There are 11 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Why does the glottal stop often replace /t/ in English?
From: C. Brickner
1b. Re: Why does the glottal stop often replace /t/ in English?
From: H. S. Teoh
1c. Re: Why does the glottal stop often replace /t/ in English?
From: Matthew George
1d. Re: Why does the glottal stop often replace /t/ in English?
From: H. S. Teoh
2a. English Orthography in the Future
From: Gary Shannon
2b. Re: English Orthography in the Future
From: Matthew George
2c. Re: English Orthography in the Future
From: Mechthild Czapp
2d. Re: English Orthography in the Future
From: Matthew Boutilier
2e. Re: English Orthography in the Future
From: Matthew George
3a. Re: translation exercises: McWhorter's 500 things language classes o
From: H. S. Teoh
4a. Re: Place/mannor/voicing
From: Matthew George
Messages
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1a. Re: Why does the glottal stop often replace /t/ in English?
Posted by: "C. Brickner" tepeyach...@embarqmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2013 10:11 am ((PDT))
----- Original Message -----
--- On Sat, 6/1/13, Matthew George <matt....@gmail.com> wrote:
ŋ is supposedly a more-difficult sound to make than most others, which I've
read is part of why it tends to vanish from languages and is only a
syllabic coda in English.
===========================================
I've encountered a dial. of Peruvian Spanish where /N/ was substituted for all
final nasals.
============================================
This is how I speak Spanish. I picked up the habit/trait when I lived in
Honduras. I have found it easier to say than /n/.
Charlie
Messages in this topic (11)
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1b. Re: Why does the glottal stop often replace /t/ in English?
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" hst...@quickfur.ath.cx
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2013 11:03 am ((PDT))
On Sat, Jun 01, 2013 at 11:43:16AM -0400, Matthew George wrote:
> ŋ is supposedly a more-difficult sound to make than most others, which
> I've read is part of why it tends to vanish from languages and is only
> a syllabic coda in English. There are thought to be reasons why it's
> so relatively uncommon, and why it's replaced.
>
> But there aren't any such reasons for the shift from t to ʔ...?
Difficulty of pronunciation is only one part of the picture. Another
factor to consider is the tendency for the vocal apparatus to "cut
corners" when in fast speech -- in order to achieve greater speed, it's
desirable to only approximate the sounds close enough for them to still
be recognizable, rather than to move all the way to the extreme
configurations demanded by the pure phones.
In the case of /t/ -> /?/, I can sorta see how this might've happened.
Both are unvoiced stops, and if you study phonetics, you'll realize that
stops are recognized mainly by their influence on the surrounding
vowels. That is to say, phonetically speaking, there is no difference
between /t/ and /?/ except for their influence on the sound waves of the
surrounding vowels. So in that sense, /t/ and /?/ are similar, even
though they have two completely different POA's. But of course, this
alone doesn't explain why /t/ should shift to /?/.
The second step is to recognize that in fast speech, our vocal apparatus
tends to "cut corners". Consider a /t/ in a stream of very fast speech
sounds, say between two vowels (which is where the /t/ -> /?/ sound
change happens). In order to pronounce a /t/, the tongue has to move up
against the alveolar ridge and press against it hard enough to cut off
the flow of air through the mouth, and the vocal chords have to stop
vibrating (otherwise it'd be /d/ instead). Now imagine the tongue
having to do this repeatedly -- /t/ is a rather common sound in English,
after all. Continually moving the tongue up and down like this can be
tiring for the vocal apparatus, and besides, when speaking really fast,
the coloring of /t/ on adjacent vowels can often be overlooked. That is
to say, if the closure of the tongue on the alveolar ridge is omitted
while still maintaining the devoicing (closure of the glottis), thereby
resulting in /?/, the cessation of air flow from the mouth is still
present (which is the most prominent feature of /t/, phonetically
speaking), and the secondary feature of /t/, its coloring of adjacent
vowels, doesn't significantly change.
The resulting word still sounds "close enough" that in fast speech, one
doesn't notice the difference. Since /?/ in this context is easier to
pronounce (the tongue doesn't have to keep moving up against the
alveolar ridge) and the resulting sound is still "close enough", one
would tend to apply this "optimization", and thus you have the sound
change /t/ -> /?/.
A similar process can be seen in /k/ -> /?/ in words like "Cockney"
[kA?nI] in some dialects: the /k/ coda in the first syllable causes the
preceding vowel to sound "clipped" due to the cessation of airflow
during the stop, and since the /k/ is the beginning of a consonant
cluster, the only sign of its presence is its coloring on the preceding
vowel. In fast speech, therefore, the omission of this coloring (i.e.,
if /k/ were substituted with /?/) would often be unnoticed. Making it
/?n/ instead of /kn/ also makes it easier to pronounce, so the sound
change /k/ -> /?/ is favored in this context.
Note that these sound changes are context-dependent. Initial /t/, for
example, doesn't become /?/ for very good reasons: initial /t/ in
English is [t_h]; the aspiration after the /t/ produces significantly
different phonetic characteristics in the resulting sound waves. It
produces a noisy fricative noise (not unlike a [h]), which is also a
prominent characteristic, phonetically speaking. Substituting with /?/
in this context would eliminate this prominent characteristic, causing
the resulting word to be far too different from the original to be
recognizable. So /t/ -> /?/ in this context is not favored (and indeed,
doesn't happen).
Indeed, a survey of other languages show that [t_h] tends to change not
to [?], but to [T] instead -- the fricative [T] preserves the noisy
characteristics of the aspiration in [t_h] better. (One can observe
this change e.g. between (pre-)classical Greek and later forms of Greek,
for example). It seems that t-initial words in English haven't undergone
this change yet, but if I'm not wrong, the initial consonant in words
like "thin", "thick", "think", etc., was historically [t_h] that has
since become [T]. The aspiration of initial /t/ as [t_h] seems to be
probably a later development in English.
T
--
Verbing weirds language. -- Calvin (& Hobbes)
Messages in this topic (11)
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1c. Re: Why does the glottal stop often replace /t/ in English?
Posted by: "Matthew George" matt....@gmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2013 11:12 am ((PDT))
So the /t/ probably wouldn't be lost from affricatives like /tʃ/ either? I
would guess the 'ease' motivation wouldn't apply when the tongue is going
to be required to make a fricative in the same location anyway. (*Do*
those regional English accents eliminate that sound? I need to do more
research.)
There are so many details that non-students of language only start to
notice once we try to do something different and have the result feel
'wrong' without knowing why. This has been very helpful to me, thank you.
Matt G.
Messages in this topic (11)
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1d. Re: Why does the glottal stop often replace /t/ in English?
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" hst...@quickfur.ath.cx
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2013 12:06 pm ((PDT))
On Sat, Jun 01, 2013 at 02:12:03PM -0400, Matthew George wrote:
> So the /t/ probably wouldn't be lost from affricatives like /tʃ/
> either? I would guess the 'ease' motivation wouldn't apply when the
> tongue is going to be required to make a fricative in the same
> location anyway. (*Do* those regional English accents eliminate that
> sound? I need to do more research.)
The different phonetic context of /t/ in /tS/ would certainly disfavor
the change /t/ -> /?/. If sound change were to happen here, it would in
all likelihood go in a different direction. Cross-linguistically
speaking, /tS/ has a tendency to completely fricativise into pure /S/.
In Russian, for example, /tS/ is written as ч (well, technically it's
palatised [tS_j] -- but close enough), but there are some places where ч
is pronounced /S/ rather than /tS/. For example, что [Sto] instead of
[tS)to] (though allegedly the St. Petersburg dialect still preserves the
pronunciation [tS)to]), or the related ничто [niSto] instead of
[nitS).to]. I've seen misspellings like што and ништо online, for
example.
The initial <ch> in English words like "charade" may have been /tS/
historically which have since fricativised to /S/, but I'm not 100%
certain about this. English orthography isn't exactly the most
predictable or consistent in this regard. :)
(Which relates to your original question about why /?/ in English isn't
represented in writing: it's probably because it *wasn't* pronounced /?/
back in the days when spelling was standardized -- IIRC that was a few
hundred years ago, at the transition of Middle English to Modern
English. The /t/ -> /?/ sound change was probably a later development.)
> There are so many details that non-students of language only start to
> notice once we try to do something different and have the result feel
> 'wrong' without knowing why. This has been very helpful to me, thank
> you.
[...]
I don't have formal linguistics training either. I have the other
listmembers to thank -- it's amazing what you pick up here on CONLANG if
you've been here for a while. :)
T
--
Любишь кататься - люби и саночки возить.
Messages in this topic (11)
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2a. English Orthography in the Future
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" fizi...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2013 11:10 am ((PDT))
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/10093089/Hay-Festival-2013-Irritating-silent-letters-could-become-obsolete.html
Leading linguist David Crystal tells the Telegraph Hay Festival 2013
that in 50 years' time silent letters will be dropped from many common
words, thanks to the internet.
The internet will make English misspellings acceptable, according to
one of the country�s most senior linguists, who predicts that in 50
years� time many common words will be spelt without �irritating�
silent letters.
David Crystal, currently professor of linguists at Bangor University,
told the Telegraph Hay Festival that it would be �inevitable� that
people would drop the �p� from receipt, and change the �c� from
necessary into a �s�, as well as �simplifying� other words.
...
He said it was neither good nor bad that spelling was changing, but it
was �inevitable� in the same way that judgment without the middle �e�
was now acceptable in many publishers and newspaper style guides.
...
(More at the link above)
--gary
Messages in this topic (5)
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2b. Re: English Orthography in the Future
Posted by: "Matthew George" matt....@gmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2013 11:22 am ((PDT))
Americans managed to drop many of the worst orthography-pronunciation
mismatches, but we still preserve lots of them. It'd be nice to lose the
worst offenders against clarity - particularly 'ugh', which is perfectly
easily understood by itself but takes on a bizarre suite of pronunciations
within words.
I suppose it would be too much to hope for to make a few extra letters in
addition...
Matt G.
Messages in this topic (5)
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2c. Re: English Orthography in the Future
Posted by: "Mechthild Czapp" 0zu...@gmx.de
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2013 11:35 am ((PDT))
On 01.06.2013, at 19:22, Matthew George wrote:
> Americans managed to drop many of the worst orthography-pronunciation
> mismatches, but we still preserve lots of them. It'd be nice to lose the
> worst offenders against clarity - particularly 'ugh', which is perfectly
> easily understood by itself but takes on a bizarre suite of pronunciations
> within words.
>
> I suppose it would be too much to hope for to make a few extra letters in
> addition...
>
> Matt G.
I think your best bet for a completely regular orthography is a North Korean
invasion with subsequent forbidding or discouragement of the use of the Latin
alphabet.
Messages in this topic (5)
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2d. Re: English Orthography in the Future
Posted by: "Matthew Boutilier" bvticvlar...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2013 12:06 pm ((PDT))
i wonder if he meant 'judgement' *with* E becoming acceptable? cf:
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=judgment%2Cjudgement&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=
anyway, the problem with losing final "silent" <e> on a large scale is that
now we'd have no way to differentiate the spelling of (what are
traditionally called) long and short vowels.
at least in the US, silent-E is deeply ingrained in our perception of how
long vowels should be written. you can eat something that is calorie-lite,
shop at Rite Aid, wish someone good nite, eat a Veggie Delite.
i know this particular thing was not even mentioned in the article. but i
am really excited by the idea of English orthographic change, however
gradual, so i thought i'd bring it up.
on a tenuously related note, i am all for bringing back <þ>.
matt
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Mechthild Czapp <0zu...@gmx.de> wrote:
> On 01.06.2013, at 19:22, Matthew George wrote:
>
> > Americans managed to drop many of the worst orthography-pronunciation
> > mismatches, but we still preserve lots of them. It'd be nice to lose the
> > worst offenders against clarity - particularly 'ugh', which is perfectly
> > easily understood by itself but takes on a bizarre suite of
> pronunciations
> > within words.
> >
> > I suppose it would be too much to hope for to make a few extra letters in
> > addition...
> >
> > Matt G.
>
> I think your best bet for a completely regular orthography is a North
> Korean invasion with subsequent forbidding or discouragement of the use of
> the Latin alphabet.
Messages in this topic (5)
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2e. Re: English Orthography in the Future
Posted by: "Matthew George" matt....@gmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2013 12:09 pm ((PDT))
As am I - but only if it's pointy instead of rounded. It's called 'thorn',
it should evoke that association. The curvy, bulbous 'thorn' is just a bad
idea. And it's easier to confuse with either 'b' or 'p'.
Matt G.
Messages in this topic (5)
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3a. Re: translation exercises: McWhorter's 500 things language classes o
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" hst...@quickfur.ath.cx
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2013 12:42 pm ((PDT))
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 02:23:54AM -0500, George Corley wrote:
> I have to say, a couple of those categories are befuddling. Do
> language classes typically not cover age? I learned very explicitly
> how to state my age when I learned Spanish (Tengo X años. "I have X
> years.") and several ways of expressing and asking age in Mandarin
> (including reminders about how some Chinese people count age
> differently from Westerners, and the expression for saying "I was born
> in X" 我是X（年）生的). I wasn't taught this explicitly in Tagalog,
> however, so maybe it doesn't always happen.
In Russian, one counts summers:
Сколько ему лет?
how_many 3SG.DAT summer.PL.GEN
How old is he?
Ему пятнадцать лет.
3SG.DAT fifteen summer.PL.GEN
He is fifteen years old.
Well, technically, in contemporary Russian лет is just the irregular
plural genitive of год "year", so it's really just "years", but I
thought it was interesting that historically it was summers.
Also interesting is the fact that a dative construction is used, rather
than "to have" or "my age is X", etc..
Malay, like Chinese, has a dedicated word for age:
Berapa umur-nya?
how_many age-3SG.POSS
How old is (s)he? (Lit. how many is his age?)
There are two ways of stating age in Malay:
Umur saya enambelas.
age 1SG.POSS sixteen
I am 16 years old (My age is 16).
Saya enambelas tahun.
1SG sixteen year
I'm 16 years old.
I'm not certain about the second way (it may be a transliteration from
Chinese, not a native construction). But interestingly enough, _umur_
was apparently imported from Arabic, which then leads to the question of
how Malay expressed age before that, or did they not count age back
then?
Hokkien (phonetic transcription):
i1 kui1 hue3?
3SG how_many age
How old is he?
gua4 sã3 tsap3 hue3.
1SG three ten age
I am thirty years old.
Oddly enough, in both Mandarin and Hokkien, you don't use the copula
when stating your age (it sounds grammatically incorrect, but being your
typical illiterate L1 speaker, I can't explain why).
It's fascinating how something seemingly so trivial and fundamental like
age can show so much variety across languages.
T
--
Не дорог подарок, дорога любовь.
Messages in this topic (14)
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4a. Re: Place/mannor/voicing
Posted by: "Matthew George" matt....@gmail.com
Date: Sat Jun 1, 2013 12:49 pm ((PDT))
Place is straightforward - it could as easily have been called 'location'.
As for 'manner', one of the meanings of that word is "the way in which
something is done". Every location that can be involved in speech can be
used to make sound in one of several different ways. To refer to a
particular way, we talk about the "manner of articulation".
As for 'voice', when someone is said to be "in full voice" they're using
their vocal cords consistently and powerfully. Normal speech has
vibration, whispered does not - and when someone has "lost their voice", we
usually don't mean that they can't make any sounds at all, but that they
can't produce glottal vibrations. Why the meaning was narrowed from the
original sense of "sound produced by the human mouth and throat" I don't
know.
Matt G.
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 5:57 AM, Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews <
goldyemo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why are these terms called by those names?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Mellissa Green
>
>
>
>
>
> @GreenNovelist
>
>
>
Messages in this topic (2)
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