Odd natlang features thread

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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Imralu wrote:
Torco wrote: the entirety of America [the continent, mind you]
Unwanted English tip: In English, America on its own means the USA. North America and South America are considered separate continents. To refer to them together, we say the Americas.
I hear Brazilians use Americano to refer to people from the US all the time.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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The tone distribution in the Vinh dialect of Vietnamese is pretty weird- /a˧ a˨ a˩ a˧˩ a̰˩˧ a˧˥/ They're kinda all smooshed together.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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I read this on Wikipedia about Khmer and found it very interesting. The aspirated stops /p_h t_h c_h k_h/ can be analyzed as consonant clusters /ph th ch kh/ as well because Khmer has infixes that can occur "between" the stop and aspiration: phem, p-an-hem.
Ulrike Meinhof wrote:The merger is between /8/ and /9/, merging into /8/. Seeing as they're just one number apart, that's not too strange.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

ayyub wrote:I read this on Wikipedia about Khmer and found it very interesting. The aspirated stops /p_h t_h c_h k_h/ can be analyzed as consonant clusters /ph th ch kh/ as well because Khmer has infixes that can occur "between" the stop and aspiration: phem, p-an-hem.
Tsou does the same.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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The Icelandic language is a truly baffling concept to me: in the eleven centuries of the seperation of Icelandic from the rest of Scandinavia (even despite the contact by ship), and even with such a large area and extremely large impassable areas, Icelandic has failed to produce a considerable dialectical difference.
The main distinctions which have been found by me are the duality of /kʰv/ and /xʷ/ in <hv> clusters and by extension a contrast of <kv> and <hv>, found generally at the same points as English <wh>, and how aspiration surfaces in post-semi-vocalic positions (in some dialects, voicing is still present but surfaces in the semi-vowel, so that <nt> and <nd> differ in the voice of the /n/ phoneme, while in others, stops carry no voice and only have aspiration, so <nt> and <nd> differ in the aspiration of the stop), but this is so subtle that it is neligible.
The second phenomenon, AFAIK, is called harðmæli, and it is a distinguishing feature of north-eastern Icelandic, and at the core of that is Akureyri. This phenomenon even has areas where more than 90% of the people there exhibit it, which is unique in Icelandic dialectology and is the single strongest feature, and is with a pretty prominent isogloss.
The first phenomenon is called hv-framburður, and it is a prominent feature of southern and eastern Icelandic, and it stretches from the eastern end of the second phenomenon, to Reykjavík.
The intersection of those two features is a very narrow area, and it has a maximal contrast of intervocalic aspiration, and a <kv> : <hv> distinction.
There exist a whole lot more of such features, but they are minor compared to those two (there is a total of thirteen identifiable dialectisms which are prominent across a large area, including those two above mentioned); no matter, no Icelandic dialect speaker has any trouble understanding any other Icelandic dialect speaker!
This dialectical coherency stands out, considering the size of Iceland and the isolation of speakers relative to each other; even though ports are the origin of such features, the spread is pretty normal, like Iceland has two million people! Also, the densely-inhabited area of Höfuðborg, Greater Reykjavík, exhibits little of the dialect features, little deviation from western dialects (which are almost void of dialect features) and for some strange reason, almost doesn't participate in hv-framburður.

This might be normal, on the other hand I might have a problem of exaggeration here '-_-
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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Wattmann wrote:The Icelandic language is a truly baffling concept to me: in the eleven centuries of the seperation of Icelandic from the rest of Scandinavia (even despite the contact by ship), and even with such a large area and extremely large impassable areas, Icelandic has failed to produce a considerable dialectical difference.
Keep in mind that Iceland has a very small population, around 320,000 or so from what I understand. That does not lend itself to much dialectal variation, at least for a modern society with electronic media and the ability to travel around the island with little difficulty. You probably would not much dialectal variation in an English county or German district of three hundred thousand either.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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Jabechasqvi wrote:Keep in mind that Iceland has a very small population, around 320,000 or so from what I understand. That does not lend itself to much dialectal variation.
So does Malta (the country, not the island), and there's plenty of variation. So do the L/Dakota, and they also have more variation than you (specific you, not generic you) would expect.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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Jabechasqvi wrote:Keep in mind that Iceland has a very small population, around 320,000 or so from what I understand. That does not lend itself to much dialectal variation, at least for a modern society with electronic media and the ability to travel around the island with little difficulty. You probably would not much dialectal variation in an English county or German district of three hundred thousand either.
Reykjavík didn't even start serious urbanization up to the 1950s, Akureyri is currently developing its higher education system which it lacked before mid-1990s (and it's the biggest city in northern Iceland, fourth biggest on the island itself), and the only way to get from Reykjavík to Akureyri efficiently is to fly to it
While Iceland may be modern in the last fourty or fifty years, also barely at that, its dialectisms stem back to the late middle ages when voicing distinction was lost in plosives. Sound changes have been nearly universal throughout such a large area with a low populace density - the inchoative, pre-modern sound changes have somehow universally spread throughout the whole of Iceland!
The vowels shifted near-universally, the consonants shifted near-universally, on both the northern and eastern shores. You have to keep in mind that it is rather hard to find a county of England, having 100 000 kilometers squared, with impassable glaciers, ancient lava flows, geysers, volcanoes and barely any food. There were only your feet, or, uncommonly, horses, to transport you across the shores of Iceland, and that's during the period of 874-1900, which is more than one thousand years.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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Jabechasqvi wrote:
Wattmann wrote:The Icelandic language is a truly baffling concept to me: in the eleven centuries of the seperation of Icelandic from the rest of Scandinavia (even despite the contact by ship), and even with such a large area and extremely large impassable areas, Icelandic has failed to produce a considerable dialectical difference.
Keep in mind that Iceland has a very small population, around 320,000 or so from what I understand. That does not lend itself to much dialectal variation, at least for a modern society with electronic media and the ability to travel around the island with little difficulty. You probably would not much dialectal variation in an English county or German district of three hundred thousand either.
Fucking Manx exhibits dialectal variation, and Man is only like 200 square miles in area.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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what, you mean eddy doesn't know a basic fact about languages? HOLD THE PHONE EVERYONE.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

Kabardian geminates consonants in V_V position, and can be analyzed so that all non-word-final syllables are closed.

Also, since people ask about homonyms every once in a while:
Most of Kabardian morphemes consist of only one segment and a vowel (i.e., the structure is CV); this results in large number of homonyms; e.g. šə can mean "brother", "horse", "to milk" and "to take out", c'a means "name" and "louse", dza means "tooth" and "army", xə is "sea" as well as "six", etc. Bisyllabic and polysyllabic roots are mostly borrowings, e. g. nāwəka "science" (from Russian), hawā "air" (from Persian), āləh "god" (from Arabic), šənāq "glass" (from a Turkic language), etc.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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Dewrad wrote:Fucking Manx exhibits dialectal variation, and Man is only like 200 square miles in area.
Whoa really? Even putting aside the present paucity of speakers, it barely even has room for people to isolate themselves all that much. It could hardly take more than hour to drive from one end of the island to another. But if you say so, I will obviously take your word for it on this issue.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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Jabechasqvi wrote: But if you say so, I will obviously take your word for it on this issue.
He doesn't believe you, Dewrad.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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I don't think you need to be physically isolated from someone to think their vowels are stupid.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Melteor »

^^Strikes at the heart of the issue, prestige and hence fashion are at the root of dialect. The Brits are constantly playing with their dialects, why don't the Americans? They on the other hand try to find ways to make them more their own thing, like breeding rat terriers to have more ridiculous noses. In a sense we conlangers do that too, while trying to keep it within bounds at least lately.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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brandrinn wrote:I don't think you need to be physically isolated from someone to think their vowels are stupid.
I think Eddy's vowels are stupid, but only when combined with his consonants and punctuation. That's not what we're talking about, it it?

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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The lack of dialectal variation in Iceland is fascinating to me too. I think it has to be at least partly a result of the relationship Icelanders have with their own language. This is of course a generalization, but I would say that Icelanders in general are very proud of their language, and very protective of it. As an example, there used to be a low status sociolect pejoratively called flámæli, which IIRC featured among other things some vowel mergers, but the sociolect is now completely gone. Another example is Icelandic's almost total resistance to loanwords. It seems to me that a society with an above average sense of pride in its language is likely to display less internal linguistic variation -- though I'm sure you can find countless counter examples to this as well.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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Magb wrote:The lack of dialectal variation in Iceland is fascinating to me too. I think it has to be at least partly a result of the relationship Icelanders have with their own language. This is of course a generalization, but I would say that Icelanders in general are very proud of their language, and very protective of it. As an example, there used to be a low status sociolect pejoratively called flámæli, which IIRC featured among other things some vowel mergers, but the sociolect is now completely gone. Another example is Icelandic's almost total resistance to loanwords. It seems to me that a society with an above average sense of pride in its language is likely to display less internal linguistic variation -- though I'm sure you can find countless counter examples to this as well.
I find this to be very true - the only loanwords I've found in Icelandic are "djók" and "djóka", that is, "joke" and "to joke" - loanwords are very frowned upon, and are often replaced with native coinages or portmanteus (computer, for example, is "tölva", a portmanteu of "tölu" (genitive of "tala", number) and "völva" [(female) seer]. Icelanders find their independence and uniqueness, and their culture and language very important (85% of Icelanders said "Very important" compared to ~50% average of EU25, according to some study); Icelanders today are, apparently, very superstitious,
My theory, in addition to yours is, that, while sound shifts did happen, mergers almost never did due to an unbroken literary tradition that was a very large part of everyone's life; I've known one Icelander who had told me that he had read the Icelanders sagas with no problem when they were written in a coherent normalised Old Norse orthography (so no <ɛK> for <ek>, but just <ek>, with the o-ogonek replaced with ö, and length indicated by acutes), and while some of the words might be a bit old, no single word is so unknown that he can't understand.
The until recently illiterate Lakhotas and Dakhotas, on the other side, had no such important literary tradition and thus nothing to focus so much on, whilst Icelanders were, AFAIK, very literate relative to the rest of Europe of the time (including NOW).
I actually don't know anything of the true reasons, and can only speculate, but at the very least, SOME of these factors must have influenced them!
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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Wattmann wrote:
I find this to be very true - the only loanwords I've found in Icelandic are "djók" and "djóka", that is, "joke" and "to joke"
I have found many, many more.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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Ngohe wrote:
Wattmann wrote:
I find this to be very true - the only loanwords I've found in Icelandic are "djók" and "djóka", that is, "joke" and "to joke"
I have found many, many more.
I'm Dutch and I'm currently learning Icelandic; my knowledge of icelandic words is below 250, for sure :)
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Magb »

Oh, Icelandic has no doubt thousands of loanwords from various sources, but the number is minuscule compared to for instance the Scandinavian languages. I think I've read a figure saying loanwords make up something like 5% of the vocabulary of the language.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by jmcd »

There are a few other dialectal differences in Icelandic mentioned in The Nordic Languages (de Gruyter 1743-44): 

1. Monophthongal v diphthongal prounciation of the vowels a, e, u, ö before -gi, ng, and nk
2. there are 3 different ways to pronounce -rl- and -rn- ([tl], [tn] being quite rare and [rl] and [rn] being mostly in the East and [rtl] [rtn] being most common.)

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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jmcd wrote:There are a few other dialectal differences in Icelandic mentioned in The Nordic Languages (de Gruyter 1743-44): 

1. Monophthongal v diphthongal prounciation of the vowels a, e, u, ö before -gi, ng, and nk
2. there are 3 different ways to pronounce -rl- and -rn- ([tl], [tn] being quite rare and [rl] and [rn] being mostly in the East and [rtl] [rtn] being most common.)
I am already aware, but IMO these are not major enough to warrant such a mention.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by merijn »

Now that we are discussing loans in Icelandic, I have a question about Icelandic that has been bugging me, but that doesn't warrant its own thread. Other western European languages have loaned some derivational suffixes that is used to form new learned words. For instance, Latin -tio became -tion in English, -tie in Dutch and -cion in Spanish, Latin -tas became -ty in English, -teit in Dutch and -dad in Spanish, Greek -ismos became -ism in English, -isme in Dutch and -ismo in Spanish, and Greek -izo became -ize in English, -iseren in Dutch and -izar in Spanish. Has Icelandic loaned any derivational suffix from Latin or Greek to form new words?

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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merijn wrote:Now that we are discussing loans in Icelandic, I have a question about Icelandic that has been bugging me, but that doesn't warrant its own thread. Other western European languages have loaned some derivational suffixes that is used to form new learned words. For instance, Latin -tio became -tion in English, -tie in Dutch and -cion in Spanish, Latin -tas became -ty in English, -teit in Dutch and -dad in Spanish, Greek -ismos became -ism in English, -isme in Dutch and -ismo in Spanish, and Greek -izo became -ize in English, -iseren in Dutch and -izar in Spanish. Has Icelandic loaned any derivational suffix from Latin or Greek to form new words?
I haven't used any yet, but there likely are.
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