Zompist Bboard Again

Akangka wrote: ↑Sat Jan 26, 2019 10:30 am What linguistic abbreviation to be used if my language has a suffix that means either 1SG or 2SG. (i.e. German except German merges 1SG and 3SG instead of 1SG and 2SG)

alynnidalar wrote: ↑Mon Jan 28, 2019 4:28 pm Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like all of those papers are focused on New York, not Michigan?

Of further interest in the development of regional Mandarins is that, due to regional prosperity and connotations of wealth, upbringing, and trendiness associated with new regional urban centers, many regional Mandarin varieties may, in time, come to command greater prestige than Mandarin spoken in its northern birthplace. Ding (1998) has observed that “many Chinese regard the Beijing accent as pompous,” and notes that his fellow academics have found the Mandarin of Taiwanese newscasters to be more pleasant-sounding than that of their northern counterparts. Zhang (2005) writes that well-to-do yuppies working in Beijing’s international corporate offices choose not to speak with a local Beijing accent, but instead to speak in an accent that selectively incorporates features of Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore (Zhang 2005, 444–458). According to Zhang, the choice of this “Cosmopolitan Mandarin” over Beijing Mandarin is not for the purposes of communication, but to signal a distinction in social status. As these speakers switch between Beijing Mandarin and “Cosmopolitan Mandarin” according to interlocutor, situation, and domain of language use, as Mandarin spreads far and wide to remote dialect regions and these regions give back by replenishing the superstrate language, we are in many ways witnessing the dawn of a new type of Mandarin-based diglossia taking root in the Chinese-speaking world, perhaps the second such cycle in as little as two centuries.

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Jan 29, 2019 12:17 pmWhat about "MadudofoW", or "Mandarin dumbed down for Westerners"? Start with Mandarin, remove the tones, replace them with additional syllables, and write it all down in some derivative of Pinyin.

mèþru wrote: ↑Tue Jan 29, 2019 3:50 pmI think the answer to the last point is yes.

mèþru wrote: ↑Tue Jan 29, 2019 3:50 pm but at the very least Mandarin is irreplaceable as the lingua franca between unrelated varieties.

Akangka wrote: ↑Tue Jan 29, 2019 6:18 pm What is the difference of using some verbs like "cook", "close", etc as intransitive verbs, and using passive voice.

What is difference of:

The meat cooks.
The meat is cooked.

The door closes.
The door is closed.

anteallach wrote: ↑Fri Oct 12, 2018 3:10 pm

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Fri Oct 12, 2018 5:35 am

masako wrote: ↑Thu Oct 11, 2018 12:19 pm I'm having a really difficult time reconciling this "خاشقجي‎" being romanized as "Khashoggi" and pronounced as /kæʃoːɡi/.

maybe cf. Genghis /gengis/. I could see -(g)dZ- being intended.

There's an old Language Hat post on this name:
http://languagehat.com/khashoggi/

That suggests that /gdʒ/ was indeed intended.

quinterbeck wrote: ↑Sat Oct 13, 2018 2:55 pm Is there a term for this occurrence, where two words of similar meaning form a phrase with no or very little added meaning. For example, bunny rabbit, which came up in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=137

Failing a term, can anyone cite any other examples? (Also of interest is the case where one word in a two-word phrase carries all the meaning, and the other adds none or very little.)