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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dEhiN wrote:What does the double quotes (two single quotes?) mean in the transcription - ejective?
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".
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
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.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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
aleph.0 wrote:Can't "heaven" mean idyllic place?
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".
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.
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.
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.
"A poll tax? Heaven forbid!"
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.
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