Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[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.

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

Yep— for reference, it's from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

[Nortaneous]

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.

High functional load isn't prohibitive - IIRC there's a case study of n > l in Cantonese about this, but also consider the phonological developments of Polynesian and North Bougainville

[Darren]

High functional load isn't prohibitive - IIRC there's a case study of n > l in Cantonese about this, but also consider the phonological developments of Polynesian and North Bougainville

I've had another look over the wordlists, and I'm beginning to think the 5-consonant inventory may not be so goofy after all. I can see a not-insignificant number of instances of /k/ → Ø, and looking at phoneme distribution, /k/ is a lot more common in Obokuitai (35% of all consonants in the wordlist are /k/ which is frankly absurd) than Biritai (where it's "only" 26%).
And one more thing, Biritai is spoken right next to where Iau is spoken, and Iau's lost a really high proportion of its /k/s; combined with Donohue listing /ɸ/ while Clouse's wordlist suggests /h/ there could be a case for Iau influence prompting loss of /k/.

[quinterbeck]

Conception :: conceive
Contraception :: *contraceive

If contraceive was a word, what sense would you use it with?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I would assume it meant "prevent pregnancy".

[Creyeditor]

According to wiktionary.org there is a verb to contracept. Maybe this blocks contraceive.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

According to wiktionary.org there is a verb to contracept. Maybe this blocks contraceive.

I don't think -ceive is a productive morpheme. One also doesn't have *inceive corresponding to inception.

[Moose-tache]

Yeah, the problem here is -tion has its own t. So if you add it to a verbal root ending in p or pt, you get the same result. Interception, contraception, etc. have a t in the root that just doesn't survive the addition of the -tion suffix. Conceive doesn't.

[Travis B.]

Yeah, the problem here is -tion has its own t. So if you add it to a verbal root ending in p or pt, you get the same result. Interception, contraception, etc. have a t in the root that just doesn't survive the addition of the -tion suffix. Conceive doesn't.

Conception and conceive are ultimately from the same Latin verb concipiō (infinitive concipere, past participle conceptus); conceive is from OF conceveir (ModF concevoir), which directly continues concipere, while conception is from OF concepcion (ModF conception) which derives from Latin conceptionem (nominative conceptio), which is an action noun derived from conceptus.

[Moose-tache]

Yeah, the problem here is -tion has its own t. So if you add it to a verbal root ending in p or pt, you get the same result. Interception, contraception, etc. have a t in the root that just doesn't survive the addition of the -tion suffix. Conceive doesn't.

Conception and conceive are ultimately from the same Latin verb concipiō (infinitive concipere, past participle conceptus); conceive is from OF conceveir (ModF concevoir), which directly continues concipere, while conception is from OF concepcion (ModF conception) which derives from Latin conceptionem (nominative conceptio), which is an action noun derived from conceptus.

Yes, exactly.
p+tion > ption
pt+tion > ption

[Raphael]

I'm a bit confused about the role of accent marks in languages that use the Latin Alphabet. I used to believe that they usually mark stress, but now I've got the impression that they sometimes mark the one syllable that is not stressed, like, for instance, in the surname of the notorious French fascist collaborationist leader Marshal Pétain.

[Man in Space]

I'm a bit confused about the role of accent marks in languages that use the Latin Alphabet. I used to believe that they usually mark stress, but now I've got the impression that they sometimes mark the one syllable that is not stressed, like, for instance, in the surname of the notorious French fascist collaborationist leader Marshal Pétain.

French has a tendency to not pronounce orthographic <e>; the accent mark here tells you that it’s pronounced.

[Raphael]

Thank you!

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I'm a bit confused about the role of accent marks in languages that use the Latin Alphabet. I used to believe that they usually mark stress, but now I've got the impression that they sometimes mark the one syllable that is not stressed, like, for instance, in the surname of the notorious French fascist collaborationist leader Marshal Pétain.

More details:

They often indicate several different things. In Spanish, the acute does usually mark stress (or distinguish what would otherwise be homographs). Some editions of Old Norse texts, and also Irish, and Tolkien's languages, also use the acute accent to mark length. I believe editions of Old English in past centuries would also use the acute for this, but macrons are more common now.

In French, the circumflex often marks a historic long vowel, often created by the deletion of a coda /s/, but sometimes from the coalescence of two vowels (note Old French aage becomes modern âge), or when a borrowed foreign word had a long vowel (note théâtre, nô); the grave, if I'm remembering right, was used to mark a change from [e] to [ɛ] in the presence of a coda consonant where there had once been a final schwa (I recall a book for learning French from the 1700s noting that the replacement of the "s" with the circumflex, and the acute with the grave, in these contexts, was becoming increasingly common, but was not universal) and also sometimes to distinguish homographs. The é in French is also, as already noted, used to mark the pronunciation [e] as opposed to [ə] or being silent. Some Nineteenth Century Romanisations of Japanese often use both é to note pronunciation of "e" as a distinct syllable (for the benefit of French and English speakers, no doubt), and the circumflex for a long vowel (Tales of Old Japan uses this scheme, as opposed to the macrons now more widely seen; I've also incidentally seen the circumflex in a few English-language manga releases, probably because ei ou, while accurate translations, are often misread as /ai au/). Welsh also uses the circumflex for length, but Romanian for quality change.

[zompist]

Alon Levy (who has been on this board) recently posted a neat linguistic tidbit on Mastodon.

The Fisheries Ordinance in Israel begins by defining a fish as "every creature that lives in the water, regardless of whether it is a fish."

> ׳דג’ פירושו כל חית־מים בין שהיא דג ובין שאינה דג והוא כולל ספוגים, דגי צדף, מקליפים, צבים וחיות־מים.

> "Fish" means every water-animal regardless of whether it is a fish, and includes sponges, shellfish, [unclear word roughly meaning "molters"], turtles, and water-animals.

This is either a brilliant or an awful use of recursion (and then they do it again with "water animal").

[Raphael]

Thank you, Rounin Ryuuji!

[Ares Land]

Alon Levy (who has been on this board) recently posted a neat linguistic tidbit on Mastodon.

This is either a brilliant or an awful use of recursion (and then they do it again with "water animal").

I don't know if it's really recursion... but the way it leverages the way we assign different semantics to words based on register ("legal" fish vs. "biological" fish is pretty neat!)

[Richard W]

I don't know if it's really recursion... but the way it leverages the way we assign different semantics to words based on register ("legal" fish vs. "biological" fish is pretty neat!)

What's a "biological" fish? Are we "biological" fish?

[WeepingElf]

I don't know if it's really recursion... but the way it leverages the way we assign different semantics to words based on register ("legal" fish vs. "biological" fish is pretty neat!)

What's a "biological" fish? Are we "biological" fish?

We are if one disallows paraphyletic taxa Which is a good reason not to be dogmatic in this regard.

[linguistcat]

I don't know if it's really recursion... but the way it leverages the way we assign different semantics to words based on register ("legal" fish vs. "biological" fish is pretty neat!)

What's a "biological" fish? Are we "biological" fish?

We are if one disallows paraphyletic taxa Which is a good reason not to be dogmatic in this regard.

I for one am amused by and enjoy being considered a fish.