Zompist Bboard Again

zompist wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 5:32 pm
The other is visibility. Thousands of languages are just barely documented. Many historical languages only exist as wordlists, which means even basic features like argument order are unknown. If you want to know (say) how the middle voice works, Ancient Greek is particularly important because of the depth of the evidence.

This is really a thing. Here is an example I like. According to Peter Ladefoged, phoneticians judged velar laterals to be non-existant in the phonology of natural languages until a few decades ago. He then met a student who was a native speaker of Mid-Wahgi when giving a lecture in PNG (IIRC) who corrected him.

Creyeditor wrote: ↑Sun Oct 27, 2024 1:00 am

zompist wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 5:32 pm
The other is visibility. Thousands of languages are just barely documented. Many historical languages only exist as wordlists, which means even basic features like argument order are unknown. If you want to know (say) how the middle voice works, Ancient Greek is particularly important because of the depth of the evidence.

This is really a thing. Here is an example I like. According to Peter Ladefoged, phoneticians judged velar laterals to be non-existant in the phonology of natural languages until a few decades ago. He then met a student who was a native speaker of Mid-Wahgi when giving a lecture in PNG (IIRC) who corrected him.

Obviously this is something that could have been disproven simply by an adequate study of English dialects.

I'm still not dure that I ever heard a real velar lateral in any English dialect (in contrast to velarized coronal laterals). They are acoustically so drastically different from the velar lateral that I heard in Mee (aka Ekagi/Ekari).

Creyeditor wrote: ↑Sun Oct 27, 2024 12:25 pm I'm still not dure that I ever heard a real velar lateral in any English dialect (in contrast to velarized coronal laterals). They are acoustically so drastically different from the velar lateral that I heard in Mee (aka Ekagi/Ekari).

The velar lateral in the dialect here to my ears sounds like [ɣ] or [ɰ] except, well, lateral. For me it is not a proper lateral being that the tongue does not actually touch the roof of the mouth (but the point where it is closest to the roof of the mouth is in the velar region ─ the tip of the tongue is nowhere near the roof of the mouth, in contrast). As I've mentioned here before, it is unstable, alternating with [ɰ] (and apparently, contrary to what I had previously thought, also [w]), but it is still common at the start of stressed words and when geminate.

Sorry to derail the thread further but do you have a recording?

Creyeditor wrote: ↑Sun Oct 27, 2024 12:59 pm Sorry to derail the thread further but do you have a recording?

length https://voca.ro/1gbNgjVA3LRd

xxx wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 1:48 am let's be more pragmatic: who among the conlangers has voluntarily studied ancient Greek...
(not me...)

as a language, I have not; as a source of words (to better understand parts of taxonomy and cladistics), I have delved into it.

If we go for famous conlangers, Tolkien had studied Classical Greek, too.
As for much less famous me, I also studied it, first out of a general interest in languages and then later because I needed to know it (in its Koine variant) for my Master's Thesis about the Periphrastic Future in the Old Church Slavic Gospel texts.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2024 2:19 pm I often heard it the claim that the Greek of the Gospels is, in fact, pretty bad Greek and obviously non-native. I'd love to know enough Greek to be able to see that for myself!

I don't know Greek either, but from what I've heard, it depends on which one: Mark is the most obviously non-native, while Matthew and Luke are less so. In fact, it's one of the reasons scholars think Mark was first: it would make sense if Mark wrote in bad Greek and the others corrected his errors, while it would be weird if Mark copied another one but added his own mistakes.