Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Kuchigakatai]

I remember finding it very funny the first time I heard that French kids spend a lot of time learning how to conjugate verbs. Obviously they have to be, because there is a lot of archaizing spellings involved (aimais/aimait/aimaient = /ɛmɛ/), but the thing is, I was never taught anything about the verbal conjugations of Spanish. Why would I be? I can just write them down as I pronounce them...

I was taught about the few instances where colloquial Salvadoran differs from Standard Spanish (yo cozo vs. standard yo cuezo, yo satisfací vs. standard yo satisfice, tú conduciste vs. standard tú condujiste), but those are really very few.

[Qwynegold]

I happened to listen to this episode of the Conlangery podcast, where they had a link to something called World Phonotactics Database. It would be really useful to me if there was a collection of phonotactic rules of various languages (specifically which consonants can appear next to one another), but that link is dead. When I Google for "World Phonotactics Database" I just get a table of numbers that someone had downloaded from there, but I can't make any sense of it. Does anyone know of any other resource like this?

[Glass Half Baked]

Qwynegold, I think I figured it out. The database was created by Mark Donohue at ANU ~2013, but in 2015-2016 budget cuts forced him out, and 2016 seems to be the last time anyone has accessed the database. Donohue now has a job in the private sector, with Language Intel, a linguistics consulting company (career goals, amirite?). Soon after taking this job the Cocos Islands domain he was using to host his personal email lapsed, presumably because he just uses his work email now, which is not listed on the company website. But they do have a company email, and a contact number that goes straight to Mark, so you can definitely ask him what happened to his database after he was forced to sell out and wear a suit.
http://languageintel.org/contact-us/

[Nortaneous]

the DB is backed up on Zenodo, so it'd be possible to make a new site for it. I thought about doing this but never did because I figured there might be a reason no one else had yet -- would at least want to run it by the original compilers, but I hate emailing people

it's all in CSV so you can just import it to Excel/Google Sheets or whatever

[Glass Half Baked]

the DB is backed up on Zenodo, so it'd be possible to make a new site for it.

That's the site Qwynegold found earlier. The problem is, without column headings, it's just a random number generator.

[Nortaneous]

the DB is backed up on Zenodo, so it'd be possible to make a new site for it.

That's the site Qwynegold found earlier. The problem is, without column headings, it's just a random number generator.

phonotactics.csv-metadata.json has the headers

[Kuchigakatai]

The Egyptian Arabic word for lobster is استاكوزا estako:za (compare Standard Arabic كركند karkand 'red spinel gem; lobster'). What are the chances this comes from Italo-Romance (ch)esta cosa 'this thing'? It think it's possible, and funny.

EDIT: I have been informed it comes from or is related to Greek αστακός 'lobster'.

[Xwtek]

Why does a lot of ancient languages in area around Persian lack 2nd person agreement?

[Raphael]

I have a question about dialect development: in the one part of the world that I'm fairly familiar with from my own experiences, the Hamburg region of Germany, I've got the impression that the local dialect/accent of the main language (German) keeps getting weaker and less pronounced over time. 200 years ago, people generally spoke a local variant of Low German, a pretty distinct German dialect that is probably in some ways closer to Dutch than to standard German. Over generations, this was gradually replaced with a speech variety much closer to standard German, but still containing local pronunciations and a number of local words. Then, over the lifetime of my grandparents' and parents' generation, the local words mostly disappeared, leaving mainly a local accent, and now the local accent is gradually getting rarer and less pronounced, too.

So, is this happening elsewhere, too? Does it usually happen? I'm not talking about disappearance of full-fledged language - I already know about the phenomenon of language death. I'm more thinking of dialects and regional accents within major languages "converging".

Unrelated, if anyone has an answer to Xwtek's question, please don't let my question distract you from that!

[Linguoboy]

So, is this happening elsewhere, too? Does it usually happen? I'm not talking about disappearance of full-fledged language - I already know about the phenomenon of language death. I'm more thinking of dialects and regional accents within major languages "converging".

I'm not sure why you see them as distinct phenomenon (especially given that Northern Low Saxon is not mutually intelligible with Standard German, thus fulfilling many people's criteria for being a "language"). It's the same factors at work either way.

[Raphael]

Hm, I might have been too much influenced by the long-standing, probably politically motivated doctrine that, while Frisian is a "proper" language, Low German was always "just a dialect".

Ok, let me rephrase the question: Are there local speech varieties that are holding up well in the face of "language convergence"? Or are they disappearing everywhere?

[Pabappa]

Gradual assimilation happened in England too, though I think German~Dutch is a better example. Ive read that northwest Germanic stands out more than other families in being better described by a wave model of evolution than by a tree model; it may be that places with sharp linguistic divides such as Spanish/Basque or even Spanish/Portuguese just cant do that, so when French swept over Occitan, Spanish swept over Catalan, Italian swept over Bolognnaise, etc, the minor languages either survived intact or disappeared outright ... they were too different from the conquering language to just gradually assimilate the way Low German has assimilated towards High German.

[Raphael]

Gradual assimilation happened in England too,

Ok, let's put it this way: General question for everyone: to which extent is gradual assimilation happening where you live? To which extent has it happened there recently?

[Linguoboy]

Gradual assimilation happened in England too,

Ok, let's put it this way: General question for everyone: to which extent is gradual assimilation happening where you live? To which extent has it happened there recently?

My native St Louis accent is in the process of losing one of its most distinctive features, the card-cord merger. It is full-blown in the speech of my parents' generation, I have it in certain words (forest, horror), and my sister's kids don't have it at all as far as I can tell.

At the same time, my mother and sister have both acquired the fronting of /ɑ/ characteristic of the NCVS. Although this is common in the Great Lakes region, it really stands out in east central Missouri, which straddles the divide between Northern and Southern Midland. So it's not a simple question of St Louis dialect "assimilating" to some theoretical General American standard.

Lexically, I haven't noticed many changes. St Louis is still firmly a "soda" region. I've noticed "y'all" spreading in the Chicago area, but not there. (The local second-person plural is still "you guys".) Could be there are some distinctive local words we're losing but none come to mind.

[Travis B.]

Gradual assimilation happened in England too,

Ok, let's put it this way: General question for everyone: to which extent is gradual assimilation happening where you live? To which extent has it happened there recently?

The dialect here in the Milwaukee area has both gained and lost features over time. Phonologically it has largely resisted the influence of GA (it is firmly NCVS, and has a variety of other phonological differences from GA, which I will not get into here) or has even diverged away from it, and I have noticed this has remained the case in my daughter's speech (she even has some innovations, such as pronouncing other and udder as homophones, and she is old enough (10/yo) to have outgrown any acquisition-related features). Likewise, there are some traditional usages which have been conserved such as by to mean "at", go with/come with/bring with/take with without prepositional objects along with yah (all German borrowings), along with some things such as the use of soda rather than pop (this may seem standard, but the matter is that pop is typical of the Midwest and rather soda is atypical), and you guys is the 2nd person plural pronoun (its possessive is your guys'). Yet at the same time there are traditional features such as the use of tag hey or yet in a generic "now" sense (a borrowing from German jetzt) which have been largely lost, if they ever were present, in the variety I grew up speaking.

[Kuchigakatai]

Ok, let's put it this way: General question for everyone: to which extent is gradual assimilation happening where you live? To which extent has it happened there recently?

It's hard to say. Even with all the international media there has been for decades now, Latin American Spanish continues to be more or less as equally diverse as it was a hundred ago. The dialects have certainly kept moving and changing, but the situation often seems like shapeless movements to me, rather than going in a particular direction. I think of it as some push-and-pull between the interests of speaking similarly to foreign native speakers vs. nationalism, and speaking similarly to wealthier fellows vs. being different from the other social classes. All sorts of borrowings keep happening but not in substantial ways I think.

For example, 20 years ago in El Salvador the normal colloquial guy-to-guy term of address ("dude, man, bro") was maje, but it has now changed to mae, which 20 years ago had a Costa Rican connotation but now doesn't. On the other hand, Costa Ricans are still going around saying tuanis as the adjective 'cool, awesome', even though that was Salvadoran slang from a century ago that is now obsolete within El Salvador itself.

It certainly helps that Spanish is tremendously pluricentric, that it exists across quite a number of more or less similar independent countries, and that the richest country, Spain, generally tries to be its own world apart using dubbings and translations in its own dialect, generally not bothering with much of anything from Latin America. As an amusing example, recently there were plenty of complaints by random online people against Disney for showing Coco in Spain with the Latin American dubbing. (I call it a "Latin American dubbing" because it was made in the dialect-neutral accent that dubbers commonly use, the one that Argentinians created back in the mid-20th century, although in Coco they did use some Mexican words for colour, and the movie of course makes tons of references to Mexican culture. It wouldn't surprise me if the dubbing was actually made by people who natively speak Miami Cuban Spanish.)

My native St Louis accent is in the process of losing one of its most distinctive features, the card-cord merger. It is full-blown in the speech of my parents' generation, I have it in certain words (forest, horror), and my sister's kids don't have it at all as far as I can tell.

I don't think "forest" and "horror" are examples of the card-cord merger? I would've thought pronouncing those with /ɑ/ would just be a regular American accent, especially eastern, as in "orange" [ˈɑɹɪndʒ] and "sorry" [ˈsɑɹi] (versus the Canadian [ˈɔɹɪndʒ] and [ˈsɔɹi], which you may hear in the western US). The historical early modern [ɒɹ] in monosyllabic words or before a consonant cluster is the one of interest: "form" [ˈfɑɹm] (=farm), "formal" [ˈfɑɹməɫ].

[Vijay]

Are there local speech varieties that are holding up well in the face of "language convergence"?

When linguists talk about convergence, one of the examples they bring up most often is a little village called Kupwar that no one seems to have studied in about half a century. Ever since I read the original paper on Kupwar, I've always suspected that convergence is far more common than that in South Asia. You even see it on some level in the large amount of structural borrowing from Dravidian into Indo-Aryan languages. But even if I'm wrong, it seems that the language varieties that converge in Kupwar are holding up well.

Here in Taiwan, everyone just seems to speak Mandarin, even old people, even by default to foreigners. I rarely hear Taiwanese. I'm sure most people here can speak Taiwanese, but they don't actually seem to do it much.

[Raphael]

Thank you, everyone!

It certainly helps that Spanish is tremendously pluricentric, that it exists across quite a number of more or less similar independent countries, and that the richest country, Spain, generally tries to be its own world apart using dubbings and translations in its own dialect, generally not bothering with much of anything from Latin America. As an amusing example, recently there were plenty of complaints by random online people against Disney for showing Coco in Spain with the Latin American dubbing. (I call it a "Latin American dubbing" because it was made in the dialect-neutral accent that dubbers commonly use, the one that Argentinians created back in the mid-20th century, although in Coco they did use some Mexican words for colour, and the movie of course makes tons of references to Mexican culture. It wouldn't surprise me if the dubbing was actually made by people who natively speak Miami Cuban Spanish.)

Now I'm curious - in Latin American dubbings of Hollywood productions, is there a traditions of using Spain-Spanish dialects/accents to dub British actors?

[Kuchigakatai]

Now I'm curious - in Latin American dubbings of Hollywood productions, is there a traditions of using Spain-Spanish dialects/accents to dub British actors?

No. If a movie or TV show is in neutral Latin American, then every character speaks neutral Latin American. And this does generally mean getting rid of any dialectal colour or diversity the movie/show may have had in the original English.

[Linguoboy]

My native St Louis accent is in the process of losing one of its most distinctive features, the card-cord merger. It is full-blown in the speech of my parents' generation, I have it in certain words (forest, horror), and my sister's kids don't have it at all as far as I can tell.

I don't think "forest" and "horror" are examples of the card-cord merger? I would've thought pronouncing those with /ɑ/ would just be a regular American accent, especially eastern, as in "orange" [ˈɑɹɪndʒ] and "sorry" [ˈsɑɹi] (versus the Canadian [ˈɔɹɪndʒ] and [ˈsɔɹi], which you may hear in the western US).

Sure, you can find [ɑ] in these words in some Eastern accents (e.g. NYC, Philly), but it's a distinctive feature of those accents as well, not part of GA. And not all words with [ɑ] before /r/ in those accents have [ɑ] in STL as well. My mother talks about "[ɑ]ranges", but not about "Fl[ɑ]rida [ɑ]ranges". (That's how my stepmother talks, because she's from the Bronx.)