Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Darren]

I just read that Biritai, a Lakes Plain language, apparently has the following phonemic inventory:

/b t d/
/ɸ s/

/i ɯ u/
/e/
/ɛ ɔ/
/a/

Which means it's possibly the only language in the world with just five consonants (?)

[Travis B.]

I just read that Biritai, a Lakes Plain language, apparently has the following phonemic inventory:

/b t d/
/ɸ s/

/i ɯ u/
/e/
/ɛ ɔ/
/a/

Which means it's possibly the only language in the world with just five consonants (?)

Is "Biritai" an exonym?

[Darren]

I just read that Biritai, a Lakes Plain language, apparently has the following phonemic inventory:

/b t d/
/ɸ s/

/i ɯ u/
/e/
/ɛ ɔ/
/a/

Which means it's possibly the only language in the world with just five consonants (?)

Is "Biritai" an exonym?

I'd assume not. Most Lakes Plain languages have /d/ > [ɾ] intervocalically which would explain the r in Biritai.

[Nortaneous]

I just read that Biritai, a Lakes Plain language, apparently has the following phonemic inventory:

where? I've been unable to find any documentation of Biritai

[Darren]

where? I've been unable to find any documentation of Biritai

It's in two papers by Mark Donohue. The first one co-authored with Bill Ross in 2011, which adds /j w/ to the consonants, and the second (actually a talk i think) is from 2017. I'm pretty sceptical of the claim myself given that in all the Biritai wordlists I can find have /k/s in them, but Donohue was confident enough to publish it twice, and the wordlists are pretty old and just from surveys so idk.

[Nortaneous]

where? I've been unable to find any documentation of Biritai

It's in two papers by Mark Donohue. The first one co-authored with Bill Ross in 2011, which adds /j w/ to the consonants, and the second (actually a talk i think) is from 2017. I'm pretty sceptical of the claim myself given that in all the Biritai wordlists I can find have /k/s in them, but Donohue was confident enough to publish it twice, and the wordlists are pretty old and just from surveys so idk.

Thanks! Maybe k > ʔ (as in Wutung and Gimi) > 0 [recently? only for certain speakers?] but I agree that it's a little dubious.

[Darren]

Thanks! Maybe k > ʔ (as in Wutung and Gimi) > 0 [recently? only for certain speakers?] but I agree that it's a little dubious.

Especially given the high functional load /k/ would have. /k/ seems to usually be the most common consonant in LP languages so it would be weird to just drop it. Although to be fair Clouse has loss of initial /k/ as a regular sound change for Edopi and Iau so I guess it wouldnt be totally unprecedented.

[Richard W]

Is this more commonly written at the start of the unattested word, phrase or utterance or at its left-hand side. I've been being startled by it occurrence at the end of hypothetical Meroitic-script Meroitic words.

[zompist]

FWIW, I just did some Googling for the use of * for Hebrew, and found a paper which places it to the left in transliteration and to the right in direct citation-- that is, at the start of the expression, which is also how I'd intuitively expect it to work. But I'd be happy to hear from users of RTL languages if that in fact is the practice.

[WeepingElf]

And, as Meroitic writing runs right to left too, it will be the same there - an asterisk preceding the word appears on the right. But I once have seen ungrammatical examples marked with an asterisk at the end. That was a book or paper on a historical linguistics topic, and in historical linguistics, the asterisk is used to mark reconstructed forms, so something else needs to be used for non-occuring ones. Some authors use two asterisks for that, but that is also sometimes used for internal reconstructions that look deeper than the comparative reconstructions marked with one asterisk. So some authors use a dagger or something like that for non-occuring forms.

[Creyeditor]

I once saw a differentiation between a five pointed star shape and an actual asterisk with the former being reconstructed forms.

[WeepingElf]

Another variation I have seen is an superscript plus sign for reconstructions and an asterisk for wrong forms (in an article by Theo Vennemann).

[zompist]

There is a theory that if linguists would all agree on one standard notation for all phonology, morphology, and syntax, then the complexity of all languages would immediately increase tenfold.

There is another theory that this has already happened.

[bradrn]

Interesting article on Pāṇini’s grammar: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg3gw9v7jnvo. The article is somewhat overblown, but the linguistics (well, metalinguistics, I suppose?) is interesting enough.

There is a theory that if linguists would all agree on one standard notation for all phonology, morphology, and syntax, then the complexity of all languages would immediately increase tenfold.

I know you’re being facetious, but I do genuinely (and strongly) think that some standardisation would be entirely desirable and a good thing on net.

[MacAnDàil]

Interesting article on Pāṇini’s grammar: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg3gw9v7jnvo. The article is somewhat overblown, but the linguistics (well, metalinguistics, I suppose?) is interesting enough.

I found the most disappointing part was when they said "Sanskrit is only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people out of a population of more than one billion, the university said." which unnecessarily adds "the university said" because that was not a discovery and fails to mention that Sanskrit evolved into Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali and the other Indo-Aryan languages.

I know you’re being facetious, but I do genuinely (and strongly) think that some standardisation would be entirely desirable and a good thing on net.

Martin Haspelmath, probably one of the major linguists at the moment, seems to working on just that.

[zompist]

There is a theory that if linguists would all agree on one standard notation for all phonology, morphology, and syntax, then the complexity of all languages would immediately increase tenfold.

I know you’re being facetious, but I do genuinely (and strongly) think that some standardisation would be entirely desirable and a good thing on net.

It'd be good for students and amateurs like us; probably bad for specialists... i.e. the primary makers and consumers of linguistic papers.

Within a region, there's usually a strong and useful consensus. There's been discussion here before about Americanist phonetics, which has been used for a hundred years. Sanskrit transliteration has been set for 150 years or more. Linguistics is one field where an important document may be that old. Arbitrarily changing Americanists' <č> to <tʃ> or Assyriologists' <ḫ> to <x> would simply make reading the standard lexicons and scholarly literature more difficult.

There can also be premature standardization... e.g. we do not really know what certain Sumerian verbal inflections mean, so an attempt at standardization would very likely be regrettable later. People are still debating even the Masoretic vowels in Hebrew, so you can't just say "write them all in IPA." Terms like "middle voice" are so variable that it'd be better to have individual terms in each language.

This isn't to say that standardization is bad! If only pinyin had been created and adopted a hundred years ago. (Though even there context is important! It's great for citing Mandarin. It's not great for citing "Chinese".)

[bradrn]

Within a region, there's usually a strong and useful consensus. There's been discussion here before about Americanist phonetics, which has been used for a hundred years. Sanskrit transliteration has been set for 150 years or more. Linguistics is one field where an important document may be that old. Arbitrarily changing Americanists' <č> to <tʃ> or Assyriologists' <ḫ> to <x> would simply make reading the standard lexicons and scholarly literature more difficult.

And those are all standards! I’m not proposing to replace pre-existing standards which already work perfectly well; merely standardising those areas where there is nothing currently.

There can also be premature standardization... e.g. we do not really know what certain Sumerian verbal inflections mean, so an attempt at standardization would very likely be regrettable later. People are still debating even the Masoretic vowels in Hebrew, so you can't just say "write them all in IPA." Terms like "middle voice" are so variable that it'd be better to have individual terms in each language.

This is indeed a problem… though I’ll note that standards can be revised, as has repeatedly happened with e.g. the IPA. Arguably standardisation attempts are useful even at an early stage, since they provide a reference point for discussion.

[Ares Land]

There is a theory that if linguists would all agree on one standard notation for all phonology, morphology, and syntax, then the complexity of all languages would immediately increase tenfold.

There is another theory that this has already happened.

Or decrease tenfold. Sometimes most of the difficulty in trying to understand how a difficult language works is figuring out the idiosyncrasies of the author of the reference grammar.
(See: every grammar of an American language, also Egyptian.)

[WeepingElf]

There is a theory that if linguists would all agree on one standard notation for all phonology, morphology, and syntax, then the complexity of all languages would immediately increase tenfold.

There is another theory that this has already happened.

Or decrease tenfold. Sometimes most of the difficulty in trying to understand how a difficult language works is figuring out the idiosyncrasies of the author of the reference grammar.
(See: every grammar of an American language, also Egyptian.)

You may have missed the Douglas Adams reference in zompist's post

[Rounin Ryuuji]

In fairness, facetiousness can be difficult to read in plain text.