Linguistic pet peeves

[Thrice Xandvii]

Considering that the original point was "other languages have more homophones than English", yeah a poem from an older version of a language certainly does count. But, even that isn't really important since modern Chinese also has a buttload of homophones (something that is minorly ameliorated by a host of two character compounds). I guess I'm just confused about your point, Teddy, since no one was trying to say anything in particular about Modern Chinese per se, it was merely a convenient example of a profusion of homophones.

@Hoskh: To be clear, I was agreeing with your position. Just in case someone somehow reads my post as agreeing with Squall. I don't see how any language that succeeds at communicating is any worse than any other.

[clawgrip]

Yeah, unless you can somehow prove that that Chinese poem is not written in a language, then I don't get what disqualifies it. By all means, try to use the very same technique to make a comparable English poem.

Here is a palindrome I made up right now in Japanese: かかがががかか Ka ka ga ga gaka ka. ("So either the mosquito or the moth is an artist.") No ancient grammar, no funny business with modern pronunciations or whatever. Just normal words arranged normally. The point is that English isn't even remotely close to having more homonyms/homographs/homophones than any other language. Notice how the originally person sneakily uses the word "most" so that any counterexamples can easily be disregarded as exceptions. It's just a load of garbage.

[Ahzoh]

English is not a poor language. I don't believe there is a such thing as a poor language, unless you include bad conlangs, in which case there are probably more poor languages than decent ones. Sure, I tend to prefer languages with more inflectional morphology than English to learn, to study, and to create as conlangs, but English's derivational morphology is actually pretty amazing (phrasal compounds, sublexical coreference, zero derivation, productively sticking affixes on phrases like "Lieber and Scalise-ish", "High German Consonant Shift-esque sound changes", as well as being able to coin words really readily in general as opposed to what I've seen in some languages where "waterfall" is "place water falls" and "carpenter" is "someone who works with wood") even if it doesn't have much in the way of inflection, and English also has tons of other great things, like particle verbs, the verb "do" that can be used as a stand-in for a predicate instead of repeating the whole thing, extremely productive noun-noun compounding, "th-sounds", and a massive vowel inventory. The only thing I'd really change about English grammar is allow more word orders, since you can really get away with many word orders and not have it be ambiguous (especially with the inflected pronouns and context, you could say things like "the dog, him bit the boy" if things were too ambiguous with "the dog bit the boy", and I know there are languages that do that), and the only things I'd change about the phonology is the weird rhotic that I'm not a fan of and I'd put glottal stops on the beginnings of words that start with vowels so we don't have a napron and a nekename things happen anymore.

You'll have to educate Marcus Teague, since he's the one who not only said that quote about English being a "piss-poor communication system" but also said that it was substantiated and doesn't know any language other than English.

This is usually what qualifies for "dumbass"

[Thrice Xandvii]

I dunno that I'd go so far as "dumbass" but certainly linguistically uneducated, or perhaps "undereducated."

[thetha]

Considering that the original point was "other languages have more homophones than English", yeah a poem from an older version of a language certainly does count. But, even that isn't really important since modern Chinese also has a buttload of homophones (something that is minorly ameliorated by a host of two character compounds). I guess I'm just confused about your point, Teddy, since no one was trying to say anything in particular about Modern Chinese per se, it was merely a convenient example of a profusion of homophones.

I'm saying nothing more than that this poem is often used as an example of the great homophony potential of Modern Chinese but it's actually a bad example of that because it isn't a Modern Chinese text at all, it's a text in a more archaic language pronounced as if it was modern language in order to facilitate homophony in some virtual archaic spoken language. It really doesn't matter to my goals whether or not anyone meant anything about Modern Chinese "per se"; because there are many people who have read and will read this thread who might have the potential to take the aformentioned text as evidence of some property of Modern Chinese, like so many have before when the text's been brought up in every other website where people like to talk about fun facts that are totally true and illustrative of real things. It's not evidence of anything about Modern Chinese of course, and we're in agreement on that, but if this is a fact we can agree on being true then we should take steps to prevent people from mistaking the opposite for being true.

Also my username is thetha, please take note

[clawgrip]

Whether or not that one poem is representative of modern Mandarin Chinese vernacular is irrelevant, as the original claim was not just comparing English to modern Mandarin Chinese vernacular prose (against which it would still lose on terms of homonymy), but "most" (whatever that means) languages. Sure, that Chinese poem employed some linguistic shenanigans, but that's the nature of poetry, and English ought to be able to hold its own if we expect it to support such a grandiose claim.

[cntrational]

Re: languages being deficient

I rarely criticize natlangs because, unlike conlangs, they have no stated capabilities or goals. In fact, natlangs are more flexible than we realize -- consider how English adapted to the text-only medium of the internet with Internet English dialects, despite that nobody has spoken like that before.

Many of the "illogical" things in natlangs are pragmatic and useful. Related words sound different because they need to be disambiguated in context. Idioms and illogical compounds are useful to create words rapidly. Implications and nuance are better at expressing complicated human emotion and relationships than a defined set of "emotion particles" or whatever. Humans want to be non-explicit.

Conlangs are criticizable because they don't adapt to the situation, but attempt to achieve goals. "Naturalistic" is a goal for most artlangs, and well, you know what claims auxlangers and loglangers make.

[Lao Kou]

Classical Chinese isn't Modern Chinese, so if we're trying to show something about Modern Chinese we shouldn't take samples of Classical Chinese to illustrate this, any more than we should take samples of Beowulf to illustrate how many words rhyme in modern English.

Except that it's not a sample of Classical Chinese; it does not date back to the Tang or Song the way Beowulf dates back to an earlier stage of English. It was written in modern times, intended to be read in modern Mandarin pronunciation, albeit using grammar and word choice elements of the Classical style to keep the homophony going because it's meant as an exaggerated example (and there's more than one of these, using different homophonous single syllables, out there).

If we want to illustrate how easy it is to make words rhyme in English then the obvious thing to do is to produce modern English words that rhyme, and not Old English words that rhyme.

It took characters as read in modern standard Mandarin and crafted a text that has a Classical vibe. Surely I can write a sonnet in modern English or create a modern limerick that rhymes "fixed" and "betwixt", "kept" and "yclept", "forsooth" and "truth", or "strumpet" and "crumpet".

I'm saying nothing more than that this poem is often used as an example of the great homophony potential of Modern Chinese but it's actually a bad example of that because it isn't a Modern Chinese text at all, it's a text in a more archaic language pronounced as if it was modern language in order to facilitate homophony in some virtual archaic spoken language.

Rather, it took modern Mandarin pronunications and employed them in a more Classical format to keep the wordplay going. It's not in the vernacular language, but that makes it no less a text in modern Mandarin. That the wordplay breaks down in dialect or in Warring States pronunciations or that one doesn't actually speak this way is utterly beside the point.

It really doesn't matter to my goals

Herein lies the crux of the issue?

whether or not anyone meant anything about Modern Chinese "per se"; because there are many people who have read and will read this thread who might have the potential to take the aformentioned text as evidence of some property of Modern Chinese, like so many have before when the text's been brought up in every other website where people like to talk about fun facts that are totally true and illustrative of real things. It's not evidence of anything about Modern Chinese of course, and we're in agreement on that, but if this is a fact we can agree on being true then we should take steps to prevent people from mistaking the opposite for being true.

If it's illustrative of anything, it's that syllables like "shi", "yi", and "zhi" have become massive dumping grounds in modern Mandarin of syllables that were pronounced in a variety of ways in earlier forms of the language (and I think one of the things Chao hoped to illustrate is that if the text were written solely in pinyin, it would be quite impenetrable). If the homophony is illustrative of anything, it's of the potential fun one can have within a given language.

If the goal is to cut off at the pass exotic-East-inspired misconceptions of Chinese that "'so many' have [retold] before at 'every other website'" where funfacts reside, I think one's energies and arguments would be better directed at such websites when such misconceptions occur. As no one in this thread has, to my mind, expressed such misconceptions, and has actually questioned your point, I think the notion of taking "preventative" steps here against misconception sells the readership ("who have read and will read") of this thread in particular, and of the forum in general, a tad short.

[cntrational]

Incidentally, Yuen Ren Chao's point was that Gwoyeu Romatzyh (and later pinyin) was intended to be for Modern Mandarin, not classical, and that generally Chinese would be more widely understood if it was spoken like the vernaculars instead of being stuffed with classicalisms. Made sense back then when few Chinese were literate and educated.

Yuen Ren Chao actively supported the Latin script as the standard script for Chinese, in addition to designing Gwoyeu Romatzyh, designed General Chinese, an etymology-based Latin script for Chinese that could be converted to any of the major dialects:

Code: Select all

Hanzi: 趙,	元, 任
General Chinese: dhyao, qiuan, remm
Mandarin: zhào, yuán, rèn
Cantonese: ziuh3, zun4, jam6
Taiwanese: tiō, ôan, jīm
Shanghainese: dzau, gnioe, gnin

[Squall]

Are you saying you agree with the assertion that English is a poor language?

What is a "poor" language?
Actually, English is "rich" because it has many features: consonantal roots, genders, cases...

Because if you are, I'd like it very much if you'd point out two or three other languages that are better.

Esperanto and Interlingua.

Do you want natural languages? Well... Let me think... Can I answer the question on another day?

[GrandPiano]

Because if you are, I'd like it very much if you'd point out two or three other languages that are better.

Esperanto and Interlingua.

I don't know about Interlingua, but Esperanto definitely has its criticisms (not the least of which being its immense Euro-centricity).

[thetha]

If the goal is to cut off at the pass exotic-East-inspired misconceptions of Chinese that "'so many' have [retold] before at 'every other website'" where funfacts reside, I think one's energies and arguments would be better directed at such websites when such misconceptions occur. As no one in this thread has, to my mind, expressed such misconceptions, and has actually questioned your point, I think the notion of taking "preventative" steps here against misconception sells the readership ("who have read and will read") of this thread in particular, and of the forum in general, a tad short.

Smart people can be misconceived and wrong about a lot of things, and not everyone who is interested in linguistics is a smart person; I know this because I am in linguistics myself and I have met many not smart people in this environment. They shouldn't feel bad about that or anything but still, they are, like all people, prone to making mistakes. I once had a person in a class who insisted that they were fluent in Irish but they couldn't pronounce a single word anywhere in the ballpark of correct. I'm not saying these are bad people (unless they're like the "fluent Irish speaker" who's clearly lying) and they shouldn't feel bad about their potential to make mistakes. So I don't know why it should be worrying that I'm implying people reading this might make mistakes.

Anyway, the nature of preventative measures is that they're done before anything bad happens, so their value isn't conditional on whether or not bad things actually happen, only the possibility that they happen. And there is a distinct possibility for bad things to happen in a community such as this even though it is pretty good. The ZBB arguably has a larger amount of collective knowledge about linguistics than this community but it has had plenty of people who have no idea what they are talking about.

I don't know why you're so bothered by this. The whole discussion is very strange to me because before I had any chance to explain myself I was already labeled as "passive aggressive" and "hostile"--but my small post was hardly enough text to derive anything at all about my disposition, and I've been on the defensive this whole time, since everyone else feels the need to tell me how irrelevant what I'm saying is to anything anyone cares about. The only way I can make sense of this is that maybe people took my use of the phrase "just sayin'" in a negative way (you did after all, repeat it in your first reply, as if you were mocking me) but I don't see any reason for doing that.

[Thrice Xandvii]

"Just saying" usually means "dude, you're wrong and I need to tell you about it, but don't bother arguing with me since I don't care about your opinion." So, yes, it did come off as hostile.

[qwed117]

Actually, I have a bit of a peeve about that too but in fact, I'm even more radical: I don't even like the concept that English has "allophony" between [pʰ tʰ kʰ] and [p˭ t˭ k˭] after /s/. My reason is, there is no process in English where you can take an aspirated consonant and then put an /s/ before it in the same syllable, causing it to become unaspirated. To me, allophony has to be proved through productive phonological processes in the language: for example, in American English, you can add a suffix to /kʰɹiˈeɪt/ and get [kʰɹiˈeɪɾəd], so that's good evidence that /ɾ/ is an actual, synchronic allophone of /t/ in American English.

But the tenuis stops exist solely as part of unanalyzable clusters; it seems ridiculous to me to say that they must somehow be underlyingly "the same sound" as the aspirated stops. After an /s/ there is actually a complete neutralization of the contrast between aspirates and the "voiced" (actually, often somewhat devoiced) consonants, so it is inappropriate in my opinion to consider this a definite allophone of either specific sound. The people who do so are just letting their knowledge of the phonological history, or more insidiously, the orthography, warp their perception.

In fact, there's a stronger argument for identifying them with the "voiced" stops:
a) many people (myself included) devoice voiced stops after /s/ in words like "disgust"
b) English already has common, productive progressive assimilation to voicelessness, as shown by the plural and past tense affixes
c) When dealing with other languages that have voiceless aspirates and voiceless tenuis, native English speakers tend to identify the voiceless tenuis with English voiced stops, not English voiceless aspirates, as you've experienced for yourself

What about cosplay? Would that count as allophony?

I, myself, can't distinguish the "p" in spine from the "p" in pine.

[Sumelic]

What about cosplay? Would that count as allophony?

I, myself, can't distinguish the "p" in spine from the "p" in pine.

It seems that cosplay is pronounced as "COSS-play" or "COZZ-play," with a syllable boundary between the "s" and the "p," so in either case, there would (in my dialect at least) be an aspirated [pʰ].

I have a harder time distinguishing the "p" in "spine" from the "b" in "textbook." For me, "excuse me while I kiss the sky" sounds more similar to "excuse me while I kiss this guy" than "excuse me while I kiss this kie" (assuming "kie" happened to be a word).

That was a fun rant for me to write, but now I sort of disagree with what I said earlier. I don't get to define "allophony," and if people use it for a concept that isn't exactly what I have in mind, that doesn't make them incorrect. Then again, if I were objectively right about this issue, it wouldn't be much of a "peeve," right ?

[cntrational]

Some linguists do propose a transcription of /sb, sd, sg/, by the way. It's actually standard in transcriptions of a few High German dialects.

[Sumelic]

Something that bugged me recently: the (apparently standard) pronunciation of "Valles Marineris" is all messed up! How annoying that astronomers make pseudo-Latin names, and then don't even know the proper, traditional way to pronounce them!

It should clearly be /ˈvæl.iːz məˈrɪn.ərɪs/; the plural suffix of vallis should follow the example of testis~testes and many other words, and Mariner has a short "e" so the stress of the genitive form Marineris should fall on the antepenult.

Instead, the standard appears to be/ˈvæl.ɛs mɑrɪˈnɛrɪs/, /ˈvæl.ɪs mærɪˈnɛrɪs/, or /ˈvɑl.eɪs mɑrɪˈnɛrɪs/. How disturbing... I think I'm just going to pretend I never read that, and keep mentally pronouncing it the way I think it should be pronounced.

[cntrational]

...it's Neo-Latin, though. A lot of those have a Classical-esque pronunciation.

[Sumelic]

...it's Neo-Latin, though. A lot of those have a Classical-esque pronunciation.

Unfortunately, you're right that there is a now a common trend of using a half-hearted blend of the reconstructed "Classical" Latin pronunciation (as pronounced by monolingual English speakers) and standard English pronunciation. (For an example of how inconsistent this is, look at the contrast between the "a" of Valles and that of Marineris in the first pronunciation that I cited. And of course, there is also inconsistency between this and the pronunciation of other astronomical terms, like the names of planets and their satellites.)

Even given that, though, the stress should not be affected; the Classical stress assignment rule means that the penult "e" in Marineris can only be stressed if it is long. And I don't see what justification there is for a long "e", when the English word "Mariner" has a schwa in the final syllable; that's pretty much the opposite of a long vowel. It's true that the vowel's etymological source was long in Latin (the suffix -ārius) but if we're going to remodel the word based on that, it should be something like Marīnāriī.

[clawgrip]

(For an example of how inconsistent this is, look at the contrast between the "a" of Valles and that of Marineris in the pronunciations that I cited.

Complaining about stress placement I get, but this is a bit too nitpicky I think. This is just a natural function of English pronunciation (in many accents, anyway).

On another topic, one thing that bothers me involves English education in Japan. There are a lot of books and materials about learning English, and of course a lot of these are written by Japanese people who do not speak English quite as naturally as they think they do, so sometimes what they teach is a bit off. This bugs me, but it's kind of unavoidable.

What really bothers me is when people making educational materials purposely distort English in attempt to make it easier, essentially by creating a type of easier English that doesn't exist. This is common in materials for teaching English to younger children, who haven't yet endured the barrage of English grammar in junior and senior high school.

I see things like "A cat is on the chair," where they specifically avoid using the more natural "There is a cat on the chair" because the "there is" structure is a more advanced grammatical structure that hasn't been taught yet. Just teach "there is" before doing prepositions, or do them at the same time!

Also, there is one 5-minute short television program on NHK every Saturday that involves some cartoon characters who absolutely never use contractions when they talk. It's extremely unnatural and I hate listening to it. Things like "I am hungry." "Have some candy." "It is good!". Probably some old, stupid people thought it would be best to teach the actual words before they learn how to contract them, rather than teaching them how people speak and later explaining the meaning. It's characteristic of the overwhelming reading-and grammar-focused English education that leaves communication as an afterthought.

This type of thing really bugs me.