Ask the linguist

[Omi_no_Kami]

[QUOTE=Shoshana]

1. Why was I caused to learn diachronic and synchronic linguistics using Anttila when none of us spoke Finno-Ugric?

[/QUOTE]

Because your instructor was a horrible, horrible sadist? I had to learn syntactic typology along with Richard Kayne’s Antisymmetry of Syntax, and as a third-semester undergraduate that book did a serious number on me. What was satisfying was to read it again the next semester, and realize how much more sense it made. I was at first elated, but that only lasted until I tried to explain R. Kayne (they don’t call him that for nothing!) to some friends, only to have them demand to know why I would study the minimalist program long enough to have him make sense. Then I became frightened.

[QUOTE=Shoshana]

2. If the colorless green nouns slept less furiously, would fruit flies like a banana?
   [/QUOTE]

I certainly hope not… I happen to LIKE my presupposition, thank you very much!

[samclem]

Since there was no question in the OP, let’s move this to MPSIMS.

samclem GQ moderator

[El_Zagna]

[QUOTE=wonder9]
Why do some word take an article in American English but not in UK English? For example, in the USA, you go “to the hospital” but in the UK you go “to hospital”.

So why is it that? College, not “the college”. “The university” not “university”. What makes the difference?
[/QUOTE]
This is similar to a question I asked a while back, and no one was able to really answer it.

My question was why do some proper names take “the” in front while some don’t? You swim in Deer Creek, but you swim in the Brazos River. You swim in Lake Travis, but you swim in the Pacific Ocean. You hike along Pike’s Peak but you hike along *the *Rocky Mountains.

There’s some rule at work but I don’t know what it is.

[Hilarity_N.Suze]

[QUOTE=El Zagna]
This is similar to a question I asked a while back, and no one was able to really answer it.

My question was why do some proper names take “the” in front while some don’t? You swim in Deer Creek, but you swim in the Brazos River. You swim in Lake Travis, but you swim in the Pacific Ocean. You hike along Pike’s Peak but you hike along *the *Rocky Mountains.

There’s some rule at work but I don’t know what it is.
[/QUOTE]

Or you can live in The Bronx and visit The Hague, in The Netherlands.

Or you can live in Queens and visit Amsterdam, in Holland.

Same rule?

[Omi_no_Kami]

Hmm. Well again, this is isn’t my specialty (the bulk of my theoretical expertise involves how sounds are produced, and how they’re patterned) but I think the choice might be a little arbitrary. ‘the’ is a category of word called a ‘determiner’, and its role is basically to express the reference of a noun in context. ‘the’ has a few big things it does, most noteably indicating presupposition by marking definiteness and specificity. Basically, anything that comes after English “the” is by definition something that’s either 1) already been mentioned in conversation or 2) otherwise assumed to have been specified in full. If there’s a plate with three apples on it, I pick one up and polish it as you’re leaving, and when you come back the apple is gone… well, if I tell you “I ate THE” apple you’re going to assume that I’m refering to the apple I’d been polishing, but if I say “I ate A apple” you have no way of knowing which of the three apples I’d been referring to.

I think you’re right that a rule is in place, but rather than some kind of syntactic parameter I think we’re looking at something more akin to idiom. Let me look into it, though; there may be reasons for this alternation that are directly obvious.

[neorxnawange]

OK here’s a question for you or any other linguists lurking around.

I’m learning Old English (Anglo Saxon) and doing pretty well now. My question concerns the pronunciation of initial “R’s”. Is it rolled or not? Most speakers, or to be more accurate, readers, I have come in contact with will roll the initial, but not the internal, R. I’ve even been taught to roll the R by one of my professors, though another instructor admits she is just not sure.

I tend to think that the R should not be rolled because, well, it just doesen’t sound Germanic. Am I wrong in thinking that none of the other West Germanic languages have a rolled R? Then why should OE? It just doesen’t make any sense to me to roll those R’s and I haven’t heard an explanation either way from a linguist on this matter. Do you have any input?

[Omi_no_Kami]

[QUOTE=neorxnawange]
OK here’s a question for you or any other linguists lurking around.

I’m learning Old English (Anglo Saxon) and doing pretty well now. My question concerns the pronunciation of initial “R’s”. Is it rolled or not? Most speakers, or to be more accurate, readers, I have come in contact with will roll the initial, but not the internal, R. I’ve even been taught to roll the R by one of my professors, though another instructor admits she is just not sure.

I tend to think that the R should not be rolled because, well, it just doesen’t sound Germanic. Am I wrong in thinking that none of the other West Germanic languages have a rolled R? Then why should OE? It just doesen’t make any sense to me to roll those R’s and I haven’t heard an explanation either way from a linguist on this matter. Do you have any input?
[/QUOTE]

We’re actually not entirely sure what the word-internal old english /r/ is. The three popular possibilities are an alveolar approximant, which is what most modern english dialects use, it could’ve been an alveolar flap, which is the /d/-like sound you hear in modern words like “butter” and “motor”, or it could’ve been an alveolar trill, which is what I think the rolled /r/ you’re describing is.

As for possibilities about why the trill was in old english, if it ever was, it’s actually the case that the trill has been reconstructed as a phoneme in proto-indo-european, and in fact originally occurs in almost every IE language. While it’s true that the Uralic and Romance languages made use of it far more than the Germanic languages did, modern german actually has a uvular trill (same kind of sound made waaaaay back in the mouth, around where that dangly throat thing is) and it’s been argued that southern dialects of german have an alveolar trill.

If it existed, it’s most likely that english got the alveolar trill from either Welsh or Old Norse.

[jackdavinci]

1. Are there any natural or artificial written languages in which the design of the letters/characters is based on the actual anatomy of speaking (like position of tongue, shape of mouth)?

2. Any anecdotal or interesting linguistic tidbits? Stories or interesting or humorous language trivia you know but we probably dont?

3. Have you tried your hand in or appreciated any one else’s real use or fictional use artificial language?

4. What are the current major controversies or areas of research or groundbreaking discoveries in linguistics in the last year and last five years?

[glee]

I listened to a Dutch speaker chatting to an Afrikaans speaker - they could communicate pretty well!
Presumably the Dutch colonists in Africa were influenced by the native languages?

A Finnish fellow I met said his language was hard to relate to any other - perhaps Hungarian was the closest?!
Is this true and how did it happen?

[Omi_no_Kami]

[QUOTE=jackdavinci]

1. Are there any natural or artificial written languages in which the design of the letters/characters is based on the actual anatomy of speaking (like position of tongue, shape of mouth)?

2. Any anecdotal or interesting linguistic tidbits? Stories or interesting or humorous language trivia you know but we probably dont?

3. Have you tried your hand in or appreciated any one else’s real use or fictional use artificial language?

4. What are the current major controversies or areas of research or groundbreaking discoveries in linguistics in the last year and last five years?
   [/QUOTE]

Oh crapping crap… I had a wonderful four-page reply to this typed out, then I hit backspace and my browser killed it. Well… let me be brief, and suggest that you guys either wikipedia topics of interest or ask me to elaborate.

1. Yes, and they’re called Featural Graphologies. Korean Hangul is the most famous, but a few less well-known examples include Visual Speech, which Alexander Graham Bell’s father, Alexander Benjamin Bell created, and Tengwar, one of the writing systems Tolkien used for the elf languages (I think this might be what they used in the films, but don’t quote me on it. Ever since those damned hobbit movies came out everyone and their cousin is a subject expert, and I don’t have the patience or interest to learn why everything I say about Tolkien is suddenly wrong for some obscure reason, so I don’t try. )

www.omniglot.com is a great place for information on writing systems. The guy who runs it isn’t a linguist, and I disagree with a lot of his ideas (especially his tips on learning languages), but it’s still a good resource.

2. Yes, some interesting things:

a) A lot of languages are in danger of dying out; at least 3,000 of the current 6,554-some languages that we know about (and there are lots we don’t) are in danger of becoming extinct in the next 100 years. This sucks, and it’s unfortunate that it’s so difficult to preserve languages. It’s important that the kids learn it, so especially in native american communites there need to be more efforts to teach the young parents, now, so their kids may grow up as native speakers.

b) Many linguists have little or no grammatical intuition, which is an occupational hazard. I can speak English perfectly well, but if you show me two sentences “The dog ran” and “the ran dog”, and ask me which one is grammatical, I can tell that you want me to say “the dog ran,” but I look at the two and honestly can’t get that “Bad Grammar Buzzer” to sound for either one; they both look equally good to me.

c) Linguists tend to be the least judgemental academics I’ve ever met, when it comes to sexuality. I know this isn’t always the case, but in general, as long as you aren’t hurting anyone else, you could tell a linguist about practically any sexual practice/preference/predilection and utterly fail to shock them.

3. Have you tried your hand in or appreciated any one else’s real use or fictional use artificial language?

A little. Tried to learn klingon and that elf language as a teenager. Quickly learned that the reasons I wanted to learn these languages (to get the “insider” look at the culture) were also true for real world languages, but if I learned one of those I could communicate with tons more people.

I also made up a few simple languages for D&D games I would run, that were intended for the players to decipher. This, also, changed as I got older, and now when I have the time to run roleplaying games I use real-world languages that have something interesting about them for the players to discover.

4. What are the current major controversies or areas of research or groundbreaking discoveries in linguistics in the last year and last five years?

Pretty much everything is controversial to a greater or lesser extend, since there’s a great deal of disagreement over very fundamental aspects of our science. (and it IS a hard science. Don’t ever let someone convince you it isn’t.)

Some interesting recent developments, however, are:

i) X-bar’s return to popularity
ii) The minimalist program
iii) Optimality Theory (this ROCKS. It’s also wrong, but it rocks.)
iv) Evidence that phonation != state of the glottis, but rather has at LEAST six different significant actions that’re involved.
v) That cambodian kid who gave us at least one more piece of evidence regarding a prolonged lack of lingual input and its effect on the language facilities.

And on a sadder note Dr. Peter Ladefoged, the father of modern phonetics and technical advisor to the film crew in My Fair Lady died this past January in his mid 80s.

That’s all I can think of for now… I feel really bad though, because I had a much more complete answer. Well, if anyone wants to hear about it, I’d be happy to tell the story of Hangul at some point, and how those shithead Hanja fanatics in the Hall of Worthies suppressed it practically from the time the fourth king of the Choson dynasty and his guys developed it in the mid 1400s until the Gabo Revolution in 1894.

[Omi_no_Kami]

[QUOTE=glee]
I listened to a Dutch speaker chatting to an Afrikaans speaker - they could communicate pretty well!
Presumably the Dutch colonists in Africa were influenced by the native languages?

[/QUOTE]

Pretty much. Afrikaans is an Indo-European language in the Low Franconian branch of the Germanic subgroup. It’s closely related to Dutch, and much of the proveable divergence occured during the 17th century on the West Cape of south africa. Major contributors to afrikaans were dutch, french, and german, with loaning from other european languages also occuring due to the high volume of europeans coming in and out of the cape. Descendents of these early immigrants were forced to move by the Britians, in the so-called Great Trek. It was during this time that Afrikaans began to be recognized as a distinct language from Dutch, rather than the dialect it had formerly been considered to be.

[QUOTE=glee]

A Finnish fellow I met said his language was hard to relate to any other - perhaps Hungarian was the closest?!
Is this true and how did it happen?
[/QUOTE]

Hungarian is genetically related to Finnish, but there are a number of other more closely-related languages. Finnish is a member of the Uralic family; the well-accepted tree is:

Uralic
Finno-Ugric
Finno-Permic
Finno-Volgaic
Finno-Lappic
Baltic-Finnic
Finnish

The Baltic-Finnic subgroup is generally considered to consist of sixteen languages in two branches: the Finnic branch and the Ugric branch. The Finnic branch has three substrands: the Baltic-Finnic strand which includes Finnish, its two closest geographic relatives the Karelian and Estonian languages, as well as Ingrian, Livonian, Veps, and Votic, the Sami strand, which only includes Sami, the Permic strand, which inclues Permyak, Komi, and Udmurt, the Mari strand, which only includes Mari, and finally the Mordvin strand, which only includes Mordvin. On the other branch, the Ugric branch, you have two substrands: the Hungarian strand, which only includes Hungarian, and the Ob-Ugric strand which includes Mansi and Khanty.

Does that answer your question?

[Kyla]

Do you know much about the Slavic languages? I’m curious as to the historical reasons for why some of them use Cyrillic and some of them use Latin letters. I actually asked a guy in Herzegovina why Croatian and Bosnian (which are, of course, two entirely different languages, haha!) are written in Latin and he went into a spiel about how they have a different mindset in BiH and are in the heart of Europe, and not in Eastern Europe. But IMO, they’d be a hell of a lot easier to read and write in Cyrillic than Latin.

That makes me think, is there any objective way to determine what writing system goes best with what languages? I mean, Polish looks disastrous in Latin letters, but I assume the Poles can read it okay, right?

[WotNot]

[QUOTE=Omi no Kami]
I’m slightly out of my depth here, since I’m a phonologist, but if semantics is involved I think that it’s only involved insofar as the lack of DP is motivated by some kind of weird collocational restriction.

My reasoning is that determinerless PPs (prepositional phrases) occur quite frequently in both north american and British english: on ice, by hammer, at school, in gaol, on video. The point of giving these examples is to note that their occurence is often predicated by one particular meaning: if we’re ice-skating I, as a Canadian, have to say “We’re on THE ice,” but if the mafia have killed us, I’m allowed to say “We’re on ice”.

This is essentially what a collocational restriction is, and since some north american determinerless PPs (at school) are suspiciously similiar to British “at hospital,” I think we’re seeing British english gain new contexts that allow for determiner dropping.
[/QUOTE]

If I understand you correctly (not being a linguist), then I think you’re right.

As a British English speaker, if I say that a person is “in hospital”, then I mean that they are being treated as an in-patient at a [non-specified] medical facility; ie it’s more a statement about their physical condition than their physical location.

If I say that someone is “in the hospital” it means either:
a) they are being treated as an in-patient at a [specified] medical facility (whether explicitly named or implicit from context), or
b) they are physically present within the hospital building (eg. Dr Brown is in the hospital).

If I say that someone is “at the hospital”, then they are in the geographical location of a [specified] medical facility, but why they are there depends on context: they may be being treated as an out-patient, they may work there, or they may be waiting for a bus outside.

I’m not at all sure I’d use the phrase “at hospital” at all.

[Omi_no_Kami]

[QUOTE=Kyla]
Do you know much about the Slavic languages? I’m curious as to the historical reasons for why some of them use Cyrillic and some of them use Latin letters. I actually asked a guy in Herzegovina why Croatian and Bosnian (which are, of course, two entirely different languages, haha!) are written in Latin and he went into a spiel about how they have a different mindset in BiH and are in the heart of Europe, and not in Eastern Europe. But IMO, they’d be a hell of a lot easier to read and write in Cyrillic than Latin.

[/QUOTE]

When you get down to it, religion is what determined the choice in writing system. Communities who got their religion from Byzantium adopted Cyrillic, whereas communities that took their cue from the Holy Roman Empire ended up using the Latin stuff.

[QUOTE=Kyla]

That makes me think, is there any objective way to determine what writing system goes best with what languages? I mean, Polish looks disastrous in Latin letters, but I assume the Poles can read it okay, right?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t think there’s really a way to determine a “best” writing system, because when you get down to it it’s partially an issue of personal preference. There are some broad guidelines: syllabaries, for instance, go best with languages with CV (Consonant + Vowel) syllable structure. If the syllable structure is more complicated and allows CVC, or CCV, or something messy like that, the writing system will quickly become horrendously complex in order to deal with all the complex onsets (the stuff that comes before the V) and codas (the stuff after the V). In general, however, writing systems tend to evolve with the language and culture, and it tends to be the case that native speakers are most comfortable with their writing system the way it is, while second-language learners spot the flaws before the good points, and tend to loudly complain about how it could be better. Japanese is a perfect example, as the most complex known writing system in the world. It has four main writing systems: hiragana and katakana, which are two different syllabic systems, their adaptation of the latin alphabet, and kanji, some of which are borrowed Chinese characters while others are unique to Japan, and all of which are logographs. (they aren’t actually ideograms, even though people like to refer to them that way.)

Now second-language learners often claim to prefer material written only in the syllabic systems when they start out, since it’s easier to read when you only have to know 204 characters, which is the size of both syllabaries combined. However, native speakers who’ve gone through the work of becoming fluent in the system (which requires knowledge of both syllabic systems and about 4,000 kanji if you don’t go into a technical field, and about 7-10,000 if you pursue higher education) actually find it easier to read kanji-heavy passages, claiming that it’s much faster that way.

So in short, it really depends on your outlook.

[JKellyMap]

[QUOTE=Kyla]

That makes me think, is there any objective way to determine what writing system goes best with what languages?
[/QUOTE]

I think this question my be moot, because people tend to adapt imported writing systems to their own languages rather quickly. Our own alphabet has its roots in a system that developed (mostly) by adapting certain Egyptian hieroglyphs to a Semitic language – and, when its descendent writing system was later adapted to an Indo-European language, further adaptations took place (some symbols, for example, were no longer used for the various laryngeals, etc. of the Semitics, but rather for completely different I-E sounds).

However, there is the popular notion that some languages are better suited to one writing system over another – perhaps less drastic adaptive changes are needed for one rather than the other. A good test case might be to compare Persian and Turkish. Persian is an I-E language that adopted (and adapted) the Arabic writing system. Turkish is a Turkic language that did the same, and then later switched to our alphabet.

[Omi_no_Kami]

[QUOTE=WotNot]
If I understand you correctly (not being a linguist), then I think you’re right.

As a British English speaker, if I say that a person is “in hospital”, then I mean that they are being treated as an in-patient at a [non-specified] medical facility; ie it’s more a statement about their physical condition than their physical location.

If I say that someone is “in the hospital” it means either:
a) they are being treated as an in-patient at a [specified] medical facility (whether explicitly named or implicit from context), or
b) they are physically present within the hospital building (eg. Dr Brown is in the hospital).

If I say that someone is “at the hospital”, then they are in the geographical location of a [specified] medical facility, but why they are there depends on context: they may be being treated as an out-patient, they may work there, or they may be waiting for a bus outside.

I’m not at all sure I’d use the phrase “at hospital” at all.
[/QUOTE]

Yea, I think that’s what’s going on. Basically, it’s possible to drop that “the” when you have a preposition before it, but there are often meanings that can only be achieved in the determiner-less form.

Wonder9, do you want me to paraphrase our discussion and findings in kid-friendly form, or do you have it covered? If you want me to do it, how old should I aim the explaination for?

[Omi_no_Kami]

[QUOTE=JKellyMap]
I think this question my be moot, because people tend to adapt imported writing systems to their own languages rather quickly. Our own alphabet has its roots in a system that developed (mostly) by adapting certain Egyptian hieroglyphs to a Semitic language – and, when its descendent writing system was later adapted to an Indo-European language, further adaptations took place (some symbols, for example, were no longer used for the various laryngeals, etc. of the Semitics, but rather for completely different I-E sounds).

However, there is the popular notion that some languages are better suited to one writing system over another – perhaps less drastic adaptive changes are needed for one rather than the other. A good test case might be to compare Persian and Turkish. Persian is an I-E language that adopted (and adapted) the Arabic writing system. Turkish is a Turkic language that did the same, and then later switched to our alphabet.
[/QUOTE]

Ooh, that sounds like it could be fun! I’m worried at how we could control for parsing order effecting coding speed, however. If we assume Kaynian antisymmetry we have to assume that rightward adjunction is going to be marked against even though there’s evidence that Persian requires rightward adjunction as an option for head movement (you can check this by controlling for a trace in spec-adjunctP). This would, at the very least, mean that there’s one extra movement operation executing in Persian. The issue is that Turkish derives its postposing from rightward scrambling but can be shown to use leftward adjunction. Adjunction is a really great informal way of predicting parsing order, since speakers tend to naturally parse the head, then its spec, then the rest of the phrase. The issue here is that it looks like with Persian and Turkish we’re looking at adjunction in two different directions, which suggests parsing will execute in a different order. On top of that, iteration is potentially going to occur at a different speed due to movement in Persian that doesn’t exist in Turkish. If that’s the case, I’m having trouble thinking of a way to control for the variations in coding speed due to the syntax, and differences due to the orthography. Maybe if we used eye tracking to test coding speed for orthography, and ran a quick test by having native speakers of both languages read a passage in orthography, do a quick regression (take a log of the F(0) for each syllable, correlate it to the pitch contour to get timing, then run a regression line through the whole thing), and look for noticeable variations to see if syntax is going to be an issue? If you were to add an airflow test to check for jitter, I think the two combined would be enough to satisfy your peer review.

[Kythereia]

Can I just say that from the heart of my first-year linguistics class, I swoon at thee?

How do you account for the click consonant? has always been curious about this

[wonder9]

[QUOTE=Omi no Kami]

I certainly hope not… I happen to LIKE my presupposition, thank you very much!
[/QUOTE]

Going to let us in on the joke?

[Omi_no_Kami]

[QUOTE=Kythereia]
Can I just say that from the heart of my first-year linguistics class, I swoon at thee?

How do you account for the click consonant? has always been curious about this
[/QUOTE]

Yay!!! I always love to see new people getting interested in linguistics!

Now, time to learn about clicks! To begin with, as you probably remember from your introduction to phonetics, when we classify a consonant there are five aspects that we tend to keep track of. What are they? (test yourself before you read on!) Typically, phoneticians will classify a phoneme based on: airstream mechanism, phonation type (voiced/voiceless), place of articulation, oral/nasal, , and manner of articulation. So an ordinary /b/ sound would be a pulmonic egressive bilabial oral voiced plosive (or stop). Oral/nasal is annoyingly redundant, so we usually leave that out in casual conversation and assume that if nobody says anything, it’s oral and not nasal. Airstream mechanism is the same way, in that if we don’t say anything, people assume it’s pulmonic aggressive. Since you’re ignoring these two, you end up falling into the three-part Voicing Manner Place method of classifying sounds.

Now, back to clicks. A click is simply a stop that has two points of closure within the oral cavity. Since both stops will be sealed at the same time, you’ll have a small pocket of air trapped between them. You then proceed to rarefy the air pocket by pulling the tongue back in a sort of sucking action. This results in the frontmost of the two closures being released while the rear closure is still sealed, which results in extremely loud plosion which seems to originate from the forward cavity.

Now, I’m oversimplifying a lot, and in the field you’re going to find that some clicks sound like clean stops, some will sound more like affricates or fricatives, and in the worst cases you’ll find languages whose clicks sound really, really close to ejectives.

In any case, now we can look at the big thing that makes a click a click: the airstream mechanism. As you’ve no doubt deduced, the source of phonation for a click can’t be the glottis, since a rear closure is in place during articulation. Air is going to be sucked in, due to the tongue action, and it will immediately blow out again, creating the noise. Now if an egressive sound involves air being pushed out through the glottis and through the oronasal cavity, then what would you guess air being sucked in would be called? Yep, you would call it ingressive! So we know that we’re looking at an ingressive airstream, but you’ll remember that when I defined an ordinary /b/ sound I used two words to describe the airstream: in particular, I called it *pulmonic *egressive. Pulmonic is just a fancy-ass way of saying “lungs”, so it’s acting like an airstream place of articulation, describing where the sound source is. So for the second part of the airstream description, we need to look at the individual stop to see where the rearmost closure is. The dental click, for instance, which tends to be the most common type of click found in the world’s languages (and even then, we’ve only definitively documented it in some African languages and in the Australian Damin ritual language), has closures at two points: the frontmost closure is at or just behind the teeth, and the rearmost closure is at the velum (which is very common for clicks). So with the place of rear closure being located at the velum, and with the manner of phonation being drawing air inwards, how would you classify the airstream mechanism of the dental click? If you said velaric ingressive, you’re correct!

So let’s review: clicks are a lot like stops in the way they’re articulated, only instead of a single closure they always have two coinciding closures. The frontmost closure is released first, by the tongue drawing back in a sucking motion, and this motion, along with the bernoulli effect, pulls air in, and immediately forces it back out, creating the actual noise. Therefore clicks are ingressive sounds, but unlike most ingressives, for which the airstream mechanism is actually pulmonic ingressive (pulmonic because air is being pulled into the lungs, instead of stopping at a velar closure like most clicks do, ingressive because the air is going in), these sounds are actually velaric ingressives. If you want to try visualizing the difference, the airstream in a pulmonic ingressive travels in a sideways L shape: it comes straight into the mouth, hits the back of the throat, and then drops straight down into the lungs. A velaric ingressive, however, is more like a C: air comes in, hits the velar closure, curves up or down, and gets pushed right back out.

And that is that! Was that clear-ish? If you have any other questions, I’d encourage you to ask; linguistics is important to learn, and I think people’d enjoy hearing about the kind of stuff your program focuses on.