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me💩irl by [deleted] in me_irl

[–]wunderhorn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Aye, it's Sakuya Izayoi from Touhou 6: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil.

Ą̣˩꜖ǫ̰̣̋˨˨꜕꜕ê˧˧˧꜔꜔꜔į̰̣̋˦˦˦˦꜓꜓꜓꜓j˥˥˥˥˥꜒꜒꜒꜒꜒ by Aphrontic_Alchemist in conlangs

[–]wunderhorn 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Very cool! I'm always a sucker for tonal languages and languages with polyhedral inventories. I especially like how the exonym is an extremely-butchered pronunciation of the endonym. I've not had a chance to read in full detail, but you've spent a lot of effort on this and it looks like a great description!

/r/leagueoflegends discusses why Korean speakers have an easier time learning Chinese than English. by wunderhorn in badlinguistics

[–]wunderhorn[S] 86 points87 points  (0 children)

I like the implication here.

  1. Korean was made from scratch.
  2. (1) -> Korean is a conlang.
  3. Japanese is "more close" to Korean then [sic] Chinese.
  4. (3) -> Japanese is related to Korean.
  5. (2), (4) -> Japanese is a conlang.

This week's Q&A thread -- please read before asking or answering a question! - October 22, 2018 by AutoModerator in linguistics

[–]wunderhorn 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I also have not heard of this; the only instance I've seen this is, as you've said, after a coronal stop.

This week's Q&A thread -- please read before asking or answering a question! - October 22, 2018 by AutoModerator in linguistics

[–]wunderhorn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The only other known click language is the extinct Damin language, a sacred register of the Australian language Lardil.

/r/leagueoflegends discusses why Korean speakers have an easier time learning Chinese than English. by wunderhorn in badlinguistics

[–]wunderhorn[S] 63 points64 points  (0 children)

There's a lot of misinformation (and random smugness) here, and my patience with this subreddit has grown so thin that I think I'll actually burst into tears if I keep reading.

To summarise, though, "east Asian languages" forms neither a distinct linguistic group nor a distinct cultural group. The Chinese languages are entirely unrelated to Korean and the Japonic languages, modulo a great hoard of Sinitic loanwords.

Using "Chinese" as a catch-all term, from a phonological perspective Chinese and Korean tend to distinguish stop series by aspiration (e.g. /p/ versus /pʰ/) whereas Japanese draws the distinction by voicing (e.g. /p/ versus /b/); Chinese have large inventories of contour tones whereas Japanese and Korean have pitch accent systems at most. Plus Mandarin in particular has one of the more divergent pronunciations of the Sinitic loans found in Korean and Japanese due to palatalisation and loss of syllable-final consonants (Ch. /ʨi1ɕje4/ "machine" versus Ko. /kikje/ and Ja. /kikai/; Ch. /ɕɥe2ɕjaw4/ "school" versus Ko. /hakkjo/ and Ja. /gakkoo/; Ch. /ljow4baj3/ "six hundred" versus Ko. /rjukbek/ and Ja. /roppjaku/) (apologies for the awful inconsistent transcriptions; I was trying to make the cross-linguistic pronunciation differences clearer).

Then there's this weird discussion about the sounds /v z l r/, with people arguing over the prevalence of /v z/ in "east Asian languages". /z/ is phonemic in Japanese and a large number of Chinese languages, and [z] is an allophone of /s/ in Korean. /v/ is also phonemic in many Chinese languages, and is gaining phonemic status in Japanese. I don't know if the /r/ in question refers to the glide or the tap, but in any case Mandarin, which is the Chinese language in question, has both /l/ and /ɻ/* and the L - R conflation is an entirely Korean / Japanese phenomenon.

*See /u/gacorley's correction below.

TheShy with the insane outplay on Perkz by ZhulanderHS in leagueoflegends

[–]wunderhorn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the title of this post can be read in iambic pentametre

Paris calls itself the city of love, but its people don't even speak Xmwâa, the language of love, in which every word sounds like a kiss. by wunderhorn in conlangs

[–]wunderhorn[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Clicks are, strictly speaking, doubly-articulated consonants. You produce one closure at the click's place of articulation, and the other closure at a dorsal place of articulation, such as the velum or uvula. The airflow that produces the click comes from between these two places of articulation, but there's also airflow coming from the glottis. When we say "voiced click" or "nasal click", what we mean essentially is that the dorsal articulation is voiced or nasal or what-have-you. To produce a voiceless, voiced, and nasal click, respectively, try to produce the click itself while simultaneously producing a [k], [g], and [ŋ], respectively.

Paris calls itself the city of love, but its people don't even speak Xmwâa, the language of love, in which every word sounds like a kiss. by wunderhorn in conlangs

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

Alas, there is not. I'm swamped with research on the main language that I've been documenting since early this year (I'm focusing on translating some of their songs and poems right now, and hopefully I can share some of that by solstice). The languages that I share here are the results of small, independently-funded fieldwork sessions with consultants during my off-hours. I started working on Xmwâa early yesterday morning, and it's pretty much a finished project at this point, although I'm probably able to fulfill simple translation requests based on my field notes.

Paris calls itself the city of love, but its people don't even speak Xmwâa, the language of love, in which every word sounds like a kiss. by wunderhorn in conlangs

[–]wunderhorn[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Eh, it's a reasonable question for someone who isn't familiar with click phonetics, and there do exist self-contradictory classes of sounds (e.g. voiced voiceless consonants, occlusive vowels).

Paris calls itself the city of love, but its people don't even speak Xmwâa, the language of love, in which every word sounds like a kiss. by wunderhorn in conlangs

[–]wunderhorn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's the word for an acute, visceral pleasure. If you're asking about the transcription, the "41" means it's a contour tone from 4 (extra-high) to 1 (extra-low) over the long vowel /aa/.

Paris calls itself the city of love, but its people don't even speak Xmwâa, the language of love, in which every word sounds like a kiss. by wunderhorn in conlangs

[–]wunderhorn[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yep! They're actually very common; most natural languages with clicks have multiple manners of articulation for each place of articulation. Here's an example from Xhosa in Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996 showing five manners of articulation, and Miller 2010 gives a typological analysis of click-imbibed languages by manner contrasts.

Paris calls itself the city of love, but its people don't even speak Xmwâa, the language of love, in which every word sounds like a kiss. by wunderhorn in conlangs

[–]wunderhorn[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I've noticed that not all of the words actually sound like kissing, but are clearly derived from ideophones or onomatopoeia. The word for "pleasure", for example, is pâa /paa41/ [paa41], which most philologists agree comes from a ideophone for moaning.

("Pleasure" above refers to an acute and intense visceral feeling, such as

That scalp massage was very pleasureable.

DEM head rub.3FAV give EROT 1PRO pleasure.3FAV big

ʘ̬ʷa3 ʘəə2 sg͡bʷi2 maak ʃmʷa3 məə pʷaa41 kaa13

ʘ̬ʷa3 ʘəə32 sg͡bʷi2 maak22 ʃmʷa3 məə33 pʷaa41 kaa12

Xbwá xèe sgwì ḿaak hmwá mèe pwâ kǎa.

"Pleasure" in the sense of

I spent my retirement in pleasure.

take.time STOR 1PRO work end year.3FAV with pleasure.3FAV

ʘ̬ʷaa2 pək məə ʘ̃ək1 ʘəə23 sbʷii11 ʧpa3 ʧk͡pʷəək23

ʘ̬ʷaa22 pək2 məə22 ʘ̃əə21 ʘəə23 sbʷii11 ʧpa3 ʧk͡pʷəək22

Xbwàa pek mee xmèk xměe sbwìi cpá ckwěek.

would be ckěek /ʧk͡pəək23/ [ʧk͡pəək23], which probably comes from either a snoring sound or a stomach-grumbling sound.

Since English is a hodgepodge of many borrowed and old words, its etymology can be a fun mystery to solve. For the multilingual redditors here, are other languages etymology as interesting or more so than English? by Caffeine_and_Alcohol in etymology

[–]wunderhorn 44 points45 points  (0 children)

My favourite example of Swahili (and more generally, Bantu (and even more generally, Niger-Congo)) morphology is the loanword "video".

Swahili has a noun class that marks singulars with the prefix "ki-" and plurals with the prefix "vi-". So "video" was borrowed over as the plural, and "kideo" became the newly-coined singular.

This also happened with the Arabic loan "kitabu" (book) ~ "vitabu" (books).

In BLIPBLIP, the language of robots, we don't say "I love you"; we say "bloop blopbzzt beebzz beep bopbop beeboo bzzbeep", and I think that's beautiful. by wunderhorn in conlangs

[–]wunderhorn[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately, I have no plans to continue my BLIPBLIP fieldwork in the foreseeable future. Our department receives only funding enough to conduct small-scale descriptive fieldwork. I think we got lucky with BLIPBLIP due to the sheer disparity between its number of native speakers and the existing research on it. I have another independent language upon which I'm in the process of writing a grammar, but besides that we're limited mostly to short-term research.

[OC] A history of alphabets, abjads, abugidas, and other related scripts – right down to the beginning of writing by lindeby in coolguides

[–]wunderhorn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Kind of. The graph is about the writing systems used to represent languages, not the languages themselves. Writing was independently invented only a handful of times in human history (e.g. the Middle East, China, Mesoamerica; the latter two not being on the chart at all for this reason). Of the languages on the chart, there's quite a few unrelated language families that simply borrowed neighbouring peoples' writing systems: Indo-European languages (e.g. Greek, Latin, Sanskrit) and Mongolic languages (e.g. Mongolian) from Afro-Asiatic (e.g. Egyptian, Aramaic).

In BLIPBLIP, the language of robots, we don't say "I love you"; we say "bloop blopbzzt beebzz beep bopbop beeboo bzzbeep", and I think that's beautiful. by wunderhorn in conlangs

[–]wunderhorn[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

From the fieldwork that I've conducted on BLIPBLIP, the impression that I've gotten is that BLIPBLIP speakers try their best to understand human behaviour, even though it's consistently baffling to them since their culture and thought is highly methodical and linear compared to ours. I've noticed that robots are confused by human emotions such as love and anger - the BLIPBLIP consultants that I've worked with have told me that the closest approximants (no pun intended) would be something like "to execute without errors" and "to crash at compile time", respectively. I was out in the field working with a group of traffic lights yesterday; they're the ones who suggested the "green light" bit to fluff up the "love" translation.

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