Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[dɮ the phoneme]

Anyone know of a good reference grammar of Modern Japanese? I feel like I should probably have one.

[bradrn]

Anyone know of a good reference grammar of Modern Japanese? I feel like I should probably have one.

I've been looking for one of those too! Haven't found any yet.

That being said, The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics (ed. Tsujimara) has its good bits, as does Martin's A Reference Grammar of Japanese.

[Man in Space]

I was trying to envisage James Spader saying "And YOU gotta help us!" à la the Hotel Mario intro earlier this evening and I came upon an interesting quirk of mine idiolect. For example:

"My friend's wife got him a guitar."

This seems like it should become, if not referring to a previously-mentioned friend:

"One of my friends' wife got him a guitar." (i.e. the wife got the guitar, "one" being part of the clause modifying "wife")

But instead I say:

"One of my friends' wives got him a guitar." (i.e. one got the guitar, "wives" signifying that it's one of the group of my friends' wives)

It just seems really…weird to me, all of a sudden.

I was also wondering about its implications on diachronics and that one rule in some earlier varieties of English where you got sentences like "They dance and sings". Can anybody point me in the direction of more sources on stuff like this?

[bradrn]

"My friend's wife got him a guitar."

This seems like it should become, if not referring to a previously-mentioned friend:

"One of my friends' wife got him a guitar." (i.e. the wife got the guitar, "one" being part of the clause modifying "wife")

But instead I say:

"One of my friends' wives got him a guitar." (i.e. one got the guitar, "wives" signifying that it's one of the group of my friends' wives)

It just seems really…weird to me, all of a sudden.

This isn’t just your idiolect; I have this rule too. To me the simplest analysis would be that *[one of my friends]’ wife has a number mismatch: ‘one of my friends’ is singular, but the form of the following possessive clitic is only available for plural possessors. The alternative *[one of my friend]’s wife has a mismatch in the other direction: although the possessive is fine there, ‘one of’ requires a plural complement, whereas ‘my friend’ is singular. The only remaining option is to let ‘one of’ modify the wives instead of the friends: one of [[my friends’] wives]. It also works if you use ‘of’ instead: the wife of one of my friends.

Incidentally, this implies that if we modify the singular ‘one of’ NP with the singular possessive marker =’s rather than the plural one =’, then it should be more acceptable… alas, ?[one of my friends]’s wife just sounds odd. One might think that using a noun with a regular plural might work better, but it doesn’t: ?‘One of the men’s wife got him a guitar’ is still a rather strained construction. It would appear that English simply doesn’t allow ‘one of’ in an possessor NP with the Saxon genitive.

I was also wondering about its implications on diachronics and that one rule in some earlier varieties of English where you got sentences like "They dance and sings".

I’m not aware of that rule, could you elaborate please?

[Moose-tache]

This could be parsing rules favoring a more parsimonious genitive.
Long clarifications are usually discouraged with genitive s. “Several of the men down the street who hang out at the bistro’s hats” would be much more natural with an “of” construction. Similarly, “one (of…) did this” works better than “(one of...)’s wife did this,” because it puts the genitive inside a phrase where the genitive only has to modify one word.

[Richard W]

I think, "a friend of mine's wife" is more acceptable if it's not obvious which friend one's talking about.

[Travis B.]

I think, "a friend of mine's wife" is more acceptable if it's not obvious which friend one's talking about.

I feel the same way about this myself.

[Kuchigakatai]

I was trying to envisage James Spader saying "And YOU gotta help us!" à la the Hotel Mario intro earlier this evening and I came upon an interesting quirk of mine idiolect. For example:

"My friend's wife got him a guitar."

This seems like it should become, if not referring to a previously-mentioned friend:

"One of my friends' wife got him a guitar." (i.e. the wife got the guitar, "one" being part of the clause modifying "wife")

But instead I say:

"One of my friends' wives got him a guitar." (i.e. one got the guitar, "wives" signifying that it's one of the group of my friends' wives)

It just seems really…weird to me, all of a sudden.

I was also wondering about its implications on diachronics and that one rule in some earlier varieties of English where you got sentences like "They dance and sings". Can anybody point me in the direction of more sources on stuff like this?

I remember being fascinated by this when I gradually noticed it during my first year living in Canada.

It also surprised me from another angle: until then I had thought of "my friend" as strongly definite, so when hearing "my friend" I'd tend to think "so you've only got one friend?". It didn't occur to me that the phrase could also mean "one of my friends" besides "my (one and only) friend".

Of course, like many such things, my native language has something to do with it. It's very normal to say mi abuela for 'my grandma' = 'one of my grandmas', but (at least in my dialect) not mi amigo if you've got more than one friend in a context. 'The wife of one of my friends got him a guitar' would have to be translated with uno de mis amigos (lit. "one of my friends" as well).

La esposa de uno de mis amigos le consiguió una guitarra.
the wife of one of my.PL friends to.him got.3S a guitar

[hwhatting]

Same in Germany - mein Freund sounds like you have only one, plus without any further information, it means "boy friend". So you say einer meiner Feunde or more colloquially, ein Freund von mir.
Die Frau eines meiner Freunde (eines Freundes von mir) hat ihm eine Gitarre geschenkt.

[Raphael]

I posted another blog post. This one is about a language-related topic, so I'm posting the link here instead of in Ephemera:

https://guessishouldputthisupsomewhere. ... n-germany/

[Moose-tache]

I once saw a claim somewhere on the internet that the version of French taught in some French classes in the USA is basically the French of the 19th century. Since I don’t speak French and have never taken any French classes in the USA, I can’t tell if there’s any truth to that, but it sure sounds like something that might happen.

I hate to nitpick, but this has nothing to do with US education. If you take a French class anywhere in the world, they teach you the official standard French endorsed by the Academie Francaise. The last time this version of French was spoken casually on the streets of Paris they were defending it from the Prussians. This is what people mean when they say "schools teach the French of the 19th century." They're teaching the same things you would learn in a French class in Germany, it's just that French has a high degree of diglossia.

Similarly, most US schools teach Castillian Spanish, despite being a country that contains 20% of the world's Mexicans. It's not that they're deliberately choosing an out-of-touch Spanish dialect; they're just going with the most standard international version of the language they can find.

As for German classes pressing students to over use sie, that might just be good practice. Japanese classes teach students to err on the side of tabemasu over taberu just to give them the best chance of not starting an international incident.

[Travis B.]

I once saw a claim somewhere on the internet that the version of French taught in some French classes in the USA is basically the French of the 19th century. Since I don’t speak French and have never taken any French classes in the USA, I can’t tell if there’s any truth to that, but it sure sounds like something that might happen.

I hate to nitpick, but this has nothing to do with US education. If you take a French class anywhere in the world, they teach you the official standard French endorsed by the Academie Francaise. The last time this version of French was spoken casually on the streets of Paris they were defending it from the Prussians. This is what people mean when they say "schools teach the French of the 19th century." They're teaching the same things you would learn in a French class in Germany, it's just that French has a high degree of diglossia.

Similarly, most US schools teach Castillian Spanish, despite being a country that contains 20% of the world's Mexicans. It's not that they're deliberately choosing an out-of-touch Spanish dialect; they're just going with the most standard international version of the language they can find.

As for German classes pressing students to over use sie, that might just be good practice. Japanese classes teach students to err on the side of tabemasu over taberu just to give them the best chance of not starting an international incident.

In the case of English, I work with many a non-native English-speaker (as many Indian and Chinese people work for my company), and aside from features that are simply due to non-native accents or L2 varieties of English such as Indian English, e.g. ingrained spelling pronunciations, what I notice from them is they do not use, and at times do not understand, features of colloquial spoken NAE that I suspect they were never taught about, e.g. many non-standard but very common contractions. By this I do not mean contractions that non-native speakers are actually taught about, such as gonna or gotta, but rather contractions such as [aːõʔ] for I don't.

[Raphael]

but rather contractions such as [aːõʔ] for I don't.

I've never heard of that particular contraction.

[Linguoboy]

but rather contractions such as [aːõʔ] for I don't.

I've never heard of that particular contraction.

Thus neatly proving Travis' point.

I remember having my mind blown years ago by a phonetician casually mentioning that medial [ɾ] can be deleted basically everywhere that it appears in NAE. My instinct was to say that that couldn't be true, because how would I never have noticed it myself? But I tested it by listening carefully to my speech and comparing versions of the same utterances with and without [ɾ] and, sure enough, he was right.

(Travis' example demonstrates this, btw. The /d/ gets flapped intervocalically and then the resulting [ɾ] is deleted. Throw in diphthong smoothing, nasalisation accompanied by nasal deletion, and stopping of final consonants--all common phonetic processes in colloquial English--and that's how you get from /ˈaɪ.ˈdoʊnt/ to [aːõʔ].)

[Travis B.]

I remember having my mind blown years ago by a phonetician casually mentioning that medial [ɾ] can be deleted basically everywhere that it appears in NAE. My instinct was to say that that couldn't be true, because how would I never have noticed it myself? But I tested it by listening carefully to my speech and comparing versions of the same utterances with and without [ɾ] and, sure enough, he was right.

I get the impression that there is a major impedance mismatch between what even native English-speakers think spoken English is and how spoken English really works. Most people have the idea that spoken English is a far more conservative creature than it really is, it seems. I first realized this in high school when I realized that there were phrases like [ˈaːõnɵ(ː)] I don't know that simply were not reflected in even the most marked eye-dialect (I have never, ever seen that phrase rendered as something like "ah ono" despite hearing it very frequently in Real Life). Also, many things I have mentioned as being features of my dialect, from listening to national media content, are clearly not specific to my dialect at all even though when I have written about those features people have reacted as if they were particularly marked (but I highly suspect that if the same people heard said features in Real Life they would not think twice about them).

[Moose-tache]

Case in point, mention the [ʃ] in words like "truck" and "train," and you will immediately start a debate between people who pronounce the [ʃ] and those who also pronounce the [ʃ] about whether or not the [ʃ] exists.

[Zju]

Old English: We've already had ai → aː
Colloquial spoken NAE: We've had one, yes. What about second ai → aː?

[Travis B.]

Old English: We've already had ai → aː
Colloquial spoken NAE: We've had one, yes. What about second ai → aː?

At least in the English I'm personally familiar with it's not that simple - it's a following /oʊ/ or /l/ which triggers /aɪ/ > [a(ː)] (you can also see this in I'll, file, mile, while, etc.). However, there are NAE varieties with more general /aɪ/ > [a(ː)].

[anteallach]

I remember having my mind blown years ago by a phonetician casually mentioning that medial [ɾ] can be deleted basically everywhere that it appears in NAE. My instinct was to say that that couldn't be true, because how would I never have noticed it myself? But I tested it by listening carefully to my speech and comparing versions of the same utterances with and without [ɾ] and, sure enough, he was right.

I get the impression that there is a major impedance mismatch between what even native English-speakers think spoken English is and how spoken English really works. Most people have the idea that spoken English is a far more conservative creature than it really is, it seems. I first realized this in high school when I realized that there were phrases like [ˈaːõnɵ(ː)] I don't know that simply were not reflected in even the most marked eye-dialect (I have never, ever seen that phrase rendered as something like "ah ono" despite hearing it very frequently in Real Life). Also, many things I have mentioned as being features of my dialect, from listening to national media content, are clearly not specific to my dialect at all even though when I have written about those features people have reacted as if they were particularly marked (but I highly suspect that if the same people heard said features in Real Life they would not think twice about them).

Most people are a lot more aware of what they do in careful speech than what they do in informal speech, for what seem to me to be fairly obvious reasons. Indeed, as soon as I'm listening to what I'm doing my speech tends to become more careful. I doubt there's anything very specific to English (or French) about this.

For the reasons expressed in the previous paragraph I am not very confident about this, but I think the most reduced version of I don't know for me is something like [əˈð̠õːʔno], where the /d/ is not completely elided (but the first vowel has actually gone further than in your version). Perhaps BrE is less prone to elision here because of having less flapping?

[Linguoboy]

Old English: We've already had ai → aː
Colloquial spoken NAE: We've had one, yes. What about second ai → aː?

At least in the English I'm personally familiar with it's not that simple - it's a following /oʊ/ or /l/ which triggers /aɪ/ > [a(ː)] (you can also see this in I'll, file, mile, while, etc.). However, there are NAE varieties with more general /aɪ/ > [a(ː)].

IMD before /r/ as well, at least in its broadest form (which tends to be more Merlinese). Smoothing in all positions is a marked Deep South/AAVE feature.