lɪŋˈgwɪstɪks

JSBᾶngs

01:52

@Evpok in english we call those "theta roles" :)

Cerberus

02:23

Boo.

Are you people happy now?

JSBᾶngs

well, yes

who are "we people"?

and were you jeering us or trying to frighten us?

Cerberus

Just a locutionarily neutral question with unpredictable illucution!

JSBᾶngs

@Cerberus boo

look, it's simchona

Cerberus

Heh.

simchona

Hi!

Cerberus

02:25

Look!

simchona

@Cerb, I thought you went to sleep :p

Cerberus

She caught me!

I am supposed to.

JSBᾶngs

it's like the whole english crowd is all coming in to see the linguists

simchona

Yes, all...three of us

Cerberus

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.

JSBᾶngs

02:26

@simchona well, you know. it's a start.

Cerberus

Bogdan and Kit appear to be in.

JSBᾶngs

@Cerberus i just got an email. your way sounds much more interesting

simchona

@JSBᾶngs Gotta start somewhere

Cerberus

@JSBᾶngs I meant this chat room specifically.

You know what's annoying? I don't feel like I can just answer something coherent to any question I see here.

5

JSBᾶngs

@Cerberus why not?

Cerberus

02:28

Hey!

Boo.

@JSBᾶngs Too hard!

On ELU, I can say something vaguely related that won't be completely wrong on any question.

JSBᾶngs

@Cerberus well, you answered that one question about phonological loss

Cerberus

But here it is often rather specialized.

JSBᾶngs

anyway, i'm not an expert or a linguist. i'm just a dillettante

Cerberus

@JSBᾶngs Yeah that's just one.

@JSBᾶngs High five!

JSBᾶngs

i shall try to convince my friend brett to join. he will be awesome

he's the one who got his doctorate from oxford

however, in the short term i'm going to go to bed

like you should have done, @Cerb :)

Cerberus

02:31

So I shall!

@simchona No? Like whom?

simchona

@Cerberus Theta perhaps?

Cerberus

I am really in the process of going to bed. I'm just bad at it.

JSBᾶngs

theta? what?

Cerberus

@simchona No! Why on earth would I want to avoid Bogdan?

simchona

@JSBᾶngs He said good night in EL&U a while back

Cerberus

02:32

I don't have anyone I want to avoid at the moment.

JSBᾶngs

@simchona yeah, but who is theta?

never mind

Cerberus

@JSBᾶngs Bogdan.

JSBᾶngs

i'll find out tomorrow

@Cerberus bogdan is great. he's romanian, so +1 for that

Cerberus

His new name.

See?

I liked his old name better.

JSBᾶngs

well, anyway

good night everyone

Cerberus

02:34

Night!

hippietrail

07:12

morning

Evpok

07:26

@hippietrail Bonjour :)

hippietrail

@Evpok: добро утро

Evpok

@hippietrail dobrý den

Ah, enough with slavic languages, my tongue twists at the very idea of them :p

hippietrail

bună dimineaţa

it's the smallest step away from slavic i could manage since i don't know any latvian

Evpok

@hippietrail I don't even know which language is that

hippietrail

romanian

i just studied it informally for a month and a half, but didn't do very well

Evpok

07:35

What's your native language?

hippietrail

australian english. yours?

Evpok

French

hippietrail

je parl seulement un petit petit peu

but i've read a couple of books in french for practice

Evpok

@hippietrail Ah, astonishingly, I, too, have read a couple of book in English ;)

hippietrail

07:55

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

Louis Rhys

13:35

hi guys

Evpok

Hi

aedia λ

15:11

@simchona Me four!

¡Hola todos!

Cerberus

Hoi!

aedia λ

15:27

@Cerberus Middag!

I am struggling to come up with a question scholarly enough to ask. The beta email was intimidating-sounding.

Cerberus

15:48

Tell me about it!

I have no idea what to ask either.

aedia λ

16:02

I wanted to ask about copula absence in specific contexts but I got distracted by, like, someone's dissertation and all of Wikipedia.

Cerberus

@aediaλ Yeah that can be annoying...

I say just ask without researching.

hippietrail

17:47

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.

Cerberus

@hippietrail I don't know; probably no more than on other .SE sites.

hippietrail

in my experience more than the other SE sites both established and betas

Cerberus

We're not a scientific journal anyway: some intuition and subjectivity may be OK.

@hippietrail Certainly much less so than on English.SE.

hippietrail

on a more established site i would comment for people to consider either presenting some evidence or moving their answer to a comment

well we are supposed to be specifically at expert level

Cerberus

Meh. It's still an amateur website.

Besides, would we get enough answers if they had to be well documented?

hippietrail

17:53

well a site is just as likely to be close if it has many bad answers as if it had few good answers

Cerberus

By the way, based on the T-shirt I received today, I will have to start abbreviating as Linguistics.SC.

hippietrail

SC?

aedia λ

@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 often contribute opinions but always (i hope always) as comments rather than answers

Cerberus

aedia λ

17:56

@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.

hippietrail

the short answers are another problem here though now that you point it out

Cerberus

Voilà "SC".

hippietrail

did you correct the letter or did it come like that? if the former that's pretty funny. if the latter it's hilarious (-:

but i'm still too dim to see where "SC" is from \-:

Cerberus

It came like that, and it was a joke, or so they say.

aedia λ

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)

Cerberus

17:59

The t-shirt itself, however, was a "misprint".

@hippietrail Look at the t-shirt carefully.

hippietrail

aha! (=

i can never remember what the difference is between uralic and finno-ugric

uralic = finno-ugric + samoyedic?

Cerberus

@aediaλ Wowie!

> Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic, though more typically Finno-Ugric is understood to exclude the Samoyedic languages.[2]

hippietrail

high five!

Cerberus

high fives but stumbles awkwardly because he didn't know it himself

hippietrail

i might ask the subjectivity question on meta because the jeffs and joels and their cops are usually pretty insistent on that point

stumbling is ok

Cerberus

18:06

They probably couldn't tell anyway.

aedia λ

@Cerberus (No puedes put the quotey thing with anything else before it if quieres las pretty little lines.)

Cerberus

@aediaλ Capito!

C'est pourquoi je l'ai reversé.

hippietrail

¿hablamos español?

Cerberus

Yo no hablo Espagnol. Puedo solemente ehhh read it.

If it's simple, like a newspaper or academic article in my field.

And I might need a dictionary.

Y tu?

hippietrail

es mi segunda idioma pero no soy/estoy fluido

aedia λ

18:10

@hippietrail y yo, lo mismo

hippietrail

lo leo pero aún con un diccionario me falta muchas detalles

Cerberus

I can understand but not reply.

I basically work with context and by comparing it with other languages I know better.

hippietrail

i tried to leverage my spanish to learn romanian just recently but i underachieved

aedia λ

@hippietrail Sí, sí. Y no puedo hablar con españoles, o latinoamericanos, sin decir 'mas despacio por favor, un poquito mas despacio'...

Cerberus

I hate writing/speaking in a language that I don't know really well.

Unless the language is extraordinarily fun and everybody who would correct me is dead.

hippietrail

18:17

yo nunca digo más despacio por favor pero en cualquier punto pierdo el thread (-:

for that the gods have bequeathed us alcohol!

but tonight im not drinking

Otavio Macedo

@Cerberus Is there such a language?

hippietrail

today i mostly dealt in a mix of german and english spiced with macedonian

i dont mind what causes everybody who would correct me to not do so. in fact i prefer if death is not the reason (-:

Cerberus

@OtavioMacedo Latin, more or less.

@hippietrail Studies have shown that people's second-language speaking skills actually improve somewhat after a few drinks.

2

@hippietrail I don't know... I feel ashamed when I know I'm making stupid mistakes.

hippietrail

i knew it wasnt just me

Otavio Macedo

@Cerberus I started learning Latin...

Cerberus

18:21

If anybody ever shows up here willing to speak Latin, do let me know!

Otavio Macedo

But I'm still struggling with all the cases and declensions and so on...

hippietrail

i always tell people three rules if you seriously want to learn a language

Cerberus

@hippietrail Yeah I used to think that I only appeared to be speaking better, but...

@OtavioMacedo Very good!

hippietrail

even in german i cant handle all the cases and declensions and so on

Cerberus

@OtavioMacedo When did you start?

Otavio Macedo

18:22

@Cerberus A month ago, more or less

hippietrail

it reduces your inhibitions and you are scared there are mistakes even in the utterences with no mistakes

Cerberus

Declensions are more important in Latin, I'd say, though you might come a long way in prose.

@OtavioMacedo Cool! If you ever have questions, ask me!

@hippietrail You mean the former after drink, the latter before?

Otavio Macedo

@Cerberus Thank you! I certainly will :)

Cerberus

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.

Otavio Macedo

Brazilian or European?

or both?

hippietrail

18:27

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

Cerberus

I think both... but perhaps European sounds less articulate to me, just as Castilian sounds less articulate to me?

hippietrail

european portuguese sounds slavic to me. brazilian portuguese sounds like a suaver smoother sexier spanish

Cerberus

@hippietrail That is odd indeed. P and I should be fairly close to Spanish, as compared to French. I didn't get your second sentence.

hippietrail

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

Cerberus

Nice.

Otavio Macedo

18:28

syllables in Brazilian Portuguese are spoken more clearly

Cerberus

Right.

That matches my impression too, then.

hippietrail

@Cerberus: which is my second sentence at this point?

for speaking / listening i do better with italian than french

Cerberus

The one after the period?

> then again i didn't get the stuff i wanted to read the most in catalan

hippietrail

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

Cerberus

@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.

Same applies to Galician.

hippietrail

18:33

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 (-;

Cerberus

Yeah, they refused to speak Spanish?

hippietrail

i bought my first book in macedonian today. that was pretty exciting

Cerberus

Pretty hilarious.

hippietrail

no they were too cool to speak to backpackers at all

Cerberus

Macedonian... that is IE, isn't it?

hippietrail

18:37

i've met great catalans on my travels, just not when i was on their home turf

aedia λ

@hippietrail Ah, I can understand Brazilian Portuguese a little, but I don't know about European Portuguese :)

hippietrail

yep macedonian is south slavic so IE

Otavio Macedo

@hippietrail What are the three rules?

hippietrail

i can tune my ear in to european pt but brazilian pt just sounds good from the start

@OtavioMacedo:
1. go to a country where they speak it
2. speak it (don't just listen, don't just study)
3. drink alcohol

Cerberus

Sounds wise.

hippietrail

18:39

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.

aedia λ

@Cerberus Cathtilian ith tho... tho... thingular, though!

I love it. I feel like it's softer.

hippietrail

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

would "what is a word" be an expert question? (-:

Otavio Macedo

@hippietrail I don't know, but I was thinking about asking the same question :-P

hippietrail

i think it and "what is a language" would be ultimate test questions to see how expert we really are (-:

especially for anybody that's dabbled in a bit of NLP - doing stuff with human languages on computers - you really have to confront these questions

Cerberus

18:57

@hippietrail Hahaha that is brilliant.

@aediaλ I might like it! It is just less articulate...

hippietrail

i wish i was articulate enough to write the answers for those questions that i have in my head

aedia λ

Hey, at least you've managed to get a question out, right? I'm still trying to make words get out of my brain for that one.

Cerberus

@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.

hippietrail

so are any of us linguists or what if i may be so rude to ask? i'm an "armchair linguist" and language dabbler and dictionary collector

Cerberus

@aediaλ I'm still trying to grow the required part of my brain.

I am a mere classicist.

Matt Эллен

19:00

I'm just here. I'm not even an armchair

Cerberus

Dictionary collector? Is that a metaphor for a lexicophage?

hippietrail

@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

aedia λ

@hippietrail I want to be, but in the meantime I am distracted by trying to do stuff they pay me for.

Evpok

@hippietrail Whatever the native speakers tell you is a word :p

hippietrail

i'm in a plastic chair right now. at least i'm flexible (-:

Cerberus

19:00

@hippietrail Exactly. But at least it is more problematic in speech.

hippietrail

i don't know what a lexicophage is but i think i like it

Cerberus

Someone who eats words, or that's what I want it to mean.

I.e. someone with vocabulary gluttony.

hippietrail

the native speakers don't agree! and they will talk about written words and ignore spoken words

what's the term for not trusting linguistic informants too much?

Cerberus

Ehmm how about endogenoscepsis?

hippietrail

if only i could eloquently regurgitate the words i ingest when i need them

aedia λ

19:04

@Cerberus eats your -tony when you are not looking so you are left with a glut of vocabulary

hippietrail

you guys are coming up with great nicks for this site. too bad we can't have a different one on each SE

aedia λ

@hippietrail pukes a -tony for you

Cerberus

@aediaλ Hmmm would that be bad for me, you think? Bloating of the brains?

aedia λ

Was that what you were looking for?

Cerberus

BRB

Evpok

19:05

@hippietrail Ha, there is even the random cases where the same phrase could be one word or several, as “patate douce” in French

hippietrail

which is correct: Cervantes' original spelling? Cervantes original spelling? Cervantes's original spelling?

Matt Эллен

Is Cervante singular or plural?

hippietrail

oh yes and of course borrowed words, and phrases which include words that never occur alone

Evpok

@hippietrail I'd say the first one, but you are the native speaker ;)

aedia λ

@MattЭллен "Cervantes" is one dude.

Matt Эллен

19:06

@aediaλ ah! thanks

hippietrail

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?

aedia λ

^wut Evpok sed.

Matt Эллен

deffo the first one

hippietrail

as far as i know the dangling apostrophe is for plurals and the special singular exception for Jesus

Evpok

@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.

aedia λ

19:08

19

Q: What is the correct possessive for nouns ending in s?

What is the possessive of a noun ending in s? The boys' books. ? The boss' car.

hippietrail

@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

Matt Эллен

:D I was looking for something like that, @aedia

hippietrail

@aedia: i was looking for that too but damn i had too many tabs going at once

aedia λ

@hippietrail But afaik you were to follow a style guide that says it's Cervantes's book, you'd have people on your side too.

hippietrail

i only asked because somebody "corrected" one of my questions on literature.SE

Matt Эллен

19:10

3

Q: Plural name apostrophe position

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?

grammatical-number punctuation possessive apostrophe

hippietrail

literature.stackexchange.com/posts/734/revisions

sorry just changing some lev for dinar with a lithuanian backpacker

Alain Pannetier

19:33

Hallo zusammen

Evpok

@AlainPannetier Bonjour, l'ami ;)

Alain Pannetier

ist jemand da?

Salut. Ils sont tous partis ? déjà ?

Evpok

@AlainPannetier Il faut croire. Ça se couche tôt les anglophones.

Alain Pannetier

@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?

hippietrail

je suis ici

Alain Pannetier

19:37

Hi @hippitrail. You had some really interesting questions today.

Evpok

@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.

hippietrail

@AlainPannetier: actually i wanted to handle all languages

Cerberus

Moi, je viens de téléphoner.

Bonjour Alain et bienvenu ici!

The French should tie up their liaison.

Alain Pannetier

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 ;-)

Evpok

Do yo guys want questions feeds in the chat?

hippietrail

19:52

thanks @AlainPannetier

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

Evpok

@hippietrail I find them quite convenient in FL&U. If you find them annoying, come and yell at me :)

Feeds

Evpok has made a change to the feeds posted into this room

Cerberus

@AlainPannetier I am; and so are you, probably.

@StackExchange Cool. Let's see how this works out.

hippietrail

i didn't personally find them annoying since we weren't getting enough new questions to flood the channel

/me battens down the hatches to prepare for the tidal wave

Alain Pannetier

@Cerberus I'm in awe! I'll probably be lurking for the time being. There some real experts hanging around. Plus I'm too busy during the day.

Stack Exchange

20:08

2

Q: What are typical triphones used in natural language processing?

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...

nlp phonemes

6

Q: Second language acquisition without contact with native speakers

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...

language-acquisition psycholinguistics

9

Q: Languages that are gaining morphological distinctions

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...

morphology language-change history

1

Q: How the tau gallicum may have been pronounced?

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...

phonetics historical-linguistics gualish

1

Q: How do linguists analyse the vowels of a language?

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...

vowels

5

Q: Are questions about a single language on topic?

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?

discussion scope

2

Q: Question on feature in different languages

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...

discussion

3

Q: Facilitating sentence diagramming?

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...

feature-request sentence-diagramming

3

Q: Typography/style conventions

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...

discussion

1

Q: Migration from English.SE

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...

discussion

Cerberus

20:19

Stack Change, you naughty spammer!

Evpok

@Cerberus Hold on, the free linguistics.SE shirt is not for now ;)

Cerberus

@Evpok Heh I wonder how that will be spelled...

As a spectrogram?

hippietrail

woah help i'm drowning!

Stack Exchange

0

Q: Is Nicaraguan Sign Language the only language born from nothing?

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...

historical-linguistics signed-languages

hippietrail

i'm pretty sure some people are disputing NSL appearing from out of nowhere but i might be wrong on that. but asking if it's the only one???

that's asking for speculation on the origin of every language which of course is lost in the mists of time

Cerberus

20:42

@hippietrail It is very well possible that the question is too difficult to answer.

But I still think it is interesting.

I'd not close it.

hippietrail

oh i would never close it. it is a big question in linguistics. where do languages come from? crikey!

Alain Pannetier

@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…

hippietrail

ooh i just left the other country that uses a letter which looks like (but isn't) Ð

Evpok

@AlainPannetier I thought they pronounced it [θ]

Alain Pannetier

@Evpok It would be nice to know how the [t͡s] hypothesis is justified.

Evpok

20:47

@AlainPannetier I will check in the Lambert at la BU de la fac tomorrow.

hippietrail

i thought about asking a question which languages used θ/ð besides english, greek, spanish, and icelandic

Alain Pannetier

Faroese ;-)

hippietrail

d-;

damn loopholes

Alain Pannetier

I migght be wrong actually.

Stack Exchange

1

Q: Should we edit non-controversial errors in spelling, grammar, and style in the questions/answers of others?

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...

discussion spelling

Alain Pannetier

20:52

@hippietrail, here is a long list of the languages using the /θ/.

hippietrail

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

Alain Pannetier

And Faroese is not one of them (it has the Ð letter though).

hippietrail

so the letter but not the sound? what sound does the letter represent??

oh of course standard arabic has it. i've only been to morocco though where they might not have it

dammit i can't find the editing for style and spelling question i thought we had on travel

3

Q: Should we be editing each other's posts for style and regional spelling?

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...

discussion editing

Alain Pannetier

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

Cerberus

@Evpok The Greeks? No.

hippietrail

20:59

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

Alain Pannetier

I think the /θ/ followed different evolution paths depending on the surrounding vowels.

hippietrail

hmm my question on travel wasn't really the same after all \-:

Alain Pannetier

@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).

hippietrail

@AlainPannetier: the kinshhip of the particles or of the entire languages?

Alain Pannetier

The languages.

jstor.org/pss/…

hippietrail

21:06

ah yes it does seem to be a chestnut that lots of people tackle. like proving that basque or burushaski is related to what have you

i like the how to analyse vowels question. they stick things in your mouth i think ...

nobody used the word "fourier" d-;

@AlainPannetier: that jstor paper is indeed taking yet another crack at altaic

> фрлајте

aedia λ

21:21

Oh my goodness, I am so nervous. I decided to just click the button and stop fussing with my question, but I still feel like it's a jumbled mess.

hippietrail

you can keep going in and editing it

kaleissin

@hippietrail Brilliant question, next stop YAEPTs (Yet Another English Pronunciation Thread)

Cerberus

@kaleissin Huh?

@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.

hippietrail

@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)

african american vernacular english

aedia λ

@Cerberus It looks like I can approve it, I guess because it's my question!

Is fixored!

Cerberus

21:28

@aediaλ Woohoo!

kaleissin

@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

@aediaλ I also commented on she runnin': isn't that an auxiliary?

hippietrail

for your own questions and answers you just edit, no queue or approval or anything

kaleissin

@hippietrail The question on travel, whether it is okay to edit other people's post to standardize on American or British English spelling norms.

hippietrail

yaept?

Cerberus

21:29

@kaleissin Yeah OK, I just didn't get the context of your remark.

hippietrail

ah

►

kaleissin

@hippietrail the term "yaept" is older than the web IIRC :)

hippietrail

ooh i didn't expect a thumbnail for my aave link

Cerberus

Never chatted much on SC?

aedia λ

@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.

hippietrail

21:33

SC?

Stack Exchange

2

Q: When does copula absence occur in African-American Vernacular English?

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...

english copula

aedia λ

Is what Wiki sez.

Well that is a slow feed :P

@hippietrail He is still making fun of those t-shirts.

I imagine we're going to keep hearing about that till he gets the corrected one ;)

hippietrail

ah i considered that possibility briefly (-:

it's a polling feed and they're being conservative with their polling rate, it's joel's style i think

Cerberus

@aediaλ Well, OK, fair enough. It is a matter of definition, I suppose.

hippietrail

you could link to the wikipedia article or such for labov in that question

Cerberus

21:39

@aediaλ How about until forever!

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!

hippietrail

know i must know how the german version of the movie airplane handled the jive talking scenes

answer: the two guys speak in bavarian dialect

Evpok

@hippietrail Ahaha! Awesome.

hippietrail

i would give a rep point to see it on youtube!

fricken found it!

Evpok

@hippietrail Eh?

kaleissin

@hippietrail link or it doesn't matter

hippietrail

21:53

►

sorry had to carry the computer away from the crowd so we could hear it

loses the humour when the white lady offers to translate though

Evpok

Fun fact : I almost understand Bairisch better than Deutsch in this video -.-

Cerberus

Really?

You have experience with it?

kaleissin

Waah I'm so been looking forward to this SE! Gotta take a break before I zone in completely and do an all-nighter.

Cerberus

By the way, is it implied in the American version that the white woman comes from the south where they still have black servants or something?

@kaleissin Breathe.

Evpok

@Cerberus The only German native speakers I have talked with are bayerisch or schwäbisch.

kaleissin

21:58

♥ Bairisch. And the best weisse in Bayern is at Brauhaus in Freising. So there.

hippietrail

instead of "excuse me i speak jive" she just says "i think i can understand"

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