(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2019]

[Thrice Xandvii]

Sal, I assume you are answering with regard to conversational English. Because, technically speaking, many of those examples you are using are incorrect usage. A verb must always agree in number with its antecedent. So, "a group of students was seen" and not "were seen" since the antecedent, "a group," is singular, "students" has no bearing on the agreement since it is a prepositional phrase describing the antecedent, which doesn't change anything into a plural.

Since the asker was asking if other languages do this as a matter of course where it is the correct way to form agreement in the language, it seems odd to answer as though it isn't technically wrong in English. Or am I misreading you?

I mean, people use those incorrect forms because they don't remember the antecedent so they use the closer noun in discourse to determine agreement, and since it's easy to understand, no one bats an eye.

[Salmoneus]

... don't even know where to start with that.

First off, no, what English teachers tell you isn't by definition "technically" "correct".

No, people don't just use "incorrect" forms because they "don't remember" not to.

The language is what is spoken, not your preconceptions about it. People's perception of correct and incorrect usage is shaped by what English teachers tell them, but also by other factors. If you concern yourself only with primary-school-rules-English, and treat everything else as the result of people "not remembering" how to talk, you ignore the whole of the actual language.

Perceptions of correctness have many sources - common usage, perception of changes in usage, practical authorities like past and present writers of high repute, theoretical authorities like style guides, and also direct instruction from people like parents and English teachers.

In this case, you're not just being prescriptivist, you're being ignorantly prescriptivist. What I've said IS 'technically correct'. Notional concord is approved of even by American authorities - the AMA Manual of Style and the Chicago Manual of Style both approve of it (the former restricted to only a few counter words, the latter allows it for all mass nouns) - and is much more widespread in the standards of other countries. [If you don't want to think in terms of counters, think in terms of mass nouns, which Chicago says can take singular agreement, plus an 'of'-clause.]

Your objection is therefore simply wrong.

You'll note also that I made clear that the details vary with the precise standard being used. So far as I'm aware, nobody would suggest avoiding plural agreement with counters like "a number of", "a great deal of", "a lot of", "none of" and so on; a few pedants in America may balk at "a set of", "not one of", "a shitload of", "a ton of", "an assortment of", "a couple of" and the like. "A group of", "a pair of", "a team of", "a sea of" and similar are more debateable; "a box of", "a boat of", "a room of" and so on are probably non-standard in most places.

The key point there being that this gradient between dialects is not about having different syntactic rules, it's about the same syntactic rules but some dialects having more words in a certain category than other dialects have.

[Thrice Xandvii]

Never mind, I guess I'm just unequivocally wrong here.

[Xonen]

No, people don't just use "incorrect" forms because they "don't remember" not to.

You're right, because that isn't what I said.

Um.

people use those incorrect forms because they don't remember the antecedent

Sal's point is that the form isn't "incorrect", nor does it necessarily have anything to do with "not remembering the antecedent"; certain collective nouns in many varieties of English simply trigger plural agreement on verbs despite being formally singular themselves.

[loglorn]

For those of you who are actually linguists, how would you draw the syntax tree for:

'Those who are able to make him take off his coat'

[Squall]

Is there any natlang that does not have writing rules?
In such language, there is no standard way to write any word, there are only representation of phonemes. Therefore, one can write according to one's own pronunciation.
It is possible, because many times non-standard pronunciation can be understood. The same could happen with the written form.

[Xonen]

Is there any natlang that does not have writing rules?
In such language, there is no standard way to write any word, there are only representation of phonemes. Therefore, one can write according to one's own pronunciation.
It is possible, because many times non-standard pronunciation can be understood. The same could happen with the written form.

wut r u tawkin bout?

[Creyeditor]

Is there any natlang that does not have writing rules?
In such language, there is no standard way to write any word, there are only representation of phonemes. Therefore, one can write according to one's own pronunciation.
It is possible, because many times non-standard pronunciation can be understood. The same could happen with the written form.

There are actually a lot of languages without a written standard, which are nevertheless written.

[eldin raigmore]

Is there any natlang that does not have writing rules?
In such language, there is no standard way to write any word, there are only representation of phonemes. Therefore, one can write according to one's own pronunciation.
It is possible, because many times non-standard pronunciation can be understood. The same could happen with the written form.

I assume you are tallking about:
(1) Languages which do have a written form;
(2) Which is not a logography.

I'm thinking that otherwise your question has no meaning or has an obvious and empty answer for the language and its writing-system.

And you seek one
(3) without orthographic rules.

Did you look at Omniglot?
You'll be looking among
abjads
abugidas
alphabets
alphasyllabaries
featurographies (Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech is nearly a featurography)
syllabic alphabets
syllabaries

The semanto-phonetic scripts probably are not what you're looking for.

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Phonetic/phonemic writing-systems that are used to write the language for which they were invented don't usually need much in the way of orthographic rules; it usually takes them centuries to need just a handful. That's because "write it the way it sounds" is the only guide needed.
English spelling was like that once.

When you adopt the writing-system of one language to write a different one, there are some mis-matches; a sound in the adopting language might not have a representation in the adopted script. One way sometimes useful to adapt the script to the "new" language is to create orthographic rules.
For instance, for English, since the Latin alphabet doesn't have æ ash and ŋ eng and ð eth and œ ethel (pronounced œðel not œþel) and þ thorn and ƿ wynn and ȝ yogh, rules about "short A vs long A", "th sometimes means ð eth and sometimes means þ thorn", "ng means ŋ eng", and so on, had to be invented.
With the Norman conquest the "cw" sound had to be written "qu" instead; before that there was no "q" in the alphabet used to write English.
Latin already had two letters for the /k/ sound, namely <C> and <K>. English started using them a little differently from each other; <K> always means /k/, but <C> can mean /k/, or, if it comes before a close front vowel /i/ or semivowel /y/, or a silent <e>, it can mean the /s/ sound.
Also English has all sorts of digraphs, especially those invoving the letter <h>; not only <th> already spoken of, but also <ch>, <gh> (now almost archaic and damn near obsolescent), <ph> (frequently occurs in words of Greek or other foreign origin where it was pronounced /ph/ instead of /f/ in the originating language -- but any pre-vocalic /p/, and in some dialects any /p/, is aspirated in English), <sh>, <wh>, <zh> …

Other Western European (and not-all-that-Western European, and not-all-that-European) languages that are also written in a mostly-Latin alphabet have also made some adjustments to it and have their own orthographic rules.

Spanish doesn't have many; IMO, probably because the Latin alphabet is just about perfect for Spanish

Russian has precious few orthographic rules; but there are other languages written in Cyrillic that have more of them. They borrowed Cyrillic from Russian.
There are languages written in Arabic script for which the script is not ideal; I imagine they have more orthographic rules than Arabic does.

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A written language, with a phonetic/phonemic alphabet, but without any orthographic rules at all, is probably one whose writing-system was invented in the last century or so (I'm guessing, but I'm betting it was probably invented after the IPA was invented).
At any rate, if you look at such just-recently-became-written languages and their writing systems, IMO that's where you'll find the richest vein to mine for languages whose writing systems don't have orthographic rules.

---

The same could happen with the written form.

Even logographic writing-systems start out that way; the writer "writes" the word or morpheme by drawing whatever picture you think is likeliest to suggest to the reader the meaning s/he actually means; and the reader "reads" it by making her/his best guess about what that picture is supposed to mean.
Words which have one and only one "spelling" and one and only one "reading" -- that is, one and only one meaning, and one and only one pronunciation, and one and only one way of "picturing" (or whatever you're doing when you represent an ideogram such as "two") them -- form the basis for the semanto-phonetic writing system.
This is so even if most morphemes can't be represented by just one such symbol.
The "radical-and-determiner" system represents a word with a grapheme that has a semantic radical that unambiguously represents a related meaning, and a phonetic determiner that unambiguously represents a similarly-pronounced utterance. This is mostly used with morphemes that are one syllable. Depending on the language, the determiner may have the same rime (nucleus and coda) and a usually-similar-but-not-same onset as the one-syllable morpheme intended; or the same body (onset and nucleus, also called "core") and a usually-similar-but-not-same coda. Most root-morphemes, or at least most one-syllable root-morphemes (and radical-and-determiner semanto-phonetic logographies like this are most useful for languages whose root-morphemes are mostly monosyllabic), can be represented unambiguously in such a way.
As time goes on, and more and more people have to write more and more things that more and more people have to read, conventions will set in about which semantic radical to use (when logically a choice between two or more might be reasonable), which phonetic determiner to use (when logically a choice between two or more might be reasonable), and the "right" way to "draw" a particular monosyllabic morpheme.

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I hope that helps, kinda?

[Squall]

I assume you are tallking about:
(1) Languages which do have a written form;
(2) Which is not a logography.

I'm thinking that otherwise your question has no meaning or has an obvious and empty answer for the language and its writing-system.

And you seek one
(3) without orthographic rules.

I mean languages that are written with an alphabet, but the alphabet only represents phonemes and the words do not have a standard written form.
It would allow to write "set" as "cet", or write "like" as "laik" and some people would write "laak". "set", "cet", "laik" and "laak" would coexist.

As time goes on, and more and more people have to write more and more things that more and more people have to read, conventions will set in about which semantic radical to use (when logically a choice between two or more might be reasonable), which phonetic determiner to use (when logically a choice between two or more might be reasonable), and the "right" way to "draw" a particular monosyllabic morpheme.

But this...

wut r u tawkin bout?

... is still understandable. I do not know about large texts.

I hope that helps, kinda?

Yes. Thanks.

[eldin raigmore]

I do not know about large texts.

For longer texts in Modern English check out the "Rite Yor Way" thread here on the CBB.

Look at issues of "The Phonetics Teacher" (Le Maitre Phonetique) published while it was still written in IPA, before they switched to publishing it in the orthography.
Each author wrote each article in his/her own 'lect.
So sometimes the same word would be spelled differently, depending on the authors' 'lects.

And of course you could look at all the different ways Shaxper (aka Shakespeare) spelled his plays an poems, not to mention his name.

[Xonen]

For instance, for English, since the Latin alphabet doesn't have æ ash and ŋ eng and ð eth and œ ethel (pronounced œðel not œþel) and þ thorn and ƿ wynn and ȝ yogh, rules about "short A vs long A", "th sometimes means ð eth and sometimes means þ thorn", "ng means ŋ eng", and so on, had to be invented.

If those letters don't exist, then how come you just managed to include them in your post? That is, there's no reason why you'd have to invent the kind of mess that English orthography eventually became; borrowing letters from other scripts, combining letters into ligatures and using diacritics are all methods that can be and have been used to represent new sounds.

<ph> (frequently occurs in words of Greek or other foreign origin where it was pronounced /ph/ instead of /f/ in the originating language

The digraph <ph> is how Greek <φ> was transliterated into Latin, and it did indeed originally represent /pʰ/. However, this changed into a fricative (presumably [ɸ] at first) quite early in the history of Greek, so the /f/ can actually be said to represent the original pronunciation quite well here.

Spanish doesn't have many; IMO, probably because the Latin alphabet is just about perfect for Spanish

Eh. There are plenty of complications in Spanish orthography that serve no purpose from a purely phonemic point of view. The Spanish have just been a bit more lucky in terms of how messy the history of their writing system has been.

Russian has precious few orthographic rules

Depends on how you define things like "few" and "orthographic rule", I suppose, but I'm sort of inclined to disagree here.

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Anyway, in response to Squall's question: Yes, pretty much any language can be written in nonstandard ways, and most of them (with the exception of languages whose speakers are all illiterate, of course) probably are, especially in various less official contexts. It is indeed possible to understand different varieties of written language much as it is possible to understand different varieties of spoken language - in fact, in some ways it's probably even easier, because writing allows you to pause and examine a word and its surrounding context for clues if you don't immediately understand it.

I don't know if there's any language where not having a standard would itself be an official standard, though.

[Xing]

Is there any natlang that does not have writing rules?
In such language, there is no standard way to write any word, there are only representation of phonemes. Therefore, one can write according to one's own pronunciation.
It is possible, because many times non-standard pronunciation can be understood. The same could happen with the written form.

I think that was somewhat true of English (and other European languages) before the orthographies were standardised.

[HinGambleGoth]

Was Old English stressed-Timed?

Yes, from what I can tell, all old Germanic languages were stress timed, but they had very different quantity structures compared to the modern languages, you could have short, long and overlong syllables, vowel and consonant length were independent of one another, that would be the largest prosodical difference, that and the fact that OE didn't have all those romance loans that introduced non-initial stressed words.

This is the toughest part of Old Germanic, there are no modern languages that "work" like them, so you don't really have any idea of how it "should" sound like.

[ol bofosh]

Are there resources online for the pronunciation of Welsh, Irish or Scottish Gaelic?

[thetha]

wikipedia

[ol bofosh]

Ah yes, there is that. But what is there anything for if I want to look for a particular word?

[Clio]

Wiktionary, Forvo, Ivona

You can also use Google translate or an English-Welsh dictionary like this one.

[Tanni]

Are there resources online for the pronunciation of Welsh, Irish or Scottish Gaelic?

Maybe not what you're looking for, but definitly about pronunciation of Welsch and Cornisch https://www.saysomethingin.com/.

Welsh

[quadrilabial]

Are there any natlangs that indicate, e.g., constituency relations explicitly? I know that English (and probably other langs- if I remember correctly French has yes/no question intonation, but I know surprisingly little about intonation cross-linguistically) indicates some syntactic information with intonational contour, but what's the limit in natlangs on purely-syntactic information being encoded phonetically/phonologically?

Edit: Arguably, if intonation is controlled by presence or absence of 'null' complementizers affecting intonation, then intonation could be said to be lexically determined rather than directly syntactic. Somehow that analysis doesn't sit well with me, though...