Linguistics thread

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Linguaphile
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Linguaphile » 2022-04-08, 3:08

dEhiN wrote:What does the double quotes (two single quotes?) mean in the transcription - ejective?

Yes. Jaqaru orthography uses a single apostrophe for aspirated sounds (i.e. p' = /pʰ/; ch' = /tʲʰ/) and double for ejectives (p" = /pʼ/; ch" = /tʲ'/).

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby mōdgethanc » 2022-04-08, 15:50

It's a kind of odd writing system - often if a language has a plain-aspirated contrast but no voiced stops, it will repurpose letters for voiced sounds and use them for the plain stops, like Chinese pinyin does. Other times it will write aspirated sounds as digraphs with <h>, like Latin did for Greek loanwords; Aymara does this. Also, there are other oddities like retroflex stops being written <cx>. It seems to work though.

Anyway, surprised but good to see someone else has heard of this obscure language.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Mars80 » 2022-09-02, 18:50

How do you pronounce "experiment"? I pronounce the "er" like in "ferry". I have heard many people say it as "expeeriment" however, possibly by influence of the word "experience".

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Linguaphile » 2022-09-03, 19:19

Mars80 wrote:How do you pronounce "experiment"? I pronounce the "er" like in "ferry". I have heard many people say it as "expeeriment" however, possibly by influence of the word "experience".

I've certainly heard both, and consider them both correct and equivalent to each other. I'm not even sure which I say; I think it's sometimes one, sometimes the other. Some dictionaries (Wiktionary, Longman) indicate that the /spɪɹ/ pronunciation ("spear") is exclusively US-English while /spɛɹ/ ("er" like in "ferry") is used in both the US and UK.
It may be influence of the word "experience", but there are other words with the same two accepted, contrasting /ɛɹ/ and /ɪɹ/ pronunciations that aren't the result of that sort of thing, like "query" (/ˈkwɪɹi/, /ˈkwɛɹi/), "hysteria" (/hɪstɪɹiə/, /hɪstɛɹiə/), "coherent" (/koʊhɪɹənt/, /koʊˈhɛɹənt/), etc., so there may be other factors at work as well.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby MarcoB » 2022-10-10, 4:19

Hi, does anyone know of any good resources on multilingualism? I’m currently fluent in En, De and Es and am interested in taking my language-learning further. :)
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby dEhiN » 2022-10-11, 3:55

MarcoB wrote:Hi, does anyone know of any good resources on multilingualism? I’m currently fluent in En, De and Es and am interested in taking my language-learning further. :)
Marco

Hi Marco, welcome to the forum. / Hola Marco y bienvenido al foro.

What do you mean by a resource on multilingualism? Specifically, do you want to know more about linguistic studies on it? Do you want to find resources that are in 2 or all 3 of your languages as a side-by-side comparison for practice?

Also, I suggest try posting both in the Introduce yourself thread and the Random language thread thread as good places to start. This is specifically the linguistics thread, so not as many of the various regular and non-regular forum members might see your post. Unless, of course, your question is specifically about linguistic research on the topic of multilingualism.

Two more great places you could try on here to help take your language-learning further are the Language Logs and Blogs board and the language-specific boards for whichever languages you want to progress in or practice. The language logs and blogs board is a place where one can create a thread as a sort of language log detailing their learning journey, or if one prefers, a blog on anything language related. (By the way, "language related" is used pretty loosely, as any musings or writings can be considered language related if one, for example, tries writing in a language they are learning).

The language-specific boards are as they sound - a board for any and all posts and threads specific to a language (or sometimes, language family group or regional area). Some prefer to create a "language log" type thread in a language-specific board. Those boards also might have various threads related to games one can play in the language.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby schnaz » 2023-01-30, 13:19

Would someone explain what is the meaning of the following:
"These letters are used by those who want symbols for five equally-spaced vowels in formant space."
I found the sentence here:

"Sinological extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet - Wikipedia" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinolog ... c_Alphabet

Thanks in advance.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby mōdgethanc » 2023-01-30, 13:59

schnaz wrote:Would someone explain what is the meaning of the following:
"These letters are used by those who want symbols for five equally-spaced vowels in formant space."
I found the sentence here:

"Sinological extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet - Wikipedia" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinolog ... c_Alphabet

Thanks in advance.
Pretty simple. Those are IPA symbols that are widely used and aren't just for Sinitic languages. For example you can see them used on Wikipedia for transcription of Spanish in some places.

The reason for them is because the most common vowels across languages are written /a, e, i, o, u/ in IPA. But officially, /a/ is a front vowel, and /e/ and /o/ are close-mid vowels. But most commonly, their values are slightly different - /a/ is often a central vowel, and /e/ and /o/ are often simply mid (not close-mid).

The reason these vowels often have these slightly different values is so that the vowels will be spaced evenly around the mouth, which they tend to be in this system. This is to make them sound as different from each other as possible. If this terminology doesn't make sense, just look an IPA vowel chart.

Since this small difference is not meaningful in any language (or next to no languages at least), it's safe to use the vowel symbols without any other diacritics. But if you want to be precise and say "this vowel is definitely front/mid/back/whatever" for clarity, you can do that.

If none of this makes sense to you still, feel free to ask me. It has to do with the way that vowels are defined by phoneticians by their height (open, mid, close) and frontness/backness in the mouth. Ignore the stuff about "formats" - that is too technical for right now.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby schnaz » 2023-01-30, 21:11

Thank you mödgethanc.
I am just starting out with IPA so as I get further along I believe your explanation will become even more clear to me.I think there is a Chinese saying - something like - if you don't understand , read the book a hundred times. Hopefully it won't take me that long.
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby dEhiN » 2023-05-06, 21:38

Hi all, it's been a while since I posted here (on this forum in general). However, I have a question about suffixes. Tamil is a heavily suffixed language and I've been using Anki to learn and remember the case suffixes. However, I always forget how to use them. That is, do they usually go on the performer or receiver of the action? For example, Tamil has an ablative and a locative suffix for inanimate and animate. In the case of the animate, I really don't know how to use it. I guess every language is probably a little different, but with inanimate nouns, it's simpler for me:

I went to the store -> in this case, I would add the inanimate locative to 'store'
I came from the store -> same with this case, I would probably add the inanimate ablative to 'store'

But how or when would I use an animate locative or ablative?
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Linguaphile » 2023-05-06, 23:58

dEhiN wrote:Hi all, it's been a while since I posted here (on this forum in general). However, I have a question about suffixes. Tamil is a heavily suffixed language and I've been using Anki to learn and remember the case suffixes. However, I always forget how to use them. That is, do they usually go on the performer or receiver of the action? For example, Tamil has an ablative and a locative suffix for inanimate and animate. In the case of the animate, I really don't know how to use it. I guess every language is probably a little different, but with inanimate nouns, it's simpler for me:

I went to the store -> in this case, I would add the inanimate locative to 'store'
I came from the store -> same with this case, I would probably add the inanimate ablative to 'store'

But how or when would I use an animate locative or ablative?


Locative -> suffix would be added to the highlighted person:
I went over to her.
I gave the book to her.
The book is near her.
etc.

Some languages also use this for possession:
She has the book.
At first glance this looks like a reversal in terms of which pronoun gets the suffix but it is not, because the literal meaning is a locative one ("at her"), not a possessive one ("she has"); c.f. Estonian: Tal on raamat. At her is book, which translates as She has the book.

For Tamil I found this example at learningtamil.com:
நான் சாப்பாட்டை அப்பாவிடம் கொடுத்தேன் = I gave the food to father.


Ablative -> again the suffix would be added to the highlighted person:
She got the book from me.
Estonian: Sain raamatu temalt. I got the book from her.
Tamil: அவளிடமிருந்து எனக்கு ஒரு பழம் கிடைத்தது = I got a fruit from her.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby dEhiN » 2023-06-05, 4:03

Linguaphile wrote:For Tamil I found this example at learningtamil.com:
நான் சாப்பாட்டை அப்பாவிடம் கொடுத்தேன் = I gave the food to father.


[b]Ablative -> again the suffix would be added to the highlighted person:
...
Tamil: அவளிடமிருந்து எனக்கு ஒரு பழம் கிடைத்தது = I got a fruit from her.

Wow, thanks for the detailed explanation with examples! (Apologies I'm replying a month later!) Also, I now have a new website for learning Tamil. Yay! :D

As for the examples, that makes sense including the use of the locative for possessive. For the ablative example, I'm surprised the sentence uses the dative-subject format. In Tamil, a lot of stative verbs use the dative-subject format, where the verb is conjugated for the 3rd singular inanimate, the nominative form of the 3rd singular inanimate pronoun is dropped thereby creating no "subject", and what would be the "subject" in English is put in the dative form. So, with the example above:

அவள் = 3sg female animate non-polite nominative/oblique pronoun
-இடமிருந்து = animate ablative suffix
என் = 1sg oblique pronoun
-உக்கு = dative suffix
கிடை = 'get', root form
-த்த = past tense suffix
-அது = present/past 3sg inanimate suffix
அது = 3sg inanimate nominative pronoun

While அது as a nominative pronoun isn't included, it's implied - அது அவளிடமிருந்து எனக்கு ஒரு பழம் கிடைத்தது = (lit.) it from-her for-me a fruit gotten. But, in this case, I wouldn't consider 'get' a stative verb. A more stereotypical use case of a dative-subject in Tamil would be எனக்கு ஒரு பழம் வேண்டும் = I want a fruit, where:

வேண்டு = 'want', root form
உம் = future 3sg inanimate suffix

Again, the implied here is அது எனக்கு ஒரு பழம் வேண்டும் = it for-me a fruit wants. In this specific scenario, the verb is conjugated in the future because Tamil uses the future form for a general or repetitive action. Also, the 3rd singular inanimate is the only PNG form that has different present/past and future suffixes, while all the other PNG forms don't. In general, Tamil verbs are composed of root + tense suffix + PNG suffix. Going back to the above example for the animate ablative, I wonder if a dative-subject construction is used because 'she' is technically in the ablative case. For example, if I wanted to say "she gave me a fruit", I would say அவள் எனக்கு ஒரு பழம் கொடுத்தாள், where:

கொடு = 'give', root form
-ஆள் = 3sg female animate non-polite suffix

Lastly, the ablative case in Tamil is an interesting one because some (I think including Vijay) see the suffix for it as the locative suffix plus a postposition, rather than a separate suffix. Taking the animate ablative as an example, we could break it down to:

-இடம் = animate locative suffix
இருந்து = adverbial participle of இரு (= copula/'be', root form)
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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aleph.0 » 2023-08-17, 9:56

In many Romance languages, the word for "tax haven" literally translates as "tax heaven". The first theory that comes to my mind is that "haven" was misread as "heaven" and hence the calque, but what baffles me is that this alleged misreading occurred in all of the major Romance languages. One might say that maybe this misreading occurred in one Romance language and then it spread to the other ones, but I'm not sure how plausible this is.

A second theory might be that it used to be "tax heaven" in English too and then it morphed into "tax haven" due to the extreme similarity of these two words and because "haven" makes more literal sense than "heaven". According to Google Ngram Viewer, "tax heaven" has been attested in the English language since the early 1800s whereas "tax haven" starts appearing in the 1920s. But I'm not a corpus linguist—in fact, I'm no linguist at all—so I'm not sure what kinds of inferences we can draw from these data.

If anyone knows something about this, I'd love to hear from you!

I'd also like to know how "tax haven" translates to other languages in order to have a bigger picture.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Linguaphile » 2023-08-17, 13:37

aleph.0 wrote:In many Romance languages, the word for "tax haven" literally translates as "tax heaven". The first theory that comes to my mind is that "haven" was misread as "heaven" and hence the calque, but what baffles me is that this alleged misreading occurred in all of the major Romance languages. One might say that maybe this misreading occurred in one Romance language and then it spread to the other ones, but I'm not sure how plausible this is.

A second theory might be that it used to be "tax heaven" in English too and then it morphed into "tax haven" due to the extreme similarity of these two words and because "haven" makes more literal sense than "heaven". According to Google Ngram Viewer, "tax heaven" has been attested in the English language since the early 1800s whereas "tax haven" starts appearing in the 1920s. But I'm not a corpus linguist—in fact, I'm no linguist at all—so I'm not sure what kinds of inferences we can draw from these data.

If anyone knows something about this, I'd love to hear from you!

I'd also like to know how "tax haven" translates to other languages in order to have a bigger picture.


In several of the languages I know, it translates as "tax paradise" or "tax oasis". I hadn't thought of it being a misreading of "heaven". I do know that the word "haven" on its own originally meant only a sheltered place or harbor but then expanded to also mean a refuge or a peaceful place. As the latter, a translation of "paradise" or "oasis" is fairly logical, and in most of the languages that I've listed below the word that translates as "paradise" can mean "heaven", but can also mean "an idyllic place". In fact if you examine the etymology of the word "paradise", it did not start out as "heaven" but rather as "an enclosed park", "a park surrounded by walls" - a sheltered, idyllic place.
(The languages below also have a separate word for "heaven" that also means "sky", and none of them have used that word here. They've all used the one that also means "an idyllic place". If it were a misunderstanding of "heaven", I'd expect that the sky-related word for "heaven" might be used in a phrase for "tax haven" in some of these languages or accepted as a synonym in this context but, as far as I know, it's not. Instead, where there are synonyms, they're more likely to mean "oasis" - again an idyllic place.)

Spanish: paraíso fiscal (tax paradise) or guarida fiscal (tax lair, tax den)
French: paradis fiscal (tax paradise)
German: Steuerparadies (tax paradise) or Steueroase (tax oasis)
Estonian: maksuparadiis (tax paradise)
Finnish: veroparatiisi (tax paradise) or verokeidas (tax oasis)
Latvian: nodokļu oāze (tax oasis)
Russian: налоговый рай (tax paradise)

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aleph.0 » 2023-08-18, 17:41

Linguaphile wrote:
aleph.0 wrote:In many Romance languages, the word for "tax haven" literally translates as "tax heaven". The first theory that comes to my mind is that "haven" was misread as "heaven" and hence the calque, but what baffles me is that this alleged misreading occurred in all of the major Romance languages. One might say that maybe this misreading occurred in one Romance language and then it spread to the other ones, but I'm not sure how plausible this is.

A second theory might be that it used to be "tax heaven" in English too and then it morphed into "tax haven" due to the extreme similarity of these two words and because "haven" makes more literal sense than "heaven". According to Google Ngram Viewer, "tax heaven" has been attested in the English language since the early 1800s whereas "tax haven" starts appearing in the 1920s. But I'm not a corpus linguist—in fact, I'm no linguist at all—so I'm not sure what kinds of inferences we can draw from these data.

If anyone knows something about this, I'd love to hear from you!

I'd also like to know how "tax haven" translates to other languages in order to have a bigger picture.


In several of the languages I know, it translates as "tax paradise" or "tax oasis". I hadn't thought of it being a misreading of "heaven". I do know that the word "haven" on its own originally meant only a sheltered place or harbor but then expanded to also mean a refuge or a peaceful place. As the latter, a translation of "paradise" or "oasis" is fairly logical, and in most of the languages that I've listed below the word that translates as "paradise" can mean "heaven", but can also mean "an idyllic place". In fact if you examine the etymology of the word "paradise", it did not start out as "heaven" but rather as "an enclosed park", "a park surrounded by walls" - a sheltered, idyllic place.
(The languages below also have a separate word for "heaven" that also means "sky", and none of them have used that word here. They've all used the one that also means "an idyllic place". If it were a misunderstanding of "heaven", I'd expect that the sky-related word for "heaven" might be used in a phrase for "tax haven" in some of these languages or accepted as a synonym in this context but, as far as I know, it's not. Instead, where there are synonyms, they're more likely to mean "oasis" - again an idyllic place.)

Spanish: paraíso fiscal (tax paradise) or guarida fiscal (tax lair, tax den)
French: paradis fiscal (tax paradise)
German: Steuerparadies (tax paradise) or Steueroase (tax oasis)
Estonian: maksuparadiis (tax paradise)
Finnish: veroparatiisi (tax paradise) or verokeidas (tax oasis)
Latvian: nodokļu oāze (tax oasis)
Russian: налоговый рай (tax paradise)


Can't "heaven" mean idyllic place?

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Linguaphile » 2023-08-18, 23:38

aleph.0 wrote:Can't "heaven" mean idyllic place?

Of course! But you said "haven" makes more literal sense than "heaven" and I think this is true only in the religious sense of "heaven". "Heaven" can certainly mean an idyllic place, but in this context so can "haven" - if not quite idyllic, then at least a peaceful and safe place, which is awfully close to a paradise - so I question the folk etymology that assumes that the "tax paradise"-words are a misreading.
As you pointed out already, it's just a theory, and it's one that pops up regularly as a folk etymology, not an attested origin. I don't consider it especially reliable because there is just no evidence that any misunderstanding was involved here and it seems to me that "tax paradise" makes good sense on its own merits, without being a mistranslated calque.

By the way, in Spanish there has been some effort to encourage the use of "guarida fiscal" over "paraíso fiscal", to discourage the positive connotations associated with "paraíso" (connotations which are also associated with both "haven" and "heaven" in English).

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aleph.0 » 2023-08-19, 8:52

Linguaphile wrote:
aleph.0 wrote:Can't "heaven" mean idyllic place?

Of course! But you said "haven" makes more literal sense than "heaven" and I think this is true only in the religious sense of "heaven".


Ok I get it. I'm not a native speaker so what makes more sense to me could be quite influenced by my own native language ahahah. For example, in my language, the two meanings of paradise as "place you go to after you die" and "idyllic place" aren't really clear-cut (at least not in my mind). What I mean is that it's a bit like the word "window" which can mean either the aperture in the wall or the glass thing with a frame that you use to open and close that aperture, but I'm willing to bet that most people are not even aware of this distinction on a conscious level.

Then there's the google ngram data according to which "tax heaven" seems to exist in English and seems to be older than "tax haven" but I'm not sure how I should interpret this finding.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Linguaphile » 2023-08-19, 17:57

aleph.0 wrote:What I mean is that it's a bit like the word "window" which can mean either the aperture in the wall or the glass thing with a frame that you use to open and close that aperture, but I'm willing to bet that most people are not even aware of this distinction on a conscious level.

Yes! Or like the word "corner", which can be the intersection of two walls (corner of a room), the intersection of two edges (corner of a desk), or the intersection of two lines (street corner). One of the really fun things about learning languages is seeing how each language expresses concepts like this because they tend to divide up the assorted meanings differently (sometimes quite differently) and it makes you see things in a new way sometimes. Sometimes it even throws me off when two languages do it the same way - it's like, "wait, they use the same word for "definition 1" and "definition 2" just like English does? How did that happen?" LOL

aleph.0 wrote:Then there's the google ngram data according to which "tax heaven" seems to exist in English and seems to be older than "tax haven" but I'm not sure how I should interpret this finding.

Yes, that's a really interesting find! I don't know how to interpret it either. I took a look at it and some of the examples seem to be from unrelated contexts, along the lines of "A poll tax? Heaven forbid!" which unfortunately comes up among the results because of the way the ngram viewer works, so it could mean nothing at all. I focused on the oldest ones and didn't spend a whole lot of time looking, but I didn't actually find any that used the phrase "tax heaven" with the same meaning that "tax haven" has now. That doesn't mean there aren't any, though.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby aleph.0 » 2023-08-21, 10:16

aleph.0 wrote:Yes, that's a really interesting find! I don't know how to interpret it either. I took a look at it and some of the examples seem to be from unrelated contexts, along the lines of "A poll tax? Heaven forbid!" which unfortunately comes up among the results because of the way the ngram viewer works, so it could mean nothing at all. I focused on the oldest ones and didn't spend a whole lot of time looking, but I didn't actually find any that used the phrase "tax heaven" with the same meaning that "tax haven" has now. That doesn't mean there aren't any, though.


Oh ok, I didn't even know you could actually check the results one by one.

"A poll tax? Heaven forbid!"


If stuff like this in included in the results, then it's all pretty meaningless.

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Re: Linguistics thread

Postby Linguaphile » 2023-08-21, 23:09

aleph.0 wrote:
aleph.0 wrote:Yes, that's a really interesting find! I don't know how to interpret it either. I took a look at it and some of the examples seem to be from unrelated contexts, along the lines of "A poll tax? Heaven forbid!" which unfortunately comes up among the results because of the way the ngram viewer works, so it could mean nothing at all. I focused on the oldest ones and didn't spend a whole lot of time looking, but I didn't actually find any that used the phrase "tax heaven" with the same meaning that "tax haven" has now. That doesn't mean there aren't any, though.


Oh ok, I didn't even know you could actually check the results one by one.

"A poll tax? Heaven forbid!"


If stuff like this in included in the results, then it's all pretty meaningless.

Unfortunately, with phrases like this, yes.


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