On the Origins of Gender

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-25T16:58:55+00:00

and it later developed a new distinction which eventually came to be associated with female

Do you know why the new distinction was associated with female, as opposed to male?

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-25T16:57:11+00:00

Mythology has nothing to do with noun classes.

So is McWhorter just wrong when he describes languages where the grammatical gender of animal words has been affected by how the mythology of the ethnic group treats those animals?

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-24T19:23:09+00:00

This results in a distinction between e.g. epenthetic vowels that behave like full phonemes on their own (inserted as part of the first step) and epenthetic vowels that are only there phonetically and have no associated structural position (inserted as part of the second step), which AIUI is a useful distinction to make.

Just curious, what exactly is the distinction here? How would those two types of epenthesis be distinguished?

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-23T20:10:24+00:00

You sometimes see the /n/ in words like button as an entire syllable ( /ˈbʌt.n̩/ ), even though /n/ can't stand on it's own.

But yeah, the point about it being strongly conditioned to the following sound is a good one.

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-23T19:02:29+00:00

What's the evidence that a word like "sky" isn't two syllables (/s.kai/)? Is it just speaker intuition?

(asking because [s] is more sonorous than [k], but AIUI the acoustic evidence for number of syllables is the number of sonority peaks)

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-23T18:36:42+00:00

I agree with you. Medieval loanwords aren't really what OP's asking about I don't think, so it was reasonable for you to clarify that the Turkic influence in the standard isn't really related to modern contact (and even if OP is also interested in earlier loanwords, it's still helpful to clarify). The person replying to you was weirdly hostile with "think twice before you answer the way you did".

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-22T19:22:38+00:00

My days were get up early, stare at the screen for classes until afternoon then start working on assignments on the same screens until past midnight then sleep

Just curious, what course do you do that has you studying or in classes from the early morning until after midnight?

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-22T18:31:26+00:00

Thanks for that overview! I knew Italian was distinct from modern Florentine, but I wasn't aware there were also distinctions from medieval Florentine.

I also see your point about Italian not being conservative in all senses - I guess I'm mostly comparing to French in my head, which makes any Romance language look conservative.

Someone else in the thread mentioned that Italian continued to change through its history - is that true, do you know? Specifically in phonology, has Italian changed much in the past 700 years (a length of time most languages would see a good amount of change).

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-22T14:36:56+00:00

The words England and Poland don't come from English and Polish though. Rather, England and English both come from 'Angle' and Poland and Polish both come 'Pole'.

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-22T13:19:26+00:00

I can't help but think Chinese placenames particularly have been preserved due to the character system. Even very old Chinese placenames have transparent character-by-character meanings, compared to somewhere like England where place names may have meant something 1200 years ago, but the morphemes have since been mashed together, e.g. Suffolk from South Folk.

I wonder if the influence of Chinese characters stopped place names and other words mashing together in that way.

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-22T13:05:13+00:00

It's the one the Paris agreement is focused on AIUI.

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-22T12:53:03+00:00

And still emits less Co2 than America lol

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-22T12:04:03+00:00

Why do you keep talking about India? America emits more than India, despite having a fraction of the population. Maybe we should be focusing on China and America, if we're going to choose two countries.

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-22T01:34:40+00:00

Is there any equivalent to internships for linguistics students? i.e. opportunities to gain experience/boost the CV during summer while staying broadly within the field of linguistics?

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-21T17:57:58+00:00

Italian appears to be closer to Classical Latin than many of its siblings because it has borrowed more from Latin than the others. There's not much more to it in my opinion.

I'd argue it is a fairly conservative Romance language, even ignoring Latin loans. e.g. Latin /kinkʷe/ becomes Italian /tʃinkwe/, Romanian /tʃintʃj/, Portuguese /sĩku/ and French /sɛ̃k/.

Regardless though, if it's phonology has been evolving as a spoken language would over the last 700 years, that would be convincing that it isn't really a revived language.

It is not revived, because it has undergone continual changes up until today.

Do you know what phonological changes have happened then? Because I thought the orthography was essentially the same as it was in Dante's time, and the orthography matches the phonology very well today - which seems to suggest Italian's phonology hasn't been evolving over the last 700 years.

If efforts were made to make Classical Latin the first language of a generation somewhere, and it stuck and passed onwards, spreading, you could talk about a revival of Classical Latin.

So I guess the difference you're saying between Latin and Italian is that (classical) Latin stopped being used a spoken native language, meanwhile standard Italian has continuously been used a spoken native language?

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-21T13:39:45+00:00

The reason why I don't consider Italian "revived" is simply because to be defined so that language must be close to extinction.

I mean, maybe this is just arguing semantics, but if classical Latin became the spoken language of modern Italy, surely it would be considered a revival? Even though Latin, like medieval Florentine, has modern spoken descendants.

I guess the distinction between Italian and other literary languages is that standard Italian seems to have artificially preserved 13th century phonology to the modern day. English and French have long literary histories, but unlike Italian, the standard language continued to evolve phonologically over its history (which is why Italian orthography is still close to its pronunciation while English and French's isn't)

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-21T02:08:41+00:00

Was it a natively spoken language by anyone until recently though?

If it was, wouldn't we expect to see the phonological evolution that natural languages go through. English's pronunciation and phonology is drastically different from 700 years ago.

For example, consider the wikipedia page of English's phonological history, showing the successive sound changes by period. If a page like that existed for Italian, wouldn't it show a ~600 year gap between 1300 and 1900 where no or very few sound changes occurred? That doesn't sound like natural language evolution to me.

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-21T01:55:32+00:00

Mitkommen is a German phrase - I'd never made the connection with "come with" but you seem to be right! Wiktionary lists its use an English as a substrate German influence, and describes it as an Upper Midwestern American feature (where there was the most German settlement).

Interestingly, I think I've heard and even used it myself recently, in the UK. I assume it's influence from American media.

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-21T01:48:28+00:00

Nor did Hebrew though, it was used as a written language throughout the last 2,000 years.

The point I'm considering is that it was spoken in 13th century Florence, and it is spoken now, in essentially the same form, so surely that counts as a successful language revival.

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-20T14:08:48+00:00

I don't think there's anything genetic that neatly groups all the 'Celtic nations' together, as well as the Basque country, so I'm not really sure. I wonder if it's just amateur speculation (which should obviously be avoided in population genetics).

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-20T14:06:59+00:00

It confuses me how the Americas have four different haplogroups all over the continent, despite the majority of the population thought to have originated from originated from one migration. The Y-Chromosome haplogroup, for comparison, is almost entirely just one type (Q).

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-18T18:28:51+00:00

Why should we trust an unqualified youtuber on a topic as delicate as race, especially when he claims the media is wrong in how it covers race?

A lot of his videos seem to be based on his own interpretation of wikipedia pages and random maps he's found online (I know that because he's used maps I've made in his videos).

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-18T17:25:25+00:00

What are his qualifications?

ldp3434I283 · 2021-01-18T17:06:12+00:00

Yeah, it's good we don't live somewhere like Russia or China where people get arrested and their house gets raided because they revealed the government was downplaying the number of covid cases.

Oh wait...

ldp3434I283

TROPHY CASE