English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2017-06-30 (page 1 of 2)

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1:17 AM

@Cerberus Who was asking about that now?

> Present in several dialects of Brazilian Portuguese is the palatalization of dental consonants triggers by front vowels that results in affricates [dʒ] and [tʃ], e.g. [ˈʒen.tʃi] gente ‘people’, [si.ˈda.dʒi] cidade ‘city’.

> In dialects such as the one spoken in Recife this palatalization is variable, such that different individuals might not apply the rule/process, and an invididual speakers might apply it variables, with tia ‘aunt’ realized as either [ˈti.a] or [ˈtʃi.a].

> This process is independent of word stress, and we find examples where both tonic and atonic front vowels trigger the process: [ˈdʒi.ka] dica ‘tip’, [dʒiˈɲej.ɾu] dinheiro ‘money”, [ˈɔ.tʃi.mu] ótimo ‘great, optimal”.

@tchrist Ah, OK, so I was right.

It's Brazilian.

And while it isn't universal, it's characteristic of them.

It was about someone who rendered a diagram showing supposed "phonetic distance".

When we say adventure, notice the affrication of the coronal stop with the front vowel.

But apparently his entire analysis changed when he found out that ti can be pronounced like chi in Portuguese.

4 hours ago, by sumelic

@Cerberus The blog owner's response to one of the "Forum" posts doesn't give me a lot of confidence in his familiarity with the linguistic data: http://www.elinguistics.net/Comparative_Linguistics/Romance_Languages.html

1:19 AM

@sumelic vide supra

Or in estuary, even issue.

But the Portuguese do not do this, nor do absolutely all Brazilians.

Estuary English now regularly pronounces tune as though it were choon.

Or tube as if it were choob.

The yod is lost to the affricate.

> (Portugal) IPA(key): /ˈʒẽ.tɨ/
(Brazil) IPA(key): /ˈʒẽ.t͡ʃi/
(South Brazil) IPA(key): /ˈʒẽ.te/
(Nordestino) IPA(key): /ˈʒẽ.ti/

Those are all gente.

But you know.

In Portugal that final vowel is often lost.

What I find most interesting is how many languages bastardise the t in words like nation.

I can't think of any language that actually keeps the consonant unchanged.

One can learn something from that.

Perhaps something happened in Late Latin.

It did.

But why only in XtiV?

1:25 AM

Couple of reasons.

You've got post-tonic yod there.

And you have a consonant whose point of articulation is not all that far from the glide that the yod became.

Hmm.

Ignatius

Let me find something on that.

Western Romance had /ts, dz/ going when you had a Latin /t/ plus a front vowel at one point.

There are a bunch of unstable sounds here so we naturally move to differentiate them.

@Cerberus Of course you can. Sure there are a number of possible ways. They happen to do it this way:

Provencal vs Catalan

(which should be pretty close) You can see the details of how well they do it.

books.google.com/…

Bottom of page 128.

Immediately you can see little weird details that you'd expect to pose problems, but it's all numeric after that.

1:31 AM

user image

So that tells you that when you have several phonemes that are too close, they will move away from each other.

@tchrist How far east is that?

@Cerberus West of Italy, I believe.

Wait no.

Italy too.

@Mitch I see no details. And that page is about genealogy, not phonetics.

And we know the diagram could not have been about genealogy, or it would have been wrong, so far as I know.

Italian has nazione /natˈsjo.ne/

So the /ts/ thing was at least that far.

Oh my.

Romanian has națiune.

Note that the mark on the t is to make it the other version.

So, I'm thinking it has to have been in Late Latin.

argh... the website isn't maintaining state well

1:36 AM

c'est moi

From that link, choose catalan and provencal or whichever two languages you want to compare.

Then press 'compare'. Then go to the bottom, and press 'details'

Provencal is not a language. We've been through this.

It’s Provençal. :)

That site seems like too big of a job to maintain for one person.

@Mitch Ah, I see it now.

At least they seem to be trying to convert letters into sounds, yes.

That's better than expected.

@tchrist Yes, that's why I suggested Late Latin.

Because it seems to be odd in all languages I know.

That is, in all except Latin.

Classical Latin.

1:42 AM

Naturally.

@Justwinbaby I don't know. Masters project in computational linguistics?

It says Latin is (extinct)

Latin is by default classical.

That weird thing they make you sing in Church Latin is something else.

@Justwinbaby !!!

1:43 AM

@Justwinbaby It's easier to study specimina that don't wriggle about under the microscope.

I imagine that /tj/ is unstable everywhere, with the same outcome repeated all over the world.

But not in Latin.

Latin doesn't have /tj/. It has /ti/.

@Cerberus no offence intended :-)

As far as I know.

Ah, OK, yes.

It has a real vowel in its own syllable. It didn't have yod.

1:45 AM

In Dutch, tj is very unstable.

Actyally, Cj seems to be unstable.

That's right.

Both /tj/ and /kj/ are.

Gaatje, popje, kerkje.

All of those turn into some sort of affricate.

What do you do with the middle one?

Typo.

pp 127–129 of the cited book are relevant to the affrication process.

1:47 AM

And any other consonant + je turns into Ctj in spelling.

Not any.

But many an.

What's the root on the diminuitivized popje?

Pop.

That had been my guess, but I didn't know if you'd had a vowel there.

Although poppetje is probably more common as the diminutive form.

But other forms of pje are common.

Kopje, lapje, hapje...

[pɸ] then?

What's the affricate for the /p/?

[pf] ?

1:52 AM

I don't know the sign.

This guy is too careful?

Noun: lapje n (plural lapjes)

Diminutive of lap...

Not f.

Is he saying it right in the audio?

He is a little bit too careful.

It sounded carefully said.

1:52 AM

But one can hear a little bit of affrication.

Less than is actual speech (as opposed to deliberate pronunciation such as here).

Right, there are two sounds there, like it geminates first.

[p:ɸj] maybe

That phi sounds far too f like.

Voiceless palatal fricative

The voiceless palatal fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ç⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is C. It is the non-sibilant equivalent of the voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant. The symbol ç is the letter c with a cedilla, as used to spell French and Portuguese words such as façade and ação. However, the sound represented by the letter ç in French, Portuguese and English orthography is not a voiceless palatal fricative but /s/, the voiceless alveolar fricative. Palatal fricatives...

It sounds more like this one, but very very soft and brief.

/pçj/

Or maybe I'm deceiving myself.

Maybe the çj I hear are better described by one symbol, but I wouldn't know which.

Or maybe the total is something like ɸj after all, without the p.

I don't know.

It's ok. :)

I'm not very educated on the coärticulated consonants myself.

The real IPA /ç/ is in German, I think.

Oh never mind, right.

There was some weird phonetic progression of p/k that surprised me.

Look at the non-sibilant affriate row

Does oa need a trema?

@Cerberus You can coax the coäx. :)

"Need" is a strong word. If the world were just and right and good, it would not.

2:07 AM

Right.

user image

Broach.

Why didn't I think of that?

Perhaps because it would not happen before r?

Somebody's smoking roaches beneath you?

But it would.

Boar.

Hmm.

I'm thinking that "croak" might have been two syllables once. :)

2:08 AM

Maybe it's my Europeaness.

Because what other languages have a digraph oa?

I don't know the global romanized inventory. Seems perverse at second glance.

Oh?

In Dutch, oa is always two syllables.

And so it is in French, Italian, Spanish, German, etc., I think.

And in Latin, Greek.

I don't know what the French were thinking when they spelled Middle English, but we're stuck with it.

It does not represent anything that was either a diphthong or two syllables in OE that I can tell.

Poor sods.

@tchrist Umm then what did it represent?

What do you expect? Just look at the mess the French made of their own language's spelling.

2:14 AM

Indeed.

It was a long a originally.

Oh, really.

Yes.

So already a digraph.

I use "long a" in the Latin sense.

No no.

> From Middle English *croken, crouken, (also represented by craken > crake), back-formation from Old English crācettan (“to croak”) (also in derivative crǣcettung (“croaking”)), from Proto-Germanic *krēk- (compare Swedish kråka, German krächzen), from Proto-Indo-European *greh₂-k- (compare Latin grāculus (“jackdaw”), Serbo-Croatian grákati).

2:16 AM

A digraph is a pair of letters representing a single phoneme, is it not?

> From Middle English ook, from Old English āc, from Proto-Germanic *aiks, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂eyǵ- (“oak”)

@Cerberus yes

It was a long a in Old English.

So if oa represented /aː/...

I don't know what the Middle English people were doing.

They would have left it as /a/ if it hadn't changed.

moan:

> From Middle English mone, mane, mān, (also as mene), from Old English *mān, *mǣn (“complaint; lamentation”), from Proto-Germanic *mainō (“opinion; mind”). Cognate with Old Frisian mēne (“opinion”), Old High German meina (“opinion”). Old English *mān, *mǣn is inferred from Old English mǣnan (“to complain over; grieve; mourn”). More at mean.

Something happened to OE /ā/ in ME. I wonder that it wasn't a diphthong somehow.

Why did they respell French cote as coat?

> From Middle English coate, cotte, from Old French cote, cotte (“outer garment with sleeves”), from Latin cotta (“undercoat, tunic”), from Proto-Germanic *kuttô, *kuttǭ (“cowl, woolen cloth, coat”), ...

Cotton?

That's Arabic, right?

2:20 AM

@tchrist I don't recall any such word in Dutch or German.

@tchrist sigh Probably.

@Cerberus It is.

If the word was so prominent in Germanic that Romance stole it, then why can't I think of any descendents?

> Middle English cotoun, from Anglo-Norman cotun, Old French coton, from (Genoese) Old Italian cotone, from (Egyptian) Arabic قُطُن (quṭun), Andalusian Arabic [script needed] (quṭūn), variants of Arabic قُطْن (quṭn), from the root ق ط ن (q-ṭ-n), possibly originally from Egyptian. The Arabic term qutun may have been derived directly or indirectly from the Akkadian work kitu, which means flax, linen, or a mat.[1]
Cognate to Dutch katoen, German Kattun, Italian cotone, Spanish algodón, and Portuguese algodão.[1]

I knew it was Arabic because algodón flashed in my mind.

O que?

ES + PT preserved the al- element (article).

Italian did not.

I don't know by which route that cotton entered Europe, but it came from the East.

2:24 AM

Ah, I see.

The Iberians were quick to venture thither.

Well, the Moors had Iberia for a time.

It may have come up out of there. The French like to drop things.

un naranjo > un orange

They're just lazy like that. :)

That, too.

The French like to drop a lot of things.

> groan From Middle English gronen, from Old English grānian (“to groan; lament; murmur”), from Proto-Germanic *grainōną (“to howl; weep”), from Proto-Germanic *grīnaną (“to whine; howl; whimper”). Cognate with Dutch grijnen, grienen (“to cry; sob; blubber”), German Low German grienen (“to whimper; mewl”), German greinen (“to whine; whimper”), Swedish grina (“to howl; weep; laugh”).

It's also funny how pompous they are, when you look at the new Presidential portrait.

It's pretty consistent.

2:28 AM

Or perhaps that's just because they don't have a King (we're pompous about ours, of course).

@tchrist Not with kreunen?

Or is that just some onomatopoeic consonant cluster.

@Cerberus I'll take pompous any day over the third-world megalomaniacal hydrocephalic nutjob that we've got.

Heh.

Oh, he's pompous too...

> zoa woa toa poa noa moa loa koa goa boa VOA ROA Goa woad whoa voar toad
stoa soar soap soam soak roar roan roam road proa moat moar moan loas
loan loam loaf load koan hoax hoar goat goal goaf goad foam foal doab
coax coat coal coak boat boar Soay Noah Moab Joan Goan FOAF Boat yoaks
troat toast toady thoan stoat stoas stoak soapy sloan shoat shoal shoad
scoad roast roary roany roall roach psoas proat proal poach ploat moany
loath loamy loach hoast hoary hoard groat groan goaty goats go at gloat

Moad'dib?

I bet all of those with just /o/ are from OE long a.

Hm, but goal, really?

Looking.

yep

> From Middle English gol (“boundary, limit”), from Old English *gāl (“obstacle, barrier, marker”), suggested by its derivative Old English gǣlan (“to hinder, delay, impede, keep in suspense, linger, hesitate, dupe”), and Old English hesitating, slow, sluggish. Possibly cognate with Lithuanian gãlas (“end”), Latvian gals (“end”), Old Prussian gallan (“death”), Albanian ngalem (“to be limping, lame, paralyzed”), ngel (“to remain, linger, hesitate, get stuck”).

> toad From Middle English tode, toode, tade, tadde, from Old English *tāde, a shortening of tādie, tādiġe (“toad”), of unknown origin, possibly Proto-Germanic. Cognate with Scots tade, taid, taed, ted (“toad”). Compare also Danish tudse (“toad”), ultimately from the same root; also Swedish tåssa, tossa (“toad”), Old English tāxe (“toad”), Old English tosca (“toad”) by contrast.

What's the Dutch?

For toad, not frog?

Kröten in German.

Which is unrelated.

Apparently there are no Dutch toads.

Padden.

Those are three very different words, I think.

It's sapo in Spanish and Portuguese both.

Should have been bufo but whatever.

2:38 AM

@tchrist Pad.

I did eventually find it.

I can't think of any cognates.

I see it.

Paddock.

Noun: paddock (plural paddocks)

(archaic or dialectal) A frog or toad.
Wycliffe
Soothly if thou wilt not deliver, lo! I shall smite all thy terms with paddocks. (Exodus 8:2)
Spenser
The grisly toadstool grown there might I see, / And loathed paddocks lording on the same.

(6 more not shown…)

Ah!

Yes.

People don't know that any longer, and I wouldn't have thought of it even.

It's like from a nursery rhyme.

It's thundering and lightninginging here a lot and Randy won't stop rubbing on me trying to make it stop. But he just makes more sparks that way. :)

2:40 AM

> Mnd. padde, pedde; oe. padde, pad (ne. dial. pad, paddock); on. padda (nzw. padda); alle ‘pad’, < pgm. *paddō-.
Verdere etymologie onbekend.

> De gewone namen voor de ‘pad’ in het Duits en Engels zijn resp. Kröte en toad, beide eveneens met onbekende etymologie en zonder verwanten in andere talen.

How odd.

"To pad quietly" is to walk softly on the soles of your feet.

At least Dutch has a few Germanic cognates.

@tchrist Cf. padding.

It's always something soft.

Dutch pad is also path, by the way.

Do you have deerpaths?

By that name?

Maybe, I don't know.

We have the harepath.

Little wildlife trails that they've made for themselves.

Yeah.

I'd warren you do. :)

2:44 AM

To choose the harepath = to make off quickly.

In Dutch.

right

Maybe that was/is also used for an actual path in the woods.

footpath is a word.

Sure.

Voetpad.

OED also has otter-path.

2:45 AM

Fietspad.

And goat-path.

Goat-path is almost normal even.

Hmm maybe geitepaadje is a thing.

cow-path

I don't think I want to look up what the lich-path is.

Geitepaadje gets lots of hits.

Goats always win.

2:46 AM

Incidentally, I've always found footpad a strange word.

Don't

For who doesn't go on foot?

Isn't it the pad of your foot? No, a footpad is a minor thief? I forget.

> (archaic) A thief on foot who robs travellers on the road.

I give up. I don't know anything less than a few centuries old.

These days he'd just get run over.

Homoeopaths

Homey paths.

Honey paths.

Beelines.

Noun: footpad (plural footpads)

The soft underside of an animal's paw.
(medicine) A medicated bandage for the treatment of corns and warts.
(archaic) A thief on foot who robs travellers on the road.
(Australia) (also foot pad) An unmade, minor walking trail formed only by foot traffic....

@tchrist Yes, a highwayman!

But it's not such an uncommon word.

Stupid wiktionary calls it archaic.

So is its mama.

2:51 AM

Meh.

6 hours later…

9:08 AM

> insoluble
insulliable

9:42 AM

@Cerberus I thought it deserved no less than your signature Ding!. :) I can't detect anything bad about it apart from being needlessly long or complicated.

The point is I think it's enough to indicate that the given argument is not enough to explain the problem with the original sentences.

To spare you from going back and forth, consider this new set of examples:

> 1. I'm going to make him an offer that he can't refuse it.

> 2. I'm going to make him an offer that it is unrefusable.

> 3. I'm going to make him an offer that I know he can't refuse it.

> 4. I'm going to make him an offer that I know it is unrefusable.

Now,

> (?) 5. I'm going to make him an offer that I don't know if he can refuse it.

> (*) 6. I'm going to make him an offer that I don't know if it is unrefusable.

The only really problematic one to me seems to be #6. I guess your disapproval of #5 as "bad English" (which is yet to be demonstrated why) gives away that you don't reject #5 out of hand as you did #6.

Actually #6 is appearing more and more normal to me now. Either that or I've been thinking about this for too long.

I'm with Cerb. 5 is clumsy. Not wrong, per se, but ugly. 6 is wrong, you want I'm going to make him an offer which I don't know whether it is unrefusable., I guess but that's just horrible even if grammatically correct.

1-4 are fine as long as you don't use the it. The only natural way I can think of to express 6 would be I'm going to make him an offer that may or may not be unrefusable or something along those lines.

Alternatively, I'm going to make him an offer and I don't know if he will be able to refuse. You have to change the sentence structure for that one.

@terdon I had that alternative among my original sentences. And didn't like it then at all.

@terdon Yes, in any respectable piece of writing something like 5 or 6 has to be reduced to a simpler form. But my question was what exactly is wrong with them in their present form?

Why does 5 sound better than 6? Why do we suddenly feel the urge to add the previously-omitted pronoun it in 6?

@Færd Well, 6 is wrong because of that I don't know if it is unrefusable

The pronoun is still wrong. You would need which I don't know is unrefusable and that's off because unrefusable doesn't really work that way. Similar constructs with a different adjective would be fine: I gave him a car which I think is green for example.

Mmm.

I think it will come down to what unrefusable "licenses" (if that's the right term here). One of those things where similar words, words that are the same part of speech, don't work the same way. I was stumped by something similar a while ago and was told that I'll just have to suck it up, basically.

5

Q: Why is "I refuse running" wrong?

I got into a discussion with another user in the comments section of this question. We disagreed over the following phrases: I refuse running. I decline running. To me, they are both clearly wrong. The correct forms of the above sentences would be: I refuse to run. I decline t...

9:55 AM

It's not about unrefusable.

@Færd I believe it is.

yesterday, by Cerberus

> 1. I am going to make a suggestion which I do not know how sounds.
2. I am going to make a suggestion which I do not know how it sounds.

yesterday, by Færd

> 1. I am going to make a suggestion which I do not know how wildly outrageous is going to sound.

For example, I made him an offer which I am not sure is fair is absolutely fine.

yesterday, by Færd

> 2. I am going to make a suggestion which I do not know how wildly outrageous it is going to sound.

Including or omitting it in all of those is problematic.

@Færd Those are different since there's a phrase (how wildly outrageous it is going to sound) to accommodate. That makes the sentence very cumbersome.

@Færd The it is the least of your problems there. The whole thing is problematic.

9:58 AM

@terdon What about I made him an offer which I don't know is fair?

Again a phrase.

But fair works better so that doesn't seem as ugly.

It seems to me that it's the how which introduces the problem. (And now, back under the stone)

Seems fine, really, just a little cumbersome.

> I'm going to make him an offer that I don't know it is unacceptable.

?

(Would someone please delete my links to yesterday's discussion? I shouldn't have introduced the distraction)

@Færd Huh? Why not? I can delete, if you like, but why?

@Færd Look, forget the it. You never want it there. That's not really the problem.

10:02 AM

@terdon Because I wanted to focus on a new set of examples to examine Cerb's theory.

But never mind. They won't do much harm.

The simple fact is that I'm going to make him an offer which I don't know is unacceptable. sounds bad while the apparently equivalent I'm going to make him an offer which I don't know is fair. sounds better. Since those two very similar things are actually different, it is going to be one of those annoying "that's just the way it is, language isn't always rational" things.

OK. We reached a good point.

There's a double negative in don't know...unacceptable. That may be what's making it awkward.

Ah, that's a good point.

I didn't think you'd find the fair example acceptable.

10:04 AM

It would also explain why I'm going to make him an offer which I don't know is fair sounds far better than [. . . ] which I don't know is unfair.

@terdon Now 5, which you deemed awkward:

21 mins ago, by Færd

> (?) 5. I'm going to make him an offer that I don't know if he can refuse it.

If rephrased into

> I'm going to make him an offer that I don't know he can refuse.

would it be better?

Or

> I'm going to make him an offer that I'm not sure he can refuse.

I guess it would.

Thanks @terdon and @AndrewLeach.

Yes. You can't have that and then use if or how (too many clauses).

@Cerberus, please don't bother with the ping above. I think you had a point. And I'm done for now. Thanks.

And you're welcome :-) (And now, really back under my stone!)

Have a good time there!

10:13 AM

@Færd Yes, much better. But use which, not that. You keep changing it back to which.

Yes, which is better. It was for a reason that I used that... that I'm not going to bore you with.

Y'all are so good at English. I have a long way to ... (never?) go.

@Færd Well that's hardly fair. Andrew and I are native speakers and Cerb is a linguist.

10:52 AM

I know.

Sometimes I just like to sit in on a discussion between articulate native speakers of a foreign tongue and enjoy, in awe, the natural flow of the words.

Regardless of what the subject is.

Lurking here can often do that for me. Some of the users especially inspire that awe (eg @tchrist).

I appreciate being capable of this joy, I guess.

1 hour later…

12:03 PM

All-fresh Russian architectural trends for @Cerberus.

user image

Well, technically it's in Belgium, but let's not split hairs.

Tear down that wall.

12:34 PM

@RegDwigнt it's aspirational

Morning is broken

And is entirely beyond repair

I'm boycotting the first couple hours after getting up

I'm just not going to do it anymore

You could always get up a couple of hours later.

12:57 PM

@Mitch Like the first morning?

1:09 PM

@RegDwigнt That looks like a sturdy gate, I don't see the problem.

Incidentally, are you aware of the book "Ugly Belgian Houses"?

user image

@Mitch Mornings suck! They do not deserve Your presence.

1:25 PM

@Færd Aww why not!

And your English is excellenter as mine.

@Cerberus yeah I guess you're right. That line of reasoning explains very well how Hitler could overrun them in one day.

@Cerberus no, I skipped past the part where I was aware of the book "ugly Belgian houses" directly to the part where I am aware that Belgium is ugly, period. Also fat, corrupt, kiddie-fiddling, and without any form of government.

And their king looks like a pancake. These are always the Euro coins I try to get rid of first.

@RegDwigнt Like the Maginot Line in France.

@RegDwigнt Now, now, now. No government? I think Molenbeek has a strict Sharia government.

1:55 PM

@AndrewLeach Or better, plan on getting up at some ungodly hour and lie in.

@MetaEd Exactly. That one should be stopped too. Start at third or fourth

@Cerberus I don't wanna seem immodest, but yes I'm better than that.

@Cerberus zing!

2 hours later…

3:35 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Offensive body detected: How do I properly name these movie titles? by leetbacoon on english.SE

Halloo

3:51 PM

which one is correct?

> It's hard just in three first days

> It's hard just in first three days

@MartinAJ Neither.

and do you know the correction?

Please don't drop questions like that here. While we are happy to help, we need to have some context. My answer is about as useful as your question :P

@MartinAJ Not if you don't explain what you're trying to say.

I want to say, when you start body building exercise, you may feel some pain in first days. Now I want to know which one is correct? "n first days" or "first n days" ?

Word-order can be problematic. It's "first three days" (because those days come before the second three days: your units are blocks of three days, and the adjective comes before that).

But: you need the first three days.

And just is a problem, depending on what you are minimising.

3:58 PM

I see, thank you

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