Linguistics

(I should note I'm ESL and I've noticed my pronunciation is a hodgepodge of British vs. American and older vs. younger pronunciation variants.)

As I was watching Geoff Lindsey's YT videos, I noticed the way he pronounces "transláte", particularly in "Google Transláte" where I heavily prefer the accent "tránslate" - although in the verb (i.e. outside the website name) I would be fine both with tránslate or transláte (but probably with mild preference for the former).

So I looked it up and it turns out this is a widespread case of variant British vs. American stress pattern, also affecting other "-ate" verbs: donate, locate, migrate... The polarisation doesn't appear to be absolute, e.g. to take representatives of US and UK pronunciation: Webster 1913 (=1890) has dónate, lócate, mígrate, but still transláte, Jones (Pronouncing Dict.) 1944 has final stress in all four, but the Concise Oxford Dict. of Current Eng. (1964) mentions the variant mígrate. Today the influence of US on UK is probably even stronger. But already in 1909 Jespersen mentions the variant pronunciation of dictate, narrate, and vacate (Mod. Eng. Gramm. vol. 1, §5.57), so surely it hasn't appeared in UK only due to US influence?

Is there some dialectological or formal explanation of this change, or a study of where and how it spread?

(Cross posting from !stupid_questions@lemmings.world https://lemmings.world/post/25535229)

A brand new sentence is a sentence which we consider to have never been spoken or written, or thought of (at least the ones which are not recorded). And just swapping a noun with another noun (for example a name of a place or person) while may techinically be considered new sentence, it is not really matching the spirit of brand new sentence.

for the linguists, can you try to come up with a better estimate (better than just coming up (all the words)^(to the power average sentence length)). Maybe by using the description of using different forms of verbs (like we consider in NLP) (verbs which take DP, CP), then adding standard adjectives and finish with remaining grammar (sorry if I am getting it all wrong, it has been a while since I took my intro to linguistics class). Also, consider a morpheme less form. This exercise is for a more realistic guess.

https://goodbearcomics.com/2021/09/23/chickens/

Use this thread to ask questions or share trivia, if you don't want to create a new thread for that.

[Note: the purpose of this thread is to promote activity, not to concentrate it. So if you'd still rather post a new thread, by all means - go for it!]

Crossposted from https://sopuli.xyz/post/25634723

I wonder how native English speakers do it, but here’s how I approach this problem.

My trick involves using a consistent spelling system for encoding a random letter sequence into a sound which I can memorize. When writing, you just pull those auditory memories, decode the sounds back to the original alphabet salad, and you’re done! Needlessly complicated, but that’s a common theme in English anyway, so it should fit right in.

To make this method work, you need a consistent spelling system, so you could make one up or modify one previously invented for another language. Basically anything more consistent than English should do, so it’s a pretty low bar to clear.

Here are some example words to test this idea with:

• carburetor
• carburettor
• carburetter

Pronounce those letter sequences using that alternate spelling system. It won’t sound like English, but it’s consistent and that’s all we care about at this stage. The end of each word could sound like this:

• [retor]
• [retːor]
• [reter]

In my system, each letter corresponds to a specific sound like e=[e], a=[ɑ] etc. I’ve been thinking of including the Italian c=[tʃ], but you could use other languages too. Feel free to mix and match, as long as you make it consistent.

The idea is that it’s easier to memorize sounds rather than whimsical letter sequences. Once you have those funny sounds in your head, it’s easy to use that same consistent spelling system to convert the sound back to letters.

Once you know that trick, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to spell common words like “island”, “salmon”, “subtle”, or “wednesday. For example “cache” could be stored as [tʃatʃe] in my head. Still haven’t settled on a good way to store the letter c, so I’m open to suggestions.

Feel free to use this thread to ask small questions or share random language / linguistics trivia, if you don't feel like creating a new thread just for that.

(Just to be clear: yes, if you want to create a new thread for your question/trivia, you can. I'm only trying to stimulate discussion in the comm.)

A team of archaeologists has discovered in Knossos, on the Greek island of Crete, the longest Linear A inscription found to date. The script appears on a circular ivory object with an attached handle, discovered in a context of clear religious significance within a Neopalatial building. Besides providing the longest inscription in this yet-to-be-deciphered system, the find offers new perspectives on the use of Minoan writing in ceremonial contexts.

Just published "Negation in English and other languages" by Otto Jespersen, edited by Brett Reynolds & Peter Evans

https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/501

Otto Jespersen's landmark study of negation provides a wide-ranging analysis of how languages express negative meaning. Drawing on an impressive array of historical texts and comparative examples, primarily from Germanic and Romance languages, Jespersen examines the forms, functions, and historical development of negative expressions. The work traces the evolution of negative markers, analyzes how negative prefixes modify word meanings, and reveals coherent patterns in how languages structure negative expressions.

Through meticulous analysis of authentic examples, Jespersen documents both common patterns and language-specific variations in negative expressions. His treatment of topics such as double negation, the distinction between special and nexal negation, and the various forms of negative particles provides a methodical account of negation's complexity. The work's enduring importance stems not only from its analysis of the cyclical renewal of negative markers (later termed “Jespersen's Cycle”) but from its comprehensive scope and detailed examination of negative expressions across multiple languages and historical periods.

This new critical edition makes this classic work accessible to modern readers while preserving its scholarly depth. The text has been completely re-typeset, with examples presented in contemporary numbered format and non-English examples given Leipzig-style glosses. A new introduction contextualizes Jespersen's achievement and demonstrates its continued significance for current linguistic research.

Skip to 11:18 for the actual linguistics content. The earlier part includes analogy to film/video editing styles. The ad read is also in that earlier section.

An interesting bit of etymology that I learnt recently.

The English word "fencing" (as in sword fighting) comes from English "defence", from Old French "defens", from Latin "defendere", meaning "to ward off, defend".

The French word for fencing is "escrime". The Italian and Spanish words are also close cognates with French. "Escrime" comes from Old French "escremir", from Frankish "*skirmjan".

That means English, a Germanic language, gets its word from Latin, a Romance language.

And the Romance languages of French, Spanish, and Italian get their word from Frankish, a Germanic language.

Essentially, the Romance and Germanic language families did a trade.

I think having a thread for small questions ("What's the IPA for this sound?", "How do you write an affricate tie?", etc.) that's pinned and replaced every week or two would be good.

Just looking at new posts here in this community, i mostly see links to news articles and i don't know if it would be appropriate to make a post for a small question with a simple but hard to find answer.

As English as you can get in America... and probably around the world
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190623-the-us-island-that-speaks-elizabethan-english
@linguistics

Discussed are things like why kids say someone's been "unalived", some surprising etymologies (and how incel terminology is widespread on TikTok), why cottagecore exploded from nothing, and whether we're cooked.

I did find his weird movements distracting - there's not many slides so you can just listen and not miss anything.

Apparently he's better known as the Etymology Nerd online, so you may know the name already.

Don't like the F-word? Blame farmers and soft food. When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. That changed the growth of their jaws, giving adults the overbites normal in children. Within a few thousand years, those slight overbites made it easy for people in farming cultures to fire off sounds like "f" and "v," opening a world of new words.

The newly favored consonants, known as labiodentals, helped spur the diversification of languages in Europe and Asia at least 4000 years ago; they led to such changes as the replacement of the Proto-Indo-European patēr to Old English faeder about 1500 years ago, according to linguist and senior author Balthasar Bickel at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The paper shows "that a cultural shift can change our biology in such a way that it affects our language," says evolutionary morphologist Noreen Von Cramon-Taubadel of the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, who was not part of the study.

Postdocs Damián Blasi and Steven Moran in Bickel's lab set out to test an idea proposed by the late American linguist Charles Hockett. He noted in 1985 that the languages of hunter-gatherers lacked labiodentals, and conjectured that their diet was partly responsible: Chewing gritty, fibrous foods puts force on the growing jaw bone and wears down molars. In response, the lower jaw grows larger, and the molars erupt farther and drift forward on the protruding lower jaw, so that the upper and lower teeth align. That edge-to-edge bite makes it harder to push the upper jaw forward to touch the lower lip, which is required to pronounce labiodentals. But other linguists rejected the idea, and Blasi says he, Moran, and their colleagues "expected to prove Hockett wrong."

First, the six researchers used computer modeling to show that with an overbite, producing labiodentals takes 29% less effort than with an edge-to-edge bite. Then, they scrutinized the world's languages and found that hunter-gatherer languages have only about one-fourth as many labiodentals as languages from farming societies. Finally, they looked at the relationships among languages, and found that labiodentals can spread quickly, so that the sounds could go from being rare to common in the 8000 years since the widespread adoption of agriculture and new food processing methods such as grinding grain into flour.

Bickel suggests that as more adults developed overbites, they accidentally began to use "f" and "v" more. In ancient India and Rome, labiodentals may have been a mark of status, signaling a softer diet and wealth, he says. Those consonants also spread through other language groups; today, they appear in 76% of Indo-European languages.

Linguist Nicholas Evans of Australian National University in Canberra finds the study's "multimethod approach to the problem" convincing. Ian Maddieson, an emeritus linguist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, isn't sure researchers tallied the labiodentals correctly but agrees that the study shows external factors like diet can alter the sounds of speech.

The findings also suggest our facility with f-words comes at a cost. As we lost our ancestral edge-to-edge bite, "we got new sounds but maybe it wasn't so great for us," Moran says. "Our lower jaws are shorter, we have impacted wisdom teeth, more crowding—and cavities."

*Correction, 15 March, 11:10 a.m.: This story erroneously stated that the newly favored consonants led to the replacement of the Latin patēr to Old English faeder about 1500 years ago. Patēr came not from Latin, but from the Proto-Indo-European language that gave rise to Latin and other languages in Europe and Asia.

Mind you this is all very fuzzy, take with salt.

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Apparently humpback whale songs show a few features in common with human language; such as being culturally transmitted through social interactions between whales.

"The authors found that whale song showed the same key statistical properties present in all known human languages" - my guess is that the author talks about Zipf's Law, that applies to both phoneme frequency and word frequency in human languages.

[Dr. Garland] "Whale song is not a language; it lacks semantic meaning. It may be more reminiscent of human music, which also has this statistical structure, but lacks the expressive meaning found in language." - so while it is not language yet it's considerably closer to language than we'd expect, specially from non-primates.

from Yuri Shevelov's Prehistory of Slavic (1964)

The title is a bit clickbaity but the article is interesting. Quick summary:

A new ancient population was recognised, based on genetic data. This population has been called the Caucasus-Lower Volga population, or "CLV". They were from 4500~3500BCE, tech-wise from the Copper Age, and lived in the steppes between the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga. .

About 80% of the Yamnaya population comes from those people; and at least 10% of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolians, where Hittite was spoken, also comes from the CLV population. The hypothesis being raised is that the CLV population was composed of Early Proto-Indo-European speakers (the text calls it "Indo-Anatolian").

Found this article in the longreads community arguing why "politically correct" terms shouldn't be used. You guys have any thoughts?