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

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

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

Heh, I never said user friendly, jus possible. [:P]
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Xonen »

I firmly believe that Turkish uses <z̧> for /ʒ/ and <j> for /dʒ/, since I refuse to participate in a reality where a major language gets away with using <c> for the latter.
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Post by sangi39 »

Can't believe I forgot this, but Turkish and Romanian actually use too different diacritics. Turkish uses s-cedilla <ş> while Romanian uses s-comma <ș> (the s-cedilla was used when typing on computers because the s-comma hadn't been included in unicode until around the mid-2000s). My original search was for z-cedilla <>, but I had a bit more luck with the z-comma <>, although not all that much luck. This particular letter was used in both Kildin Sami and in Nenets between 1932 and 1937, representing /zʲ/ in both languages, before the Latin orthography was replaced by a Cyrillic one.

In both Kildin Sami and Nenets, the comma diacritic consistently represented palatalisation (one thing I love about the Latin Kildin Sami orthography is <ʒ̒> for /dzʲ/), so <> was distinct from <z>, but those are the only two times I've come across it being used, and it was a short-lived period between the use of two periods of Cyrillic use.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sumelic »

Xonen wrote:I firmly believe that Turkish uses <z̧> for /ʒ/ and <j> for /dʒ/, since I refuse to participate in a reality where a major language gets away with using <c> for the latter.
The one that always bothers me is Albanian using <x> for /dz/ and <xh> for /dZ/. Even more irritating is that the Bashkimi alphabet which used to be used had the opposite convention, which I find much more intuitive. If you must assign single letters to /z/ and /dz/, the correspondence <x> = /z/ and <z> = /dz/ seems more natural considering the use of <z> for affricates in various well-known European languages like German and Italian (and now in Pinyin too, which also has <zh> as an affricate).
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by sangi39 »

Sumelic wrote:
Xonen wrote:I firmly believe that Turkish uses <z̧> for /ʒ/ and <j> for /dʒ/, since I refuse to participate in a reality where a major language gets away with using <c> for the latter.
The one that always bothers me is Albanian using <x> for /dz/ and <xh> for /dZ/. Even more irritating is that the Bashkimi alphabet which used to be used had the opposite convention, which I find much more intuitive. If you must assign single letters to /z/ and /dz/, the correspondence <x> = /z/ and <z> = /dz/ seems more natural considering the use of <z> for affricates in various well-known European languages like German and Italian (and now in Pinyin too, which also has <zh> as an affricate).
My issue with Albanian is this:

/s/ vs. /ʃ/ = <s> vs. <sh>
/z/ vs. /ʒ/ = <z> vs. <zh>
/dz/ vs. /ʒ/ = <x> vs. <xh>

Okay, so, firmly established pattern of alveolar+<h> = post-aveolar...

/ts/ vs. /ʃ/ = <c> vs. <ç>

No! What are you doing? (although apparently <ch> can occasionally appear in place of <ç> if the keyboard in use doesn't permit use of the latter). And then there's:

/n/ vs. /ɲ/ = <n> vs. <nj>
/g/ vs. /ɟʝ/ = <g> vs. <gj>

So again, the beginnings of a pattern, +<j> representing palatals, but what comes next?

/k/ vs. /cç/ = <k> vs. <q>

I mean, sure, that's only two exceptions in the entire written language, which, for the most part (if you include digraphs) has a one to one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, so hey, it's better than English, but they're just so jarringly noticeable.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

I don't know that this necessarily has any answer, but what exactly is "the deal" with all the English words with connotations of "shininess" beginning with /gl/? We have glimmer, gleam, glow, glisten, glass, glint, glare, glitter...

Obviously there's nothing inherently "shiny" about the sequence /gl/. I just find it bizarre and fascinating. These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night [xP]

Is there a term for this phenomenon? Is something like this perhaps counter-evidence to the "arbitrariness" principle of language (apart from onomatopoeia)?

I'll be honest that in conlanging, I sometimes pick a sound or sound sequence and create a semantic association with it. For example, a lot of nouns referring to things I find "beautiful" contain the sequence /nt/, because I happen to like the way /nt/ sounds in the middle of a word. I consider it euphonic and I match it to my perception of the noun.
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Post by qwed117 »

"Derivation".
Most of them are derived from PIE *ǵʰley or *ǵʰelh₃. It wouldn't strike me as particularly surprising if the two are considered related/derivative of each other. English's position as a highly innovative and borrowing language has allowed different variants of the same word to spread through the language. Add this to the relatively wack derivational morphology, and many of the words don't seem related beyond the 'gl' they begin with.

Some more related words (from *ǵʰley): glee, glide, glower, glim, glitz, glam (maybe)
Some more related words (from *ǵʰelh₃): yellow, gold, chlorine, chlorophyll, yield, zloty, gild, gall (possibly)

It's a bit of a stretch to include *ǵwelH, given how different it is (in shape) from the remaining words, but it would add "coal" to our list.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by LinguistCat »

This might be best taken directly to Clawgrip, but does anyone know when Japanese borrowed 勿論 mochiron from Literary Chinese? All I could find through wiktionary and the like was that it was borrowed from Literary Chinese and not any specific time or stage of Japanese it was borrowed during. I could definitely use the info for my current project but I also just like the word tbh.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Creyeditor »

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote: 12 Nov 2017 19:03 I don't know that this necessarily has any answer, but what exactly is "the deal" with all the English words with connotations of "shininess" beginning with /gl/? We have glimmer, gleam, glow, glisten, glass, glint, glare, glitter...

Obviously there's nothing inherently "shiny" about the sequence /gl/. I just find it bizarre and fascinating. These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night [xP]

Is there a term for this phenomenon? Is something like this perhaps counter-evidence to the "arbitrariness" principle of language (apart from onomatopoeia)?

I'll be honest that in conlanging, I sometimes pick a sound or sound sequence and create a semantic association with it. For example, a lot of nouns referring to things I find "beautiful" contain the sequence /nt/, because I happen to like the way /nt/ sounds in the middle of a word. I consider it euphonic and I match it to my perception of the noun.
I think some people call it "sound symbolism", which can be languages specific.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote: 12 Nov 2017 19:03 I don't know that this necessarily has any answer, but what exactly is "the deal" with all the English words with connotations of "shininess" beginning with /gl/? We have glimmer, gleam, glow, glisten, glass, glint, glare, glitter...
Also glister, gloaming, glamour, glaze, glory, glimpse, glance, glower, gloom (the opposite!)...

This is a common phenomenon, particularly in English (though I think this is the most obvious example). It happens in (at least?) five ways:

- multiple derivations from the same source
- borrowings of cognates to form doublets
- portmanteaus and analogical extensions. For instance, a famous set in English are the loud-collision -ash words: crash, bash, smash, splash, gnash, brash, mash, and arguably thrash, lash, trash, gash, and maybe even flash, dash, etc. "Crash", for instance, either started out with a -k or started out with an -s, and spontaneously aquired the other (to make -sk, becoming -sh) probably by analogy with the others. "Smash" is a portmanteau of "smack" and "mash". In turn, "splash" (which started out as "plash", meaning puddle, but got an s- somehow) donated its 'l' to "sputter" to make "splutter"; it may be that both words ('splash' and 'splutter' both involve the spreading out of a (liquid) material) are in turn in debt to "splay" (spread out).
- ex nihilo "onomatopoia" using elements established in other words. Take, for instance "glomp". Well, -omp and -ump are associated with solid but non-sharp collisions (trump, thump, whump, bump, etc, all of which can be -omp instead). And as well as glimmer words, gl- is also associated with stickiness: glue, gloop, glob, globule, glut, gleet. So naturally, "glomp" is going to mean to collide with and stick to. But this is also an example of analogy: an earlier word was "glom", which meant "snatch, steal", which has been altered by analogy with other -mp words, and sometimes the meaning of 'glom' itself is altered to match. Intriguingly, "glom" is from the Gaelic, yet it's also ended up with a sense of "look at, watch" - almost as though it were related to the glare/glance words! Oh, and from "globule" we might get "blob", which probably has something to do originally with "bubble", apparently, although etymonline instead suggests that "glob" comes from "blob" (and not from "globule"?). "Gloop", meanwhile, may be "goop" with a gluey /l/ added... and there's also "glop", suspiciously similar to "slop".
- altered survival rates: words tend to survive if they fit these sets. For instance, there used to be both "blob" and "bleb", but "bleb" died out and "blob" didn't - perhaps because "blob" harmonised better with globule, slop, slobber, bob, gob, sob, etc.
Likewise, going back to "splay" above - maybe it added its 'l' to splatter, splutter and/or splash... but then again, maybe those words helpd give us "splay", which originated as a dialectical abbreviation of "display", and probably wouldn't have survived if it didn't harmonise with other words...

While we're on the subject, how about sl-? Slope, slant... and then slide, slither, slip (what you do down slants and slopes)... and then slimy, slick, sloppy (the propety of things prone to slide, slither and slip) and sly (metaphorically)... and then slather (what you do to something to give it that property). Slop can slip, and when it slips it slops down with a slap, as does something that's slack when it smacks, and when you slap water with a slack lash it splashes...
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Thank you guys :) This is interesting stuff.

I did consider that the /gl/ words might be of similar derivation; perhaps neologisms were formed on analogy with other similar words. After enough words with /gl/ have associations with "shiny", then mentally we may associate that sound with that meaning, so that new words can be formed. And it does seem there are a number of ways these patterns and associations can arise.
Salmoneus wrote: 12 Nov 2017 20:50 While we're on the subject, how about sl-? Slope, slant... and then slide, slither, slip (what you do down slants and slopes)... and then slimy, slick, sloppy (the propety of things prone to slide, slither and slip) and sly (metaphorically)... and then slather (what you do to something to give it that property). Slop can slip, and when it slips it slops down with a slap, as does something that's slack when it smacks, and when you slap water with a slack lash it splashes...
I found this article here on "phonesthemes": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonestheme

It cites the /gl/ example, as well as the association of /sl/ with "frictionless movement" (slick, slip, slide, slither, etc.) and /sn/ with facial words (snarl, snicker, sneer, snout, etc.) ("smirk, smile"?)

Interesting how most of these examples involve stop + resonant blends.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by All4Ɇn »

Aside from ze also being used as an adverb and before infinitives, what are the different uses between ze and zuo in Middle High German and what did zuoze mean? Is it similar to usage in modern Dutch for te and tot?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Concerning tautosyllabic clusters of consonant:

I read a "universal" (that is, the author(s) was/were pretty sure s/he/they had convincing evidence at that time that it was a universal),
concerning consonant clusters, that went along these lines:
If any cluster of more-than-one* consonants is an attested onset cluster in a natlang, then at least one of its "one-consonant-deleted substrings" is also an attested onset in that natlang:
and, if any cluster of more-than-one* consonants is an attested coda cluster in a natlang, then at least one of its "one-consonant-deleted substrings" is also an attested coda in that natlang.

*(The presence of one-consonant onsets does not imply the acceptability of onsetless syllables; nor does the presence of one-consonant codas imply the acceptability of open (i.e. codaless) syllables.)

I'm pretty sure they wished, for example concerning three-consonant clusters, they could say:
"If C1C2C3- is an onset-cluster in the language then both C1C2- and C2C3- are acceptable onsets in the language"
and
"If -C1C2C3 is a coda-cluster in the language then both -C1C2 and -C2C3 are acceptable onsets in the language".
But apparently they knew of counter-examples.


For two-consonant clusters; the formulation they actually published is pretty clear.
If C1C2- is an acceptable onset-cluster, then either C1- or C2- (likely both) is also an acceptable onset;
and, if -C1C2 is an acceptable coda-cluster, then either -C1 or -C2 (likely both) is also an acceptable coda.

But for clusters of three-or-more consonants there's an ambiguity (or, at least, it's ambiguous to me), that I don't remember seeing resolved in the article (which I can no longer locate).

Does the formulation they actually came up with mean:
"If C1C2C3- is an acceptable onset-cluster in the language then at least one of the three two-consonant clusters C1C2- or C1C3- or C2C3- is also a syllable-onset in the language"?
Or does it mean:
"If C1C2C3- is an acceptable onset-cluster in the language then at least one of the two two-consonant clusters C1C2- or C2C3- is also a syllable-onset in the language"?

Does it mean:
"If -C1C2C3 is an acceptable coda-cluster in the language then at least one of the three two-consonant clusters -C1C2 or -C1C3 or -C2C3 is also a syllable-coda in the language"?
Or does it mean:
"If -C1C2C3 is an acceptable coda-cluster in the language then at least one of the two two-consonant clusters -C1C2 or -C2C3 is also a syllable-onset in the language"?

(Note the much stronger version "if C1C2C3- is an acceptable onset-cluster in the language then all three of the two-consonant clusters C1C2- and C1C3- and C2C3- are also accepted syllable-codas in the language" is false for most English 'lects; str- is an acceptable onset, and so are st- and tr-, but sr- is not.)

The difference is even more extreme if we're talking about four-consonant clusters.
Which is true?
The stronger
"If C1C2C3C4- is an acceptable onset-cluster in a language, then at least one of the two three-consonant clusters C1C2C3- or C2C3C4- is also an acceptable syllable-onset in the language; and,
if -C1C2C3C4 is an acceptable coda-cluster in a language, then at least one of the two three-consonant clusters -C1C2C3 or -C2C3C4 is also an acceptable syllable-coda in the language."?

Or, the weaker
"If C1C2C3C4- is an acceptable onset-cluster in a language, then at least one of the four three-consonant clusters C1C2C3- or C1C2C4- or C1C3C4- or C2C3C4- is also an acceptable syllable-onset in the language; and,
if -C1C2C3C4 is an acceptable coda-cluster in a language, then at least one of the four three-consonant clusters -C1C2C3 or -C1C2C4 or -C1C3C4 or -C2C3C4 is also an acceptable syllable-coda in the language."?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Dormouse559 »

I don't see ambiguity in what you've written. Since, to make a substring, you can only delete characters from the beginning and/or end of a string, I interpret the universal to mean these conclusions:
eldin raigmore wrote: 13 Nov 2017 22:40 "If C1C2C3- is an acceptable onset-cluster in the language then at least one of the two two-consonant clusters C1C2- or C2C3- is also a syllable-onset in the language"?

"If -C1C2C3 is an acceptable coda-cluster in the language then at least one of the two two-consonant clusters -C1C2 or -C2C3 is also a syllable-onset in the language"?

The stronger
"If C1C2C3C4- is an acceptable onset-cluster in a language, then at least one of the two three-consonant clusters C1C2C3- or C2C3C4- is also an acceptable syllable-onset in the language; and,
if -C1C2C3C4 is an acceptable coda-cluster in a language, then at least one of the two three-consonant clusters -C1C2C3 or -C2C3C4 is also an acceptable syllable-coda in the language."?
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Post by qwed117 »

From what I'm reading in Norquest 2007, I'm lead to believe that /ɾj/ was an acceptable onset cluster at one point in the languages' development, but /ɾ/ had already become /l/, meaning that /ɾ/ itself wasn't an acceptable onset.
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Post by Dormouse559 »

Was /j/? If so, then that fits the proposal.
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Post by qwed117 »

Dormouse559 wrote: 14 Nov 2017 01:50 Was /j/? If so, then that fits the proposal.
/j/ wasn't legal since all initial sonorants in Proto-Hlai, in Norquest's reconstruction are voiceless.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Dormouse559 wrote: 13 Nov 2017 23:37 I don't see ambiguity in what you've written. Since, to make a substring, you can only delete characters from the beginning and/or end of a string, I interpret the universal to mean these conclusions:
You're right; there's no ambiguity in what I wrote.
I had originally written "subcluster"; but thought that a two-consonant cluster C1C2 wouldn't have subclusters -- neither C1 nor C2 is a cluster, rather, each is a single consonant.
I no longer remember the exact wording of the article that raised this question for me. If I remember correctly it was ambiguous just as I asked; though from their examples they seem to have meant to delete either the first consonant or the last consonant from the cluster.

I still want to know whether there's an onset-cluster C1C2C3- for which C1C3- is a valid onset but neither C1C2- nor C2C3- is; and/or a coda-cluster -C1C2C3 for which -C1C3 is a valid coda but neither -C1C2 nor -C2C3 is.

Even more : what about a four-consonant cluster C1C2C3C4 which is a valid onset or coda, for which both C1C3C4 and C1C2C4 are valid clusters as the same syllable-margin (respectively onset or coda), but neither C2C3C4 nor C1C2C3 is a valid cluster as that syllable-margin (respectively onset or coda)?

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Post by eldin raigmore »

qwed117 wrote: 14 Nov 2017 00:35 From what I'm reading in Norquest 2007, I'm lead to believe that /ɾj/ was an acceptable onset cluster at one point in the languages' development, but /ɾ/ had already become /l/, meaning that /ɾ/ itself wasn't an acceptable onset.
Using Google or GoogleBooks to look up "Norquest 2007" turns up a lot of spurious hits.
The fifth one is "A Phonological Reconstruction of Proto-Hlai" by Peter Norquest; is that the one you meant?
Did you perhaps mean to include a link but inadvertently omit it?
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Post by Isfendil »

Does anyone know where I can get a tokpisin english dictionary? It seems to be unusually difficult to find for a majority language.
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