By the way, to Kythereia and anyone else interested in linguistic phonetics and phonology, if you’re willing to put in the effort to learn a bit of the technical stuff Peter Ladefoged’s The Sounds of The World’s Languages is an extremely cool book. It doesn’t spoon feed you, so you need to think about the stuff it talks about beyond the immediate context to get the full value out of it, but it’s really, really neat.
No problem! It’s tough to teach, especially if you haven’t been trained for it. I hope you both have the best of luck. ^^
Very clear, thanks. How interesting that researchers can interpret in different ways the tiny delays in how we say some things. For example, Pinker discusses this in regard to regular and irregular verbs.
Pinker’s a good writer, but I really wish more people would remember that he’s a psychologist. The general consensus among the acquisitionists I’ve worked with is that he’s doing psychology studies that lack sufficient linguistics background, so he ends up drawing conclusions that seem a little funny to the community. (his entire child language spiel is one of the biggies: although a lot of people are in favor of the nativist approach in one fashion or another, he assumes the so-called mental module model of the brain, in which evolution causes parts of the brain (modules) to hyper-specialize. I’m assuming this comes from his looking at Chomsky’s early work; initially, people thought that generative grammar presupposed mental modules, but this interpretation has since fallen out of favor.)
Pissing matches aside, though, I think Pinker’s done a lot to popularize psycholinguistics as a field. 
Wow! I will admit that I haven’t read through this thread, but I am glad to have a linguist on board (I know there are probably more, but it’s the first time I’ve noticed one). So…my question:
What are the latest hypotheses/theories as to the origin of the word that the Greeks called the “Tetragrammaton” (or “Name of Four Letters”), which is mostly transliterated as “Yahweh” or “Jehovah”…written in Hebrew as Yod-He-Vau-He?
It seems as if it should be significant (because of its definition), but I’ve never been able to pin down a source for it. Does anybody have an idea these days where it came from?
And welcome to the boards!
Thanks for the welcome! I’ve honestly never heard anything regarding the etymology of that particular term. Someone who has a particular interest in the semitic languages could probably come up with a good guess, but in general researchers are more interested in patterns and overarching systems than they are in individual words. ^^
Sorry if I’ve missed it in this thread, but in another one, I mentioned the L/R confusion among some Asians that has become a stereotype. What’s that called? You know, the old “flied lice” joke. Even though Thai has a distinct L and a distinct R, there are some who cannot differentiate between the two. Whether it comes out L or R is often simply a matter of chance. But one person I knew up North simply could not pronounce R. She really DID say “flied lice.” This does not seem to be too common, though, and the vast majority of Thais can pronounce R fine and can tell the difference between the two letters/sounds.
However, certain words do take an L or R despite clearly being spelled with the Thai R. There is a dish called “rat na” (no, it’s not rat as in the English word; both A’s are pronounced like the A in “father”). Even those who CAN distinguish between L and R will commonly say “lat na.” Occasionally, you’ll even see it SPELLED with the Thai L, which always amazes me.
What you’re looking at is called allophony, and it’s extremely common throughout the world’s languages. It’s essentially an issue of speech perception in which speakers of one language hear multiple distinct sounds as a single phone. English does this, you can hear for yourself: hold a sheet of paper close to your mouth and say “truck, truck, truck,” and then contrast that with “cat, cat, cat”. The reason the paper (should) blow forward when you say the ‘t’ in “truck” but not in “cat” is because the sound in “truck” is actually an aspirated t, and the sound in “cat” is unaspirated. This isn’t important in english, and so even though the sounds are in complementary distribution (e.g. you can predict where they go: aspirated /t/ never goes in unaspirated /t/'s slot and vice versa) most English speakers hear them as one sound. Speakers of a language like Tibetan, however, in which changing aspiration will actually change a word’s meaning, can hear the distinction easily.
Thai, on the other hand, doesn’t have the American English /r/ sound, which is called an alveolar approximate. It does have two similiar sounds, however, an
alveolar trill and a lateral alveolar approximate.
The lateral alveolar approximate, which is the English /l/ sound, is actually produced in a very similiar way to the English /r/. The primary distinguishing characteristic is that rather than the air flow down the center of the dorsum (the tongue body) we see an occlusion formed along that center axis, which forces the air to flow around one side of the tongue or another. (Or both.)
Since the manner in which the lateral alveolar approximate is produced is quite similiar to the central alveolar approximate /r/, it’s quite easy for Thai speakers to hear /l/ as /r/. As for the other option, the alveolar trill, the place of articulation is the same as for the alveolar approximate /r/, that is, tongue tip to that little ridge behind the teeth, the spot which gets burned if you eat pizza before it cools off. Rather than a single release like we see with approximates, however, the trill is characterized by rapid movement of the articulator, which results in the dimensions of the closure being quickly changed during articulation. You can hear this in Spanish words like “perro” and “carro”.
Since the Thai language doesn’t have the English /r/ sound it ends up chosing something close, which is usually the lateral alveolar approximate or alveolar trill. The reason you hear both is because there’s probably something in English that conditions the usage; almost every speaker you meet is likely to have a predictable pattern of replacement.
Thanks. The Thai R sound does sound close to my ear; I can’t really distinguish it from the English R.
There’s a definite letter R in the alphabet, but whereas it is pronounced like an R at the beginning of a syllable, it’s pronounced like an N at the end of a syllable. L is also pronounced like an N if the written letter apears at the end of a syllable; the choice of the L or R letter will affect the sound of the vowel in the syllable.
Thai syllables basically end only with N, T, K and P sounds, as far as consonants go (not counting vowel endings).
While I really do understand that talking about “how a letter is pronounced” may help those learning a new language, it also perpetuates the notion that writing drives speech, while in fact writing is a way of representing speech, and now often even just a way of communicating. , :mad: , :smack: , :o , etc. are essentially hieroglyphs–yes, re are regressing when it comes to internet communication. I mean, if you really have to put in an :dubious: to make your point, then your not giving your writing much credit, and perhaps it doesn’t deserve it.
As I’ve said so many times before here, letters don’t have sounds. We use them to represent sounds, and various systems of alphabets, syllabaries (sp?), pictographs, etc. can do weird things. Sometimes they seem rather arbitrary. English is such a mongrel language that it’s spelling system can be mystifying. Hangul, on the other hand, the writing system to represent Korean speech (it’s kind of like a combination alphabet and syllabary)(sp.?), is actually very consistent and linguistically quite admirable–though it takes a while to figure out some of its more subtle qualities.
Anyway, once you start to become a proficient reader of any language, the “sound” almost becomes irrelevant. (Perhaps the difference in syllable stress in INvalid vs. inVALid may help you understand the meaning of something you are reading, but syntax usually makes that unnecessary anyway.). Reading out loud is not reading. It is pronouncing, and making students do that is probably not helping them to become better readers. The only time you read out loud, is when you’re an idiot politician and you have to look at one of those invisible (to the audience) prompters–or worse yet, when you are so nervous about speaking to the public that you feel you need to look at a piece of paper and read it verbatim like some kind of computer program. (This, even when you are well-versed throughout every nerve in your body of what you want to say.)
The human eye of a “competent” reader takes in an average of three words in an instant. It is not pronouncing; it’s using the eye and brain (and a different part of the brain from that which is used to speak, as PET scans have shown) to comprehend ideas.
The issue, Siam Sam, is that few East Asian languages use liquids as allophones in the same way English does.
This complaint seems wholly unconnected to the rest of your post.
I disagree that it’s a sign of regression to use emoticons, too. Online chat is often intended to emulate speech in ways that normal writing does not. The problem is, things like pitch, stress, tone, and body language are all non-existant in text form, but they are essential to conveying proper meaning in a conversation. Some people see message boards and such as more writing than conversing, but those who see it the other way round tend to employ emoticons to simulate body language. Really, there’s plenty of times in face-to-face conversations when a mere :dubious: is sufficient to describe your reaction to something someone else has said. There’s no need to verbalize if it gets your reaction across succinctly.
I would say that English always has had “complex socially driven rules.” They’re just not done in the same way (such as Japanese particles, etc.) Even before you’re 12 years old, you know that you don’t talk to your friends on the playground the same way you talk to Officer Suspicious that you’re sitting behind a dumpster when there’s the faint smell of marijuana around. You could say that in English it’s simpler, but that could be very subjective (and certainly U.S. society is has fewer–or, should we say–less stringent social constraints. It’s just that the Altaic languages and their use of social recognition are so different from English.
I stand corrected. I was being a little factitious when I said that emoticons are regressive—let’s say it’s a joke. I’ve used them myself, form time to time and they do, in fact, help fill in for body language that the telephone eliminated. But some people seem addicted to them.
Altaic as a family is complete bullshit, it’s one of those crazy theories that lonely, middling scholars came up with to make themselves feel accomplished. (Please don’t take this as hostile, since it isn’t; I just have a serious axe to grind with bad comparative reconstruction, which is essentially what the Altaic theory was. )
As for the English versus Japanese distinction, I think what we’re really looking at is an issue of where social functions are coded. English pragmatics are certainly rife with politeness constraints, just like any language, but the morphology, syntax, and semantics don’t reflect this. There are languages which code politeness directly into the syntactic or morphological structure, however, which is what I was trying to accomplish by citing Japanese and Tibetan. It isn’t just that native speakers who grew up elsewhere lack the manners they would’ve learned by growing up in that culture; without a substantial population of native speakers with whom to use and witness interactions between social groups, they simply don’t have the vocabulary or grammar which is required. (Tibetan tends to have five levels of politeness, for instance, as reflected by the morphology; to say “give” you can say “chie” or “chang” or “chong” depending on who’s doing the giving and who’s recieving it. Most native speakers who’ve grown up without a large Tibetan community have a very weak grasp on the high honorific forms; some don’t have the vocabulary at all.)
Nitpick: We’re Southeast Asian. No one at least over here would ever consider this East Asia. That’s strictly China, Korea and Japan.
That may be, (and I use the term only out of convenience), but the similarities between Japanese and Korean grammar suggest a strong relation. I didn’t bring it up as an absolute theory, but a quick way of referring to a group of languages.
As for East vs. South East, I realize the difference; again, I’m just trying to be brief.
What i said.
Just as a minor nitpick, but if you’re taking about Egyptian Hieroglyphics, then although they are a predominantly logographic system (with a few weird alphabetic elements) most Egyptian graphemes are capable of pulling double-duty as pure phonetic markers.
If you’re talking about Anatolian Hieroglyphs (which haven’t been completely deciphered) we see elements of logographic, determinative, and syllabic roles.
If you’re referring to Mayan Hieroglyphics they actually function a little (a VERY little) like Japanese kanji, filling both logographic and syllabic roles.
You’re nitpicking about the “letters don’t have sound” thing. It’s relevant to note that most writing systems are, at their core, linear tools with clear beginning and ending points that are intended to represent nonlinear information that has no clear starting and ending points. But there’s nothing to be gained by poking fun at semantics.
On the topic of English, the logic of its writing system, or the general lack thereof, isn’t in any way related to the colorful origins of the English language (which while impressive, aren’t all that unusual when compared to the world’s languages). Rather it’s a result of multiple contributing factors that, at their core, revolve around the orthography having been regularized without being standardized. Regularization of a writing system is always a tricky business, and early on it was the influential authors who tended to be the big driving force behind regularized spelling. (Chaucer, for instance, did a serious number on English.) The great vowel shift and extensive borrowing of foreign vocabulary that retained the spelling of its language of origin introduced inconsistency to the system, and the arrival of printing presses and eventually the formal dictionaries that began to role out in the 1600s wrought a lot of these changes in stone. So don’t blame typology when it isn’t the cause. ^^
What’s the point of this? That reading and speaking are seperate processes is kind of common sense… The fact that spoken language drives production, not written language, is blatantly obvious. You’ve already noted that written language is nothing but a system to represent spoken language, so I don’t see what the point in using overdone political jokes to illustrate a concept which has already been established… it seems like you’re arguing against a concept that nobody was proposing until your little battle with the meaning of “have”.
Wow, that’s really cool. What on earth do you have to back it up? Wikipedia explains this much better than I do, but PET basically tracks bloodflow (I think they usually use oxygen tracers for neurological work) via the injection of radiocative isotopes with an extremely short half-life. It works to measure activity if you’re going under the theory that bloodflow can be directly equated with neural activity, which I understand many professionals agree on. (I haven’t worked in neurology myself, so I’m flying by the seat of my pants.) In any event, while I can understand using PET for neurolinguistic research to track motor events responsible for regulating aspects of the prosody (tone, meter, geshtalt, that sort of thing), I’m really interested in seeing who tried to a) convincingly define “comprehend” in a neurological sense, seeing as how we’ve yet to even prove that both syntax and semantics exist, and b) examine this using an extremely finicky procedure whose nature makes it extremely difficult to conduct a statistically significant number of tests in this sort of study. Do you have a paper you got this from? If so, I’d actually like to read it.
(also, I’d really like a cite for that “three words in an instant” figure, and while we’re playing the definition game what an “instant” is. I’m almost certain that you can’t ascribe an average universal reading rate unless there’s a syntactic process driving it which I’m not aware of.)
Convenience is great, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of accuracy. Altaic probably doesn’t exist, and the grammatical similiarities between Korean and Japanese can be reconstructed as a series of contact-induced syntactic changes. After that whole fiasco with Sapir and the Mosan hypothesis, I’m eager to head of another one at the pass.
So please don’t make a genetic family out of nothing all for the sake of convenience.
Testy, testy, testy, considering the tone of the OP:
If you want to pontificate, you go to the Pit. If you want to discuss, go to IMHO, or GB.
I’m right pissed, but I’m also being fair; anger aside, I maintain that the above represents a fair criticism.
This work has been going on in the depts. of Applied Linguisits and Neurology at UCLA for quite some time. If Wikipedia is your main source of info, I suggest you go to a school for better information. Schools have libraries, and journals, and professors you can talk to. In most neuro-linguistists studies, brain blood-flow is meaningful, as it is in other studies. But your doubt is reasonable. Quite frankly, I have too many other things to do than to give you cites for things which are easily accessible at any library.