Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Travis B.]

Something else that's also occurred to me — dental fricatives, and possibly [æ], in English: some theories, and I tend to agree with them, posit that Chaucer's /aː/ was phonetically [æː], and the dental fricatives are well-documented historically; these rare sounds, the bane of foreigners trying to learn English, we seem to have kept out of sheer spite (though there are varieties which have lost them). Even weird and rare features can stick around indefinitely, it would seem.

Mind you, neither [æ] nor [ð] or [θ] have been stable in English varieties. [æ] has become [a] in very many EngE varieties and has become, conditionally or unconditionally, [ɛə~eə~iə] in various NAE varieties. [ð] has become [d̪~d] initially in many English varieties and, more generally, [v] in many southeastern EngE varieties. Likewise, [θ] has become [f] in many southeastern EngE varieties.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Something else that's also occurred to me — dental fricatives, and possibly [æ], in English: some theories, and I tend to agree with them, posit that Chaucer's /aː/ was phonetically [æː], and the dental fricatives are well-documented historically; these rare sounds, the bane of foreigners trying to learn English, we seem to have kept out of sheer spite (though there are varieties which have lost them). Even weird and rare features can stick around indefinitely, it would seem.

Mind you, neither [æ] nor [ð] or [θ] have been stable in English varieties. [æ] has become [a] in very many EngE varieties and has become, conditionally or unconditionally, [ɛə~eə~iə] in various NAE varieties.

I was aware of the diphthongisation of [æ], but not of [æ] > [a] except in Wales (though I'm not very knowledgeable about English, Scottish, and Irish varieties).

...[ð] has become [d̪~d] initially in many English varieties and, more generally, [v] in many southeastern EngE varieties. Likewise, [θ] has become [f] in many southeastern EngE varieties.

I've heard [θ] > [f] or [θ] > [t] in Irish speakers (but I don't know many); otherwise, dental fricative loss in my area is largely restricted to AAVE.

Even if they are being lost, however, they've stuck around a remarkably long time in some very widespread varieties of English.

[linguistcat]

Japanese has been using particles to mark syntactic function from the oldest attested texts, though which particles are used, and for what purpose, have changed over the centuries. Its ancestrally quadrigrade (yodan), modern quintigrade (godan), verbs have survived a long time, even when the bigrade (nidan) conjugations were regularised out of existence beyond a single lone modern verb.

Pitch accent also seems to have been present as far back as we can reasonably reconstruct as well, though there is some debate about which version of the pitch accent in modern times is the closest to the original.

[anteallach]

Something else that's also occurred to me — dental fricatives, and possibly [æ], in English: some theories, and I tend to agree with them, posit that Chaucer's /aː/ was phonetically [æː], and the dental fricatives are well-documented historically; these rare sounds, the bane of foreigners trying to learn English, we seem to have kept out of sheer spite (though there are varieties which have lost them). Even weird and rare features can stick around indefinitely, it would seem.

If you mean an [æ] quality somewhere in the system, then I don't think that's that surprising in a fairly complex vowel system (and perhaps the persistence of complex vowel systems in most Germanic varieties is another possible example), but I thought it was generally thought that modern English [æ] in the TRAP lexical set was a roughly 17th century southern English innovation from ME [a] (areas further north generally having [a]), and not a retention of OE [æ]. And as Travis says it doesn't seem to be that stable, with several dialects either raising it further (New Zealand), diphthongising it (some US English) or tending to revert to [a] (southern England, non-Atlantic Canada and some cot/caught merged areas in the US).

[Zju]

In some languages, some specific subclass of e.g. nouns has less categories or morphology than the general category of nouns in that language, e.g. pluralia tantum nouns have, of course, only plural.
Is the reverse ever the case? Are there languages in which some subclass of some part of speech has more categories or richer morphologhy than that same part of speech in general does?

[Vilike]

Well, in Latin, some place nouns (cities, small islands, miscellaneous) have a standalone locative case, morphologically similar to the genitive for nouns of the 1st and 2nd declension class, to the dative for nouns of the 3rd declension class, and a distinct ending for domus 'house'. Other nouns normally use the ablative with a preposition to express this meaning.

You could say that transitive verbs in language with an inflectional passive have a richer morphology than intransitive verbs (unless this 'passive' has other uses unrelated to voice).

[Linguoboy]

Similar examples would be Irish (where a small subclass of chiefly feminine nouns—including several significant place names—preserve a distinct dative singular) and Polish (additional case distinctions for masculine animate nouns).

Certain verbs of feeling and perception in Korean have a 1 v 23 distinction otherwise absent from Korean verbs. (Essentially the non-first-person forms are a paraphrase that can be analysed as “does as if X”.) This is also found in the usage of some volitional infixes.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Something else that's also occurred to me — dental fricatives, and possibly [æ], in English: some theories, and I tend to agree with them, posit that Chaucer's /aː/ was phonetically [æː], and the dental fricatives are well-documented historically; these rare sounds, the bane of foreigners trying to learn English, we seem to have kept out of sheer spite (though there are varieties which have lost them). Even weird and rare features can stick around indefinitely, it would seem.

If you mean an [æ] quality somewhere in the system, then I don't think that's that surprising in a fairly complex vowel system (and perhaps the persistence of complex vowel systems in most Germanic varieties is another possible example), but I thought it was generally thought that modern English [æ] in the TRAP lexical set was a roughly 17th century southern English innovation from ME [a] (areas further north generally having [a]), and not a retention of OE [æ]. And as Travis says it doesn't seem to be that stable, with several dialects either raising it further (New Zealand), diphthongising it (some US English) or tending to revert to [a] (southern England, non-Atlantic Canada and some cot/caught merged areas in the US).

I was speaking specifically of Chaucer's long /aː/, the face vowel, being phonetically [æː], but his short /a/ being still [a]. My familiarity with English dialects ought to be better than it is — they do seem to contradict that [æ] has been more persistent than I was wanting to imagine.

In some languages, some specific subclass of e.g. nouns has less categories or morphology than the general category of nouns in that language, e.g. pluralia tantum nouns have, of course, only plural.
Is the reverse ever the case? Are there languages in which some subclass of some part of speech has more categories or richer morphologhy than that same part of speech in general does?

English (and most Romance) pronouns tend to have richer (and frequently suppletive) paradigms than nouns, being vestiges of the fuller case systems earlier stages of the language had.

[Qwynegold]

I was working with an old IAL of mine, that I've never gotten far with, and decided to read about relative clauses on WALS. Apparently the gap strategy is by far the most common type. This is the type used by Japanese, so I thought this must be most common among SOV languages. But to my surprise it was more common in SVO langs. Spanish is listed as one of those languages. Could someone please show me how this works in Spanish, because I can't imagine how. (Note that the relativized noun must appear as the subject of the main clause.) Mandarin is supposed to do the same, so similar examples from Mandarin would also be welcome.

[zompist]

I was working with an old IAL of mine, that I've never gotten far with, and decided to read about relative clauses on WALS. Apparently the gap strategy is by far the most common type. This is the type used by Japanese, so I thought this must be most common among SOV languages. But to my surprise it was more common in SVO langs. Spanish is listed as one of those languages. Could someone please show me how this works in Spanish, because I can't imagine how. (Note that the relativized noun must appear as the subject of the main clause.) Mandarin is supposed to do the same, so similar examples from Mandarin would also be welcome.

I'm trying to understand the WALS presentation. From the Turkish example, and the fact that Mandarin is given as following the "gap strategy", I take it that key is that the relative clause itself has no reference to the head noun. E.g. ren ying le "people won" > ying de ren "the people who won" where the relative clause is ying de.

But, Spanish doesn't exactly work that way. Cf.

el libro que compró el hijo "the book that the boy bought"
el hijo que compró un libro "the boy that bought a book"

As the translations indicate, this is exactly like English: the relative clause is introduced by a relative particle.

But maybe they're putting a lot of emphasis on case marking. It's quite true that que isn't marked for case. But neither is "that", and they cheerfully call English a "relative pronoun" language. (Maybe because of who/whom? But not only is that distinction declining, but it doesn't apply to inanimates at all.)

FWIW I put the argument last in both Spanish sentences, so there's no syntactic indication of case either. But this is optional in Spanish-- I could also have said el libro que el hijo compró.

[Qwynegold]

Thank you! I'll look at that more closely later, because I'm going to sleep right now. But would you mind providing glossing for the Spanish sentences?

[Richard W]

But maybe they're putting a lot of emphasis on case marking. It's quite true that que isn't marked for case. But neither is "that", and they cheerfully call English a "relative pronoun" language. (Maybe because of who/whom? But not only is that distinction declining, but it doesn't apply to inanimates at all.)

Well, relative that does arguably have a genitive whose or that's, though I think there's a lot of idiolectical variation in what goes on - both structure and surface. Maybe those as have the relevant learning can comment usefully.

[bradrn]

WALS defines the ‘gap strategy’ as occurring when ‘there is no overt case-marked reference to the head noun within the relative clause’ — that is, when the head noun is entirely omitted from the relative clause, leaving behind a gap. From those examples, it certainly looks like Mandarin and Spanish straightforwardly satisfy this.

[kodé]

What are some examples for very long-lived features of a language? That is, things that are generally believed to have been present in an ancestral language thousands of years ago, and that are still present in a descended language today? Can be anything from words to phonological, morphological, or syntactical features.

Both the phoneme inventory and verbal morphological structure of Athabaskan languages have been stable for at least a couple of thousand years, not to mention thousands of miles. My postdoc supervisor says that Navajo speakers can roughly understand some of the speech of Canadian Athabaskan languages (or maybe it was vice-versa).

[zompist]

WALS defines the ‘gap strategy’ as occurring when ‘there is no overt case-marked reference to the head noun within the relative clause’ — that is, when the head noun is entirely omitted from the relative clause, leaving behind a gap. From those examples, it certainly looks like Mandarin and Spanish straightforwardly satisfy this.

If Spanish does, so does English.

[KathTheDragon]

Contemporary colloquial English may be, but the prescribed standard definitely still uses relative pronouns, as you observed, and it should go without saying that prescribed standards hold a lot of weight. And there's the matter of "whose", which is probably enough to count as non-gapping.

[zompist]

And there's the matter of "whose", which is probably enough to count as non-gapping.

You mean, like el libro cuyo autor yo conozco ('the book whose author I know')?

[bradrn]

WALS defines the ‘gap strategy’ as occurring when ‘there is no overt case-marked reference to the head noun within the relative clause’ — that is, when the head noun is entirely omitted from the relative clause, leaving behind a gap. From those examples, it certainly looks like Mandarin and Spanish straightforwardly satisfy this.

If Spanish does, so does English.

Yes, this is correct; both languages use a gapping strategy.

Contemporary colloquial English may be, but the prescribed standard definitely still uses relative pronouns, as you observed, and it should go without saying that prescribed standards hold a lot of weight. And there's the matter of "whose", which is probably enough to count as non-gapping.

I think I see where the confusion arises. Relative pronouns are one strategy; gapping is another. However, rather than being mutually exclusive, the two strategies are orthogonal to each other — English has both. To illustrate, here are some hypothetical examples:

no gapping, no relative pronouns: the book the boy bought the book
no gapping, relative pronouns: the book the boy bought which
gapping, no relative pronouns: the book the boy bought ______gap
gapping, relative pronouns: the book which the boy bought ______gap

[Pabappa]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_gap
this might be relevant .... seems to be talking about something similar, but not the same ... but it might help with understanding this subject too.

[Qwynegold]

Okay, so que is some kind of relative pronoun, and you can have an invariant relativization marker in the gap strategy.

I wonder if the pronoun retention strategy would not be better (easier) in an IAL, even though that's uncommon. So you'd say something like "boy buy book, he [did something]" for "the boy who bought the book".