All you can eat er et adjektiv
Er det bare mig, der har været for længe i Skotland?
Jeg erindrer i hvert fald ikke, at all you can eat skulle være et dansk adjektiv.
Meningen er naturligvis klar nok, nemlig at man kun får en begrænset mængde kød, men lige så meget tilbehør, som man kan spise, men kunne det ikke have været udtrykt lidt bedre?
Tilbehør ad libitum, for eksempel, eller tilbehørstagselvbord?
Qongqothwane
I’ve come home from a long weekend in Denmark to the news that Miriam Makeba has died.
When I was a linguistics undergraduate, it was claimed that she made click sounds famous through her click song:
I had never heard about her before, nor about the click song, but I borrowed it from the library and enjoyed the clicks.
French Orthography
French orthography annoys me. It manages to be based neither on the phonology nor on etymology.
For instance, Latin e has in many circumstances become /wa/ in French, but it’s neither written with a grapheme close to ‘e’ (such as ‘ë’) nor with one representing the phonemes (such as ‘oua’), but as ‘oi’.
It would be possible to design a new orthography that would at the same time take French closer to its sounds and to its Romance relatives.
Some examples:
- fleur -> flör (compare Spanish flor)
- trois -> trës (compare Spanish tres)
- autre -> ałtre (compare Italian altro)
- nous -> nōs (compare Latin nos)
- tu -> tü (compare Latin tu)
- aimez -> ämäts (compare Latin amatis)
Un tracteur des herbes
I had a dream last night.
I was in France, in a place with mountains close to the sea.I walked up to a big Citroën, where two old guys were standing talking to a young one.
The young one asked me in English to wait there while he got a lawn mower that needed to go into the car.
As soon as he had left, the old guys and I got into the car and drove away.
I then had to persuade the old guys – who only spoke French – that we needed to return.
However, I didn’t know what a lawn mower was called in French, so I tried to call it un tracteur des herbes, which they didn’t fully understand, so we went into a supermarket so that I could point at one.
The funny thing is that the old guys were speaking a patois that I could only understand ten percent of, yet I could hear all the words in the dream.
I reminds me of another dream I had a few years ago, in which I was a pupil in a French class, and my teacher was speaking rapidly and clearly in French, and correcting my mistakes.
How is this possible? The fact that I didn’t remember the actual words the teacher and the old guys used the next morning makes me wonder whether my brain was telling me they were speaking clearly, yet without actually producing the words.
Do other people ever dream in languages they don’t speak well?
Bad translation prolonging the Russo-Georgian war
There’s an interesting article today in The Telegraph about how bad translations from the French original has prolonged the war in Georgia:
One reason for the continuation of the conflict now appears to be a passage in the Russian translation of the agreement that speaks of security “for” South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The English version speaks of security “in” the two areas.The difference is crucial, because Russia continues to keep its tanks and armed troops “in” Georgian territory. The international community, in turn, wants security “for” South Ossetia and Abkhazia without the Russian army staying in Georgia.
Y
Perhaps because my native language is Danish, where y is a vowel and (almost) never a consonant, I’ve always regarded the English letter as primarily a vowel that can sometimes act as a consonant.
However, native speakers seem to regard it primarily as a consonant.
When Charlotte moved it with me two years ago, she was six years old and had just started in P2. Back then she hadn’t learnt the names of the letters yet and instead called them (with a Scottish accent) /a, bə, ˈkʌrle kə, də, ɛ, fə, ɡə, hə, ɪ, dʒə, ˈkɪkən kə, lə, mə, nə, ɔ, pə, kwə, rə, sə, tə, ʌ, və, wə, ks, jə, zə/.
And the daughter of a friend of Phyllis’s parents is called Yvonne /jɪˈvɔn/.
John Wells has also picked up on it twice: In “Yngling”, he spotted he pronunciation /ˈjɪŋlɪŋ/ for yngling (the keelboat), and in “Ylang-Ylang”, he had come across /jəˌlæŋ jəˈlæŋ/ for ylang-ylang.
I wonder whether yttrium is gradually becoming /ˈjɪtriəm/, too. I guess I’ll find out when Marcel starts chemistry next year.
Phonetic destiny
In Danish and its ancestral languages, medial (and final) stops have been undergoing reduction for more than a millennium: Old Norse often has voiced fricatives corresponding to stops in other Germanic languages (rauð corresponding to English red, German rot), and Danish then created more (ON hvít > hvid /viðʔ/). And now the same thing seems to be happening in colloquial Danish: bakke /ˈbɑɡə/ can be pronounced as [ˈbɑɣ(ə)] in rapid speech.
Likewise, German seems to be obsessed with hardening initial consonants. First the Germanic one, then the High German one, and now in many varieties, /ptk/ are aspirated and thus ready for another shift.
And Slavonic seems to have undergone several palatalisations, one after another.
It can thus feel like languages are destined to move in a specific directions, thus the title for the posting.
However, destiny is not a very scientific concept, so what is really going on?
One possibility is that it’s random. This cannot be dismissed out of hand, and further study is needed to determine whether phonetic destiny is statistically significant.
If it isn’t random, my best guess is that it’s caused by ways of speaking. Some languages are on average spoken faster than others, some are spoken more sloppily or with less jaw movement, and then there’s the contrast of syllable-timed vs. stress-timed languages.
My guess is that certain ways of speaking leads to certain sound changes being likely while effectively ruling out other sound changes.
For this to be the cause of phonetic destiny, it would require such ways of speaking to be much more stable than specific pronunciations, lasting centuries if not millennia.
This long time-frame makes this very hard to investigate scientifically. I guess one could try to find old perceptions of other languages. For instance, have any Norwegian or Swedish medieval sources commented on how the Danes pronounced their language?
One could also try to find unrelated languages that are known to have gone through similar sound changes recently and investigate whether their pronunciations are similar in other respects, e.g., whether they are spoken equally fast.
Does anybody know whether anybody has already investigated this topic?
Forbedret
Jeg har altid troet, jeg fulgte den normale rigsdanske udtaleregel m.h.t. endelsen -et, nemlig at udtale den /-əð/ normalt, men /-əd/ efter /-ð-/, altså fx vasket /ˈvæsɡəð/, åndet /ˈʌnəð/, kastet /ˈkæsdəð/, klandret /ˈklændʁʌð/, men badet /ˈbæːðəd/, spiddet /ˈsbiðəd/.
Det undrede mig derfor en del, da jeg tog mig selv i at udtale forbedret som /fʌˈbɛðʔʌd/, ikke det forventede /fʌˈbɛðʔ(ʁ)ʌð/.
Er det bortfaldet af /-ʁ-/, der skaber mulighed for dissimilering?
Er jeg den eneste med denne udtale?
Linguistic sophistication
Léon has for some time known that dragons and kites are called the same in Danish (en drage).
Today Phyllis decided to test whether he would calque this into English.
She showed him a picture of a kite (knowing that he’s very familiar with dragons already) and asked him what it was:
– What’s that, Léon?
– What’s that?
– What’s it called?
– A flying box? [sounding uncertain]
– Is it a dragon?
– Yes, it’s a dragon! [sounding relieved]
This shows that’s he’s analysed that Danish drage and drage are homonyms, not just senses of the same word, and that he therefore can’t assume that the two drager will be called the same in English.
Also, he’s clearly keeping track of the words he knows in each language, and he won’t just use the Danish word for something when he’s speaking English. He used to do this, but he’s clearly realised that doesn’t work.
Ireland and the Gricean maxims
The latest opinion polls seem to indicate that the Irish referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon will be very close.
For some reason, most referendums tend to end up with a close result, even if one of the sides is far ahead before the campaigns start.
I’ve been thinking a bit about this, and I think an explanation might be found in the Grice’s conversational maxims.
Basically, the maxims are some rules that form the basic assumptions underlying human communication. The rules are often broken, but not without reason, and breaking them implies a meaning on its own.
In particular, I think the Maxim of Relation (”Be relevant”) is crucial here. In means that one will assume that a question asked is relevant, that is, it is assumed it can be there is more than one possible answer. If the politicians arrange a referendum but say that only voting yes really works and that a no would be a disaster, they break this maxim, which makes people confused and angry and they start thinking they’re being lied to. They might even think the Maxim of Quality (”Be truthful”) is violated, too.
To make it even worse, people tend to say no when they don’t fully understand a question, which is why making people read the whole treaty is normally a winning strategy for the opponents.
Because of all this, I believe referendums only work where politicians are happy to proceed with either outcome. For instance, Scotland can feasibly continue as a part of the UK or become an independent country, so this is a possible topic for a referendum.
On the other hand, saying yes to a complex treaty that is a messy compromise between 27 countries that took years to negotiate is clearly not a good basis for a referendum. If one had wanted one, it should have been held years ago and have been about the negotiation mandate for the Irish government (but that’s of course not what the Irish constitution demands).