Linguistics discussion thread - for anything languages related

[pork and beans]

I personally think this thread is long overdue because I've seen many threads about languages and grammar, so some kiwis do have an interest in linguistic related topics. And lots of kiwis speak other languages.

Sperg about languages, grammar, spelling, phonetics, whatever. Things you like, things you don't... Do you guys find it boring, interesting...



To start with something random I find it really funny that the verb 'to parent' in spanish is 'criar'; in english it's linked to the parents and in spanish to the offspring even though it means the same thing; "to care for"

 

[TEA 3HF]

Just gonna start this off with Raging about how teaching English is annoying as all hell.

Spoiler: Muh Sperging

It's literally the Mister Fantastic of languages, where every rule is able to be stretched, bent, twisted and otherwise contorted beyond recognition before breaking. Then when an explicit rule breaks, everyone knows it, it snaps apart loudly, painfully and annoyingly. Then there are implicit rules related to how you actually manipulate these elastic rules such that if a student bends the rule in a manner unfamiliar to a native English speaker it "sounds awkward." Good luck explaining why though. Also good luck trying to teach students from face heavy cultures like Japan, China, and Korea where the moment you try to give them constructive criticism along those lines, they shut down and act like they are failures. Romance Speakers end up crying at the conjugation of verbs because they are all practically irregular. Other Germanic speakers rage at what should be homonyms to roots of their languages having totally different declensions, conjugations, etc. At least half of Slavic Speakers straight up quit. Finally, the sounds made are both irregular and do not line up very well with the orthography. Thus, the students must listen to you speak, practice speaking, and accept that they are inevitably going to fuck something up, frustrating them further.

 

[Samson Pumpkin Jr.]

This is what you look like when you use duolingo in public.

 

[Every One Procedural]

Well, speaking of Chomsky, you ever hear of Daniel Everett? For context, one of Noam Chomsky's main contributions to the field of linguistics was his concept of the "universal grammar": a list of features found in every language, due to them being in some way inherent to how the human mind processes language. This concept is innately vague and ill-defined, even by Chomsky, but two common "universals" under this theory are recursion and color. He also "contributed" by successfully supplanting empirical study of language for some time with "armchair linguistics", or in other words, thinking about how language "should" work rather than how it does work.

In comes Everett, a researcher who went to somewhere in the fucking jungle and became the first and only non-native speaker to learn some fucked-up language called "Piraha", which lacks most "universal" traits. It doesn't have proper words for colors, only distinctions between "light and "dark" (though it does use relative terms, similar to how Homer described the sea as "wine-dark"). It also doesn't have words for numbers or meaningful recursion. Furthermore, these restrictions seem to lend credence to a different controversial theory, "linguistic relativity", also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: their lack of recursion and number terms, along with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, render the Piraha unable to identify counts of things without a visual example currently present.

Discussing the limitations of Piraha also remind me of my personal least favorite language: Toki Pona. If Piraha is a shabby lean-to in the woods, Toki Pona is a tiny house decorated in monochrome white: almost as restrictive, but with absolutely nothing interesting to show for it. Pretty much its only advantages, comparatively speaking, are that it has recursion and you can learn it without going to the Amazon rainforest. It's also basically the Rust of constructed languages, since everyone I've seen praising it is some sort of genderspecial for some goddamn reason.

 

[pork and beans]

teaching English is annoying as all hell.

i bet! i am so happy i dont really remember learning english; as a kid i remember being kinda bad with the irregular verbs list and not really getting anything because i never studied and then all of a sudden i just got gud from being on the internet too much and never had to study for a test again lol

Right now I am being taught english grammar from a functional linguistics approach for grammars sake and its so annoying; stuff makes me curious and I want to ask why it is the way it is and my teacher will have no idea and try to tell the class not to worry and that its easy even though thats not the issue since we all can speak english already lol. I feel that the way certain things are categorized is such a mess.

Furthermore, these restrictions seem to lend credence to a different controversial theory, "linguistic relativity", also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: their lack of recursion and number terms, along with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, render the Piraha unable to identify counts of things without a visual example currently present

I didnt know about Everett, that's really interesting. I think linguistic relativism is mostly kind of bogus on some level but not completely. I also heard the other day about some language that has a very exhaustive list of terms related to smell that makes it basically untranslatable compared to the way most languages treat smell, using word that refer to things ("flowery", "grassy", "bloody"...) and other senses ("sweet", "bitter").

 

[Samson Pumpkin Jr.]

Learning another language is just impossible, don't even bother

 

[pork and beans]

View attachment 5877611View attachment 5877612
Learning another language is just impossible, don't even bother

no way thats real omg

also lmao i know many linguists thinks its mean and wrong not to view all languages as equal but luxembourgish are you kidding me. i mean.. no offense...

 

[Samson Pumpkin Jr.]

no way thats real omg

also lmao i know many linguists thinks its mean and wrong not to view all languages as equal but luxembourgish are you kidding me. i mean.. no offense...

I think it's all real since which person would go on reddit to lie about failing to learn a language?

About the supposed equality of languages, one French ambassador to Britain, whose last name was Cambon and whose first name I don't remember, refused to communicate in any language other than French because he believed French was the only language capable of expressing rational thought. Julius Evola believed that German was a 3 dimensional language, able to express deeper meaning, compared to English which was a 2 dimensional language.

To me, all this is just nonsense. It's telling that actual linguists don't hold this belief while philosophers and random French ambassadors do. But what about Piraha? Because it's so lacking as a language, I think it's fair to call it legitimately inferior.

 

[pork and beans]

which person would go on reddit to lie about failing to learn a language?

good point. but then wow that is really sad. nine years apparently studying really hard and stuck.

but i find the second image even worse, i mean you don't need to know THAT many words to follow a simple exchange. there's no way... I think it's normal not to understand everything, but you should be able to sort of fill the gaps and get some sort of understanding, even if incomplete. Unless the person doesnt actually know that many words or unless the person has some sort of audio processing disorder (in which case I'm guessing it would affect his L1 too...?)... its really weird.

To me, all this is just nonsense. It's telling that actual linguists don't hold this belief while philosophers and random French ambassadors do. But what about Piraha? Because it's so lacking as a language, I think it's fair to call it legitimately inferior.

oh 100% agree. I genuinely don't think there are better or worse languages and in my opinion saying its impossible to completely understand a second language or that languages have certain qualities is bullcrap. I'm sure we all jokingly favor some over others, but that's just personal taste.

I guess on the Piraha stuff, it's that way because it's what the speakers needed. If they had needed more the language would have reflected that. Usually languages that are 'simpler' in one area make up for it in others, maybe something like that happens? Either way I still think most if not all language are equal in the sense that they all allow for communication.

 

[Grub]

I guess this is pretty random and a bit autistic but I just finished reading through the first four Hawkmoon books by Michael Moorcock and holy fuck his use of dashes in those books drove me fucking crazy. Fucking random dashes everywhere. Shit like: pur-itan, equi-librium, abol-ish, in-credulous tons of words like that. But then he also did shit like not use dashes where it would make sense to shit like sorcererscientist. I've read a lot of Michael Moorcock books and I don't really remember his other books being that bad with the dashes.

Even the later Hawkmoon books don't seem to have that shit. In book 5 there's been almost no dashed words so far and Sorcererscientist is now spelled Sorcerer-Scientist.

Was there some kind of weird dash revival shit or something in the 60's? I just read The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit before that, which were written quite a bit before Moorcock's books and it lacked all the weird dash shit so it seems like it's not some archaic spelling or something. It just seems like it's some weird arbitrary shit Moorcock decided to do but it's fucking weird and I don't like it. It was jarring and brought me out of the story every time.

 

[pork and beans]

this is pretty random and a bit autistic

this is exactly the right place for that kind of stuff

Fucking random dashes everywhere. Shit like: pur-itan, equi-librium, abol-ish, in-credulous tons of words like that. But then he also did shit like not use dashes where it would make sense to shit like sorcererscientist

wow thats odd lol. I like creative liberties but that seems like it trumps readability. Writers pick and choose their battles i guess

Was there some kind of weird dash revival shit or something in the 60's?

Not that I know of! Maybe the american and anglo kiwis know something. obviously linguistic norms change overtime and all but yeah, it might be just a choice the guy made. I wouldn't like it either, it sounds like it ruins the immersion and disrupts flow.

 

[Grub]

I wouldn't like it either, it sounds like it ruins the immersion and disrupts flow.

It was one of those things it made me think about the word every time it came up. Trying to figure out why the fuck he did that. It's not something I normally think about when I read a book but every time with these ones.

 

[MerriedxReldnahc]

View attachment 5877612

I wonder if this person is trying to learn words in isolation rather than in context, I realized very quickly that using pre-made flashcard decks doesn't help me if I don't know how the word is supposed to look in an actual sentence. You can memorize hundreds of Spanish words but still not be able to use them in real-life situations like hiring a hooker in Tijuana.
You're also going to get situations like in Gàidhlig where you never want to get to comfortable with the spelling because guess what motherfucker, we put a random "h" in that word sometimes and pronounce it differently now. Have fun learning which words do it.

 

[skjora]

I really like reading up on the etymology of both common and rare words in various languages. There's detective work, interesting trivia and funny misunderstanding baked into it.

 

[pork and beans]

I wonder if this person is trying to learn words in isolation rather than in context, I realized very quickly that using pre-made flashcard decks doesn't help me if I don't know how the word is supposed to look in an actual sentence. You can memorize hundreds of Spanish words but still not be able to use them in real-life situations like hiring a hooker in Tijuana.
You're also going to get situations like in Gàidhlig where you never want to get to comfortable with the spelling because guess what motherfucker, we put a random "h" in that word sometimes and pronounce it differently now. Have fun learning which words do it.

Yeah I wondered that too. Honestly for most people I don’t think thats a productive method and I wouldn’t call that knowing a word. I think part of knowing a word is also recognizing it, and if you can’t follow a conversation that has it or use it in your speech then.. I dunno.

the Gàidhlig thing is interesting, I didnt know that.

on the subject of pronunciation and spelling, the first time I heard the word “licorice“ i was so shocked by its correct pronunciation lol. Lickorish. hilarious. love it.

 

[MerriedxReldnahc]

the Gàidhlig thing is interesting, I didnt know that.

It's an interesting grammatical thing called lenition, and in the case of Gàidhlig it causes the first letter of a word to soften into a different sound. There is a specific pattern to it involving feminine nouns, the only issue is that you can't tell if a noun is masculine or feminine so you kind of have to just remember, lol.

A good example is in the phrase "Madainn mhath" for good morning- "Math" in its own means good, but because "Madainn" is a feminine noun it lenites math into mhath, changing the "m" sound into a "v" sound. To further complicate things, feminine nouns also lenite if they are following a definite article. So if I wanted to say the good morning, it would become a' mhadainn mhath.
Not all letters lenite though (thank goodness!) and none of the vowels do.

Certain words like "Glè" (meaning, very) will always lenite the following word, e.x Glè mhath for very good. It also occurs in the vocative case, which is when you are adressing a person directly. If you're speaking to someone named Màiri then you would say "a' Mhàiri".


I did also hear an interesting example of lenition as being when American English speakers pronounce t's more like d's. I had a friend in college named Natalie who spent some time in the UK and was endlessly entertained by how people pronounced her name. It was an all-or-nothing pronunciation of the t, and she didn't even realize until then how she was pronouncing her own name as 'Na-Duh-Lee". Even more entertaining was when she went around a store asking people to pronounce the name of a product called "Utterly Butterly", which she would have said as "Udderly Budderly". Yes, we are the stupid Americans delighted by accents.

 

[pork and beans]

That the grammar reflects the lenition is so cool! Yeah the example in English you speak of happens in Spanish a lot too, as well as debuccalization in some were sounds are dropped altogether.

I completely get your friend’s situation as a kid my English pronunciation came straight from the youtubers and the gameplays I watched so it’s all very American sounding. English relatives my age found hilarious that I pronounced the t’s in pretty or beautiful as d’s.

at the time I was totally embarrassed because I hadn’t even realized it, but it was worth it; they didn’t speak my L1, so it was the only way for us to talk, even if I didn’t sound like a bong

 

[I hate women (like you)]

their lack of recursion and number terms, along with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, render the Piraha unable to identify counts of things without a visual example currently present.

Which is quite curious, seeing that it would render them cognitively underdeveloped. Needing visuals to count and calculate is characteristic of children and if you have a cousin or a young sibling you can experiment on them and see that, as they grow older, they gradually gain the ability to create simulations in their head, calculate shit without fingers, have a sense of permanency of count and volume and so on. Grabbing a bunch of modelling clay and making them form various shapes, separating one piece into multiple smaller pieces and vice versa and then asking them to compare them before and after in terms of volume ('Which piece of clay is bigger? The one we did not touch, or the one we rolled around so that it's now longer?', 'Are there more balls here [pointing to 5 balls that are close to each other] or here [4 balls that are more spaced out]?' and so on) is amusing. Because of this, it's funny to imagine a language making people retarded.

 

[pork and beans]

Because of this, it's funny to imagine a language making people retarded.

very

on that same line of thought, I sometimes wonder how differently English speakers express themselves in literally writing depending on their native language; in academic writing there are more rigid standards to follow, but in literature there’s more leeway to experiment. Grammar structures, expressions or ways of describing things that are more common in another language can sort of creep up and bring a really poetic effect to a text. And what could be considered a mistake in an academic context suddenly gains purpose in a creative one, since native English speakers sometimes purposely do those things like playing with the word order, dropping the subject or the verb, etc

man that is a faggy thing to think about. But it’s true…!