Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[linguistcat]

Does anyone happen to know what verbs could be used in Classical Japanese for moving the capital? Would <動く> "to move" work? What about <ひきこす> an older variant of <引っ越す> "to move (house); to change residence​"? Or would a completely different term be used, whether it (or a descendant) has the same meaning in modern Japanese, it has changed, or has left no modern descendant?

[missals]

Does anyone know of any languages with fairly simple phonologies - especially ones with small phoneme inventories, and possibly ones with very simple phonotactics - that have a good amount of morphological alternations?

I can think of rendaku and Lyman's law in Japanese, and those stem extensions that exist in some Polynesian languages, but I'm unsure of what else is out there. Does Japanese have anything else?

I was just thinking about how, even though languages with very restricted phonotactic structures wouldn't seem to provide especially fertile ground for the genesis of morphological alternations, such languages might preserve very old morphological alternations that developed in a previous stage when the language had a more complex phonological structure.

[Pabappa]

Uralic has consonant gradations, despite some languages having only 13 consonants.

[Travis B.]

I have been paying attention to my parents' speech and they both definitely have elision of unstressed or final intervocalic /t d n nt nd/ along with unstressed or final /t d n/ after /r/ and before a vowel. This makes me conclude that this isn't just an idiosyncrasy of my own speech.

[Whimemsz]

Does anyone know of any languages with fairly simple phonologies - especially ones with small phoneme inventories, and possibly ones with very simple phonotactics - that have a good amount of morphological alternations?

I can think of rendaku and Lyman's law in Japanese, and those stem extensions that exist in some Polynesian languages, but I'm unsure of what else is out there. Does Japanese have anything else?

I was just thinking about how, even though languages with very restricted phonotactic structures wouldn't seem to provide especially fertile ground for the genesis of morphological alternations, such languages might preserve very old morphological alternations that developed in a previous stage when the language had a more complex phonological structure.

(At least some) Caddoan and Iroquoian languages definitely fit the bill. Wally Chafe's sketch of Seneca (9 consonant phonemes, 7 or 8 vowel phonemes) in the Handbook of North American Indians, for example, ends up giving reconstructed earlier (or deep underlying, if you prefer) forms for every single word in addition to the surface forms because otherwise the morphemes would be almost impossible to segment out (e.g., o’gi’ "I said" and waë’ "he said", which actually differ in only one morpheme: respectively |wa’-k-i-’| FACT-1AGT-say-PUNCT and |wa’-ha-i-’| = FACT-MASC.AGT-say-PUNCT), and also includes a long section on historical sound changes to help clarify the resulting alternations.

David Rood does something similar in parts of his sketch of Wichita (10 or 11 consonants, and 3 surface vowels [4 underlying vowels]), noting, for instance, that the underlying non-3rd person pl morpheme |ra:k| can surface as any of /ra:k/, /ra:r/, /ra:s/, /ha:k/, /ha:s/, /a:s/, /a:k/, or /a:/ depending on the environment. He also gives the example of the word for "tree," literally "wood stands upright," which is underlying |ta-i-ya:k-ri-wi| INDIC-3SUBJ-wood-COLL-stand.upright = surface tiyá:hkʷ.

[dansoo]

So I was listening to a French song, and the words
"de leur amour plus bleu que le ciel autour"
caught my attention.
Is it a thing French generally do: calling love blue? Doors the phrase have any specific connotation in the language, or is it just something that the author of the lyrics thought sounded nice?

[linguistcat]

I have finally been able to find some reference to pitch accent patterns in Japanese verbs and.... apparently it was very simple all this time. So simple that the people discussing it seemed to assume everyone knew at least the basics, in an almost "As you know Bob" way. If I were a fictional character, my writer would need to edit that part of my life surely.

[mèþru]

Yeah, Iroquoian languages fit the bill very well. Looking at a paper on sound changes in each branch from Proto-Iroquoian is a thing of beauty.

[Ryusenshi]

So I was listening to a French song, and the words
"de leur amour plus bleu que le ciel autour"
caught my attention.
Is it a thing French generally do: calling love blue? Doors the phrase have any specific connotation in the language, or is it just something that the author of the lyrics thought sounded nice?

No, there's no specific connotation. It's just poetry. Also, in English, blue can mean "melancholic" (as in "I'm feeling blue"), but French bleu does not have this connotation.

By the way, here's an interesting fact about this song ("Petite Marie" by Francis Cabrel). The singer has disowned the studio version because of a phonetic detail. Why? At one point, the lyrics say "milliers de roses". Cabrel is from Southern France, and would have pronounced the last word [ʁɔz], but the producers insisted that he use the more standard [ʁoːz] instead.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Does anyone happen to know what verbs could be used in Classical Japanese for moving the capital? Would <動く> "to move" work? What about <ひきこす> an older variant of <引っ越す> "to move (house); to change residence​"? Or would a completely different term be used, whether it (or a descendant) has the same meaning in modern Japanese, it has changed, or has left no modern descendant?

遷す（うつす） would be the word you are looking for. The link provided explicitly gives 都を遷す as an example.

This link provides a short explanation of the kanji used.

[Whimemsz]

.

[linguistcat]

Does anyone happen to know what verbs could be used in Classical Japanese for moving the capital? ...

遷す（うつす） would be the word you are looking for. The link provided explicitly gives 都を遷す as an example.

This link provides a short explanation of the kanji used.

Thank you so much!

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Does anyone happen to know what verbs could be used in Classical Japanese for moving the capital? ...

遷す（うつす） would be the word you are looking for. The link provided explicitly gives 都を遷す as an example.

This link provides a short explanation of the kanji used.

Thank you so much!

どういたしまして。

[Zju]

Is there such a thing as retroflex vowels? As in vowels pronounced with the tip of the tongue curled back, or the whole tongue retracted. I guess I'm interested if it occurs in natlangs.

[Linguoboy]

Is there such a thing as retroflex vowels? As in vowels pronounced with the tip of the tongue curled back, or the whole tongue retracted. I guess I'm interested if it occurs in natlangs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-colored_vowel

[Linguoboy]

which is spiced with loads of Christmas spices like orange and so forth.

My first reaction to this was, "Aroo? Orange is not a 'spice'!" But then I checked the definition of "spice" and found this: "A spice is a seed, fruit, root, bark, or other plant substance primarily used for flavoring, coloring or preserving food." No one would argue that peppercorns, juniper berries, and allspice are not "spices" and all are obtained from dried fruits (in the botanical sense). But those all fit the "primarily" condition of the definition whereas oranges I think of being primarily used for their juice.

But then you have bell peppers, which are primarily eaten fresh, but are also dried to produce paprika, which is not only a spice but one of the six known even to Midwesterners. Moreover, there are varieties of orange (e.g. bergamot) which are rarely juiced or eaten fresh but whose dried peel is often used to scent or flavour. So I guess I have to concede that "orange" can be considered a "spice" even though I can't ever see it being covered by my personal definition of the word.

tl;dr: Folk taxonomies are a real tangle.

[missals]

I suddenly wonder - are there sign languages with phonological alternations? That is, purely phonological in diachronic origin, akin to consonant mutation or umlaut?

I know some (most? all?) sign languages have verbal alternations marking aspect (e.g. iterative, etc) but I'm under the impression they're (at least in ASL?) expressive/symbolic in origin (like some phenomena in oral languages, like a lot of reduplication, or front/high vowel diminution ablaut, etc)

For example, I wonder if there might have been a sign language with a grammatical particle signed on, say, the forehead, which was eventually elided, but left behind a raised initial hand position on the following lexical item - thus, location/movement mutation.

[Vijay]

In ASL, for example, there are signs that mean entirely different things but differ from one another only in one respect, such as place or manner of articulation, so I'm not sure, but I imagine it should be possible to find the kind of alternation you're thinking of.

[Linguoboy]

I thought that this was an interesting bit of misnegation:

Not surprised I’ve fallen ill. Depression and negative thoughts predispose one toward inflammations, which weakens the immune system, hence lowering one’s susceptibility.

I'm not sure what the thinko is here. It seems possible that the author just wrote "susceptibility" when she meant "resistance". But I think another possibility is that "lowering" just seems to fit better with terms like "fallen" and "weakens". The overarching metaphor is one of decline, so it's counterintuitive to talk of one's receptiveness to illness increasing.

[Travis B.]

Remember phrases like "I could care less", where the actual (lack of) negation does not fit the canonical meaning.