Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[linguistcat]

The parallel shifts of [uː] > [yː] > [iː], [u] > [y] > [i], and [ʊ] > [ʏ] > [ɪ] appear to be very common crosslinguistically; we have seen these shifts at various stages of completion in various Hellenic, Germanic, and Romance varieties to just pick some obvious examples off the top of my head.

There's also a shift via high back unrounded vowels, which is why I didn't spell the above paths out. It's seen in Scots, and may be suspected for Japanese (can the Japonicists please confirm or deny?).

In Japonic there have been a few instances of mid or midhigh vowels raising in various environments. In some cases they merged with their high counterparts and in others they caused the original high vowels in those same environments to be dropped or otherwise change. At least that's what I've read recently.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

In Japonic there have been a few instances of mid or midhigh vowels raising in various environments. In some cases they merged with their high counterparts and in others they caused the original high vowels in those same environments to be dropped or otherwise change. At least that's what I've read recently.

Which change are you referring to?

[Estav]

In Japonic there have been a few instances of mid or midhigh vowels raising in various environments. In some cases they merged with their high counterparts and in others they caused the original high vowels in those same environments to be dropped or otherwise change. At least that's what I've read recently.

Which change are you referring to?

I believe a change along the lines of [i u] > [ɨ] with a new [i] supplied by the old [e] is fairly often seen in varieties of Japonic. Wikipedia gives this as a change in Miyakoan, but I think I first read about it elsewhere.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Oh, that one; I was wondering if he were referring to historical shifts or modern ones.

[linguistcat]

In Japonic there have been a few instances of mid or midhigh vowels raising in various environments. In some cases they merged with their high counterparts and in others they caused the original high vowels in those same environments to be dropped or otherwise change. At least that's what I've read recently.

Which change are you referring to?

I believe a change along the lines of [i u] > [ɨ] with a new [i] supplied by the old [e] is fairly often seen in varieties of Japonic. Wikipedia gives this as a change in Miyakoan, but I think I first read about it elsewhere.

Also at least according to Frellesvig, Proto-Japonic o* raised to u in all environments except word finally along with e* raising to i in Old Japanese (this also assume a 6 or 7 vowel inventory instead of the traditional 4 for Proto-Japonic).

There does seem to be a tendency in Japonic for midvowels to be formed by vowel combinations, raise or lower, and then more midvowels get created by new vowel combos. At least it seems like a pattern that keeps happening.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Also at least according to Frellesvig, Proto-Japonic o* raised to u in all environments except word finally along with e* raising to i in Old Japanese (this also assume a 6 or 7 vowel inventory instead of the traditional 4 for Proto-Japonic).

There does seem to be a tendency in Japonic for midvowels to be formed by vowel combinations, raise or lower, and then more midvowels get created by new vowel combos. At least it seems like a pattern that keeps happening.

I was thinking this was what you were referring to. I do think Proto-Japonic probably had six or seven vowels */i i₂ u e a o o₂/, given the various things I've read. I'm not as sure about */i₂/, which might've been derived from a diphthong.

[Raphael]

TIL that "slogan" is derived from an Irish or Scottish Gaelic root. I wouldn't have guessed that.

[MacAnDàil]

The parallel shifts of [uː] > [yː] > [iː], [u] > [y] > [i], and [ʊ] > [ʏ] > [ɪ] appear to be very common crosslinguistically; we have seen these shifts at various stages of completion in various Hellenic, Germanic, and Romance varieties to just pick some obvious examples off the top of my head.

There's also a shift via high back unrounded vowels, which is why I didn't spell the above paths out. It's seen in Scots, and may be suspected for Japanese (can the Japonicists please confirm or deny?).

Are you implying that there would be high back unrounded vowels in Scots?

[Richard W]

Are you implying that there would be high back unrounded vowels in Scots?

Yes, though it seems an unpopular claim, and by 'Scots' I'm quite willing to go back a few centuries. (I have found it claimed for the equivalent of RP /u:/ in a Scots accent.)

[MacAnDàil]

Where did you hear about this idea?

[Richard W]

Where did you hear about this idea?

I probably read it in a University library, but I've had the idea for over 40 years. I associate it with a picture of vowel space. Unfortunately, I cannot remember which book or article I read it in.

Now, when IPA symbols are used to indicate Scottish sounds, one can find /ɪ/ for what may well be pronounced, to use modern IPA notation, as [ɘ], which had not been adopted by the IPA then. Now, as 'ɩ̈' has been used as a handwritten alternative to 'ɯ', I wonder if the author may have been confused as to how back the vowel was when rounding was lost. Indeed, I wonder how close Aitken's 'Vowel 7', denoted /ø/, has ever been to [ø]. It is not unknown for the symbols for rounded front vowels to be used to denote unrounded back vowels - there seems to be a tradition of it in some parts of the world.

[MacAnDàil]

Aitken's 7th vowel is still [ø] in the Shetlands so that's proof enough.
/ø/ is though used to be misused for Scottish Gaelic. And [ɘ] is a common realisation of /ɪ/ in Scots.

[Travis B.]

One thing I just thought of is the nature of [y(ː)]. For instance, my dialect of English has [y] as a phone, in that it has a rounded vowel further front than the central [ɘ] (for the sake of comparison). However, I have always prononced German [yː] differently from native English [y], i.e. I purse my lips and push the tip of my tongue as far front as I can when pronouncing German [yː], whereas I pronounce my native [y] just like my native [u] except that the tip of my tongue is front of center. This distinction seems to be similar to the distinction between Standard Swedish [yː] and "[ʉː]", where they are both rounded front vowels but the way the lips are articulated is different.

[Moose-tache]

In the movie Hidden Figures, a scientist asks a talented aspiring engineer, held back by racism and sexism, “If you were a White man, would you want to be an engineer?” She replies “I wouldn’t have to; I’d already be one.” Now, it’s obvious what she’s saying here, and I was never confused about her meaning. She is saying “I wouldn’t need to still want it in this moment, because by now I would have already become an engineer.” But the most literal interpretation of her words, and the only one my subconscious can parse as fully correct, is the meaning “If I were a White man, wanting to be an engineer would be unnecessary,” i.e. if you are a White man you are dragged off to engineering school whether you want it or not. “I wouldn’t have to want to” to me has the literal meaning in my mind of “wanting would not be required,” but the applied use in this situation is clearly “wanting would not still be required.”

I’m not asking if everyone else detected an ambiguity in this line of dialogue (although feel free to chime in if your dialect does something weird here), but rather how we all feel about hidden connotations of modals like “have to” or “want to.” Do they normally contain implied aspectual information like “still” or “yet?” Do any languages overtly separate these distinctions by diction or syntax?

[zompist]

I’m not asking if everyone else detected an ambiguity in this line of dialogue (although feel free to chime in if your dialect does something weird here), but rather how we all feel about hidden connotations of modals like “have to” or “want to.” Do they normally contain implied aspectual information like “still” or “yet?” Do any languages overtly separate these distinctions by diction or syntax?

One way of handling modality is with possible worlds (Lakoff's book on logic for linguists covers this). Desires, conditionals, and possibilities can be seen as defining a possible world, and we can reason about that world rather than the usually disappointing real world.

So the character is considering the possible world where nothing has changed except her race and sex, and deducing how her life would have gone differently. (She's also pointing out that her deduction process is more thorough than the guy's.) A little more elaborate, but the same process, as if you say "If I had a pizza right now I'd be happier."

[Travis B.]

In the movie Hidden Figures, a scientist asks a talented aspiring engineer, held back by racism and sexism, “If you were a White man, would you want to be an engineer?” She replies “I wouldn’t have to; I’d already be one.” Now, it’s obvious what she’s saying here, and I was never confused about her meaning. She is saying “I wouldn’t need to still want it in this moment, because by now I would have already become an engineer.” But the most literal interpretation of her words, and the only one my subconscious can parse as fully correct, is the meaning “If I were a White man, wanting to be an engineer would be unnecessary,” i.e. if you are a White man you are dragged off to engineering school whether you want it or not. “I wouldn’t have to want to” to me has the literal meaning in my mind of “wanting would not be required,” but the applied use in this situation is clearly “wanting would not still be required.”

I’m not asking if everyone else detected an ambiguity in this line of dialogue (although feel free to chime in if your dialect does something weird here), but rather how we all feel about hidden connotations of modals like “have to” or “want to.” Do they normally contain implied aspectual information like “still” or “yet?” Do any languages overtly separate these distinctions by diction or syntax?

See, in this example, the actual intended meaning is the one that seems most right to me, i.e. that she wouldn't have to want to be an engineer as she would already be one; I simply do not get the meaning that you see as "fully correct", which rather seems counterintuitive to me.

[Moose-tache]

I agree that the intended meaning comes accross clear. But I'm sure you can understand what I mean about the "literal" meaning.

"You don't have to want to eat your broccoli; just eat it!" This doesn't mean "It is unecessary for you to want the broccoli because it's already been eaten by you." It means "It is unecessary for you to want to eat the broccoli, because you're doing it whether you like it or not." This is what I consider to be the most straight-forward meaning of "would not have to want to;" literally: "your wanting would not be required." Extensions of this (like "your wanting would no longer be required, but was at some point") are perfectly understandable, but if you parse them out grammatically, those extensions are not literally what the words are saying.

My question is, how many of these hidden extensions are there? Are there more ways we can deviate from the default meaning and still be understood? Are all aspectual additions equally valid?

[Moose-tache]

I have illustrated my point with a chart:

As you can see, it's not just that "would not have to want to" has multiple meanings, but that only some of these meanings are possible in each situation. Pragmatics will make it obvious which meaning is intended, but there is no syntactic or semantic or morphological signposting to warn of what meaning we're supposed to infer, or how many possible meanings we are choosing from. This is all trivially easy for a listener to figure out, but from a technical stand point, this is the sort of thing that bears some further investigation. Imagine an AI translator trying to parse these sentences without understanding how many possible meanings of "would not have to want to" are available, and how they can be distinguished. Does the chart extend to the right by one or more columns?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Might it have something to do with the if-clause?

I think this is all rather silly, though.

[zompist]

As you can see, it's not just that "would not have to want to" has multiple meanings, but that only some of these meanings are possible in each situation. Pragmatics will make it obvious which meaning is intended, but there is no syntactic or semantic or morphological signposting to warn of what meaning we're supposed to infer, or how many possible meanings we are choosing from.

I'm not sure what's surprising you-- that pragmatics is involved in meaning? that people reason differently based on the context?

I'd note that your broccoli example isn't a conditional, while your engineer example is. That changes the reasoning right there: as we are talking about this world, we can't be talking about making the wanting disappear, only about making it irrelevant.

Or, an alternative theory: an unuttered conditional is involved. The eater has the conditional "If I don't want to eat it, I won't", and the speaker is denying that this condition holds.

This is all trivially easy for a listener to figure out, but from a technical stand point, this is the sort of thing that bears some further investigation. Imagine an AI translator trying to parse these sentences without understanding how many possible meanings of "would not have to want to" are available, and how they can be distinguished. Does the chart extend to the right by one or more columns?

If AIs are anything like the machine learning we're getting right now, the answer will probably be "Who knows how they do it?" (You can analyze the weighting and try out sample inputs, etc., but you're still not likely to get a nice logical rule as if the AI was written in the 1960s.)

But in general, if your idea is that the semantics and pragmatics of common words could be really complex-- yes, definitely. "Must" and "want" are complicated ideas, and even more so when you throw possible worlds in.