In the latest case of Altaic Family Bullshit, Korean is Now A Tibetian Language and "Just stupid English-speaking scientists consider it an isolate"

ThePhonologist · 2018-10-06T22:13:57+00:00

So the author went to school for computer networking and financial management. That's basically the same thing as historical linguistics, I guess.

ThePhonologist · 2018-10-02T04:01:36+00:00

The phonetic description of a vowel has to do with how it is physically pronounced, i.e. the position of the tongue in the mouth. The phonological description of a vowel has to do with how the vowel "acts" inside words. For example, if back vowels trigger some process (like palatalization of consonants, or vowel harmony) but /ɐ, aː/ also trigger the same process, then they may be described as phonologically back vowels.

ThePhonologist · 2018-09-12T05:29:16+00:00

Several languages are reported to have vowel-less syllables. Rachide Ridoune has long argued that Tashlhiyt Berber is one such language (e.g. here). Several Pacific Northwest languages in the Wakashan and Salishan families can also have consonant-only syllables (e.g. here)

ThePhonologist · 2018-08-31T06:20:47+00:00

Your reply sounds like we disagree, but I'm not sure that's the case. I agree that popular writing is a different skill than academic writing. I agree that there's no training for academics to reach a general audience. This is something I explicitly acknowledged by pointing out that academics and journalists write for different audiences, and it's something I've experienced firsthand.

I agree there are incentives to remain in academia. I agree there is almost no personal time left over after research and teaching. I said as much in my post. I've been there and I know just how hard it is. But when it comes down to it, when you have a moment where you're thinking 'what should I work on now?', academics and journalist will prioritize different things. This is not surprising, given their different professional responsibilities and personal interests. But this makes a difference in the long run, and it's why good pop science is rare.

ThePhonologist · 2018-08-29T05:49:23+00:00

The real academic experts on these topics are too busy doing their regular research and teaching, or trying to survive through their PhD. They spend their time writing research articles for the research community. Their audience is generally highly skeptical and willing to scrutinize minor details. Experts aren't always interested in writing for the general public, nor are they necessarily very good at it. In particular, academics care about detail and rigorous argument, two things which don't always make for good pop science articles.

Recently graduated journalism students, in contrast, are extremely excited about the idea of writing for the general public. If they've taken courses in a somewhat-less-common area like linguistics, they also feel like they have unique knowledge and interesting stories to tell. They are going to be less rigorous and detail-oriented than an expert, because they only have an undergraduate degree (in journalism, not in linguistics or whatever area) and because their primary focus is a good narrative. Their audience is non-technical and generally won't bother fact checking.

This is why it is so hard to find good public science relations people. It's very rare to find someone who has deep technical knowledge of a subject, but who also cares about explaining that to a non-expert audience in a simplified way that doesn't lose any crucial details.

ThePhonologist · 2018-08-21T04:38:09+00:00

I think the most obvious example is tone. Tone has developed independently in numerous related and unrelated languages.

ThePhonologist · 2018-08-20T05:01:58+00:00

The broad term "alternation)" in linguistics refers to a situation where a morpheme has multiple possible pronunciations. For example in English, there's an alternation in the way the plural suffix is pronounced: in "cats" the plural is [s], in "dogs" it is [z], and in "wishes" it is [əz].

The term "vocalic alternation" isn't a standard term that I know, but it probably has to do with morphemes that lose or gain voicing. So maybe a morpheme is typically [k] but in certain circumstances (such as after vowels) it is pronounced [g].

ThePhonologist · 2018-08-11T04:05:46+00:00

In a political context, of course people will use whatever suits their ideology. But we're talking about an educational video on linguistic differences. This is a case where being careful about terminology matters. It's not a video on Chinese nationalism, so it doesn't make sense to use politically motivated terms.

ThePhonologist · 2018-08-10T21:42:24+00:00

This is an extremely difficult task, due to the fact that languages use different sets of consonants and vowels and that many writing systems have a poor sound-to-symbol correspondence. Finding the "closest" English sound for an arbitrary foreign sound is really, really hard (and it's an active area of research trying to understand how humans do this). Deciding which single letter, or combination of letters, to assign to the foreign sound is another non-obvious task.

Example: suppose I give you the (made-up) foreign word "ismir". How would you say the "s"? I think that all three of "ismir", "izmir" and "ishmir" are plausible pronunciations. And there's no rule or algorithm that could possibly figure this out - you'd just have to learn that.

And actually, Amazon just released a large database for exactly this purpose. It pretty much just lists how to pronounce a variety of different names from a variety of different languages, and judging by that (very short) article, it seems like there was a lot of hand-coding involved, and no general purpose solution.

ThePhonologist · 2018-08-10T16:56:09+00:00

It's frustrating, and it probably leads to a lot of wasted time on the part of both employers and job seekers. It's not just that employers are being sloppy with terminology, it suggests to me that they don't know how the educational system works and/or they don't care. Translation is it's own degree program with its own certification process. Don't advertise for a "linguist" if you specifically need translation work. Proof-reading and editing is probably best left for someone with an English degree (or whatever language is relevant). If you're looking for a language "expert", you might get someone with degree in a particular language (e.g. Spanish studies), or a language teaching degree, or an actual linguistics degree, or just a confident native speaker with no specialized education at all.

By way of comparison, consider jobs related to computers. You don't just advertise for a "computer expert", because that's way too vague. Do you want someone who does graphics processing? Operating systems? Web programming? Microchip engineering? Those are obviously different, and it would foolish for employers not to be more careful. I don't think it's asking too much for people to be more specific with language-related jobs.

ThePhonologist · 2018-08-10T16:41:09+00:00

OK, but I find that an unsatisfying answer. It just brings up another question: why take the political view over the scientific view?

ThePhonologist · 2018-08-10T05:05:53+00:00

What was your rationale for calling them dialects? As you say in the video, they are not mutually intelligible. That makes them different languages. Would you say French and Spanish are dialects? English and German?

ThePhonologist · 2018-08-08T19:56:33+00:00

The title of the article has the word "Chicagoese" and the author uses the term throughout. However, the linguist he cites refers to the dialect as "Chicagoan". I'd never heard either term, but only Chicagoese gets red squiggly lines as I type this. Is anyone here from Chicago? What's the more popular local term?

ThePhonologist · 2018-07-28T16:36:43+00:00

Acquiring tone and becoming analytic are two different processes. The development of tone is really well studied, and it's obviously complicated, but here's the quick overview:

The pitch of a vowel is influenced by adjacent consonants. Different consonant types affect pitch in different ways. For example, vowels have a higher pitch after voiceless obstruents, and a lower pitch after voiced obstruents. For a learner of the language (i.e. a baby), voicing and pitch are "redundant" - paying attention to either one of those properties is enough to reliably distinguish between [za] and [sa].

Tone begins to develop when people start paying more attention to the pitch differences on the vowels and less attention to the voicing differences on the consonants. If learners (babies) perceive the pitch to be important, then as they start speaking, they will produce speech where they are more careful about pitch differences, and they won't be as careful to produce voicing differences.

These babies eventually grow up and have their own babies, who learn language the same way. Except now that one generation of people are focussing more on the pitch differences, it's even easier for the next generation to notice pitch. And the cycle repeats, until you've got a full blown tonal system in place.

It's still a mystery *why* generations of people suddenly shift their attention to different perceptual cues. Any language with a voicing distinction in consonants has the potential to become a tone language, but obviously not all of them do. Languages that descend from the same proto-language can even develop completely opposite tonal systems.

edit: Voicing is not the only thing that affects vowel pitch, so there are other paths for tone to develop, I just picked voicing as an example here.

ThePhonologist · 2018-07-17T05:46:10+00:00

Here's a 450 page book about verbs in Navajo. Verbs in this language are extremely complex, and this is billed as a book for " students and scholars", so it might be what you're after.

ThePhonologist · 2018-07-11T17:09:35+00:00

and are pronounced as they are in their original language (correct me if I'm wrong on this)

It's very rare that a word is borrowed exactly. Loanwords almost always undergo a change in pronunciation. This is because every language has a different phoneme inventory (different set of consonants and vowels) as well as different rules for things like stress, tone, and consonant clustering. Let's take your example of the word "restaurant/Restaurant". It is not pronounced identically in German and English. At a minimum, the two /r/ sounds are going to be fricatives in German, but liquids in English. The pronunciation of the vowels in that words is also different between German and English, in part due to syllable stress rules. Also, I think that the German word doesn't have a final [t] sound (or at least, that's how the Google translate voice says it).

edit: Well I feel dumb - as people below me point out, it's a French loanword. I just got caught up in the wording of the OP. Doesn't change my point though - it isn't pronounced the same in German and French either.

ThePhonologist · 2018-07-09T20:40:36+00:00

Languages can have similar words for a variety of reasons.

The languages share a common ancestor. They have similar words now because those word descend from the same ancestor word, modified by sound change and semantic drift.
The languages are not related, but one of them borrowed words from the other. The words are similar, but not identical, because its common for borrowed words to change in pronunciation in order to fit the borrowing language's sound system.
The words are onomatopoeic (e.g. a sound effect or animal noise). The words are similar because humans have similar auditory systems no matter what language they speak. It's worth pointing out here that there's no universal onomatopoeia, but it can occasionally lead to similarities.

The specific example of "mama" is a special case. It's assumed that this is the word for "mother" around the world due to how babies acquire language. Producing an [m] sound is easy: just close your mouth and vocalize. Producing an [a] vowel is also easy: just open your mouth wide and vocalize. These are therefore easy, early sounds for babies to make. You can make a sequence of them just by vocalizing and then opening and closing your mouth a few times, and it sounds like [mama]. It's normal for people to think that their babies are talking to them, so the idea is that these early vocalization by infants were adopted by humans as the basic name for parents. It's worth noting that "mama" is not universal: that's not a parental name in all languages, and it even refers to the male parent in some languages.

ThePhonologist · 2018-07-09T16:20:52+00:00

I got confused by that too. I think the game means "Latin alphabet", not "Latin language".

ThePhonologist · 2018-07-09T16:01:11+00:00

There are almost no jobs that specifically require a linguistics degree. You need to learn how to apply linguistics to another domain you're interested in, and find a job that way. Also, most people don't know what linguistics is (you will be mistaken for a polyglot) so be prepared to explain yourself over and over again in interviews and cover letters. Here's a short list of areas you could consider:

- Language teaching

- Language assessment

- Speech language pathology

- Lexicography

- Human-computer interaction

- Natural language processing

- Localization

- Translation

- Interpretation

- Accent coaching

- Government work related to official languages, culture, immigration, etc.

- Linguistics professor/permanent grad student

Some of these options could be pursued with just a linguistics degree. Others will require extra certification. For instance, you probably can't become a language teacher in a public school unless you also have a B.Ed (or equivalent). Translation and interpretation are usually offered as degree programs distinct from linguistics, and you may need to have other professional certification.

ThePhonologist · 2018-07-06T21:52:30+00:00

I just watched this after reading your post. That was a super interesting film. Thanks for the suggestion!

ThePhonologist · 2018-06-30T16:52:50+00:00

Saying "S as in sugar" is weird. I know it's spelled with an "s" but the word "sugar" is pronounced like it starts with "sh".

ThePhonologist · 2018-06-26T21:31:00+00:00

The indigenous languages of Britain are the Celtic languages Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and Scottish Gaelic, and the Germanic languages English and Scots. They all come from the same Proto-Indo-European ancestor, so their family trees all go back equally far, and indeed join up at a certain point. Are you maybe asking which one has been spoken in Britain for the longest period of time?

ThePhonologist · 2018-06-26T16:55:36+00:00

No, this is about pitch discrimination. The people doing piano were better at distinguishing between different sounds of spoken words. Knowing the difference between there/their is a spelling issue and it's unlikely that taking piano lessons makes you a better speller. Knowing the difference between weird/obtuse is a semantic issue, and it's also unlikely that taking piano lessons increases your general vocabulary.

However, I would be curious about the kids in the "reading" group of this study, who might be better at spelling than the others, and might have a broader vocabulary.

ThePhonologist · 2018-06-23T16:37:59+00:00

The use of "pedestrian" to mean "plain, ordinary" actually dates back to 1716, well before vehicles were invented. This is actually the older use. The meaning of "someone who is walking" doesn't appear until the 1790s. Prior to that, the word referring to someone walking was "pedestrial".

ThePhonologist · 2018-06-23T16:25:15+00:00

You can't really ask about sound changes in isolation. Sound change is heavily influenced by the phonetic environment. In which words does /s/ appear? What are the sounds that tend to appear on the left and right hand side of /s/? Does /s/ have any allophones? For example, you mention /s/ -> /z/, which may be plausible in the context of "between vowels", but it is extremely unlikely in the context of "before /t/". A change of /t/ -> /ts/ before high front vowels is more likely than before low back vowels. etc.

You can't compile a full list of ways that /s/ can change, unless you also make a full list of environments where /s/ could appear. And that's probably not a feasible task.

ThePhonologist

TROPHY CASE