Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Otto Kretschmer]

Certain components of it are common, like breaking of long front vowels. But none of the languages takes it to the same extent.

I really just wanted to say "Great Bowel Shift" but thanks anyway.

[keenir]

Many many years ago, I read(?) that there was a language - possibly African - in which the speaker can say things like "I say X" and "I do Y" and "I think Z" as well as "You say X" and "You do Y"...but cannot say "You think Z" because the speaker only knows for certain that he himself can think. (one would think this would be blown out of the water as soon as anyone held a conversation - but then again, people can lie) *shrugs*

Is this/was this a linguistics urban myth?

[Richard W]

Many many years ago, I read(?) that there was a language - possibly African - in which the speaker can say things like "I say X" and "I do Y" and "I think Z" as well as "You say X" and "You do Y"...but cannot say "You think Z" because the speaker only knows for certain that he himself can think. (one would think this would be blown out of the water as soon as anyone held a conversation - but then again, people can lie) *shrugs*

If you put them in the past tense, it could be French - it's quite widely spoken in Africa . The claim seems eminently plausible - see the Wikipedia article on grammatical evidentiality.

[keenir]

Many many years ago, I read(?) that there was a language - possibly African - in which the speaker can say things like "I say X" and "I do Y" and "I think Z" as well as "You say X" and "You do Y"...but cannot say "You think Z" because the speaker only knows for certain that he himself can think. (one would think this would be blown out of the water as soon as anyone held a conversation - but then again, people can lie) *shrugs*

If you put them in the past tense, it could be French - it's quite widely spoken in Africa .

seriously, many thanks.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Are there languages other than Wolof that have pronouns inflected for tense?

[Linguoboy]

Many many years ago, I read(?) that there was a language - possibly African - in which the speaker can say things like "I say X" and "I do Y" and "I think Z" as well as "You say X" and "You do Y"...but cannot say "You think Z" because the speaker only knows for certain that he himself can think. (one would think this would be blown out of the water as soon as anyone held a conversation - but then again, people can lie) *shrugs*

Is this/was this a linguistics urban myth?

I don't know of any African languages that work this way, but I know two Asian languages which make similar distinctions: Korean and Tibetan. However, it's not true to say that you cannot say the equivalent of "he thinks". You can, but this requires using a different form of the verb than one uses with first-person subjects.

I can't remember the details for Tibetan, but in Korean the third-person construction can be diachronically analysed as "he does [as if] + infinitive". Compare:

나는 슬퍼요.
na nun sulphe.yo
I TOP sad.INF-TOP
"I am sad."

그는 슬퍼해요.
na nun sulphe.hay.yo
that TOP sad.INF-AUX.INF-POL
"He is sad."

The verb which I'm glossing as "AUX" here is 하다 /hata/, which historically meant "do". It's used not only in this construction but also indirect discourse and to provide an inflectable stem to verbs which lack them (generally foreign borrowings). For example, 피곤 /phikon/, a borrowing of Literary Chinese 疲困 píkùn "tired". But look what happens when we conjugate this derived verb:

나는 피곤해요.
na nun phikon.hay.yo
I TOP tired-AUX.INF-POL
"I am tired."

그는 피곤해해요.
na nun phikon.hay.hay.yo
that TOP tired-AUX.inf-AUX.inf-POL

The auxiliary appears twice, once to verbify 피곤 and then a second time in the second example to indicate a third-person subject.

Korean also has some volitional suffixes (e.g. -ㄹ게요 /-l.key.yo/) which can only be used with first-person subjects, e.g. 나는 갈께요. "I will go." These attach to all verbs, but the underlying logic is the same: You can't say for sure what anyone else intends to do, only what you think they're likely to do.

[linguistcat]

Something similar also happens in Japanese to some degree. You use different verbs for "I want" versus "You/He/She/etc (seem to) want" and also "I am happy/sad/etc" versus "You/He/She (seems) happy/sad/etc"

[Moose-tache]

Heard in the wild from a native speaker: "That's what pisses me so off!"

[bradrn]

I seem to recall reading (possibly on the old ZBB) that case prefixes combined with a large case system are attested only around the Great Lakes region of Africa, particularly Lake Turkana. Can anyone else recall anything like this?

EDIT: The claim may actually have been about VSO word order combined with a large case system; I can’t quite remember. In any case, VSO and prefixes tend to go together, I think.

[dɮ the phoneme]

Does anyone have a sense of what the sociolinguistic situation of Malay/Indonesian is? There are two mutually-intelligible standard forms (Standard Malay and Standard Indonesian), plus various dialects whose exact level of diversity I am unsure of. And I know that most speakers of Indonesian are L2 speakers, but I'm not sure what the situation is for Malay. What's the general layout here?

[Creyeditor]

I can only speak for the Indonesian side here. Standard Indonesian (SI) is similar enough to Standard Malay to allow Indonesians to read Malay texts (apart from a few false friends that cause a lot of laughter). The well-known children cartoon 'Upin dan ipin' which uses some kind of standardized colloquial Malay is subtitled on TV though. I personally think that differences in intonation cause a lot of confusion here.
Inside Indonesia, multilingualism is the norm. Most areas have their local languages which often are Austronesian but not closely related to Standard Indonesian (e.g. Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese, various Papuan languages). Additionally, Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian (CJI) has emerged as a colloquial standard that is used in many talkshows on national TV and on many national Youtube channels. CJI is not mutually intelligible with SI, e.g. CJI has personal pronouns loaned from Southern Chinese.
This is not enough. Many areas in Indonesia have their own variety of Indonesian (often derived from Bazar Malay). These varieties differ (at least) in pronouns and syntax from Standard Indonesian and are not mutually intelligible with Standard Indonesian, but some have a restricted mutual intelligibility with each other. They exist in a continuum from acrolectal to basilectal forms. Acrolectal forms are of course very close to Standard Indonesian.
Some immigrant/heritage communities have also kept their languages, e.g. Chinese and Arabic. Many Chinese Indonesians are switching from Southern Chinese varieties to Mandarin. Few elderly people still know Dutch. Schools teach English and some other languages like Javanese or German.
The newest development I heard of is 'bahasa jaksel' (jaksel < Jakarta selatan 'Southern Jakarta'), which is colloquial Jakarta Indonesian but with a lot of English and pseudo-English loans.
The only thing I heard about Malaysian Malay is that there is more ethnic nationalism involved. SI is often a uniting factor across ethnic groups in Indonesia, since the dominant ethnic group are the Javanese, which have their own language.

[bradrn]

I personally think that differences in intonation cause a lot of confusion here.

I’m surprised to hear this. Do you have any audio samples? (Or at least, spectrographs.)

[Creyeditor]

Try listening to "upin&ipin" (e.g. here) vs. the Indonesian dub of Doraemon (e.g. here). I did not do any measurements, but impressionistically there is a stronger prasal stress and more utterance final rising in the former than the latter.

[bradrn]

Try listening to "upin&ipin" (e.g. here) vs. the Indonesian dub of Doraemon (e.g. here). I did not do any measurements, but impressionistically there is a stronger prasal stress and more utterance final rising in the former than the latter.

Yep, I can hear this too! They sound very different.

(Also, are the subtitles in ‘Upin & Ipin’ in Indonesian rather than Malay? They seem different to the audio, though as a non-speaker it’s hard for me to tell.)

[Creyeditor]

Yes, and there are some lexical differences between the audio and the subtitle, as you might have noticed.

[Starbeam]

I notice there's a bit of an oddity with semantics in two seemingly-synonymous phrases:

"I had an unfair shot." implies the unfairness works for the speaker.

but

"I didn't have a fair shot." implies the unfairness works against the speaker.

Is there a term for this? Or at least, is there a term for this when it happens between words that i could rework to apply between sentences/ phrases? Or am i mistaken a tad?

[Otto Kretschmer]

Is the claim that Phone language has had the strongest impact on Haitian Creole (as a substrate) correct?

Second question - virtually all languages of East and Southeast Asia have limited syllabe inventory. This is true even for outliers like Japanese or Manchu

Is this such a strong and persistent areal feature? Chinese literary influence on Japanese started in the 600s and was reserved to a small (5-6%) percentage of literati, not larger than the number of people who knew Latin in Europe.

[Creyeditor]

I notice there's a bit of an oddity with semantics in two seemingly-synonymous phrases:

"I had an unfair shot." implies the unfairness works for the speaker.

but

"I didn't have a fair shot." implies the unfairness works against the speaker.

Is there a term for this? Or at least, is there a term for this when it happens between words that i could rework to apply between sentences/ phrases? Or am i mistaken a tad?

Is this just about semantic scope of negation?

[zompist]

I notice there's a bit of an oddity with semantics in two seemingly-synonymous phrases:

"I had an unfair shot." implies the unfairness works for the speaker.

but

"I didn't have a fair shot." implies the unfairness works against the speaker.

Is there a term for this? Or at least, is there a term for this when it happens between words that i could rework to apply between sentences/ phrases? Or am i mistaken a tad?

That's a really interesting observation. I agree about the implications, but I'm not sure about the reason for them.

One thing that may be relevant is Neg Hopping. English allows the negative to hop over to the left as far as possible (compare Mandarin which requires that it stick with the element negated). This interacts with scope, as Creyeditor suggests— it can be harder to figure out what an English speaker is actually negating. In this example, though, scope doesn't seem to be the issue, as what's being negated is the fairness.

However, there might be a pragmatic signal here. Not using Neg Hopping can give a sentence a narrow or pedantic feel— thus it's appropriate for a concession. ("The defendant recognizes that unwarranted language may have been used.") So maybe that's why the first sentence feels like a concession, while the second (with normal Neg Hopping) is more appropriate for a complaint.

[Moose-tache]

virtually all languages of East and Southeast Asia have limited syllabe inventory. This is true even for outliers like Japanese or Manchu

Not sure this is true. For syllable structure, this map shows that most languages of the region are about average. It turns out, allowing any coda at all, even if it's just a nasal, puts you well above the bottom rung of the syllable structure ladder. And if we look at this and this map, we see that the total number of phonemes is not unusual in the region, either. By my count, if you include all the initial clusters, diphthongs, tones, etc., Thai has 59,400 syllables. Probably some of those are disallowed and certainly many of them are unattested. But that's hardly a limited syllable inventory.