(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Porphyrogenitos
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Porphyrogenitos »

eldin raigmore wrote: 31 Oct 2020 02:17 Why don’t any of the high-schoolers in “teenage bounty-hunters” have Georgia accents?
It’s set in Atlanta, right?
Only the older people and bit-part and extras seem to have accents from any part of the Confederacy.

Am I wrong?
I have no familiarity with this show, but major urban areas in the South, Atlanta most of all, have seen huge migration from other parts of the country, especially the Midwest, especially middle/professional-class transplants. That means there are large numbers of people in Atlanta and other southern cities who do not have Southern accents, and whose children either barely have a Southern accent or don't have one at all. So it's quite plausible that depending on the neighborhood, there could be whole schools full of kids that don't have Southern accents.

Anecdotally, when browsing lay discussions of American accents on reddit, I have seen people who live in Atlanta - either transplants or children of transplants, I would presume - express disbelief that "anyone actually talks like that anymore" or claim that "nobody talks like a hick here", that is, in reference to an ordinary Southern accent. So I think it's very much possible depending on your location, profession, social class, social network, etc, to live in Atlanta and have a peer group where no one has a Southern accent.

I have relatives who moved from the Midwest to Atlanta 20 years ago and they and their children still don't have Southern accents.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Porphyrogenitos wrote: 29 Nov 2020 03:25 I have no familiarity with this show, but major urban areas in the South, Atlanta most of all, have seen huge migration from other parts of the country, especially the Midwest, especially middle/professional-class transplants. That means there are large numbers of people in Atlanta and other southern cities who do not have Southern accents, and whose children either barely have a Southern accent or don't have one at all. So it's quite plausible that depending on the neighborhood, there could be whole schools full of kids that don't have Southern accents.

Anecdotally, when browsing lay discussions of American accents on reddit, I have seen people who live in Atlanta - either transplants or children of transplants, I would presume - express disbelief that "anyone actually talks like that anymore" or claim that "nobody talks like a hick here", that is, in reference to an ordinary Southern accent. So I think it's very much possible depending on your location, profession, social class, social network, etc, to live in Atlanta and have a peer group where no one has a Southern accent.

I have relatives who moved from the Midwest to Atlanta 20 years ago and they and their children still don't have Southern accents.




Thanks!
I already had essentially the same answer from someone on another forum.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

Worth saying also that, other than Miles (who is black an speaks with a Black (ie Southern) accent), the younger characters are at an elite private school of some kind. It would seem reasonable that these would be exactly the people who you might expect to speak with a non-Southern accent in the South. Although, then again, it is a Christian school, and their teachers and parents all have Southern accents, so maybe it is a bit surprising. I think that, even if they didn't have broad accents, they should probably have sounded at least a little bit southern - I find it hard to pick up on accents, so maybe they did have a mild accent, but they did sound to me like they could have been from anywhere else in America (Sterling is Canadian, and Blair is from New York). There was something odd about Sterling's accent, which I think I assumed was mild Southern influence, but it may just have been hypercorrection from Canadian into American.

I suspect the real reason is that a) they wanted the characters to be at least vaguely relatable to TV viewers, and it's bad enough having them be gun-owning Christians without trying to give them Southern accents as well; and b) they may not have wanted to try to get their young cast, most of whom don't have many credits and who probably weren't Southern, to produce a reliably "mild, modernised upper-class teenage Southern" accent, so they were probably happy to get them to just 'neutral'.

EDIT: oh, she's Canadian but spent her teenage years in western Australia! And then putting on an American accent. OK, yeah, no wonder her accent is maybe slightly unusual...
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sequor »

eldin raigmore wrote: 04 Nov 2020 18:11First question:
Do any languages that double-mark both the head (possessum) and the dependent (possessor) ever make the head agree with any feature of the dependent? Do any make the dependent agree with any feature of the head? Do any do both?

Second question:
In some of these languages as i inderstand it, the possessum has to be in construct state but can be in any case, and the possessor has to be in genitive case but can be in any state.
So if there’s a possessed possessor, does that mean (as I’m guessing it does) it has to be both in genitive case and construct state?
As it often happens, your two questions are really four, but regardless, the answers are, as far as Standard Arabic goes (I don't know about early Akkadian), no, no, no and yes. As far as I know, for Biblical Hebrew (not that I'm wholly well familiar with it, caveat lector!), the answers for the first three questions are no, no and no as well (the fourth question doesn't apply as it doesn't have a genitive case).
Like suppose in one of these languages someone wants to say
“The People’s King’s wife’s father” or “the father of the wife of the King of the People”.
“People” and “King” and “wife” would all be genitive case, right?
“King” and “wife” and “father” would all be construct state, right?
“People” here is definite, and “father” could be nominative or ergative or accusative or absolutive or comitative or whatever.
In Standard Arabic, the answers are yes and yes. And I confirm 'father' could be nominative, accusative or genitive in it.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Thanks, Sequor!

I appreciate knowing about Arabic.

...

I think for the three parts of my first question, where you said “no, no, and no”, you meant
“I never heard of any, I never heard of any, and (therefore obviously) I never heard of any”.

Or do you really mean you know for certain there aren’t any languages (among those that double-mark the possessor/possessum relationship) that mark the possessum with some feature of the possessor and/or vice-versa?

Because I’m pretty sure some that dependent-mark it do mark the possessor to agree with the case of the possessum.

If you’re an expert on Semitic languages maybe you do know for sure no Semitic language with both construct state and genitive case does that. Could that be what you meant?

....

Is it a fact that the only languages with construct state and genitive case are Semitic?

Or isn’t there a Persian language that in effect has a construct state?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

He said "as far as Standard Arabic goes". Clearly that is not a claim about all languages ever anywhere.
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Post by Imralu »

Can anyone help me remember a psychology (or probably pop psychology) term for the phenomenon whereby humans can't maintain high anxiety states for prolonged periods for the same thing? E.g. how even people who are taking covid seriously are not as anxious about it now as in March and April, even though in most places, the threat is actually objectively far higher. I learnt a term for this, something like "fear fatigue", "anxiety fatigue" etc., but googling that is very unhelpful as I just find lots of instances of "fear, fatigue".

It seems closely related to "fear extinction", but that's not the term I'm looking for and I suppose I'm splitting hairs, but fear extinction describes the loss of fear through repeated exposure to the feared stimulus without reinforcement, but the word/phrase I remember learning was less focused on the deconditioning and more about the time and the inability to maintain a high anxiety state for the same stimulus for long (yes, certainly the same process, but I remember the phrase I learnt sounded more understandable to laypeople than "fear extinction" ... I'm pretty sure it had "fatigue" as the second element).
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Maybe it’s “satiation” or “saturation”.

I tend to think of it as “Bill and Ted get all screamed out”.

If you remember Bill and Ted fell into The Pit. They screamed all the air out of their lungs. Noticed they hadn’t hit bottom, filled their lungs again, and screamed it all out again. By the time they actually did hit bottom they were playing Hangman or something.
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Post by Salmoneus »

I'm not aware of the technical term, but I've heard terms with both 'exhaustion' and 'fatigue'. I've certainly heard anxiety fatigue. Also concern fatigue, though that can sometimes mean something else.

There's also a technical term - that I can't think of - for the phenomenon where increasing stimulus yields increased response, but only up to a certain point, after which there is little or no further increase in response. Our senses get, as it were, 'blown out' and can't respond beyond a certain point. This is a relatively physical thing about sensation, but it's essentially parallel I think to the point you're making about emotion.

[although there's a difference between not being able to care any more strongly because you've reached your limit, vs actually caring LESS strongly because you're exhausted]
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Has anyone heard of a language with implosive affricates? Gleb just gave me an inventory with implosive affricates instead of voiced affricates (seed 1283138608) and I only found Jur Mödö (nicely crazy, btw) on Phoible, which contrasts the implosive affricate with voiced and prenasalized stops.
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Post by qwed117 »

Creyeditor wrote: 07 Dec 2020 20:50 Has anyone heard of a language with implosive affricates? Gleb just gave me an inventory with implosive affricates instead of voiced affricates (seed 1283138608) and I only found Jur Mödö (nicely crazy, btw) on Phoible, which contrasts the implosive affricate with voiced and prenasalized stops.
Wikipedia says this:
Oracle of the Internet wrote:A few affricates have been reported (like [ɗʒ] in Roglai and Komo; allophonic [ɗz] and [ɗɮ] in Gitxsan), but more investigation may reanalyze them as something else.
If there were no other implosives, I would just analyse it as a voiced affricate with heavy implosion.
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Post by Creyeditor »

Thank you. I should have started with Wikipedia. Unfortunately, I could not find any information in a quick search that would confirm their phonemic status.

The gleb inventory had other implosives but no contrast between voiced stops and implosives at all. Your reanalysis is probably on the right track then.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Xonen »

The discussion on Japanese pitch accent seems to have evolved beyond a "quick" question, so it's been split into its own thread.
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Post by Sequor »

Another question about Japanese: I've rarely watched much anime, but I've been watching some this year, and I'm surprised to see kami-sama is very often rendered "God", with a capital G!, as if misleadingly suggesting a reference to the Abrahamic god in English... On occasions I've noticed it doesn't get translated at all, but the intention gets reworded in some other way (say, "kami-sama won't forgive you!" -> "you will never be forgiven for this!"). But I have never, not a single time yet, seen it translated as "the gods", which I suspect would be more appropriate most of the time??

But would "the gods" be really more appropriate really? Maybe I'm wrong?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by clawgrip »

Probably just an idiomatic translation. Translations between Japanese and English frequently need to take a lot of liberties to get natural text in the target language. Plus, kami-sama can be used to refer to the Abrahamic God anyway. The plurality in Japanese is ambiguous.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

clawgrip wrote: 21 Dec 2020 13:11 .... Plus, kami-sama can be used to refer to the Abrahamic God anyway....
Just found this out today from YouTuber ReligionForBreakfast.
It’s kinda like LORD God or Lord GOD.
I think.

It doesn’t imply unicity (uniqueness); just very high, even princely, honor among kami.
I think.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sequor »

clawgrip wrote: 21 Dec 2020 13:11Probably just an idiomatic translation. Translations between Japanese and English frequently need to take a lot of liberties to get natural text in the target language. Plus, kami-sama can be used to refer to the Abrahamic God anyway. The plurality in Japanese is ambiguous.
That is reasonable, but I'm curious, what do the Japanese understand by kami-sama in such a context? Say, in the "kami-sama won't forgive you for this!" line? Is it perhaps usefully ambiguous for the authors towards the Japanese-speaking audience?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by clawgrip »

When Japanese people go somewhere to pray for something, is generally going to be a Buddhist temple of Shinto shrine, since very few Japanese people are Christian. And since the word kami is not used in Buddhist tradition, we can safely assume it refers to Shinto gods. Keep in mind also that the vast majority of Japanese are not strongly religious, and treat religion more like just a tradition, so their idea of gods is somewhat nebulous anyway.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Otto Kretschmer »

What is the origin of Polish word for Jew, i.e. "Żyd"? It does not seem to come from Yiddish Yid or French juif (Polish reflex would be something like "Żyw").
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Post by sangi39 »

Otto Kretschmer wrote: 07 Jan 2021 16:41 What is the origin of Polish word for Jew, i.e. "Żyd"? It does not seem to come from Yiddish Yid or French juif (Polish reflex would be something like "Żyw").
Wiktionary gives:

"From Proto-Slavic *židъ, Proto-Slavic *židovinъ, from Italian giudeo, from Latin Iūdaeus, from Ancient Greek Ἰουδαῖος (Ioudaîos), from Hebrew יהודי‎ (Yehudi)"

Which means it's from the same source as the Yiddish and French forms (through Latin), but down different routes.
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