphophonology, between how people here spoke and the standard language.

I didn't have that difference in pronunciation — my speech was very close to "neutral" (a lot of the early speech to which I was exposed was fairly close to that; my natural mother was from Michigan, and herself had a very close to "neutral" accent).

I was never told to speak in a more standard fashion, and if anything, the pressure I experienced was to favor speaking in lower registers.

By the time I encountered any of this, I was a contrary teenager, and the quarters from which it came were not those I was given to looking on with any sort of respect (this actually hasn't changed as I've grown older). I didn't (and don't) deliberately use big words, but I also don't avoid using them if that's what pops up, despite being told by some family members that I shouldn't speak the way I do.

I also came to strongly identify as a Wisconsinite in particular, and thus this lent itself to favor speaking in the dialect here in southeastern Wisconsin over speaking in a more standard fashion.

I never really came to identify with the geographical area in which I grew up (I have never had any very strong attachment to any geographical area).

Other North Americans seem to understand it anyways even though it may sound strongly accented to them (from what I gathered from when I lived out in Maryland). This does result in occasionally having to repeat myself, though, when speaking with non-native English-speakers.

From the way you transcribe it, I might have some trouble understanding it at first, but would probably adapt quickly enough.

[Travis B.]

I haven't always had this distinction in my mind. I tended to take it at face value when I was told certain forms were "incorrect" as a child, and so didn't really develop distinctive dialect features to begin with.

I was one of those kids who liked to use "big words" and formal language, but I always recognized that certain words were pronounced differently by myself and other people here than in other parts of the country (and certain morphological forms are present which are not in Standard English, like in "I was broughten up to speak this way"), and in particular by the time I reached high school I realized there were considerable differences, particularly with regard to morphophonology, between how people here spoke and the standard language.

I didn't have that difference in pronunciation — my speech was very close to "neutral" (a lot of the early speech to which I was exposed was fairly close to that; my natural mother was from Michigan, and herself had a very close to "neutral" accent).

I from early on could readily speak in both high and low registers, and often as a kid preferred speaking in higher registers, and I perceived the high register as "neutral", but later on I realized that the high register was just the high register of the dialect here and not General American, due to having significant phonetic and morphophonological differences from GA (i.e. it has significantly different vowel realization from GA despite mapping closely to it on a per-phoneme basis, it has markedly differently-pronounced /r/ and /l/ from GA, it has palatalization/affrication in places (e.g. fac[tɕ]ory, re[ɕtɕ]aurant) where GA does not have it, etc.)

I was never told to speak in a more standard fashion, and if anything, the pressure I experienced was to favor speaking in lower registers.

By the time I encountered any of this, I was a contrary teenager, and the quarters from which it came were not those I was given to looking on with any sort of respect (this actually hasn't changed as I've grown older). I didn't (and don't) deliberately use big words, but I also don't avoid using them if that's what pops up, despite being told by some family members that I shouldn't speak the way I do.

I grew away from preferring high registers to preferring low registers on my own, in part due to perceiving low registers are more characteristic of how actual people my age spoke and in part due to coming to favor dialect over standard language, but I still readily use high-register terms when I see fit without trying to emulate GA.

Other North Americans seem to understand it anyways even though it may sound strongly accented to them (from what I gathered from when I lived out in Maryland). This does result in occasionally having to repeat myself, though, when speaking with non-native English-speakers.

From the way you transcribe it, I might have some trouble understanding it at first, but would probably adapt quickly enough.

I rarely encounter North Americans who actually have trouble with my speech, and I suspect it is because many features of my speech are more widespread than people are aware, so people likely have at some point already heard them somewhere.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I from early on could readily speak in both high and low registers, and often as a kid preferred speaking in higher registers, and I perceived the high register as "neutral", but later on I realized that the high register was just the high register of the dialect here and not General American, due to having significant phonetic and morphophonological differences from GA (i.e. it has significantly different vowel realization from GA despite mapping closely to it on a per-phoneme basis, it has markedly differently-pronounced /r/ and /l/ from GA, it has palatalization/affrication in places (e.g. fac[tɕ]ory, re[ɕtɕ]aurant) where GA does not have it, etc.)

I can have a similar shift in some words — before /r/, my /t/ can have a realisation of [tʰ~tʃʰ] in free variation, though the affrication is weak, and doesn't spread, so res[tʃʰ]aurant is a possible realisation, but not *re[ʃtʃʰ]aurant, but battery, factory are still trisyllables, so I'm not a perfect GA, just... fairly close to it. Your pronunciation might sound acoustically a bit nicer than mine, which I tend to think feels "chewed up", to put it in very subjective and nonquantifiable terms.

I grew away from preferring high registers to preferring low registers on my own, in part due to perceiving low registers are more characteristic of how actual people my age spoke and in part due to coming to favor dialect over standard language, but I still readily use high-register terms when I see fit without trying to emulate GA.

That makes sense. I suppose I've come to see being a bit flowery as a kind of personal expression.

[Travis B.]

I from early on could readily speak in both high and low registers, and often as a kid preferred speaking in higher registers, and I perceived the high register as "neutral", but later on I realized that the high register was just the high register of the dialect here and not General American, due to having significant phonetic and morphophonological differences from GA (i.e. it has significantly different vowel realization from GA despite mapping closely to it on a per-phoneme basis, it has markedly differently-pronounced /r/ and /l/ from GA, it has palatalization/affrication in places (e.g. fac[tɕ]ory, re[ɕtɕ]aurant) where GA does not have it, etc.)

I can have a similar shift in some words — before /r/, my /t/ can have a realisation of [tʰ~tʃʰ] in free variation, though the affrication is weak, and doesn't spread, so res[tʃʰ]aurant is a possible realisation, but not *re[ʃtʃʰ]aurant, but battery, factory are still trisyllables, so I'm not a perfect GA, just... fairly close to it. Your pronunciation might sound acoustically a bit nicer than mine, which I tend to think feels "chewed up", to put it in very subjective and nonquantifiable terms.

Affrication and retroflexion is very common in /tr/ and /dr/ in English. What sticks out in some varieties like my own is that /t/ affricates and palatalizes before /ər/ without losing a syllable except where /t/ would be flapped (so one still gets ba[ɾ]ery) or aspirated (aside from occasional cases like [tɕʰ]arantula).

[Nortaneous]

The conservative spellings have the advantage of cross-generational recognisability, and being broadly understandable. I simply take for granted that "have to" probably sounds something like ['hæf.tə] unless the "have" is emphasised — "you have to" would presumably be [juʊ hæv tʰuː] if I spoke it aloud (note that "you" can also be reduced to [jʊ~jə], and "to" to [tʰə], depending on the speed of speech, and the cadence most natural for where this appears in a larger sentence). It also helps when we pronounce a certain contraction differently (my colloquial "I don't know" is ['ai.də.noʊ], not something like what I guess is ['ai ʔə.noʊ]) — I'm not sure I would've known what I onno was.

For me, "you have to" is something like [jæ̌ftə] ~ [jə(ɦ)æftə] - I don't think there's any degree of emphasis in which it would end with [uw] - and "I don't know" can be anywhere between [ɑ̃ɤ̃nʌw] and [ə̃ːː] with a pitch contour.

"Alright" is [ɒˤɹʌjˀt] ~ [ɒˤɹaʔ]. "Already" is [ɒˤɹɛ(ɾ)i].

I don't have affrication in 'restaurant' and don't think I've ever heard that, but I also don't have yod coalescence or affrication of /dr/.

The teens are /θɚttijn forttijn fiftijn sikstijn sevənttijn ejttijn nʌjnttijn/.

Also, even the informal spelling I used was in many ways conventional, e.g. the /h/ in "hafta" may be dropped, and "I onno" may even be pronounced [ˈaːːnɵ(ː)], as the goal was to bring about change in English orthography rather than to write in away that directly reflected actual pronunciation.

Informal spelling is highly conventionalized. [ə̃˧ə̃˥ə̃˩˨] is spelled <idk>.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Affrication and retroflexion is very common in /tr/ and /dr/ in English. What sticks out in some varieties like my own is that /t/ affricates and palatalizes before /ər/ without losing a syllable except where /t/ would be flapped (so one still gets ba[ɾ]ery) or aspirated (aside from occasional cases like [tɕʰ]arantula).

Yes, I had noted my comparative lack of palatalisation. I imagine it has something to do with the differing quality of the rhotic.

Incidentally, a change of postconsonantal /r/ > /j/ is hypothesised to have occurred in some varieties of Old Japanese (explaining the existence of the imperative particles in ro and yo, and the Old Japanese yodan imperative in -ye). I've only recently come to understand the things rhotics can do to surrounding consonants.

[Otto Kretschmer]

What are examples of some of the most polysynthetic langauges in the world/

[bradrn]

What are examples of some of the most polysynthetic langauges in the world/

Well, any question about ‘the most polysynthetic language’ runs into two problems:

1. How does one define ‘polysynthesis’?
2. Can it be measured?

For the first, the problem is that so-called ‘polysynthetic’ languages come in very many different and distinct types: my favourite reference here is Mattissen’s paper A structural typology of polysynthesis. The second is also difficult, but we could consider WALS feature 22A (‘inflectional synthesis of the verb’) as a crude starting point. By this measure, the most polysynthetic languages would be Koasati and Wichita, followed by Abkhaz, Alamblak, Chinook, Imonda, Ingush, Lakhota and Yagua.

[Travis B.]

Has anyone else heard intervocalic /ð/ regularly pronounced as [d~ɾ] in English? I ask because my daughter has this and no one else I know here does, as it is much more common here to leave it as a fricative or even to elide it than to stop or flap it intervocalically (whereas it is very common to stop initial /ð/ here).

[foxcatdog]

Has anyone else heard intervocalic /ð/ regularly pronounced as [d~ɾ] in English? I ask because my daughter has this and no one else I know here does, as it is much more common here to leave it as a fricative or even to elide it than to stop or flap it intervocalically (whereas it is very common to stop initial /ð/ here).

If she doesn't also have it initially it would be weird. But general fortition is well attested and the specific change your looking for is a common resolution of *ð in less prestigous english dialects through it's usually combined with the stopping of it's voiceless equivalent. What dialect do you speak btw?

[Travis B.]

Has anyone else heard intervocalic /ð/ regularly pronounced as [d~ɾ] in English? I ask because my daughter has this and no one else I know here does, as it is much more common here to leave it as a fricative or even to elide it than to stop or flap it intervocalically (whereas it is very common to stop initial /ð/ here).

If she doesn't also have it initially it would be weird.

I haven't really paid attention to whether she stops it initially or not; after I noticed the above I listened for her stopping /ð/ initially and noticed case of her not stopping it initially, but it's pretty normally here to both stop and not stop it initially in free variation.

But general fortition is well attested and the specific change your looking for is a common resolution of *ð in less prestigous english dialects through it's usually combined with the stopping of it's voiceless equivalent.

/ð/ stops (and assimilates to nasals and sibilants too) or elides much more readily than /θ/ in the dialect here, which tends to either be preserved or to initially have slight affrication in the dialect here.

What dialect do you speak btw?

I'm from and live in southeastern Wisconsin, i.e. I speak a more northwestern Inland North dialect.

[foxcatdog]

Voiced fricatives are generally more unstable than their voiceless counterparts to but i've never heard of it in any dialect of english. Interesting.

[Pabappa]

Though English has a perfectly good native word, shink, meaning "cupbearer, waiter; to pour an alcoholic drink", it has fallen out of use.
....
Perhaps modern English speakers have come to prefer words with more than one morpheme, or perhaps we simply don't like the sound of those old Germanic monosyllables.

similarly it occurred to me that close(d) is a much more polite term than shut, ....without looking it up, i wasnt sure whether the first word was native or a loan (turns out its a very old loan), but the latter word definitely isnt.

it could also just be the more forceful enunciation of the second word, but .... would people say "ship" is more rude than "boat"?Ive never heard that. That also rules out phonosemantic association with "shit", so I dont think that's what's up either. Still, it could be that ship~boat is not a word for which a rude form can arise since we dont generally form such emotional associations with naval vessels.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

similarly it occurred to me that close(d) is a much more polite term than shut, ....without looking it up, i wasnt sure whether the first word was native or a loan (turns out its a very old loan), but the latter word definitely isnt.

The word "close" is presumably softer-sounding both because of the sounds composing it, and because it's a loan from a superstratum perceived as elegant by the culture that speaks it (this can occur with two words that both sound harsh, cf. Japanese harakiri, which in fact has fewer harsh sounds than seppuku, which is all stops and sibilants).

it could also just be the more forceful enunciation of the second word, but .... would people say "ship" is more rude than "boat"? Ive never heard that. That also rules out phonosemantic association with "shit", so I dont think that's what's up either. Still, it could be that ship~boat is not a word for which a rude form can arise since we dont generally form such emotional associations with naval vessels.

A "ship" is usually significantly larger than a "boat" (though both are, in my understanding, native), and "vessel" sounds quite a lot more elegant than "ship".

If English had a word borrowed from Old French nef or navirie, probably something like neaf or navery (which would probably come out sounding like ['nævəɹiː]), I suspect speaking of the neaves or naveries, poetically perhaps even nav'ries (I could also see some form confusion, yielding yet another form neavery [nɛvəɹiː]) being more elegant-sounding than of "ships".

Also note other pairs, where the superstratum borrowing is more refined in some way — "cloth" and "fabric", "book" and "volume", "first run" and "first edition", "glass-like" and "vitreous", "never-ending" and "eternal", "yard" and "garden", "house" and "mansion" — not to mention how English differentiates between pig, cow, and chicken, and pork, beef, and poultry.

[Otto Kretschmer]

When is Proto Malayo-Polynesian spoken

[Moose-tache]

Probably around 2500~2000 BC.

Question: Is it possible for a language to "sound Papuan?" Language diversity is so high in the area that it seems difficult to pin down any characteristic features. I guess there are some basic tendencies, like a preference for head-final syntax, and the near-absense of rare distinctions like uvular plosives and the like. But if you were, say, hired to make a language that "sounds" Bantu, or SAE, or from certain parts of North America, it would be trivially easy. Fantasy authors have been making vaguely Arabic or pseudo-Chinese conlangs for years, and it never fails to get the message across. But even for people who have more exposure to them than the average, how do you make a language sound Papuan?

[bradrn]

‘Sounds Papuan’ is tricky; it’s as ill-defined as ‘sounds African’. Anecdotally from the ‘Name That Language’ thread there’s certainly a distinctive ‘Papuan’ æsthetic (which actually is remarkably close to the ‘South American’ æsthetic), but I’d be hard-pressed to pin down exactly what it is, or easily make a language with it. (It’s easier with specific families: I could easily make one which sounds like Yam for instance, though that family is distinctive even by Papuan standards.) Some salient points:

• Few to no fricatives
• A simple vowel system like /a e i o u/
• Usually simple syllable structures
• Often a contrast between voiceless and prenasalised stops
• Typewriter-friendly orthography

[Nortaneous]

Not that similar to South American - fewer nasal vowels and more coda consonants. A prototypical Papuan inventory would be something like /p t k mb nd Ng s m n N l r/ + optional /f h B G/ + /j w/ + labiovelars. Five vowels (some Tehit dialects have only four but this is unusual) and CVC syllable structure. Some Papuan languages, like Abau (IIRC), don't tolerate vowel sequences.