Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[bradrn]

Not sure whether this is the right thread, but anyway. I recently encountered a website (https://youglish.com/) that, in its pronunciation description, uses bith "traditional IPA" and something called "modern IPA". I've never heard of the latter, and it looks decidedly odd. So does anyone know whether this is an actual thing, or just something that website invented?

Without knowing much about this site, they might merely be missing a few words: “traditional IPA transcription of English” vs “modern IPA transcription of English”. I know that the way English is often transcribed is rather out-of-date (how many people retain a genuine [ʌ]?), and people regularly attempt to create more accurate transcriptions, e.g. Geoff Lindsey’s.

But the use of the acute accent for stress doesn’t look at all IPA-like to me, so… really, I don’t know.

[Travis B.]

Not sure whether this is the right thread, but anyway. I recently encountered a website (https://youglish.com/) that, in its pronunciation description, uses bith "traditional IPA" and something called "modern IPA". I've never heard of the latter, and it looks decidedly odd. So does anyone know whether this is an actual thing, or just something that website invented?

Without knowing much about this site, they might merely be missing a few words: “traditional IPA transcription of English” vs “modern IPA transcription of English”. I know that the way English is often transcribed is rather out-of-date (how many people retain a genuine [ʌ]?), and people regularly attempt to create more accurate transcriptions, e.g. Geoff Lindsey’s.

The dialect here has true [ʌ] for /ʌ/, except where the hurry-furry merger applies, just for the record.

There are some things that I find very out of date, such as the transcription of "mid-to-high back" vowels after coronals and palatals as being back vowels - pronouncing true back vowels here comes off to me as very accented, and I mean like non-natively accented, so the commonplace transcriptions of these in that environment seems very inaccurate to me.

Some sorts of "modern" transcriptions do not seem right to me, such as ones which transcribe /iː/ and /uː/ as "[ɪj]" and "[ʉw]"; of course, this is because in the dialect here these are the pure monopythongs [i] and [y~ʉ~u].

[bradrn]

Some sorts of "modern" transcriptions do not seem right to me, such as ones which transcribe /iː/ and /uː/ as "[ɪj]" and "[ʉw]"; of course, this is because in the dialect here these are the pure monopythongs [i] and [y~ʉ~u].

Well, of course, these ‘modern transcriptions’ are for specific dialects. Lindsey’s, for instance, is for British English. And here in Australia, I regularly hear diphthongs [ɪj] and [ʉw], even though I have monophthongs [iː] and [ʉː] myself.

[Travis B.]

Some sorts of "modern" transcriptions do not seem right to me, such as ones which transcribe /iː/ and /uː/ as "[ɪj]" and "[ʉw]"; of course, this is because in the dialect here these are the pure monopythongs [i] and [y~ʉ~u].

Well, of course, these ‘modern transcriptions’ are for specific dialects. Lindsey’s, for instance, is for British English. And here in Australia, I regularly hear diphthongs [ɪj] and [ʉw], even though I have monophthongs [iː] and [ʉː] myself.

The key thing to me is crossdialectally it is useful to have uniform phonemic transcription notation, and these should not favor the phonology of any particular dialect. In this area the conventional transcriptions, at a phonemic level, seem to work well. "Modern transcriptions" seem too narrow and parochial to me, in that they seem to seek to replace broad transcriptions that attempt to work well with English as a whole with ones that fit a specific variety alone.

[bradrn]

Some sorts of "modern" transcriptions do not seem right to me, such as ones which transcribe /iː/ and /uː/ as "[ɪj]" and "[ʉw]"; of course, this is because in the dialect here these are the pure monopythongs [i] and [y~ʉ~u].

Well, of course, these ‘modern transcriptions’ are for specific dialects. Lindsey’s, for instance, is for British English. And here in Australia, I regularly hear diphthongs [ɪj] and [ʉw], even though I have monophthongs [iː] and [ʉː] myself.

The key thing to me is crossdialectally it is useful to have uniform phonemic transcription notation, and these should not favor the phonology of any particular dialect. In this area the conventional transcriptions, at a phonemic level, seem to work well. "Modern transcriptions" seem too narrow and parochial to me, in that they seem to seek to replace broad transcriptions that attempt to work well with English as a whole with ones that fit a specific variety alone.

True, but then again that’s their whole point. It’s questionable whether a single transcription is even possible for ‘English as a whole’.

[Travis B.]

Well, of course, these ‘modern transcriptions’ are for specific dialects. Lindsey’s, for instance, is for British English. And here in Australia, I regularly hear diphthongs [ɪj] and [ʉw], even though I have monophthongs [iː] and [ʉː] myself.

The key thing to me is crossdialectally it is useful to have uniform phonemic transcription notation, and these should not favor the phonology of any particular dialect. In this area the conventional transcriptions, at a phonemic level, seem to work well. "Modern transcriptions" seem too narrow and parochial to me, in that they seem to seek to replace broad transcriptions that attempt to work well with English as a whole with ones that fit a specific variety alone.

True, but then again that’s their whole point. It’s questionable whether a single transcription is even possible for ‘English as a whole’.

Tis true - e.g. in the dialect here there are phonemic splits in both PRICE and START, due to "Canadian Raising" having become unpredictable for those lexical sets.

[foxcatdog]

Indo european reconstructions be like native cabal "to leave" is related to non-native jamal "to forget" (it originally meant to leave but anyways) from which descends something pronounced zhemod "breakup in hipster terms" spelled (jemaude) and also the name of a genre of mainly breakup songs and the root gives us the foreign term dauvas which means to achieve enlightenment all from a root originally meaning "to pass".
Every other language family be like the proto languages voiced stops became nasals in all except language a where they become approximants and language b where they merge with their voiceless counterparts also based on occurence they were probably originally in complementary distribution with the nasals and also we really don't know the precise value of phoneme X since it gives us among other things l, j, d, h, n, s, sh and f as reflexes.

[KathTheDragon]

what

[MacAnDàil]

Some sorts of "modern" transcriptions do not seem right to me, such as ones which transcribe /iː/ and /uː/ as "[ɪj]" and "[ʉw]"; of course, this is because in the dialect here these are the pure monopythongs [i] and [y~ʉ~u].

Well, of course, these ‘modern transcriptions’ are for specific dialects. Lindsey’s, for instance, is for British English. And here in Australia, I regularly hear diphthongs [ɪj] and [ʉw], even though I have monophthongs [iː] and [ʉː] myself.

And it's specifically for Sourther English English. Scottish English has quite different vowel sounds to that, especially compared to other English accents.

[Travis B.]

And it's specifically for Sourther English English. Scottish English has quite different vowel sounds to that, especially compared to other English accents.

I don't get why people group English English with Scottish English as "British English" when, say, Southern English English is closer to GA than it is to Scottish English.

[Travis B.]

Hell, SSBE seems closer to GA than Northern English English to me.

[MacAnDàil]

You are surely right. The main reason for grouping British English together is just a variation on 1° assuming one language = one country, which so far from the truth of 7000 languages for 200 countries and 2° lack of general knowledge, in linguistics as in other domains. It's like when people are surprised there is any language other than Indian in India.

[foxcatdog]

what

its poking fun at indo european diachronics
as well as the diachronics of other language families

[foxcatdog]

"I fought with the class bully" vs "I picked a fight with the class bully"
The latter narrows the meaning of the former by nominalising it. What is this phenomena called and examples in languages other than english would be appreciated

[bradrn]

"I fought with the class bully" vs "I picked a fight with the class bully"
The latter narrows the meaning of the former by nominalising it. What is this phenomena called

This is generally called a ‘light verb’ construction. (According to Wikipedia, sometimes in English they’re also called ‘stretched verbs’).

The light verb in this case is ‘pick’, which is bleached of its usual semantics, and simply acts to qualify its complement ‘fight’. Often, as in this case, it imparts an aspectual meaning.

Despite the appearance, this isn’t actually a nominalisation: it just so happens that the word ‘fight’ in English can be used both as a verb and as a noun. In many cases, there isn’t really any corresponding full verb: e.g. make a mistake, have sex, take a break. (Well, I suppose you could say ‘err’ and ‘rest’ have similar meanings to the first and last of these, but ‘err’ is quite uncommon, and ‘rest’ doesn’t mean quite the same thing.)

[bradrn]

As for non-English examples (which I forgot to mention in the last post): light verb constructions are really common cross-linguistically.

For obvious reasons, they’re particularly common in languages with closed or small verb classes: for instance, in Japanese, Jingulu and Kalam (in which they’re called ‘verb adjuncts’, see https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu ... 885/146744). Often they go on to evolve into auxiliary verb–like constructions.

I’ve also seen them mentioned regularly with regards to Indo–Iranian languages: e.g. see https://doi.org/10.1524/stuf.2002.55.1.15 for Kurdish.

EDIT: Another good paper on the subject: Complex predicates and bipartite stems in Skou.

[Travis B.]

what

its poking fun at indo european diachronics
as well as the diachronics of other language families

Umm, "what" is the proper response to that.

[Travis B.]

As for non-English examples (which I forgot to mention in the last post): light verb constructions are really common cross-linguistically.

For obvious reasons, they’re particularly common in languages with closed or small verb classes: for instance, in Japanese, Jingulu and Kalam (in which they’re called ‘verb adjuncts’, see https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu ... 885/146744). Often they go on to evolve into auxiliary verb–like constructions.

I’ve also seen them mentioned regularly with regards to Indo–Iranian languages: e.g. see https://doi.org/10.1524/stuf.2002.55.1.15 for Kurdish.

EDIT: Another good paper on the subject: Complex predicates and bipartite stems in Skou.

A good language that comes to mind when it comes to light verbs is Basque, in which fully declined, independent verbs are a small closed class.

[bradrn]

As for non-English examples (which I forgot to mention in the last post): light verb constructions are really common cross-linguistically.

For obvious reasons, they’re particularly common in languages with closed or small verb classes: for instance, in Japanese, Jingulu and Kalam (in which they’re called ‘verb adjuncts’, see https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu ... 885/146744). Often they go on to evolve into auxiliary verb–like constructions.

I’ve also seen them mentioned regularly with regards to Indo–Iranian languages: e.g. see https://doi.org/10.1524/stuf.2002.55.1.15 for Kurdish.

EDIT: Another good paper on the subject: Complex predicates and bipartite stems in Skou.

A good language that comes to mind when it comes to light verbs is Basque, in which fully declined, independent verbs are a small closed class.

Indeed, that’s another good example of the type!

[Richard W]

"I fought with the class bully" vs "I picked a fight with the class bully"
The latter narrows the meaning of the former by nominalising it. What is this phenomena called

This is generally called a ‘light verb’ construction. (According to Wikipedia, sometimes in English they’re also called ‘stretched verbs’).

The light verb in this case is ‘pick’, which is bleached of its usual semantics, and simply acts to qualify its complement ‘fight’. Often, as in this case, it imparts an aspectual meaning.

Is there a terminology for this as a means of narrowing? In the example, pick implies a choice, possibly of whom to fight and possibly of whether to fight at all when peace was possible.