Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Travis B.]

Relevant: how people of ancient India came up with big numbers.

(don't worry, it's slow content, not some musicked out brainrot)

Cool, those are some amazing numbers. So it sounds like religion and mysticism provided considerable impetus for gargantuan numbers in this case.

It definitely sounds like the ancient Jains put more thought into this than L. Ron Hubbard did.

[alice]

Well, L. Ron Hubbard said that the operating frequency of a thetan was 10^69 Hz, so presumably it's nothing more than the desire to inspire awe with Very BIg Numbers.

That's way shorter than Planck time!

Irrefutable proof that LRH's science is far in advance of anything anyone else has been remotely capable of, of course.

[Richard W]

Presumably the same way ‘googol’ did — one person suggested those values and others followed.

One has to wonder whether these words truly meet Wiktionary's criteria for inclusion. There seem to be various systems within closely related cultures.

Are you one of those perfidious deletionists?

No, I take the view that if a people are going to want to know the meaning of a word, it's better to give the meaning. Thus I would allow bandersnatch and especially its unusual plural, bandersnatchi, even though the plural always have reference to Larry Niven's Known Space.

[Brilliant-Resource14]

One has to wonder whether these words truly meet Wiktionary's criteria for inclusion. There seem to be various systems within closely related cultures.

Are you one of those perfidious deletionists?

No, I take the view that if a people are going to want to know the meaning of a word, it's better to give the meaning. Thus I would allow bandersnatch and especially its unusual plural, bandersnatchi, even though the plural always have reference to Larry Niven's Known Space.

when i hear "bandersnatch" i think of the jabberwocky

[Travis B.]

Are you one of those perfidious deletionists?

No, I take the view that if a people are going to want to know the meaning of a word, it's better to give the meaning. Thus I would allow bandersnatch and especially its unusual plural, bandersnatchi, even though the plural always have reference to Larry Niven's Known Space.

when i hear "bandersnatch" i think of the jabberwocky

I should note that the plural bandersnatchi does not make an appearance in the Jabberwocky.

[Travis B.]

Speaking of the Jabberwocky, today I learned that the word galumphingly is actually attested.

[Raphael]

Are there any treatments anywhere of the physics and other practical sides of speaking becoming more difficult, and harder to understand if you try it anyway, with food in your mouth? Stuff like, "How much of which types of food in which places will turn which phonemes into which other phonemes"?

[Moose-tache]

Well, there is a whole language based on oral potato insertion: Danish.

[malloc]

(people in this thread): "I don't get it. How can 'butterfly' mean a lepidoptera insect if there is no way a person could reasonably work out that it's a lepidoptera from the semantics of the word's components? And if they made up the word, how could they do that, confident that others will understand them, without a pre-existing insect naming convention? What if someone thinks it's a beetle? How could such a word arise? This is such a mystery!"
(Mark, pinching the bridge of his nose): "Someone called it a butterfly and everybody thought it was cool. That's it. There's no code."

Sure but there are different levels of arbitrary and people will only tolerate so much metaphorical stretching. Currently my own conlang number systems face the challenge of choosing plausible metaphors for larger numbers. The few natural language models I have managed to find are far from enlightening. Many languages of India use padma or its cognates for one of their larger numbers, yet it hardly seems obvious to me why lotus flowers would signify extraordinary magnitudes.

[Moose-tache]

Eddy, I'm sure you've noticed by now, there is no upper bound to a neurotypical person's tolerance for stupid, infuriating nonsense. As long as we are a minority, nothing in society is required to make sense beyond the sense provided by custom and consensus. Language is sex seven. Civilization is six seven. It's all six seven, all the way to the bottom.

[xxx]

Yeah, language is sex seven...
it gives sense to all this rot to reproduce...
but it gives first fun,
and to maximise fun it's better to know yourself
better than six seven,
conlang yourself...

[Travis B.]

Ich glaube, dass Moose-tache "six" nur vertippt habe.

[bradrn]

Ich glaube, dass Moose-tache "six" nur vertippt habe.

xxx est français, non allemand.

[malloc]

Eddy, I'm sure you've noticed by now, there is no upper bound to a neurotypical person's tolerance for stupid, infuriating nonsense. As long as we are a minority, nothing in society is required to make sense beyond the sense provided by custom and consensus. Language is sex seven. Civilization is six seven. It's all six seven, all the way to the bottom.

True enough. Then again, the main users of such large numbers were presumably mathematicians and I would guess such people are disproportionately neurodivergent. Surely there must have been someone obsessed with massive numbers but confused by the convention of naming one of them after a kind of flower.

[Zju]

Many languages of India use padma or its cognates for one of their larger numbers, yet it hardly seems obvious to me why lotus flowers would signify extraordinary magnitudes.

Hot take: Lotus flowers are and were extraordinarily significant, so only extraordinarily large numbers are worthy enough of being named after them.
And the other way around: if you - say - came up with some extraordinarily large number, what is an extraordinarily significant name that could go along with that number?

[malloc]

Hot take: Lotus flowers are and were extraordinarily significant, so only extraordinarily large numbers are worthy enough of being named after them.

Good point. I must admit that I don't really understand the cultural connotations of the lotus but your explanation does make sense.

And the other way around: if you - say - came up with some extraordinarily large number, what is an extraordinarily significant name that could go along with that number?

That has been one the challenges facing me, actually. The etymology of numbers is often quite hazy.

[Raphael]

And the other way around: if you - say - came up with some extraordinarily large number, what is an extraordinarily significant name that could go along with that number?

That has been one the challenges facing me, actually. The etymology of numbers is often quite hazy.

Well, those ancient inventors of very large numbers were not modern conlangers trying to do realistic conlangs, so they could simply go with names they saw as nice or cool or dignified or whatever.

[Qwynegold]

How do we feel about the idea that /f/ is a post-neolithic innovation?

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav3218

I asked about this exact same thing earlier!

I watched a history TV-show, where they had an interesting linguistic claim that I have not heard before. They said that bilabials are much more than labiodentals in hunter-gatherer societies than in agricultural societies.

They said that people are usually born with a slight overbite, but if you eat hard and chewy food throughout your childhood, the lower jaw developes in such a way that the front teeth end up meeting edge to edge. This helps with biting of tough pieces of food. They also said that with that kind of jaw, producing labiodentals requires a little bit more effort, which is why the language would favor bilabials.

If someone wants the source I could look for the episode and post a link. It's in Swedish, though I think that part might have had English audio. But it's probably not viewable outside Sweden.

I have heard of that idea, though I don't remember where, and I don't know what to think of it. Most such claims of correlations between phoneme inventory features and geographical or cultural environments are doubtful, if not entirely spurious.

A causation between culture and phonetics does sound dubious, but in this case there was also an anatomical aspect to it.

This is from page 283 in this thread. See also other posts on that same page.

[Moose-tache]

I have read at least one paper that noted /f/ is less common as we go from attested languages to proto-languages, which would be a very intriguing way to address this problem, but of course it runs into some issues. Confidently reconstructed photo-languages is a pretty small sample size. And if the lack of certain consonants is an artifact of our reconstructive methodology, we would unwittingly create a circular argument.

[Travis B.]

I have read at least one paper that noted /f/ is less common as we go from attested languages to proto-languages, which would be a very intriguing way to address this problem, but of course it runs into some issues. Confidently reconstructed photo-languages is a pretty small sample size. And if the lack of certain consonants is an artifact of our reconstructive methodology, we would unwittingly create a circular argument.

Probably the best examples of this are Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Semitic, which are confidently reconstructed without /f/ or /v/, yet /f/ and /v/ developed in multiple daughters of each at the expense of bilabials. Yet these are just two proto-languages, so the likelihood of them just coincidentally lacking labiodentals is not low.