I am just very bad at finding my bed. I was almost ready to turn off the screen, but then I was like, "oooh, what does this button dooo? Pretty!". And then I fell through the room of this room.
i once managed to read a book in swedish. conversationally my german is better than my french but even simple books in german are hard to read though i did manage it at least once
is it just me or are we getting a lot of subjective (opinions, "i think", etc) answers?
i also struggled with what to ask after waiting for this site to appear for so long. maybe because i committed after the example question contribution was already closed
just go about your usual linguistics stuff and soon a question either that will come up, or you will be reminded of a question you once had. you should ask such old good questions now even if you now know the answer.
@hippietrail I am also not a big fan of short answers that are one link without explanation; someone's opinion can be better than those. But I agree I have felt like I've seen a lot of those short, subjective answers so far.
@hippietrail I don't think it's bad to encourage people to flesh out answers even now. Most people don't read directions, so a little coaching goes a long way.
This is an exciting answer to a question that could have invited a lot of subjective or personal experience answers. (of course, I'd like to format it to shrink those giant images if I could think how to do so nicely, without making the browser squish 'em)
But perhaps don't bother with the 4th and 5th declensions yet if you're still learning basic grammar.
You know what's funny? I can read some Portuguese, but speech sounds utterly unintelligible to me, more like some Slavic language, most of the time. At least when I hear people speaking on the news.
i thought i would be able to read portuguese and italian after getting ok at spanish but oddly french is the only one i can manage. then again i didn't get the stuff i wanted to read the most in catalan
after learning spanish and having some exposure to brazilian portuguese, when i went to portugal i thought i was hearing something totally and utterly alien
oh i buy books in every language but the ones i like best i either didnt find or were too expensive in catalonia so i only bought stuff i was less inspired to try to read
@hippietrail I find Italian comparatively easier to understand in speech than French, probably because of liaison, even though I took French classes for six years in school, none in Italian.
@hippietrail Ah OK, so no Catalan involved? I find that OKish to read after French/Italian/Spanish/Latin.
yes the liaison in french i found impenetrable to begin with but a few weeks backpacking in france got me feeling the similarity to spanish much better. but i can't have a conversation in french
yes i wish i had one of the practice reading a foreign language books i prefer in catalan to give it a proper try
then again i also with the people in barcelona didn't act so snobby and i would've spent more time drinking and chatting with them (-;
macedonian turns out to be a controversial language. greece wants it to be a dialect of bulgarian
3
linguistically that's fair enough but the greeks want to force it from a political view. one way of looking at it is there is a dialect continuum from serbian through macedonian to bulgarian.
and of course something similar happens with danish to german and german to dutch and propably among the nordic languages too. it's just the places that gather enough mass and choose a written standard that end up crystalising as languages. only macedonian is doing that right now instead of safely in the past
@hippietrail Oh God... well, it actually might be. People seem to have all sorts of naïve conceptions of a "word". That is, outside writing it is very difficult, and even in writing it is controversial.
@Cerberus: in writing you have to consider languages without spaces, or with spaces between syllables rather than between words; and you have to consider inflections of words, and compounds both character based and variants with hyphen, space, or blocked directly together
ping pong, runcible spoon, there must be better ones than that. oh and proper nouns; or you can combine them. is Hong or Kong a word and what about Hong Kong?
@hippietrail I spend two month last summer trying to figure out a way for a tagger to find words boundaries. It was the biggest PITA I've ever experienced.
@Evpok: i wrote my own simplistic machine translator years ago and the word boundary problem prevented me from ever including japanese, chinese, vietnamese, thai, etc
At my English lesson the native English speaker couldn’t tell what is correct and promised to search it for us!
He told us that if James is one person then we should write
James' Book
but if we had many James he didn't know to tell us what to write...
Any suggestions?
@hippietrail @Evpok. I've developed a rudimentary Mandarin to English translator. I used a longest match algorithm! Is that what you guys were talking about?
@AlainPannetier We were talking about the general issue of finding word boundaries. My issue was with French, and it was implemented as machine-learned CRF model.
With Mandarin, I've done it like this. Took the cedict, loaded into mysql 6.0alpha db (defunct) and built a tree. Whenever I find a word. I try the longest match possible. I sometimes have to go back a few characters of course.
This leads me to the nexr word.
Hello @Cerberus.
You must be happy, linguistics.SE started at last !!!
@hippietrail, Sorry but I had to look up CRF. It seems quite complex. Good thing I don't have too much difficulty with French: this CRF seems even harder ;-)
yes french also has word boundary problems, espcially with the contractions and such which are written as affixes
@Evpok you can maybe try it. we tried it in japanese l&u but people complained even though nobody but maybe two of used the chat so we ended up turning it off to appease them
Reading the claims of Method for natural voice recognition based on a generative transformation/phrase structure grammar
What exactly would they be looking at in a sentence to aid the processing?
Also would such processing only work in English? I.e. would it be pointless looking for triphones i...
Children raised in a multilingual environment learn all the languages that they are exposed to with no effort. Does the same thing happen if a child has only indirect contact with a language? For example, if the child is only exposed to music, TV and radio programs in another language, is it poss...
In diachronic comparison of languages, say PIE to Latin to Romance, it is a classic recognition that the later languages strictly lose some of the morphologically marked categories. PIE had 8 noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, etc), Latin 5, Romance 2 or even 1. Pick a morphological ca...
The so-called tau gallicum was a character used in Gaulish, written Đ, ð or even a Θ. Its name comes from the only commentary on it that we have, by Vergil (Appendix Vergiliana, Catalepton II, 4).
Every study I have read on Gaulish states that it was pronounced as the affricate [t͡s] or the reve...
Since vowels in human speech are a continuous spectrum rather than a discrete set, many descriptions of languages I’ve seen — not only on Wikipedia — place the vowels of a language as dots in a two-dimensional grid. For example, here is the one for modern Hebrew:
The positions of these dots se...
It was suggested at this question that a question about a single language is off-topic, being more appropriate for a Stack Exchange site dedicated to that language. What do people think of this idea?
I have asked the following question which I think might be controversial as it demands a list (obviously, I personally do think that it is of interest)
Which body parts can invented speech be taken from?
So please weigh in whether questions like this should be
closed
discouraged
wikified
tolera...
Having had many discussions on other forums that essentially turned on trying to express an opinion about the tree structure of a sentence, are there any clever ways to illustrate a sentence diagram on this site?
[[[I'm] aware] [of [[this sort] [of diagramming.]]]]
But it isn't all that readabl...
Derived from french.stackexchange's one.
As we have already one question dealing with typography and formatting issues and as there will likely be many of these, I think it would be fitting to set down a typography guide, e.g. like Wikipedia's one. Even more since we will likely have many specif...
It has been suggested on the English Meta that questions regarding linguistic topics there should be copied to Linguistics.SE and then closed on EL&U. Now that Linguistics.SE has been launched, what are the plans? How are these tasks normally carried out? Are moderators in charge of this task...
My interest in linguistics was sparked by John McWhorter's popular book The Power of Babel, which, in its section on creoles, includes a small piece on Nicaraguan Sign Language, which really sparked my imagination.
According to that book, it's the only language which has been, in historical time...
@Evpok, regarding your question about the tau gallicum, I have no personal opinion of my own on the topic but I can't help noticing 2 things: 1/ The same letter "Ð" or "ð" came to be [used in Old English](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth_%28letter%29) from the 9th century onward interchangeably with the thorn (þ). It was IIRC brought by Irish monks/scribes. The fact that they transcribed the Old English consonant with either þ or ð would suggest that the sound was /θ/ (voiceless) or /ð/ (voiced) as in Modern Greek and English or possibly /dʰ/ allowing for some evolution. Please note tha…
On English.SC, we voted to edit non-controversial errors in the questions and answers of others. The argument went that, since the site was about English, it would be more appropriate there than anywhere else to do so.
What do you think: should we do the same on Linguistics?
I have in mind typo...
we asked this same thing on either japanese or travel, i think travel. it turns out to be a general SE guideline to clean up questions and answers to make them better for the future audiences, also more findable by google searches of course
I've noticed one contributor is rewriting people's answers to change many minor things which I would not call fixing problems but personalizing style. For instance changing between British and American spellings. I thought this was not the purpose of the post-editing power as I've used it and see...
Straight from the horse's mouθ: "<Ð> and <G> are used in Faroese orthography to indicate one of a number of glides rather than any one phoneme." - góðan morgun! [ˌɡɔuwan ˈmɔɹɡʊn] - leður [ˈleːvʊɹ] (leather
ah yes. i also was going to ask what glides languages have besides /j/ and /w/ since those seem to pop up all over the planet but i can't think of any others
@hippietrail, regarding the korean/japanese relationship and "ga". - I know that "ga" is thought to have been the mark of a genitive in Old Japanese. - There are a couple of american linguists who have claimed to have proven the kinship (mainly on the basis of vocabulary).
@aediaλ I can't really tell because I know nothing of the dialect, but it looked fine to me! Except that I didn't know what AAVE was. I've edited it in, now someone has to approve my edit.
@kaleissin: sorry which question is brilliant? the vowel analysis one? (sorry dozens of windows going and a friend next to me talking english/german/macedonian all mixed together)
@Cerberus Cerberus: There's an unbreakable law in the universe that any discussion of how spellings differ in various forms of English leads to discussions on how words are pronounced, and such can go on for weeks and several hundred posts, hence the dreaded YAEPT and things that are known to lead to YAEPT.
@Cerberus Umm. I don't know. I think yes but at the same time I've always heard that lumped in with copula when discussing AAVE...
> The auxiliary verb function derives from the copular function; and, depending on one's point of view, one can still interpret the verb as a copula and the following verbal form as being adjectival.
In what contexts can the zero copula occur in African-American Vernacular English? What rules govern its use—for example, what makes she runnin' more likely to be acceptable than ?she a runner?
Some of what I know:
Some (I think Labov, notably) have proposed that copula absence in AAVE occurs w...
By the way, I sort of have the feeling that everyone is doing his best so much to make his question of the highest quality that they're extremely difficult to answer... which I suppose is a good thing!
What is the possessive of a noun ending in s?
The boys' books.
? The boss' car.
At my English lesson the native English speaker couldn’t tell what is correct and promised to search it for us!
He told us that if James is one person then we should write
James' Book
but if we had many James he didn't know to tell us what to write...
Any suggestions?
On English.SC, we voted to edit non-controversial errors in the questions and answers of others. The argument went that, since the site was about English, it would be more appropriate there than anywhere else to do so.
What do you think: should we do the same on Linguistics?
I have in mind typo...
In what contexts can the zero copula occur in African-American Vernacular English? What rules govern its use—for example, what makes she runnin' more likely to be acceptable than ?she a runner?
Some of what I know:
Some (I think Labov, notably) have proposed that copula absence in AAVE occurs w...
lɪŋˈgwɪstɪks
lɪŋˈgwɪstɪks