(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2019]

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All4Ɇn
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by All4Ɇn »

Omzinesý wrote:French phonetic history has:

Vs -> V:

Did /s/ first become something like schwa or how the compensatory lengthening did happen?
It became /h/ before being lengthened
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

All4Ɇn wrote:
Omzinesý wrote:French phonetic history has:

Vs -> V:

Did /s/ first become something like schwa or how the compensatory lengthening did happen?
It became /h/ before being lengthened
How boring!
/h/ has very little effect on vowel qualities :(
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Omzinesý wrote:
All4Ɇn wrote:
Omzinesý wrote:French phonetic history has:

Vs -> V:

Did /s/ first become something like schwa or how the compensatory lengthening did happen?
It became /h/ before being lengthened
How boring!
/h/ has very little effect on vowel qualities :(
Well, perhaps, but does the glottal stop have that much more? Also, most sound changes start small; add up a few centuries' worth of small changes, though, and the the difference can be as big as between English before and after the Great Vowel Shift (which itself was exactly that: a few centuries' worth of small changes).

Anyway, /s/ > /h/ is a pretty common sound change. In some varieties of Spanish it is even indeed having an effect on neighboring vowels - to the point where some dialects essentially mark the plural by a vowel change rather than a suffix.
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Post by Sumelic »

Omzinesý wrote:
All4Ɇn wrote:
Omzinesý wrote:French phonetic history has:

Vs -> V:

Did /s/ first become something like schwa or how the compensatory lengthening did happen?
It became /h/ before being lengthened
How boring!
/h/ has very little effect on vowel qualities :(
While /h/ may generally have little effect on vowel qualities, in French it seems the lengthening process itself affected vowel quality. The lengthened counterpart of /a/ was /ɑː/, and the lengthened counterpart of /ɔ/ was /oː/. (But lengthened /ɛ/ was /ɛː/, not /eː/.)

I'm not sure that the lengthening was compensatory. As I understand the term, that would imply that lengthening occured simultaneously to loss of /h/; however, these quality changes also occured as far as I know in words like "rose" where no consonant was lost. However, I guess "rose" does have a word-final schwa, which can cause lengthening in some varieties of French such as Belgian French.

The English sound changes of BATH-lengthening and CLOTH-lengthening do show that it is possible for something like /ast/ > /ɑːst/ to occur.
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Post by GrandPiano »

Iyionaku wrote:
GrandPiano wrote:
Iyionaku wrote:I've been always wondering. So in Germany (and I suppose most of Western Europe) there are numerous jokes about Chinese/Japanese/Korean people not being able to distinguish /l/ and /r/. Are there, exactly vice-versa, some jokes in China or Japan about Europeans not being able to distinguish /ʂ/ and /ɕ/, or /͡d̥ʐ̥/ and /͡d̥ɕ/, respectively? If so, could you state some?
Considering Mandarin's retroflex and alveolo-palatal consonants are in complementary distribution (alveolo-palatal consonants only occur before /i y j ɥ/, while retroflex consonants occur before everything else), I doubt it.

Just out of curiosity, where did you learn to transcribe Mandarin's unaspirated stops and fricatives using the voiced IPA letters? In my experience, it's more common just to transcribe them as /p t k t͡ɕ ʈ͡ʂ/.
Thanks for your reply. Ya, as loglorn already stated, jokes about tones might be more appropriate. I followed the statements of the German wikipedia page. They are refering to Duanmu, San: The Phonology of Standard Chinese; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007²; ISBN 978-0-19-921578-2..
Which Wikipedia page are you using? The German Wikipedia page on Standard Chinese just uses the voiceless consonant letters. (although they also transcribe the retroflex <r> as /​ɹ̺​/ for some reason)
eldin raigmore wrote:
Sumelic wrote:Ah, is this difficult? I believe I've heard there are accents of Chinese where the distinction is pretty much lost entirely, but from reading descriptions of standard Mandarin, I had guessed it would suffice for an American English speaker to use something between /sz̩/ and /sɪ/ for "four", and /ʃɚ/ or something like that for "ten".
Maybe I was learning some other accent of Mandarin. She was Taiwanese, and she said and thought she was teaching me Mandarin.
She probably was teaching you Mandarin. Many Mandarin speakers merge the retroflex consonants /ʈ͡ʂ ʈ͡ʂʰ ʂ/ with the dental consonants /t͡s t͡sʰ s/, so that 山 shān [ʂan˥] "mountain" and 三 sān [san˥] "three" become homophones (both pronounced [san˥]). The merger is non-standard, but very common. For speakers with the merger, the only difference between 四 sì [sz̩˥˩] "four" and 十 shí [ʂʐ̩˧˥] "ten" is tone, so they become much more difficult for non-native speakers to distinguish.
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GrandPiano wrote:She probably was teaching you Mandarin. Many Mandarin speakers merge the retroflex consonants /ʈ͡ʂ ʈ͡ʂʰ ʂ/ with the dental consonants /t͡s t͡sʰ s/, so that 山 shān [ʂan˥] "mountain" and 三 sān [san˥] "three" become homophones (both pronounced [san˥]). The merger is non-standard, but very common. For speakers with the merger, the only difference between 四 sì [sz̩˥˩] "four" and 十 shí [ʂʐ̩˧˥] "ten" is tone, so they become much more difficult for non-native speakers to distinguish.
Huh. Wikipedia also says some speakers, especially women and children pronounced [t͡ɕ t͡ɕʰ ɕ] as /t͡sʲ t͡sʰʲ sʲ/ so that'd make things even more confusing
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Post by Iyionaku »

GrandPiano wrote:
Iyionaku wrote:
GrandPiano wrote:
Iyionaku wrote:I've been always wondering. So in Germany (and I suppose most of Western Europe) there are numerous jokes about Chinese/Japanese/Korean people not being able to distinguish /l/ and /r/. Are there, exactly vice-versa, some jokes in China or Japan about Europeans not being able to distinguish /ʂ/ and /ɕ/, or /͡d̥ʐ̥/ and /͡d̥ɕ/, respectively? If so, could you state some?
Considering Mandarin's retroflex and alveolo-palatal consonants are in complementary distribution (alveolo-palatal consonants only occur before /i y j ɥ/, while retroflex consonants occur before everything else), I doubt it.

Just out of curiosity, where did you learn to transcribe Mandarin's unaspirated stops and fricatives using the voiced IPA letters? In my experience, it's more common just to transcribe them as /p t k t͡ɕ ʈ͡ʂ/.
Thanks for your reply. Ya, as loglorn already stated, jokes about tones might be more appropriate. I followed the statements of the German wikipedia page. They are refering to Duanmu, San: The Phonology of Standard Chinese; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007²; ISBN 978-0-19-921578-2..
Which Wikipedia page are you using? The German Wikipedia page on Standard Chinese just uses the voiceless consonant letters. (although they also transcribe the retroflex <r> as /​ɹ̺​/ for some reason)
The one about Pinyin.
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Post by GrandPiano »

Iyionaku wrote:The one about Pinyin.
Huh. Personally, I think it's more accurate to just use the voiceless letters, since as far as I can tell, unlike in some Germanic languages, there's no fortis/lenis distinction at play in Mandarin, just aspirated/unaspirated.

(I also don't entirely agree with all of the IPA in the vowel descriptions; in particular, [ɚ] or [əɻ] for <er> is pretty uncommon nowadays, and [ɑɻ] is much more commonly heard)
All4Ɇn wrote:
GrandPiano wrote:She probably was teaching you Mandarin. Many Mandarin speakers merge the retroflex consonants /ʈ͡ʂ ʈ͡ʂʰ ʂ/ with the dental consonants /t͡s t͡sʰ s/, so that 山 shān [ʂan˥] "mountain" and 三 sān [san˥] "three" become homophones (both pronounced [san˥]). The merger is non-standard, but very common. For speakers with the merger, the only difference between 四 sì [sz̩˥˩] "four" and 十 shí [ʂʐ̩˧˥] "ten" is tone, so they become much more difficult for non-native speakers to distinguish.
Huh. Wikipedia also says some speakers, especially women and children pronounced [t͡ɕ t͡ɕʰ ɕ] as /t͡sʲ t͡sʰʲ sʲ/ so that'd make things even more confusing
That's not as confusing, since the alveolo-palatals are in complementary distribution with the dentals. I've definitely heard that before, though, and it's especially noticeable for /ɕ/.
Spoiler:
In fact, the alveolo-palatal consonants in Mandarin originated from the palatalization and merging of dental and velar consonants before /i y j ɥ/, and by historical coincidence they're also in complementary distribution with the retroflex consonants. They're not really distinct phonemes, but they're hard to analyze as allophones because synchronically it's impossible to tell whether any given alveolo-palatal is phonemically dental or velar.
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Post by All4Ɇn »

GrandPiano wrote:That's not as confusing, since the alveolo-palatals are in complementary distribution with the dentals. I've definitely heard that before, though, and it's especially noticeable for /ɕ/
Well I meant if that pronunciation was further compounded with the merging of /ʈ͡ʂ ʈ͡ʂʰ ʂ/ with /t͡s t͡sʰ s/
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Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Why are words for cardinal directions in Romance languages borrowed from English? E.g. sud, ouest, etc.
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Post by alynnidalar »

Huh. So they are. How bizarre!
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Post by Egerius »

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote:Why are words for cardinal directions in Romance languages borrowed from English? E.g. sud, ouest, etc.
They aren't. They're borrowed from Proto-Germanic, or rather Gothic.
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Hmm. Wiktionary lists "Old English" as the source for the French terms at least. I'll have to look into it more.
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Post by GrandPiano »

All4Ɇn wrote:
GrandPiano wrote:That's not as confusing, since the alveolo-palatals are in complementary distribution with the dentals. I've definitely heard that before, though, and it's especially noticeable for /ɕ/
Well I meant if that pronunciation was further compounded with the merging of /ʈ͡ʂ ʈ͡ʂʰ ʂ/ with /t͡s t͡sʰ s/
Well, the retrofex consonants are also in complementary distribution with the alveolo-palatal consonants.
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KaiTheHomoSapien wrote:Hmm. Wiktionary lists "Old English" as the source for the French terms at least. I'll have to look into it more.
I'd think its Proto-Anglo-Frisian. *este is only deriveable from Anglo-Frisian. It appears Charlemagne is attributed with starting this (https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Vita_K ... ite_ref-52). This suggests it might have been out of nothing the seafaring Jutes and Angles to the North.
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I've just discovered how weird Estonian's vowel phonology is. How exactly did /y ø ɤ æ/ develop into only occurring in the first syllable and is there anything in Estonian grammar related to it? Are there other languages with similar phenomena?
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Post by Xonen »

All4Ɇn wrote:I've just discovered how weird Estonian's vowel phonology is. How exactly did /y ø ɤ æ/ develop into only occurring in the first syllable
A bunch of vowel changes eliminated the more marked vowels from unstressed syllables. Unstressed /y/ was turned into /u/ or /i/, while unstressed /æ/ changed into /a/. AFAIU, /ø/ never occurred in unstressed syllables to begin with, and whether /ɤ/ did is debatable (if it did, then it changed back into /e/ at some point).
Are there other languages with similar phenomena?
A reduced number of vowel distinctions in unstressed syllables? Yes.
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Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

qwed117 wrote:
KaiTheHomoSapien wrote:Hmm. Wiktionary lists "Old English" as the source for the French terms at least. I'll have to look into it more.
I'd think its Proto-Anglo-Frisian. *este is only deriveable from Anglo-Frisian. It appears Charlemagne is attributed with starting this (https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Vita_K ... ite_ref-52). This suggests it might have been out of nothing the seafaring Jutes and Angles to the North.
Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese seem to have borrowed their cardinal direction words from the French. Online Etymology Dictionary says this about "east": "French est, Spanish este are borrowings from Middle English, originally nautical." This Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French) also references the nautical nature of French borrowings from English.

It's interesting that English east and Latin auster ("south [wind]") are cognates, from the same PIE root meaning "dawn".
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Sumelic wrote:
All4Ɇn wrote:How did the forms with buv- (buvez etc.) develop for boire in French? From what I can tell those forms were even bev- in old French.
The CNRTL/Trésor says
La voyelle rad. [œ] des formes faibles s'est peu à peu fermée en [ü], beuvons est encore empl. à côté de buvons par Ramus 1562 (Fouché, p. 429)
Referring back to this, I happened to be reading a book about Old French, and it mentions both possibilities. The writer seems less partial to the sound-change explanation than CNRTL.
La transformation de bevons, bevez en buvons, buvez s’explique sans doute par l’analogie du radical bu, du parfait et du participe passé, ou peut-être par une raison de phonétique.

The changing of bevons, bevez into buvons, buvez is doubtless explained by analogy with the radical bu, of the perfect and the past participle, or perhaps by a phonetic reason.
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Dormouse559 wrote:The changing of bevons, bevez into buvons, buvez is doubtless explained by analogy with the radical bu, of the perfect and the past participle, or perhaps by a phonetic reason.
I think it's probable that both of them simultaneously caused it. I'm not entirely sure why it solely effected boire and not similar verbs like devoir but I supposed it could have to do with the infinitive in boire's case ending with -e
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