Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[zompist]

What linguistic abbreviation to be used if my language has a suffix that means either 1SG or 2SG. (i.e. German except German merges 1SG and 3SG instead of 1SG and 2SG)

½?

This is semiserious... you'll have to explain it anyway, but at least that's short yet mnemonic!

[Pabappa]

Ive heard this called "present (person)", though that wont really help with a gloss since the term "present" already has a meaning.

[WeepingElf]

The accepted term is "speech act participant", or "SAP" in short.

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

Alternatively, you could gloss it as either 1SG or 2SG as appropriate and analyse it as two separate suffixes that happen to have the same form.

[Zju]

When a language has a length distinction and a speaker wants to emphasise a word from a length minimal pair by lengthening it (as in nooooooo! or do you heeeaar me?) how is the contrast maintained or is it not?

[Space60]

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~dinkin/NWAV37abstract.pdf

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~dinkin/Weak ... stance.pdf

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~dinkin/CLAhandout.pdf

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~dinkin/DefenseHandout.pdf


Lots of linguists believed before that the NCVS affected areas would resist the spread of the cot-caught merger. However recent evidence suggests in at least some NCVS affected areas, this is not the case. There is recent evidence of the LOT vowel experiencing rebacking among younger speakers in certain areas with the NCVS (some areas of New York state and Michigan) and getting close to the THOUGHT vowel, though not quite merged with it yet.

[alynnidalar]

Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like all of those papers are focused on New York, not Michigan?

[Space60]

Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like all of those papers are focused on New York, not Michigan?

Okay, here is a paper focused on Michigan.

http://msusociolinguistics.weebly.com/u ... nwav44.pdf

[Kuchigakatai]

A hint about where the future of Standard Mandarin might lie, for the futurelang makers among us:

Of further interest in the development of regional Mandarins is that, due to regional prosperity and connotations of wealth, upbringing, and trendiness associated with new regional urban centers, many regional Mandarin varieties may, in time, come to command greater prestige than Mandarin spoken in its northern birthplace. Ding (1998) has observed that “many Chinese regard the Beijing accent as pompous,” and notes that his fellow academics have found the Mandarin of Taiwanese newscasters to be more pleasant-sounding than that of their northern counterparts. Zhang (2005) writes that well-to-do yuppies working in Beijing’s international corporate offices choose not to speak with a local Beijing accent, but instead to speak in an accent that selectively incorporates features of Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore (Zhang 2005, 444–458). According to Zhang, the choice of this “Cosmopolitan Mandarin” over Beijing Mandarin is not for the purposes of communication, but to signal a distinction in social status. As these speakers switch between Beijing Mandarin and “Cosmopolitan Mandarin” according to interlocutor, situation, and domain of language use, as Mandarin spreads far and wide to remote dialect regions and these regions give back by replenishing the superstrate language, we are in many ways witnessing the dawn of a new type of Mandarin-based diglossia taking root in the Chinese-speaking world, perhaps the second such cycle in as little as two centuries.

Source:
Li, Chris Wen-Chao. 2014. “Shifting Patterns of Chinese Diglossia: Why the Dialects May Be Headed for Extinction.” Divided Languages? Diglossia, Translation and the Rise of Modernity in Japan, China and the Slavic World.

Articles cited in the quote:
Ding, Yi 丁乙. 1998. “Guanyu Guifan Putonghua he Dazhong Putonghua de Taolun” 關於規範普通話和大眾普通話的討論 (Discussion on Standard Mandarin and Popular Mandarin). Yuwen Jianshe Tongxun 語文建設通訊 57: 14.
Zhang, Qing. 2005. “A Chinese Yuppie in Beijing: Phonological Variation and the Construction of a New Professional Identity.” Language in Society 34: 431–466.

[Linguoboy]

When I did create a future Mandarin for a space game, I used "Cosmopolitan Mandarin" (which at the time I just referred to as "southern Mandarin") as my base. It was a lingua franca spoken by non-native speakers (mostly Southeast Asians) for whom the retroflex sounds of Beijing Mandarin would have been difficult to imitate.

[Raphael]

What about "MadudofoW", or "Mandarin dumbed down for Westerners"? Start with Mandarin, remove the tones, replace them with additional syllables, and write it all down in some derivative of Pinyin.

[Linguoboy]

What about "MadudofoW", or "Mandarin dumbed down for Westerners"? Start with Mandarin, remove the tones, replace them with additional syllables, and write it all down in some derivative of Pinyin.

Modern Mandarin is mostly multisyllabic to start with. And I don't think four tones is too much for Westerners to handle (especially considering we use all four of them prosodically, at least in English). But I can see it simplifying to a pitch-accent system (à la Shanghainese) relatively easily.

[Salmoneus]

Is it even certain that Mandarin will continue to dominate? It's not the native language of either of China's two largest metropolises. Is there any possibility that Mandarin may become seen as the stuffy, old-fashioned language of centralising bureaucrats and pompous academics, and that Shanghainese and/or Cantonese become more culturally potent among the young? Or are we too far past that point already?

[mèþru]

I think the answer to the last point is yes. There already seems to be an expanding of usage of non-Mandarin dialects for daily and public life, but at the very least Mandarin is irreplaceable as the lingua franca between unrelated varieties.

[Linguoboy]

I think the answer to the last point is yes.

Agreed.

I've been struck by the number of Cantonese borrowings and idioms making their way into general Standard Chinese slang but that just demonstrates how you can borrow from a variety with covert prestige without altering the prestige of the standard variety. (See also: AAVE in Standard American English.)

[Xwtek]

What is the difference of using some verbs like "cook", "close", etc as intransitive verbs, and using passive voice.

What is difference of:

The meat cooks.
The meat is cooked.

The door closes.
The door is closed.

[Salmoneus]

but at the very least Mandarin is irreplaceable as the lingua franca between unrelated varieties.

But the thing about linguas franca is precisely how rapidly they can be discarded. Europeans no longer all speak French.

[Zaarin]

What is the difference of using some verbs like "cook", "close", etc as intransitive verbs, and using passive voice.

What is difference of:

The meat cooks.
The meat is cooked.

The door closes.
The door is closed.

"The meat cooks." = "The meat is in the process of cooking."
"The meat is cooked." = "The meat is not raw."

The examples with "close" strike me as more stylistic; I can't imagine using "The door closes" outside of narrative, where it lends some dramatic flair or suspense. However, it still remains true that the passive has an implied completive aspect (i.e., in both cases the action is regarded as a completed whole, whereas in the simple present it is regarded as an ongoing process).

[Qwynegold]

Replying to really old posts...

I'm having a really difficult time reconciling this "خاشقجي‎" being romanized as "Khashoggi" and pronounced as /kæʃoːɡi/.

maybe cf. Genghis /gengis/. I could see -(g)dZ- being intended.

There's an old Language Hat post on this name:
http://languagehat.com/khashoggi/

That suggests that /gdʒ/ was indeed intended.

Khashoggi with /gdʒ/ is correct? In Sweden they keep pronouncing his name /xa-/ or /kaʃodʒɡɪ/ in the news, which irks me. I don't know anything about Arabic pronounciation, but surely /dʒɡ/ can't be right?

[Qwynegold]

Is there a term for this occurrence, where two words of similar meaning form a phrase with no or very little added meaning. For example, bunny rabbit, which came up in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=137

Failing a term, can anyone cite any other examples? (Also of interest is the case where one word in a two-word phrase carries all the meaning, and the other adds none or very little.)

In Finnish we have repokettu for fox, where kettu is the normal word for fox, and repo is an old word for it, which is not used in isolation anymore. Then we have susihukka for wolf, where susi is the normal word for wolf and hukka is an old-timey word. Oh, and kollikissa for tomcat, where kolli in itself means tomcat, and kissa just means cat.