Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[zompist]

I don't like to criticize conlangers' phonological inventories, but if I saw this--

	Lab	Dent	Pal	Ve	Uv	Phar	Glot
plosive	b	t d ṭ		k g			ʔ
fric/affric	f	ṯ ḏ ḏ ̣ s z ṣ	š j		x ġ	ḥ ʕ	h
nasal	m	n
lat/rhot		l ḷ r ṛ
glide	w		y	w

I might ask, could you consider consistency? and did you lose interest halfway down the chart?

As you may have guessed from which forum we're in, this is a real language— Wadi Ramm Arabic.

(The original chart really does list /w/ twice, so I left it.)

[Kuchigakatai]

I don't like to criticize conlangers' phonological inventories, but if I saw this--

	Lab	Dent	Pal	Ve	Uv	Phar	Glot
plosive	b	t d ṭ		k g			ʔ
fric/affric	f	ṯ ḏ ḏ ̣ s z ṣ	š j		x ġ	ḥ ʕ	h
nasal	m	n
lat/rhot		l ḷ r ṛ
glide	w		y	w

I might ask, could you consider consistency? and did you lose interest halfway down the chart?

As you may have guessed from which forum we're in, this is a real language— Wadi Ramm Arabic.

(The original chart really does list /w/ twice, so I left it.)

Material for the "If natlangs were conlangs" thread.

Also, that chart is just regular Arabic in general. When it conserves ṯ ḏ /θ ð/ at least, which various dialects do.

[zompist]

Also, that chart is just regular Arabic in general. When it conserves ṯ ḏ /θ ð/ at least, which various dialects do.

Fair enough, though standard Arabic does have /q/ and doesn't have /ṛ/. And famously /ḷ/ only occurs in one word— I don't know if that's true of Wadi Ramm Arabic as well.

[Moose-tache]

The g > j and q > g shift, as well as the collapse of four emphatic obstruents into three, marks it as Hijazi Arabic. I looked up Wadi Ramm, and turns out, it's just north of there! I wonder if we could play this game with, like, varieties of Spanish or something.

[mocha]

I don't like to criticize conlangers' phonological inventories, but if I saw this--

	Lab	Dent	Pal	Ve	Uv	Phar	Glot
plosive	b	t d ṭ		k g			ʔ
fric/affric	f	ṯ ḏ ḏ ̣ s z ṣ	š j		x ġ	ḥ ʕ	h
nasal	m	n
lat/rhot		l ḷ r ṛ
glide	w		y	w

I might ask, could you consider consistency? and did you lose interest halfway down the chart?

As you may have guessed from which forum we're in, this is a real language— Wadi Ramm Arabic.

(The original chart really does list /w/ twice, so I left it.)

Reminds me of one tiny east asian language the name I forgot, where there was a six-way voicing distinction in plosives, but only for bilabial plosives, the rest were 2- or 3- way.

[Kuchigakatai]

Fair enough, though standard Arabic does have /q/ and doesn't have /ṛ/. And famously /ḷ/ only occurs in one word— I don't know if that's true of Wadi Ramm Arabic as well.

Arabic dialects generally have /lˤ/ and other such non-Classical emphatic phonemes in a variety of words, often but definitely not always borrowings, e.g. Syrian Arabic ألماني [ʔɑlˤmˤɑːni] 'German', بنك [bˤɑnˤk] 'bank', ميّ [mˤɑjj] 'water', so probably not.

[Raphael]

At some point in the last few days, I noticed a typo ("grammo"? "synto"?) in a post I had posted on my blog back in 2011, and even back then it had been a (slightly modified) repost of something I had posted on the old ZBB years before that. Instead of "that she", I had, for some reason, written "she that". I find it interesting that I never noticed that during all those years.

[Raphael]

Reading up on Irish history a bit, I discovered yesterday that apparently in Irish English, at least sometimes, the term "law library" is used to describe the legal profession as a whole.

[Jonlang]

Do we know what (if any) intermediary changes there were between the PIE aspirated voiced plosives becoming initial /f/ in Latin?

[hwhatting]

Do we know what (if any) intermediary changes there were between the PIE aspirated voiced plosives becoming initial /f/ in Latin?

We don't, in the sense that they would be attested somewhere. Here is what de Vaan assumes for Proto-Italic in his "Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages" (p.7):

The series of PIE stops traditionally termed 'voiced aspirate' yields voiceless
fricatives in word-initial position in Latin and Sabellic, voiced fricatives
word-internally in Sabellic, and voiced stops (merging with the old voiced stops)
word-internally in Latin. The Latin stops probably go back to voiced fricatives, as is
shown by the variant forms of Lat. ab- (see s.v.). This points to a complementary
distribution of Proto-Italic voiceless word-initial fricatives vs. voiced word-internal
ones. In other words, there was one fricative phoneme with two allophones (see
Stuart-Smith 2004: 196-198, and the critique of her phonemic interpretation by
Kortlandt 2007: 150). I will note voiceless fricatives in my Pit. reconstructions, but it
seems likely that they were voiced word-internally. After nasals and sibilants, the PIE
voiced aspirates probably did not change into fricatives, but remained stops.

The step from PIE to Proto-Italic can then either have been voiced aspirated -> voiced fricative with partial devoicing as next step or voiced aspirated -> voiceless aspirates (parallel to Greek) and then fricativisation and partial voicing.

[WeepingElf]

The step from PIE to Proto-Italic can then either have been voiced aspirated -> voiced fricative with partial devoicing as next step or voiced aspirated -> voiceless aspirates (parallel to Greek) and then fricativisation and partial voicing.

I consider the former scenario more plausible. The latter, with the voiceless aspirates, is IMHO an attempt at moving Latin closer to Greek, but otherwise, Italic and Greek do not really have that much in common, and thus do not appear to be particularly closely related to each other within IE.

[Jonlang]

Do we know what (if any) intermediary changes there were between the PIE aspirated voiced plosives becoming initial /f/ in Latin?

We don't, in the sense that they would be attested somewhere. Here is what de Vaan assumes for Proto-Italic in his "Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages" (p.7):

The series of PIE stops traditionally termed 'voiced aspirate' yields voiceless
fricatives in word-initial position in Latin and Sabellic, voiced fricatives
word-internally in Sabellic, and voiced stops (merging with the old voiced stops)
word-internally in Latin. The Latin stops probably go back to voiced fricatives, as is
shown by the variant forms of Lat. ab- (see s.v.). This points to a complementary
distribution of Proto-Italic voiceless word-initial fricatives vs. voiced word-internal
ones. In other words, there was one fricative phoneme with two allophones (see
Stuart-Smith 2004: 196-198, and the critique of her phonemic interpretation by
Kortlandt 2007: 150). I will note voiceless fricatives in my Pit. reconstructions, but it
seems likely that they were voiced word-internally. After nasals and sibilants, the PIE
voiced aspirates probably did not change into fricatives, but remained stops.

The step from PIE to Proto-Italic can then either have been voiced aspirated -> voiced fricative with partial devoicing as next step or voiced aspirated -> voiceless aspirates (parallel to Greek) and then fricativisation and partial voicing.

Well, it's only for conlanging purposes anyway. I was looking at the Wikipedia article for PIE sound changes into different families and saw that PIE initial *bʰ *dʰ *ɡʰ > f in Latin and thought it would be a good change to incorporate, seeing as I already had /bʰ dʰ ɡʰ/ in my proto-conlang and they didn't change into anything particularly interesting in my 'L' conlang, so this is will yield much more interesting cognates. Plus it's another way of getting rid of voiced consonants in 'L' which I want to have a much smaller frequency of seeing as its sister conlangs, 'P and 'Q' both have a large frequency of voiced consonants, particularly plosives.

[Raphael]

Over in the Random Thread in Ephemera, there was a short discussion of traditional royal families and their attitudes and traits, and alice posted the following:

I thought it was the Habsburgs who had the screwed-up jaws.

And in a wonderful example of the Oneness of Person and Universe, somebody once told me that the reason that European Spanish has /θ/ was "because the Habsburgs all had hare lips".

Which leads me to the question: to which extent has it ever happened that an extremely small group of powerful or influential people - not a larger ruling class or ruling elite, but an individual ruling family or perhaps even an individual ruler - put their stamp on the historical development of a language or dialect? Sure, in the UK, there's the stereotype of the "Queen's English", but was that really, to any significant amount, the result of the influence of the Queen personally, or the Houses of Hanover/Saxe-Coburg and Gotha/Windsor in general?

[Travis B.]

Over in the Random Thread in Ephemera, there was a short discussion of traditional royal families and their attitudes and traits, and alice posted the following:

I thought it was the Habsburgs who had the screwed-up jaws.

And in a wonderful example of the Oneness of Person and Universe, somebody once told me that the reason that European Spanish has /θ/ was "because the Habsburgs all had hare lips".

Which leads me to the question: to which extent has it ever happened that an extremely small group of powerful or influential people - not a larger ruling class or ruling elite, but an individual ruling family or perhaps even an individual ruler - put their stamp on the historical development of a language or dialect? Sure, in the UK, there's the stereotype of the "Queen's English", but was that really, to any significant amount, the result of the influence of the Queen personally, or the Houses of Hanover/Saxe-Coburg and Gotha/Windsor in general?

I have never heard anyone seriously suggest that the "Queen's English" was so really because of British (and thus German) royalty themselves.

[Moose-tache]

I have recently learned about a theory (which has been around for almost a century) about the history of the Greek script.

The conventional story is that the Proto-Sinai script gave rise to alphabetic scripts in the Levant and adjacent parts of Mesopotamia around the Bronze Age / Iron Age transition. Then after a delay of a couple of centuries the version in use among the coastal Canaanites, i.e. Phoenecians, diffused to Greece where it was modified and quickly spread across the Greek world. This version of events closely matches the archaeological data.

An alternate theory is that "the alphabet" spread north from Sinai not in two phases, first to the Levant and later to Greece, but in more-or-less one steady radiation from Sinai to a long list of places, including the Levant and Greece. This would mean that the Greek script arrived in Greece at the very beginning of the Iron Age, long before the earliest attested samples. This is supported by the fact that the Greek script appears already in a form that is highly variable and highly derived. Also, some of the quirks of early Greek, like boustrophedon writing direction and word dividers, are found in early Canaanite inscriptions but not in ones that would be contemporary with attested versions of Greek.

What does everyone think?

[Raphael]

I'm not at all sure how that question could be decided, at least absent a time machine.

[zompist]

An alternate theory is that "the alphabet" spread north from Sinai not in two phases, first to the Levant and later to Greece, but in more-or-less one steady radiation from Sinai to a long list of places, including the Levant and Greece. This would mean that the Greek script arrived in Greece at the very beginning of the Iron Age, long before the earliest attested samples. This is supported by the fact that the Greek script appears already in a form that is highly variable and highly derived. Also, some of the quirks of early Greek, like boustrophedon writing direction and word dividers, are found in early Canaanite inscriptions but not in ones that would be contemporary with attested versions of Greek.

I ran into this theory while writing my book-- the version I read was a 2019 paper by Willemijn Waal. His theory however only posits Greek writing a couple of centuries earlier-- e.g. around 1000 not 800 BCE. So it still came from the Phoenicians, not directly from the Sinaitic inscriptions 500 years before that.

I like Waal's theory, mostly because it explains the wide variation within Greek. The earliest inscriptions we have are on stone; it's extremely likely we're missing a lot that was on papyrus.

[Raphael]

How does a blackboard or whiteboard filled with mathematical equations look like in an East Asian country? Does it look more or less like in the West, or are different notations systems used? Are Greek letters in such contexts there as common as they are here? How about individual Latin letters?

[bradrn]

How does a blackboard or whiteboard filled with mathematical equations look like in an East Asian country? Does it look more or less like in the West, or are different notations systems used? Are Greek letters in such contexts there as common as they are here? How about individual Latin letters?

My understanding is that pretty much exactly the same notation is used worldwide. (With the possible exception of Arabic countries, which apparently use a RTL notation based on Arabic letters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Ar ... l_notation)

The other thing to note here (in case you’re unfamiliar with the notation) is that the letters in mathematical formulae aren’t random. Each letter has very distinctive semantics, and letters are used more or less consistently in different contexts: e.g. m, n are usually whole numbers, x, y, z are unknown real values, θ and ϕ are angles; in physics, ω is angular momentum, ψ is a quantum state. And so on.

[Raphael]

Thank you. I know about the standard values of Greek and Latin letters in equations. I was asking because, to be honest, I find the idea of North Korean nuclear scientists filling their blackboards, whiteboards, or papers with equations full of Greek and Latin letters when they work on their atomic bombs intended for use against the evil Western capitalist oppressors and enemies a bit surreal.