(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 »

What is the semantic role of emotions?
In the clause "I feel pain." what is the role of 'pain'? It is a noun so it should have a role.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Khemehekis »

Omzinesý wrote: 29 Dec 2024 19:11 What is the semantic role of emotions?
In the clause "I feel pain." what is the role of 'pain'? It is a noun so it should have a role.
I'd say "pain" is the agent, and the first-person singular pronoun is the patient. With verbs like "feel", "see", "hear", etc., the patient happens to become the subject -- and the agent the direct object -- in many languages, such as English.
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Post by Creyeditor »

The subject in "I feel pain" is an Experiencer. In other similar sentences the emotion is often part of the predicate, as in "I love pasta.". I would say that "feel pain" might be a complex predicate as it's equivalent to (some sense) of "to hurt".
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Post by Omzinesý »

Thank you for your answers!
Creyeditor wrote: 29 Dec 2024 19:42 The subject in "I feel pain" is an Experiencer. In other similar sentences the emotion is often part of the predicate, as in "I love pasta.". I would say that "feel pain" might be a complex predicate as it's equivalent to (some sense) of "to hurt".
Damn, I think you are right. I have a vague idea of a lang without verbs where all nouns are case-marked according to their roles. But yes, I also think it doesn't have a role in the basic list.
Khemehekis wrote: 29 Dec 2024 19:14
Omzinesý wrote: 29 Dec 2024 19:11 What is the semantic role of emotions?
In the clause "I feel pain." what is the role of 'pain'? It is a noun so it should have a role.
I'd say "pain" is the agent, and the first-person singular pronoun is the patient. With verbs like "feel", "see", "hear", etc., the patient happens to become the subject -- and the agent the direct object -- in many languages, such as English.
I think you mean actor - the more agent-like argument - and undergoer - the more patient-like argument. Semantic roles can be abstracted to such a dichotomy, but I meant the basic list that has a few more roles.
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Post by H. H. P. M. P. Cole »

What is the "most analytic" (for some definition of "most analytic) natural language? In a similar vein, what is the most analytic conlang that you know of?
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Post by HolyHandGrenade! »

H. H. P. M. P. Cole wrote: 03 Jan 2025 12:35 What is the "most analytic" (for some definition of "most analytic) natural language? In a similar vein, what is the most analytic conlang that you know of?
Toki Pona is a prefectly analytic conlang
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Post by Creyeditor »

If analytic means analytic and isolating here, I have to say that I do not know of a single language that has neither compounding, nor affixation, nor some kind of tonal/mutation morphology.
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Post by eldin raigmore »

Creyeditor wrote: 03 Jan 2025 15:28 If analytic means analytic and isolating here, I have to say that I do not know of a single language that has neither compounding, nor affixation, nor some kind of tonal/mutation morphology.
I don’t think mutation of consonants or vowels, nor mutation of the tones, violates analytic-and-isolating.

I’m not sure about compounding!
Does a language which allows compounding, automatically not qualify as analytic and/or isolating?
Maybe so!
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Post by sangi39 »

I think this has been discussed before as to derivation and morphology should be treated separately on this front, e.g. does "relies on compounds for derivation" count or isolating or not? And it seems reasonable to consider things like mutation as an example of non-isolating behaviour (while it might not be an example of affixation, there's definitely something going on that's roughly equivalent to a morphological process to indicate a change in meaning)

Personally, since some compounds can also include morphological elements, it does seem reasonable to consider derivation and grammatical morphology separately, but along a similar axis. As Creyeditor has noted, though, it doesn't seem like any one language is purely isolating, but off the top of my head I can't think of a language that is the "most" isolating language

(again, though, I realise the question was "most analytic", but given that "analytic" means "low morpheme to word count", I've assumed that "analytic" was intended to mean "isolating")
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Post by HolyHandGrenade! »

sangi39 wrote: 05 Jan 2025 03:30 I think this has been discussed before as to derivation and morphology should be treated separately on this front, e.g. does "relies on compounds for derivation" count or isolating or not? And it seems reasonable to consider things like mutation as an example of non-isolating behaviour (while it might not be an example of affixation, there's definitely something going on that's roughly equivalent to a morphological process to indicate a change in meaning)
I guess to answer the mutation question you would have to see if isolating languages are less likely to have mutation. I wonder if WALS or something has anything on that.
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Post by Omzinesý »

Are Japanese plosives sometimes pronounced as fricatives?
I think I have sometimes heard such pronunciation.
In which context does that happen? Is it to do with tones?
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Post by zyma »

Wikipedia's article on Japanese phonology has this section on the lenition of voiced stops.
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Post by Omzinesý »

zyma wrote: 18 Jan 2025 20:08 Wikipedia's article on Japanese phonology has this section on the lenition of voiced stops.
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It's possible that I've asked that before 😄
Thank you
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Post by Omzinesý »

Languages with three vowel phonemes are normal.
But is there a language with only six (or eight) vowel phonemes half of which are nasal?
Nasals are probably unstable in small inventories where they can easily change to oral vowels with distinct qualities.
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Post by Creyeditor »

I found Wapishana (https://phoible.org/inventories/view/608#tipa) and Jivaro (https://phoible.org/inventories/view/383#tipa) with eight vowels each, half of it nasal via UPSID on Phoible. Probably, there is more in South America.
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Post by Omzinesý »

Creyeditor wrote: 21 Jan 2025 00:43 I found Wapishana (https://phoible.org/inventories/view/608#tipa) and Jivaro (https://phoible.org/inventories/view/383#tipa) with eight vowels each, half of it nasal via UPSID on Phoible. Probably, there is more in South America.
Thank you again. I should remember phoible myself.

Then I think my Mandarin-ish vowel inventory is not fully unnatural.
i ĩ u ũ
ə ə̃(?)
a ã
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Post by WeepingElf »

Omzinesý wrote: 22 Jan 2025 22:07
Creyeditor wrote: 21 Jan 2025 00:43 I found Wapishana (https://phoible.org/inventories/view/608#tipa) and Jivaro (https://phoible.org/inventories/view/383#tipa) with eight vowels each, half of it nasal via UPSID on Phoible. Probably, there is more in South America.
Thank you again. I should remember phoible myself.

Then I think my Mandarin-ish vowel inventory is not fully unnatural.
i ĩ u ũ
ə ə̃(?)
a ã
Seems OK to me.
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Post by sangi39 »

I've watched a handful of videos recently dealing with the history of the English language, and the impact of the Norman conquest of 1066, and it got me thinking again about a question I've had (one and off) since college (so basically 18 years ago, and now I feel old)... To what extent did the import of Norman French actually impact the morphological development (or "simplification") of Old English as it became Middle English

For example, if you assume that all vowels in inflectional endings in Old English nouns reduce to a schwa, and, where two schwas appear in adjacent syllables, the second schwa drops out, you more or less end up with three patterns in the singular:

(1)
Nom: -
Acc: -
Gen: -əs
Dative:-ə

(2)
Nom: -ə
Acc: -ən
Gen: -ən
Dat: -ən

(3)
Nom: -
Acc: -(ə)
Gen: -ə
Dat: -ə


And it seems like a lot of the nouns in the third category ended up reassigned to the other two (because if you have some pattern of inflection, it seems like a lot of languages will assign "mostly doesn't inflect" into an inflectional rule, rather than the other way around), which is then probably where a lot of the "(kind of) uninflected nouns" like sunnu and giefu ended up

The plurals seem to follow a similar pattern:

(1)
Nom: -əs
Acc: -əs
Gen: -ə
Dat: -ən

(2)
Pl: -ən

(3)
Nom: -ə
Acc: -ə
Gen: -ə
Dat: -ən


Again, because a lot of the nouns in the singular third category got reassigned, the (3) pattern plurals would have eventually dropped out. This leaves the following:

(1)
SG.
Nom: -
Acc: -
Gen: -əs
Dative:-ə
PL.
Nom: -əs
Acc: -əs
Gen: -ə
Dat: -ən

(2)
SG.
Nom: -ə
Acc: -ən
Gen: -ən
Dat: -ən
PL.
_: -ən

Which is pretty much exactly what the Wikipedia article on Middle English Grammar gives for nouns, with the exception that the Class 1 Dative Plural sometimes ends is "s" rather than "n"


A similar result falls out when you take Old English weak verbs and reduce inflectional ending vowels to a schwa. The Middle English verbs, more or less, reflect their Old English counterparts, and exceptions get caught up in the results


Given this trend, and a general trend in at least North-Western Europe for unstressed vowels to be reduced, to what extent can Middle English really be considered "simplified" by the presence of non-native Old English speakers in the later decades of the 1st millennium CE??
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Post by sangi39 »

I (think) the genitive plural being -(ə)nə could be a weird holdover. If you assume "Old English, but schwa" you get a lot nouns where the genitive plural seems almost "agglutinative" as -ən+ə, so in nouns where the genitive plural is just -ə, compared to a bunch where it's -ənə, you get this situation where the "Class 1 -ənə" is an instance of over generalisation, where nouns with a gen. pl. of "-ən" is just "these nouns are -ən in the plural regardless". It's an example of an irregular sound change that's explainable, I guess
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Post by Omzinesý »

Does anybody happen to know how Arabic dialects are stressed. There is a thead about Arabic dialects in the Teach&Share section but I didn't find the answer.
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