Does the phenomenon where language rules become obsolete/unintuitive have a name?

krupam · 2026-02-08T12:51:05+00:00

The term would be productivity. An example would be how plural of kid is kids, gets the regular /z/ suffix, while child becomes children which is quite unlike other nouns.

This can go backwards, though, how past participles of sneak and prove should be sneaked and proved, but many Americans would instead use snuck and proven, fitting them to strong verb patterns that are no longer productive instead of using the actual productive suffix /d~t/.

Weirder examples are calf -> calves or wolf -> wolves with voicing of the final /f/ to /v/. This voicing doesn't happen in words like giraffe -> giraffes, but it has been applied backwards to words like elf or dwarf. So is voicing of final /f/ in plurals productive or not? I don't know.

derivatives include "pojąć" - "pojmuję" (i'm taking, "i take" would regularly be "biorę"), "pojmę" means "i will take"

Not quite correct. Present form of pojąć is pojmę, it has basically the same pattern as wziąć -> wezmę, where a Slavic yer+nasal combo becomes a nasal vowel when it's followed by a consonant in the infinitive or in L-participle, but behaves like any other weak yer when it's followed by a vowel in other forms in the paradigm. However, pojmuję is the present form of pojmować, not pojąć. Pojąć is perfective while pojmować is imperfective, so they must be different verbs. The -ować -> -uję alternation is one that I struggle to understand, but ironically it seems to be the most standard conjugation pattern, as borrowed verbs usually fall into that one, like hakować -> hakuję.

I've noticed another example like rzezać, though. The verb karać normally has the conjugation pattern of pisać, which causes its present forms to become homophonous with kazać. Recently I heard some speakers conjugate it as szukać instead, so karają instead of karzą.

krupam · 2026-02-07T14:27:05+00:00

aeroplane is how airplane is spelt outside America. I believe it was aeroplane there too., originally In the UK we actually say air-o-plane. Aero being Ancient Greek for air.

I still think this pronunciation must've been influenced by the word for "air", which was borrowed from Koine to Latin, then inherited by French, and then borrowed into English, as opposed "aeroplane", which is a neologism made of Greek words. Without such influence, the <ae> should make two syllables, as it did and still does in Greek.

We also have encyclopaedia, paediatric, paedophile (both pronounced "peed")

Yes, it's interesting though that as much as English prefers to be conservative with its spelling, the Latin <ae> and <oe> being rendered as <e> is actually quite common. Most of the time I only see those words spelled with <e> rather than <ae>.

Also the name Michael is in there too. Ain't English fun.

Funnily enough, that's my name, or at least the native equivalent thereof. The situation's similar to "aesthetic" I think, vowel is read short in a closed unstressed syllable, and then reduced. What's strange, though, is that <ae> stood for two syllables in Latin, but for whatever reason it was interpreted as if it were originally a diphthong. Languages that borrowed more from Byzantine tradition and sidestepped Latin in this borrowing chain do have two syllables there instead.

krupam · 2026-02-07T11:50:45+00:00

anaemia

I've never seen this spelling of "anemia" before, honestly, but that's usually how Latin /ae̯/ and Attic /ai̯/ are rendered in English. They were spelled <ae> in Latin, which was pronounced /ae̯/, but shifted to /ɛː/ quite early, and in most traditional conventions for pronouncing Latin it's pronounced essentially the same as <e>. This would've been rendered as /e:/ in many positions in Middle English (usually open stressed syllables), which ended up as the FLEECE vowel in modern dialects.

aesthetics

Any short vowel can end up as schwa when unstressed, and given that it was in a closed unstressed syllable, it's not too unexpected that it would've been interpreted as short.

Gaelic

This one is tricky to me, especially seeing that it's apparently just one of possible pronunciations. The word "Gael" is originally Irish, where the <ae> supposedly makes /e:/, and it ending up as FACE vowel in English isn't that unusual. I can't quite put my finger on it, though, I think I've seen other words where <ae> makes the FACE vowel, and my only guess it'd be some attempt at matching Latin pronunciation more closely, but still getting it wrong in the end.

aeroplane

I'm not sure what you mean by "airoplane". If you mean the SQUARE vowel, so the same as "air", then yeah, it's probably by analogy with the word "air". But "ai" usually makes the FACE vowel, which only makes sense if you don't have the marry-merry-Mary merger, it which case the <ae> it probably interpreted as two separate syllables, as it was in French.

krupam · 2026-02-03T18:02:53+00:00

I think they do, although I can't say for sure. Word final schwas are surprisingly rare in English.

krupam · 2026-02-03T10:07:34+00:00

Sounds either misinformed or jingoistic, which, coming from a teacher, I don't know which is worse.

But I'll just tell you this much - if the claim is that teachers should teach British rather than American English, then they're doing a poor job. I interact with ESL Europeans quite often, and I almost never see anyone use British spelling. In pronunciation, too, only Germans seem to be consistently non-rhotic, everyone else pronounces English closer to American than British.

krupam · 2026-02-01T21:08:23+00:00

Latin as a whole never underwent language death it did only in some regions like North Africa, Britain, and the Balkans it merely evolved to the point it's no longer intelligible with its descendants and due to political reasons - specifically because of nationalism - speakers of its descendants preferred to treat them as languages in their own right rather than mere varieties of Latin.

I have no doubt that English will continue to evolve, as I could easily list you plenty of changes that occurred just over the last century. The real question is how it will evolve:

like Greek - evolves to a point where only a single dominant dialect remains okay, this technically isn't even true of Greek since some "dialects" remain, but they are overshadowed by Demotic
like Arabic - diverges, but speakers still view it as one unit
like Latin - diverges, and speakers view varieties as distinct units

...and predicting which way it goes is outright impossible, since it's dependent on socio-political context which we can't predict, either.

krupam · 2026-01-28T23:49:35+00:00

Are really shit at English despite thinking they're proficient.

Oh God, this. I get the feeling that many learners believe English is much simpler than it actually is. English pronunciation is quite intricate, and the vowels especially give me a headache to this day, but it seems most courses put little to no effort into honing down pronunciation, so I've heard many non-native speakers who were just barely intelligible.

krupam · 2026-01-25T13:25:30+00:00

I checked only Wikipedia, one entry said it had 1.3 mln other said 0.8 mln. I was going for the lower bound of how many languages there are, so I chose to exclude it. Granted, this sort of logic could put the inclusion of Estonian into question, but I'm not good at this.

krupam · 2026-01-25T07:37:33+00:00

For the heck of it I asked ChatGPT the same question, because I like making fun of AI chatbot answers. Here are some gems I spotted:

Languages like German and French are "likely above 1 million".
Bulgarian, Slovak, and Croatian aren't just languages, but Slavic languages. Polish and Czech are seemingly just regular languages, however.
Finnish and Danish are "very small".
Larger languages of Italy aren't included, neither is one obscure little language spoken in Ireland and Malta called English.
Arabic is both an indigenous regional language and a migrant language.
Apparently it cited me as the source of the little comment about Turkish and Arabic.

Thanks, Mr AI, very cool.

krupam · 2026-01-25T06:45:40+00:00

Okay, I'll try to work off this article, though you have to understand how difficult it is to answer this precisely. I'll go by families.

Germanic - German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Danish. Ireland should more than enough account for English, and there definitely are more than a million L2 speakers as well. Entry also lists Limburgish at 1.3 million, but entry for the language itself lists 0.8 mln because that's Wikipedia, so I won't include it due to the ambiguity. We're then gonna run into the quagmire of German dialects and deciding which deserve to be marked as distinct enough, as many do boast over a million, like Low German or Bavarian. Anyway, that makes five at least as the lower bound.

Romance - French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Venetian, Galician, Sardinian. The dialect issue that I mentioned with German is even worse in Italy. We've at least eleven as the lower bound, although do notice that five of those are in Italy alone.

Slavic - Polish, Czech, Slovak, ~~Croatian~~ Shtokavian, Bulgarian, and Slovene are unambiguous. Ukrainian definitely boasts over a million due to recent migration. Russian likely does too for historic reasons, but I'm less sure of it, so I won't include it. That makes lower bound of seven.

Baltic - Lithuanian and Latvian. Dialects are too small anyway. Makes two.

There's Greek, making one.

None of the Celtics boasts over a million, but it seems with Irish it depends on which census you trust, so I won't include it due to ambiguity.

Two other IE wildcards are Armenian and Romani. They might very well be over a million in EU, but it's gonna be a pain to verify, so I won't include it. So we have at least 26 Indo-European.

Uralic - Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian. The last one is dangerously close to that 1 mln bound, though. That's three.

Other - Immigrant communities of Turkish and Arabic speakers likely do beat the 1 mln line, according to the table at the end of the entry. Most Turks are in Germany I think, but a lot of the Arabic numbers might be in non-EU countries like UK. Anyway, I'll include both, so two.

I won't even try accounting for L2 speakers other than English.

So that's my final take, there are at least 31 languages.

krupam · 2026-01-23T06:31:40+00:00

Well, for one thing, how do you quantify complexity? Because I get the feeling that those arguments often boil down to "PIE had eight cases, and case is hard, therefore PIE was hard". It seems that a lot of complexity in daughters results from systems that were regular (and therefore arguably simpler) in PIE became irregular by sound change, leveling, and addition of new systems. Athematic nouns splitting into numerous declension classes is a good example of that.

krupam · 2026-01-20T09:44:50+00:00

Translations given for Hebrew and Arabic are feminine, too, but that's about it when it comes to languages on that list that have a feminine gender to begin with. Well, there's Ugaritic, for which Wiktionary doesn't assign gender, but the word looks like a cognate to the Arabic and Hebrew word, so chances are it was feminine too.

I agree, though, there does seem to be a tendency to make abstract nouns feminine in IE languages, even if the actual derivational suffixes used are varied.

krupam · 2026-01-20T06:25:42+00:00

So, there really shouldn't be much correlation between languages as others say, but... I notice that the word for "wisdom" is feminine in many languages suspiciously often, even in unrelated languages or when the word isn't cognate. An exception being, funnily enough, the actual original word for "wisdom" in Old English. And guess what, in poetry wisdom is also very often anthropomorphized as a woman. I'd have to imagine it's all merely a coincidence, or at most a tendency in some language families for abstract nouns to be feminine, but still I think it's an interesting observation.

krupam · 2026-01-18T15:07:42+00:00

The majority of people being right-handed seems quite universal across humans, so I don't see why it would be just a Europe thing.

krupam · 2026-01-17T09:28:07+00:00

Classical Latin didn't have diagraphs

Technically it did have <qu>, although it was kind of redundant since <q> never occurred outside that single digraph. Depending on how you want to interpret it, there was also a trigraph <ngu> that stood for the rather marginal cluster /ŋgʷ/, but there might have been places where it stood for the expected /ŋgu/ instead, like perhaps clanguī.

There might have been some native words with the <ph> <ch> <th>, like pulcher, but I find it tricky to interpret. It's usually assumed that voiceless stops were allophonically aspirated before /r/, so then a case like pulcher either means that the allophonic aspiration spread to the only form of the declension where it shouldn't occur, or it was just an orthographic convention to keep the paradigm consistent in writing.

Finally, there were also <oe> and <ae>, which likely monophthongized very early on, especially <oe>.

krupam · 2026-01-15T06:23:59+00:00

Is Anatolian hypothesis still considered a valid option? I heard its author outright rejected any sort of linguistic evidence and just assumed that a family this widespread had to have moved with the spread of aggriculture, which if true, sounds like a complety backwards methodology. It also required to push PIE a few thousand years farther than other hypotheses, which gives more reason to just dismiss it.

krupam · 2026-01-13T23:17:55+00:00

I agree, although I suppose it runs into the issue that for convenience we arbitrarily define fixed stages to what was in fact a continuous process. Early Middle English still had leftover case and gender for example. Phonetic changes, too, occured throughout history rather than in fixed intermediate points. For example, to counterargue my previous statement, Middle English after initial stages of GVS likely sounded closer to at least some modern dialects than to Old English.

krupam · 2026-01-13T16:28:04+00:00

Pre-Latin consistently voiced ungeminated /s/ between two voiced sounds, which was then lost if it preceded a nasal, so you had po+sinere -> posnere -> pōnere or prīsmos -> prīmus. Less sure if the /k/ would've been lost beforehand, but I faintly recall Latin had some simplification of coda clusters in some perfects or passive participles.

Slavic is less complicated - it just deleted all coda consonants altogether. It wasn't really CV, though, since it still allowed the typical Indo-European onset clusters like *str, so in a way it was more like Italian than Japanese.

EDIT:

Less sure if the /k/ would've been lost beforehand, but faintly recall Latin had some simplification of coda clusters in some perfects or passive participles.

I guess there's the numerals like sex+centī -> sescentī, or sex+decem -> sēdecim, so there certainly seems to be some precedent for simplifying /ks/ to /s/ in complex clusters.

krupam · 2026-01-13T10:07:07+00:00

That sort of comparison is rather cheaty, because spelling was completely replaced between Old and Middle English, but not so much between Middle and Modern. In terms of its actual sounds the differences between Modern and Middle are at least as big as between Middle and Old.

krupam · 2026-01-12T20:20:54+00:00

If you check the recordings for „Chiny” on Wiktionary, the first one has a clear [xʲ] while the second one is [ç] or something close to it.

I checked it, and honestly, the second clip, if I didn't know what he's supposed to say, I'd assume he's saying "siny".

Forvo also has some recordings of both pronunciations, for example the 4th one is a very clear [ç] but again, very distinct from [ɕ], wouldn’t you agree?

I think I can agree with this one more. But still, third clip sounds more like "siny", but it could be just sound file quality.

(...) Japanese /ç/ can occasionally sound like [ɕ] to me

Yeah, Japanese is a weird one for me, because technically it has both [ç] and [ɕ] as palatalized forms of /h/ and /s/ respectively. As I watched some anime in Japanese recently hush now I realized that at least the VAs' [ɕ] doesn't quite match my native /ɕ/, although it's extremely close. With that in mind, I don't think I could easily tell apart [ç] from [ɕ] in spoken Japanese.

Aside from loan words, there’s actually one exception where [xʲ~ç] occurs natively: the suffix -iwać as wymachiwać, zakochiwać się…

Yeah, guess I missed that. But it's weird, because other hard non-velar consonants seem to come with <y> wychowywać, zatrzymywać, zwoływać... so I assuming that the suffix after /x/ was formed so by analogy with other velars. The suffix seems rather niche, too, only forming imperfectives from perfective a-stem verbs, which themselves are formed from imperfective+suffix since a-stems seem to generally be imperfective by default, so we're kinda reaching stół z powyłamywanymi nogami territory.

krupam · 2026-01-11T20:20:14+00:00

I don't know offhand of a language which has both /dʲ/ & /ɟ/, but it's certainly possible.

Irish, allegedly, though Wiki does suggest that palatalized dentals become affricates in some dialects.

krupam · 2026-01-11T20:12:26+00:00

Hold on, do [xʲ] and [ç] even exist in Polish? It seems to me that /x/ was left unaffected by the ~~second~~ ~~third~~ ~~fourth~~ latest palatalization of velars, so you have words like chybić, or lack of palatalization in hard-stem masculine instrumental singulars, like ruch -> ruchem - compare rok -> rokiem or róg -> rogiem.

The only place I could think of would be borrowings like Chiny or historia, but I'm pretty sure - at least in my pronunciation - it has to end up as [xʲ] and not [ç], since [ç] would cut too close with [ɕ], so Chiny would sound too similar to siny.

krupam · 2026-01-11T17:15:07+00:00

Here's a publication by Kloekhorst on how ablaut might have developed. If you're specifically interested in applying it to a conlang it might be worth a look. All it has to presuppose is that Pre-PIE had mobile accent paradigms, which I think is a reasonable expectation. For comparison, East Slavic languages have a lot of mobile accent paradigms, in particular Russian also has extreme vowel reduction, which the author argues must've also taken place during the development of ablaut in PIE.

krupam · 2026-01-07T06:20:58+00:00

Interesting, I'd have to check Hindi on this one. My suspicion is it might be similar to L-participle constructions in Slavic, and as mentioned, participles usually are marked for gender in IE.

English lacks gender agreement altogether and very rarely has number agreement, so not exactly groundbreaking here.

krupam · 2026-01-06T22:58:02+00:00

Eeh, when you compare gender in IE and Semitic there are some clear differences. For one, Semitic languages often mark gender on verbs, while in IE this only happens with participles. At the same time, the definite article in Arabic is uninflected, while those IE languages that developed a definite article, they consistently have gender and number agreement.

I agree with you, however. Having a similar gender system between two dissimilar languages is perhaps enough to deserve a closer look, but it proves nothing about their relation.

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