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

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Znex
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Znex »

Isfendil wrote: 22 Nov 2017 07:11 Does anyone know where I can get a tokpisin english dictionary? It seems to be unusually difficult to find for a majority language.
This one any good? Wikibookshas a nice selection too, from just glancing over it.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Isfendil »

Znex wrote: 22 Nov 2017 09:06
Isfendil wrote: 22 Nov 2017 07:11 Does anyone know where I can get a tokpisin english dictionary? It seems to be unusually difficult to find for a majority language.
This one any good? Wikibookshas a nice selection too, from just glancing over it.
Thank you very much! That is perfect. I have no idea why google didn't spider that, it kept taking me to trading websites instead.
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Post by Gordon Daws »

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote: 12 Nov 2017 19:03 I just find it bizarre and fascinating. These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night [xP]
I know it's been cleared up what this phenomenon is, but here's a link I saved a while ago you'll probably enjoy. Basically an English phonestheme dictionary. http://www.lchr.org/a/29/gz/phond1.html
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Post by AlwaysForget »

I've exhibited θ-fronting ever since I was a little kid in casual speech, yet I never front /ð/ > /v/. Why is this? Like I'll say things like:

free : three [fɹiː]
feeder : theater [fiɾɚ]
think [fɪŋk]
eighth : [eɪf]

But the following sound awful to me and a lot more obviously "incorrect" in my idiolect:

the *[və]
mother *[mʌvɚ]
weather *[wɛvɚ]


My merger is not complete though, I'd say there's variation between my usage, so /f~θ/, the former being the dominant variant. I sometimes hypercorrect though. I've caught myself saying [θʊt] for "foot" before! I'm from the midwest US and have been ridiculed for it before, so I don't think it's common. I'll have to observe the speech of people tomorrow to see. Is this some sort of change based on frequency, that one of the pair (the less common) would merge with a more frequently occuring sound?
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Post by Isfendil »

AlwaysForget wrote: 27 Nov 2017 07:03 I've exhibited θ-fronting ever since I was a little kid in casual speech, yet I never front /ð/ > /v/. Why is this? Like I'll say things like:

free : three [fɹiː]
feeder : theater [fiɾɚ]
think [fɪŋk]
eighth : [eɪf]

But the following sound awful to me and a lot more obviously "incorrect" in my idiolect:

the *[və]
mother *[mʌvɚ]
weather *[wɛvɚ]


My merger is not complete though, I'd say there's variation between my usage, so /f~θ/, the former being the dominant variant. I sometimes hypercorrect though. I've caught myself saying [θʊt] for "foot" before! I'm from the midwest US and have been ridiculed for it before, so I don't think it's common. I'll have to observe the speech of people tomorrow to see. Is this some sort of change based on frequency, that one of the pair (the less common) would merge with a more frequently occuring sound?
Okay this is a really big coincidence. See, I am a persian speaker, but I speak far more english (torontonian dialect, no f-merger) than persian even though I inow them both natively. Persian has no /θ/. The persian word for think is /fekr/ but for my entire life I have been saying /θekr/ and no-one noticed until I learned that persian has no /θ/ in my first year of university (intro to lin opens so many eyes). It is not interchangable either, I have a great deal of trouble trying to correct it to fekr (especially because my mum cant even hear the difference). I know I do this with other persian words too Im just not sure which ones. So I think, even though this is across language barriers, that the answer to this question of yours is yes.
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Post by loglorn »

And θ-f and ð-v are relatively common changes in some parts of England. While they do seem to come together you're not the first one i heard that fronts only θ and not ð, though you're probably the first one i heard that does has that change in the US.
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Post by gestaltist »

I need some help with terminology as I can't find the proper names for those.

1) what are the linguistic terms for the two types of Slavic verbs of motion (e.g., Polish "iść" vs "chodzić")?
2) I am working on a protolang where retroflexes led to front vowels getting rhotacized, and back vowels getting unrounded. The retroflexes later merged with coronals, leaving behind two sets of vowels (there was retroflex harmony in the proto-proto). Is there a name for such a set of vowels?
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Post by DesEsseintes »

gestaltist wrote: 27 Nov 2017 12:19 I need some help with terminology as I can't find the proper names for those.

1) what are the linguistic terms for the two types of Slavic verbs of motion (e.g., Polish "iść" vs "chodzić")?
2) I am working on a protolang where retroflexes led to front vowels getting rhotacized, and back vowels getting unrounded. The retroflexes later merged with coronals, leaving behind two sets of vowels (there was retroflex harmony in the proto-proto). Is there a name for such a set of vowels?
1) I seem to remember ‘unidirectional’ and ‘pluridirectional’
Edit: The Wikipedia article on Russian grammar uses ‘multidirectional’ for the latter, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen both.
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Post by loglorn »

gestaltist wrote: 27 Nov 2017 12:19 I need some help with terminology as I can't find the proper names for those.

1) what are the linguistic terms for the two types of Slavic verbs of motion (e.g., Polish "iść" vs "chodzić")?
2) I am working on a protolang where retroflexes led to front vowels getting rhotacized, and back vowels getting unrounded. The retroflexes later merged with coronals, leaving behind two sets of vowels (there was retroflex harmony in the proto-proto). Is there a name for such a set of vowels?
I'm really interested in seeing 2) further explained.
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Post by sangi39 »

DesEsseintes wrote: 27 Nov 2017 14:22
gestaltist wrote: 27 Nov 2017 12:19 I need some help with terminology as I can't find the proper names for those.

1) what are the linguistic terms for the two types of Slavic verbs of motion (e.g., Polish "iść" vs "chodzić")?
2) I am working on a protolang where retroflexes led to front vowels getting rhotacized, and back vowels getting unrounded. The retroflexes later merged with coronals, leaving behind two sets of vowels (there was retroflex harmony in the proto-proto). Is there a name for such a set of vowels?
1) I seem to remember ‘unidirectional’ and ‘pluridirectional’
I've also seen "determinate" and "indeterminate" before, as well as "concrete" and "abstract", for the same terms respectively. I think because the two classes cover a range of semantically different things, different authors use different terminology to refer to the same two classes (I've also found the latter class referred to as "iterative" on etymological grounds, but that seems controversial and restrictive).

As for the vowel question, I'm not sure there's a name that would cover that set specifically, but you could use a historical label. Normally when this sort of thing happens, front and back vowels undergo roughly the same change before splitting, so in this case front and back vowels in proximity with retroflex consonants would share the same change in feature before splitting (into rhotic front vowels and unrounded back vowels), so you could label them on the basis of that feature.
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Post by gestaltist »

loglorn wrote: 27 Nov 2017 14:43
gestaltist wrote: 27 Nov 2017 12:19 I need some help with terminology as I can't find the proper names for those.

1) what are the linguistic terms for the two types of Slavic verbs of motion (e.g., Polish "iść" vs "chodzić")?
2) I am working on a protolang where retroflexes led to front vowels getting rhotacized, and back vowels getting unrounded. The retroflexes later merged with coronals, leaving behind two sets of vowels (there was retroflex harmony in the proto-proto). Is there a name for such a set of vowels?
I'm really interested in seeing 2) further explained.
Alright. The idea is that this language has very strong retroflex harmony. Basically, all coronals become retroflex, and all vowels become rhotacized if there is at least one retroflex anywhere in the word. So for example /ʈatu/ = [ʈa˞ʈu˞] but the vowels rhoticized even in absence of neighboring retroflexes, e.g.: /ʈaku/ > [ʈa˞ku˞]. In a second step, the back vowels moved from rhotacized to unrounded so [o˞ u]˞ > [ɤ ɯ]. Finally, retroflexes became alveolar, so we end up with tə˞tɯ / tə˞kɯ (there was further merging of rhotacized /a/ and /e/).

Is that clearer?

EDIT: I guess I could call these vowels "rhotacized" as per sangi's suggestion. This could even have a cool romanization: <taku> = [taku] but <rtaku> = [tə˞kɯ]
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Post by loglorn »

gestaltist wrote: 27 Nov 2017 14:54
loglorn wrote: 27 Nov 2017 14:43
gestaltist wrote: 27 Nov 2017 12:19 I need some help with terminology as I can't find the proper names for those.

1) what are the linguistic terms for the two types of Slavic verbs of motion (e.g., Polish "iść" vs "chodzić")?
2) I am working on a protolang where retroflexes led to front vowels getting rhotacized, and back vowels getting unrounded. The retroflexes later merged with coronals, leaving behind two sets of vowels (there was retroflex harmony in the proto-proto). Is there a name for such a set of vowels?
I'm really interested in seeing 2) further explained.
Alright. The idea is that this language has very strong retroflex harmony. Basically, all coronals become retroflex, and all vowels become rhotacized if there is at least one retroflex anywhere in the word. So for example /ʈatu/ = [ʈa˞ʈu˞] but the vowels rhoticized even in absence of neighboring retroflexes, e.g.: /ʈaku/ > [ʈa˞ku˞]. In a second step, the back vowels moved from rhotacized to unrounded so [o˞ u]˞ > [ɤ ɯ]. Finally, retroflexes became alveolar, so we end up with tə˞tɯ / tə˞kɯ (there was further merging of rhotacized /a/ and /e/).

Is that clearer?

EDIT: I guess I could call these vowels "rhotacized" as per sangi's suggestion. This could even have a cool romanization: <taku> = [taku] but <rtaku> = [tə˞kɯ]
What you just did is just a very interesting way to develop vowel harmony, between what i'd call rhotic and non-rhotic vowels. Quite cool might steal
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Post by gestaltist »

loglorn wrote: 27 Nov 2017 15:01 What you just did is just a very interesting way to develop vowel harmony, between what i'd call rhotic and non-rhotic vowels. Quite cool might steal
Thanks. It was a bit of an accident. I decided the protolang had too few phonemes so I added retroflexes. But I really didn't want retroflexes in the final product. Since I was already toying with having /ɯ/, the rest followed somewhat naturally.

BTW, I might lose the actual rhotacity entirely and have /ɨ ə ɯ ɤ/ as the "rhotic" vowels instead.
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Post by sangi39 »

I'd go with "rhotic" on that basis.

I've seen a couple of languages that use historical labels for sets, e.g. "front" and "back" in Khalkha Mongolian despite both sets (barring /e/) being comprised of back vowels with the distinction being one of tongue root.
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Post by AlwaysForget »

loglorn wrote: 27 Nov 2017 11:30 You're probably the first one i heard that does has that change in the US.
It's definitely not a common thing where I'm from (Ohio), since I've gotten shit from people for saying "one two free..." before. Like I said, I'm going to have to listen in on the speech of people around me for the next few days and see if it goes beyond my idiolect. I feel like it'd be known though already if it did
Last edited by AlwaysForget on 27 Nov 2017 17:30, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Salmoneus »

gestaltist wrote: 27 Nov 2017 14:54 Alright. The idea is that this language has very strong retroflex harmony. Basically, all coronals become retroflex, and all vowels become rhotacized if there is at least one retroflex anywhere in the word. So for example /ʈatu/ = [ʈa˞ʈu˞] but the vowels rhoticized even in absence of neighboring retroflexes, e.g.: /ʈaku/ > [ʈa˞ku˞]. In a second step, the back vowels moved from rhotacized to unrounded so [o˞ u]˞ > [ɤ ɯ]. Finally, retroflexes became alveolar, so we end up with tə˞tɯ / tə˞kɯ (there was further merging of rhotacized /a/ and /e/).
Why would this happen, given that rhoticity and roundedness are phonologically similar?
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Post by gestaltist »

Salmoneus wrote: 27 Nov 2017 17:28
gestaltist wrote: 27 Nov 2017 14:54 Alright. The idea is that this language has very strong retroflex harmony. Basically, all coronals become retroflex, and all vowels become rhotacized if there is at least one retroflex anywhere in the word. So for example /ʈatu/ = [ʈa˞ʈu˞] but the vowels rhoticized even in absence of neighboring retroflexes, e.g.: /ʈaku/ > [ʈa˞ku˞]. In a second step, the back vowels moved from rhotacized to unrounded so [o˞ u]˞ > [ɤ ɯ]. Finally, retroflexes became alveolar, so we end up with tə˞tɯ / tə˞kɯ (there was further merging of rhotacized /a/ and /e/).
Why would this happen, given that rhoticity and roundedness are phonologically similar?
A good question that I don't have an answer to. Do you think dissimilatory unrounding of the non-rhotic /o u/ would be more likely instead?
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Post by Imralu »

Is there a word for a sound that's a little bit like an ejective [pʼ] except instead of the pressure building up on top of the rising glottis, it is built up between a closure of the tongue against the velum which then slides up a bit? I tend to pronounce this very lightly allophonically a bit in the /m̩.k/ sequence in Swahili words such as mwanamke "woman" /mwa.na.ˈm̩.ke/ and kuamka "to wake up" /ku.a.ˈm̩.ka/. The glottal closure seems to form before I finish the [m] so when I open my lips, a little bit of pressure has built up and creates a little pop, a high pitched "soap-bubble pop" rather than the more "uncorking a bottle" sound of [pʼ], which has a bigger resonating cavity. (Not that soap bubbles actually pop with a sound I've ever heard except for the crackling of foam, but this is kind of what I imagine for the right sound effect of a bubble popping.)

I also make this sound deliberately as a sound effect, letting my tongue close off the cavity completely from the back, which gives a slightly water-drop-ish sound as the resonating cavity closes from the back to the front. My boss also makes this noise quietly while he's concentrating. He's Deaf and apart from laughter, he makes pretty much no other sounds.

I also do it as a trill, which, I suppose I could transcribe as [ʙ̥ʼ], except the pressure is created by the tongue filling the space of the mouth from the back, so it sounds like a much more bubbly [ʙ̥] which rises in pitch until it cuts off when my tongue reaches the [t̪] position.
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Post by esoanem »

isn't that a (maybe nasalised) bilabial click?
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Post by DesEsseintes »

gestaltist wrote: 27 Nov 2017 17:34
Salmoneus wrote: 27 Nov 2017 17:28
gestaltist wrote: 27 Nov 2017 14:54 Alright. The idea is that this language has very strong retroflex harmony. Basically, all coronals become retroflex, and all vowels become rhotacized if there is at least one retroflex anywhere in the word. So for example /ʈatu/ = [ʈa˞ʈu˞] but the vowels rhoticized even in absence of neighboring retroflexes, e.g.: /ʈaku/ > [ʈa˞ku˞]. In a second step, the back vowels moved from rhotacized to unrounded so [o˞ u]˞ > [ɤ ɯ]. Finally, retroflexes became alveolar, so we end up with tə˞tɯ / tə˞kɯ (there was further merging of rhotacized /a/ and /e/).
Why would this happen, given that rhoticity and roundedness are phonologically similar?
A good question that I don't have an answer to. Do you think dissimilatory unrounding of the non-rhotic /o u/ would be more likely instead?
Here’s an idea, although I don’t know how it ties in with the rest of your system:

Have /e i/ back to /ɤ ɯ/ in the rhotic/retroflex environments? Much Mandarin.
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