Does accent change intrinsically?
Iain
Would accent change alone, independent of social mobility and social
restructuring, immigration, language change, etc? Various British
accents are inconclusive but the young Australian accent suggests that
it might.
~Iain
Peter T. Daniels
Language is always changing. What do you mean by "accent"?
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
ranjit_...@yahoo.com
> Would accent change alone, independent of social mobility and social
> restructuring, immigration, language change, etc?
It does, as you can tell from the Great Vowel shift.
Iain
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> Iain wrote:
> >
> > Would accent change alone, independent of social mobility and
social
> > restructuring, immigration, language change, etc? Various British
> > accents are inconclusive but the young Australian accent suggests
that
> > it might.
>
> Language is always changing. What do you mean by "accent"?
I suppose the boundaries are fuzzy. The silent H at the beginning of
"honour" could be construed as a bit of French accent left over from
1066, rather than an actual aspect of the language.
But since you ask, by "language" I mean to involve the retention of the
identity of phonemes, but by "accent" I mean change in the sound,
length and emphasis of the phonemes, and amount of neutralisation into
shwas, if, like in English, shwa isn't part of the language itself.
The background to my question is the apparent fact that because accent
changes gradually, it invariably corresponds with migration and
changing social conditions.
My question is, if these things did not change, would accent change
nonetheless?
~Iain
ranjit_...@yahoo.com
Yes; that's why RP is changing. "fifties" was once pronounced like
[fIftIz]; it's now more like [fIftiz].
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > Iain wrote:
> > >
> > > Would accent change alone, independent of social mobility and social
> > > restructuring, immigration, language change, etc? Various British
> > > accents are inconclusive but the young Australian accent suggests that
> > > it might.
> >
> > Language is always changing. What do you mean by "accent"?
>
> I suppose the boundaries are fuzzy. The silent H at the beginning of
> "honour" could be construed as a bit of French accent left over from
> 1066, rather than an actual aspect of the language.
?? There is no /h/ in <honour>; it's only spelled with one.
> But since you ask, by "language" I mean to involve the retention of the
> identity of phonemes, but by "accent" I mean change in the sound,
> length and emphasis of the phonemes, and amount of neutralisation into
> shwas, if, like in English, shwa isn't part of the language itself.
?? Why do you suppose shwa isn't part of the English language itself?
> The background to my question is the apparent fact that because accent
> changes gradually, it invariably corresponds with migration and
> changing social conditions.
Except that it doesn't. Ranjit mentioned the RP change of final /I/ to
/I/; in the US, the Northern Cities Shift is mucking about with the
vowels about as much as the Great Vowel Shift did 600 years ago, and
everyone but linguists is totally oblivious to it, and communication
isn't impaired in the least.
> My question is, if these things did not change, would accent change
> nonetheless?
My answer is, how could it not?
John Atkinson
"Iain" <iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1110968741.6...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Like, I'm not sure what you're asking here, and don't much care. But I
would be very interested to know what particular aspects of the accent of
young Australians you've noticed that you're referring to here.
John.
Iain
> Iain wrote:
> >
> > Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > > Iain wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Would accent change alone, independent of social mobility and
social
> > > > restructuring, immigration, language change, etc? Various
British
> > > > accents are inconclusive but the young Australian accent
suggests that
> > > > it might.
> > >
> > > Language is always changing. What do you mean by "accent"?
> >
> > I suppose the boundaries are fuzzy. The silent H at the beginning
of
> > "honour" could be construed as a bit of French accent left over
from
> > 1066, rather than an actual aspect of the language.
>
> ?? There is no /h/ in <honour>; it's only spelled with one.
That was the question I raised -- the line is blurry and depends
largely on a sort of reference point. How long does something have to
have to be ommitted before it ceases to become standard? The answer is
not "when a minority of people use it". I once pointed out that just as
regular long skirts in the U.K. are rareish, they are still a cultural
reference point for normality, etc, so if fashion changes in the
future, there is a *chance* of it returning to long(er) skirts(even
though it may not). This seems like a lost cause where things like the
H in honour are concerned, but that was also true about the "t" in
"often", until Victorian times when literacy increased sharply, and "of
/t/ en" was reconsidered as "polished" speech. Even an illiterate
person probably recognises "ishoo" as being a tongue-friendly version
of "isyoo"(as Princess Diana said it), even though most people say
"ishoo". For as long as there is an underlying sense of normality, that
is considered(usually curricularly) as the standard form of the
language itself, even if it's rarely adhered to. So I suppose we are
talking about English on a slightly synthetic level.
> > But since you ask, by "language" I mean to involve the retention of
the
> > identity of phonemes, but by "accent" I mean change in the sound,
> > length and emphasis of the phonemes, and amount of neutralisation
into
> > shwas, if, like in English, shwa isn't part of the language itself.
>
> ?? Why do you suppose shwa isn't part of the English language itself?
It is of accent.
I nev'r say it. English and Americans say "'rly"; I in Scotland say
"early".
I tell an Englishman that my surname is Inkster, and he immediately
converts the /er/ sound into a shwa, even though he never heard the
word before(this would be meaningless if the word was "g*i*rl" because
he may remember it is three phonemes: g/shwa/l). This is illustration
of accent as opposed to language. He might have an English version of
my /o/ and /e/ but we don't have our own versions of each other's shwa
phonemes (both the Scots and English sometime use shwa sounds, but they
do not share the same phoneme in words). Our common "legend" or
"language" doesn't agree on shwa as an identifyable phoneme -- The
sound is there, but it sorts itself out via accent.
Hence what I mean by shwa not being part of the language, in the
capacity of language as legend we use to decipher sound.
When a Chinese man has an /er/ sound in his name, an Englishman renders
it as shwa -- again it's accent.
> > The background to my question is the apparent fact that because
accent
> > changes gradually, it invariably corresponds with migration and
> > changing social conditions.
>
> Except that it doesn't. Ranjit mentioned the RP change of final /I/
to
> /I/; in the US, the Northern Cities Shift is mucking about with the
> vowels about as much as the Great Vowel Shift did 600 years ago, and
> everyone but linguists is totally oblivious to it, and communication
> isn't impaired in the least.
But you cannot use real-world examples because I'm talking about a
hypothetical cultural "freeze". Look at the subject title. The
pronunciation of "fifties" that was mentioned, may well be due to
changing social conditions, media, etc.
Most of the time British accent change hints of interchange, rather
than solitary change, which is the topic of my question.
Reconstructions I've heard of Elizabethan English accent, I would
describe as "miscellaneous British Isles". I wouldn't notice if I heard
it from a Top of the Pops presenter.
> > My question is, if these things did not change, would accent change
> > nonetheless?
>
> My answer is, how could it not?
See above. Short answer, I don't know whether it would or wouldn't.
~Iain
Iain
John Atkinson wrote:
> "Iain" <iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1110968741.6...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> >
> > Would accent change alone, independent of social mobility and
social
> > restructuring, immigration, language change, etc? Various British
> > accents are inconclusive but the young Australian accent suggests
that
> > it might.
>
> Like, I'm not sure what you're asking here, and don't much care.
The question is in the first sentence. It's perfectly clear.
> But I
> would be very interested to know what particular aspects of the
accent of
> young Australians you've noticed that you're referring to here.
No I didn't mean the young people; I meant the young accent.
~Iain
brennus
change without external influences. For example, Icelandic, as
conservative as it is, has changed a little bit in acccent and
pronunciation from that of Old Norse. Yet, Icelandic society was
almost completely isolated from the rest of northern Europe after the
middle of the 12th century.
Linguists have also noticed changes in the accents of Black American
speakers. Just a century ago, Black American accents were nearly
identical to those of White American Southerners. Recordings of them
were made as late as the 1940's. By comparing the speech of 21st
century American Blacks with these, we know that their accents have
undergone some changes. However, I can't think of any external
influences that would really cause their accents to change. The
majority of them still live in the South or have until the last 15 to
25 years. Even, outside the South, they have little interaction with
Northern Whites or Hispanics.
Posted Via Usenet.com Premium Usenet Newsgroup Services
----------------------------------------------------------
** SPEED ** RETENTION ** COMPLETION ** ANONYMITY **
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Ruud Harmsen
galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid (brennus): in sci.lang:
>There is some evidence that accents in human languages can still
>change without external influences.
Whyever would they not?
>For example, Icelandic, as
>conservative as it is, has changed a little bit in acccent and
>pronunciation from that of Old Norse.
Not just a little bit, but considerably.
>Yet, Icelandic society was
>almost completely isolated from the rest of northern Europe after the
>middle of the 12th century.
So?
>Linguists have also noticed changes in the accents of Black American
>speakers. Just a century ago, Black American accents were nearly
>identical to those of White American Southerners. Recordings of them
>were made as late as the 1940's. By comparing the speech of 21st
>century American Blacks with these, we know that their accents have
>undergone some changes.
They moved from the south to New York, Chicago etc.? Which Black
accent are we talking about, from which parts of the US?
>However, I can't think of any external
>influences that would really cause their accents to change.
Why should external influences have anything to do with accents?
>The
>majority of them still live in the South or have until the last 15 to
>25 years.
Is that so? Aren't black people now all over the country?
>Even, outside the South, they have little interaction with
>Northern Whites or Hispanics.
???
--
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com/
Peter T. Daniels
Don't worry. "Brennus" knows as much about US sociology as s/he does
about Icelandic.
brennus
Even if you disagree with me, it would be nice if you could post
something that shows that you can talk about the topic in an
intelligent manner. Seriously. What I see is some brain dead
guttersniping instead. While you may get away with it on Science
Forum, I sure hope that you would never write like this for a school
or college assignment.
Regards,
Brennus
Brian M. Scott
<galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid> wrote in
<news:423c9a9a$1...@127.0.0.1> in sci.lang:
> Dear Ruud and Peter,
> Even if you disagree with me, it would be nice if you could post
> something that shows that you can talk about the topic in an
> intelligent manner. Seriously.
Ruud's comments were entirely appropriate. That you don't
recognize them as an intelligent response tends to confirm
your ignorance of the subject.
[...]
Brian
Ruud Harmsen
galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid (brennus): in sci.lang:
>Even if you disagree with me, it would be nice if you could post
>something that shows that you can talk about the topic in an
>intelligent manner.
What are you talking about? How would I know without any quoted
context?
John Atkinson
>
> John Atkinson wrote:
> > "Iain" <iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote...
> > >
> > > Would accent change alone, independent of social mobility and
> social
> > > restructuring, immigration, language change, etc? Various British
> > > accents are inconclusive but the young Australian accent suggests
> that
> > > it might.
> >
> > Like, I'm not sure what you're asking here, and don't much care.
>
> The question is in the first sentence. It's perfectly clear.
>
> > But I
> > would be very interested to know what particular aspects of the
> accent of
> > young Australians you've noticed that you're referring to here.
>
> No I didn't mean the young people; I meant the young accent.
Three independent questions for you:
(1) Is the accent currently used by English-speakers in Australia "younger"
than that used in any other part of the English-speaking world? What
evidence do you have for your answer?
(2) Do you believe there has been significantly less "social mobility,
social restructuring, immigration, language change, etc" in Australia than
elsewhere?
(3) I assume that by "accent" in your original question means the way a
language sounds. OK, the answer to your question is "Yes". That is, it
would still change if there was no change in social mobility, social
restructuring, immigration, language change, etc (an impossible situation,
which has never occured in the history of the world). And the answer to
your question is "No". That is, if social mobility, etc, change, this will
have some (perhaps small, but never zero) effect on the changes that occur
in "accent" -- they're not completely "independent".. Do you still think
your original question is "perfectly clear"?
J.
Iain
According to the people of the respective time, the accent only became
identifyable as an "Australian accent" in the 1820s, hence "young" --
presumably because it actually sounded different to anything else.
So I'm talking in terms of identity of accent, rather than speed of
change. E.g. The English accent(s) is(are) therefore "old" albethey
different in their youth. But this isn't especially material.
> (2) Do you believe there has been significantly less "social
mobility,
> social restructuring, immigration, language change, etc" in Australia
than
> elsewhere?
Not especially AFAIK -- but I gather the early days involved much
distillation of various British communities and that British society
was not lifted neatly onto another island without transformation,
especially since only certain cross-sections of society were
transferred at all. Instead, it was like transferring a fragile pancake
between pans.
> (3) I assume that by "accent" in your original question means the
way a
> language sounds. OK, the answer to your question is "Yes". That is,
it
> would still change if there was no change in social mobility, social
> restructuring, immigration, language change, etc (an impossible
situation,
> which has never occured in the history of the world).
Ok, but how do we know this?
> And the answer to
> your question is "No". That is, if social mobility, etc, change,
this will
> have some (perhaps small, but never zero) effect on the changes that
occur
> in "accent" -- they're not completely "independent".. Do you still
think
> your original question is "perfectly clear"?
Yes because I'm using an imaginary situation to ask about the real
nature of something, that makes perfect sense.
It's like "would some humans have gay anal sex if they grew up in the
wild without no language, civilisation or culture?" to elaborate on "is
homosexuality innate?"(for the record, I don't ken).
~Iain
Iain
Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> 18 Mar 2005 03:33:15 -0600:
> galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid (brennus): in sci.lang:
>
> >There is some evidence that accents in human languages can still
> >change without external influences.
>
> Whyever would they not?
>
Natural hi-fi imitation, of course. My question is about *whether*
accent change is about lo-fi imitation. Your statement suggests someone
is asking a silly question.
~Iain
Brian M. Scott
<galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid> wrote in
<news:423fe660$1...@127.0.0.1> in sci.lang:
> Mr. Brian Scott,
> Re: <<Ruud's comments were entirely appropriate. That you don't
> recognize them as an intelligent response tends to confirm
> your ignorance of the subject.>>
> How naive can you be? Give me a break! Ruud poses seven
> questions or comments regarding my post; none of them
> very sterling.
He gave it just about the treatment it deserved, considering
how full of errors it is.
> Each one of them can be refuted categorically.
Questions are not subject to refutation in the first place.
But let's take a look. Here's the post, with comments
added:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 11:34:36 +0100, Ruud Harmsen
<realemail...@rudhar.com.invalid> wrote in
<news:lfbl31p2dueu3hgnh...@4ax.com> in
sci.lang:
> 18 Mar 2005 03:33:15 -0600:
> galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid (brennus): in sci.lang:
>>There is some evidence that accents in human languages can still
>>change without external influences.
> Whyever would they not?
Or to say the same thing at much greater length, all of the
evidence is that they invariably do change, with or without
external influences.
>> For example, Icelandic, as conservative as it is, has
>> changed a little bit in acccent and pronunciation from
>> that of Old Norse.
> Not just a little bit, but considerably.
Which is certainly true. And the morphology and syntax have
changed a bit, too.
>> Yet, Icelandic society was almost completely isolated
>> from the rest of northern Europe after the middle of the
>> 12th century.
> So?
>> Linguists have also noticed changes in the accents of
>> Black American speakers. Just a century ago, Black
>> American accents were nearly identical to those of White
>> American Southerners. Recordings of them were made as
>> late as the 1940's. By comparing the speech of 21st
>> century American Blacks with these, we know that their
>> accents have undergone some changes.
> They moved from the south to New York, Chicago etc.? Which Black
> accent are we talking about, from which parts of the US?
Ruud was overly kind here: he pointed out only one of the
obvious problems with your statement.
>>However, I can't think of any external
>>influences that would really cause their accents to change.
> Why should external influences have anything to do with accents?
A better question would have been why on earth you think
that external influences were necessary, since we know that
they aren't.
>> The majority of them still live in the South or have
>> until the last 15 to 25 years.
> Is that so? Aren't black people now all over the country?
Yes, though there are places where they're a very small
minority. However, over a third of them are in the states
of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland,
Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois.
>>Even, outside the South, they have little interaction with
>>Northern Whites or Hispanics.
> ???
Precisely. Your claim of little interaction is rubbish.
> However, the $60,000 dollar question
The idiom is '64,000 dollar question'.
> is why are you not discussing Iain's topic yourself?
There's nothing to discuss. Languages change irrespective
of circumstances.
[...]
brennus
Re: <<Ruud's comments were entirely appropriate. That you don't
recognize them as an intelligent response tends to confirm
your ignorance of the subject.>>
How naive can you be? Give me a break! Ruud poses seven questions or
comments regarding my post; none of them very sterling. Each one of
them can be refuted categorically.
However, the $60,000 dollar question is why are you not discussing
Iain's topic yourself? Even defending Ruud makes no sense if you
cannot compose your own posts on this site and argue with facts,
evidence and logic. Until you do so, my impression of you is that you
are just another troll.
Brian M. Scott
<iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote in
<news:1111433468.8...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
> Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>> Whyever would they not?
Not precisely silly, but certainly indicating almost
complete linguistic naiveté. If there is one universal
characteristic of language, it's that it changes over time
irrespective of circumstances.
Brian
Ruud Harmsen
galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid (brennus): in sci.lang:
>How naive can you be? Give me a break! Ruud poses seven questions or
>comments regarding my post; none of them very sterling. Each one of
>them can be refuted categorically.
What about just answering them?
Let me state another question:
Is accent change always caused by external factors, or does it also
happen all by itself, for no apparent reason?
I think both can and does occur. Assuming the accent must always be
caused by extrnal factor to me seems somewhat biased. But perhaps I am
wrong.
brennus
I can see right now that I'm not going to get you guys to compose
commentaries with an introduction, a premise and a conclusion. It
doesn't seem to be your style. So, I'll try to tailor my responses
more to your way of thinking and doing things.
Don't get me wrong, however. I'm not saying that you don't have a
right to criticize what I write. In a public internet forum, anyone
can criticize what anyone writes; but the more facts and information
you have when you criticize the better off you are. Part of the
problem, too, is that this is a tough subject to talk about on the
internet for anyone. Were I talking to you about it in a bar (tavern,
pub etc) over a couple of beers it would be different and I think we
might understand each other better.
Now, I'll get of my lecture, my soapbox, and just recap the seven
points where objections were raised and give my responses. I realize
that I can't force you to accept them but they do reflect the truth
as I see it.
1) Iain asks a legitimate question. In most languages accent and
pronunciation changes come about through contact with either another
language or another dialect which has higher political or cultural
status. You have to stop and think a bit to find a language or a
dialect where accent change has occured on its own.
Icelandic and Black American English (i.e. Ebonics) are two languages
that have existed and developed almost in vacuum. They are also two
languages where we have some written records that we can compare. For
instance, the Jivaro Indian language deep in the Ecuadorian
rainforest has probably also undegone some changes in accent and
pronunciation on its own too since the Spanish first encountered
them in 1596 but there are no written records to prove it.
2) Icelandic has NOT changed considerably form Old Norse. It is so
close to Old Norse that it still preserves Old Norse sounds like au,
ð and þ unlike the Continental Scandanavian languages (Norwegian,
Danish Swedish).
3) I point out that Icelanders had little contact with their kinsmen
in northern Europe after about 1150 A.D. when the last colonists from
Sweden and Norway arrived there. This means that no new influences
from Norway & Sweden or from the Low German of the Hanseatic
League reached Iceland. The few changes from Old Norse that Icelandic
did undergo were done so in a virtual vacuum. That's all I'm saying.
4)Black English is a pretty homogeneous dialect replete with southern
inflections regardless of what part of the United States it is spoken
in. Ruud is mistaken in thinking that there is a "New York" form and a
"Chicago"
form etc.
5) External influences do affect accents. Celtic tongues shaped Latin
into French. 1,000 years of Chinese rule in Vietnam transformed
Vietnamese from an Austronesian language into more of a Chinese-like
language. The accent and pronunciation of English changed after the
Norman conquest (1066); the umlaut and gutteral sounds disappeared.
There are Spanish inflections on Chicano English, Afrikaans
inflections on South African English etc.
6) It's true that Blacks can be found through out most parts of the
United States from coast to coast - However, the majority of Amrican
Blacks (or "Afro-Americans") still live in the South; 58.4% according
to the 2000 census. Last year I read an article which said that more
Blacks were actually moving back to the South from the northern and
western states.
7) Although de jure segregation ended in the United States between
1947 and 1964, a form of de facto segregation still exists. Blacks
and Whites still live largely apart from one another in public and
reside in separate communities. Hispanics generally don't get along
with Blacks in the United States either. Mexican inmates killed a
number of Black prisoners in a 1979 prison riot in New Mexico and
even beheaded some of them. Prejudice against Blacks still exists
among non-Black Cubans in both Cuba and the United States where many
have come as refugees. I've seen some of it first hand.
Take care! :)
Jacques Guy
> Now, I'll get of my lecture, my soapbox,
Vas-y, Brennus, on t'écoute, nous autres les gaulois.
> 1) ....You have to stop and think a bit to find a language or a
> dialect where accent change has occured on its own.
Yes... and then you find it. All over the place, too.
Well... no, you can always argue that the changes were
meant to make your language incomprehensible to your
next-door neighbours. And I think there is a lot of
truth in there, in Vanuatu, in Papua New Guinea, and
in the Solomon Islands.
> Icelandic and Black American English (i.e. Ebonics) are two languages
> that have existed and developed almost in vacuum.
You mean dem niggas had no whities across da river?
All right, I'll buy it that Icelanders had no close
neighbours. But American Blacks?
> For
> instance, the Jivaro Indian language deep in the Ecuadorian
> rainforest has probably also undegone some changes in accent and
> pronunciation on its own too since the Spanish first encountered
> them in 1596 but there are no written records to prove it.
That is certain. But, lacking documentary evidence, we'll
never know, until someone turns up with a time-machine. And,
let's face it, with all this stuff about quantum cryptography
I am starting to believe that it might happen in my life time
(*oh joy*)
> 2) Icelandic has NOT changed considerably form Old Norse.
Phonetically, it has. The vocabulary, however, has remained
stable. By design, too.
> 5) External influences do affect accents. Celtic tongues shaped Latin
> into French.
Who knows? The only evidence I see is diphthonguization and
triphthonguization. But that evidence is subject to our
analysis of modern Gaelic languages. We really don't know
what Gaulish sounded like 2000 years ago.
> 1,000 years of Chinese rule in Vietnam transformed
> Vietnamese from an Austronesian language
Another moot point. The Vietnamese-Austronesian linkage
is very, very flimsy. I have been through Benedikt's
Thai-Kadai evidence, together with Don Laycock, and
all we saw was chance resemblances. Laycock thought
Benedikt might have something. I thought he had nothing.
"cá" (fish) vs "ikan" is just not enough. You need hundreds
upon hundreds more such cognate candidates to make a
case when such phonological decay may have taken place.
Ekkehard Dengler
"brennus" <galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid> schrieb im
Newsbeitrag news:424137e5$1...@127.0.0.1...
> 2) Icelandic has NOT changed considerably form Old Norse. It is so
> close to Old Norse that it still preserves Old Norse sounds like au,
> ğ and ş unlike the Continental Scandanavian languages (Norwegian,
> Danish Swedish).
I understand that the first element of this diphthong is now a mid-open
front rounded vowel, though, while the second is [i] (or perhaps [y]). Can
you confirm this?
Regards,
Ekkehard
Ruud Harmsen
galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid (brennus): in sci.lang:
>Ruud and Brian (Scott),
>
>I can see right now that I'm not going to get you guys to compose
>commentaries with an introduction, a premise and a conclusion. It
>doesn't seem to be your style.
It sometimes is when I am writing web pages, but I don't have time for
that in usenet.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Ruud and Brian (Scott),
>
> I can see right now that I'm not going to get you guys to compose
> commentaries with an introduction, a premise and a conclusion. It
> doesn't seem to be your style. So, I'll try to tailor my responses
> more to your way of thinking and doing things.
>
> Don't get me wrong, however. I'm not saying that you don't have a
> right to criticize what I write. In a public internet forum, anyone
> can criticize what anyone writes; but the more facts and information
> you have when you criticize the better off you are. Part of the
> problem, too, is that this is a tough subject to talk about on the
> internet for anyone. Were I talking to you about it in a bar (tavern,
> pub etc) over a couple of beers it would be different and I think we
> might understand each other better.
>
> Now, I'll get of my lecture, my soapbox, and just recap the seven
> points where objections were raised and give my responses. I realize
> that I can't force you to accept them but they do reflect the truth
> as I see it.
>
> 1) Iain asks a legitimate question. In most languages accent and
> pronunciation changes come about through contact with either another
> language or another dialect which has higher political or cultural
> status.
factually incorrect
> You have to stop and think a bit to find a language or a
> dialect where accent change has occured on its own.
factually incorrect
> Icelandic and Black American English (i.e. Ebonics) are two languages
> that have existed and developed almost in vacuum.
factually incorrect
> They are also two
> languages where we have some written records that we can compare. For
> instance, the Jivaro Indian language deep in the Ecuadorian
> rainforest has probably also undegone some changes in accent and
> pronunciation on its own too since the Spanish first encountered
> them in 1596 but there are no written records to prove it.
<skipping Icelandic>
> 4)Black English is a pretty homogeneous dialect replete with southern
> inflections regardless of what part of the United States it is spoken
> in. Ruud is mistaken in thinking that there is a "New York" form and a
> "Chicago" form etc.
factually incorrect
> 5) External influences do affect accents. Celtic tongues shaped Latin
> into French.
factually incorrect
> 1,000 years of Chinese rule in Vietnam transformed
> Vietnamese from an Austronesian language into more of a Chinese-like
factually incorrect
> language. The accent and pronunciation of English changed after the
> Norman conquest (1066); the umlaut and gutteral sounds disappeared.
> There are Spanish inflections on Chicano English, Afrikaans
> inflections on South African English etc.
>
> 6) It's true that Blacks can be found through out most parts of the
> United States from coast to coast - However, the majority of Amrican
> Blacks (or "Afro-Americans") still live in the South; 58.4% according
> to the 2000 census. Last year I read an article which said that more
> Blacks were actually moving back to the South from the northern and
> western states.
>
> 7) Although de jure segregation ended in the United States between
> 1947 and 1964, a form of de facto segregation still exists. Blacks
> and Whites still live largely apart from one another in public and
> reside in separate communities. Hispanics generally don't get along
> with Blacks in the United States either. Mexican inmates killed a
> number of Black prisoners in a 1979 prison riot in New Mexico and
> even beheaded some of them. Prejudice against Blacks still exists
> among non-Black Cubans in both Cuba and the United States where many
> have come as refugees. I've seen some of it first hand.
irrelevant
Ruud Harmsen
in sci.lang:
>> 1) ....You have to stop and think a bit to find a language or a
>> dialect where accent change has occured on its own.
>
>Yes... and then you find it. All over the place, too.
>Well... no, you can always argue that the changes were
>meant to make your language incomprehensible to your
>next-door neighbours.
I think a lot if not all language change arises from adoloescents who,
in the process of developing from children to adults, have a strong
desire to sound differennt from people younger and older than
themselves, and like each others, but also different from rivalling
same age groups.
Some of those changes survive into adulthood, though most don't. It
will happen regardless of contact with other languages. It affects
accent, vocabulary, and even grammar.
Ruud Harmsen
<ED...@t-online.de>: in sci.lang:
>"brennus" <galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid> schrieb im
>Newsbeitrag news:424137e5$1...@127.0.0.1...
>
>> 2) Icelandic has NOT changed considerably form Old Norse. It is so
>> close to Old Norse that it still preserves Old Norse sounds like au, /
>I understand that the first element of this diphthong is now a mid-open
>front rounded vowel, though, while the second is [i] (or perhaps [y]). Can
>you confirm this?
It is, judging from the few instances I heard of it. The Icelandic
word augu (meaning eye) sounded very much like a (non-existant, but
possible) Dutch word "uige".
Ruud Harmsen
galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid (brennus): in sci.lang:
>7) Although de jure segregation ended in the United States between
>1947 and 1964, a form of de facto segregation still exists. Blacks
>and Whites still live largely apart from one another in public and
>reside in separate communities. Hispanics generally don't get along
>with Blacks in the United States either. Mexican inmates killed a
>number of Black prisoners in a 1979 prison riot in New Mexico and
>even beheaded some of them. Prejudice against Blacks still exists
>among non-Black Cubans in both Cuba and the United States where many
>have come as refugees. I've seen some of it first hand.
That they hate and kill each doesn't mean they don't talk.
Ruud Harmsen
<realemail...@rudhar.com.invalid>: in sci.lang:
>I think a lot if not all language change arises from adolescents who,
>in the process of developing from children to adults, have a strong
>desire to sound different from people both younger AND older than
>themselves, and like each other, but also different from rivalling
>same age groups.
>Some of those changes survive into adulthood, though most don't. It
>will happen regardless of contact with other languages. It affects
>accent, vocabulary, and even grammar.
Meanwhile, in neighbouring group nl.taal, someone posted a fragment
from "De vier heemkinderen", in the Dutch of over 500 years ago. Most
of it is still readily comprehensible for present-day Dutch speakers.
Language change seems quick short-term, but is slow in the long run,
because very many innovations are undone again later on, when young
people grow older and more conservative. My 20-year old son is now
often correcting his 16-year old sister, and it isn't even a joke any
more, he almost means it. We parents taught him those corrections, and
he wouldn't accept them when younger either. When 30 they'll talk
almost exactly like we do.
Brian M. Scott
<galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid> wrote in sci.lang:
[...]
> 1) Iain asks a legitimate question. In most languages accent and
> pronunciation changes come about through contact with either another
> language or another dialect which has higher political or cultural
> status. You have to stop and think a bit to find a language or a
> dialect where accent change has occured on its own.
You may; I don't. It happens constantly in all languages.
> Icelandic and Black American English (i.e. Ebonics) are two languages
> that have existed and developed almost in vacuum.
Neither statement is true.
[...]
> 2) Icelandic has NOT changed considerably form Old Norse.
You don't know what you're talking about, I'm afraid. The
pronunciation of the modern language differs greatly from that
of, say, the 12th century; read any side by side comparison of
the two. There are also less obvious changes in morphology and
syntax, never mind the changes in the lexicon -- and this
*despite* conscious efforts to minimize those changes.
> It is so
> close to Old Norse that it still preserves Old Norse sounds like au,
> ð and þ unlike the Continental Scandanavian languages (Norwegian,
> Danish Swedish).
For instance, <au> in Old Icelandic was something reasonably
close to [Au]; in modern Icelandic <au> represents something
closer to [öy]. OIc <á> was apparently [A:]; in the modern
language it's [aU] or thereabouts. Similarly, <æ> was something
like [E]; it's now [aI].
> 3) I point out that Icelanders had little contact with their kinsmen
> in northern Europe after about 1150 A.D. when the last colonists from
> Sweden and Norway arrived there. This means that no new influences
> from Norway & Sweden or from the Low German of the Hanseatic
> League reached Iceland. The few changes from Old Norse that Icelandic
> did undergo were done so in a virtual vacuum. That's all I'm saying.
And you're wrong. There was quite noticeable Middle Low German
influence on the Icelandic lexicon up to about 1600 or so. In
the 17th century, however, the loans began to be replaced by
native constructs. Some still survive, e.g., <riddari> 'knight',
<hertogi> 'duke', and <sykur> 'sugar', along with a few, like
<spegill> 'mirror', that entered via Danish.
> 4)Black English is a pretty homogeneous dialect replete with southern
> inflections regardless of what part of the United States it is spoken
> in. Ruud is mistaken in thinking that there is a "New York" form and a
> "Chicago" form etc.
Ruud is not mistaken.
> 5) External influences do affect accents. Celtic tongues shaped Latin
> into French. 1,000 years of Chinese rule in Vietnam transformed
> Vietnamese from an Austronesian language into more of a Chinese-like
> language.
False.
> The accent and pronunciation of English changed after the
> Norman conquest (1066); the umlaut and gutteral sounds disappeared.
1. OE /y(:)/ unrounded to /i(:)/ *before* the Conquest in some
dialects.
2. Some dialects of ME -- those in the south and southwest, as I
recall -- retained /y(:)/ for quite a while after the Conquest.
3. In any case, OFr had /y(:)/ (and modern French still has it),
so blaming the Conquest for the eventual loss of the phoneme from
English is plain silly.
I don't know what 'gutteral' sounds you think disappeared.
Palatal /g/ had weakened to /j/ before the Conquest, and /x/
persisted *long* after it.
[...]
> 7) Although de jure segregation ended in the United States
> between 1947 and 1964, a form of de facto segregation still
> exists. Blacks and Whites still live largely apart from one
> another in public and reside in separate communities.
This does not, however, mean that they aren't exposed to one
another and to different speech varieties. (Before you dig
yourself any deeper into that hole: I live in an inner-ring
suburb of Cleveland, and I teach at an urban university in
downtown Cleveland.)
[...]
Brian M. Scott
<ED...@t-online.de> wrote in sci.lang:
Yes. A German reading Icelandic <au> as if it were spelled <öü>
would produce a pretty decent approximation.
Brian
Jacques Guy
>>>2) Icelandic has NOT changed considerably form Old Norse. It is so
>>>close to Old Norse that it still preserves Old Norse sounds like au, /
>>I understand that the first element of this diphthong is now a mid-open
>>front rounded vowel, though, while the second is [i] (or perhaps [y]). Can
>>you confirm this?
> It is, judging from the few instances I heard of it. The Icelandic
> word augu (meaning eye) sounded very much like a (non-existant, but
> possible) Dutch word "uige".
Why, that Icelandic "au", Dutch "ui", is exactly French "oeil" (eye)!
(Bon, d'accord, mais on peut rigoler un peu quand même, non?)
Peter T. Daniels
Actually they'll talk like their own cohort -- their own generation.
Torsten Poulin
> brennus wrote:
>> It is so close to Old Norse that it still preserves Old Norse sounds
>> like au, ğ and ş unlike the Continental Scandanavian languages
>> (Norwegian, Danish, Swedish).
It is certainly true that the Danish writing system doesn't use the letters
Ğ/ğ and Ş/ş, but I can assure you, brennus, that Danish as it is spoken has
plenty of [ğ]'s. They just happen to be represented in writing as t's and
d's.
>> 3) I point out that Icelanders had little contact with their kinsmen
>> in northern Europe after about 1150 A.D. when the last colonists from
>> Sweden and Norway arrived there. This means that no new influences
>> from Norway & Sweden or from the Low German of the Hanseatic
>> League reached Iceland. The few changes from Old Norse that Icelandic
>> did undergo were done so in a virtual vacuum. That's all I'm saying.
> And you're wrong. There was quite noticeable Middle Low German
> influence on the Icelandic lexicon up to about 1600 or so. In
> the 17th century, however, the loans began to be replaced by
> native constructs. Some still survive, e.g., <riddari> 'knight',
> <hertogi> 'duke', and <sykur> 'sugar', along with a few, like
> <spegill> 'mirror', that entered via Danish.
Modern Danish <spejl> (neuter); from older Danish <speyel>, <speghel>,
<spegel>, <spegiill>, etc. (common gender). It, of course, goes back to
Latin <speculum> via Low German.
--
Torsten
Ruud Harmsen
in sci.lang:
>> It is, judging from the few instances I heard of it. The Icelandic
>> word augu (meaning eye) sounded very much like a (non-existant, but
>> possible) Dutch word "uige".
>
>Why, that Icelandic "au", Dutch "ui", is exactly French "oeil" (eye)!
Almost exactly, yes. The Dutch diphthong ends (and begins) rounded and
not fully front, the French diphthong ends unrounded and front.
ranjit_...@yahoo.com
> Jacques Guy <jg...@alphalink.com.au>: in sci.lang:
>
> >> It is, judging from the few instances I heard of it. The Icelandic
> >> word augu (meaning eye) sounded very much like a (non-existant,
but
> >> possible) Dutch word "uige".
> >
> >Why, that Icelandic "au", Dutch "ui", is exactly French "oeil"
(eye)!
>
> Almost exactly, yes. The Dutch diphthong ends (and begins) rounded
and
> not fully front, the French diphthong ends unrounded and front.
>From the description, the best guesses that come to mind are [u"y] for
the Dutch and [Yi] for the French.
http://www.blahedo.org/ascii-ipa.html
Ekkehard Dengler
"Ruud Harmsen" <realemail...@rudhar.com.invalid> schrieb im
Newsbeitrag news:mpn34151hsh7j6pc2...@4ax.com...
Hi Ruud.
The "town" diphthong in Belfast English is very similar, too.
Regards,
Ekkehard
Aidan Kehoe
Ar an tríú lá is fiche de mí Márta, scríobh Ekkehard Dengler:
> > >> It is, judging from the few instances I heard of it. The Icelandic
> > >> word augu (meaning eye) sounded very much like a (non-existant, but
> > >> possible) Dutch word "uige".
> > >
> > >Why, that Icelandic "au", Dutch "ui", is exactly French "oeil" (eye)!
> >
> > Almost exactly, yes. The Dutch diphthong ends (and begins) rounded and
> > not fully front, the French diphthong ends unrounded and front.
>
> The "town" diphthong in Belfast English is very similar, too.
Wow, yes, indeed it is. I had been asking myself how to describe it, since
it’s a relatively effective way to caricature a Northern Irish accent.
--
“I, for instance, am gung-ho about open source because my family is being
held hostage in Rob Malda’s basement. But who fact-checks me, or Enderle,
when we say something in public? No-one!” -- Danny O’Brien
Ekkehard Dengler
"Aidan Kehoe" <keh...@parhasard.net> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:16961.62335....@parhasard.net...
>
> Ar an tríú lá is fiche de mí Márta, scríobh Ekkehard Dengler:
>
> > > >> It is, judging from the few instances I heard of it. The Icelandic
> > > >> word augu (meaning eye) sounded very much like a (non-existant,
but
> > > >> possible) Dutch word "uige".
> > > >
> > > >Why, that Icelandic "au", Dutch "ui", is exactly French "oeil"
(eye)!
> > >
> > > Almost exactly, yes. The Dutch diphthong ends (and begins) rounded
and
> > > not fully front, the French diphthong ends unrounded and front.
> >
> > The "town" diphthong in Belfast English is very similar, too.
>
> Wow, yes, indeed it is. I had been asking myself how to describe it, since
> it's a relatively effective way to caricature a Northern Irish accent.
Hi.
Actually, it's one of my favourite diphthongs, although I slightly prefer
the Donegal version. Then again, Azorean Portuguese has lots to offer in the
exotic diphthongs department.
Regards,
Ekkehard
Ruud Harmsen
<ranjit_...@yahoo.com>: in sci.lang:
No. The Dutch sound is rounded, between central and front, and goes
from half-open (=open-mid) to close (sometimes without reaching it).
The French sound is between central and front, and goes from half-open
ronded to close unrounded, and usually really reaches that point.
Disregarding the not-quite-frontness, they are [9y] and [9j] in Sampa,
and [&.y] and [&.j] in Kirshenbaum. (judging from this list, but I
always thought the Kirshenbaum symbol was different).
Ruud Harmsen
<ED...@t-online.de>: in sci.lang:
>> >Why, that Icelandic "au", Dutch "ui", is exactly French "oeil" (eye)!
>>
>> Almost exactly, yes. The Dutch diphthong ends (and begins) rounded and
>> not fully front, the French diphthong ends unrounded and front.
>
>The "town" diphthong in Belfast English is very similar, too.
No, I think that one is different yet again, very similar to the
Australian and New-Zealand sound in "tone":
From mid central unrounded to close central rounded.
http://rudhar.com/fonetics/ooo.htm
brennus
Hello,
I subscribe to the Celtic substratum theory in French (and even Dutch
for that matter) even though it would be nice if the Romans had left
us records of how Gaulish actually sounded. Thanks to archeology,
however, we know a lot more about Gaulish (Gallic) now than we did
250 years ago or even 40 years ago. A whole bunch of new inscriptions
were found in the 1970's and 80's, some of them from the Seine River,
I understand.
Diphthongization is rare in Latin and usually only in Greek
borrowings. On the other hand, the Celtic languages, especially the
Brythonic Celtic languages are full of them. While the nasal sounds
in French could have come from some hayseed dialect of Vulgar Latin,
a Celtic origin is much more probable for them too. Welsh and Gaelic
both have nasals. So, nasals are not extraneous to the Celtic
languages.
When it gets right down to it, Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Malayan,
Indonesian, Malagasy, Samoan, Maori, Hawaiian etc. all appear to be
part of a larger Malayo-Polynesian superfamily. I think that the fish
example you gave is valid, but an even better word is the words for
"eye" which are usually something like m@t or mata in these languages
as in the name Mata Hari which means "Eye of the sun" in Indonesian.
Of course, you won't find one-on-one correspondences for every word
in all of these languages. Just random ones here and there throughout
the whole language superfamily just like Indo-European where English
'wasp', French guêpe and Latin 'vespa' can all be traced back to a
Proto-Indo-European *Ueps- or something like that. Anyhow, that's my
take on it.
Take care! Prennez garde!
Bye! Au revoir!
Brennus :)
Jacques Guy
> A whole bunch of new inscriptions
> were found in the 1970's and 80's, some of them from the Seine River,
> I understand.
I have only Lambert's "La langue gauloise" to go by (1995 edition)
and I was struck by how little inscriptions there are.
> On the other hand, the Celtic languages, especially the
> Brythonic Celtic languages are full of them.
The modern languages. We do not really know what their
ancestors sounded like 2000 years ago. I vaguely
remember having read about Old Irish having three
consonant "colours": palatal (i-colour), neutral
(a-colour), velar (u-colour). I am not even sure about
the terms (palatal, neutral, velar). Such a phonological
substratum might nicely explain how 'bellus/m' -> [bjOw]
(still attested in Norman patois) -> modern Fr. [bo]
But that it could have happened that way is not
evidence that it did.
> While the nasal sounds
> in French could have come from some hayseed dialect of Vulgar Latin
I don't know what specialist in Latin say, but I have long
suspected that final -m was not [m], but marked the nasalization
of the preceding vowel, since in poetry ...Vm V... count for
one syllable only. But that is an opinion which I won't defend
until death, not even until death *exclusively*.
> When it gets right down to it, Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Malayan,
> Indonesian, Malagasy, Samoan, Maori, Hawaiian etc. all appear to be
> part of a larger Malayo-Polynesian superfamily.
Malagasy, Indonesian and Malaysian languages and dialects, Philipino,
Taiwanese (aboriginal Taiwanese), Fijian, [snip, snip snip snip],
Hawaiian are demonstrably members of a clear language family. Cambodian
less transparently so (it's full of diphthongs, BTW). Vietnamese I
wouldn't know. Thai, I am sure not. I have been through those
comparative word lists and I saw nothing demonstrable.
Brian M. Scott
<jg...@alphalink.com.au> wrote in
<news:4242...@news.alphalink.com.au> in sci.lang:
[...]
> I vaguely
> remember having read about Old Irish having three
> consonant "colours": palatal (i-colour), neutral
> (a-colour), velar (u-colour). I am not even sure about
> the terms (palatal, neutral, velar).
Yes, that's the standard description, e.g., à la Thurneysen.
They're basically the remains of lost vowels.
[...]
Brian
Brian M. Scott
<galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid> wrote in
<news:4242190f$3...@127.0.0.1> in sci.lang:
[...]
> Diphthongization is rare in Latin and usually only in
> Greek borrowings. On the other hand, the Celtic
> languages, especially the Brythonic Celtic languages are
> full of them. While the nasal sounds in French could have
> come from some hayseed dialect of Vulgar Latin, a Celtic
> origin is much more probable for them too.
There is the small problem that the low vowels, which are
the first to nasalize, begin to show nasalization only in
the 10th century.
> Welsh and Gaelic both have nasals. So, nasals are not
> extraneous to the Celtic languages.
Quite apart from the fact that the modern languages are
irrelevant to the question of a possible Celtic substrate in
French, the standard Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic
languages do not have nasal vowels.
[...]
Brian
sig...@binet.is
brennus wrote:
> 2) Icelandic has NOT changed considerably form Old Norse. It is so
> close to Old Norse that it still preserves Old Norse sounds like au,
> ð and þ unlike the Continental Scandanavian languages (Norwegian,
> Danish Swedish).
>
> 3) I point out that Icelanders had little contact with their kinsmen
> in northern Europe after about 1150 A.D. when the last colonists from
> Sweden and Norway arrived there. This means that no new influences
> from Norway & Sweden or from the Low German of the Hanseatic
> League reached Iceland. The few changes from Old Norse that Icelandic
> did undergo were done so in a virtual vacuum. That's all I'm saying.
Iceland was in steady and continous contact with mainland Europe after
1150 and the language was greatly influenced by and recieved many loan
words from both the Scandinavian languages and, via Hanseatic commerce,
Low German and other European languages. The language was so greatly
under foreign influence that it took a great effort by Icelandic
writers and others to clean up the language in the 19th century.
Also note that the majority of the Icelandic settlers did not come from
Norway/Sweden but from the British isles and Icelandic was also
influenced from the languages there.
brennus
Just a couple of comments but don't take them too personally. My
intent is not to irritate you but just to defend my academic views
on the subject.
First:
Re: <<Quite apart from the fact that the modern languages are
irrelevant to the question of a possible Celtic substrate in
French,>>
How did you arrive at this conclusion? Most words in French of Celtic
(Gaulish) origin have cognates in the modern Celtic languages: e.g
French boue 'mud' Welsh bawa; French ruche "beehive", Irish rusc
'bark'
Brton ruskenn "beehive"; blaireau "badger, 'Scots Gaelic blair "gray"
etc.
Secondly,
>>the standard Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic
languages do not have nasal vowels.>>
Maybe not vowels but consonants, yes. I know that nasal n's exist in
Gaelic and Breton. I still remember a statement by Richard Burton
about Welsh made in 1970 that "it can out nasalize French and
outgutteralize German."
Good day!
brennus
With all due respect, it is only a tiny fraction of words in Icelandic
that are foreign or foreign-influenced like penisillin "penicillin",
lamadyr "llama" and limonaði "lemonade". By and large it has remained
Old Norse. There are no traces of Irish, Saami or Finnish on the
Icelandic language even though some of the early Icelandic slave
population must have come from these nationalities. The Low-German of
the Hansa changed the texture and the lexicon of Danish, Swedish and
Norwegian radically, it even had a strong impact on Estonian and
Polabian (a Slavic language. However, its effects on Icelandic were
indeed minute and would have come by way of Danish.
I have read several histories on Iceland by Icelandic authors. While
there were some settlers from the Danish settlements in Ireland and
the Hebrides who came there, the bulk of the colonists appear to have
come from western Norway and the Swedish provinces of Skona and
Norland. They also appear to have been more peasant than Viking . The
port of Tronheim is where most of the Swedish colonists disembarked
for Iceland. While it is part of Norway today, it was kind of in
no-man's land until 1658 and both Swedes and Norwegians lived there.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> brennus wrote:
>
> > A whole bunch of new inscriptions
> > were found in the 1970's and 80's, some of them from the Seine River,
> > I understand.
>
> I have only Lambert's "La langue gauloise" to go by (1995 edition)
> and I was struck by how little inscriptions there are.
YOu also have Eska's extensive chapter in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of
the World's Ancient Languages, but we know you didn't bother to read it
before publishing a scurrilous and inaccurate review of the book.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Jacques,
>
> Hello,
>
> I subscribe to the Celtic substratum theory in French (and even Dutch
> for that matter) even though it would be nice if the Romans had left
> us records of how Gaulish actually sounded. Thanks to archeology,
> however, we know a lot more about Gaulish (Gallic) now than we did
> 250 years ago or even 40 years ago. A whole bunch of new inscriptions
> were found in the 1970's and 80's, some of them from the Seine River,
> I understand.
> Diphthongization is rare in Latin and usually only in Greek
> borrowings. On the other hand, the Celtic languages, especially the
> Brythonic Celtic languages are full of them. While the nasal sounds
> in French could have come from some hayseed dialect of Vulgar Latin,
> a Celtic origin is much more probable for them too. Welsh and Gaelic
> both have nasals. So, nasals are not extraneous to the Celtic
> languages.
>
> When it gets right down to it, Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Malayan,
> Indonesian, Malagasy, Samoan, Maori, Hawaiian etc. all appear to be
> part of a larger Malayo-Polynesian superfamily.
Malayo-Polynesian is the family that includes Malay (= Indonesian),
Malagasy, Samoan, Maori, and Hawaiian. It is the principal component of
Austronesian. Cambodian and Vietnamese are in the Mon-Khmer family,
which is one of the two components of Austroasiatic. Thai is in the
Tai-Kadai family. No one has satisfactorily demonstrated a historic
relationship among those three phyla, though there have been many
proposals linking them and others in various ways.
> I think that the fish
> example you gave is valid, but an even better word is the words for
> "eye" which are usually something like m@t or mata in these languages
> as in the name Mata Hari which means "Eye of the sun" in Indonesian.
> Of course, you won't find one-on-one correspondences for every word
> in all of these languages. Just random ones here and there throughout
> the whole language superfamily just like Indo-European where English
> 'wasp', French guępe and Latin 'vespa' can all be traced back to a
> Proto-Indo-European *Ueps- or something like that. Anyhow, that's my
> take on it.
Superficial similarity between words with similar meaning is a good
reason to suspect they are _not_ related by descent, but rather by
borrowing (or by chance).
Is 'wasp' a parallel to "war," which is not a cognate of "guerre," but
represents an early borrowing?
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in
<news:4242B1...@worldnet.att.net> in sci.lang:
> brennus wrote:
[...]
>> Of course, you won't find one-on-one correspondences for every word
>> in all of these languages. Just random ones here and there throughout
>> the whole language superfamily just like Indo-European where English
>> 'wasp', French guêpe and Latin 'vespa' can all be traced back to a
>> Proto-Indo-European *Ueps- or something like that. Anyhow, that's my
>> take on it.
> Superficial similarity between words with similar meaning is a good
> reason to suspect they are _not_ related by descent, but rather by
> borrowing (or by chance).
> Is 'wasp' a parallel to "war," which is not a cognate of "guerre," but
> represents an early borrowing?
<Wasp> is native, from OE <wæfs>, <wæps>, <wæsp>, with WGmc
cognates: OSax <uuepsia>, OHG <wafsa>, <wefsa> (though these
are feminine rather than masc. as in OE). It's not attested
in Gothic or in NGmc (except as a loan from Low German).
OFr <guespe> is from Latin <vespa>, but the <gu> looks like
the result of influence from Gmc.
Pokorny has Avestan <vawz^aka-> 'scorpion', MPers <vaBz>
'wasp', Baluchi <gwabz> 'bee, wasp'; OCorn <guhi-en> glossed
'vespa', MWelsh <gw(y)chi>, OBret <guohi> glossed 'fucos';
Lith <vapsvà>, OPruss <wobse> 'wasp'; OCS <osa> 'wasp'.
Brian
Miguel Carrasquer
>Is 'wasp' a parallel to "war," which is not a cognate of "guerre," but
>represents an early borrowing?
The cases are slightly different. English wasp, and the
Germanic word (*wab-it-, *wab-is- > *wäps-, *wäpt-) in
general, are cognate with Latin vespa (*wobh-sa:). In
French, guępe shows confusion between the native term (which
should have given *vępe) and the Frankish word (*wäps-,
*wäsp-).
English "war" is a native word meaning "confusion, turmoil"
(which is still the meaning of <war>, <ver-warr-ing> in e.g.
Dutch). It was borrowed in the technical meaning of
"battle, war" (as presumbaly used by German mercenaries)
into Vulgar Latin (g)werra > French guerre (= Norman werre).
Under the influence of the semantics of the Norman word, the
native English word shifted its meaning to mean "war".
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
m...@wxs.nl
sig...@binet.is
brennus wrote:
> Guest,
>
> With all due respect, it is only a tiny fraction of words in
Icelandic
> that are foreign or foreign-influenced like penisillin "penicillin",
> lamadyr "llama" and limonaði "lemonade". By and large it has
remained
> Old Norse. There are no traces of Irish, Saami or Finnish on the
> Icelandic language even though some of the early Icelandic slave
> population must have come from these nationalities. The Low-German of
> the Hansa changed the texture and the lexicon of Danish, Swedish and
> Norwegian radically, it even had a strong impact on Estonian and
> Polabian (a Slavic language. However, its effects on Icelandic were
> indeed minute and would have come by way of Danish.
Foreign or foreign influenced words in Icelandic runs in thousands and
many of them are of Low-German origin, brought to Iceland by traders
that traded with Iceland in the middle ages.
There is a number of words and place names in Iceland of
Gaelic(Irish/Scottish) origin reflecting the fact that a majority of
the settlers of Iceland came from the British isles.
> I have read several histories on Iceland by Icelandic authors. While
> there were some settlers from the Danish settlements in Ireland and
> the Hebrides who came there, the bulk of the colonists appear to have
> come from western Norway and the Swedish provinces of Skona and
> Norland. They also appear to have been more peasant than Viking . The
> port of Tronheim is where most of the Swedish colonists disembarked
> for Iceland. While it is part of Norway today, it was kind of in
> no-man's land until 1658 and both Swedes and Norwegians lived there.
> :)
I would advise you to take these accounts with whole bagfuls of salt,
most of the settlers of Iceland came from the British isles, some were
of Norwegian origin but had mixed with the population of the western
isles, northern Scotland or Ireland, others were totally of
Irish/Scottish origin.
The slaves were only a small part of the settlers and a number of them
were of Wendic and Finnish origin, further adding to the Icelandic
genetic mix.
The Trondheim region was Norwegian before the Swedish expansion in the
1600´s, indeed the Jämtland territory, nowadays part of Sweden was
Norwegian before 1600.
Sigvaldi Eggertsson
Iain
Brian M. Scott wrote:
> On 21 Mar 2005 11:31:08 -0800, Iain
> <iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote in
> <news:1111433468.8...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
> in sci.lang:
>
> > Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>
> >> galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid (brennus): in
sci.lang:
>
> >>>There is some evidence that accents in human languages can still
> >>>change without external influences.
>
> >> Whyever would they not?
>
> > Natural hi-fi imitation, of course. My question is about
> > *whether* accent change is about lo-fi imitation. Your
> > statement suggests someone is asking a silly question.
>
> Not precisely silly, but certainly indicating almost
> complete linguistic naiveté.
Linguistic naiveté? Horror upon horrors! Now is a good time to tell me
how you ken I'm wrang instead of claiming obviousness and argument by
authority (assuming you're some sort of professional linguist, as you
connote).
> If there is one universal
> characteristic of language, it's that it changes over time
> irrespective of circumstances.
How do we ken that when we have never indentified the innate dynamic
nature of language against circumstances -- or have we?
~Iain
Des Small
> Brian M. Scott wrote:
> > If there is one universal characteristic of language, it's that it
> > changes over time irrespective of circumstances.
>
> How do we ken that when we have never indentified the innate dynamic
> nature of language against circumstances -- or have we?
What is "indentified"?
The procedure Brian refers to is simple enough, though: take a bunch
of langwidges in a bunch of circumstances, and wait.
So far, all the ones with native speakers and documented histories
have changed.
Des
suspects a conspiracy
Peter T. Daniels
> How do we ken that when we have never indentified the innate dynamic
> nature of language against circumstances -- or have we?
Could you try writing in English?
Brian M. Scott
<galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid> wrote in
<news:42426d46$1...@127.0.0.1> in sci.lang:
[...]
> Re: <<Quite apart from the fact that the modern languages are
> irrelevant to the question of a possible Celtic substrate in
> French,>>
> How did you arrive at this conclusion? Most words in
> French of Celtic (Gaulish) origin have cognates in the
> modern Celtic languages:
Not in the usual sense of 'cognate'. What you mean is that
the Gaulish words that were borrowed have cognates in the
modern Celtic languages. Of course. What does that have to
do with the suggestion that Celtic substrate influence is
responsible for French nasalized vowels? (The lexical
influence, though rather small, is not in doubt.)
> e.g French boue 'mud' Welsh bawa;
The Welsh is <baw>.
>French ruche "beehive", Irish rusc 'bark'
Irish <rúsc>, actually. In this case *both* words go back
to borrowings: Old French <rusche> is from Low Latin
<rusca>, which in turn was borrowed from Gaulish, and the
Irish word is a borrowing from British (cf. Welsh <rhisg>),
according to the Dictionary of the Irish Language Based
Mainly on Old and Middle Irish Materials, RIA, 1983.
> Brton ruskenn "beehive"; blaireau
> "badger, 'Scots Gaelic blair "gray" etc.
French <blaireau>, OFr <blarel>, is from OFr <bler>,
<blaire> 'spotted, having a white spot on the head', and
there seems to be quite general agreement that this is a
borrowing of Frankish <bla:ri> (which I presume is cognate
with MLG <bla:re> 'paleness, pallor; pale cow'), possibly
confounded with a similar Gaulish word. I don't know of a
Sc. Gaelic word <blair>; are you sure that you don't mean
<blàr> 'having a white spot on the forehead', or perhaps
Welsh <blawr> 'grey'?
> Secondly,
>>>the standard Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic
> languages do not have nasal vowels.>>
> Maybe not vowels but consonants, yes.
So? The claim was to do with nasal *vowels*.
> I know that nasal n's exist in Gaelic and Breton.
What other kind of /n/ is there? And why look to the Celtic
languages for nasal consonants when Latin already had them?
[...]
brennus
Re:<blàr> 'having a white spot on the forehead', or perhaps
Welsh <blawr> 'grey'?
That's it. Blair is an alternate spelling. Maybe more of an anglicized
one also found in the present British prime minister's last name.
Brian M. Scott
<galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid> wrote in
<news:42434e3f$1...@127.0.0.1> in sci.lang:
> Brian,
> Re:<blàr> 'having a white spot on the forehead', or perhaps
> Welsh <blawr> 'grey'?
> That's it. Blair is an alternate spelling.
No, it isn't, but <blàire> is an inflected form of it.
> Maybe more of an anglicized one also found in the present
> British prime minister's last name.
Only very indirectly. The surname is most probably locative
in origin, from one of the various places <Blair->, though
that place-name element does appear to be from <blàr>.
Brian
brennus
A diacritical mark like an accent accute or accent grave usually
indicates that there was an i in the spelling at one time. In some
languages, scholars would later write it as a tiny diagonal line
above the preceding vowel. The same is true for the tilde ~ in
Spanish. It was once a letter j (maybe a y) but later it came to be
written over the n hence senjor>señor .
Scotland was allied with France in the hundered years war against
England. The Scottish court at that time even adopted a lot of French
customs. It is quite possible that French orthography influenced
Scottish Gaelic spelling shortly thereafter, although I'm not sure
.. just a hunch.
--- Brennus
Posted at: http://www.groupsrv.com
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Brian,
>
> A diacritical mark like an accent accute or accent grave usually
> indicates that there was an i in the spelling at one time. In some
Who told you that? It happens to be the origin of the German umlaut mark
(an e written over the letter), but that's not where most diacritics
came from.
> languages, scholars would later write it as a tiny diagonal line
> above the preceding vowel. The same is true for the tilde ~ in
> Spanish. It was once a letter j (maybe a y) but later it came to be
> written over the n hence senjor>señor .
>
> Scotland was allied with France in the hundered years war against
> England. The Scottish court at that time even adopted a lot of French
> customs. It is quite possible that French orthography influenced
> Scottish Gaelic spelling shortly thereafter, although I'm not sure
> .. just a hunch.
Miguel Carrasquer
galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid (brennus) wrote:
>The same is true for the tilde ~ in
>Spanish. It was once a letter j (maybe a y)
An <n>, in fact. For the same reason, tilde represents
nasalization in Portuguese.
>but later it came to be written over the n hence senjor>señor .
The origin is in words like anno > año. The use in señor <
senior is analogical.
Brian M. Scott
<galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid> wrote in
<news:42449...@127.0.0.1> in sci.lang:
> A diacritical mark like an accent accute or accent grave usually
> indicates that there was an i in the spelling at one time.
Hardly. In Icelandic the acute accent marks what were long
vowels; now <á> and <ó> are diphthongs [au] and [ou], and
<é> is [jE]. In Spanish the acute accent marks stress. In
Irish the acute accent is basically a length marker. In
Hungarian it's also a length marker. In none of these cases
does it mark the omission of a former <i> or anything else.
The French situation is more complicated. The grave has two
main uses, neither showing loss of a letter: in <à> ~ <a>,
<là> ~ <la>, and <où> ~ <ou> it distinguishes monosyllabic
homophones, and in <chèvre> and the like it signifies that
the <e> is open. The main use of the acute is to show that
an <e> is close (e.g., <énorme>. It can also indicate loss
of an earlier <s>, as in <écaille>, Old French <escale>.
Finally, the circumflex indicates loss of earlier <s>
(<être>, OFr <estre>), or the contraction of two vowels or
levelling of a diphthong (<âge>, OFr <eage>, <aage>). So
some French diacritical marks indicate that there was once
an <s> in the spelling, but not an <i>.
The German umlaut derives from an <e> written over the
letter, but this was just one of many ways of indicating an
umlauted vowel, so it can't really be said that the umlaut
stands for an <e> that was formerly present in the spelling.
> In some languages, scholars would later write it as a
> tiny diagonal line above the preceding vowel.
I cannot think of a single language in whose writing this is
the source of the acute or grave accent.
> The same is true for the tilde ~ in Spanish. It was once a
> letter j (maybe a y) but later it came to be written over
> the n hence senjor>señor .
This is very badly garbled. A tilde ('nasal stroke') placed
over the preceding letter was a common medieval abbreviation
for a nasal consonant, <n> or sometimes <m>; it continued in
at least occasional use in both French and English down
through the 16th century. E.g., de Bara's Le Blason des
Armoiries, published in 1582, has <quãt> for <quand>. It
could also be placed over a preceding consonant: the same
book has, for instance, <couroñes> for <couronnes>. Latin
NN became palatalized-n in Old Spanish, so that <anno> (from
Latin <annu(m)> was pronounced [año]. When the nasal stroke
was used, the word was spelled <año>, then purely as an
abbreviation of <anno>. The symbol <ñ> thus came to be
associated with the palatalized nasal and was subsequently
employed for it even when it did not originate from Latin
NN, as in <señor> from Latin <senior>, or <puño> from
<pugnu(m)>, or <viña> from <vi:nea>.
> Scotland was allied with France in the hundered years war
> against England. The Scottish court at that time even
> adopted a lot of French customs. It is quite possible
> that French orthography influenced Scottish Gaelic
> spelling shortly thereafter, although I'm not sure ..
> just a hunch.
It's not even remotely tenable. Sc.Gaelic orthography is
nothing like French orthography, but rather follows the same
basic principles as Irish orthography (though with some
differences in the details).
Ekkehard Dengler
"Ruud Harmsen" <realemail...@rudhar.com.invalid> schrieb im
Newsbeitrag news:19v341hka67ah5td5...@4ax.com...
> Wed, 23 Mar 2005 23:32:51 +0100: "Ekkehard Dengler"
> <ED...@t-online.de>: in sci.lang:
>
> >> >Why, that Icelandic "au", Dutch "ui", is exactly French "oeil" (eye)!
> >>
> >> Almost exactly, yes. The Dutch diphthong ends (and begins) rounded and
> >> not fully front, the French diphthong ends unrounded and front.
> >
> >The "town" diphthong in Belfast English is very similar, too.
>
> No, I think that one is different yet again, very similar to the
> Australian and New-Zealand sound in "tone":
> From mid central unrounded to close central rounded.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. Admittedly, "*the* 'town'
diphthong in Belfast English" was a gross oversimplification since the
English spoken in Belfast is extremely heterogeneous. I believe, however,
that what you describe is a relatively moderate general Ulster pronunciation
rather than a peculiarity of the Belfast accent.
According to Wells ("Accents of English"), the second element of the "town"
diphthong in Belfast speech can range from a close central rounded or
unrounded vowel to [y]. He goes on to say "often with little or no
rounding", which I take to mean that even [i] is a possible realisation.
The first element is equally variable: Wells describes typical middle-class
realisations as ranging between cardinal vowels 5 and 6, but observes that
centralised [E] and "even fronter" realisations may occur in working-class
speech. Although he doesn't mention any non-back rounded vowels, I think the
implied continuum is likely to include rounded schwa, which would perhaps
explain why the diphthongs in "feuille" and "uige" remind me of a Belfast
pronunciation of "town".
At any rate, Wells remarks that "the result can suggest [the] 'price'
[diphthong] rather than [the] 'mouth' [diphthong] to the English ear". This
is true, but I've got the feeling that extreme working-class variants are
just as likely to suggest the RP "face" diphthong.
Regards,
Ekkehard
António Marques
>>How did you arrive at this conclusion? Most words in
>>French of Celtic (Gaulish) origin have cognates in the
>>modern Celtic languages:
>
> Not in the usual sense of 'cognate'. What you mean is that
> the Gaulish words that were borrowed have cognates in the
> modern Celtic languages.
In fact it seems like a particular case - words that survived a
language shift (and this is only valid for those places where there
was a gaulish > latin shift).
For instance, is southern french _peguer_, from occitan _pegar_, not
cognate with portuguese _pegar_ 'to stick' (the oc. obviously is)?
--
António Marques
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. Even if it erases
your hard drive, too bad. Although we did fix that bug from the last
release.
-- README from a long-ago release of DJGPP
Ruud Harmsen
sci.lang:
>On 25 Mar 2005 17:33:23 -0600,
>galaxy...@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid (brennus) wrote:
>
>>The same is true for the tilde ~ in
>>Spanish. It was once a letter j (maybe a y)
>
>An <n>, in fact. For the same reason, tilde represents
>nasalization in Portuguese.
True. An example can be seen in this 1572 edition of Camões' Lusíadas:
http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/GT_toc.html
http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/Geral/P_P79.html
where "cuidãdo" (cuidando in modern editions) rhymes with
"declarando". So it was often done, but inconsistently.
There are many other differences between this text and the modern
spelling, like in
http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/Geral/p_P84.html
where forão is used for what is nowadays written foram. That means
accentuation rules were different too.
See also: http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/Geral/p_P02.html where the name
now written Gonçalves is written Gõçalues.
http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/Geral/p_P03.html
fourth line: "hu~a" for what is now "uma".
23rd line: cõ for com.
etc. etc.
Ruud Harmsen
<realemail...@rudhar.com.invalid>: in sci.lang:
>True. An example can be seen in this 1572 edition of Camões' Lusíadas:
>http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/GT_toc.html
>http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/Geral/P_P79.html
>where "cuidãdo" (cuidando in modern editions) rhymes with
>"declarando". So it was often done, but inconsistently.
It's also interesting to see, in the last line of
http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/Geral/p_P186.html
that the word for "so, thus", in modern Portuguese "assim", then still
"assi" (cognate with Spanish así), was written with what looks very
much like a German "scharfes s", as a result of combining a "long" s
and a normal s. The German letter is often thought as coming from a
Gothic s+z, but this background is also possible.
Brian M. Scott
<realemail...@rudhar.com.invalid> wrote in
<news:41qb4114fqa866f6i...@4ax.com> in
sci.lang:
[...]
> It's also interesting to see, in the last line of
> http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/Geral/p_P186.html
> that the word for "so, thus", in modern Portuguese "assim", then still
> "assi" (cognate with Spanish así), was written with what looks very
> much like a German "scharfes s", as a result of combining a "long" s
> and a normal s. The German letter is often thought as coming from a
> Gothic s+z, but this background is also possible.
Apparently not:
<http://groups-beta.google.com/group/sci.lang/msg/ab66e177e88533ba>
Brian
Iain
I'm not talking about language change, but accent specifically. If
language never changed, nor everything we normally associate with
bringing about accent change such as internal migration, immigration,
differing media standards, social restructuring, etc, etc, to what
extent would accent change?
~Iain
Nathan Sanders
"Iain" <iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not talking about language change, but accent specifically. If
> language never changed, nor everything we normally associate with
> bringing about accent change such as internal migration, immigration,
> differing media standards, social restructuring, etc, etc, to what
> extent would accent change?
None at all.
Accent is a component of lannguauge, and if the language doesn't
change, then no piece of it changes, and thus, accent wouldn't change.
This seems intuitively obvious, so maybe you aren't asking the right
question...
Languages change spontaneously because they are inherently unstable
entities. There doesn't have to be a social factor to condition
language change; it just happens.
Nathan
--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program nsan...@wso.williams.edu
Williams College http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders
Williamstown, MA 01267
Iain
Nathan Sanders wrote:
> In article <1112027505.0...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
> "Iain" <iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm not talking about language change, but accent specifically. If
> > language never changed, nor everything we normally associate with
> > bringing about accent change such as internal migration,
immigration,
> > differing media standards, social restructuring, etc, etc, to what
> > extent would accent change?
>
> None at all.
>
> Accent is a component of lannguauge, and if the language doesn't
> change, then no piece of it changes, and thus, accent wouldn't
change.
>
Maybe I lack the vocabulary -- but consider then that the sound of
phonemes can differ in two different areas, whilst their identity can
be shared. The set of phoneme identities is what I mean by "language"
and their sounds and emphases is what I mean by "accent". E.g. Whether
you are Australian xor Scottish, "get" rhymes with "wet", although
Scottish "wet" doesn't sound like the Australian one.
So, having established what I mean, does accent change intrinsically or
is it entirely because of external factors(external to the act of
flawed imitation)?
~Iain
Peter T. Daniels
I think maybe what Iain isn't grasping is that wherever there is
variation in language, one or the other or both of the varieties have
changed.
Languages change automatically. The transmission of language from one
generation to the next is not perfect; one part of a speech community
can be influenced by influences that don't reach other parts of the
speech community. Even in complete isolation, with no influences from
anywhere, the language changes, and the slightest inhomogeneity in the
society involved can be reflected is speech differences that help mark
that inhomogeneity.
António Marques
> There are many other differences between this text and the modern
> spelling, like in
> http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/Geral/p_P84.html
> where forão is used for what is nowadays written foram. That means
> accentuation rules were different too.
> See also: http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/Geral/p_P02.html where the name
> now written Gonçalves is written Gõçalues.
Orthography has never stopped to change, but most basic principles
have remained the same, more or less as in English since Shakespeare.
The last great reform was in 1911 and fundamentally set a framework
that can't be easily changed (very little is arbitrary):
1. 100% etymological - but yet,
2. all unnecessary duplicates discarded, so for instance any <k> or
<y> just becomes <c/qu> or <i>
3. no unnecessary diacritical marks allowed
Compared to that, previous standards were full of arbitrary decisions
(now you need a ´, now you don't, now [z] from -s- is <z>, now it's
not...).
> http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/Geral/p_P03.html
> fourth line: "hu~a" for what is now "uma".
To this day 'u~a' in galician (written <unha>, which the ILG will
insist sounds like german *unge) and some rural portuguese. It's
probably the only thing that gets spelt differently (as u~a) in modern
renderings of the texts.
--
António Marques
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are crunchy and good
with ketchup.
-- Aleister Crowley
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Other notes (still a lot of catch-up to do)...
>
> > There are many other differences between this text and the modern
> > spelling, like in
> > http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/Geral/p_P84.html
> > where forão is used for what is nowadays written foram. That means
> > accentuation rules were different too.
> > See also: http://purl.pt/1/html/Cinza5/Geral/p_P02.html where the name
> > now written Gonçalves is written Gõçalues.
>
> Orthography has never stopped to change, but most basic principles
> have remained the same, more or less as in English since Shakespeare.
Since Johnson's Dictionary (beginning in 1755, well over a century after
Shakespeare's death). (Try to find a facsimile edition of the First
Folio [1623] or the King James Bible [1611].)
> The last great [Portuguese] reform was in 1911 and fundamentally set a
> framework that can't be easily changed (very little is arbitrary):
Nathan Sanders
"Iain" <iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Nathan Sanders wrote:
> > In article <1112027505.0...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
> > "Iain" <iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I'm not talking about language change, but accent specifically. If
> > > language never changed, nor everything we normally associate with
> > > bringing about accent change such as internal migration,
> immigration,
> > > differing media standards, social restructuring, etc, etc, to what
> > > extent would accent change?
> >
> > None at all.
> >
> > Accent is a component of lannguauge, and if the language doesn't
> > change, then no piece of it changes, and thus, accent wouldn't
> > change.
>
> Maybe I lack the vocabulary -- but consider then that the sound of
> phonemes can differ in two different areas, whilst their identity can
> be shared. The set of phoneme identities is what I mean by "language"
> and their sounds and emphases is what I mean by "accent".
Ah, I see what you're asking now. If you define the language only as
the set of phonemes, then yes, it's possible for the accent (the
pronunciation) to change without the language itself (the phonemes)
changing, and yes, such accent change can happen spontaneously,
without any external impetus at all.
However, linguists traditionally define languages not only by their
abstract underlying properties (phonemes, lexicon), but also by their
measurable surface properties (pronunciation, word order).
*Every* aspect of a language---whether it's underlying or at the
surface---is vulnerable to spontaneous, purely internal change, so
it's usually not necessary to make a distinction between the two
levels when talking about language change.
Iain
How would a traditional linguist view the role of text in all this? I
always disagreed with people who merely see written English as a lo-fi
misrepresentation of spoken English. To a somewhat deaf person like
myself, who once could hear and whose inner monologue is maybe
fading(although it's hard to tell), written English is a visual
language with no warts and a logical correspondance with meaning.
Although language is an innately vocal instinct, wouldn't you say these
intincts have been successfully transferred to the much more hi-fi and
design friendly world of text, and that it is having a prescriptive
effect upon the spoken word, such as the reappearence of the /t/ in
"often" coinciding with increased literacy? Isn't text the real medium
for standardisation? Cannot spoken English be construed as a lo-fi
misrepresentation of text?
Will the word "byte" (an acronym) ever change in pronunciation other
than accent(accent being what I defined above)? If not, isn't that
evidence for my above point? What about "aids"?
~Iain
Ruud Harmsen
sci.lang:
>How would a traditional linguist view the role of text in all this? I
>always disagreed with people who merely see written English as a lo-fi
>misrepresentation of spoken English. To a somewhat deaf person like
>myself, who once could hear and whose inner monologue is maybe
>fading(although it's hard to tell), written English is a visual
>language with no warts and a logical correspondance with meaning.
To me too. In English and in my native Dutch. I /can/ mentally or
physically pronounce the words while reading, but I often don't, and
it doesn't make comprehension harder, perhaps even easier, because the
brain has fewer tasks to accomplish at the same time.
In a language I know less well, say Portuguese, I find that
pronouncing while reading really hinders the comprehension process,
instead of helping it. Visually reading and understanding is easier.
>Although language is an innately vocal instinct, wouldn't you say these
>intincts have been successfully transferred to the much more hi-fi and
>design friendly world of text, and that it is having a prescriptive
>effect upon the spoken word, such as the reappearence of the /t/ in
>"often" coinciding with increased literacy? Isn't text the real medium
>for standardisation? Cannot spoken English be construed as a lo-fi
>misrepresentation of text?
I think spoken and written languages are two separate entities, each
in its own right. They are strongly related and intertwined of course,
but both can exist without the other independently. And even where
they exist in conjunction, they each have their own peculiartities and
characteristics. I think it is a mistake to regard either as THE
language, and the other as a derived entity.
In classic times the written language was often seen as most
important, but modern lingists make the same mistake in the other
direction.
Iain
Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> 29 Mar 2005 02:45:16 -0800: "Iain" <iain_i...@hotmail.com>: in
> sci.lang:
>
> >How would a traditional linguist view the role of text in all this?
I
> >always disagreed with people who merely see written English as a
lo-fi
> >misrepresentation of spoken English. To a somewhat deaf person like
> >myself, who once could hear and whose inner monologue is maybe
> >fading(although it's hard to tell), written English is a visual
> >language with no warts and a logical correspondance with meaning.
>
> To me too. In English and in my native Dutch.
As a Scot, I can pick up Dutch fairly easily. The Dutch words for "now"
and "know" are the same as the Scots dialect ones(aurally).
Are you sure one is not more derived from the other than the other?
Standard Written English has scarcely evolved at all since it ended its
function as a method of medieval sound recording, but spoken English
hath.
Don't you think that if Standard Written English didn't exist, spoken
English would have evolved further beyond recognition? Or perhaps the
"recognition" in question is provided by writing.
Writing is an axiom reminder than the /t/ sound at the end of "chased"
has the same semantic function as a written "-ed" -- our mental image
of the "-ed" distinguishes "chased" from "chaste" in our minds.
I always feel, when listening to linguists, that they underestimate how
integral text is to spoken English. Even an illiterate person may be
speaking a language kept in check by writing, via school curricula,
publishers, etc.
> In classic times the written language was often seen as most
> important, but modern lingists make the same mistake in the other
> direction.
By "classical times" do you mean millenia ago? What evidence do you
have for that attitude? Wasn't it Plato who said we ken how to read
once we've learnt the alphabet?
~Iain
Peter T. Daniels
> Standard Written English has scarcely evolved at all since it ended its
> function as a method of medieval sound recording, but spoken English
> hath.
You are mistaken, sir.
> Don't you think that if Standard Written English didn't exist, spoken
> English would have evolved further beyond recognition? Or perhaps the
> "recognition" in question is provided by writing.
>
> Writing is an axiom reminder than the /t/ sound at the end of "chased"
> has the same semantic function as a written "-ed" -- our mental image
> of the "-ed" distinguishes "chased" from "chaste" in our minds.
And the millions of illiterate English-speakers aren't aware of that?
> I always feel, when listening to linguists, that they underestimate how
> integral text is to spoken English. Even an illiterate person may be
> speaking a language kept in check by writing, via school curricula,
> publishers, etc.
You are mistaken, sir.
> > In classic times the written language was often seen as most
> > important, but modern lingists make the same mistake in the other
> > direction.
>
> By "classical times" do you mean millenia ago? What evidence do you
> have for that attitude? Wasn't it Plato who said we ken how to read
> once we've learnt the alphabet?
It was Plato (or Socrates) who was deeply suspicious of written
language, saying that it would destroy the art of memory.
And check the etymology of <millennium>.
Nathan Sanders
"Iain" <iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Don't you think that if Standard Written English didn't exist, spoken
> English would have evolved further beyond recognition? Or perhaps the
> "recognition" in question is provided by writing.
This is a common gut intuition. Like many gut intuitions, it's wrong,
but understandable.
The short explanation is that all speakers learn to speak before they
learn how to read (if they ever learn how to read), and their spoken
language is basically already set by the time they learn to read.
Literacy only makes minor random changes in a speaker's spoken
language (hyperarticulation, spelling pronunciations, etc.), not the
kind of major systematic changes needed to keep the spoken language
wedded to the written language.
Just look at Chinese, which has a writing system in use by different
spoken varieties of the language (to some extent; like English, the
written language varies), some of which (e.g. Cantonese and Mandarin)
are not mutually intelligible. (I believe Arabic is in a similar
situation, but I don't know which varieties are not mutually
intelligible. I'd guess a pair like Moroccan and Lebanese.)
English hasn't reached that point yet (though I bet a Scotsman and a
Mississippian would have a hell of time having a conversation), but
it's on its way.
> Writing is an axiom reminder than the /t/ sound at the end of "chased"
> has the same semantic function as a written "-ed" -- our mental image
> of the "-ed" distinguishes "chased" from "chaste" in our minds.
And writing used to be a reminder that the "e" in "peek" and in "peck"
were pronounced essentially the same, differing only in length ([e:]
and [e]). Now, the two vowels have a completely different
pronunciation from each other ([i] and [E]), and in the US, they are
changing even more in the Northern Cities ([i] and [@]) and in the
South ([@I] and [e@]).
The spelling hasn't hindered these changes at all, nor has it hindered
any of the changes that distinguish other English dialects:
r-dropping, low back vowel merger, loss of interdentals, mergers of
various vowels before nasals or liquids, debuccalization of
glottalized stops, etc.
> I always feel, when listening to linguists, that they underestimate how
> integral text is to spoken English. Even an illiterate person may be
> speaking a language kept in check by writing, via school curricula,
> publishers, etc.
Intuitively, it seems like writing (and mass media in general) should
keep speech in check. But all evidence shows that literacy and mass
media have little or no systematric impact on the spoken language.
Linguists aren't underestimating anything here---they've done the
work, and all of the data point to the opposite conclusion that
conventional wisdom has come up with.
This isn't a new phenomenon in science. Conventional wisdom used to
tell us that the earth was flat (just look at it---how can this flat
surface not be flat!) and that heavier objects fell faster than
lighter objects.
And don't even think about rotational mechanics... that stuff makes no
sense at all to the layman!
Brian M. Scott
<iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote in
<news:1112108011.9...@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
[...]
> Standard Written English has scarcely evolved at all since
> it ended its function as a method of medieval sound
> recording, but spoken English hath.
This is false. Standard written English has changed
noticeably in my reading lifetime (~50 years) and enormously
in the last 400 years, say. For instance, the everyday
passive progressive construction -- 'The house is being
built' -- is a major innovation of the last 250 years or so.
As recently as the mid-18th century that sentence was
impossible: the passive progressive only arose in the late
18th century (and was condemned at the time). But never
mind detailed analysis of the differences; just look at
Early Modern texts. For instance:
The several Climates of the World, have influenced
the Inhabitants with Natures very different from one
another. And their several speeches bear some
proportion of Analogy with their Natures. The
Spanish and the Spaniard both are Grave, the Italian
and th' Italians Amourous, the Dutch as boisterous
as the Germans, and the French as light as they
themselves are. But the moderate Clime of England
has indifferently temper'd us as to both: and what
excess there is in either, must be attributed to the
accession of something Foreign.
Even getting rid of the old-fashioned capitalization and
replacing <th'> by <the> and <termper'd> by <tempered>
wouldn't obscure the obvious fact that this is not the
standard written English of today, or even of the 20th
century. (It's from 1676.)
> Don't you think that if Standard Written English didn't
> exist, spoken English would have evolved further beyond
> recognition? [...]
No. Sometimes linguistic change is very rapid, sometimes
it's quite slow, and so far as I'm aware, no one has
demonstrated any connection with writing.
> Writing is an axiom reminder than the /t/ sound at the end
> of "chased" has the same semantic function as a written
> "-ed" -- our mental image of the "-ed" distinguishes
> "chased" from "chaste" in our minds.
No, the context does that.
> I always feel, when listening to linguists, that they
> underestimate how integral text is to spoken English.
> Even an illiterate person may be speaking a language kept
> in check by writing, via school curricula, publishers,
> etc.
Standard English spelling was designed for a pronunciation
profoundly different from that of any modern English
variety; it hasn't kept pronunciation from continuing to
change, any more than it's kept syntax from changing.
[...]
Brian
Ruud Harmsen
sci.lang:
>Don't you think that if Standard Written English didn't exist, spoken
>English would have evolved further beyond recognition?
I doubt it. Just this last week I found examples of texts 400 or 500
years old, in Dutch and Portuguese, that have changed very little, and
are still comprehensible. A large proportion of those periods the
majority of these language communities were illiterate. So I think the
influence of the written language on the spoken language has been very
limited, and it hasn't slowed change. Change is slow with or without
written language.
>Or perhaps the
>"recognition" in question is provided by writing.
Possibly. Now, but not in the recent past.
>Writing is an axiom reminder than the /t/ sound at the end of "chased"
>has the same semantic function as a written "-ed" -- our mental image
>of the "-ed" distinguishes "chased" from "chaste" in our minds.
In the mind of those who can read, yes. Until recently, they were a
small minority.
Iain
Not true :-) After the changes you mention, the above is merely one
comma short of passing the Microsoft grammar check(don't knock it!). I
suspect Bill Gates would give Bill Shakespear 8 out of 10 for grammar
if he didn't use a poetic layout.
Another test: No modern schoolteacher would criticise the grammer,
except for the "And...".
Seriously though, you are confusing style with language(actual code) a
wee bit here.
The above passage is actually what I meant by "scarcely changed", esp.
compared to the sound of that century.
> > Don't you think that if Standard Written English didn't
> > exist, spoken English would have evolved further beyond
> > recognition? [...]
>
> No. Sometimes linguistic change is very rapid, sometimes
> it's quite slow, and so far as I'm aware, no one has
> demonstrated any connection with writing.
Well the word "often" is supposed to be one example cited by linguists.
> > Writing is an axiom reminder than the /t/ sound at the end
> > of "chased" has the same semantic function as a written
> > "-ed" -- our mental image of the "-ed" distinguishes
> > "chased" from "chaste" in our minds.
>
> No, the context does that.
>
> > I always feel, when listening to linguists, that they
> > underestimate how integral text is to spoken English.
> > Even an illiterate person may be speaking a language kept
> > in check by writing, via school curricula, publishers,
> > etc.
>
> Standard English spelling was designed for a pronunciation
> profoundly different from that of any modern English
> variety;
Ah yes, that mid-Atlantic, Cornish-Cockney, shwaless sound?
Pronunciation has certainly changed from that, but the MORphemes of old
twin fairly well with the PHOnemes of new, and the morphemes are
_virttualie_ the same for centuries.
Note that although Standard English spelling was designed for a
particular pronunciation now extinct, it wasn't even phonetic at the
point of invention. Few\no Elizabethan Englishmen, AFAIK, said a /t/ in
"invention".
Remember that a language can theoretically change its sound completely
without losing a correspondance to a fixed text -- e.g. In the future,
all /s/ sounds before /y/ sounds may(for example) sound like /sh/, but
its connection with writing can still be traced to a rule(that Ss
before Us sounds like /sh/), as in "sugar" from /syoogar/, no more
complex than G before E being /j/ , etc.
Besides, doesn't it stand to reason that English maybe is becoming more
retained? Schoolchildren are exposed to 19th century corpora, all their
schoolbooks and exams follow the same set of Standard English rules,
like legislation. Difference? More schoolchildren now.
Also, there are words in our beloved language that seem as if they were
formulated on paper first, and then given a pronunciation afterwards,
such as "aids".
My humble suggestion is this: No doubt, the pronunciation of "aids"
shall change, but it will retain some connection via rules, to the
letters A.I.D.S. I believe this won't be restricted to acronyms. I
suppose that's just a guess.
So even if it sounds like "EEPL", "EEPL" is likely to be spelt:
A.I.D.S, and there will be a logical connection.
> it hasn't kept pronunciation from continuing to
> change,
I don't think text stops pronunciation from changing; I just suspect it
retains a sort of logical, cyclic change, in which "sci" will never
vanish utterly from "unconcious".
>any more than it's kept syntax from changing.
Hmm, again I think you mean style more than anything else.
~Iain
Brian M. Scott
<iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote in
<news:1112126472.3...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
> Brian M. Scott wrote:
>> [...]
Knock it? I consider it almost completely irrelevant.
[...]
> Another test: No modern schoolteacher would criticise the
> grammer,
No modern schoolteacher who would write 'grammer', perhaps!
> except for the "And...".
A modern schoolteacher who knew what he was doing would
strike the first and last commas: they're both incorrect in
modern standard written English. A good many modern
schoolteachers would be unfamiliar with this use of
'indifferently'. The expression 'bear some proportion of
analogy' is pretty nearly unusable in modern standard
written English. 'Clime' is obsolescent if not actually
obsolete. And the passage as a whole is instantly
recognizable as pre-modern by anyone not cursed with a tin
ear for the written language.
> Seriously though, you are confusing style with
> language(actual code) a wee bit here.
No. The passage that I quoted -- and it is by no means an
extreme example -- is not acceptable in modern standard
written English: it could be written today *only* in a
deliberate attempt to imitate an earlier state of the
language. Much of what you appear to mean by 'style' is
actually part of how the language can be used.
> The above passage is actually what I meant by "scarcely
> changed", esp. compared to the sound of that century.
Then you have a very peculiar notion of 'scarcely changed',
or you have very little feel for language, or you confuse 'I
can understand it' with 'It's acceptable standard modern
written English'.
>>> Don't you think that if Standard Written English didn't
>>> exist, spoken English would have evolved further beyond
>>> recognition? [...]
>> No. Sometimes linguistic change is very rapid, sometimes
>> it's quite slow, and so far as I'm aware, no one has
>> demonstrated any connection with writing.
> Well the word "often" is supposed to be one example cited
> by linguists.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Example of
*what*?
[...]
>> Standard English spelling was designed for a pronunciation
>> profoundly different from that of any modern English
>> variety;
> Ah yes, that mid-Atlantic, Cornish-Cockney, shwaless sound?
Don't be ridiculous. Modern spelling most nearly represents
late Middle English pronunciation. ('Cornish-Cockney'?!
WTF is that supposed to mean?)
> Pronunciation has certainly changed from that, but the
> MORphemes of old twin fairly well with the PHOnemes of
> new,
This is nonsense; please don't try to use technical
terminology that you don't understand.
[...]
> Besides, doesn't it stand to reason that English maybe is
> becoming more retained?
'Stands to reason' comes in a poor second to the evidence,
which, as Nathan noted, shows no systematic impact of
literacy and mass media on the spoken language.
> Schoolchildren are exposed to 19th century corpora, all
> their schoolbooks and exams follow the same set of
> Standard English rules, like legislation.
The same set of rules as what? Certainly not the same set
of rules as students in the 19th century.
[...]
> Also, there are words in our beloved language that seem
> as if they were formulated on paper first, and then given
> a pronunciation afterwards, such as "aids".
Sure, there are a few acronyms. So what? They're a minute
part of the language.
[...]
>>any more than it's kept syntax from changing.
> Hmm, again I think you mean style more than anything else.
I meant syntax.
Brian
Peter T. Daniels
> Remember that a language can theoretically change its sound completely
> without losing a correspondance to a fixed text -- e.g. In the future,
> all /s/ sounds before /y/ sounds may(for example) sound like /sh/, but
> its connection with writing can still be traced to a rule(that Ss
> before Us sounds like /sh/), as in "sugar" from /syoogar/, no more
> complex than G before E being /j/ , etc.
?? You're really not allowed to make stuff up out of whole cloth.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> On 29 Mar 2005 12:01:12 -0800, Iain
> <iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote in
> <news:1112126472.3...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>
> in sci.lang:
>
> > Brian M. Scott wrote:
> >> Standard English spelling was designed for a pronunciation
> >> profoundly different from that of any modern English
> >> variety;
>
> > Ah yes, that mid-Atlantic, Cornish-Cockney, shwaless sound?
>
> Don't be ridiculous. Modern spelling most nearly represents
> late Middle English pronunciation. ('Cornish-Cockney'?!
> WTF is that supposed to mean?)
Wasn't it Iain who showed up recently with the claim that English
doesn't have any shwas?
Iain
Well ok.
I think you're missing my point.
-- Written English has changed less in the last 400 years than spoken
English has.
-- Words that do not sound like they did in the past, nonetheless are
often spelt like they were in the past.
-- These modern sounds, can, nonetheless, in most or many cases, be
mapped almost consistantly using alternative rules, to the old,
unchanged spelling. So, the L in "themselves" in your 17th century
passage can now be said as a dark L instead of the plainer L probably
used by the writer, but it nonetheless corresponds to a printed L.
-- My "get" doesn't rhyme with Shakespeare's "get", but "wet" and "get"
rhymed to me as much as they rhymed to Shakespeare. I know this doesn't
owe itself to writing, but what about more complex words? With no other
accents about, would Southern English people consider changing "For" to
"Fau"? I don't think they would, because their awareness of the R is
made known when they say "For it". Does at least the notion of letters
have a hand in this? Might not this trend continue, so that no matter
how "get" and "wet" sound, they will always rhyme in the classroom, for
as long as they are spelt the same?
A case against this would be "ou" in "pour", "you", and "house". IIRC
"Enough" was messed up long before the Early modern period.
On a similar topic...
Here in Britain, Dove, a beauty products company, is running a poster
campaign named The Campaign for Real Beauty. It employs various posters
showing various unconventional styles of beauty, using alliterations in
the captions. One picture is of a fattish brunette. The caption for it
is: "Fat? [tick box] Fabulous? [tick box]". Another is of a silver
haired woman who is nonetheless pleasing to the eye. Its caption is
"Grey? [tick box] Gorgeous? [tick box]". There are at least another
couple of posters with such alliterations.
One poster is of a very old negro woman with short hair and a big
smile. The caption is "Wrinkled? [tick box] Wonderful? [tick box]". The
graphic designer obviously thought it was natural that two initial Ws
would have the same benefit as an audible alliteration. This lead me to
question whether there was a /W/ sound in my inner monologue's instance
of the word "wrinkled", and whether text is integral to the psychology
of language. Does text hijack a sort of stead or function of the mind
oftener inhabited by speech? I get the feeling that our psychology
recognises "'rinkled" as a tongue-friendly version of "wrinkled", but
nonetheless makes no effort to say a W. Can similar be said of the
varying pronunciations of "issue" and "policeman"?
> or you have very little feel for language, or you confuse 'I
> can understand it' with 'It's acceptable standard modern
> written English'.
>
> >>> Don't you think that if Standard Written English didn't
> >>> exist, spoken English would have evolved further beyond
> >>> recognition? [...]
>
> >> No. Sometimes linguistic change is very rapid, sometimes
> >> it's quite slow, and so far as I'm aware, no one has
> >> demonstrated any connection with writing.
>
> > Well the word "often" is supposed to be one example cited
> > by linguists.
>
> I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Example of
> *what*?
Of increased literacy affecting what is considered correct
pronunciation. In early 19th century Britain a /T/ in "often" sounded
odd, wheras now it isn't, even if it isn't the most common.
> [...]
>
> >> Standard English spelling was designed for a pronunciation
> >> profoundly different from that of any modern English
> >> variety;
>
> > Ah yes, that mid-Atlantic, Cornish-Cockney, shwaless sound?
>
> Don't be ridiculous. Modern spelling most nearly represents
> late Middle English pronunciation. ('Cornish-Cockney'?!
> WTF is that supposed to mean?)
Well that's how Early Modern sounds to me -- Miscellaneous British
Isles in the South East, and more mid-Atlantic elsewhere.
~Iain
Iain
Shwas feature in speech but they aren't part of the code(language) as
such -- A Scot says a shwa where someone else doesn't, etc.
~Iain
Peter T. Daniels
We'd appreciate seeing your phonemic analysis of English that manages to
do without shwa.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Does at least the notion of letters
> have a hand in this? Might not this trend continue, so that no matter
> how "get" and "wet" sound, they will always rhyme in the classroom, for
> as long as they are spelt the same?
"Get" and "wet" will (probably) continue to rhyme as long as there is an
English language -- not because of their spelling, but because sound
changes apply uniformly. "Sweat" and "threat" and "layette" will also
continue to rhyme with them and each other for all time as well.
Iain
Well of course shwa features as a sound in English -- that's obvious --
but not uniformly placed like other vowels tend to be, which sets it
apart.
I'll clarify. In a pronunciation dictionary, "get" only has one
pronunciation. However, the vowel sound in "get" sounds different
worldwide but everyone says it the same way they do in "pet", which is
why it only deserves one pronunciation in the dictionary. The
dictionary is basically saying "just say pet so that it rhymes with
get, however you say it".
But "girl" and "curl" don't rhyme when I say them. "world" and
"twirled" don't rhyme when I say them. "Early" has no shwa for me. Even
"Entrepreneur" has no shwa for me. "Policeman" _does_ have a shwa for
me, but if I'm asked to say the word slowly it'd come out as an /A/.
Shwa isn't a propor stead like the middle of "get".
Do you see what I'm getting at?
~Iain
Iain
What is your opinion on the "ghost" R in SE English "for"? The notion
of the R must be there when they are saying it, because they say it
when they say "for all time". They identify the two
pronunciations("fau" and "for") as the same word.
Is there a name for this?
~Iain
Mikael Thompson
> Iain wrote:
>
>> Does at least the notion of letters
>>have a hand in this? Might not this trend continue, so that no matter
>>how "get" and "wet" sound, they will always rhyme in the classroom, for
>>as long as they are spelt the same?
>
> "Get" and "wet" will (probably) continue to rhyme as long as there is an
> English language -- not because of their spelling, but because sound
> changes apply uniformly.
Big if though: Unless there are sound changes conditioned by the
preceding consonant. MAT
John Atkinson
"Iain" <iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote...
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >
> > "Get" and "wet" will (probably) continue to rhyme as long as there
is
> an
> > English language -- not because of their spelling, but because sound
> > changes apply uniformly. "Sweat" and "threat" and "layette" will
also
> > continue to rhyme with them and each other for all time as well.
As for "layette", I suspect it's just about stopped rhyming with
anything. I know there's such a word (I just checked, it's in the
dictionary), but does anyone today actually use it?
> What is your opinion on the "ghost" R in SE English "for"? The notion
> of the R must be there when they are saying it, because they say it
> when they say "for all time".
And equally, a notion of an R must be there when we say "Saw all the
wood", because we say it.
> They identify the two
> pronunciations("fau" and "for") as the same word.
>
> Is there a name for this?
Yes. "Intrusive R"
John.
Peter T. Daniels
We have no idea what you're saying.
> I'll clarify. In a pronunciation dictionary, "get" only has one
> pronunciation. However, the vowel sound in "get" sounds different
> worldwide but everyone says it the same way they do in "pet", which is
> why it only deserves one pronunciation in the dictionary. The
> dictionary is basically saying "just say pet so that it rhymes with
> get, however you say it".
Correct.
> But "girl" and "curl" don't rhyme when I say them. "world" and
> "twirled" don't rhyme when I say them.
All four have the same vowel (which isn't a shwa); "girled" and "curled"
are perfect rhymes with each other and with "world" and "twirled."
If they don't rhyme for you (and you're Scottish, so presumably you're
rhotic), they have different syllabic nuclei from each other. But what's
that got to do with English having or not having (a phoneme) shwa?
> "Early" has no shwa for me. Even
Nor for me. Which syllable are you referring to?
> "Entrepreneur" has no shwa for me. "Policeman" _does_ have a shwa for
"Entrepreneur" has two shwas, in the middle syllables. What do you have?
> me, but if I'm asked to say the word slowly it'd come out as an /A/.
Seems to me if you had to say "policeman" _that_ slowly, it would be
[o].
> Shwa isn't a propor stead like the middle of "get".
Usually your typos are self-correcting, but I don't know what <propor
stead> was meant to be.
> Do you see what I'm getting at?
Not in the slightest.
Now, if you would provide your phonemic analysis of English syllabic
nuclei, with phonemic transcriptions of your examples ...?
Or perhaps consult Wells's *Accents of English* and provide your
interpretations of his 24 vowel sets? (Which include the full range of
r-containing ones for people like us who haven't been tainted by the
recent loss of r in a limited-range prestige dialect of English.)
Peter T. Daniels
>
> "Iain" <iain_i...@hotmail.com> wrote...
> >
> > Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > >
> > > "Get" and "wet" will (probably) continue to rhyme as long as there is an
> > > English language -- not because of their spelling, but because sound
> > > changes apply uniformly. "Sweat" and "threat" and "layette" will also
> > > continue to rhyme with them and each other for all time as well.
>
> As for "layette", I suspect it's just about stopped rhyming with
> anything. I know there's such a word (I just checked, it's in the
> dictionary), but does anyone today actually use it?
Then what do you call all the stuff you need to get when a new baby is
on the way?
Maybe it's an Americanism. Obviously, any "-ette" word will do; that was
the first one that came to me.
> > What is your opinion on the "ghost" R in SE English "for"? The notion
> > of the R must be there when they are saying it, because they say it
> > when they say "for all time".
>
> And equally, a notion of an R must be there when we say "Saw all the
> wood", because we say it.
JFK was famous for his dealings with Castro's island nation of "Cuber."
> > They identify the two
> > pronunciations("fau" and "for") as the same word.
> >
> > Is there a name for this?
>
> Yes. "Intrusive R"
Should we tell him about archiphonemes and underlying segments and such?
Iain
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: accents
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 06:46:23 -0800
Have they a vowel in North America at all? There it begins like the
"gr" of "grill" and ends in a dark L.
> "girled" and "curled"
> are perfect rhymes with each other and with "world" and "twirled."
> If they don't rhyme for you (and you're Scottish, so presumably
you're
> rhotic), they have different syllabic nuclei from each other.
If by the syllabic nuclei you mean the vowels as distinct from the Rs,
yes. I say them rhotic as an American, but with a U and I like in "cut"
and "piss", respectively -- "G-ih-rl", "Kuh-rl".
> But what's
> that got to do with English having or not having (a phoneme) shwa?
See below.
> > "Early" has no shwa for me. Even
>
> Nor for me. Which syllable are you referring to?
Shwa is Ә, right?
Dictionaries of mine show a shwa at the end of "finger", and the same
sound at the start of "early". My ears don't challenge that when
listening to RP, but neither are they shwas for me.
> > "Entrepreneur" has no shwa for me. "Policeman" _does_ have a shwa
for
>
> "Entrepreneur" has two shwas, in the middle syllables. What do you
have?
Mine rhymes with "manure". Ohn-treh-preh-nyoorr, with subtly bigger
emphasis on the penultimate syllable than usual. Mine is a bastard
Highland accent. But I do say shwa in "entrepreneurship".
> > me, but if I'm asked to say the word slowly it'd come out as an
/A/.
>
> Seems to me if you had to say "policeman" _that_ slowly, it would be
> [o].
So the shwa dies. You're thinking of the Lowland "mon". I'd say "Man".
All I'm really saying is that shwa is different from other sounds in
English because it tends to disappear with emphasis, unlike "wet",
which can bear massive emphasis without phonemic alteration.
> > Shwa isn't a propor stead like the middle of "get".
>
> Usually your typos are self-correcting, but I don't know what <propor
> stead> was meant to be.
There is a parallel associated with E along which "get" and "wet" rhyme
in various locations worldwide, but a parallel involving shwa doesn't
stretch as far as where I am sitting.
That's what I mean by "stead". Shwa is not steady. It can crop up
anywhere, and when it goes, the original vowel returns, hence the /a/
in policeman.
I just suspect that people pick up emphases from eachother rather than
shwas themselves, and that shwas are an emergent result of the
emphases.
It seems more etheral, more an aspect of speech rather than language
per se.
> Now, if you would provide your phonemic analysis of English syllabic
> nuclei, with phonemic transcriptions of your examples ...?
>
> Or perhaps consult Wells's *Accents of English* and provide your
> interpretations of his 24 vowel sets? (Which include the full range
of
> r-containing ones for people like us who haven't been tainted by the
> recent loss of r in a limited-range prestige dialect of English.)
Have you a U.R.L.?
~Iain
ranjit_...@yahoo.com
Iain wrote:
> Shwa is Ә, right?
A schwa is a short indistinct vowel, so Ә is a representation for
convenience; its exact pronunciation in a given context depends on the
context (the adjacent consonants presumably being the primary
determiner of pronunciation).
> Dictionaries of mine show a shwa at the end of "finger", and the same
> sound at the start of "early". My ears don't challenge that when
> listening to RP, but neither are they shwas for me.
If a schwa has to be short enough to be indistinct, a long central
vowel would just be a long central vowel, not a schwa since a long
vowel would be distinct rather than indistinct.