Zompist Bboard Again

Xwtek wrote: ↑Tue Sep 24, 2019 12:31 am

Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Mon Sep 23, 2019 12:26 am Are you thinking about the infamous Hale (2000) paper that analyzed Marshallese with four vowel phonemes //, //, /☎/, /☯/?

Is that even a phoneme?

Wikipedia wrote: Superficially, 12 Marshallese vowel allophones appear in minimal pairs, a common test for phonemicity. For example, [mʲææ̯] (mā, 'breadfruit'), [mʲæ͡ɑɑ̯] (ma, 'but'), and [mʲæ͡ɒɒ̯] (mo̧, 'taboo') are separate Marshallese words. However, the uneven distribution of glide phonemes suggests that they underlyingly end with the glides (thus /mʲaj/, /mʲaɰ/, /mʲaw/). When glides are taken into account, it emerges that there are only 4 vowel phonemes.

dhok wrote: ↑Mon Sep 23, 2019 10:17 amBut yes, since on replaces nous in colloquial French, and the 3pl and 3sg have merged unexpectedly for non-phonological reasons (not unlike Lithuanian)...

dhok wrote: ↑Mon Sep 23, 2019 11:25 amLinguoboy: 3pl /-ɔ̃/ a retention of the expected reflex of -ent, or are we looking at something else? (Somewhat reminiscent of 1pl-3pl syncretism in German.)

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Sep 24, 2019 2:04 am

Xwtek wrote: ↑Tue Sep 24, 2019 12:31 am

Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Mon Sep 23, 2019 12:26 am Are you thinking about the infamous Hale (2000) paper that analyzed Marshallese with four vowel phonemes //, //, /☎/, /☯/?

Is that even a phoneme?

Well, it makes about as much sense as any other analysis of Marshallese vowels. From the

Xwtek wrote: ↑Tue Sep 24, 2019 5:42 am

Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Mon Sep 23, 2019 12:26 am //, //, /☎/, /☯/

No, I mean, I saw "a cup of coffee", "soccer ball", "rotary telephone", and "ying-yang" as the phoneme inventory of the Marshallese

Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Tue Sep 24, 2019 5:56 am

Xwtek wrote: ↑Tue Sep 24, 2019 5:42 am

Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Mon Sep 23, 2019 12:26 am //, //, /☎/, /☯/

No, I mean, I saw "a cup of coffee", "soccer ball", "rotary telephone", and "ying-yang" as the phoneme inventory of the Marshallese

Yes, that's the point. Phoneme notation is kinda arbitrary: when there is little allophony, you may as well use the same symbol as the phone, but when allophony is rampant, you could use whatever. KathTheDragon suggested using // (nose emoji) for the syllable-final nasal of Japanese, since people disagree about what it is, exactly.

Marshallese is usually analyzed with four vowel phonemes, but there is so much allophony that describing each phoneme is a nightmare.In a famous paper, in 2000, Hale decided to embrace the crazy and use nonsensical symbols /, , ☎, ☯/ (coffee, football, phone, yin-yang) for the phonemes.

KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Sun Sep 22, 2019 10:18 pm

mae wrote: ↑Sun Sep 22, 2019 7:44 pm I don't think it's reasonable to call it "the word final allophone of /n/"

Phoneme labels are arbitrary, however. We could denote Japanese's nasal phoneme as //, for example. It's merely convention that phoneme labels are similar to their primary allophone(s).

Chuma wrote: ↑Mon Sep 23, 2019 4:41 am English distinguishes θ/ð from s/z, and has gendered pronouns but not gendered nouns.

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sat Sep 28, 2019 5:18 pm Some of the rarest sounds are the linguolabial consonants found in many languages on the island of Espiritu Santo, and some on neihbourhin Malakula (presumably an areal effect, as the Malakula and Santo lanuaes are not particularly closely related within Southern Oceanic). They've also been found in just a handful of other lanuaes in the world.

The weird thin, thouh, is that there's no obvious reason for them to be so rare - they don't involve any awkward or weird tonue movements, and everyone can learn to do them reliably in just seconds - just put your tonue as for /T/, and move the tip forward a little until it touches your upper lip. They're reasonably acoustically distinct - the stops in particular do tend to mere into alveolars, but they're no less distinct than the various dentals, alveolars, postalveolars, all variously laminal or apical, that other lanuaes distinuish. They just... don't seem to occur to people!

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Sep 28, 2019 7:43 pm

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sat Sep 28, 2019 5:18 pm Some of the rarest sounds are the linguolabial consonants found in many languages on the island of Espiritu Santo, and some on neihbourhin Malakula (presumably an areal effect, as the Malakula and Santo lanuaes are not particularly closely related within Southern Oceanic). They've also been found in just a handful of other lanuaes in the world.

The weird thin, thouh, is that there's no obvious reason for them to be so rare - they don't involve any awkward or weird tonue movements, and everyone can learn to do them reliably in just seconds - just put your tonue as for /T/, and move the tip forward a little until it touches your upper lip. They're reasonably acoustically distinct - the stops in particular do tend to mere into alveolars, but they're no less distinct than the various dentals, alveolars, postalveolars, all variously laminal or apical, that other lanuaes distinuish. They just... don't seem to occur to people!

For me personally, pronouncing a linguolabial does feel like quite an awkward tongue movement: for dental, alveolar, postalveolar… consonants the relevant part of the tongue only needs to be moved a short distance, but for linguolabials the tip of the tongue must be moved quite a long distance, from behind the teeth to the top lip. Maybe that might go some way towards explaining why linguolabials are so rare, although it could just as easily have nothing to do with it.

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sun Sep 29, 2019 12:13 pm

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Sep 28, 2019 7:43 pm

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sat Sep 28, 2019 5:18 pm Some of the rarest sounds are the linguolabial consonants found in many languages on the island of Espiritu Santo, and some on neihbourhin Malakula (presumably an areal effect, as the Malakula and Santo lanuaes are not particularly closely related within Southern Oceanic). They've also been found in just a handful of other lanuaes in the world.

The weird thin, thouh, is that there's no obvious reason for them to be so rare - they don't involve any awkward or weird tonue movements, and everyone can learn to do them reliably in just seconds - just put your tonue as for /T/, and move the tip forward a little until it touches your upper lip. They're reasonably acoustically distinct - the stops in particular do tend to mere into alveolars, but they're no less distinct than the various dentals, alveolars, postalveolars, all variously laminal or apical, that other lanuaes distinuish. They just... don't seem to occur to people!

For me personally, pronouncing a linguolabial does feel like quite an awkward tongue movement: for dental, alveolar, postalveolar… consonants the relevant part of the tongue only needs to be moved a short distance, but for linguolabials the tip of the tongue must be moved quite a long distance, from behind the teeth to the top lip. Maybe that might go some way towards explaining why linguolabials are so rare, although it could just as easily have nothing to do with it.

But the actual tongue movement is tiny!

If you have your tongue as for /T/, and just push it a milimetre further, you get a lin'uolabial. If you have it as for dental /t/ and push it a couple of milimetres further, you have a linguolabial.

Compared to the tongue motion involved in, say, a subapical retroflex, it's nothing.

And it involves only the tongue-tip - the most dextrous and consciously controlled bit of the speech apparatus - rather than anythin dorsal and weird. And it doesn't involve multiple motions in a defined order, or simultaneous motions, and it doesn't involve anything in the throat or larynx... so compared to most 'weird' sounds, it's incredibly easy.

Try gettin some schoolchildren and teachin them linguolabials, and then teaching them ejectives, pharyngealised retroflexives, faucal voice, velar laterals, nasalised lateral clicks, coarticulated alveolar-velar implosives, and so forth. Linguolabials will be grasped much sooner, I'm sure! And yet linguolabials are rarer than any of these...

Vijay wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 1:31 am Having /ɬ/ but not /l/ is pretty common. See: Mongolian, Amis, Avar, Chukchi, Muscogee/Mvskoke/Creek, Dogrib, Saaroa...

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 5:53 am

Vijay wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 1:31 am Having /ɬ/ but not /l/ is pretty common. See: Mongolian, Amis, Avar, Chukchi, Muscogee/Mvskoke/Creek, Dogrib, Saaroa...

According to Wikipedia at least, Avar and Muscogee have /l/. But this does appear to be more common than I thought!