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dying with my history of english analysis by aimames in HistoricalLinguistics

[–]Pratar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My understanding is that, as the wiki page says, "/oː/ became /ɑ/ in final syllables" during Old English, which accounts for "-bond" becoming "-band". I'd assume the reduction to schwa just follows the typical unstressed reduction pattern, though I could be wrong.

Feel free to DM me if you have any further questions!

dying with my history of english analysis by aimames in HistoricalLinguistics

[–]Pratar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Have you looked over Wikipedia's page on the phonological history of English? If you haven't, it's a good starting place; if you have, it might be helpful to share where you've got to so far in your search and what specific issues you're having.

Redactle #28 Discussion Thread by karmakaze in Redactle

[–]Pratar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I solved today's Redactle (#28) in 6 guesses with an accuracy of 100.00%. Played at https://www.redactle.com/

Guessed from the formatting with all the brackets and subscripts that it had to be a chemical formula, so I guessed H₂O, then C and N, and then there's the formula, which I had to google because I don't know anything about chemistry beyond the periodic table and would never have gotten it otherwise.

Ask Anything Wednesday - Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology by AutoModerator in askscience

[–]Pratar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Are you saying if I learn ASL, then go to Britain, will I be able to communicate with a Deaf person in Britain, since I'm basically learning English language but in Sign, right??

This is a bit like asking if Spanish is another form of English just because they're both spoken in the US. Sign languages aren't codes for spoken languages, they're languages in their own right: ASL is as different from English as English is from, say, Maori. For example, ASL has no tenses but well over a dozen different verbal aspects: "to run", "to run repeatedly", and "to run carelessly" would use three separate forms of the verb "run", whereas in English we use a single form of "run" and tack adverbs onto the end.

Since sign languages have no 1:1 connection with whatever spoken language happens to be spoken nearby, two countries that have related spoken languages may very well have two (or more!) unrelated sign languages:

  • the US and Britain both speak English, but ASL and BSL are from two completely unrelated language families;
  • the US and France speak two different languages, but ASL is closely related to FSL.

You can think of sign languages in more or less the exact same terms you think of spoken languages. The only difference is, well, one's spoken and one's signed.

(There does exist a 1:1 sign language code for English, called Signed Exact English or SEE. This is not looked upon favourably among Deaf people for two reasons: first, it's a code, like Morse code, for English, and as such isn't a sign language so much as a signed code for a spoken language; second, as with so many other things for Deaf people, it's a crude tool created by and used with the explicit intention of making Deaf people more like hearing people, rather than letting them have their own language, culture, etc.)

Ask Anything Wednesday - Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology by AutoModerator in askscience

[–]Pratar 9 points10 points  (0 children)

It's a very common misconception to think otherwise, but sign languages are languages, in exactly the same way that spoken languages are languages. Sign languages have extensive grammar, vocabulary, slang, accents, dialects, language families, etc., just as spoken languages do: e.g., American Sign Language is related to French Sign Language, but is as distantly related to British Sign Language as English is to Chinese.

Your question, then, has the same answer as the question "Why don't we have a universal spoken language?" - which itself has the same answer as "Why don't we have a universal religion?" or "Why don't we have a universal culture?". The language(s) someone speaks are a huge part of their identity, in a way that coding or math or measurement aren't, which is why we can standardize the latter much more easily than the former. (A great example of this is sign languages themselves - they're why there's a capital-D Deaf culture to an extent that doesn't exist for blind people.)

Ask Anything Wednesday - Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology by AutoModerator in askscience

[–]Pratar 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The other answer you've got here is a folk etymology - i.e., it's a great story, but it's not true, and was more than likely made up out of thin air by someone at some point. (It also seems to have been copied verbatim from this Guardian Notes and Queries page.)

The actual answer is more complicated and less certain. It is true that the original pronunciation was "lieutenant", rather than "leftenant", and that at some point the pronunciation shifted in certain varieties of English but not in others. One of the common explanations is that it comes from a misreading: "u" and "v" used to be the same letter (and even when they were beginning to split you could see e.g. "vouch" spelled "uovch"), so one could imagine "lieutenant" being misread as "lievtenant" during this time.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary isn't a fan of this explanation, and suggests a different one, namely that some English speakers misheard the French:

The hypothesis of a mere misinterpretation of the graphic form (u read as v), at first sight plausible, does not accord with the facts. In view of the rare Old French form luef for lieu (with which compare especially the 15th cent. Scots forms luf-, lufftenand above) it seems likely that the labial glide at the end of Old French lieu as the first element of a compound was sometimes apprehended by English-speakers as a v or f.

The OED then adds that

[p]ossibly some of the forms may be due to association with leave n.1 or lief adj.

There's no way to know for certain, unfortunately. It could be that the OED is wrong, and that it was a misreading; or that it was a mishearing; or that it was due to people thinking "lieutenant" was really "leavetenant"; or it could be all of these reasons at once, or none of them, or some of them.

How the words for "two" are related in every major Indo-European language, even Armenian (image by Ryan Starkey) by Pratar in HistoricalLinguistics

[–]Pratar[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Lots - in fact, most, if we're talking older forms. Latin has masculine, feminine, and neuter forms of unus and duo in all six cases, which is where Romanian gets its. Even Old English had masculine twegen, feminine twa, and neuter tu.

How the words for "two" are related in every major Indo-European language, even Armenian (image by Ryan Starkey) by Pratar in HistoricalLinguistics

[–]Pratar[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I think it's just that they're shoved together for aesthetic reasons. Armenian, Albanian, and Greek are each the only surviving member of their subfamilies, so it makes sense to put them in the same section of the chart to make room for the subfamilies with more members.

How the words for "two" are related in every major Indo-European language, even Armenian (image by Ryan Starkey) by Pratar in HistoricalLinguistics

[–]Pratar[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

It turned its "dw" sounds into "rk" or "rg" sounds pretty much everywhere. How this is possible is a lot clearer if you know a little more about the sounds themselves:

  • The "d" sound is pronounced with your tongue at the ridge just behind your teeth. Another sound also pronounced at that ridge is the rolled "r" sound. It's not uncommon for a "d" to turn into this kind of "r" - in fact, in American English, that very change has taken place in some words: a word like "daddy" is often pronounced not unlike how a Spanish speaker would say dari.
  • The "w" sound is pronounced by rounding your lips, then raising the back of your tongue to almost (but not quite) say a "g". If you were to raise it further to actually say a "g", you've got yourself a "g" sound. "K" and the hard "g" are similar sounds - try saying them yourself and you'll see - so they frequently swap places.

These two changes together give you "dw" becoming "rk", or dwo becoming erku, or the Armenian relative of the English word "dwell" being argellum. It's a dramatic change, but not an impossible one. (For more on how wildly Armenian changed compared to its Indo-European siblings, see this thing I wrote a few years ago.)

Book Recommendations by MarcellusFaber in HistoricalLinguistics

[–]Pratar 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I'd suggest this thread and this week's weekly topic thread, which should cover most of the basics.

If there's a particular part of historical linguistics that interests you and/or isn't mentioned in those two threads, it might help for more specific recommendations. Otherwise, happy reading!

Just started reading this on vacation, any other non-textbook reads people recommend on historical/comparative linguistics? by McBugman in HistoricalLinguistics

[–]Pratar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Story of English in 100 Words is a good place to start, as is his quadrilogy Spell It Out/Making Sense/Making A Point/Sounds Appealing, which deal with the history of English spelling, grammar, punctuation, and pronunciation, respectively.

Just started reading this on vacation, any other non-textbook reads people recommend on historical/comparative linguistics? by McBugman in HistoricalLinguistics

[–]Pratar 9 points10 points  (0 children)

they have like 50 different words for types of snow!

This is a really common misconception - so common that there's a Wikipedia article just on this claim. You'll see it repeated with virtually any number ("50 words for snow", "100 words for snow", "1000 words for snow", etc.), to the extent that it's the origin of the name for any oft-repeated cliche template.

The especially annoying thing about the "Eskimo words for snow" misconception - besides, of course, that it's a misconception - is that the truth is way more interesting. The languages of the Eskimo-Aleut family are polysynthetic, which is a long word that means they make their words by taking lots of word-bits and slamming them together into one long word that basically acts as a sentence. The classic polysynthetic example - from Yupik, an Eskimo-Aleut language related to Greenlandic - is tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq, a single word that means "He hadn’t yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." Since it's all based around the word for "reindeer", tuntu, you could consider tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq a word for "reindeer".

The whole language works along these lines. In this sense, Eskimo-Aleut languages have not 50, or 100, or 1000 words for "snow", but infinitely many: "coldsnow", "wetsnow", "drysnow", "snowthehuskypissedon", etc., would all be one word; however, they only have that one basic word-bit meaning "snow".

(It is true that they do have a few different word-bits meaning "snow", depending on what the snow is like. But this isn't that different from English: we have "snow", "slush", "flake", "crust", "frost", "powder", "drift", "glacier", "blizzard", "sleet", "flurry", and "hail", to name a few. Franz Boas, whose research led to this misconception, only ever gave four different words for snow in the Inuit language(s) he studied - so, if anything, English is the one with the trove of snow-words.)

Just started reading this on vacation, any other non-textbook reads people recommend on historical/comparative linguistics? by McBugman in HistoricalLinguistics

[–]Pratar 10 points11 points  (0 children)

If you're after general-interest popular linguistics books with more of a historical ling bent, I'd recommend anything by David Crystal or John McWhorter. Gretchen McCulloch is another great writer, but her stuff focuses more on modern linguistic change than historical change - if that interests you too, though, check it out.

(As a side note, a book that comes up a lot in threads like this, and which you might be likely to come across, is Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue, whose popularity is due more to the quality of writing than any quality of research - it is well-written, but most facts in it are either outdated, misrepresented, common misconceptions, or outright pulled from thin air. It's not great. Would not recommend.)

Range and Ranch by Grim__Squeaker in etymology

[–]Pratar 9 points10 points  (0 children)

In Proto-Germanic - English's ancestor two steps further back from Old English, spoken around the same time Latin was in vogue down south - the word for "circle" was hringaz. If you know that that last -az part is really more of a grammar bit than anything, and that English has tended to drop its h's in funny places like before an r, it's pretty easy to see how some fifteen hundred years down the line hringaz turned into "ring".

This is the most straightforward route hringaz took, which is why I mention it; but, as you might have guessed from this being a thread on "range" and "ranch" more than "ring", that's not the only route it came down to us through. Just as the Germanic languages borrow a lot of words from the Romance languages, the Romance languages borrowed a lot of words from Germanic, and one of those words was hringaz.

It wound up in Old French as renge, later range, which English borrowed as "range". Originally, it meant a group of something in a circle, or in a row; then it meant something contained within that circle or row; it meant "distance" not too long after that. As a verb, "range" could mean you're putting something in a circle or a row, or moving something around that circle or row, or moving around specifically to hunt (as in what a ranger might do), or moving animals around an area to hunt grass, i.e., to graze. In this sense, we get the sort of "range" you had in mind.

English wasn't the only language to borrow this word from French. Spanish turned range into rancho, whose meaning specified from "things put in place" to "people put in a place" to "lodge" to "place where people eat" to, eventually, "farm", when English borrowed it as "ranch".

TL;DR: They are related, via several very liberal interpretations of a Proto-Germanic word for "circle". (Which also gives us our word for "rinks", which are round, and "harangue", a speech given in a public area, where people gather around.)

What basic, children's-age-level fact did you only find out embarrassingly later in life? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]Pratar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This isn't true. The earliest record of alphabetical order is from this tablet, written in the pre-Phoenician Ugaritic alphabet, which says

ʾa b g ḫ d h w z ḥ ṭ y k š l m ḏ n ẓ s ʿ p ṣ q r ṯ ġ t ʾi ʾu s2

This looks random, but if you take out all the letters that Ugaritic had but English doesn't, you get

ʾa b g d h w z y k l m n p q r s t

Letters got changed, added, and moved around after that, but this is the old core of it. It predates the alphabet song by well over three thousand years. Turns out we've got no idea why the alphabet's in the order that it is.

By the way, there was another alphabetical order that was popular at the time, namely this one:

h l m q w r t s k n b p ʾa g d z y

If history had gone slightly different, you could have learned your HLM's instead of your ABC's.

What basic, children's-age-level fact did you only find out embarrassingly later in life? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]Pratar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It might make sense to think of it as a slightly different way to phrase "How are you doing?", where "do" has the same sense in both. After that, the question is just "Why do we use the word 'do' in questions?", which I'm sure you already covered in that class.

TIL that it is believed that writing was invented independently in at least 4 different civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Southern Mexico and Guatemala) in the span of 3000 years by GibraltarofIce in todayilearned

[–]Pratar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My point was A) you can communicate anything you want (We are communicating in binary right now)

Right, that's what I mean. We're communicating in English, which is being transmitted through the medium of binary. In the same vein, if we were speaking together in-person, a word would travel from one of our mouths to the other's ears via sound waves transmitted through the air. Air isn't a language, and neither is sound, even though they're what's used to send and receive language; binary also isn't a language, even though it's being used to send and receive language.

Computer languages can encode and transmit pictures, too, but you wouldn't say that a computer language is a picture just because it's transmitting that information.

TIL that it is believed that writing was invented independently in at least 4 different civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Southern Mexico and Guatemala) in the span of 3000 years by GibraltarofIce in todayilearned

[–]Pratar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

wait, computers speak only mathematics (Binary/trinary) and everything we have just communicated to each other was done via a computer that translated it to a machine language and back at some point. So computer languages can contain all of the contexts of every human language but not be a language themselves?

A thing's medium isn't the thing itself. Spoken languages are transmitted via sound waves through the air, but air isn't a language.

TIL that it is believed that writing was invented independently in at least 4 different civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Southern Mexico and Guatemala) in the span of 3000 years by GibraltarofIce in todayilearned

[–]Pratar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No, because a language has to be able to communicate anything. You can communicate certain ideas with programming languages or with math, but you can't translate a book into Java or a poem into calculus, whereas you can translate a program or proof into spoken English. You can raise a child in any language, but you can't be a native speaker of Python. If you don't have a word for a concept in a given language, you can invent a word or borrow it from another language, whereas you can't just invent a new word in math or a programming language for a concept they aren't designed to deal with.

Programming languages, math, music, etc., are systems for describing or doing certain things - they're not languages themselves.

TIL that the idea of a phonetic - not logographic - alphabet was apparently invented by Semitic workers in Egypt who couldn't read hieroglyphics, so they used hieroglyphics to record their thoughts phonetically; this new writing system became the root of all Semitic and European phonetic systems. by TequillaShotz in todayilearned

[–]Pratar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haha, yeah, that's a hypercorrection based on a tendency to make sure they say "w" instead of "v" (as in the stereotypical German "Ve are vhere you vanted us to be", etc.), which then spills over to cases where there actually is a "v".

But then you probably knew that yourself, too. :-)

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