Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[bradrn]

It's pretty common. The obvious example is Japanese.

Thanks! (I had thought that Japanese was tenseless; looks like I was wrong…)

[Znex]

It's pretty common. The obvious example is Japanese.

Isn't the distinction more imperfective vs. perfective than past vs. non-past?

The Germanic languages as a family are certainly past vs. non-past; I think North Germanic certainly have no particular future tense. English is debatable because we have multiple ways of indicating the future, including using the simple present tense, all used frequently to indicate the future.

As for other families, comparing these two WALS chapters is a good place to start: 1 2

[bradrn]

As for other families, comparing these two WALS chapters is a good place to start: 1 2

WALS was the first place I looked, but I can’t see how those two articles in particular would help me.

[Moose-tache]

Where the boundary is between tense and aspect is certainly a rabbit hole we could explore until the stars go dim. I am only conversational in Japanese, so I will defer to experts, but in my experience, the -ta past only overlaps with the perfective aspect in places where it's pretty natural to have such an overlap because the speaker is talking about a past completed action. When you hear "wakatta" to indicate that someone has understood you, are they saying "understanding you is something I did just now" or "understanding you is something that I have now completed"? Even in English the -ed past can frequently appear in sentences that could be parsed as perfective (it's fairly common where I come from to hear people say "I never went to Arkansas, and I never will."). It's just a natural gray area since we frequently talk about completed actions in the past. The ambiguity is really only disentangled completely if a language is nice enough to keep its telic and atelic verbs separate either with morphology or word choice, and we rarely have such a luxury.

We could go further and look at the gray area between tense, aspect, and mood. The Choctaw -aachin is often classified as an irrealis marker in formal grammars, and it co-occurs with tense markers so morphologically it's clearly part of a different set of affixes. But 90% of the time it refers to future actions, and most fluent Choctaw speakers explain it in English as "Choctaw future tense." A similar shift is proposed for Proto-Indo-European. The subjunctive is a similar soup of confusion and ambiguity.

So does Japanese have a past/non-past distinction? I think the answer is yes, but the answer is pretty much guaranteed to be less interesting than the question.

[bradrn]

Even in English the -ed past can frequently appear in sentences that could be parsed as perfective (it's fairly common where I come from to hear people say "I never went to Arkansas, and I never will.").

Um, isn’t that because the -ed past is a past perfective? Past imperfective would be was V-ing.

[Moose-tache]

Even in English the -ed past can frequently appear in sentences that could be parsed as perfective (it's fairly common where I come from to hear people say "I never went to Arkansas, and I never will.").

Um, isn’t that because the -ed past is a past perfective? Past imperfective would be was V-ing.

Yeah, I confused perfective with perfect (as in, "I never went" and "I've never gone" can swap in interesting ways). But I think the larger point is intact, especially since "was V-ing" is far from being just a past imperfective. Tense markers and aspect markers can impersonate each other in situations where only the listener's interpretation can distinguish them. Bonus: my momentary brain fart about perfective vs perfect is another great jumping off point for the complexity of tense-aspect systems!

[Qwynegold]

Yes. It's common for native speakers to disagree in a number of characters such as 北 běi 'north', 火 huǒ 'fire' or 母 mǔ 'mother' (the last one regarding the order of the dots vs. the middle horizontal line). I'd say that in such cases it doesn't matter much as long as you broadly follow larger patterns, say, writing the left half of 北 before the right half, or in the case of 母, leaving the dots and the middle horizontal line to the end (regardless of which order you end up using for these three final strokes).

It is also common for native speakers to disregard a number of things about stroke order when doing regular handwriting (informal 行書 xíngshū or Semi-cursive Script) as opposed to fully standard 楷書 kǎishū (Regular Script), even when they are perfectly aware of the standard order. For example, 生 shēng 'be born' is written in its standard Regular Script form as:

1. NW slant
2. top horizontal
3. mid horizontal
4. vertical
5. bottom horizontal

But in regular handwriting it is very common to use instead:

1. NW slant into top horizontal (looking like a kind-of-L)
2. vertical
3. mid horizontal
4. bottom horizontal (forming a "Z" with the previous stroke)

Or if you don't mind a crude Paint drawing made with a mouse:

Which one is it? And if you know of an authorative correct source, can you tell me what are the orders for 比 and 区?

The 现代汉语通用字笔顺规范 Xiàndài Hànyǔ Tōngyòngzì Bǐshùn Guīfàn ("Stroke Order Standards for Modern Chinese Characters in Use", 1997) made by the Chinese government's 国家语言文字工作委员会标准化工作委员会 Guójiā Yǔyán Wénzì Gōngzuò-wěiyuán Biāozhǔnhuà Gōngzuò-wěiyuán ("Standardization Working Committee of the National Language Script Working Committee") says the following:







Note this dictionary does not distinguish between the 提 tí (slanted from SW to NE) and 撇 piě (slanted from NE to SW) strokes (this is because it lists everything by its Wubi composition). However, the greater thickness at the NE end in this dictionary's font, as well as the various Simplified Chinese fonts I have (including Google's Noto Serif SC), show it's a 撇 piě stroke (so drawn from the NE end towards the centre).

China's Baidupedia mentions a difference between Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean (hanja) vs. Traditional Chinese here (Taiwan and Hong Kong are second and third from the left):



In the Traditional Chinese form, the SW stroke typically reaches the bottom of the left vertical, instead of touching it at a point about 70% the way down. The Taiwanese form is also shown to be near horizontal in the NE stroke previously discussed to be 撇 piě. The website strokeorder.com.tw (naturally a website from Taiwan) confirms this (also while using the same stroke order as China), and shows China's 撇 piě stroke is actually a 橫 héng (horizontal) stroke in Taiwanese Traditional. I asked someone from Taiwan and they mentioned this horizontal stroke is in fact about 10 degrees upwards, as you can correctly observe on that website, although sometimes a zero-degree horizontal is seen as in Baidupedia's font sample for Taiwan.

Thank you! This was really helpful, including the stuff about the ti~pie distinction, which I didn't even mention but was wondering about.

[smii]

I remember hearing a while ago about a language that marked aspect (I think, but it might have been tense) purely through word order, but I can't seem to find it now. Does anyone know of a language like that, or have I misremembered?

[Linguoboy]

And now I have found a source that says it's:

1. The NW horizontal
2. The left vertical
3. The SW horizontal
4. The NE horizontal
5. The right leg

This was the order I learned and I honestly surprised to find out about the others--so much so that I began to doubt myself. So I finally went back and dug out my copy of A guide to Korean characters by Bruce K. Grant. (Perhaps I should explain: I learned Korean before I formally studied Mandarin and because of the teacher I had and my own interest in hanja, I learned a lot of characters first in their Sino-Korean forms, which tend to be nearly identical to their traditional Chinese versions.) It confirms that this order is standard for South Korea.

And if you know of an authorative correct source, can you tell me what are the orders for 比 and 区?

From the same source (FWIW), 比 is written in essentially the same order: left horizontal, left vertical, SW horizontal, NE horizontal, right vertical.

(区 isn't listed because it's a simplified version of 區. But based on the order for the characters 匹 and 凶, if I had to write it, it would be: top horizontal, NE to SW diagonal, NW to SE diagonal, then the rest of the enclosure starting in the upper left corner.)

[Jonlang]

I apologise if this is interrupting an on-going discussion but I didn't think this was worth a thread of its own.

Does anyone here know why/how some Latin words beginning in /f/ became /χw/ or /ʍ/ in Brythonic languages and why some didn't change? For example, Latin februarius became Welsh Chwefror, Cornish Hwevrer, Breton C'hwevrer; Latin fenestra became Welsh ffenestr, Cornish fenester, Breton fenestr. My gut feeling is that februarius and fenestra were borrowed at different times and were subject to different changes, but I'm mostly interested in how Latin /f/ became /χw/.

[Linguoboy]

Does anyone here know why/how some Latin words beginning in /f/ became /χw/ or /ʍ/ in Brythonic languages and why some didn't change? For example, Latin februarius became Welsh Chwefror, Cornish Hwevrer, Breton C'hwevrer; Latin fenestra became Welsh ffenestr, Cornish fenester, Breton fenestr. My gut feeling is that februarius and fenestra were borrowed at different times and were subject to different changes, but I'm mostly interested in how Latin /f/ became /χw/.

Your instinct is correct: Chwefror is an earlier borrowing from the era in which /f/ wasn't yet fully established as a phoneme in Common Brittonic.

The native sources of Brittonic *f- are Proto-Celtic PC *s- before *r and *ɸ (< **p), e.g.:

PC *srognā > W ffroen
PC *sɸerā > W. ffêr

It's unclear what the precise phonetic value of *sɸ- was in early Brittonic at the time of the first Roman contacts, but it wasn't sufficiently close to Latin /f/ to be used in Latin loanwords. What was substituted instead was a sequence Jackson writes as *Σu̯-, deriving from earlier *su̯-. Again, the exact phonetic value at the time is unclear, but it was probably similar to [ʍ], which is its reflex in Cornish; in Welsh and Breton, it is strengthened to [xʍ]. (Compare the parallel change of PB *w- > /gw/.) You can find similar interchanges in this position in languages like Maori, Southern Min, and even Andalusian Spanish.

[Jonlang]

Does anyone here know why/how some Latin words beginning in /f/ became /χw/ or /ʍ/ in Brythonic languages and why some didn't change? For example, Latin februarius became Welsh Chwefror, Cornish Hwevrer, Breton C'hwevrer; Latin fenestra became Welsh ffenestr, Cornish fenester, Breton fenestr. My gut feeling is that februarius and fenestra were borrowed at different times and were subject to different changes, but I'm mostly interested in how Latin /f/ became /χw/.

Your instinct is correct: Chwefror is an earlier borrowing from the era in which /f/ wasn't yet fully established as a phoneme in Common Brittonic.

The native sources of Brittonic *f- are Proto-Celtic PC *s- before *r and *ɸ (< **p), e.g.:

PC *srognā > W ffroen
PC *sɸerā > W. ffêr

It's unclear what the precise phonetic value of *sɸ- was in early Brittonic at the time of the first Roman contacts, but it wasn't sufficiently close to Latin /f/ to be used in Latin loanwords. What was substituted instead was a sequence Jackson writes as *Σu̯-, deriving from earlier *su̯-. Again, the exact phonetic value at the time is unclear, but it was probably similar to [ʍ], which is its reflex in Cornish; in Welsh and Breton, it is strengthened to [xʍ]. (Compare the parallel change of PB *w- > /gw/.) You can find similar interchanges in this position in languages like Maori, Southern Min, and even Andalusian Spanish.

Thanks, dude!

[Zju]

How come *sr > fr?

[KathTheDragon]

Presumably *sr > *θr > *fr. Latin had exactly the same development of *sr > *fr (whence *br medially)

[Qwynegold]

This was the order I learned and I honestly surprised to find out about the others--so much so that I began to doubt myself. So I finally went back and dug out my copy of A guide to Korean characters by Bruce K. Grant. (Perhaps I should explain: I learned Korean before I formally studied Mandarin and because of the teacher I had and my own interest in hanja, I learned a lot of characters first in their Sino-Korean forms, which tend to be nearly identical to their traditional Chinese versions.) It confirms that this order is standard for South Korea.

Yeah, I learned Japanese first and have studied only a tiny bit of Mandarin. And it's annoying that sometimes the two languages have different orders. And sometimes I do discover that I've been writing some character wrong for years.

(区 isn't listed because it's a simplified version of 區. But based on the order for the characters 匹 and 凶, if I had to write it, it would be: top horizontal, NE to SW diagonal, NW to SE diagonal, then the rest of the enclosure starting in the upper left corner.)

Yeah, that's how I've learned it. But I even found some source claiming that the whole box is done first. *sigh*

[Kuchigakatai]

Yeah, that's how I've learned it. But I even found some source claiming that the whole box is done first. *sigh*

In Chinese? Who is that? I tried finding any website that said that, and every one I came across showed the same order as that of the Chinese government's standardization body I mentioned above.

[Linguoboy]

Yeah, I learned Japanese first and have studied only a tiny bit of Mandarin. And it's annoying that sometimes the two languages have different orders. And sometimes I do discover that I've been writing some character wrong for years.

The forms of the characters aren't even consistent between standards so why would you expect the stroke order to be? Fortunately it doesn't really affect anything unless you're interested in writing more calligraphic styles where strokes are joined up and simplified.

[Kuchigakatai]

The forms of the characters aren't even consistent between standards so why would you expect the stroke order to be? Fortunately it doesn't really affect anything unless you're interested in writing more calligraphic styles where strokes are joined up and simplified.

In more calligraphic styles the official stroke order isn't necessarily followed anyway, as with 生 above...

[Travis B.]

I ran into someone here in Oregon who didn't get that [pɜːʁ] meant better; it was only after switching to carefully pronouncing the word as [ˈpɛɾʁ̩(ː)] that she understood me.

[bradrn]

I ran into someone here in Oregon who didn't get that [pɜːʁ] meant better; it was only after switching to carefully pronouncing the word as [ˈpɛɾʁ̩(ː)] that she understood me.

Well, without the appropriate context, I’m not sure I would recognise that word either.