English Language Learners

tchrist

21:00

Well, we have a problem in that we think of stress for length.

And for tone.

Ancient Greek and Ancient Latin probably used tones instead.

Well, not instead, exactly.

But it was part of it.

We use tones with stress and don’t even think about it.

Ben Kovitz

What have you learned about pitch accent in Latin? I've read a couple tidbits about it, but nothing much.

Well, one interesting fact I read is that in the Greek hexameter, there's no correlation between accent and ictus, but the accent matches the ictus in 70% of the feet in Latin hexameter--not to mention just about 100% in the last two feet in each line.

I've taken that as evidence that stress was more than just pitch in Latin.

tchrist

@BenKovitz Little. It wasn’t included in my courses.

I know of it more in context of Ancient Greek, but I do believe that Ancient Latin had that in common with Ancient Greek. I may be wrong. Certainly there was a switch from tones to stress. I have a question about this somewhere.

Oh, I was thinking of this one.

14

Q: What did we gain in return for the loss of phonemic vowel length from Old English?

In Old English, vowel length was phonemic, but stress and certain kinds of consonant voicing were not. In Modern English, that situation is reversed: vowel length is no longer phonemic, but stress always, and consonant voicing in most cases now, is. My main question is . . . Is there any connec...

Ben Kovitz

I'm not sure this scans by purist standards, but it's definitely got an appropriate rhythm: "You have it easy compared to those many of us who struggled to read that epic song of rage with words beginning thus"

tchrist

@BenKovitz heh

Strong words.

eclassics.ning.com/profiles/blogs/727885:BlogPost:25181

Ben Kovitz

Reading...

Hmm. Strong words from Mr. FitzHugh indeed. I'm no expert here, but my understanding is that Vergil goes out of his way to move the stress around, conflicting with the ictus in ways that seem hard to explain except for their rhythmic/artistic effect. What do you think?

tchrist

21:17

I would have to ask Mother.

But she has probably forgotten by now. She read the entire Aeneid after her 4th year of Latin in high school.

Ben Kovitz

Excellent! (As long as she didn't shift the stresses.)

This blog post looks quite interesting. I'm going to come back to that. But now I'm going to turn to your post about the loss of vowel quantity. For me, that is the most interesting thing.

I didn't realize that in Old English, stress wasn't phonemic. I'd always read that Old English poetry was "thumpy".

tchrist

Man, Flock-Clucking Day really does bear strange fruit!

-1

Q: Who other than G** determines what is S***** and what isn’t S*****?

The Bible says that the Marriage Bed which is the Union of Male & Female is undefiled. So that tells me that if we as Husband & Wife Agree that we can do whatever other than Anal Sex in the privacy of our Bedroom then it is not a Sin in God's Eyes.

terminology

Somebody please go close-vote the sodomy question so it gets into the close-vote queue.

I’m long out.

Ben Kovitz

On it...

tchrist

Thanks.

Ben Kovitz

Oops, it's on ELU. I haven't participated enough on ELU to closevote.

tchrist

21:31

Drat.

The "related" algorithm is yielding amusing results for that question.

Ben Kovitz

I flagged it.

tchrist

That is just as good.

Ben Kovitz

"A cat who is bossing other cats around."

tchrist

You can do a close-flag, and that too will bounce it into the queue.

Ben Kovitz

That's exactly what I did: "blatantly off-topic".

Well, this is interesting stuff about the loss of phonemic vowel quantity. I find it a bizarre and interesting phenomenon, for all sorts of reasons.

One thing that got me curious about this was talking with people from India who speak English in rapid syllable-counting style. If they don't need the (non-phonemic) vowel quantity that we use, what's holding it in place?

tchrist

21:37

I’m not sure anything is. That may be why we cannot understand them. :)

Ben Kovitz

Ha! I'm glad someone else has noticed that we can't understand them.

tchrist

Spanish and Japanese also have syllable timing.

Ben Kovitz

The Indians seem to think I'm stupid or something.

tchrist

But for some reason, the Spanish and Japanese do not rattle off incomprehensible English the way the East Indians do.

Ben Kovitz

Yes! The Spanish and Japanese rhythms don't foul up comprehension.

tchrist

21:41

I wonder what the difference is.

Ben Kovitz

My first thought is it's just the speed. But that can't be the whole story.

tchrist

Perceived speed of delivery is inversely correlated with comprehension.

That is, things that you do not understand sound faster than things you do, even when the true speed is identical.

Ben Kovitz

Another thought is that Spanish and Japanese might have a higher variance in syllable length, so they're more accustomed to adjusting the rhythm, making it fit our rhythmic expectations a little better.

I see what you mean. Makes sense.

tchrist

Spanish doesn’t really vary much in syllable length. Additionally, there is no such thing as vowel reduction. In theory. Practice can vary, particularly with vocalic clusters.

Ben Kovitz

A couple months ago, I was talking about this with a classmate from India. I told him about the different rhythms. Once I explained it to him, he said that I had put my finger on the difference between people who seem to him to speak English well and people who speak it poorly.

tchrist

21:44

English is stress-timed. Our minds seek out stresses for cues.

Without those cues, we become lost.

It is harder for a fluent Spanish speaker to understand English spoken by a Spanish speaker with a strong accent than it is for an English speaker with little or no Spanish to understand that same person.

Ben Kovitz

He had noticed that there was a difference, but he hadn't figured out quite what it was. Once I explained to him that for us, words have distinct rhythms (e.g. "competitive" is not four beats all the same length; it has a rhythmic signature of dum DA da dum), he tried to see if he could speak with standard English prosody.

And he got it immediately.

tchrist

Interesting.

Ben Kovitz

His exposure to English, living in the U.S. the last six years, had taught him the rhythms, even though he wasn't pronouncing them. He seemed overjoyed: instantly, he became able to speak English the way the good speakers do it.

tchrist

I no longer interact with an offshore team in Byzantium, but I did so for quite some time and it could be a hardship.

They always said they were in India, but everyone knew they were really in Istanbul because of their Byzantine code. :)

Ben Kovitz

Ha!

What is the Byzantine rhythm?

tchrist

21:51

I’m being funny.

Ben Kovitz

"Oh."

I'm probably missing some crucial piece of information.

Well, I'm surely missing a lot of crucial pieces of information about vowel quantity and isochronicity generally. But right now, I gots to get back to work. It's been a pleasure. ttyl!

BTW, your opening bit of verse here seems to go 5-5-3, but the rhyme in the third "line" makes a wonderful cadence with its mate in the first "line". So much for the purist approach to scansion! :)

Anonymous

22:53

Mary is nice to me can't be passivized

Anonymous

The things that non-native speakers should probably learn about the passive are, most importantly, when passives are appropriate in terms of information structure (When should you use them? When should you avoid them?) and secondarily the formation of the prepositional passive, as that's part of very few languages

Anonymous

And it has some oddball semantic constraints

Anonymous

A lot of the homework related to passives seems ridiculous because it has people mechanically forming passives (possibly based on a confused explanation of the syntax) with no regard for when it's appropriate—and of course what learners really need to know is when to use the passive and when not to

Anonymous

23:46

@DamkerngT. To be honest, I was thinking of certain things people say about English

Anonymous

@MARamezani Do it! Python's a useful language :-)

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Good evening!

Ah, I thought it was about Japanese.

Anonymous

Hello!

Anonymous

Well, in theory it applies to any language.

Damkerng T.

nods

@snailboat Probably... it could be passivized in my first language!

Anonymous

23:52

@DamkerngT. Be is always intransitive.

Anonymous

But in Thai, you wouldn't have be there, right? :-)

Anonymous

I imagine the sentence would look rather different to begin with

Damkerng T.

I mean, I'm still not sure when the passive voice came to exist in Thai.

@snailboat You're right!

So, it's sort of like this: [Mary-nice-to-me] --> [I-got-nice-with-by-Mary]

It will sound very artificial, though.

But I thought it could be passable because a lot of passive sentences in Thai already sound rather foreign.

Hmm... I think naturally, Thai's passive works rather differently from the way English works.

Anonymous

I'm reading about it

Anonymous

But I'm an absolute beginner, so it's hard for me to follow!

Damkerng T.

23:58

> [Jack-punch-Jim] --> [Jim-got-punch].

[Jim-got-punch] works sort of like English, superficially.

But if we expand it, we will see the difference immediately.

> [Jim-got-punch] == [Jim-got-Jack-punch]

See the difference?

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