Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 February 19

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

February 19

Phonological change and information theory

According to the usual models of historical linguistics, an 'ideal' perfectly regular sound change must lose or conserve information (in the information theoretical sense), with all mergers strictly losing information. Yet, the reconstructions of ancient languages have a similarly-sized phonetic inventory to modern languages. How can this be explained? Is every (or just a significant chunk of) historical sound law irregular? If that's so, how can there be any confidence in the conclusions of historical linguistics (e.g., distinguishing between an irregular phonemic split in a daughter language and a parent language with a corresponding phonemic distinction that other descendents merged)? 94.195.23.7 (talk) 00:02, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Purely phonological changes tend to erode information, while analogical changes and morphological changes tend to restore information. As for phoneme inventories, allophonic alternations can get promoted to phonemic distinctions over time, balancing mergers or losses of sounds. However, some languages do decrease or increase the size of their sound inventories over time... AnonMoos (talk) 01:02, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm under the impression that change by analogy is somewhat rare, and happens on a lexeme-by-lexeme basis anyway (and so relying on it as an explanation too much can be indistinguishable from fudging). If lexical entropy is mainly increased by morpho-syntactic changes, I can see that being significant for more synthetic language families, but what about isolating languages? How can, say, Chinese dialects deal with this loss of entropy when they're so isolating? One way I can see is for the average size of lexical elements to increase and hence to carry more information with a smaller (& less entropic) phonemic space, but that would probably lead to a more synthetic morphology, which isn't observed in the case of Chinese. (As for allophony, that's either going to be a regular sound law with different allophones in complementary distributions and hence non-information-gaining, or have an element of irregularity and hence tricky to analyse historically.) 94.195.23.7 (talk) 01:39, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Analogical changes sometimes affect a whole verb conjugation pattern or noun declension pattern. The long-term evolution of Chinese has been that the ancient Chinese of 2,000 or more years ago had a large number of distinct syllables, many involving complex consonant clusters etc., and each syllable tended to be a unit of syntax. Over time, due to sound changes (especially in Mandarin), the number of distinct syllables has decreased, and the types of syllables allowed in the language have grown simpler -- and the corresponding compensation is that many syllables are now only a part of a multi-syllable word, and have no real separate meaning (i.e. such syllables are not syntactic units). Currently Vietnamese is probably more truly monosyllabically "isolating" than Chinese... AnonMoos (talk) 03:17, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

IPA

Why do the voiced uvular fricative and the uvular approximant have the same IPA symbol? --108.225.117.174 (talk) 03:08, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Because the further back you go, the less likely it is that any language will contrast an approximant vs. a voiced fricative with the same place of articulation. AnonMoos (talk) 03:27, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

The further back you go? I'd say it's the more peripheral you go: contrasts between [β] and [β̞] are very rare too, and just like [ʁ̞], [β̞] has no dedicated symbol of its own. Contrasts are also rare between [v] and [ʋ] and between [ɣ] and [ɰ], the last of which had no symbol other than [ɣ̞] until relatively recently. Angr (talk) 15:40, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

However, some varieties of Dutch are claimed to have a [v] vs. [ʋ] contrast, [w] is commonly considered to fill the role of a bilabial approximant, and [ɰ] is back. By the way, when [ɣ] palatalizes, the end result is almost always [j] (as seen in Old English, modern Greek, etc.); any intermediate stage between [ɣʲ] and [j] seems to be rather unstable... AnonMoos (talk) 19:56, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

See Voiced uvular fricative. rʨanaɢ (talk) 03:32, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Does French use the fricative or the approximant? --108.225.117.174 (talk) 15:51, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

It depends on the speaker - either would be acceptable in all contexts, and indeed there are much wider variations (for example in Marseille /r/ is realized as [χ], and amongst older speakers in the south, Avignon region, even [r] is heard. The Parisien working class /r/ is stereotypically [ʀ], probably the most famous variation). You have to realize that language is not so absolute and occurs in shades. 24.92.85.35 (talk) 00:41, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

I've even met people from the Gruyère District region in Switzerland who pronounce it as [ɹ]. --Terfili (talk) 07:00, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

I know someone from Angers, who jokes that people from that area speak the purest and most beautiful French. But he uses [r]! I don't think he even realized it until I pointed it out. (His family is ultimately North African though, maybe that's where the [r] comes from.) Adam Bishop (talk) 23:50, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

Szeemann, Harald

May someone know please how his surname is pronounced? --Omidinist (talk) 09:10, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

According to youtube, as "zimann" or "zeemann".--Itinerant1 (talk) 09:48, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you.--Omidinist (talk) 11:25, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Though he himself pronounced it with a voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/ (typically Swiss German, but at the same time reflecting the Hungarian "sz"). The surname might be a magyarization of the German word "Seemann" (seaman), a word which most Germans pronounce with a voiced alveolar sibilant /z/, but most Swiss and Austrian German speakers would pronounce as /s/. Swiss people trying hard to sound German often give themselves away by pronouncing an initial "s" (e.g. "sieben") voicelessly. ---Sluzzelin talk 12:15, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

So do Bavarians trying hard to sound German... Angr (talk) 15:43, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks.--Omidinist (talk) 15:42, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Salzburg

A related followup: how do Salzburgers pronounce the name of their city? What pronunciation would be used e.g. in radio or TV? The Salzburg^ⓘ file used in the article uses /z/, but I'm not sure if the speaker was a resident. Neighboring Slavic languages overtook it with «S»: see cs:Salcbursko or sr:Салцбург. No such user (talk) 12:37, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

In standard German, radio and TV it is pronounced that way. The locals pronounce it bar:Såizburg (note that the whole article is written in Salzburg city dialect). --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 22:59, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

French pronunciation

Are there any general rules for determining whether 'eu' is /œ/ or /ø/ in a particular word? --108.225.117.174 (talk) 17:35, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Here how it was in 1890. --Luboslov Yezykin (talk) 19:08, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Here's an incomplete set of rules that is sufficient in most cases. You may find it easier to digest than the book.

• In forms of the verb avoir, the vowel is /y/. (Eu, eurent, ...) We'll exclude this case from now on.
• Be careful about words like gageure /gaʒyʀ/, where the ending is really -ure and the e is only there to make the g soft. These words are spelled gageüre, etc., in the new 1990 spelling.
• If the eu vowel is the last sound in a word, it's /ø/. (peu, lieu, lieue, ceux, monsieur...)
• If eu appears in the final syllable of the word, and this syllable is closed (i.e., ends in a semi-consonant, a consonant or a consonant cluster), then the vowel is usually /œ/. (peur, meurtre, seul, veulent, meuble, feuille, jeune...) This is always the case for -eur (/œʀ/) words. The exceptions are all -euse words, which are always /øz/, and about 30 sporadic exceptions (neutre, feutre, meute, émeute, jeûne, veule,...). See [1] for a categorization of these exceptions. The page seems to have left out Pentateuque, so perhaps it's incomplete. Words ending in-eute are automatically /øt/. An increasing number of French people are daring to use /œ/ in all these words (except the /øz/ ones - everybody agrees about those, in northern France at least) so if you're going for a French French accent, you can get away with using /œ/ for these and you won't shock anybody.
• If the syllable is unstressed (i.e., non-final) and closed, then the vowel is /œ/. (meurtrier, seulement, ...).
• If the syllable is unstressed and open, then it's hard to say. But the good news is, it doesn't really matter too much, because if you're talking at a normal speed people usually won't notice the difference. It's more often /ø/, but it can be /œ/ as well, especially when the word is derived from a root word with /œ/. For example, beurrer has /œ/ like beurre, while deuxième has /ø/ like deux. Heureux can be /øʀø/ or, in careful speech, /œʀø/, which is harder to say but more like the -heur in bonheur. 96.46.204.126 (talk) 21:40, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

The book Dr. Pataki Pál, Francia nyelvtan a középiskolák számára, Tankönyvkiadó, Budapest, 1992 gives an (incomplete) set of rules in section 4.4. These seem to agree with the rules given by 96.46.204.126 above, but are somewhat less detailed. – b_jonas 09:56, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

labor sine deliciae vana

Could someone translate this from Latin: Labor Sine Deliciae Vana

It's supposed to be a spin-off of Leges Sine Moribus Vanae (Laws Without Morals are Useless), I think...

Thanks! 128.239.41.190 (talk) 23:27, 19 February 2012 (UTC)quake

Pseudo-Latin for "Work without pleasure is in vain." `Collect (talk)