Ask the linguist

[Omi_no_Kami]

@guizot

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.

A little testy, I see. ^_~

You don’t like my science, I don’t like your pretention, so I’ll just ignore you and hope you return the favor.

[guizot]

@Omi no Kami

A little testy, I see. ^_~

You don’t like my science, I don’t like your pretention, so I’ll just ignore you and hope you return the favor.

Well, I’d rather not ignore you, since you obvious know a lot, and are well-versed in linguistics. But the pretension goes both ways: Ask the ________________ sounds like saying: “I know everything about _____________________. You can ask me and I’ll give you the one and only correct answer.” Granted: you gave in the OP a caveat but in the in spirit you didn’t follow it, IMHO.
“Vainity, all is vainity,” as they used to say.

I prefer to bring up specific questions: “What’s the difference between x and y?”

In the end, I can see you are a very well-versed linguist. I’ve done graduate work in the same field, but I’ve taught Enlish in a variety of contexts, as I imagine you have. So there’s no reason to ignore each other.

[Omi_no_Kami]

@guizot

Well, I’d rather not ignore you, since you obvious know a lot, and are well-versed in linguistics. But the pretension goes both ways: Ask the ________________ sounds like saying: “I know everything about _____________________. You can ask me and I’ll give you the one and only correct answer.” Granted: you gave in the OP a caveat but in the in spirit you didn’t follow it, IMHO.
“Vainity, all is vainity,” as they used to say.

I prefer to bring up specific questions: “What’s the difference between x and y?”

In the end, I can see you are a very well-versed linguist. I’ve done graduate work in the same field, but I’ve taught Enlish in a variety of contexts, as I imagine you have. So there’s no reason to ignore each other.

Well I chose the thread title out of tradition; there are hundreds of Ask the X threads floating around, and I assume that a known type of thread would garner the most responses. As for the caveat, I don’t know what you’re referring to; I never claimed to be well versed outside my field, but I still tried to give the best answer I could to most of the questions; that only seemed fair.

I suppose I was just pissed off by the combonation of percieved pretention and imprecise terminology; you’d harp on someone for being vague one moment, and come back with a response filled with the exact same imprecise terminology.

Whose work did you get this whole comprehension of grapheme thing from, though? We don’t conclusively know how graphs are parsed beyond the topical patterns of variation you can get with an eye tracking study, so I can only imagine they would’ve been running a regression through some kind of priming table and comparing it against motor activity, but that seems too simple to involve a PET. (which is the most horrific form of imaging I’ve ever encountered; I’d rather work with a 10cm-squared fMRI just to avoid the steady stream of calibrations you need to make as your isotopes degrade.)

[Siam_Sam]

@guizot

As for East vs. South East, I realize the difference; again, I’m just trying to be brief.What i said.

Well, we’re NOT East Asia. Period. So go ahead and spare the extra five letters.

[Vision_of_Love]

I have a question related to rhotacism. Is there a name for pronouncing “th” as “v” in the beginning of words? I’ve met someone who would pronounce “and then” more like “and ven.”

It interested me because I’d never heard anyone with that kind of pronunciation before. Is there a name for this?

[Omi_no_Kami]

@Vision of Love

I have a question related to rhotacism. Is there a name for pronouncing “th” as “v” in the beginning of words? I’ve met someone who would pronounce “and then” more like “and ven.”

It interested me because I’d never heard anyone with that kind of pronunciation before. Is there a name for this?

Well I think it’s another case of allophony, that is someone’s language weirdness (weird from your dialect’s point of view ) allowing them to substitute different sounds for one phone. In this case, they’re substituting a voiced labiodental fricative (“v”) for a voiceless interdental fricative “th”.

[Ol_Gaffer]

Omi no Kami, what is the state of OT these days? I got my MA in phonology back in 2000 when OT was first being extended into Syntax and Semantics. At the time, there weren’t too many Feature Geometrists left but there were even a few practitioners of Metrical Stress Theory floating around (despite Hayes’ insistence that it wasn’t a particularly sound theory). Anways, OT had pretty much taken over everything but I would be interested to hear how it has held up. I’m not in the field anymore, having moved onto the far sexier and lucrative business of environmental compliance.

[saoirse]

@BayleDomon

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.

Well, the thing is, you wouldn’t use the same facial expression for those situations. The raised eyebrow you give to someone explaining how the Jews are responsible for all the wars in history is different from the raised eyebrow you give the person who mentions how much they love NuSkin. And these are different from the raised eyebrow you give if a friend tells you he just met a girl yesterday and wants to marry her, which diiffers from the expression when he says he just met a girl and thinks you should marry her.

As my favorite YouTube video put it: “I didn’t learn to read and write so I could communicate using a system of crude pictograms.”

[Omi_no_Kami]

@Ol'Gaffer

Omi no Kami, what is the state of OT these days? I got my MA in phonology back in 2000 when OT was first being extended into Syntax and Semantics. At the time, there weren’t too many Feature Geometrists left but there were even a few practitioners of Metrical Stress Theory floating around (despite Hayes’ insistence that it wasn’t a particularly sound theory). Anways, OT had pretty much taken over everything but I would be interested to hear how it has held up. I’m not in the field anymore, having moved onto the far sexier and lucrative business of environmental compliance.

Well it depends on who you ask, but the general consensus on OT is that it’s really cool, it can’t possibly be 100% correct, but since we don’t have any better theories we put up with it. The most marked criticisms tend to be that it does a piss-poor job of explaining nasal harmony (plug Hmong into OT and it damn near explodes), and its reliance on the standard onset-rhyme model of syllable structure makes it awkward to use with aspects of Bella Coola, which is a Salishan language famous for having words that contain no vowels or sonorants of any sort. It seems kind of cheap, using two languages out of over 6,500 to criticise a theory, but it’s important to remember that since language is regular and systematic, if the model is accurate it should be able to do every language.