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| John Atkinson... |
 Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 12:27 am |
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Peter T. Daniels wrote:
[quote]On Oct 27, 8:03 pm, John Atkinson <johna... at (no spam) bigpond.com> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Oct 27, 1:18 am, John Atkinson <johna... at (no spam) bigpond.com> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
[...]
"Polysynthesis" refers to languages that pack more than one root into
a single word -- a feature of Dravidian languages, Eskimo-Aleut
languages, and various other families.
AIUI, "root" means what's left when a word is stripped of its
inflections. (I note that Wikipedia gives the alternative description:
"The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most
significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into
smaller constituents", which seems less useful.)
One of the unusual things about Eskimo-Aleut languages is that a word
can contain only a single "root" (no compound words at all), and
everything else in the word is suffixes, which have no independent
existence. Of course, this doesn't stop them being everyone's favourite
polysynthetic languages.
Dravidian languages (Tamil at least) certainly have compound words
containing more than one root, just as English and Chinese do. Tamil
nouns and verbs decline/conjugate using agglutinative suffixes in a
similar manner to Finnish and Turkish. Verbs don't agree with objects.
I don't think I've ever heard Tamil called "polysynthetic" as opposed
to simply "agglutinative" -- though I could be wrong.
Two dissertations were written at the University of Chicago
_simultaneously_ on precisely the same topic -- polysynthesis in Tamil
-- by Sanford Steever and Vijayarani Fedson.
Fair enough. That explains why "Dravidian" was the first example that
popped into your head above. (I guess I would have said "Tiwi", since
that's the one I'm most familiar with, and maybe added Classical Nahuatl
and Chukchi.)
Do you happen to remember what sort of morpheme-to-word ratios your
friends were coming up with for Tamil?
You're not suggesting I would have _read_ such things, are you?
You quote the Routledge volumes a lot -- surely Sandy quoted himself
in the introductory chapters.
I haven't got that one... but a quick count of a few lines in[/quote]
Krishnamurti's book gives a ratio of 1.87. Not much more than for
Fennic and Turkic (Estonian 1.63, Tatar 1.86), which aren't usually
thought of as "polysynthetic". OTOH, Chukchi (1.89) and Tiwi (1.73) are
often given as examples of "typical" polysynthetic languages. So much
for morpheme-to-word ratios.
Yupik, however, lives up to expectation with a MtoW of 2.70. And a
paragraph of linguistics text gives 1.3 for English.
Don't take any of these numbers seriously; I wasn't prepared to spend
more than 20 minutes or so on them. (1) Sample sizes are too small (56
to 250 morphemes); (2) Some "roots" I took as monomorphemic may not be;
(3) No effort was made to select texts of equivalent complexity.
J. |
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| John Atkinson... |
| Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 12:47 am |
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John Atkinson wrote:
[quote]Peter T. Daniels wrote:
John Atkinson <johna... at (no spam) bigpond.com> wrote:
[...]
Do you happen to remember what sort of morpheme-to-word ratios your
friends were coming up with for Tamil?
You're not suggesting I would have _read_ such things, are you?
You quote the Routledge volumes a lot -- surely Sandy quoted himself
in the introductory chapters.
I haven't got that one... but a quick count of a few lines in
Krishnamurti's book gives a ratio of 1.87. Not much more than for
Fennic and Turkic (Estonian 1.63, Tatar 1.86), which aren't usually
thought of as "polysynthetic". OTOH, Chukchi (1.89) and Tiwi (1.73) are
often given as examples of "typical" polysynthetic languages. So much
for morpheme-to-word ratios.
Yupik, however, lives up to expectation with a MtoW of 2.70. And a
paragraph of linguistics text gives 1.3 for English.
And Chinese is 1.38 (assuming a word is the thing between spaces in[/quote]
pin-yin). So much for it being an isolating language.
[quote]
Don't take any of these numbers seriously; I wasn't prepared to spend
more than 20 minutes or so on them. (1) Sample sizes are too small (56
to 250 morphemes); (2) Some "roots" I took as monomorphemic may not be;
(3) No effort was made to select texts of equivalent complexity.
J.[/quote] |
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| Jim Heckman... |
| Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 1:11 am |
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On 26-Oct-2009, naddy at (no spam) mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber)
wrote in message <hc4d1c$130r$2 at (no spam) lorvorc.mips.inka.de>:
[quote]LEE Sau Dan <danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
Thanks to the conservative French spellings, which spells many lost
sounds. This has made it easy for you to 'decipher' French, but
difficult for people to learn modern French. It also makes writing
*correct* French a challenge for native speakers!
Not that I recommend it as an effective approach, but you can
probably pick up quite a number of clues on French pronunciation
from the rampant misspellings you see on French Usenet groups (fr.*)
or in similar online media.
[/quote]
Even better, spend some time in those media where "les djeunes"
regularly post in an SMS/texting style. I dare say you'll find it
quite difficult to follow unless your understanding of spoken
French is fairly good.
--
Jim Heckman |
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| Jim Heckman... |
| Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 1:11 am |
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On 26-Oct-2009, Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis at (no spam) comcast.net>
wrote in message <7klonoF3ad3lgU2 at (no spam) mid.individual.net>:
[quote]Ruud Harmsen wrote:
Different, as indicated by the spelling.
It's just that in the ending <-ent> the n and t are silent (mute).
Same in <parlaient>, which sounds the same as <parlais> and <parlait
(except perhaps a difference in /e/ and /E/?, but that distinction is
waning; but <parlais> etc. are different from <parler>?).
Yes, as I've read, the difference is waning, though I can't tell you
where it's observed and where it isn't. The suffixes -ais, -ait, -aient
and, I think, /-ai/ are historically /E/ but are now pronounced /e/ by
some speakers, while the suffixes -er and -é are historically, and
remain, /e/.
[/quote]
I think -ai is historically /e/, not */E/. I'm sure you recall there
used to be a poster in the <fr.langue.*> groups who would regularly
correct others who wrote, say, "je serais" when the future was
called for by replying "Si quoi ?". She made it clear it wasn't
just a "faute de frappe" issue for her, but that she indeed
pronounced them differently.
It'd be nice if some native French speakers weighed in on some of
the questions in this vein that have been raised in this thread.
--
Jim Heckman |
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| Ruud Harmsen... |
| Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 2:39 am |
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Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:58:57 GMT: John Atkinson <johnacko at (no spam) bigpond.com>:
in sci.lang:
[quote]The difference, or one of them, is presumably that Dutch <oe> is tense
[/quote]
Possibly, but that tense/lax distinction I just don't understand, I
cannot hear the difference, don't know how to do it, and don't what
the physiologic background (if any) is.
[quote](or else long, depending on dialect?),
[/quote]
It's long before /r/. Otherwise always short.
[quote]like British English /u:/, while
English /U/ is short (or lax). AIUI, Dutch <oe> doesn't have a
corresponding closed back lax vowel, unlike a, e, i, o.
Does that make sense at all?
[/quote]
Not to me, but that may be just me.
[quote]Also, in most of the English accents Ruud's likely to have heard (RP in
particular), /u:/ is pronounced rather forward, between [u:] and [y:] --
though not as far forward as Dutch <uu> of course!
[/quote]
Right.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com |
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| LEE Sau Dan... |
| Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 4:29 am |
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[quote]"Christian" == Christian Weisgerber <naddy at (no spam) mips.inka.de> writes:
[/quote]
Christian> * The distinction between [E~] and [W~] (brin ~ brun) is
Christian> disappearing, with [E~] winning out.
Does that mean that the number "un" tends to be pronounced [E~]?
--
Lee Sau Dan §õ¦u´° ~{ at (no spam) nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee |
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| António Marques... |
| Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 7:32 am |
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Franz Gnaedinger wrote:
[quote]On Oct 26, 4:07 pm, na... at (no spam) mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) wrote:
*Shrug* So French has a number of irregular plurals:
oeuf - oeufs, boeuf - boeufs, oeil - yeux, os - os.
And irregularities, I believe, keep a memory of early
language, for example in the case of oeil and yeux,
[/quote]
Oeil / yeux is not that irregular, those forms are natural developments
of something like weGL / weGls, which in turn are the normal french
result of oculu / oculos.
[quote]Occitan, the language of southern France, has oc
for eye
[/quote]
No, it doesn't. It has uèlh, plural uèlhs. Pronunciations may vary, but
they are never [Ok], [uk], [O] or [u], which is how something written
<òc> or <oc> would sound. |
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| Christian Weisgerber... |
| Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 9:11 am |
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Jim Heckman <weu_rznvy-hfrarg at (no spam) lnubb.pbz.invalid> wrote:
[quote]Yes, as I've read, the difference is waning, though I can't tell you
where it's observed and where it isn't. The suffixes -ais, -ait, -aient
and, I think, /-ai/ are historically /E/ but are now pronounced /e/ by
some speakers, while the suffixes -er and -é are historically, and
remain, /e/.
I think -ai is historically /e/, not */E/.
[/quote]
We were still taught this distinction between future tense -ai /e/
and conditional -ais /E/ in the 1980s. Modern dictionaries explicitly
list -ai as /E/.
Of course, as mentioned before, there is a trend to realize final
/E/ as /e/, and, in fact, to treat [E] and [e] as allophones.
[quote]It'd be nice if some native French speakers weighed in on some of
the questions in this vein that have been raised in this thread.
[/quote]
I'm dreading the participation of a Québécois speaker. ;-)
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy at (no spam) mips.inka.de |
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| Franz Gnaedinger... |
| Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 10:25 pm |
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On Oct 28, 2:32 pm, António Marques <m... at (no spam) sapo.pt> wrote:
[quote]
Oeil / yeux is not that irregular, those forms are natural developments
of something like weGL / weGls, which in turn are the normal french
result of oculu / oculos.
No, it doesn't. It has uèlh, plural uèlhs. Pronunciations may vary, but
they are never [Ok], [uk], [O] or [u], which is how something written
òc> or <oc> would sound.
[/quote]
I intended my comment as a short aside, illustrating
that curious forms in language - as in physiology -
testify to early stages in the evolution of a language
or an animal, and I should first have looked up the
sources again: oc is yes in Occitan, not eye, as
I wrongly said. Dante was the first to note the three
ways of saying yes in Italy: oc, si, and oil. Here you
have the parallel of oc 'yes' and Latin oculus 'eye',
in my opinion from Magdalenian OC for the right eye,
and then oil 'yes' and oeuil 'eye'. In English you have
yes that is close to French yeux 'eyes', and in Scottish
och, aye, a double confirmation that became okay
in America when a lot of Scots were shiped over
to the new continent (my explanation). Aye - aye aye
Sir - comes from Magdalenian AY for the left eye,
so that 'och, aye' means 'right eye, left eye', indicating
a close look into each other's eyes, an early way of
saying yes and making a contract by means of body
language - still a very effective way of saying yes and
making a 'contract' in matters of love, as you certainly
(and hopefully) know from your own personal experience.
The inverse of AY is YA, close to German Ja English yeah,
while the inverse of OC is CO and stands for the activity
of a focused mind. Why did nobody notice the close
relationship of words for eye and yes before? |
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| Christian Weisgerber... |
| Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 10:47 am |
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In article <hc6ttn$pt3$3 at (no spam) lorvorc.mips.inka.de>,
[quote](I do know that "ill" should be pronounced as
IPA inverted "y", which should contrast with "ail".)
Presumably that was the case at some historical stage of the language,
but in modern French it's plain [j].
[/quote]
According to Wartburg, this change happened in Parisian French in
the mid-17th century, but it took until the early 19th century
before it was accepted by the upper classes.
At least I think this is what Wartburg means when he briefly discusses
the fate of the "l mouillé", since he doesn't bother to explain the
actual sound he is talking about or its status in previous stages
of the language.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy at (no spam) mips.inka.de |
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| Harlan Messinger... |
| Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 12:05 pm |
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Ruud Harmsen wrote:
[quote]Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:36:46 +0800: LEE Sau Dan
danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de>: in sci.lang:
"Franz" == Franz Gnaedinger <frgn at (no spam) bluemail.ch> writes:
Franz> Future dictionaries will be entirely electronical and offer
Franz> spoken versions of words and phrases and sentences,
Undoubtedly.
However, will you expect them to give pronunciations of INFLECTED forms,
such as "parleront", "choisiraient", "prennent" "eu", "eûtes", "aie",
"aient", ...?
Probably not.
I think they are: /parl at (no spam) ro~/, /SwAzirE/, /prEn( at (no spam) )/, /y/ (exception to
the rule!), /yt( at (no spam) )/, /E/ (or /aj/?).
[/quote]
I'm pretty sure that "eu" and "eûtes" are /Y/ and /Yt( at (no spam) )/. Close-mid,
not fully close. |
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| Harlan Messinger... |
| Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 12:06 pm |
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LEE Sau Dan wrote:
[quote]"Ruud" == Ruud Harmsen <rh at (no spam) rudhar.eu> writes:
However, will you expect them to give pronunciations of INFLECTED
forms, such as "parleront", "choisiraient", "prennent" "eu",
"eûtes", "aie", "aient", ...?
Ruud> Probably not.
Ruud> I think they are: /parl at (no spam) ro~/, /SwAzirE/, /prEn( at (no spam) )/, /y/
Ruud> (exception to the rule!), /yt( at (no spam) )/,
Isn't this /yt( at (no spam) )/ an exception, too.
Ruud> /E/ (or /aj/?)
I remember having heard /ai/, but I'm not sure. And unfortunately, I
can check it in dictionaries. 
[/quote]
You may be thinking of "aller" rather than "avoir": "aille", "ailles",
"aillent" = /aj/ |
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| Christian Weisgerber... |
| Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 12:26 pm |
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Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis at (no spam) comcast.net> wrote:
[quote]I'm pretty sure that "eu" and "eûtes" are /Y/ and /Yt( at (no spam) )/. Close-mid,
not fully close.
[/quote]
What!? Like "deux"? Certainly not. It's the "lu" vowel.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy at (no spam) mips.inka.de |
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| Ruud Harmsen... |
| Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2009 12:35 am |
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Wed, 4 Nov 2009 22:26:03 +0000 (UTC): naddy at (no spam) mips.inka.de (Christian
Weisgerber): in sci.lang:
[quote]Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis at (no spam) comcast.net> wrote:
I'm pretty sure that "eu" and "eûtes" are /Y/ and /Yt( at (no spam) )/. Close-mid,
not fully close.
What!? Like "deux"? Certainly not. It's the "lu" vowel.
[/quote]
Y as IPA, not as Kirshenbaum. Some symbol mix-up, I expect.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com |
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| Harlan Messinger... |
| Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2009 1:52 am |
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Christian Weisgerber wrote:
[quote]Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis at (no spam) comcast.net> wrote:
I'm pretty sure that "eu" and "eûtes" are /Y/ and /Yt( at (no spam) )/. Close-mid,
not fully close.
What!? Like "deux"? Certainly not. It's the "lu" vowel.
[/quote]
You're right, I just confirmed it online. Wow, I thought Ruud had just
mistyped a lower-case "y" instead of an upper-case one. I can hardly
believe I never knew this. |
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