Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by linguofreak »

Here's a bit of quackery I thought up on my own (of course, it's debatable if it can be called "quackery" if it's not proposed seriously in the first place):

The word for every animal can be traced back to an onomatopoeia representing its call.

Thus, some group of sound changes must exist that changes /bəkɒ::::/ to /tʃɪkɪn/, and a set that changes /ɒl læŋgwɪdʒɪz ɒr disɛndɪd frəm bæsk/ to /dək/ by way of /kwæk/. There also exists a set of changes that turns // into /fɪʃ/.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by finlay »

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Bob Johnson »

linguofreak wrote:There also exists a set of changes that turns // into /fɪʃ/.
/fɪʃ/ is descended not from its call but from the noise it makes passing through the water

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by WeepingElf »

Bob Johnson wrote:
linguofreak wrote:There also exists a set of changes that turns // into /fɪʃ/.
/fɪʃ/ is descended not from its call but from the noise it makes passing through the water
Isn't /fɪʃ/ from Proto-Miscellaneous-Other *ghoti?
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Izambri »

Fish, fisc, fiskr, visc, vis, fisch, fisks, piscis, ψάρι, peis, peix, peixe, poisson, pesce, pez, paîsson, *peisk- "fish"... all come from the onomatopoeia of the noise a fish makes when dives into the water.

On the other hand, the very original word, related to Modern Basque arrain "fish", can be seen in ιχθύς, isda, eungkôt, iwak, balıqlar... (velar stem) and ryby, riba, ribe... (liquid stem).
Un llapis mai dibuixa sense una mà.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Vuvuzela »

Most words in English can be traced back to Sanskrit through either Latin or Icelandic.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Wattmann »

Vuvuzela wrote:...through either Latin or Icelandic.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Bob Johnson »

Wattmann wrote:
Vuvuzela wrote:...through either Latin or Icelandic.
reactionface.png
English is a Germanic language, after all; where do you think those elements came from?

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Yaali Annar »

Hangul wins alphabet olympics:

http://www.koreabang.com/2012/stories/k ... mpics.html
The 26 letters of English orthography is capable of expressing 300 kinds of sounds and more; and hangul can theoretically express more than 11,000 sounds and, practically, 8,700 sounds. In particular, Hangul excels at time-efficient communication.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Qwynegold »

I saw this documentary about Pirahã. Huh, that's a nasty feud the lingvists have going there. Anyway, I read more about on the TV-channels website, and it was written by a n00b. -_-
SVT wrote:[...]One example of that is that in Pirahã one word can mean five different things depending on how it is pronunced.
No shit! Differently pronunced words mean different things?!! D:
SVT wrote:The word xaooi can mean either ear, skin, stranger, hand or nutshell. Only the stress decides the meaning. But even though this phenomenon is relatively rare among the world's languages[...]
Actually it's tone. And it isn't rare at all.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Vuvuzela »

Google Translate wrote:In all other languages, the verb reveals if you're talking about the present, past or future - I read, I read, I'll read.
No. No it doesn't.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by ---- »

It's especially egregious because they used an example that's ambiguous between simple past and present. They're doing their best to look silly, I think.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by clawgrip »

Google translate wrote that? Where?

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by brandrinn »

Vuvu wrote that sentence in Greek and hit "translate."
[quote="Nortaneous"]Is South Africa better off now than it was a few decades ago?[/quote]

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by clawgrip »

Oh I see, it's the SVT link. I missed that.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Qwynegold »

Vuvuzela wrote:
Google Translate wrote:In all other languages, the verb reveals if you're talking about the present, past or future - I read, I read, I'll read.
No. No it doesn't.
lolololol so ironic! :D
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Pole, the »

Well, in English it does, it's just obscured by the orthography.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by marconatrix »

This subject interests me, but especially when you get myths propagated by academic and similar 'official' sources who you'd expect to know better. All part of the wider fascination with how people will believe what it suits them to believe even in the face of clear facts; the basis of all the best cons and hoaxes. I haven't gone through the whole of this extensive thread so please forgive me if you've heard this one before ...

I recently developed an interest in Latvian a language I knew next to nothing about but which for some reason I think is really cool ;-) Anyway, looking for materials on the internet I found a US Peace Corps language manual from 1992, the 'cultural notes' alone make this a fun read. It's here :

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j& ... Og&cad=rja

So here's the opening paragraph of the introduction :
The Latvian language is the second oldest language in the Indo-European language family tree which consists of most of the European languages. Latvian and Lithuanian (the oldest) have their own branch on the tree: the Baltic branch. Their grammars can be helpful in studying Sanskrit, a language that used to be on the tree, but is no longer spoken.
To be fair the same (apart from the reference to Sanskrit) is often said about Welsh, on what basis I can't imagine. What after all do folk mean by 'oldest'? Clearly not oldest literary tradition, in the Baltic that only goes back to the Reformation afaik. Not the inflexions since these are more complex in the Slavic languages and probably even in modern literary Greek and German. And while the Baltic vocabulary includes some familiar friends like vīrs and tauta etc. which have cognates in Celtic (e.g. Gaelic fear, tuath, Welsh gŵr, tud) and which are always featured in comparative linguistics books, the vast majority of Baltic words are totally weird, e.g. zirgs 'horse' or māja 'house' and many more 'core' words. It makes you realise just how little languages really own to lineal descent and distant origins.
Kyn nag ov den skentel pur ...

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by WeepingElf »

marconatrix wrote:
The Latvian language is the second oldest language in the Indo-European language family tree which consists of most of the European languages. Latvian and Lithuanian (the oldest) have their own branch on the tree: the Baltic branch. Their grammars can be helpful in studying Sanskrit, a language that used to be on the tree, but is no longer spoken.
To be fair the same (apart from the reference to Sanskrit) is often said about Welsh, on what basis I can't imagine. What after all do folk mean by 'oldest'? Clearly not oldest literary tradition, in the Baltic that only goes back to the Reformation afaik. Not the inflexions since these are more complex in the Slavic languages and probably even in modern literary Greek and German. And while the Baltic vocabulary includes some familiar friends like vīrs and tauta etc. which have cognates in Celtic (e.g. Gaelic fear, tuath, Welsh gŵr, tud) and which are always featured in comparative linguistics books, the vast majority of Baltic words are totally weird, e.g. zirgs 'horse' or māja 'house' and many more 'core' words. It makes you realise just how little languages really own to lineal descent and distant origins.
The Baltic languages are often referred to as "old" because of their conservatism. Lithuanian is about as close to PIE as is Latin, despite being spoken about 2,000 years later. This makes it the most conservative modern IE language (note: modern - Ancient Greek, Vedic and Avestan are still more conservative than Lithuanian). Latvian is a bit less conservative than Lithuanian, finishing second in the conservatism "contest". What regards the Insular Celtic languages, they are anything else than conservative, but they were spoken in the British Isles before English came there (and even before Latin came there), and are thus "very old" (as "is" Basque). Of course, the Insular Celtic languages have changed a lot in the perhaps about 2,500 years that elapsed since Celtic was first brought to the British Isles.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by linguoboy »

Latvian is what happens when Livs try to speak Lithuanian. It never seemed particularly "conservative" to me even in comparison to Russian.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Qwynegold »

marconatrix wrote:māja 'house'
:o In Finnish maja means like hut or treehouse.
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by hwhatting »

Qwynegold wrote:
marconatrix wrote:māja 'house'
:o In Finnish maja means like hut or treehouse.
Probably no accident. Speakers of Baltic and Finno-Ugrian languages have been neighbours for millennia.

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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by marconatrix »

Latvian to me feels only a little more IE-like than Scots Gaelic (Irish in the mouths of Vikings?) Lithuanian I've only scanned the grammar, but it 'feels' about on a par with say Middle Irish. That is some of the IE morphology is retained, but other parts are heavily remodelled, simplified etc. I admit that Baltic still has actual case endings, verb inflections etc. where in Irish they're reflected mainly as vowel alternation, consonant quality and mutations, but the information content is still there (and you have to learn to do all of this stuff).

Go here for a run down of Baltic grammar (go down a bit to "Grammar Points"):

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ ... -TC-X.html

Not much like Sanskrit thank goodness ;-)
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Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

Post by Qwynegold »

hwhatting wrote:
Qwynegold wrote:
marconatrix wrote:māja 'house'
:o In Finnish maja means like hut or treehouse.
Probably no accident. Speakers of Baltic and Finno-Ugrian languages have been neighbours for millennia.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. *checks things* Ah, it means house in Estonian too.
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