gwenguistics

[gwenguistics]

you are a nazi

we got random hoes schizoposting about how we‘re all nazis now… can’t say i’m not entertained

[gwenguistics]

what motivated you to go into linguistics? I have a minor in linguistics myself

hmmm i've just always loved languages, it's hard to explain. also damn lol i havent posted on this account in forever, how did you find this

[gwenguistics]

is it just me or are there barely any historical linguistics papers? so so many synchronic analysises but barely anything on how the shit actually comes to exist.

[gwenguistics]

it’s interesting how the /w/ phoneme was so prominent in Proto-Indo-European and its descendant languages, but is actually pretty rare in modern Indo-European languages. or at least it’s rarer for /w/ to have remained /w/ (in other words, Spanish has a /w/ of sorts from sequences of u+vowel, like “huevo”, but the original Latin /w/ became /v/ and then /b/. like the v in huevo. lol).

English is like the only Germanic language that i can think of that kept it as-is. Dutch still distinguishes /w/ from the v that results from a voicing of /f/ in theory, but from what i understand, this isnt even true in every Dutch dialect lol. Romance languages only have /w/ when it comes from /ua/, /ue/, /uo/ etc, despite /w/ being so common in Latin. /v/ is a relatively uncommon sound cross-linguistically EXCEPT for languages that turned /w/ to /v/. /v/ almost always comes from /w/ or /f/ or /b/, and /f/ almost always comes from /p/, so like... idk, anyway i just think it’s interesting. /w/ is one of the most common sounds for a language to have, for a language to lose (by it either turning into v or disappearing completely like in Greek), AND for a language to gain (by lenition of other consonants, vowels in hiatus, etc). /j/ too, though that’s way more stable it seems. yes it does often change to other sounds, like how /j/ in Latin became three different sounds in French, Spanish, and Italian, but the entire Slavic branch kept /j/ pretty heavily. and both Slavic and Italic lost their original /w/s. Italic lost both the original /w/ and /j/ (for the most part, there are obviously exceptions, especially in smaller romance languages), but Slavic kept /j/, Germanic kept /j/ except for English (and probably some other smaller ones) who kept /j/ and /w/... etc. 

interesting.

[gwenguistics]

my dream job–and i mean “job” loosely, i would do this for no pay–would be reconstructing protolanguages for families that are pretty well established, but who still need somebody to obsessively crawl through their lexicons and grammars to work out the exact sound correspondences

[gwenguistics]

i live in a part of south africa where isiXhosa is the primary language spoken and its the worst because you cant whisper in class because the clicks are so loud the teacher WILL hear you

Oh shit I'd never thought about this. But yeah, it makes sense. Clicks are so sonorous.

[gwenguistics]

say what u will but i think kortlandt has a point with indo-uralic

I hear conflicting things about Indo-Uralic. My general impression is that it has promise, but I really know very little.

@possessivesuffix, do you have thoughts on Indo-Uralic?

[gwenguistics]

I’d bet money that Cushitic is probably the branch most relevant to Proto-Afroasiatic and it’s just being slept on because too many people have boners over Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew.

[gwenguistics]

the japanese “-ne?” particle and the british slang term “innit” serve the same function

[gwenguistics]

What's your position on *a?

pretty agnostic

when it's required in the roots of content words (nominals, verbs), that's not really that problematic, even if it is unusual – late PIE did have an *[a] in any case as a consequence of laryngeal colouring, which then became phonemic (that's how *tau̯ros 'bull' was borrowed into PIE with an *a). i don't think forcing a laryngeal explanation is the best way to go about solving the presence of a "primary" *a, not least because it often opens up new problems (e. g. *sh₂el- instead of *sal- 'salt' is viable, but *nh₂es- instead of *nas- 'nose' is not, because the syllabification would be *n̥h₂es- with a syllabic nasal), though as shown it can work in some cases. even less economical is positing a whole nother laryngeal (*h₄)

it's more problematic when it seems to be required in morphology, particles, pronouns, as in the thematic ablative *-o-ad > *-ād (perhaps *-oh₁-ad from the instrumental + particle *ad, but almost certainly not *-o-h₂ed or *oh₁-h₂ed, because that would be visible in Hittite; required by Lith. -o from PBSl. *-ā and not *-ō which would've given Lith. -uo) because borrowing doesn't work as well there. late creation after laryngeal-coloured *a became phonemic is still possible imo (the issue here is whether "primary" *a and laryngeal-coloured allophonic *[a] are the same – mostly based on the fact that there's indication that *o and laryngeal-coloured *[o] were not the same. but i don't think that's that relevant because a primary, non-laryngeal *o clearly exists throughout the proto-language which canmot be said for "primary" *a)

[gwenguistics]

is there a difference between "someone" and "somebody"? there isn't, right? you might use them in different set phrases and maybe different contexts, or just to alternate between the two so you aren't saying "someone" too many times in a row, but like... there's no fundamental difference in meaning right? i wonder why there's only one "something" though. "somewhat" exists but it's an adverb lol

[gwenguistics]

british podcasts be like "rate and review us on iChunes"

[gwenguistics]

this is not dutch

http://bit.ly/305Y3X8

[gwenguistics]

it is past time we jettisoned the useless false dichotomy of introversion vs. extroversion and just accepted that everybody has a minimum amount of social interaction, failing which, they get really weird. and everybody has a maximum amount of social interaction, exceeding which, they get really weird. these levels are different for everyone, for a variety of reasons, and have no moral dimension. and that is all.

[gwenguistics]

i love when words change meaning over time because they become associated with stuff thats kinda related, but not originally covered by the word. 

like, for example, “manure” didn’t originally mean cow shit, it comes from same old french word that “maneuver” does, which comes from the latin roots “manu-” and “operare”, so it literally just means “to work with your hands”. “manure” didnt mean the cow shit itself, it meant the act of doing farm labor, including spreading fertilizer and tending to crops and stuff like that by hand. in english, it originally came in as a verb. you would go manure the fields or whatever lmao. so like naturally it came to mean the fertilizer itself eventually. 

similarly, “chaos” didn’t mean like wild, unpredictable randomness, it referred to the big empty void of nothingness that existed before the gods created the world in greek mythology. it literally comes from the greek for “yawning”, cause its a big void. but “chaos” eventually started to mean like the absense of form and rules and stuff like that, and then eventually the meaning it has today. but yeah, it didnt originally mean “too much stuff happening”, it originally meant “nothing at all”

[gwenguistics]

it makes a bit of sense why Greek has a separate letter for “ks”, because in Greek you can actually start words with that consonant cluster (and pronounce it as such. xylophone does start with ks- in Greek), but why did Latin have a letter for that? Latin had a lot of clusters of /ks/ (or cs in a Latin alphabet that doesnt include x), but never at the start of a word unless it was borrowed from Greek. the only reason really is that the use of “x” in Latin is because the alphabet was borrowed from/derived from Greek, and so “ks” was spelled with “x”. but... they borrowed it wrong, lol. Latin “x” is derived from the shape of Greek chi, χ, not Greek xi/ksi, ξ. x should have been used for “ch” in borrowings from Greek, in words like “character” and “chimera” and such. the Latin x should have been more like a squiggly ξ if they wanted to have a letter to represent ks lol. Latin x even comes at the place in the alphabet that Greek chi does, at the end, not where Greek xi does, between n and o. though that may just reflect a relatively late addition to the Latin alphabet, as obviously y and z (two more letters derived from Greek directly) come after x in Latin, and not where their corresponding Greek letters do (y would be before x, and z would be all the way at the beginning, after e)

and what’s weird is that Latin has plenty of clusters of “ps” too, like in words like “princeps” and “ipso facto” or whatever, and yet Latin doesnt borrow the Greek psi ψ, which would make just as much sense for Latin to have as x/ks does... 

neither of them have a letter for ts to complete a trio with letters for ks and ps, but then again neither of those two languages had ts clusters in their classical periods anyway. though both developed or borrowed words with ts in them much later. 

but also, why have a separate letter for ks and ps at all? they werent treated as single phonemes, even in Greek, they were treated as clusters that they just simply wrote with one letter. and the letters arent ligatures of the letters for the two sounds theyre composed of either, theyre unique letters that, apparently we’re not sure of the origin of. I actually didnt know that until i was researching things while writing this post, because i know most Greek letters are derived from Phoenician and are tied to other Semitic language letters, but apparently Greek ξ and ψ’s origins are unclear? That just makes it even weirder that they have letters for those sets of sounds. clusters like “st” or “nt” or “pr” occur way more often than “ks” and “ps”, yet those dont have dedicated letters.... Latin did have a dedicated letter for /kw/, Q, but that actually does make sense, as that was treated as a single phoneme, not a consonant cluster. it doesnt make much sense for English, which treats Q as a combination of K+W, but Latin treated it as one sound, /kʷ/. so they get a pass for that one, haha.

anyway, i’m just thinking out loud here, sorry lol

[gwenguistics]

is 신류진 pronounced like 실류진 or 신 류진? i feel like ive mostly heard it pronounced with the ㄴ and ㄹ pronounced separately, but that goes against normal korean pronunciation rules. but on the other hand, it’s a name, so different rules might apply in order for it to make sense and be understood

박 before a name that starts with ㅁ or ㄴ is pronounced like 방 right? but i guess thats more common than a name that starts with ㄹ, so it’s more easily understood (even though 방 is a regular surname too. less common, but regular)