Random language thread 6

[Saim]

Historically the cadence of Basque was completely different, but with widespread bilingualism, most speakers have come to adopt the intonation patterns of Spanish.

Every once and a while, when I mention to a Spanish-speaker that I speak Catalan, they'll say something like, "It's just like Spanish" or "It's a dialect of Spanish, right?" When they do that, I say, "Quan parlo el català amb castellanoparlants, no m'entenen" and that shuts them right up.

ell entén, ells entenen

That's funny. I'd never heard that from Latin Americans before, just that it's "useless". Generally it's non-Spanish-speakers who say the dialect thing (IME), although in the past couple of years they've started saying "how different is it from Spanish?" instead of asking whether it's actually a language. My response is always: "about as different as Portuguese is, perhaps even more so".

...but judging by this video, it does sound quite a lot like Portuguese and not at all cecillified or grumped,

He has a pretty heavily Spanish-influenced accent tbh.

Listening to just the first one over and over again in the background as I'm typing this, it does overall sound better than Spanish because it doesn't seem to have [β] and [ɣ], which I'm not a fan of in Spanish even if they sound nice in some languages; on the other hand, I kind of prefer Spanish because it has [ð], which is a sound I like.

I think the only traditional variety of Catalan that lacks intervocalic approximate allophones is Alguerese. Even Northern Catalan traditionally has it IIRC.

[IpseDixit]

On an instagram language page I've just read that you cannot be a true language enthusiast if you don't find Esperanto fascinating (the person saying this was the admin of said page).

So if I don't like a whacky conlang made by an ophtalmologist 100-ish years ago, I'm not a real language lover. That's really interesting.

[Vlürch]

Is there any real difference between [ɰᵝ] and [β̞ˠ]? I know that technically a difference can be "forced" even if it doesn't really sound different, but is it only down to convention that the Japanese /w/ is phonetically transcribed [ɰᵝ] instead of [β̞ˠ], etc?

He has a pretty heavily Spanish-influenced accent tbh.

Now I'm wondering if there are Catalan-speakers with heavily French-influenced accents? Like having a uvular R and such?

I think the only traditional variety of Catalan that lacks intervocalic approximate allophones is Alguerese. Even Northern Catalan traditionally has it IIRC.

For some reason I just can't hear any of that in the video of the woman speaking? It sounds like there are [v~ʋ] and I guess [ð~ɾ̪̞] or something, but I can't hear a single [β] or [ɣ] anywhere? Unless some of the faster-pronounced [b​] are actually [β~β̞] and my brain isn't registering it because it's subtler than in Spanish and I'm expecting them to sound the same as in Spanish because I'd only seen IPA transcriptions of Catalan before, which use the same symbols as Spanish even if they're phonetically different, or...?

On an instagram language page I've just read that you cannot be a true language enthusiast if you don't find Esperanto fascinating (the person saying this was the admin of said page).

wat

I could kind of understand the "logic" if they said it about Ithkuil or something, but Esperanto, a language that's pretty much literally meant to be as uninteresting and basic as possible? How...? Like, I've heard the argument that liking Esperanto disqualifies one from being a "true language enthusiast" or whatever before because it's such a boring SAE conlang and a band-aid for interlingual communication, but even that sounds like bullshit to me...

But well, it's not like "hurr durr you have to like X to be Y" is ever a valid statement so it doesn't even matter.

PS: I know this isn't really the right thread to ask this, but I don't feel like asking anywhere more appropriate since it's not that important: have the quote and report buttons switched places recently? I keep accidentally clicking "report" every time I want to quote a post today... obviously I immediately click "cancel" and it's no big deal, but it's weird because it had never happened before and I've done it three times today.

[Yasna]

I realized I'm never going to reach all my language goals by traditional methods, so time to try something radical. I bought small paper dictionaries for Persian, Russian, Turkish, and Hindi. The goal is not to read them front to back or memorize everything, but rather to absorb enough from them to make these languages relatively transparent to me. Something like how the Romance languages appear to a native English speaker. I started doing it with Persian, and it seems like my passive retention of the words is proceeding reasonably well. It helps that I love words and can lose myself in a dictionary for 10 to 20 minutes at a time.

The idea is that this combined with a little additional "normal" studying should allow me to access compelling content to use for comprehensible input earlier than would normally be possible. I have come to this point after my struggles with Korean. Between the quasi-abandonment of Hanja and the divergent pronunciations compared to Japanese, Sino-Korean vocabulary just wasn't transparent enough on a whole to make Korean "transparent" to me, and I can't see myself spending years learning any more relatively opaque languages by traditional methods.

[Saim]

He has a pretty heavily Spanish-influenced accent tbh.

Now I'm wondering if there are Catalan-speakers with heavily French-influenced accents? Like having a uvular R and such?

Northern Catalan has been influenced by Occitan and French for centuries. In general though most Northern Catalans are native French speakers nowadays (so they have a foreign accent in Catalan), but if you want to hear how some if them speak look up Joan-Lluís Lluís for example. I'm not sure if any native speakers would have an uvular r.

For some reason I just can't hear any of that in the video of the woman speaking? It sounds like there are [v~ʋ] and I guess [ð~ɾ̪̞] or something, but I can't hear a single [β] or [ɣ] anywhere? Unless some of the faster-pronounced [b​] are actually [β~β̞] and my brain isn't registering it because it's subtler than in Spanish and I'm expecting them to sound the same as in Spanish because I'd only seen IPA transcriptions of Catalan before, which use the same symbols as Spanish even if they're phonetically different, or...?

Majorcan has /v/ so it's no surprise that you would hear [v~ʋ]. I'm not aware of there being any difference betweem Spanish and Catalan approximants, I certainly can't hear any.

[Bubulus]

I realized I'm never going to reach all my language goals by traditional methods, so time to try something radical. I bought small paper dictionaries for Persian, Russian, Turkish, and Hindi. The goal is not to read them front to back or memorize everything, but rather to absorb enough from them to make these languages relatively transparent to me. Something like how the Romance languages appear to a native English speaker. I started doing it with Persian, and it seems like my passive retention of the words is proceeding reasonably well. It helps that I love words and can lose myself in a dictionary for 10 to 20 minutes at a time.

The idea is that this combined with a little additional "normal" studying should allow me to access compelling content to use for comprehensible input earlier than would normally be possible. I have come to this point after my struggles with Korean. Between the quasi-abandonment of Hanja and the divergent pronunciations compared to Japanese, Sino-Korean vocabulary just wasn't transparent enough on a whole to make Korean "transparent" to me, and I can't see myself spending years learning any more relatively opaque languages by traditional methods.

So did you actually already try this with Korean, ending up with a satisfying degree of success?

Karavinka here at UniLang was also (at least once upon a time) a bit of a proponent of grabbing small dictionaries and familiarizing yourself with most or all the words in them, since they are probably all essential at that size.

I've tried it a little bit myself, but haven't done it enough to speak of its results.

[IpseDixit]

I realized I'm never going to reach all my language goals by traditional methods, so time to try something radical. I bought small paper dictionaries for Persian, Russian, Turkish, and Hindi. The goal is not to read them front to back or memorize everything, but rather to absorb enough from them to make these languages relatively transparent to me. Something like how the Romance languages appear to a native English speaker. I started doing it with Persian, and it seems like my passive retention of the words is proceeding reasonably well. It helps that I love words and can lose myself in a dictionary for 10 to 20 minutes at a time.

The idea is that this combined with a little additional "normal" studying should allow me to access compelling content to use for comprehensible input earlier than would normally be possible. I have come to this point after my struggles with Korean. Between the quasi-abandonment of Hanja and the divergent pronunciations compared to Japanese, Sino-Korean vocabulary just wasn't transparent enough on a whole to make Korean "transparent" to me, and I can't see myself spending years learning any more relatively opaque languages by traditional methods.

So did you actually already try this with Korean, ending up with a satisfying degree of success?

Karavinka here at UniLang was also (at least once upon a time) a bit of a proponent of grabbing small dictionaries and familiarizing yourself with most or all the words in them, since they are probably all essential at that size.

I've tried it a little bit myself, but haven't done it enough to speak of its results.

It's funny 'cause I'm doing this with Portuguese right now. However, I'm more and more realizing how crappy small, cheap dictionaries can be, so I'm also trying to double-check using wordreference and other on-line sources.

[Bubulus]

It's funny 'cause I'm doing this with Portuguese right now. However, I'm more and more realizing how crappy small, cheap dictionaries can be, so I'm also trying to double-check using wordreference and other on-line sources.

Crappy in what terms exactly? If you're looking at random words in a small dictionary with the intention of improving recognition only, I'm surprised they'd be that crappy. Although if you want to learn to use words right away off dictionaries, then, yeah, a cheap small dictionary is not good enough. You need collocations, phrases, idioms, grammatical information particular to the word, and example sentences, which even the big reference dictionaries often do not provide.

I am also a little surprised you're doing it for Portuguese. I guess all the false friends you've been posting recently show there's some value in it, but I've never done it for French because of all the shared vocabulary. Hmm...

[IpseDixit]

It's funny 'cause I'm doing this with Portuguese right now. However, I'm more and more realizing how crappy small, cheap dictionaries can be, so I'm also trying to double-check using wordreference and other on-line sources.

Crappy in what terms exactly?

Crappy because I've found a few translations that are flat-out wrong (e.g: sedano (celery) being translated as funcho (fennel) instead of aipo, or calabrone (carpenter bee) being translated as zangão (drone))

Btw: I still haven't found how to translate "carpenter bee" (xylocopa violacea). So any help would be appreciated.

Moreover there are a few typos and several translations are only partial or without context.

Maybe I've been particularly unlucky...

I am also a little surprised you're doing it for Portuguese. I guess all the false friends you've been posting recently show there's some value in it, but I've never done it for French because of all the shared vocabulary. Hmm...

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Even with the shared vocabulary, you still have to learn words.

[linguoboy]

Btw: I still haven't found how to translate "carpenter bee" (xylocopa violacea). So any help would be appreciated.

abelha carpinteira

[Bubulus]

Crappy in what terms exactly?

Crappy because I've found a few translations that are flat-out wrong (e.g: sedano (celery) being translated as funcho (fennel) instead of aipo, or calabrone (carpenter bee) being translated as zangão (drone))

Alright, that's pretty bad.

Btw: I still haven't found how to translate "carpenter bee" (xylocopa violacea). So any help would be appreciated.

This page gives "abelhão-violeta" and "abelha-carpinteira" (both with hyphens, curiously) at least:
https://educacaoambientalnarocha.blogspot.com/2015/10/abelha-carpinteira.html

Portuguese Wiktionary agrees with it (including the hyphens) in its translation of other languages' words:
https://pt.wiktionary.org/wiki/abella

I am also a little surprised you're doing it for Portuguese. I guess all the false friends you've been posting recently show there's some value in it, but I've never done it for French because of all the shared vocabulary. Hmm...

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Even with the shared vocabulary, you still have to learn words.

Yeah, but in my way of thinking, I can pick up a lot of these from exposure, and look up anything that seems strange. I'm not saying you're wrong, in fact I'm considering doing it.

[IpseDixit]

Yeah, but in my way of thinking, I can pick up a lot of these from exposure

Right now my only exposure is books, and they usually lack a lot of "down-to-earth", practical words.

Also, I need to study words in a serious way because if I only relied on lexical similarity, I would always be left wondering "am I just 'portuguesizing' Italian words or are they real Portuguese words?"

---

Obrigado pela ajuda com a traduçāo de "carpenter bee".

[Luís]

Is calabrone supposed to be a common word in Italian?

I've never heard of carpenter bees until now, to be honest.

[Bubulus]

Yeah. I've heard abeja carpintera in Spanish before, in a pop biology TV show or something, but the only distinction that really matters in Spanish is abeja 'bee' vs. avispa 'wasp, hornet'. Of course, someone into entomology would distinguish avispa 'wasp' vs. avispón 'hornet' and make further distinctions, but as far as regular people go, not really...

[IpseDixit]

Is calabrone supposed to be a common word in Italian?

I've never heard of carpenter bees until now, to be honest.

It's a very common insect where I live. It's always been pretty common for me during summer to find at least one of these guys stuck in my house.

(I've also found out that technically calabrone is the European hornet (vespa crabro), whereas the carpenter bee's true name is ape legnaiola. But everyone here call it calabrone so screw prescriptivism)

but the only distinction that really matters in Spanish is abeja 'bee' vs. avispa 'wasp, hornet'.

I distinguish four of them: ape (bee), vespa (wasp/hornet), bombo (bulmblebee) and calabrone (carpenter bee).

[linguoboy]

Here I think it's (honey)bee, bumblebee, yellowjacket, and wasp. Some people call yellowjackets "hornets" or "wasps". I've heard of carpenter bees before, but I couldn't identify one.

[Naava]

Meanwhile, I call them all amppari. No time to distinguish, they're all horrible and I. will. run.

[IpseDixit]

Meanwhile, I call them all amppari. No time to distinguish, they're all horrible and I. will. run.

:'(

IMG_20181219_001109.png

[Yasna]

So did you actually already try this with Korean, ending up with a satisfying degree of success?

No, I have built up my Korean vocabulary largely through looking up words from texts and subtitles. But it has taken so long that it made me think hard about how to speed up the process. Persian and Russian are the first languages I'm using the dictionary method on.

[Naava]

:'(

IMG_20181219_001109.png

No.