Linguistics thread

This is our main forum. Here, anything related to languages and linguistics can be discussed.

Moderator:Forum Administrators

kevin
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:2134
Joined:2012-03-29, 11:07
Gender:male
Country:DEGermany (Deutschland)
Contact:
Re: Linguistics thread

Postby kevin » 2017-03-30, 18:07

linguoboy wrote:
kevin wrote:Well, the core "political" statement I read from this is "I don't care about you". Of course, everyone is free to tell me that, but if you do that, don't expect me to be very much interested in communicating with you.

Funny, the core political statement I get is "i'm lazy af". In fact, they've said as much when challenged. (Usually framed as blaming the interface, e.g. "i'm typing on my phone".)

Yes, that's what they would say. But still what I see behind it is that I'm not important enough to them to deserve a carefully written text. Most likely they wouldn't do the same thing in an exam or a job application because that would be actually important to them. And as you say, usually this doesn't only include orthography or grammar, but also the actual content.

So if you write a text as if you don't want me to read it, I won't read it if I can avoid it.

User avatar
Michael
Posts:7126
Joined:2009-07-21, 3:07
Real Name:Mike
Gender:male
Location:Oak Park, IL
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Michael » 2017-03-30, 18:22

I recall being pretty lax about both grammar and punctuation in the days before I became a hardcore language nerd, to the point where I would go out of my way to employ slang and text-speak spelling on MySpace, to give an air of an against-the-grain attitude (what I now know to be descriptivism) about myself. As I started becoming interested in foreign languages, however, I became more conscious about my usage of my own native language(s), gradually adopting an increasingly prescriptivist attitude towards my personal usage and making more conscious efforts to use "correct" grammar and punctuation. The most salient example of this is the improvement in my usage of correct past participles.

I would say that nowadays, I still permit myself to use slang and rather descriptivist usages in colloquial speech depending on my audience, but I'm pretty prescriptivist about correct spelling and punctuation in written language, whether or not I permit myself to transcribe "slangy" language. Others' grammatical "errors" stick out to me as a result, but as I used to be in that same position as well, I "keep it to myself" and even look down on the type of prescriptivists who pretend to not understand the text of someone who dares use an incorrect spelling (as in the image meidei shared).
American English (en-us) Neapolitan from Molise (nap) N Italian (it) B2 Spanish (es) Portuguese (pt) French (fr) Greek (el) Albanian (sq) B1 Polish (pl) Romanian (ro) A2 Azerbaijani (az) Turkish (tr) Old English (en_old) A1
„Çdo njeri është peng i veprave të veta.‟
Every human being is hostage to their own deeds.

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby linguoboy » 2017-03-30, 19:48

I vacillate here between wanting to provide good natural examples of colloquial American usage and between aiming for a neutral "international" style which will be most comprehensible for L2 speakers of English. Like when I'm writing responses to LifeDeath, I often find myself rewriting sentences to make the structures more transparent (e.g. supplying omitted "that"s). But when I contribute to TPAM, I'll slip in some slang usages since I assume the audience there is up for more of a challenge.

But I always feel it's important to use normative orthography because, for advanced speakers, it makes things easier to read and, for learners, it provides them with a good model whether or not they ultimately decide to follow it.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-03-31, 0:28

Vlürch, natural languages are constantly evolving and changing. Things are lost in our languages all the time. Things are also created in our languages all the time. We use or start using loanwords all the time, and these days, we use loanwords from all sorts of languages. All of this is simply how languages work, and we don't even seem to notice as any of these things are happening, only after they already have (probably a very long time after they have in most cases).

User avatar
dEhiN
Posts:6828
Joined:2013-08-18, 2:51
Real Name:David
Gender:male
Location:Toronto
Country:CACanada (Canada)
Contact:

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby dEhiN » 2017-03-31, 4:45

linguoboy wrote:
kevin wrote:Well, the core "political" statement I read from this is "I don't care about you". Of course, everyone is free to tell me that, but if you do that, don't expect me to be very much interested in communicating with you.

Funny, the core political statement I get is "i'm lazy af". In fact, they've said as much when challenged. (Usually framed as blaming the interface, e.g. "i'm typing on my phone".)

In actual practice, my reaction is the same. But it's typically because their thoughts are as disordered as their orthography. I don't have much patience for stream-of-consciousness masquerading as a comment. If you want me to read what you write, for the love of language do some pre-writing.

Yeah I concur; I always thought the majority type that way because they're lazy. The funny thing is that I personally use proper punctuation and rarely use text-speak with SMS but tend to drop capitalization and sentence-ending periods when typing on Skype.

As for stream-of-consciousness, I think there are a few online site/technologies that are designed for that - such as Twitch and other interactive live-streaming stuff. But outside of those, I think it's worth at least formulating your thoughts properly. (Personally I also think even in those live-streams, you need to formulate your thoughts enough that others understand you).
Native: (en-ca)
Active: (fr)(es)(pt-br)(ta-lk)(mi)(sq)(tl)
Inactive: (de)(ja)(yue)(oj)(id)(hu)(pl)(tr)(hi)(zh)(sv)(ko)(no)(it)(haw)(fy)(nl)(nah)(gl)(ro)(cy)(oc)(an)(sr)(en_old)(got)(sux)(grc)(la)(sgn-us)

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-03-31, 5:22

Oh, also:
kevin wrote:Most likely they wouldn't do the same thing in an exam or a job application because that would be actually important to them.

You wouldn't believe this if you saw some of the things that American students at least wrote on exams. :P

User avatar
Vlürch
Posts:943
Joined:2014-05-06, 8:42
Gender:male
Location:Roihuvuori, Helsinki
Country:FIFinland (Suomi)

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Vlürch » 2017-03-31, 18:10

vijayjohn wrote:Vlürch, natural languages are constantly evolving and changing. Things are lost in our languages all the time. Things are also created in our languages all the time. We use or start using loanwords all the time, and these days, we use loanwords from all sorts of languages. All of this is simply how languages work, and we don't even seem to notice as any of these things are happening, only after they already have (probably a very long time after they have in most cases).

True, but that doesn't mean it should be celebrated and intentionally sped up in the way "diversity" is celebrated as an expression of tolerance or whatever. One example that demonstrates my point is that because antisemitism is stupid, Finnish antisemites don't realise that the word "kaveri" (friend) comes from Yiddish, so they use it; if they knew that that's where it comes from, they almost certainly wouldn't use it, and they would have every right not to use it under the right to freedom of expression. Not using a loanword doesn't take anything away from the language itself or have any effect on other people's use of the language; if anything, it preserves the "purity" of the language, even if thanks to stupidity rather than a conscious choice to maintain the language's distinctiveness. So, if someone went out of their way to never use the word "kaveri", that'd in certain contexts reveal their antisemitism and help Jews in avoiding them so that they could avoid experiencing antisemitism.

Loanwords can have destructive influence only if they're allowed to become integrated into the language as if they were native words, because the concepts are replaced by the introduction of the new word if the old word's meaning changes instead. This has happened in Finnish with "ystävä" (friend) becoming a deeper term, implying a deeper connection than just regular friends; it's obvious that a shift has happened from the related, derived terms like "ystävällinen" meaning just "friendly" or "kind", etc. In this case, it's not exactly destructive influence, but it is negative because it has probably reduced the ability of Finns to be friendly with one another (and it's common knowledge that we've never been friendly with anyone as a people), but imagine a hypothetical scenario where the word "kaveri" is replaced by an Arabic loanword as a result of rising antisemitism due to Arab immigrants and so-called populism. It wouldn't be harmful just to the handful of Jews living in Finland, but to the Finnish language and culture as a whole, because it would further reduce our ability to be friendly and alienate the concept even more.

For what it's worth, a lot of people also use the English loanword "frendi" (or at least used to some years ago), but English loanwords aren't really loanwords since English isn't even considered a foreign language by a lot of Finns as far as I know; like, "everyone in the world speaks English, so it doesn't count", which is obviously not true, but honestly it makes sense because everyone anyone from Finland has to ever speak anything other than Finnish with does speak English. :lol:

User avatar
md0
Posts:8188
Joined:2010-08-08, 19:56
Country:DEGermany (Deutschland)
Contact:

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2017-03-31, 19:11

Holy Sapir-Whorf, Batman!
"If you like your clause structure, you can keep your clause structure"
Stable: Cypriot Greek (el-cy)Standard Modern Greek (el)English (en) Current: Standard German (de)
Legacy: France French (fr)Japanese (ja)Standard Turkish (tr)Elementary Finnish (fi)Netherlands Dutch (nl)

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-03-31, 19:31

Vlürch wrote:True, but that doesn't mean it should be celebrated

What is the harm in celebrating something both normal and inevitable if it's already happening?
and intentionally sped up in the way "diversity" is celebrated as an expression of tolerance or whatever.

Who is "intentionally speeding up" either language change or diversity?
Not using a loanword doesn't take anything away from the language itself or have any effect on other people's use of the language; if anything, it preserves the "purity" of the language, even if thanks to stupidity rather than a conscious choice to maintain the language's distinctiveness.

No language is pure, and depending on how well-established loanwords are, yes, not using them can indeed both take something away from the language and affect other people's use of the language. Even the very idea of doing this can do those things. Look at what happened in post-Ottoman Turkey, for example, where the scale of language reform was so great that one of Atatürk's own speeches had to be translated into modern Turkish three times.
So, if someone went out of their way to never use the word "kaveri", that'd in certain contexts reveal their antisemitism and help Jews in avoiding them so that they could avoid experiencing antisemitism.

I'm sure Jews in Finland would have plenty of other cues for identifying antisemites besides just what word they use for 'friend' in Finnish, thanks.
Loanwords can have destructive influence only if they're allowed to become integrated into the language as if they were native words, because the concepts are replaced by the introduction of the new word if the old word's meaning changes instead. This has happened in Finnish with "ystävä" (friend) becoming a deeper term, implying a deeper connection than just regular friends; it's obvious that a shift has happened from the related, derived terms like "ystävällinen" meaning just "friendly" or "kind", etc. In this case, it's not exactly destructive influence, but it is negative because it has probably reduced the ability of Finns to be friendly with one another (and it's common knowledge that we've never been friendly with anyone as a people), but imagine a hypothetical scenario where the word "kaveri" is replaced by an Arabic loanword as a result of rising antisemitism due to Arab immigrants and so-called populism. It wouldn't be harmful just to the handful of Jews living in Finland, but to the Finnish language and culture as a whole, because it would further reduce our ability to be friendly and alienate the concept even more.

I hope you had fun building your big ol' straw man there. Every kind of language you can possibly think of has loanwords, even sign languages, and has had them for hundreds or even thousands of years (inasmuch as the languages in question have existed that long). None of this has anything to do with how friendly people are construed to be; I'm not even sure it makes any sense to portray an entire nationality as either friendly or unfriendly since this is something that varies at the personal level, not at the national level.
For what it's worth, a lot of people also use the English loanword "frendi" (or at least used to some years ago), but English loanwords aren't really loanwords since English isn't even considered a foreign language by a lot of Finns as far as I know; like, "everyone in the world speaks English, so it doesn't count", which is obviously not true, but honestly it makes sense because everyone anyone from Finland has to ever speak anything other than Finnish with does speak English. :lol:

So when one language is already threatening your language so much that everyone has already given up trying to do anything about it, you're going to sit there worrying about some other language potentially threatening it instead because of immigrants who just recently arrived in your country? Yeah that makes sense. :roll:

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby linguoboy » 2017-03-31, 20:05

Vlürch wrote:Now, consider how Finnish. In spite of being a language known to exist by probably everyone in the western world, has only about 5 million native speakers (including all the dialects that aren't even entirely mutually intelligible with the standard language), and few actually learn it to the point of fluency as a second language even if they live in Finland; there was just yesterday in the news about how the number of Arabic-speakers has increased massively in recent years due to refugees. Obviously, most of them have no intention of learning Finnish to anywhere near fluency

How do we know this?

Vlürch wrote:which would be fine if they eventually moved back to Arab countries... but everyone knows that not a single immigrant ever wants to leave Europe.

Again, how do we know this?

Compare Germany. Since 2005, the number of Turks leaving Germany has outnumbered Turkish migrants into Germany. Official records show that 2.8 million people who migrated to Germany from Turkey have since returned to Turkey. However, the German Embassy estimates that the actual figure is closer to 4 million, which makes it greater than the number of Turkish-born residents in Germany today. So a huge proportion of immigrants who came to Germany with the idea of eventually returning home did just that.

Moreover, Finland ≠ Europe. Assuming the EU holds together, immigrants to Finland will eventually have the freedom to resettle elsewhere in Europe. So it's possible some are not learning Finnish because they see Finland only as the first step to a life elsewhere. And the more native Finns oppose integration of migrants, the more inviting this prospect becomes.

Vlürch wrote:They claim to one day want to go back to their home countries, but they never do. As a result, more Arabic loanwords will inevitably end up in Finnish and every other language spoken in Europe, and in informal contexts grammar will be simplified to accommodate the Arab immigrants...

There's nothing "inevitable" about the flow of loanwords. There are far more Russians and Estonians in Finland today than Arab-speakers. How many loanwords are these languages contributing to modern Finnish?

Furthermore, not all borrowings stay. In fact, the more trendy the borrowing, the less likely it is to hang around. Japanese demonstrates this rather well: initially, almost all of its loanwords were Chinese. The first Europeans they had extensive contact with were the Dutch and the Portuguese, so they borrowed many words from them, but most have gone back out of use again, replaced by trendier English terminology. At some point, English may begin to lose its luster and a large number of these words will go out of use again.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

IpseDixit

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby IpseDixit » 2017-04-05, 16:06

Vlürch wrote:But it is negative because it has probably reduced the ability of Finns to be friendly with one another (and it's common knowledge that we've never been friendly with anyone as a people)


The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been largely refuted. AFAIK, the scientific consensus nowadays is that language affects cognition only in a very marginal way, for example it's been noticed that speakers of certain languages tend to categorize objects by shape and speakers of other languages by material.

I seriously don't know how anyone can believe the hard version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it doesn't take a linguist or a cognitive scientist to see that it's fucked up. I've always been able to experience Schadenfreude even if Italian doesn't have a word for it and I'm perfectly able to get my head around the concept of non-binary even if my native language has a male-female binary gender system.
Last edited by IpseDixit on 2017-04-05, 22:50, edited 2 times in total.

User avatar
Yasna
Posts:2672
Joined:2011-09-12, 1:17
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Yasna » 2017-04-05, 16:21

IpseDixit wrote:Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been largely refuted.

I wouldn't put it that strongly. It's not like the parts of the theory that are finding support in the evidence are trivial. See Through the Language Glass.
Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. - Kafka

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-04-07, 15:06

IpseDixit wrote:I seriously don't know how anyone can believe the hard version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it doesn't take a linguist or a cognitive scientist to see that it's fucked up.

At the time that it was proposed, academia was dominated by all kinds of fucked-up notions regarding the differences between groups of people. But anyway, when I was first learning about linguistics from the SIL website and taking notes on my computer about what I was reading about it, I thought some of the claims being made were more sweeping than they were probably intended to be, which outraged me. :P For example, one of the questions asked in one of these introductory pages was "do people who read languages written from left to right think differently from people who read languages written right to left?" and I thought they meant whether their brains were fundamentally different in all areas or something just because of the direction of writing. I was like "that's stupid. That's like saying if you run from one point to another, and then run back, do you become a different person?" :lol:

User avatar
Vlürch
Posts:943
Joined:2014-05-06, 8:42
Gender:male
Location:Roihuvuori, Helsinki
Country:FIFinland (Suomi)

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Vlürch » 2017-04-10, 16:02

I wasn't really talking about Sapir-Whorf, though. My point was that the more informal the loanwords become, the more formal the native words become, and in turn the more alien the native words become in informal situations. The opposite can happen, too, and it largely depends on the prestige of the source language of the loanwords. In Finnish, a lot of scientific terms have come from English, but at the same time the most colloquial terms also come from English. It's all to do with the ease of pronunciation as far as I know; "shit" is easy to pronounce, so it's used informally in contexts like "kaikenlaista shittii" (all kinds of shit) and the German word "Scheiße" is also used; neither is usually used in writing, no matter how informal, but when they are, they're rarely spelled "šit" or "šaisse" even by people who still use š, even though that would be technically correct. So, at least by my definition, they're not really real loanwords and could never replace "paska". The rare alternative "paška" still exists, too, as well as "sonta" and other synonyms, proving that no amount of shit from English or any other language can ever replace any native Finnish word for shit even informally.

The reason I originally referred to friendliness is that because the native word for friend has become formal, and the informal one is actually a loanword, there's the possibility that if all Finns suddenly realised that "kaveri" is a loanword, from Yiddish of all languages, it could easily be replaced by something else; probably the English loanword "frendi" would become more widely used. Whether that would have any effect on how unfriendly Finns are, I have no idea, but it would alienate the concept of friendship and friendliness even more, and everyone knows we're not at all friendly to begin with; anyone claiming otherwise needs to stop taking classes on cultural relativism... :P

EDIT: my 400th post! :o

vijayjohn
Language Forum Moderator
Posts:27056
Joined:2013-01-10, 8:49
Real Name:Vijay John
Gender:male
Location:Austin, Texas, USA
Country:USUnited States (United States)
Contact:

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-04-10, 16:35

Vlürch wrote:So, at least by my definition, they're not really real loanwords and could never replace "paska".

If that's how you define "real loanwords," then most loanwords in most languages are not real loanwords.
The rare alternative "paška" still exists, too, as well as "sonta" and other synonyms, proving that no amount of shit from English or any other language can ever replace any native Finnish word for shit even informally.

Except that this situation is not permanent.
if all Finns suddenly realised that "kaveri" is a loanword

Which literally never happens
it would alienate the concept of friendship and friendliness even more, and everyone knows we're not at all friendly to begin with; anyone claiming otherwise needs to stop taking classes on cultural relativism... :P

No idea what all that was about

User avatar
razlem
Posts:2291
Joined:2011-01-10, 3:28
Real Name:Ben
Gender:male
Location:San Francisco
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby razlem » 2017-04-23, 21:32

Anyone here good with X-bar syntax?
American English (en-us)::German (de)::Standard Spanish (es) Swedish (sv) Mandarin (zh)::Choctaw (cho) Finnish (fi) Irish (ir) Arabic (ar)
Image wia wi nehas-kolwatos lae angos! Check out my IAL Angos
Image Contributor to the Houma Language Project
I have a YouTube channel! I talk about languages and stuff: Ben DuMonde

User avatar
Levike
Posts:6153
Joined:2013-04-22, 19:26
Real Name:Levi
Gender:male
Location:Budapest
Country:HUHungary (Magyarország)

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Levike » 2017-04-26, 18:02

Why does Russian use its pronouns despite having a conjugation system?

I think this was once discussed here, but I'm not sure :?

And on the same note, languages like English or French where you also always use them, has there been a period when you could still omit them, sort of like a transitional period and when was that?

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby linguoboy » 2017-04-26, 18:16

Levike wrote:Why does Russian use its pronouns despite having a conjugation system?

Personal endings are found only in certain tense/mood combinations. They are notably absent in the past tense and in all forms of the copula. So I would conjecture that use of subject pronouns was generalised from instances without personal endings to all instances.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

User avatar
Levike
Posts:6153
Joined:2013-04-22, 19:26
Real Name:Levi
Gender:male
Location:Budapest
Country:HUHungary (Magyarország)

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Levike » 2017-04-26, 18:26

Makes sense. Thanks. :)

Does anyone happen to know about French, when it began to use its pronouns as it does know?

User avatar
linguoboy
Posts:25540
Joined:2009-08-25, 15:11
Real Name:Da
Location:Chicago
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: Linguistics thread

Postby linguoboy » 2017-04-26, 20:16

Levike wrote:Does anyone happen to know about French, when it began to use its pronouns as it does know?

According to this paper, they were always used in complement clauses. In main clauses, they became mandatory in the 14th century (when Old French gives way to Middle French).
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons


Return to “General Language Forum”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 11 guests