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Basic terminology question

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 3:50 am
by alice
What is the correct linguistic term for a group of phonemes, whether unordered ("I put a ??? down here a moment ago, and it's vanished") or ordered ("It's naive to assume you can model speech entirely as ???")?

Re: Basic terminology question

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 11:53 am
by WeepingElf
I don't understand your question; your sample sentences do not make clear what you are asking for.

Re: Basic terminology question

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 12:03 pm
by mèþru
He's asking if there's a group word like herd for animals but for phonemes.

Re: Basic terminology question

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 12:25 pm
by dɮ the phoneme
An articulation of phonemes, a movement of phrases, an agglutination of affixes. You can make these all day...

Re: Basic terminology question

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 12:51 pm
by alice
Max1461 wrote: Mon Aug 06, 2018 12:25 pm An articulation of phonemes, a movement of phrases, an agglutination of affixes. You can make these all day...
Yes, but the qualifier "official" restricts it somewhat.

What is this called?

Posted: Wed Apr 24, 2019 10:43 am
by alice
The construction with "must" in "I must have been drunk last night". Is it a mode with a funny name?

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Wed Apr 24, 2019 11:09 am
by Linguoboy
alice wrote: Wed Apr 24, 2019 10:43 amThe construction with "must" in "I must have been drunk last night". Is it a mode with a funny name?
The term you want is probably "epistemic modality".

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Wed Apr 24, 2019 6:01 pm
by Salmoneus
Specifically, it's deductive.

Re: Basic terminology question

Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2019 3:55 pm
by Opalescent Yams
alice wrote: Mon Aug 06, 2018 3:50 am or ordered ("It's naive to assume you can model speech entirely as ???")?
n-grams?

Else... substrings? strings?

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2019 4:33 pm
by zompist
We normally call group of phonemes a "word", but then I don't understand the "ordered" and "unordered" business.

Or maybe you're thinking of groups of words? "Constituent" would do for your examples., though in some frames it might be question-begging (that is, if the question we're addressing is whether it is a constituent).

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2019 4:45 pm
by malloc
You mean a phoneme inventory, as in the set of phonemes used by a particular language?

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Fri Jun 07, 2019 12:44 pm
by quinterbeck
An ordered set of phonemes could be a string - "It's naive to assume you can model speech entirely as strings" sounds valid - although strings of phonemes would be clearer.

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Fri Jun 07, 2019 1:10 pm
by Opalescent Yams
I mean, if its unordered then perhaps "bag of phonemes" might work?

It would certainly be in line with naive attempts at modeling language, though "bag of words" is definitely more usual when it comes to those...

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Tue Jul 02, 2019 10:10 am
by Linguoboy
Is there a name for the kind of rhyming slang which consists of an extension of the original expression rather than a substitution for it? I'm thinking of examples like:

"No way, José!"
"Later, alligator."
"What's the plan, Stan?"

New World Spanish has a similar phenomenon (which doesn't always involve rhyming). For instance, "nada" ("nothing") can be extended to "nariz quebrada" ("broken nose") but also just "nariz" or "naranja" ("orange"). In Mexico City slang, the extensions can get quite elaborate. For instance, from "¿qué onda?" ("what's up?", lit. "what wave?") you have:

¿qué ondita con el pandita? ("what's up with the gang", where the equivalents of both "up" and "gang" take the diminutive ending -it@)
¿qué Honduras con las verduras? (lit. "what Honduras with the vegetables?")
¿qué ondón, Ramón, con el camarón? ("what's up, Ramón, with the shrimp?")

and presumably many more, since this is such a stereotyped exchange that virtually anything which sounds vaguely like the original expression would be understood.

Some examples from Argentina for "¿y vos?" ("and you?"):

¿y bocina? ("and horn?")
¿y Boston?
¿y Bosnia?
¿y bosque? ("and woods?")
¿y botella? ("and bottle?")

Do people know of examples from other languages?

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Tue Jul 02, 2019 10:12 am
by Vijay
Cockney.

EDIT: Never mind. I was confused by the "nariz" example.

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Tue Jul 02, 2019 10:14 am
by Linguoboy
Vijay wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 10:12 amCockney.
Linguoboy wrote:Is there a name for the kind of rhyming slang which consists of an extension of the original expression rather than a substitution for it?
(Emphasis added for the hard-of-reading.)

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Tue Jul 02, 2019 10:42 am
by Vijay
Sorry, I got a little excited. :ugeek: I edited my post just when you posted that.

It sounds a little bit like reduplication, like fancy-shmancy. Dravidian languages have a lot of that. (Well, in theory. It's always kind of hard for me to come up with an example off the top of my head but not so hard to come across one).

The only examples that immediately come to mind for me in Malayalam are obscene. :P (Like, they take a perfectly innocuous word and pair it with a swearword that rhymes. AFAIK this particular kind of reduplication is used almost exclusively by men in college dorms).

Idk how common this example is, but I have seen it before: [kəˈɖijʊm kʊˈɖijʊm] (literally 'bite and drink'; [kəˈɖijkʲʊga] means 'to bite', and [kʊˈɖijkʲʊga] means 'to drink'. Probably means something like 'drinks and snacks').

There are also a few old Malayalam movie songs that have nonsense reduplication: [əˈɳijəm məˈɳijəm] (the name of a fictitious pond) and [hoj ləˈmaːli əe̯ lesəˈmaːli] (unexplained utterance in an unidentified foreign language). EDIT: Come to think of it, I guess this is a common pattern when it comes to gibberish.

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Tue Jul 02, 2019 12:29 pm
by Linguoboy
Vijay wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 10:12 am Cockney.

EDIT: Never mind. I was confused by the "nariz" example.
AFAICT, extended rhyming forms like "nariz quebrada" derive from simple unrhymed "nariz" and not vice versa. So it's a similar phenomenon to CRS but not identical.

For one thing, it seems more open-ended. The extension of a ver "to see" (i.e. "let's see") to a verga "to dick" can be further extended to a ver plus virtually any word beginning with ga, e.g. Gastón, garganta, Gabriel, Graciela, García Lorca. None of these examples rhyme either.

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Tue Jul 02, 2019 5:51 pm
by Salmoneus
Linguoboy wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 10:10 am Is there a name for the kind of rhyming slang which consists of an extension of the original expression rather than a substitution for it? I'm thinking of examples like:

"No way, José!"
"Later, alligator."
"What's the plan, Stan?"

New World Spanish has a similar phenomenon (which doesn't always involve rhyming). For instance, "nada" ("nothing") can be extended to "nariz quebrada" ("broken nose") but also just "nariz" or "naranja" ("orange"). In Mexico City slang, the extensions can get quite elaborate. For instance, from "¿qué onda?" ("what's up?", lit. "what wave?") you have:

¿qué ondita con el pandita? ("what's up with the gang", where the equivalents of both "up" and "gang" take the diminutive ending -it@)
¿qué Honduras con las verduras? (lit. "what Honduras with the vegetables?")
¿qué ondón, Ramón, con el camarón? ("what's up, Ramón, with the shrimp?")

and presumably many more, since this is such a stereotyped exchange that virtually anything which sounds vaguely like the original expression would be understood.

Some examples from Argentina for "¿y vos?" ("and you?"):

¿y bocina? ("and horn?")
¿y Boston?
¿y Bosnia?
¿y bosque? ("and woods?")
¿y botella? ("and bottle?")

Do people know of examples from other languages?

I think you're talking about several different things. Your "nariz" example looks a lot like rhyming slang, although I accept that you say that's not its origin but purely a coincidence. But I think you've got at least two other things going on:

- "extension", where a valid word or phrase is idiomatically extended in a way that often involves assonance.
- "substitution", where a valid word is replaced by an entirely different word that assonates with it.

The former is widespread in English, particularly among annoying people. The latter is commonly found in English in taboo deformations (eg "shit!" > "sugar!", "by God!" > "by gum", "God grace us!" > "goodness gracious!", "for Christ's sake!" > "for crying out loud!"), and in rhyming slang ("strong" > "ping-pong", etc), but isn't widely found in set English expressions beyond that, so far as I'm aware (though there probably are some, I should have thought...). Although it does occur commonly in the language games of highly annoying people. [c.f. many exchanges in "The Thick of It"]

The difference you're drawing seems to be that your Spanish examples involve first-syllable assonance, instead of final-syllable assonance. Presumably, then, the term would be to "rhyming slang" as [the term for first-syllable assonance] is to "rhym". Unfortunately, so far as I know there IS no term for first-syllable assonance, beyond mere "alliteration". [and most of your examples are alliterative slang, but that's maybe slightly underselling it]

Re: What is this called?

Posted: Tue Jul 02, 2019 5:58 pm
by Pabappa
Salmoneus wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 5:51 pm Unfortunately, so far as I know there IS no term for first-syllable assonance, beyond mere "alliteration". [and most of your examples are alliterative slang, but that's maybe slightly underselling it]
i thought "vime" and "chime" were used in SE Asian languages like Khmer for their expressive reduplication, but I dont remember which is which and cant find any mention of them on Wikipedia.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... gmentation & https://www.academia.edu/14747359/What_ ... ly_readers show that the terminology exists, but i cant get direct access to either of those from my hotspot.