Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Raphael]

Oh. No wonder I couldn't find it anywhere.

Maybe I didn't parse the word quite right: the actual words used are Aussendiensttier and Innendiensttier and refer to worker ants that, respectively, specialize in tasks outside and inside the nest.
(The top entomologists and animal behaviorists are German and the field uses quite a few German words)

I can well imagine those two words being used. Not knowing much entomological specialized literature, I haven't seen them before, but in everyday German, Außendienst and Innendienst are common words for having a position in the organization that employs you where work outside versus one where you work inside. (I think, though I'm not sure about it, that having a job where you make home calls to customers/clients can be called Außendienst, too - you might work inside buildings, but outside your employer's "headquarters".)

[Ares Land]

Thanks! That makes more sense.

[hwhatting]

I think, though I'm not sure about it, that having a job where you make home calls to customers/clients can be called Außendienst, too - you might work inside buildings, but outside your employer's "headquarters"

Yes. The distinction is between working at company premises or away from them, not between working inside of buildings or outside of them. Someone working at company premises, but outside, like e.g. a gardener taking care of the lawns and shrubbery around the offices, would not be Außendienst, even if they spend most of the time outside.

[Raphael]

Thank you!






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What is the difference between exciting and exhilarating?

[Vijay]

What is the difference between exciting and exhilarating?

I would say mostly intensity (exhilarating being more intense than exciting); it also seems as if there's an element of surprise involved in exhilarating.

[Raphael]

Thank you!

[Kuchigakatai]

They're somewhat close in meaning as adjectives that say something causes strong positive emotions, but I don't think they are that close?

I mean, I see these two words as something like:
something exciting = people can hardly wait anymore for it, being anxious to start to enjoy it; people can hardly hold their positive emotion for it while doing it
something exhilarating = makes people sigh in relief towards a very positive state, refreshingly (or surprisingly as Vijay says) they can see themselves enjoying it a lot for a change

So, "exhilarating" implies a usually worse typical situation or a previously worse situation.

[Vijay]

I'm not so sure about that. What about Hong Kong in the late seventies was an exhilarating place to be implies a worse situation?

[zompist]

Yeah, that sounds backwards. Exhilarating is more intense, but also more positive. You can use exciting for (say) a horror film, but not so much exhilarating.

From Google, some events described as exhilarating: an eclipse, becoming CEO, scoring a touchdown for the first time, a spacewalk, going to a ball for the first time in years, writing a very personal book, having sex with a really great guy, steering a sled, performing on TV, a season finale, a game-winning home run.

Exciting wouldn't do for most of these— things can be exciting but also sustained or routine. You can watch an exciting movie every night, so you need a stronger word for when you go on a spacewalk.

[quinterbeck]

There's a lot of crossover between exhilarating and exciting, but exciting is much more general, and exhilarating somewhat narrower in meaning. It's definitely more intense, as others have said.

I'd say exhilaration carries more of a sense of adrenaline, a thrill, or a rush. It works better as a description of in the moment enjoyment than of future enjoyment. Riding a rollercoaster is exhilarating, surfing a big wave is exhilarating, successfully negotiating a major business deal is exhilarating, etc.

[Salmoneus]

I'd echo quinterbeck in identifying adrenaline as key.

'exhilarating' is more intense, but more specifically it's intensely physical. Exhilaration is a physical sort of excitement (and yes, I think the latter is an umbrella that includes the former as a subtype). It's often provoked by something physical - travelling at high speed, escaping mortal peril, etc. But even when it isn't, it's a physical sensation - you feel adrenaline, you want to move, you often need to catch your breath afterward. There's also a joyous, ecstatic element to exhilaration, though that's probably just the endorphin high.

'Exciting', on the other hand, can be used for very cerebral sorts of emotions. If you say "I had a really exciting talk with Alice!", people might wonder "was she offering him a promotion?" or "did she suggest a way the company might expand into a new market?" or something like that. If you say "I had a really exhilarating talk with Alice!", people might wonder "has he fallen in love with her?" or "were they on a rollercoaster?" or "is Alice a genius and they had the most incredibly intellectually stimulating discussion he's ever had?"

Indeed, although I think 'exhilarating' is probably properly a subtype of 'exciting', I can even imagine an arguable situation where somethign might perhaps be the former without being the latter: if you're an army veteran who has become bored and jaded by military endeavours, then being in a firefight might actually not be very exciting for you, even if it's, in a literal sense, exhilarating.


I would also say, though, that sometimes exhilarating doesn't mean that. Because it's more physical, it sometimes has what I think is its older meaning, of really physically stimulating. A good brisk walk through a storm might be physically "exhilarating", even if it doesn't involve much pumping adrenaline.


But yeah, generally I'd say exhilaration is intense, but also (directly or indirectly) physically stimulating.

[also, most 'exciting' things actually aren't. It's a very overused word.]

[Raphael]

Thank you, everyone!

[Kuchigakatai]

In the history of Latin handwriting, the late Roman Empire replaced the so-called Old Roman cursive with the much more readable New Roman Cursive, which later evolved into various regional scripts like the Merovingian and Visigothic scripts.

One thing that amuses me about New Roman Cursive is that in its later forms (and also in its daughter scripts: Visigothic, Merovingian, etc.) it had a large number of ligatures with <e> + another letter, which in the case of <ed> and <eq>, the top part of the semicircles was removed, then connecting the remaining top-left ending to the middle line of the <e>. Something like this, if you don't mind some crude mouse drawings in classic Paint:



Apparently, writers found it annoying that this <eq> ligature resembled the look of <ey> far too much, so they decided to disambiguate <y> by adding a dot on top of it in all contexts, hence the use of dotted <y>, i.e. <ẏ>, in most documents between the 6th century and the 14th century. For example, <elemosẏna> 'alms', <papẏrus> 'papyrus', <stẏlus> 'pen(cil); style', or in Old Spanish, <ẏentes> 'people', <reẏ> 'king'. The dotted <y> was actually inherited in the 9th-century Carolingian script, even though the designers of Carolingian eliminated the <e> + letter ligatures that made it necessary in the first place.

The letter <i> was originally not dotted in New Roman Cursive, its daughter regional scripts, or Carolingian. By the 14th century, the Blackletter script (a 12th-century off-spin of Carolingian) had evolved in such a way that it was difficult to tell <i>, <m>, <n>, <r> and <u> apart, as the strokes had become so similar they were hardly identifiable as anything other than a sequence of "minims", so for example <mi> looked like <un> or <rm>. This was partially addressed by adding acute accents on every <i>, and over the next century our modern dotted <i> was developed.

Here we have two instances of a dot being added to disambiguate similar-looking letters in the Latin alphabet, just like it happened in Arabic with its i3jaam marks or Hebrew with its niqqud marks, except that it only applied to one letter. I do wonder what the Latin alphabet would've looked like if further dots had been added to blackletter and Renaissance printers had decided to use that, with the 21st-century Latin script ending up with many dots just like how Arabic is normally written.

[Pabappa]

hmmm...

i had thought that German did something similar later on with the Sütterlin script .... the glyphs for E and U are very similar, and U looks effectively like an e-breve, written as Ӗ ĕ . u-umlaut was thus Ë ë.

but, reading the text, i see i misremembered quite a bit .... /u/ is not derived from /e/, but from /n/, although the glyph for e is similar ... and the capitals are all distinct and thus unmarked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtt ... he_letters and http://enwp.org/Kurrentschrift

[Kuchigakatai]

I reinstalled my OS and as I was reconfiguring a fresh Firefox, I noticed this add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefo ... src=search
"Hong Kong Language / Converts the words in web pages to the original language of Hong Kong people"

It was first released in November last year, and only has 4 users.

Regardless, the sample screenshots are a bit interesting. For the term for 'Mainland China', it changes 內地 loi6dei6 "the Interior" in favour of 大陸 daai6luk6 "the Big Land", and for "to improve" also 優化 yau1faa3 in favour of 改善 goi2shin6. Presumably it's because 內地 loi6dei6 has a political connotation of "the Interior as opposed to us, the Exterior, also part of China", and perhaps 優化 yau1faa3 was not commonly used in HK Cantonese before the annexation.

However it also prefers 研究開發 yin4gau3 hoi1faat3 'research and development' instead of its abbreviated form 研發 yin4faat3, and for 'cellphone' also 手提電話 sau2tai4 din6waa6*2 "portable phone" instead of the shorter 手機 sau2gei1. Unlike the ones above, I think these are likely overzealous replacements, ignoring the practicality of the shorter words for older, longer-winded terms.

[Raphael]

I reinstalled my OS and as I was reconfiguring a fresh Firefox, I noticed this add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefo ... src=search
"Hong Kong Language / Converts the words in web pages to the original language of Hong Kong people"

It was first released in November last year, and only has 4 users.

Do you know anything about how reliable these user stats are?

[Kuchigakatai]

Do you know anything about how reliable these user stats are?

I know nothing.

[Linguoboy]

Today I saw "Erdoğan" in a CNN headline. I think that may be the first time I've seen g-breve in English-language MSM.

[äreo]

In the song "Antes de Huir," Natalia Lafourcade seems to say [antes je wir] for the words in the title. Have any of y'all heard anything like this in spoken Spanish? And is ð > j an attested sound change anywhere? I recall seeing something about it having happened in Faroese.

[Estav]

is ð > j an attested sound change anywhere? I recall seeing something about it having happened in Faroese.

I can't answer the Spanish phonetics question. My impression (I think this was discussed somewhere earlier on this or the previous ZBB) is that Faroese is perhaps better analyzed as having elision of original ð, with the hiatus that would otherwise result in intervocalic position being avoided by insertion of an epenthetic glide between the vowels: [j] in some contexts, but [w] or [v] in others. So it's not an unconditioned, and perhaps not even a direct change of "ð > j".

But I don't think ð > j is improbable as an unconditioned sound change. The Vietnamese consonant spelled <d> is pronounced as [z] in some accents and as [j] in others, and is apparently reconstructed as going back to an earlier voiced dental fricative [ð] ("The origin of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet," André-Georges Haudricourt, page 9, translator's note by Alexis Michaud). I don't know the basis for the [ð] reconstruction, though.

I found the following examples using chridd's searchable version of the Index Diachronica:
d → ð → j / V_ : 8.5.1 Proto-Turkic to Proto-Kypchak
ð → j : 10.7.1 Proto-Rukai to Budai Rukai