Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

[Travis B.]

[xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ] is essentially the real-world analogue of Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

[Zumir]

BTW, how the hell do you say it? Did Lovecraft himself ever give the pronunciation? If not, inventing creative phonologies for it could be fun. But anyway, we've gotten a bit off topic. We're supposed to be laughing at others hilarious ignorance, and it was damn fun.

[Travis B.]

BTW, how the hell do you say it? Did Lovecraft himself ever give the pronunciation? If not, inventing creative phonologies it could be fun.

Obviously it is unspeakable, and can only be vaguely approximated, by human mouths.

[TomHChappell]

.

[Risla]

I am suddenly overtaken by the urge to create a Cthulhulang.

[MisterBernie]

Dooo eeeeet. And then, may you be eaten first !

[Nortaneous]

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
/ɸʼŋlʊj ŋ͡ɡluʔnafχ kθʊɬʊ ʁʔʎeχ uɰaχʔnɑɡ̟͡ʟ̟̝ fχtaɰn/
[ʔʷŋʷlʷʊi̯ ŋ͡ɡlun̰afχ kθʊɬʊ‿ʁ ʎ̰eχ uwaχn̰aɡ̟͡ʟ̟̝ fχtaɰn]

[Zumir]

You win.

[roninbodhisattva]

Or, we could just be really boring:

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
[pʰəŋəlyj məglunapfʰ kθyɫy rəljɛ uganagəɫ pfʰətagən]

[finlay]

My mental pronunciation is something like [kθʉlʉ r̩:ʔʎɛh ɸtaɲ] (or [lj] instead of [ʎ] and [jn] instead of [ɲ]). not sure about the other words.

Certainly whenever I've heard "Cthulhu" pronounced aloud it's been [kəθʉ:lʉ] or similar. Sometimes I might substitute a [ʎ] in there as well; never really felt the need to substitute [ɬ] though.

[Nortaneous]

The 'official' pronunciation is something like [ˈχɬʊl.ɬuː], but you can't get there from "Cthulhu". Maybe there's a dialect that merges /θ/ into /ɬ/ and does some weird things with lenition? Also, there's probably a tense/lax distinction of some sort, and lax vowels can't occur in open/final/whatever syllables, so:

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
[ʔʷŋʷlʷʊi̯ ŋ͡ɡlun̰əpf kθʊɬːuː‿ʁ ʎ̰ɛχ uwəχn̰əɡ̟͡ʟ̟̝ pftəɰn]

Also, the affricate for <fh> works better, because there's a planet called Vhoorl, and <w> is from <uu>. Doubling a vowel indicates that it's long/tense/whatever. (edit: and I think <y> can also be a vowel... long i, probably)

[Zumir]

The ultimate horror is to gaze upon the dark abyss of Lovecraft's orthography...

[Zumir]

I've always liked the idea of fanlanging. While we're on the topic, has anyone thought of creating one of the languages from the Ender books?

[Nortaneous]

The ultimate horror is to gaze upon the dark abyss of Lovecraft's orthography...

There are ways to get damn near any orthography to make sense.

Come to think of it, it's not that hard to analyze the apostrophes away. In that text, they always appear before coronals, so:
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
/ɸɲ̩ɟ͡ʎ̝ʊi̯ ŋ̩ɡluːɲəp͡f χθʊɬːuː‿r ʎiːɛh uːɡəhɲəɟ͡ʎ̝ p͡ftəɡn̩/

And then anywhere else, it can just be /j/.

Also, <c> for /χ/, since <k> appears elsewhere.

[linguoboy]

The 'official' pronunciation is something like [ˈχɬʊl.ɬuː], but you can't get there from "Cthulhu".

I got into a tedious discussion with someone one over the best way to transcribe Cthulhu into Greek. Based on the "official" pronunciation, I suggested Χθλόυθλου, but she got quite dogmatic about λ as the One True Transcription for the lh. Of course, the silly fool didn't have half an inkling what a lateral fricative was in the first place.

[Travis B.]

The 'official' pronunciation is something like [ˈχɬʊl.ɬuː], but you can't get there from "Cthulhu".

I got into a tedious discussion with someone one over the best way to transcribe Cthulhu into Greek. Based on the "official" pronunciation, I suggested Χθλόυθλου, but she got quite dogmatic about λ as the One True Transcription for the lh. Of course, the silly fool didn't have half an inkling what a lateral fricative was in the first place.

That transliteration doesn't seem all that bad there, considering the "official" pronunciation of Cthulhu...

[patiku]

I am suddenly overtaken by the urge to create a Cthulhulang.

You should check out this site and get R'lyehian as a Toy Language, which I've read about but been too cheap to actually buy.

[linguofreak]

The 'official' pronunciation is something like [ˈχɬʊl.ɬuː], but you can't get there from "Cthulhu". Maybe there's a dialect that merges /θ/ into /ɬ/ and does some weird things with lenition?

[ɬ] sounds like /θ/ to me, and I have a conlang with /ɬ/ > /θ/. (In fact it devoices /l/ after voiceless obstruents, so I do actually end up with /kθ/ clusters that come from earlier /kl/ via /kɬ/, though I wasn't going for a Lovecraftian feel to the lang).

In this case, we could say that velarized /ɬ/ becomes /θ/ (at least in the mind of a non-native speaker coming up with a Roman orthography for whatever language Cthulhu's name comes from), while unvelarized /ɬ/ remains unchanged.

Also, there's probably a tense/lax distinction of some sort, and lax vowels can't occur in open/final/whatever syllables, so:

Plausible.

[Zumir]

Check this out : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Language_Theory
Oy .

[linguoboy]

Check this out : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Language_Theory
Oy .

There's a good treatment of this in Lewis' The Turkish language reform : a catastrophic success--including the intriguing suggestion that Atatürk espoused it not out of true conviction but in a cynical attempt to do an end run around language reformers run amok.

Had some guys over for cocktails on Saturday. One of them asked me the source of the "lisp" in Spanish: "When I took classes at [Instituto] Cervantes, my instructor told me--"

"You don't even have to finish that sentence; I already know it's going to be bullshit."

"He said that the false explanation is that there was a king who lisped and everyone imitated them. The real reason is Arab influence."

Is that progress of a sort? No lo sé.

[Bedelato]

A guy at might work thinks there are "300 German dialects".

Srs.

It depends on what level of detail you go to. There's as many German idiolects as there are German speakers, and a dialect is basically a group of idiolects which have certain features in common. Depending on which features you group them by, there may well be 300 German dialects. Or there might be just 5. Or 127. It depends on how willing you are to lump things together.

[linguoboy]

A guy at might work thinks there are "300 German dialects".

It depends on what level of detail you go to. There's as many German idiolects as there are German speakers, and a dialect is basically a group of idiolects which have certain features in common. Depending on which features you group them by, there may well be 300 German dialects. Or there might be just 5. Or 127. It depends on how willing you are to lump things together.

I've actually heard the 300 figure before, which makes me curious what the actual basis for it is. I wonder if at some point someone did a count of published dialect descriptions, came up with a number close to that, and rounded off.

[Drydic]

Is there a generally-agreed upon cutoff line/point between Low German and Dutch?

[MisterBernie]

Well, Wikipedia gives this map of Low Saxon dialects. Apparently the rest of the Netherlands speaks Low Franconian.

As for the number of dialects, yeah, it really depends on where you wanna draw the line between different dialects. This map has the larger dialect groups as 53 (although they include all of continental West Germanic there), but you could easily subdivide each of those a few times.

ETfix links

[Drydic]

You don't need quotes in bbcode urls, unlike quotes and html links.

& ty.