Zompist Bboard Again

alice wrote: ↑Mon Aug 06, 2018 3:50 am correct linguistic term

Bold of you to assume there's any actually standardised terminology in linguistics.

Pabappa wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 5:58 pmi thought "vime" and "chime" were used in SE Asian languages like Khmer for their expressive reduplication, but I dont remember which is which and cant find any mention of them on Wikipedia.

You thought those specific syllables were used in those languages? That's odd, I don't remember encountering either of those...

I mean vime&chime are the names for nonfinal assonance. In the PDFs there should be more information, but i think its about children's speech therapy.

Frislander wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 6:59 pm

alice wrote: ↑Mon Aug 06, 2018 3:50 am correct linguistic term

Bold of you to assume there's any actually standardised terminology in linguistics.

You mean there isn't? So when I say "alveolar fricative", a linguist might think I really mean what I'd call "prenasalised labiodental approximant"? This is troubling.

There seems to be a lot of confusion between dental and alveolar at least. Which is also troubling because that distinction is phonemic in some languages...although of course so are a lot of other distinctions.

Let's not even get into the mess that is the usage of terminology related to the glottal region - like how Semitic epiglottals are described as "pharyngeals", or the issues surrounding how different kinds of phonations are analysed.

But I will grant you phonetics isn't too much of a mess in this regard, because unlike the rest of linguistics there is actually an International Phonetics Association that sets the rules on these things. Everywhere else though, even in phonology, the "standardisation" comes through even general trends or particular theories - look at the uncertainty of the boundary between pitch-accent and tone.

Part of the problem is that much of the terminology has been built piece-by-piece, often family by family (see IE vs. Semitic), so there's an awful lot of stuff which hasn't had the chance to be standardised because there hasn't been work which would warrant the terminology to be coined, or alternatively there might have been works that have worked on the same thing but coined different terms.

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Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 10:10 amDo people know of examples from other languages?

Since you mentioned those Argentinian extensions of vos, I'll mention that in Salvadoran Spanish you can replace sí 'yes' with Simón "Simon", sillón "couch, sofa", ciego "blind", cilantro "coriander", and Simona la mona pelona "Simona the bald she-monkey" (mona 'she-monkey' is also a slang word for 'penis').

Nada can be replaced by neles pasteles "noes cakes" too. Nel is a colloquial variant of no (I have no idea where the -el comes from, but I doubt this might be inherited Latin nihil in case you suspected that, mostly because it's not attested in older Spanish). It is unclear to me why it's made plural when nel pastel could've worked as well.

Frislander wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 10:19 amLet's not even get into the mess that is the usage of terminology related to the glottal region - like how Semitic epiglottals are described as "pharyngeals", or the issues surrounding how different kinds of phonations are analysed.

Yeah... the Arabic ع `ayn is basically a glottalized voiced epiglottal approximant (if you don't mind me using the phonation term "glottalized"), not a "voiced pharyngeal fricative".

But I will grant you phonetics isn't too much of a mess in this regard, because unlike the rest of linguistics there is actually an International Phonetics Association that sets the rules on these things. Everywhere else though, even in phonology, the "standardisation" comes through even general trends or particular theories - look at the uncertainty of the boundary between pitch-accent and tone.

The IPA doesn't seem to have fully succeeded standardizing the palatal terminology in particular though... I often see the IPA "postalveolars" referred to as "palato-alveolars" so that the term "postalveolar" can include the IPA's (sibilant) alveolo-palatals as well. And then some linguists like to make finer distinctions among these consonants, distinguishing laminal from apical postalveolars (the latter remaining distinct from "subapical" retroflex sounds).

Also, the traditional description of Spanish describes the ñ and hard-y sounds as palatal [ɲ] and [ɟʝ], but the ch sound as a postalveolar [tʃ]. I am a native speaker and I don't perceive any difference in the point of articulation of the three consonants. I'd rather describe ch as "[cç]" or otherwise make them all postalveolar i.e. "[n̠ tʃ dʒ]".

Part of the problem is that much of the terminology has been built piece-by-piece, often family by family (see IE vs. Semitic), so there's an awful lot of stuff which hasn't had the chance to be standardised because there hasn't been work which would warrant the terminology to be coined, or alternatively there might have been works that have worked on the same thing but coined different terms.

Yes. Distinguishing the terms used for the adverbial-y "converbs" of Altaic languages from the preposition-like "coverbs" of Chinese more clearly would be a good start... (Hungarian linguistics could also stop using the term "coverbs" for derivational verbal prefixes.)

The awful, awful terms "unaccusative" and "unergative" could also be replaced by the Americanists' much more sensible "patientive" and "agentive", since these are closely-related semantic concepts (an unaccusative verb is a verb with a patientive subject). People in Romance linguistics would also need to be told to stop using "unaccusative/unergative" for syntactic phenomena (French aller 'to go' typically has an agentive subject, stop calling it an unaccusative verb!).

A common definition for "dynamic verb" could also be imposed, so that the struggle between those who use it for continuous actions and those who use it as a synonym for "inchoative verb" would finally stop.

Ser wrote:Thu Jul 04, 2019 2:34 pm Also, the traditional description of Spanish describes the ñ and hard-y sounds as palatal [ɲ] and [ɟʝ], but the ch sound as a postalveolar [tʃ]. I am a native speaker and I don't perceive any difference in the point of articulation of the three consonants. I'd rather describe ch as "[cç]" or otherwise make them all postalveolar i.e. "[n̠ tʃ dʒ]".

There's an argument (I know it from Hall, The Phonology of Coronals) that c, ɟ, and ɲ (and maybe j) are (both phonetically and phonologically) coronal, more specifically alveopalatals (and pattern with ɕ and ʑ rather than with the true palatals ç and ʝ).