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

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

Post by Omzinesý »

Isthmus Zapotec seems to have contrastive phonation only in stressed syllables https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_Zapotec

Is it common that contrastive phonation is constrained by stress? What about syllable structure?
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It is commonly restrained by both in Otomanguean languages but the literature is sparse and oftentimes in Spanish.
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Post by Omzinesý »

Creyeditor wrote: 17 Jan 2023 21:40 It is commonly restrained by both in Otomanguean languages but the literature is sparse and oftentimes in Spanish.
I found a doctor thesis about one language of them. I'll have to page it more thoroughly.
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Post by LinguoFranco »

So lately, I have been interested in vowel harmony systems based on advanced tongue root, and it seems fairly straightforward. From a non-linguist's perspective, it seems that ATR is really just a harmonic contrast between tense and lax vowels?

I know retracted tongue root is a thing, where vowels are "retracted." I couldn't find much on this aside from Wikipedia. So, how would a vowel harmony system based on RTR differ from one based on ATR, and are there any natlang examples of RTR harmony?
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Post by Creyeditor »

The difference between tenseness and ATR is articulatory rather than acoustic. While both are peripheral in terms of the first and second formant frequencies, only ATR vowels have a consistent articulatory gesture namely the tongue root moving a bit to the front. Also, the schwa is usually seen as lax but ATR.
Some languages have a so-called dominant-recessive harmony where only one feature value is relevant for vowel harmony. Dominant-recessive ATR harmony is very common. Harmony which refers to both ATR and RTR is also reasonably common. Dominant-recessive RTR harmony is less common but attested in some varieties of Yoruba (at least).
The book on asymmetries in vowel harmony by Harry van der Hulst is hard to read but has lots of interesting data if you can get your hands on it. The work by Roderic Casali is also relevant and maybe more accesible online. A very recent contribution by Rolle et al. (2020) surveys lots of ATR/RTR vowel harmony languages and is open access.
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Post by Salmoneus »

LinguoFranco wrote: 22 Jan 2023 08:48 So lately, I have been interested in vowel harmony systems based on advanced tongue root, and it seems fairly straightforward. From a non-linguist's perspective, it seems that ATR is really just a harmonic contrast between tense and lax vowels?
Ultimately, the reality of harmony is that two sets of vowels are being distinguished, often with some predictable articulatory factor seeming to be involved. Often, there's more than one articulatory factor potentially involved, either co-occuring or seemingly equivalent. But the decision to say "this is [insert name here] harmony" rather than "this is [insert other name here" harmony is often rather arbitrary, and dependent on what the investigator is expecting to find, and features they consider most significant. Harmony is often described as a simple binary distinction in a single dimension of articulation; but it's worth bearing in mind that most languages have not actually been subject to even scientific acoustic analysis, let alone accurate anatomical-articulatory analysis. When people do do those studies, they often find the situation is more complicated than the labels suggest. There are many languages for which there is open debate on what type of harmony is 'really' there - which is to say, on which observable features of the vowel inventory split are really signficant, and which are coincidental.

So yes, tense/lax harmony and ATR harmony can look similar, and I'm sure there will be languages where you can debate which one is really present.

That said, as Crey says, they aren't quite the same thing conceptually. A big difference is that many languages don't permit high vowels to be -ATR, and/or don't permit low vowels to be +ATR, and such vowels can even resist harmony so strongly that they act as blockers.

There's also a grey area as to whether something is 'really' a +ATR/-ATR language or a -RTR/+RTR language. Since it's common with binary distinctions for the 'neutral' setting to be exaggerated at least some of the time into the opposite setting (that is, -ATR may be exaggerated into +RTR and vice versa, making it hard to see what it 'really' is meant to be).

Similarly, RTR (and by extension -ATR) can also be confused with faucal, dorsal, pharyngeal, velar and/or uvular harmony, or 'emphasis' harmony (which may be the same as pharyngeal or uvular harmony, or may be diffeent). These terms are more likely to be used if there is interaction between vowels and consonants in the harmony, but not necessarily. For instance, harmony in Mongolic may be called 'pharyngeal' harmony, harmony in Afro-Asiatic may be called 'emphasis' harmony, and harmony in northwestern US languages may be called 'faucal' harmony, but whether any of these are actually different from RTR harmony, or indeed ATR harmony with -ATR as the more marked feature, is debateable. And of course it's entirely possible that in a given language the actual harmony you'd find if you really examined it may not be the same as in closely-related languages!
I know retracted tongue root is a thing, where vowels are "retracted." I couldn't find much on this aside from Wikipedia. So, how would a vowel harmony system based on RTR differ from one based on ATR, and are there any natlang examples of RTR harmony?
Apparently Tungusic is traditionally considered to have RTR harmony, although the pharyngeal harmony in neighbouring Mongolic may very well be the same, who knows.

I get the impression that some languages may not allow RTR on some front vowels, but I don't have any examples.

Apparently Li (1996) argues that there may be "typological differences" between RTR and ATR harmony patterns, inventories, and historical development. But of cours it's going to be debateable whether these are really RTR vs ATR differences, or simply differences between Siberian and West African languages, with the exact tongue root placement only being one of those differences rather than the cause of the other differences.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Why does the Russian noun мечта́ (fantasy, daydream, dream) have no genitive plural? This word is a classic example of defectiveness and I first learned about it from reading a paper on defectiveness. For some reason, there's just no genitive plural of this noun, and the genitive plural of a different noun is used when one wants to express the genitive plural. Is there a historical, phonological, or semantic reason for this? I don't know enough about Russian to know.

I find it difficult to wrap my head around this kind of defectiveness because there just isn't a similar example in English.
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Post by Sequor »

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote: 27 Jan 2023 18:04I find it difficult to wrap my head around this kind of defectiveness because there just isn't a similar example in English.
"Drink" is an example of a defective verb in English. Some people accept "I have drunk mojitos before", but a lot of native speakers simply have no past/"passive" participle for it and therefore no perfect verb TAMs at all (or at any rate, they have non-standard formations like "drinken"), so this example sentence is invalid for them, as "drunk" is purely an adjective for them ("I got very drunk"). I can't think of any good phonological or semantic reason why this is so; "eat" has "eaten" without any problems.

"Lie [on a surface]" is another one. Prescriptively it has the participle "lain", but in practice a lot of people have a gap in their idiolect there, so they don't really accept "he had lain on the floor for hours" except maybe as a forced, near-poetic thing. However, this is a very stative verb semantically (likely the reason why this has happened), so in general you can simply use the perfect progressive constructions instead of the perfect ones: "he had been lying on the floor for hours".
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Post by Khemehekis »

Sequor wrote: 28 Jan 2023 01:33 "Drink" is an example of a defective verb in English. Some people accept "I have drunk mojitos before", but a lot of native speakers simply have no past/"passive" participle for it and therefore no perfect verb TAMs at all (or at any rate, they have non-standard formations like "drinken"), so this example sentence is invalid for them, as "drunk" is purely an adjective for them ("I got very drunk"). I can't think of any good phonological or semantic reason why this is so; "eat" has "eaten" without any problems.
Heh, I remember back on the Fourth Turning forum in the tenties, two then-teen Millennials from the Seattle Millennial wave (1979-1987) were arguing over underage drinking. The 1987-born conservative Millennial (who was against under-21 alcohol use) said "have drank", possibly because there was a taboo to him associated with a word that could be used as an adjective for intoxication. The anarcho-syndicalist 1984-born Millennial (who was against the 21 drinking age in the U.S.) told him, "The past participle is not 'drank', but 'drunk'! [O.O] " (Yes, I remember he used that smiley.)
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Post by Salmoneus »

Sequor wrote: 28 Jan 2023 01:33
KaiTheHomoSapien wrote: 27 Jan 2023 18:04I find it difficult to wrap my head around this kind of defectiveness because there just isn't a similar example in English.
"Drink" is an example of a defective verb in English. Some people accept "I have drunk mojitos before", but a lot of native speakers simply have no past/"passive" participle for it and therefore no perfect verb TAMs at all (or at any rate, they have non-standard formations like "drinken")
Huh! I've never encountered that problem. Do you know which dialect has that issue?
For me, the participle problem does occur - "drink" has no passive participle - but the verb tense issue does not ("I have drunk mojitos before" is completely unremarkable for me). The fact that the perfect is diachronically derived from the past participle and thus is formally identical for most verbs isn't significant to me.

Do such speakers also have problems with the passive forms as well? To me, it's hard to imagine not being able to say something like "all the water had been drunk".
so this example sentence is invalid for them, as "drunk" is purely an adjective for them ("I got very drunk"). I can't think of any good phonological or semantic reason why this is so; "eat" has "eaten" without any problems.
It's for semantic reasons: as far back as Proto-Germanic, "drunken" (/"drunk") already meant inebriated. Since it so strongly means inebriated, it has fallen out of use in its secondary meaning as a passive participle. "Eaten" has no other meaning, so is available as the participle.

[why did 'drunken' come to mean inebriated? I don't know. Maybe it's ironic - some drunken guy said that the beer had drunken him or something and people copied it. But also, very old 'participles' could become divorced fom their verbs, and even survive when their verbs had died out (*faganaz, "glad", from **fahanaz, "to fasten", and *upanaz, "open", from some extinct verb probably meaning "to lift"). I think the -naz adjectives probably started as adjectives and only later became fixed into a role as participles with completely predictable meanings?]
"Lie [on a surface]" is another one. Prescriptively it has the participle "lain", but in practice a lot of people have a gap in their idiolect there, so they don't really accept "he had lain on the floor for hours" except maybe as a forced, near-poetic thing. However, this is a very stative verb semantically (likely the reason why this has happened), so in general you can simply use the perfect progressive constructions instead of the perfect ones: "he had been lying on the floor for hours".
This one I do agree with, although again there are very obvious reasons for these problems.

[primarily, confusion between forms of "lie" and of its causative "lay". Dogmatically, lie-lay-lain and lay-laid-laid, but "lain" can in practice be used in the perfects of either verb, leading to hypercorrective avoidance of "lain" (reanalysed as a form of the causative) in perfects altogether (and indeed avoidance of the causative verb altogether). Similar abnormalities include the use of "laid" in perfects of "lie" ("It has laid here for five hundred years!"), and indeed the use of "lay" as the present tense of "lie", which is further encouraged by the traditional use of a reflexive causative as a synonym of the non-causative intransitive (as in the famous childen's prayer begining "now I lay me down to sleep"). This novel present tense is particularly common with "down" ("just lay down!"), perhaps also helped by confusion with non-causative phrasal verbs from "lay", like "lay in" and "lay on". Finally, there are confusions btween "lie" and the homophonous weak verb "lie", which can lead to "lied" being adopted in the perfects of the strong verb.]


So I'm not sure these are good examples of defectives that have no justification. More to the point, they're not the same sort of defective as in the Russian example. Defective verbs are always more common than defective verbs (the best examples in English are the modal verbs - the radical defectiveness of "ought to" is a near-daily annoyance!). And it's also more common to have defectiveness or suppletion in an entire category (like a noun having a defective plural, or indeed a defective singular (two trousers, one... pair of trousers)) rathe than a defect in a single fusional form, like having a genitive singular and a nominative plural but no genitive plural.
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Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Interesting discussion. [:)] I hadn't thought about those English examples. And I can understand how verbs are more commonly defective than nouns and how it more commonly affects an entire category rather than one inflectional form missing (perhaps the Russian example is exceptional).
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Post by Omzinesý »

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote: 27 Jan 2023 18:04 Why does the Russian noun мечта́ (fantasy, daydream, dream) have no genitive plural? This word is a classic example of defectiveness and I first learned about it from reading a paper on defectiveness. For some reason, there's just no genitive plural of this noun, and the genitive plural of a different noun is used when one wants to express the genitive plural. Is there a historical, phonological, or semantic reason for this? I don't know enough about Russian to know.

I find it difficult to wrap my head around this kind of defectiveness because there just isn't a similar example in English.
You are the one who has read an article about the word. I can give guesses that are better than nothing. I also think that you cannot really know why those things happen, they just are.

- It seems to be a feminine noun ending in -a, so its genitive plural should be -∅. мечeт Maybe moving the stress from the syllable that should be zero is hard at this paradigm. Russian though does it with other nouns.
- Semantically, I think genitive plural should be frequent enough.
- The verb мечта́ть 'to desire' is much more frequent than the noun (because I know the verb and don't know the noun). Could it be considered somehow "verby" without a full nominal paradigm?
- Wiktionary says that the genitive plural of мечта́ние 'dreaming' is used instead. It is not uncommon that a language has phonetically very similar near-synonyms that are used defectively so that some forms come from one and the others from the other. Sometimes both words have full paradigms and some forms are just more frequent, sometimes the paradigms really lack forms. So maybe the answer is just "because it can".

These were just guesses. My Russian is not very good.
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Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

The article doesn't explain it; that's why I'm asking. [:)]

Here's a link to the article, if anyone's interested: https://www.academia.edu/20056034/Defec ... _diachrony

I know we may never know, but I'm always interested in the reasons behind irregularity. Irregularity is one of the hardest things to duplicate in conlangs. Should I just arbitrarily get rid of the dative singular of the word for "chair" in my conlang just...because? I'm fascinated by these kinds of gaps. So I'm interested in your theories, even if we can't know for sure why certain nouns or verbs are missing forms they should have. Thanks for answering.
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Salmoneus wrote: 28 Jan 2023 03:04
Sequor wrote: 28 Jan 2023 01:33 "Drink" is an example of a defective verb in English. Some people accept "I have drunk mojitos before", but a lot of native speakers simply have no past/"passive" participle for it and therefore no perfect verb TAMs at all (or at any rate, they have non-standard formations like "drinken")
Huh! I've never encountered that problem. Do you know which dialect has that issue?
For me, the participle problem does occur - "drink" has no passive participle - but the verb tense issue does not ("I have drunk mojitos before" is completely unremarkable for me). The fact that the perfect is diachronically derived from the past participle and thus is formally identical for most verbs isn't significant to me.

Do such speakers also have problems with the passive forms as well? To me, it's hard to imagine not being able to say something like "all the water had been drunk".
I'm from the Southern US and to me drunk as a past participle or verb form sounds off. I was actually thinking about this earlier this week but had no clue it was fairly common. I'd go with "have drank" or "have drinken" or even "have dranken" (dranken looks wrong in writing but in my idiolect /ɪŋ/ often becomes /eɪ̯ŋ/ so dranken sounds better). I will say that "drunk" actually does still sound perfectly fine as a passive even to me!
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Post by eldin raigmore »

“All4Ɇn” wrote: I'm from the Southern US and to me drunk as a past participle or verb form sounds off. I was actually thinking about this earlier this week but had no clue it was fairly common. I'd go with "have drank"
I’m also from the southern US (mostly East Texas, I guess) and “drunk” sounds good as a participle form of “drink” to me.
I’d say “I have drunk” as a present perfect and “I drank” as a simple past are near-synonymous.
To me “drunken” is not a transitive form; it goes more with “I am drunk” than with “I have drunk”.

I was born in Texarkana in 1952 and spent more of my first 17 years there than anywhere else.
Which part of the South did you learn to talk in? And which decades?
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Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

I think "drunk" works as a past participle for me, but I understand the semantic reasons behind "drunk" meaning "inebriated" replacing the past participle usage. There's still no real parallel in English of the Russian example, but I guess "go/went" suppletion is similar in that there's no word "goed", despite "going" and "gone" existing so the past tense from a verb with a similar meaning, "wend", is used instead, i.e. went. That's the closest I can come up with. It's not really defective looking at the historical explanation (rather a verb with irregular stems, one of which dropped out), but it's at least a similar idea of a gap with no semantic explanation being filled by a different word's form.
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eldin raigmore wrote: 30 Jan 2023 03:24I was born in Texarkana in 1952 and spent more of my first 17 years there than anywhere else.
Which part of the South did you learn to talk in? And which decades?
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Post by clawgrip »

I also tend to avoid using "drunk" as a past participle, instead using different tenses or different phrasing, e.g. "I have had mojitos before," or, "There was no water left," or whatever.

Also, the past participle "swum" feels unnatural for me, and I similarly avoid using it, but since it has no alternate adjectival meaning, I don't really know why that is. I know that this is common enough, at least for North American English speakers, that people will sometimes use "swam" as a past participle.

While we're at it, I know people who have fully replaced simple past tense "saw" with "seen" e.g. "I seen it at the store yesterday."
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clawgrip wrote: 03 Feb 2023 01:30 I also tend to avoid using "drunk" as a past participle, instead using different tenses or different phrasing, e.g. "I have had mojitos before," or, "There was no water left," or whatever.

Also, the past participle "swum" feels unnatural for me, and I similarly avoid using it, but since it has no alternate adjectival meaning, I don't really know why that is. I know that this is common enough, at least for North American English speakers, that people will sometimes use "swam" as a past participle.

While we're at it, I know people who have fully replaced simple past tense "saw" with "seen" e.g. "I seen it at the store yesterday."
Yeah, but that's just part of a more general thing: the distinction between the forms used in perfects and the forms used in preterites is being lost for many speaker (indeed, it HAS been lost for a great many speakers, though many have reintroduced it through 'correction' from the standard dialects).

This goes in both directions: "I have went to market" or "I gone to market". The latter is definitely more common, though, at least for weak verbs - I think it had become standard for a lot of English English dialects by the mid-20th century, though subsequently partially reversed through social pressure. With strong verbs, it's less clear-cut which form wins out, since many people don't know which is which to begin with. I remember this being a big focus of prescriptivism in primary school. For me and people I know, I think it's more common to say "I swum" than "I have swam"; it's certainly very common to say "I rung". In fact, I think "rung" is the default for me, with "rang" feeling a bit like an affectation. [although it's definitely "I ran", perhaps because of the perfect/present homophony]

But again note that the perfect form doesn't have to be the same as the past participle. There will be people who say "I have swam the race" but "the race is swum", or "I have ate" but "the cake is eaten".
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Post by eldin raigmore »

Salmoneus wrote: 03 Feb 2023 16:43 …. the distinction between the forms used in perfects and the forms used in preterites is being lost for many speaker (indeed, it HAS been lost for a great many speakers, though many have reintroduced it through 'correction' from the standard dialects).
….
I watched/listened to a couple of interesting and informative YT videos from ReligionForBreakfast yesterday.
He kept saying “have arose” instead of “have arisen”.
That’s an example of what you’re talking about, I think. An educated and articulate guy with a PhD, a few decades younger than me, has replaced the participle with the simple-past form even in the perfect.
Is that wrong, or just different? I couldn’t help noticing it every time; OTOH I understood him perfectly every time.
Is this a general trend among people a bit older than one-third of my age?
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