Linguistics thread

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-09-23, 1:08

razlem wrote:As far as transcription, we've been having difficulty pinning down the exact quality. Sometimes it's as low as /ə/, as back as /ɯ/ and as front as /ɨ/.

Oh, then it's probably what I always transcribe as [ɯ] in Malayalam. :lol:
Her family is from Chennai, so I don't think there would be too much interference from Telugu or other languages.

Chennai is just south of Andhra Pradesh and has so many Telugu-speakers that when the Indian states were formed, whether it should be the capital of Tamil Nadu or of Andhra Pradesh was a serious political issue. I'm pretty sure the variety of Tamil spoken in Chennai has lots of influence from Telugu, but I'm not sure any of this is at all relevant to what you're finding.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby OldBoring » 2016-09-27, 5:04

razlem wrote:I'm very good at phone perception

I'm not.
I often don't hear my phone when it rings.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-09-27, 5:29

I'm very bad at phone perception in both senses. :P Being good at it in the linguistic sense is a claim I've seen some people throw around before. It's not a very trustworthy claim.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Vlürch » 2016-09-27, 8:23

vijayjohn wrote:Being good at it in the linguistic sense is a claim I've seen some people throw around before. It's not a very trustworthy claim.

I'm probably the worst at it. I still can't properly differentiate between [v], [ʋ], [w], [β] and [b] in most contexts except when it's more or less obvious like in English or Russian, or [ð] and [θ], and when it comes to Spanish spoken at a normal speed... well, in the worst case scenario, "viva la vida buena sin bebidas!" would be interpreted as "bebe re bese vire sim veveses!" and I'd be extremely confused. I never knew phone perception was a thing before now and assumed more or less everyone recognises every sound perfectly and I'm one of the weird ones with broken ears, which is why I was always confused by things like some people not being able to pronounce a sound in another language even if it exists in their own language in some contexts. :|

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-09-27, 12:09

Yeah, no, human ears are imperfect and a poor judge of what sound someone is making. This is why even if you do think you have good ears, if you're a linguist worth your salt doing anything related to phonetics, you will use spectrograms.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby razlem » 2016-09-28, 21:37

vijayjohn wrote:Yeah, no, human ears are imperfect and a poor judge of what sound someone is making. This is why even if you do think you have good ears, if you're a linguist worth your salt doing anything related to phonetics, you will use spectrograms.

This is true, and I didn't mean to imply my ears were infallible. I just happen to have a good success rate of matching phones to projections.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby dEhiN » 2016-09-30, 4:00

razlem wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:Also, is /ku.rə/ really a phonemic transcription of that word as she says it?

As far as transcription, we've been having difficulty pinning down the exact quality. Sometimes it's as low as /ə/, as back as /ɯ/ and as front as /ɨ/. Her family is from Chennai, so I don't think there would be too much interference from Telugu or other languages.

I'm very good at phone perception, and I've heard all three of these phones at one point or another in both Indian and Singaporean Tamil (Singapore Tamil seems to front vowels more, but could just be the speaker). The vowel quality probably varies with the phonetic context, but the double accenting on this word was unmistakable. I had just noticed it at the end of the session, so I'll have to go back and see if there are any other odd stress incidences.

I have to admit, I'm not sure what "the red basket" would be in Tamil, so I can't argue whether /ə/ is correct or not. I do know that a is realized as /ə/ in the middle of a word and at the end. And from what I've heard in SL Tamil dialects (at least, Jaffna and Colombo, which are the main ones here in Toronto), u is realized as /ɯ/ and e is realized as /ɘ/ both in the middle of a word and at the end. I imagine this is to contrast from the lengthened vowels which seem to become reduced to the same as non lengthened vowels. For example, anna which should be /aːɳːaː/ gets pronounced more like /aːɳːa/.

As far as I'm aware for Tamil stress, it's usually the first syllable that's stressed.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-09-30, 4:05

In Malayalam, 'that red basket' would be something like [aː t͡ʃɔˈʋən̪n̪a kɔˈʈa], lol. :P

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby mbojakr » 2016-10-02, 21:04

Thank you bro 8-) :)

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Saim » 2016-10-10, 15:43


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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2016-10-10, 18:27

What I love about this is that the JPEG compression artifacts are part of the aesthetic :D
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2016-10-19, 10:23

I'm trying to see if a syntactic phenomenon in Standard Modern Greek occurs in other languages. It currently seems like this specific expression breaks the usual meaning of that syntactic structure. Probably there's different underlying structure.

Tell me if you notice anything.

[ελλ-κνε] [gre-SMG]
target: σαν πολύ δεν ντρέπεσαι; [likep veryadv NEGind ashamedPres2SG] = aren't you too not ashamed> (unashamed)
control: σαν πολύ δεν κάθεσαι: [likep veryadv NEGind stayingPres2SG] = aren't you staying here too much? (aren't you getting too comfortable here?) no negation here, and that's the typical case (dummy negation, or intensifier)

[ελλ-κυπ] [gre-CyG]
target: *σαννα τζιαι πολλά έν αντράπηκες; [likep_andintensf veryadv NEGind ashamedSPast2SG]
instead: εν ανρέπεσαι τίποτες; [PRO2SG-NOM ashamedPres2SG nothingpn] aren't you ashamed of nothing (anything)?
control: σαννα τζιαι πολλά έν έκατσες: [likep_andintensf veryadv NEGind stayedSPast2SG] = haven't you stayed here too much? (haven't you got too comfortable here?)
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2016-10-24, 20:14

We were officially introduced to Praat today in Phonetics, so that's my first attempt plotting formants on a chart.
Not a native speaker obviously, and there's no averaging/multiple recordings, but still this ɔː looks way out there :? (Maybe a recording artifact that confuses Praat).
vowelf.png


Edit. Hm, my back vowels are also systematically lower? This is my CyGreek i ɛ ɐ ɔ u.
And it makes me think that the ɔː was really an artifact, maybe because of my choice of English words. The words I used for Greek are all /'kVtɐ/, while in English I didn't control the surrounding consonants at all.
greekvowels.png
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-10-25, 0:20

Y'all got to do that by computer? We had to draw it on paper with a pencil every single time. :lol:

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby md0 » 2016-10-25, 12:14

Just the plotting right? You didn't have to annotate the spectogram manually as well?
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Saim » 2016-10-25, 16:41

When I did phonetics we did everything on the computer. :para:

(And thank God for that. My handwriting is atrocious and my notebooks are mostly just stuff I scribbled so I could pretend I was actually taking notes.)

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-10-25, 23:56

md0 wrote:Just the plotting right? You didn't have to annotate the spectogram manually as well?

No, we had to do that, too. Fortunately, at least in grad school, the only annotation I remember having to do on spectrograms was draw an arrow on a printout of the spectrogram showing roughly where voicing began. As an undergrad, I think we also(?) had to indicate roughly where F1 was.

I went to the same school for both undergrad and grad school, so I had the same professor both times. He was way too strict with his undergrads in his phonetics course (supposedly because undergrads aren't even allowed to take that course without taking at least one introductory linguistics course as a prerequisite, but probably also due to an assumption that undergrads are less serious linguistics students) and the exact opposite with grad students in his Phonology I course (supposedly because grad students have to take this class in their first semester and probably most of them don't even have any formal education in linguistics, only in areas that I guess they think are close enough, but probably also because (linguistics) professors in the US really try to appear friendly to their grad students and they work with grad students, kind of like colleagues).

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby dEhiN » 2017-01-06, 5:51

I just read a pretty interesting response on Quora to the question "Why do most languages lose their declension over time". The responder just finished a masters dissertation on the question, apparently, and even links to the paper. You can see his answer here. While I cannot comment fully on the technical aspects of his answer, being an amateur interested in linguistics, his answer seems to me to make sense at first blush. Any thoughts from the linguistics here?
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-01-06, 6:49

I'm not sure I agree that the usual answers fall short of explaining it. To me, it makes sense that cases might erode as a result of various processes that, taken in isolation, have nothing to do with cases.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby dEhiN » 2017-01-06, 7:03

vijayjohn wrote:I'm not sure I agree that the usual answers fall short of explaining it. To me, it makes sense that cases might erode as a result of various processes that, taken in isolation, have nothing to do with cases.

I assumed he meant that the usual answers fall short of explaining things fully because there are counter examples, some of which he offers. However, I don't know if his belief that the IE languages (at least the Germanic, Romantic, and Hellenic branches) lost their cases as a result of speech rhythm is correct or not.
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