Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Otto Kretschmer]

My alt history spirit just asked what if that Alcuin never existed...

The only limitations of reconstruction I see is that One cannot reconstruct Classical Latin of 1st century BC from contemporary Romance languages which means that they started splitting later than this date.

[Travis B.]

The only limitations of reconstruction I see is that One cannot reconstruct Classical Latin of 1st century BC from contemporary Romance languages which means that they started splitting later than this date.

The whole idea of "Proto-Romance" is what would be reconstructed from attested Romance languages alone, as if Classical Latin and Late Latin graffiti were entirely lost to time.

[Richard W]

The only limitations of reconstruction I see is that One cannot reconstruct Classical Latin of 1st century BC from contemporary Romance languages which means that they started splitting later than this date.

No. Dialects can develop in parallel even in isolation. For example, as far as I'm aware, the accusative singular ending in -m is not reconstructable, but it was already feeble in the 1st century BC. Remember that vowel + m elides before another vowel in classical scansion.

[hwhatting]

No. Dialects can develop in parallel even in isolation. For example, as far as I'm aware, the accusative singular ending in -m is not reconstructable, but it was already feeble in the 1st century BC. Remember that vowel + m elides before another vowel in classical scansion.

A nasal ending can be reconstructed based on some one-syllable words (Fr. rien < rem, Sp. quien < quem), but without written Latin we wouldn't know that the nasal originally was /m/ and that it wasn't limited to, well, a couple of one-syllable words.

[Starbeam]

That's a really interesting observation. I agree about the implications, but I'm not sure about the reason for them.

One thing that may be relevant is Neg Hopping. English allows the negative to hop over to the left as far as possible (compare Mandarin which requires that it stick with the element negated). This interacts with scope, as Creyeditor suggests— it can be harder to figure out what an English speaker is actually negating. In this example, though, scope doesn't seem to be the issue, as what's being negated is the fairness.

However, there might be a pragmatic signal here. Not using Neg Hopping can give a sentence a narrow or pedantic feel— thus it's appropriate for a concession. ("The defendant recognizes that unwarranted language may have been used.") So maybe that's why the first sentence feels like a concession, while the second (with normal Neg Hopping) is more appropriate for a complaint.

That makes a lot of sense actually, thank you. I guess there should be a term for this sort of overlap, but honestly i'm not the one who should find it. Even on an ad-hoc basis. What's strange to me is that i can never imagine "I was given an unfair shot" being a complaint, unless it was accented unusually on the "unfair". In turn, "I wasn't given a fair shot" also has to accent the adjective "fair" to come off as a concession. But maybe what i just described in the previous two sentences is a form of circumlocution or at least a common tactic for patching semantic gaps with a different name.

[Richard W]

How likely would it be for prepositions to become postpositions? It happened in many Indo Aryan languages if not all of them.

It's not really what happened. There's an account of the evolution in https://ifl.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/sites ... ns2016.pdf. Basically she (Uta Reinöhl) says the inherited particles became verb prefixes or adpositions tending to become prepositions, for with SOV word order postnominal particles were liable to be interpreted as verb prefixes (so much for typology predictinɡ postposition), and in Indic the prepositions that had been particles were replaced by case forms of relational nouns, with the noun governed being in a genitive relationship. Now a word order universal kicks in, for the dominant relevant word order is GN, so the new adpositions became postpositions.

[dɮ the phoneme]

When a phoneme has both syllabic and non-syllabic allophones that are determined positionally (e.g. /i u/ in Latin, etc.), what formalism is typically used to describe the phonological processes in play? We might naively write a rule like i > j /_V, but this predicts that e.g. /iiia/ would be realized as [jjja], when I suspect [jija] is the more realistic outcome. I'd like to use footing to account for this, but the problem is that syllabification must happen before footing, whereas this kind of allophonic variation necessarily happens before syllabification. I don't know much about Latin, but my impression is that sequences like /iiia/ are not very common, if attested at all. Are there any languages with similar positional variation of vowels and semivowels that do allow long strings like this, which might provide a test case for different formalisms?

[bradrn]

When a phoneme has both syllabic and non-syllabic allophones that are determined positionally (e.g. /i u/ in Latin, etc.), what formalism is typically used to describe the phonological processes in play? We might naively write a rule like i > j /_V, but this predicts that e.g. /iiia/ would be realized as [jjja], when I suspect [jija] is the more realistic outcome. I'd like to use footing to account for this, but the problem is that syllabification must happen before footing, whereas this kind of allophonic variation necessarily happens before syllabification. I don't know much about Latin, but my impression is that sequences like /iiia/ are not very common, if attested at all. Are there any languages with similar positional variation of vowels and semivowels that do allow long strings like this, which might provide a test case for different formalisms?

Not sure, but there is a more fundamental question here: are [iiia] and [jija] even different things in the first place?

[Travis B.]

When a phoneme has both syllabic and non-syllabic allophones that are determined positionally (e.g. /i u/ in Latin, etc.), what formalism is typically used to describe the phonological processes in play? We might naively write a rule like i > j /_V, but this predicts that e.g. /iiia/ would be realized as [jjja], when I suspect [jija] is the more realistic outcome. I'd like to use footing to account for this, but the problem is that syllabification must happen before footing, whereas this kind of allophonic variation necessarily happens before syllabification. I don't know much about Latin, but my impression is that sequences like /iiia/ are not very common, if attested at all. Are there any languages with similar positional variation of vowels and semivowels that do allow long strings like this, which might provide a test case for different formalisms?

Not sure, but there is a more fundamental question here: are [iiia] and [jija] even different things in the first place?

I can personally contrast [ii] and [ji] myself...

[bradrn]

When a phoneme has both syllabic and non-syllabic allophones that are determined positionally (e.g. /i u/ in Latin, etc.), what formalism is typically used to describe the phonological processes in play? We might naively write a rule like i > j /_V, but this predicts that e.g. /iiia/ would be realized as [jjja], when I suspect [jija] is the more realistic outcome. I'd like to use footing to account for this, but the problem is that syllabification must happen before footing, whereas this kind of allophonic variation necessarily happens before syllabification. I don't know much about Latin, but my impression is that sequences like /iiia/ are not very common, if attested at all. Are there any languages with similar positional variation of vowels and semivowels that do allow long strings like this, which might provide a test case for different formalisms?

Not sure, but there is a more fundamental question here: are [iiia] and [jija] even different things in the first place?

I can personally contrast [ii] and [ji] myself...

Are you sure? When I try it comes out as something like [ii] vs [jɨ̯i] — which gives a phonemic distinction between /ii/ and /ji/, but not a phonetic one.

[Travis B.]

Not sure, but there is a more fundamental question here: are [iiia] and [jija] even different things in the first place?

I can personally contrast [ii] and [ji] myself...

Are you sure? When I try it comes out as something like [ii] vs [jɨ̯i] — which gives a phonemic distinction between /ii/ and /ji/, but not a phonetic one.

Of course, my [j] seems to be closer than my [i] without really being fricated...

[Moose-tache]

There are literally people who speak Danish. No phonetic distinction is too trivial to be meaningful.

I understand why ii and ji are tricky to distinguish in initial position, but try it after a consonant: fii vs fji. Way different, right?

[bradrn]

There are literally people who speak Danish. No phonetic distinction is too trivial to be meaningful.

True, but my point is that there is no phonetic difference between [j] and [i]. They are the same thing. What difference exists is phonemic: one acts as a syllable nucleus, and the other doesn’t.

I understand why ii and ji are tricky to distinguish in initial position, but try it after a consonant: fii vs fji. Way different, right?

Not at all. [fii] and [fji] sound exactly the same. /fii/ and /fji/ can sound different, but that’s because the latter ends up getting realised as something more like [fjɪ̯i].

[Travis B.]

There are literally people who speak Danish. No phonetic distinction is too trivial to be meaningful.

True, but my point is that there is no phonetic difference between [j] and [i]. They are the same thing. What difference exists is phonemic: one acts as a syllable nucleus, and the other doesn’t.

I understand why ii and ji are tricky to distinguish in initial position, but try it after a consonant: fii vs fji. Way different, right?

Not at all. [fii] and [fji] sound exactly the same. /fii/ and /fji/ can sound different, but that’s because the latter ends up getting realised as something more like [fjɪ̯i].

I can easily distinguish [fii] and [fji], and for me /i/ is a pure monophthong (I never diphthongize /i/). To me the difference is that [j] is a bit closer than [i].

[bradrn]

To me the difference is that [j] is a bit closer than [i].

OK, this is fair. (Though I am a bit confused about how a semivowel ends up more closed than a full vowel.)

[dɮ the phoneme]

To me the difference is that [j] is a bit closer than [i].

OK, this is fair. (Though I am a bit confused about how a semivowel ends up more closed than a full vowel.)

Why? Vowels are more open than consonants generally (indeed, that's pretty much the defining characteristic of vowels). Almost definitionally, [j] is a less open version of .

[bradrn]

To me the difference is that [j] is a bit closer than [i].

OK, this is fair. (Though I am a bit confused about how a semivowel ends up more closed than a full vowel.)

Why? Vowels are more open than consonants generally (indeed, that's pretty much the defining characteristic of vowels). Almost definitionally, [j] is a less open version of [i].

Whoops, sorry — for some reason I managed to confuse ‘close’ and ‘open’. You are of course correct.

[Moose-tache]

I feel like fii/fji is the new Yanny/Laurel. To me they sound totally different, with no vowel breaking at all. You might as well try to say /uu/ and /wu/ are the same.

[bradrn]

You might as well try to say /uu/ and /wu/ are the same.

Well, of course they aren’t! However, in narrow transcription, [uu] and [wu] are the same, for precisely the same reason that [ii] and [ji] are the same.

[Travis B.]

You might as well try to say /uu/ and /wu/ are the same.

Well, of course they aren’t! However, in narrow transcription, [uu] and [wu] are the same, for precisely the same reason that [ii] and [ji] are the same.

/uu/ and /wu/ certainly aren't the same to me at least.