There are 13 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Spanish s as h
From: H. S. Teoh
1b. Re: Spanish s as h
From: John Q
1c. Re: Spanish s as h
From: MorphemeAddict
1d. Re: Spanish s as h
From: H. S. Teoh
1e. Re: Spanish s as h
From: John Q
1f. Re: Spanish s as h
From: Jyri Lehtinen
1g. Re: Spanish s as h
From: Leonardo Castro
2.1. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Douglas Koller
2.2. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: H. S. Teoh
2.3. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Douglas Koller
2.4. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: G. van der Vegt
2.5. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Daniel Bowman
3a. Re: What do you call the damn thing!
From: Douglas Koller
Messages
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1a. Re: Spanish s as h
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" [email protected]
Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 6:09 pm ((PDT))
On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 08:46:09PM -0400, John Q wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 16:22:13 -0400, MorphemeAddict <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >Where is s spoken as h in Spanish-speaking world? What are the
> >conditions for this sound change?
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> You can definitely hear it in Cuban Spanish as well as several pockets
> in South America. It occurs wherever /s/ is in syllable-final
> position. So the word "estos" is pronounced [eh.toh]. Many speakers
> take this further and pronounce it [e:to:]. if you've ever watched
> the popular variety program "Sábado Gigante" on Saturday nights on the
> Univision channel you'll notice the host Don Francisco has this
> accent. The show comes from Chile, although I don't know if that's
> where he's from originally. The popular Spanish-lamguage TV host
> Cristina Saralegui, who hosted her own show called Cristina for many
> years, also speaks this way. She is Cuban.
[...]
Interesting. I know an older Spanish speaker who consistently elides the
_s_ in _spiritu_ (I don't know enough Spanish to be able to tell if she
does that with other words containing _s_). Is this a dialectal
occurrence, or just a personal speech peculiarity?
T
--
Verbing weirds language. -- Calvin (& Hobbes)
Messages in this topic (10)
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1b. Re: Spanish s as h
Posted by: "John Q" [email protected]
Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 6:30 pm ((PDT))
On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 18:07:47 -0700, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
>Interesting. I know an older Spanish speaker who consistently elides the
>_s_ in _spiritu_ (I don't know enough Spanish to be able to tell if she
>does that with other words containing _s_). Is this a dialectal
>occurrence, or just a personal speech peculiarity?
>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, the Spanish word is "espíritu" so the elision of the syllable-final /s/
would follow the general pattern. It would seem that the particular speaker
you mention goes on to elide (or perhaps devoice?) the initial vowel as well,
given its atonic position before a tonic antepenultimate vowel (which is a
somewhat atypical stress pattern for Spanish).
--John Q.
Messages in this topic (10)
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1c. Re: Spanish s as h
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 7:10 pm ((PDT))
Thanks for all the responses. They're a big help.
stevo
On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 9:30 PM, John Q <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 18:07:47 -0700, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> >Interesting. I know an older Spanish speaker who consistently elides the
> >_s_ in _spiritu_ (I don't know enough Spanish to be able to tell if she
> >does that with other words containing _s_). Is this a dialectal
> >occurrence, or just a personal speech peculiarity?
> >
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Well, the Spanish word is "espíritu" so the elision of the syllable-final
> /s/ would follow the general pattern. It would seem that the particular
> speaker you mention goes on to elide (or perhaps devoice?) the initial
> vowel as well, given its atonic position before a tonic antepenultimate
> vowel (which is a somewhat atypical stress pattern for Spanish).
>
> --John Q.
>
Messages in this topic (10)
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1d. Re: Spanish s as h
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" [email protected]
Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 8:04 pm ((PDT))
On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 09:30:48PM -0400, John Q wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 18:07:47 -0700, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >Interesting. I know an older Spanish speaker who consistently elides
> >the _s_ in _spiritu_ (I don't know enough Spanish to be able to tell
> >if she does that with other words containing _s_). Is this a
> >dialectal occurrence, or just a personal speech peculiarity?
> >
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Well, the Spanish word is "espíritu" so the elision of the
> syllable-final /s/ would follow the general pattern. It would seem
> that the particular speaker you mention goes on to elide (or perhaps
> devoice?) the initial vowel as well, given its atonic position before
> a tonic antepenultimate vowel (which is a somewhat atypical stress
> pattern for Spanish).
[...]
If the correct word is _espiritu_, then probably she's pronouncing it
[E"pi:rItu], and it's just my non-Spanish ears failing to pick up the
initial vowel or failing to analyse word boundaries correctly. After
all, it's notoriously hard to recognize word boundaries in a foreign
language, esp. one that I'm not even actively learning. :)
T
--
Marketing: the art of convincing people to pay for what they didn't need
before which you can't deliver after.
Messages in this topic (10)
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1e. Re: Spanish s as h
Posted by: "John Q" [email protected]
Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 9:41 pm ((PDT))
On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 20:02:47 -0700, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>If the correct word is _espiritu_, then probably she's pronouncing it
>[E"pi:rItu], and it's just my non-Spanish ears failing to pick up the
>initial vowel or failing to analyse word boundaries correctly. After
>all, it's notoriously hard to recognize word boundaries in a foreign
>language, esp. one that I'm not even actively learning. :)
>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yeah, and for as easy (relatively speaking) as Spanish grammar is to learn
compared to most other languages, it is usually very difficult for students to
understand it when hearing it spoken due to the rapidity of speech which
Spanish phonology allows plus the great difficulty in figuring out the word
boundaries.
--John Q.
Messages in this topic (10)
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1f. Re: Spanish s as h
Posted by: "Jyri Lehtinen" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 4:06 am ((PDT))
>
> According to my knowledge of Spain, it is mostly a southern thing, but it
> seems to be creeping northward. The conditions of the sound change are
> rather place-dependent, as is the final point of the sound change. In
> Murcia all syllable-final /s/'s are deleted, and the vowel before becomes
> lax, giving Murcian Spanish a ten-vowel system. In Granada syllable-final
> /s/ is changed into [h], sometimes becoming aspiration on the vowel before,
> in rapid speech becoming inaudible to my ears. I know some people in
> Valencia who speak Spanish natively and who only delete /s/ now and then.
> If I remember correctly (I haven't been there for almost a year) /s/ is
> more unstable in front of /t/ than in front of /p/ and /k/, which may (or
> may not) be due to /s/ and /t/ (at least in that particular accent) to not
> have exactly the same point of articulation, leading to some lingual
> acrobatics to pronounce /-st-/ if no assimilation or lenition happens.
Something similar happens on the Canaries as well. The end point there
seems to be a very weak [h] which I was seldom able to hear properly when
staying there. Don't ask me anything else about the accent there, I stayed
on La Palma for a while but due to international friends did quite much
worse learning the language than what I would have wanted. I still managed
to get the bad habit of saying [grasia] for gracias.
-Jyri
Messages in this topic (10)
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1g. Re: Spanish s as h
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 6:41 am ((PDT))
In Brazilian Portuguese, this also happens in uncarefully pronounced
final-syllable s not immediately followed by vowel, usually in more
common words (mesmo, nós).
Até mais!
Leonardo
2013/6/20 MorphemeAddict <[email protected]>:
> Where is s spoken as h in Spanish-speaking world? What are the conditions
> for this sound change?
>
> stevo
Messages in this topic (10)
________________________________________________________________________
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2.1. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Douglas Koller" [email protected]
Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 7:37 pm ((PDT))
> Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:50:13 +0200
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
> To: [email protected]
> On 19 June 2013 04:41, Douglas Koller <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:14:53 -0500
> >> From: [email protected]
> >> I have briefly
> >> considered capitalizing DJ and CH together rather than Dj and Ch, but
> >> haven't ever actually done it as it looks weird to me.
> > Yeah, I don't go there either. IJsland? Thank you, no. :)
> In handwritten Dutch, it looks more like ÿ or its capitalized
> equivalent,
*My* cursive "ij" certainly looks like "ÿ". I stumbled on *typed* "ÿ" for Dutch
"ij" for the first time online some time last year and was suitably thrilled
(apparently, one can/could even eschew the dots: "yzer" ?). Too kewl. And so I
noted with interest the Jack Johnson was using it in earnest for his
Evidun/Nieuenederlands. But even he seems to have uppercase "¾" and "IJ"
running concurrently. "¾" isn't immediately intuitive to me, but it's easy
enough to get used to, and surely there are fonts out there where it's just a
glorified bigger version of "ÿ".
> and there are plenty examples of the digraph in
> non-handwritten Dutch where it's clearly represented as a single
> letter.
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Signboard-slijterij.jpg
Ooo, me like. Does the spelling "kooper" place it pre-war? The sign has an
older feel to it (sans "kooper", I would've guessed late 50s/early 60s). I know
you just proffered this by way of example, but one wonders if the "broken U"
would work (as well) if the sign were oriented horizontally. And you couldn't
get away with it in, say, Fraktur :D (though a different fun ligature could
certainly be created there). I don't pretend to understand any of it (people
start talking ascii, unicode, bitmaps, and the like, and I glaze over), but now
that the technology is *here*, why *can't* one make some ß-equivalently-kewl
ligature for "ij" ("ÿ" isn't incredibly sexy, but it'll do) that would make
Dutch even more uniquely Dutch-y? :)
> That said, I can imagine it's weird for people not used to it.
> Different expectations and all that.
Just so.
"¾sland" -- yessssssssssssssss.
Kou
Messages in this topic (31)
________________________________________________________________________
2.2. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" [email protected]
Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 7:58 pm ((PDT))
On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 10:37:31PM -0400, Douglas Koller wrote:
> > Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:50:13 +0200
> > From: [email protected]
> > Subject: Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
> > To: [email protected]
[...]
> > and there are plenty examples of the digraph in non-handwritten
> > Dutch where it's clearly represented as a single letter.
> > http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Signboard-slijterij.jpg
>
> Ooo, me like. Does the spelling "kooper" place it pre-war? The sign
> has an older feel to it (sans "kooper", I would've guessed late
> 50s/early 60s). I know you just proffered this by way of example, but
> one wonders if the "broken U" would work (as well) if the sign were
> oriented horizontally. And you couldn't get away with it in, say,
> Fraktur :D (though a different fun ligature could certainly be created
> there). I don't pretend to understand any of it (people start talking
> ascii, unicode, bitmaps, and the like, and I glaze over), but now that
> the technology is *here*, why *can't* one make some
> ß-equivalently-kewl ligature for "ij" ("ÿ" isn't incredibly sexy, but
> it'll do) that would make Dutch even more uniquely Dutch-y? :)
[...]
The Unicode characters already exist:
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/132/index.htm
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/133/index.htm
It's just a matter of tweaking existing fonts to make a nice ligature
for it. :)
T
--
The early bird gets the worm. Moral: ewww...
Messages in this topic (31)
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2.3. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Douglas Koller" [email protected]
Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 9:02 pm ((PDT))
> Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 19:57:02 -0700
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
> To: [email protected]
> On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 10:37:31PM -0400, Douglas Koller wrote:
> > I don't pretend to understand any of it (people start talking
> > ascii, unicode, bitmaps, and the like, and I glaze over), but now that
> > the technology is *here*, why *can't* one make some
> > ß-equivalently-kewl ligature for "ij" ("ÿ" isn't incredibly sexy, but
> > it'll do) that would make Dutch even more uniquely Dutch-y? :)
> The Unicode characters already exist:
> http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/132/index.htm
> http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/133/index.htm
> It's just a matter of tweaking existing fonts to make a nice ligature
> for it. :)
Glaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaze. XP
Kou
Messages in this topic (31)
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2.4. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "G. van der Vegt" [email protected]
Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 11:45 pm ((PDT))
On 21 June 2013 04:37, Douglas Koller <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:50:13 +0200
>> From: [email protected]
>> Subject: Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
>> To: [email protected]
>> In handwritten Dutch, it looks more like ÿ or its capitalized
>> equivalent,
>
> *My* cursive "ij" certainly looks like "ÿ". I stumbled on *typed* "ÿ" for
> Dutch "ij" for the first time online some time last year and was suitably
> thrilled (apparently, one can/could even eschew the dots: "yzer" ?). Too
> kewl. And so I noted with interest the Jack Johnson was using it in earnest
> for his Evidun/Nieuenederlands. But even he seems to have uppercase "Ÿ" and
> "IJ" running concurrently. "Ÿ" isn't immediately intuitive to me, but it's
> easy enough to get used to, and surely there are fonts out there where it's
> just a glorified bigger version of "ÿ".
It's not just with cursive. I've scanned a quickly prepared sample of
my handwriting <
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2757345/handwriting.png > which is
not remotely cursive.
I believe it should be fairly easy to read, but here's how this
translates to good ol' ASCII
Grijs
IJsland
Jan
Uurwerk
Index
Bijectie (syllable break between the i and j, so they are separate.)
Bijeen (syllable break after the ij, so they are a single entity.)
Xylofoon
Most of this is to display the specifics of my handwriting and how it
distinguishes between some cases.
In particular, Dutch capital Us tend to have (in my experience) that
little hook. Probably to help disambiguate it from a hastily written
IJ.
And also because there actually are cases where the ij sequence is
treated as two /different/ letters instead of one, in those cases
where the two characters actually represent something that isn't the
same as what the proper digraph/letter means.
The latter cases are admittedly rare, and in most cases, for written
Dutch, there's not much _need_ to distinguish, but there's a reason
that the 'IJ' is considered one of the two 25th letters of the Dutch
alphabet. (The y, aka 'griekse ij'/'y-grec' <greek y/ij> is considered
the other.)
PS: I believe that most people who spell IJ/ij as Y/y are writing
Afrikaans. Exceptions may exist, but I don't know of any.
Messages in this topic (31)
________________________________________________________________________
2.5. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Daniel Bowman" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 4:52 am ((PDT))
I generally write my conlang Angosey in Roman script rather than its native
scripts. When I do so, I preserve the same capitalization schemes as
English (my native language) does. I cannot be sure but I suspect this is
how most (all?) languages that are not written in Roman script are
transliterated for the benefit of English speakers. If a German speaker
writes Korean text in Roman script for German readers, does he or she
impose a German capitalization?
The native Angosey scripts use an initial-medial glyph system. There are
no spaces between words, so in a sense YouWriteLikeThisInAngosey. I would
not call the initials capitals and the medials lowercase as it serves a
purely orthographic system.
I did come up with a cursive substitution code when I was 12 that
distinguished between lowercase and 2 types of capitals: proper nouns and
sentence onsets. However, I soon decided that 78 symbols were a bit much
and ended up writing everything in lowercase.
Danny
2013/6/21 G. van der Vegt <[email protected]>
> On 21 June 2013 04:37, Douglas Koller <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:50:13 +0200
> >> From: [email protected]
> >> Subject: Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
> >> To: [email protected]
> >> In handwritten Dutch, it looks more like ÿ or its capitalized
> >> equivalent,
> >
> > *My* cursive "ij" certainly looks like "ÿ". I stumbled on *typed* "ÿ"
> for Dutch "ij" for the first time online some time last year and was
> suitably thrilled (apparently, one can/could even eschew the dots: "yzer"
> ?). Too kewl. And so I noted with interest the Jack Johnson was using it in
> earnest for his Evidun/Nieuenederlands. But even he seems to have uppercase
> "Ÿ" and "IJ" running concurrently. "Ÿ" isn't immediately intuitive to me,
> but it's easy enough to get used to, and surely there are fonts out there
> where it's just a glorified bigger version of "ÿ".
>
> It's not just with cursive. I've scanned a quickly prepared sample of
> my handwriting <
> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2757345/handwriting.png > which is
> not remotely cursive.
>
> I believe it should be fairly easy to read, but here's how this
> translates to good ol' ASCII
>
> Grijs
> IJsland
> Jan
> Uurwerk
> Index
> Bijectie (syllable break between the i and j, so they are separate.)
> Bijeen (syllable break after the ij, so they are a single entity.)
> Xylofoon
>
> Most of this is to display the specifics of my handwriting and how it
> distinguishes between some cases.
>
> In particular, Dutch capital Us tend to have (in my experience) that
> little hook. Probably to help disambiguate it from a hastily written
> IJ.
>
> And also because there actually are cases where the ij sequence is
> treated as two /different/ letters instead of one, in those cases
> where the two characters actually represent something that isn't the
> same as what the proper digraph/letter means.
>
> The latter cases are admittedly rare, and in most cases, for written
> Dutch, there's not much _need_ to distinguish, but there's a reason
> that the 'IJ' is considered one of the two 25th letters of the Dutch
> alphabet. (The y, aka 'griekse ij'/'y-grec' <greek y/ij> is considered
> the other.)
>
> PS: I believe that most people who spell IJ/ij as Y/y are writing
> Afrikaans. Exceptions may exist, but I don't know of any.
>
Messages in this topic (31)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3a. Re: What do you call the damn thing!
Posted by: "Douglas Koller" [email protected]
Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 8:41 pm ((PDT))
> Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:47:46 -0500
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: What do you call the damn thing!
> To: [email protected]
> I call it a "remote". A Chinese friend informs me that the Chinese is é¥æ§,
> which appears to be a direct calque of the English "remote control" (é¥ yao2
> "far, remote, distant"; æ§ kong4 "to control"). She said é¥æ§å¨
> yao2kong4qi4
> "remote control device" is also acceptable.
A calque, certainly, but I imagine it was truncated. Like "When in Rome.", full
stop, doesn't make a whole lotta sense unless you already know the entire
expression, and "remote", in English, by itself would be a little opaque
without a history of "remote control" behind it, so, too, I'm guessing,
"é¥æ§".
"éé " yao2yuan3 (remote) + "æ§å¶ "kong4zhi4" (control) = éé æ§å¶
Start with that for a while, let the masses settle into it, then at the tipping
point, take the first one of each: é¥æ§
Hardly a new phenomenon:
ç°å¢ huan2jing4 (environment) + ä¿è· bao3hu4 (protection) = ç°å¢ä¿è· =>
ç°ä¿
空氣 kong1qi4 (air) + èª¿ç¯ tiao2jie2 (adjusting) = ç©ºæ°£èª¿ç¯ => 空調
(air conditioner)
? å³é chuan2song4 (transmit/convey) + ç件 zhen1jian4 (actual documents) =
å³éç件 => å³ç (fax)
I suspect that's what's going on. (unless one is being specifically technical,
glomming å¨'s and æ©'s onto these feels to non-native me like saying "channel
changer" or "clicker" in English; c'mon, Pops, cut off your queue and join us
in the 21st century, won't you?)
Meanwhile, over by the mouth of the Tumen, the Géarthçins are most likely
calling it a "klébvöks", a calque-y "remote control" that simply blends too
well. I suspect there may be a more indigenous term from back in the 70s that,
to the chagrin of purists, died of loneliness as the calque elbowed its way in.
We'll just have to see.
Kou
Messages in this topic (16)
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