Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Otto Kretschmer]

When and why did Danish become so weird compared to other North Germanic languages?

[jal]

I thought the only "weird" thing about Danish is the pronunciation?


JAL

[Otto Kretschmer]

I thought the only "weird" thing about Danish is the pronunciation?


JAL

I mean the pronounciation.

[bradrn]

I thought the only "weird" thing about Danish is the pronunciation?

I mean the pronounciation.

It’s not even that weird, though. The most distinctive feature is stød, but then again English has preglottalisation, so there’s precedent for such things.

[Travis B.]

I thought the only "weird" thing about Danish is the pronunciation?

I mean the pronounciation.

It’s not even that weird, though. The most distinctive feature is stød, but then again English has preglottalisation, so there’s precedent for such things.

And when it comes to English, the English here has developed a level of elision that, while not meeting Danish standards, is approaching it.

[Qwynegold]

I'm looking over the long mid mergers in English (pane-pain/ toe-tow), and wondering if any language has a stable contrast between /e:/ and /ej/ and/or /o:/ and /ow/. I am aware English had the contrast for centuries, but it seems like something that breaks off before other stuff does. I can't think of any language doing so off the top of my head,

Is this rare? Swedish has /eː/ vs. /ɛj/ (the vowel is [eː] when long and [ɛ] when short), crf:

se /ˈseː/ see vs. sej /ˈsɛjː/ saithe (fish)
eder /ˈeːdɛr/ oath-PL or 2PL-GEN (arch.) vs. ejder /ˈɛjːdɛr/ common eider (bird)
sedel /ˈseːdɛl/ banknote vs. sejdel /ˈsɛjːdɛl/ beer muɡ
led /ˈleːd/ queu, trail, joint (bodypart) or suffer-PST vs. lejd /ˈlɛjːd/ hire-PST.PTCP (a person temporarily)

[zompist]

I'm looking over the long mid mergers in English (pane-pain/ toe-tow), and wondering if any language has a stable contrast between /e:/ and /ej/ and/or /o:/ and /ow/.

Does [ɛ] count? French -eille- is pronounced [ɛj], and produces minimal pairs like réveil [rɛvɛj] and rêvait [rɛvɛ].

(At least, that's how I was taught: [e] in rêvé vs. [ɛ] in rêvait. Maybe that distinction hasn't been maintained.)

According to Wiktionary, Italian ne/nei are [ne / nej].

[Moose-tache]

It’s not even that weird, though. The most distinctive feature is stød, but then again English has preglottalisation, so there’s precedent for such things.

This is only possible to believe if you learned Danish from a book. Actual spoken Danish is utterly incomprehensible.

Click on these sentences and tell me that's normal. Every word in spoken Danish is some permutation of [øɑɞʏæɤ̞ɘ] but somehow spelled {splink}.

[Nortaneous]

<d g> outside stressed onsets are approximants and all intervocalic stops are lenis - doesn't seem too bad

[bradrn]

It’s not even that weird, though. The most distinctive feature is stød, but then again English has preglottalisation, so there’s precedent for such things.

This is only possible to believe if you learned Danish from a book. Actual spoken Danish is utterly incomprehensible.

Click on these sentences and tell me that's normal. Every word in spoken Danish is some permutation of [øɑɞʏæɤ̞ɘ] but somehow spelled {splink}.

Oh, I never claimed it was comprehensible. Just that, linguistically, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. It’s just that the spelling doesn’t reflect all the lenition that’s happened.

[fusijui]

There used to be -- this is like >25 years ago now -- a tiny video clip on the internet of a Danish family gathering at the birthing bed to insert a steaming hot potato into their newborn's mouth so it would be able to speak Danish properly.

[Otto Kretschmer]

How might Toki Pona develop if (hypothetically) taught to a group of people and used by them as a sole native language for a few thousand years?

[jal]

How might Toki Pona develop if (hypothetically) taught to a group of people and used by them as a sole native language for a few thousand years?

What do you mean by "develop"? Toki Pona is a kind of pidgen, as far as its complexity goes, so it'll very quickly gain a lot of vocabulary, and probably a bunch of grammar rules too. From there, anything goes of course. You can't predict what any language develops into in a few thousand years, Toki Pona or any other.


JAL

[Linguoboy]

So here's an interesting pair of sentences:

"You don't kiss like him."
"He doesn't kiss like you."

Formally, these should be equivalent: You and him both kiss differently. But without further context, the former strongly implies "He kisses better than you" and the latter "You kiss better than him". (Don't ask me how I discovered this.)

Can folks think of other examples of this sort of pragmatic asymmetry? I know in the past Mark has produced examples of how ordering can matter (even when the grammatical analysis suggests it shouldn't) but I'm coming up empty.

[Travis B.]

So here's an interesting pair of sentences:

"You don't kiss like him."
"He doesn't kiss like you."

Formally, these should be equivalent: You and him both kiss differently. But without further context, the former strongly implies "He kisses better than you" and the latter "You kiss better than him". (Don't ask me how I discovered this.)

Can folks think of other examples of this sort of pragmatic asymmetry? I know in the past Mark has produced examples of how ordering can matter (even when the grammatical analysis suggests it shouldn't) but I'm coming up empty.

You're right in how you perceive these two sentences. I think the reason for this asymmetry has something to deal with the fact that one of the arguments is the 2nd sg. which is being contrasted with the 3rd. sg. and this being emotionally loaded. Contrast these two sentences with:

"He doesn't kiss like her."
"She doesn't kiss like him."

In these cases this difference largely goes away.

[Otto Kretschmer]

How did IE languages get infinitives if PIE didn't have it?

[Travis B.]

How did IE languages get infinitives if PIE didn't have it?

Verbal nouns.

[Zju]

So here's an interesting pair of sentences:

"You don't kiss like him."
"He doesn't kiss like you."

Formally, these should be equivalent: You and him both kiss differently. But without further context, the former strongly implies "He kisses better than you" and the latter "You kiss better than him". (Don't ask me how I discovered this.)

Can folks think of other examples of this sort of pragmatic asymmetry? I know in the past Mark has produced examples of how ordering can matter (even when the grammatical analysis suggests it shouldn't) but I'm coming up empty.

What about adjectival antonyms? Mark is taller than Bob vs Bob is shorter than Mark. IIRC one implied that both persons had the quality, the other one implied that only one of them had it, though I can't recall which was which.

[zompist]

So here's an interesting pair of sentences:

"You don't kiss like him."
"He doesn't kiss like you."

Formally, these should be equivalent: You and him both kiss differently. But without further context, the former strongly implies "He kisses better than you" and the latter "You kiss better than him". (Don't ask me how I discovered this.)

Science requires experiment. More kissing may be needed.

Can folks think of other examples of this sort of pragmatic asymmetry? I know in the past Mark has produced examples of how ordering can matter (even when the grammatical analysis suggests it shouldn't) but I'm coming up empty.

Quantifiers and scope are a good source of these. E.g.:

Not many candidates could have passed that test.
Many candidates couldn’t have passed that test.

The first statement implies that few candidates passed; the second only says that the number of failures was significant. Or there's

Bees are swarming in the garden.
The garden is swarming with bees.

Only the latter suggests that bees are all over.

We loaded the donkeys with the sassafras.
We loaded the sassafras onto the donkeys.

Here, only the first sentences suggests that the donkeys were fully loaded.

Your sentences are pretty neat, since they're so simple, the construction is identical, and there's nothing in play but word order.

I'm tempted here by Adele Goldberg's Construction Grammar. We're obviously going beyond the literal meaning, which simply denies sameness of kissing. I don't think the trigger is the word "kiss", since you can also have:

You don't twerk like Beyoncé.
I can't write like Tolkien.

The negative seems necessary— "You kiss like him" doesn't imply that either party is particularly good at it.

I'm not sure I agree with Travis about person: I think 3rd person attenuates the implication in the abstract, but not necessarily in context. E.g. here it's quite clear that Carlos is the better kisser:

"Jon left Rakesh because he didn't kiss like Carlos."

Does the implication have to be positive? I think "You don't snore like John" is ambiguous— it could mean that John is an intolerable snorer, but not necessarily. It does seem to imply that John snores, though. You can remove the ambiguity with "at least": "At least you don't snore like John" does imply John's snoring is really bad.

I bring up Goldberg because her framework allows meanings to be assigned to constructions rather than just words; she also recognizes prototype effects. I think the prototype here is <person A> doesn't <do some positive thing> like <person B who does it really well> with some slippage about the positivity.

[Travis B.]

Adele Goldberg's Construction Grammar.

For a moment I was thinking that Adele Goldberg the Smalltalk person also did linguistics on the side...