(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2019]

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

Post by sangi39 »

This might be a stupid question, but what do people think this consonant is?

https://vocaroo.com/

https://vocaroo.com/

https://vocaroo.com/

There's something clicky to it, but it seems very... fricated. There's no noticeable connection between the blade of the tongue and anything forward of the soft palate. As far as I know, this isn't a phoneme, or "sound unit", within any natural language, but I was wondering if anyone's heard of anything similar.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by qwed117 »

The links are only to the main vocaroo site, not the specific recording
Spoiler:
My minicity is [http://zyphrazia.myminicity.com/xml]Zyphrazia and [http://novland.myminicity.com/xml]Novland.

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

Post by sangi39 »

qwed117 wrote: 07 Sep 2019 03:31 The links are only to the main vocaroo site, not the specific recording
Ah fudge. Whelp, never mind [:P] I wasn't planning on doing anything with it, and can't be bothered recording it again, so no matter [:)]
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Where does the Italian word "Iddio" come from? It is a synonym of "Dio", meaning "God". Wiktionary offers no etymology. Any idea how this word came about?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by sangi39 »

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote: 14 Sep 2019 03:50 Where does the Italian word "Iddio" come from? It is a synonym of "Dio", meaning "God". Wiktionary offers no etymology. Any idea how this word came about?
Apparently it's from il Dio with some assimilation.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

I guess I could've figured that out [xD]

It's another one of those words that I notice a lot in opera libretti. And it's used alongside Dio. It seems like it might be archaic, but I wouldn't know.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sequor »

It is positively archaic in modern Italian. Italian Wiktionary says it fell into disuse in 19th century.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Vlürch »

Where did the Tibetan nominalising suffix -པ /pa/ come from? I tried to google but couldn't find anything about its origin...
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

It seems that word order encodes which participant is the topic in all languages (?), while there must be some morphological marker for semantic roles (voice or case).
Do languages that have morphological marker for topic but code semantic roles with word order exist?

X-top V Y. 'X is Ving Y.'
X V Y-top. 'Y is being Ved by X.'
My meta-thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5760
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

Might depend what you mean. Lots of languages mark topic with particles, and I'm sure some must be cliticised, but I'm not aware of any topic-marking affixes per se.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sequor »

Omzinesý wrote: 20 Sep 2019 19:24It seems that word order encodes which participant is the topic in all languages (?), while there must be some morphological marker for semantic roles (voice or case).
Do languages that have morphological marker for topic but code semantic roles with word order exist?

X-top V Y. 'X is Ving Y.'
X V Y-top. 'Y is being Ved by X.'
Oh, that looks fun.

I don't know of any natlang like that, but I'd like to mention some languages do have particles or adpositions to indicate topics. English has "now", "regarding", and "as for". Classical Chinese has 夫 (Mandarin fú, Cantonese fu4), 也 (M: yě, C: yaa5) and 者 (M: zhě, C: je2). "Now Tibetan, that was a nightmare to learn to spell."

It is also common for languages to use resumptive pronouns. Very commonly seen in French: les tomates, je te les avais déjà apportées, bien que j'avais oublié d'acheter de la laittue en même temps 'as for the tomatoes, I had already brought them for you, even though I had forgotten to buy some lettuce at the same time'.

It's not always or usually done purely with word order.
Last edited by Sequor on 21 Sep 2019 02:41, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by sangi39 »

So, I work for a company that deals with gift cards in a fashion, and I work in the fraud section. Best part of the job for me, going "oo, message in Turkish", or "oh my god, finally, a message in Estonian". Most of the messages we get are in English, unsurprisingly with us being in the UK, and actually quite surprisingly a fair few in Welsh (beyond the set phrases of "penblwydd hapus" and "nadolig llawen" and the like).

Now, cool thing I saw today, in a message in Finnish, was "hyvää syntymäpäivää, dyyd", and I really, really want that to be a Finnish rendering of the stereotypical California surfer "dude".

I can't find anything through Google (any attempt I make at a search always tries to correct to Welsh "dydd", meaning "day"), but is this a thing in Finnish?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Khemehekis »

sangi39 wrote: 21 Sep 2019 02:37 I can't find anything through Google (any attempt I make at a search always tries to correct to Welsh "dydd", meaning "day"), but is this a thing in Finnish?
In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker says that to people living through the Great Vowel Shift, it must have sounded "like that strange surfer dialect" in which "dude" sounds something like [dɪːuːd].

Native Finnish words don't begin with [d], so "dyyd" is almost certainly something borrowed -- I'd say it's quite likely "dude".
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Xonen »

sangi39 wrote: 21 Sep 2019 02:37Now, cool thing I saw today, in a message in Finnish, was "hyvää syntymäpäivää, dyyd", and I really, really want that to be a Finnish rendering of the stereotypical California surfer "dude".

I can't find anything through Google (any attempt I make at a search always tries to correct to Welsh "dydd", meaning "day"), but is this a thing in Finnish?
I wouldn't specifically associate it with California, but yes, it's clearly a rendering of "dude". As for being a thing... I guess? I wouldn't say "dyyd" itself exists as an established loanword in Finnish, but this kind of code switching / ad hoc borrowings from English are certainly a thing among the kind of younger Finnish speakers who've grown up inundated in American pop culture.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by All4Ɇn »

In French some words with the circumflex added them not due to any etymological reasoning but simply because the accent gives the words a royal look due to the accent's similarity to a crown. This is most commonly seen in the words trône and suprême.

My question is, are there any other cases of the spelling of a word in a phonographic system being based on a visual element of a letter/accent/etc. ?
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Zekoslav »

All4Ɇn wrote: 23 Sep 2019 12:36 In French some words with the circumflex added them not due to any etymological reasoning but simply because the accent gives the words a royal look due to the accent's similarity to a crown. This is most commonly seen in the words trône and suprême.

My question is, are there any other cases of the spelling of a word in a phonographic system being based on a visual element of a letter/accent/etc. ?
Hm, I don't think that's true. The circumflex accent marks, or rather marked as it's mostly gone nowadays, phonemic vowel length (as a consequence it's used either etymologically or to disambiguate homophones). It usually arises through compensatory lengthening when /s/ was lost or through vowel contraction. In the case of trône and suprême it seems to be borrowed from a contemporary traditional pronunciation of Latin.

By that logic I'd expect the cǎrǒn, or rather ǎltêrnǎtîng cǎrôns ǎnd cîrcǔmflêxěs, to be used. I don't know of an actual example of what you proposed (in the Latin alphabet, Egyptian Hieroglyphics are full of it*), but the idea is interesting.

*Hieroglyphics are usually written in the direction of reading, but characters indicating royalty or divinity may exceptionally be written at the beginning of the word. And later, hellenistic era Hieroglyphics are full of graphic puns.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Reyzadren »

All4Ɇn wrote: 23 Sep 2019 12:36 In French some words with the circumflex added them not due to any etymological reasoning but simply because the accent gives the words a royal look due to the accent's similarity to a crown. This is most commonly seen in the words trône and suprême.

My question is, are there any other cases of the spelling of a word in a phonographic system being based on a visual element of a letter/accent/etc. ?
In that other natlang that I speak, with its somewhat irregular spelling system, there are a group of spelling combinations known as polar vowels, which are spelt in a somewhat similar way and are not pronounced as what they appear as initially.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

Ser wrote: 21 Sep 2019 02:15
Omzinesý wrote: 20 Sep 2019 19:24It seems that word order encodes which participant is the topic in all languages (?), while there must be some morphological marker for semantic roles (voice or case).
Do languages that have morphological marker for topic but code semantic roles with word order exist?

X-top V Y. 'X is Ving Y.'
X V Y-top. 'Y is being Ved by X.'
Oh, that looks fun.

I don't know of any natlang like that, but I'd like to mention some languages do have particles or adpositions to indicate topics. English has "now", "regarding", and "as for". Classical Chinese has 夫 (Mandarin fú, Cantonese fu4), 也 (M: yě, C: yaa5) and 者 (M: zhě, C: je2). "Now Tibetan, that was a nightmare to learn to spell."

It is also common for languages to use resumptive pronouns. Very commonly seen in French: les tomates, je te les avais déjà apportées, bien que j'avais oublié d'acheter de la laittue en même temps 'as for the tomatoes, I had already brought them for you, even though I had forgotten to buy some lettuce at the same time'.

It's not always or usually done purely with word order.
Yes, of course there are topic particles and affixes, and even more for focus.
I just mean that word order is never used to code purely semantic roles.

French syntax is a mess, hot to say I would know French. It uses very complex cleft clauses to allow information structure be coded by word order in a language with a very strict word order.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Vlürch »

Does 小陽 mean "moon" in either Chinese or Japanese? I mean, it'd complement 太陽 and "little sun" seems like it could mean "moon"? Maybe I'm an idiot for thinking that, though... I tried to google but couldn't really find anything at all about what it actually means, only that it's a Japanese feminine given name. If it can't mean "moon" in either language, I might have to make a conlang that uses Chinese characters just so I can include it.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sequor »

Vlürch wrote: 26 Sep 2019 03:51Does 小陽 mean "moon" in either Chinese or Japanese? I mean, it'd complement 太陽 and "little sun" seems like it could mean "moon"? Maybe I'm an idiot for thinking that, though... I tried to google but couldn't really find anything at all about what it actually means, only that it's a Japanese feminine given name. If it can't mean "moon" in either language, I might have to make a conlang that uses Chinese characters just so I can include it.
陽 (Mandarin: yáng, Cantonese: yeung4) is the side of a mountain that receives sunlight, and by extension it's the Sun, heat, light and the male principle. 小陽 (M: xiǎoyáng, C: siu2yeung4) would just mean 'little Sun' if it existed.

The counterpart of 太陽 (M: tàiyáng, C: taai3yeung4) would be 太陰 (M: tàiyīn, C: taai3yam1), using 陰 (M: yīn, C: yam1), the side of a mountain with shade that stands for the Moon, cold, darkness and the female principle. This word does exist and it means "moon", but is a word closely associated with Taoism. It isn't used in regular language.
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