Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[akam chinjir]

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.)

Sounds like synonym compounds. Very common in Chinese, fwiw.

[mèþru]

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.

Yes, but Mandarin's huge number of native speakers and their wide geographic spread within China makes it have far more of an advantage than any European language does in Europe

[Vijay]

Not to mention that the governments of both the PRC and Singapore have Mandarin-only policies, which are in the process of killing off other varieties

[Travis B.]

Consider, though, how French has effectively wiped out the other languages of France...

[mèþru]

Local varieties of German in Moselle and Alsace seem to be still going strong.

[Travis B.]

Local varieties of German in Moselle and Alsace seem to be still going strong.

Whereas most of the Romance varieties of France other than French seem to be dying out (except I hear Picard may still be surviving).

[mèþru]

(except I hear Picard may still be surviving).

Really? I want to hear more about that.

Also, while specific Occitan varieties are dying out, Occitan as a whole might actually be regaining speakers.

[Pabappa]

Does anyone have a link to a pDF of https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/intro/index.php ? i had it long ago but i think it was on my other computer which broke down. the new site wont let me browse more than 1 feature at a time .

thanks

[Travis B.]

(except I hear Picard may still be surviving).

Really? I want to hear more about that.

Okay, the Wiki says that Picard has c. 700,000 speakers as of 2008, but at the same time says that UNESCO says that the language is a "seriously endangered language" due to a significant reduction in its use in everyday life.

(That is still not that many speakers, when contrasted with say, Low German, which is estimated to have 6.7 million native speakers as of 2001.)

[Raholeun]

Local varieties of German in Moselle and Alsace seem to be still going strong.

Quite correct. Although there are a lot of young people who do speak it (natively), many others who claim proficiency really are not very fluent at all. Words and idioms get thrown in, but most of the sentence stays French for most speakers.

My statement is based on anecdotal evidence, mind you. It would be interesting to see a study on that exact subject.

[WeepingElf]

I once saw the following Runic inscription (probably a band logo) on a T-shirt:

ᛏᚻᚢᚱᛁᛋᚨᛉ

Apparently, the one who designed this made a mistake. Can you spot it?

More: show

Of course, the Runic script has a separate letter for /þ/, so the th digraph in the lettering is wrong,

[Qwynegold]

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.

A couple of other things Japanese does: -tsu, -chi, -ki or -ku at the end of a word may turn into gemination when compounded, e.g. getsu+kō > gekkō, toku+kyū > tokkyū. Some words that consist of an uneven number of mora have had random gemination to make them an even number of mora: yahari (3) > yappari (4). This is very rare however. One more rare thing is an epenthetic consonant that appears between vowels in compounding: haru+ame > harusame.

[Boşkoventi]

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).

"Dinner is being cooked as we speak."
"The house is being built."
"The bell is rung at the same time every day."

Granted, they're (sometimes) ambiguous, but you're confusing passive voice with copula + participle. "The door is closed" could be equivalent to "The door has been closed" (it's in a certain state) or "The door gets closed" (someone does something to it). The latter is still passive -- roughly equivalent to "(Someone) closes the door" -- but not completive (probably habitual, depending on context). Also consider "The door is being closed" -- passive, but definitely not complete/completive. Although they often go together, passive voice and completion are different things.

The point of passive voice is to downplay the subject/agent, or to put focus on the usual object (to emphasize it, or to make it the subject of the sentence). In simple terms, the object is promoted to subject, and the usual subject is made optional. Even if it's not stated, there's still an implied agent.

On the other hand, Akangka's examples ("The meat cooks", "The door closes") are examples of unaccusative verbs, which are in some ways similar to middle voice. In such cases, the subject of the verb is a patient and there is no agent at all.

[Space60]

Was "sweetheart" really originally "sweetard" or is that just a myth?

[alynnidalar]

EtymOnline indicates that the obvious etymology (sweet + heart) is the correct one.

[Kuchigakatai]

People often say that pragmatics or other such considerations determine word order in languages that have lots of word orders available to be applied to a given sentence. But I look at certain pairs of SV - VS sentences in Spanish, and I can't feel any difference between them.

Imagine a babysitter saying, at the end of her work, to the mother of a couple girls: hoy se portaron bien tus niñas ~ hoy tus niñas se portaron bien 'your girls behaved pretty well today'.

They both sound equally good to me, and I don't know what the difference between them in meaning could be. Sometimes word order is probably left to just the whim of the speaker...

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?

Who knows, really... The non-Mandarin varieties are definitely losing users and domains so far, but if you ask specifically about Shanghainese and Cantonese, those still have plenty of room to go. There is still a chance that some political or cultural developments could make them stop receding.

10 years ago, a young man from Xiamen told me young people were largely not speaking Min Nan in that city anymore (he himself had Min Nan-speaking parents but could not speak it), and I can imagine the situation is worse now as it gets more and more associated with older times. I contrast this with a young woman from Shanghai I met at about that time, who said Shanghainese was still going and that she definitely wanted her future children to speak Shanghainese, or with the many complaints received when the government tried to ban Cantonese from TV broadcasts in Guangdong in the summer of 2010, with the result that Cantonese stayed.

[zompist]

Imagine a babysitter saying, at the end of her work, to the mother of a couple girls: hoy se portaron bien tus niñas ~ hoy tus niñas se portaron bien 'your girls behaved pretty well today'.

I tried these out on my wife, who's Peruvian. She thinks there's a very slight difference. Partly topicalization: the first sentence is about the behavior, the second about the children. But she thinks the second could express some disapproval— i.e. the babysitter expected them not to behave, but for once they did.

[gach]

Imagine a babysitter saying, at the end of her work, to the mother of a couple girls: hoy se portaron bien tus niñas ~ hoy tus niñas se portaron bien 'your girls behaved pretty well today'.

I tried these out on my wife, who's Peruvian. She thinks there's a very slight difference. Partly topicalization: the first sentence is about the behavior, the second about the children. But she thinks the second could express some disapproval— i.e. the babysitter expected them not to behave, but for once they did.

So in other words you are saying that it's also a matter of indicating contrast, right?

[anxi]

I once saw the following Runic inscription (probably a band logo) on a T-shirt:

ᛏᚻᚢᚱᛁᛋᚨᛉ

Apparently, the one who designed this made a mistake. Can you spot it?

More: show

Of course, the Runic script has a separate letter for /þ/, so the th digraph in the lettering is wrong,

More: show

Wait, isn't the inscription itself a name of the th rune?

Somebody basically wrote the name of the th forgetting about the th letter itself?

[Qwynegold]

I'm looking for a specific grammatical term, and I was wondering if someone can remind me what it was. It was a type of gender for nouns that are masculine and feminine at the same time, or possible for nouns that can be either masculine or feminine depending on the referent.