zompist bboard

Just to bring this slightly back on topic, is there a phonetic difference between <tl> in, say, "útland" (foreign country) and <ll> in, say, "bolli" (cup)?

linguoboy wrote: You can speculate all you like about communities of which you have no real knowledge, but the end result is nonsense like this:

sirdanilot wrote:People do not use Manx in day-to-day conversations. If there are people that do so, then it's only a small subset[.]

Well, which is it? Do people (even if it's just a "small subset") use Manx in day-to-day conversations or don't they? You don't know. You're just guessing. Reading your remarks on Manx (or Irish or Cornish or any other Celtic language) tells me nothing at all about the language in question and more than I wanted to know about your own personal biases.

So people who study PIE can also say nothing about PIE because they weren't in the area where PIE was spoken (as a monolithic single language of course !) at the time it was spoken.

So basically we can say nothing unless we are actually right there at the right time, or have experienced it first-hand for a considerable amount of time. This all despite the existence of the internet and gazillions of books about places and times and concepts that we might actually never engage with first-hand in real-life.

Okay

jal wrote:

sirdanilot wrote:The potential language community of Manx is too small compared to, say, Welsh, where revitalization (of a once dying language) has actually worked because there were still enough people to produce materials for learning Welsh as well as teaching materials IN welsh about all kinds of things.

1) The potential language community of Manx is way larger than the language communities of most of Earth's 6000 languages.

Except Manx is in Europe, which means that people are expected to go through years and years of education and spend the majority of their time in those years on education. And if you don't have enough resources to do that education predominantly in Manx, then you already lose out on a lot of domains in which the language could be used.
Now the absence of a language in education is, admittedly, not something that is utterly fatal to the language. For example, in Belgium and to a lesser extent Holland local dialects (some of which are almost separate languages) dialects still survive and are being passed on to children (although dialects have been lost too in many parts of Holland and are continuing to do so). But it does definitely make things much more difficult. Especially for a language that is already extinct and needs to be revived.
If you look at areas in Holland where the local dialects have died (for example, the dialect of Aalsmeer, some town near Amsterdam, has died out) then even suggesting to revive the local dialect would be met with laughter only. Simply because education and such in the dialect is not a concept that people are even willing to think about.

2) Welsh wasn't "revitalized" the way you use it here (i.e. brought back from the dead, cf. your remark about Hebrew), it was just unstigmatized, but still spoken by 100,000s, I presume, at the time of the start of this "revitalization".

Revitalization =/= revival, I must make that more clear. Hebrew was not revitalized, rather a new language was created based on Biblical hebrew and substrate of the languages spoken by the Jews at that time (for a substantial part Yiddish); in a sense you can say they revived Biblical Hebrew but this is not completely the case. Revitalization is basically reversing a process of language death. And this has definitely been done with Welsh.
Welsh was very much an endangered language in the past. The fact that the amount of speakers was still very large doesn't change that; if a language is no longer passed on to a new generation, it is by definiton endangered and bound to die unless a revitalization takes place (an even younger generation being taught the language).

Languages like Quechua and Aymara are definitely endangered, even though they have millions of speakers, simply because in many areas the language is no longer passed on to children. Even if there are still some older monolingual speakers in more isolated areas a language can become endangered if the new generation has a negative attitude towards the language and almost exclusively use another language, only knowing the 'old' language to engage with these very old people.

You just said basically what I said, bro

sirdanilot wrote:So basically we can say nothing unless we are actually right there at the right time, or have experienced it first-hand for a considerable amount of time. This all despite the existence of the internet and gazillions of books about places and times and concepts that we might actually never engage with first-hand in real-life.

So what books have you read about the current sociolinguistic situation on the Isle of Man?

"reading books makes you an expert"

R.Rusanov wrote:"reading books makes you an expert"

So you don't need any direct experience to be an expect and you don't need to read anything about the subject to be an expert, you just need, what, a sincere desire? You wish expertise into existence by sheer force of will?

Expertise is a social construct

Not really sure why this became the Manx/Epistemology thread; however, regarding the original question, Manx has some interesting pre-occlusion, which as mentioned before was an intermediate step in the Icelandic affricate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Consonants_2

R.Rusanov wrote:Expertise is a social construct

Then so is reality.


JAL

sangi39 wrote:Just to bring this slightly back on topic, is there a phonetic difference between <tl> in, say, "útland" (foreign country) and <ll> in, say, "bolli" (cup)?

Just retweeting to prevent it being snowed over :)


JAL

2+3 clusivity wrote:Not really sure why this became the Manx/Epistemology thread;

Back to the derailing: here's a report on the Manx Revival (originally linked at languagehat's, Manx seems to be in the air).

someday i would like to be able to type one single sentence without it turning into a multi-page flamewar

speaking of manx, is there a description of its orthography somewhere

Nortaneous wrote:someday i would like to be able to type one single sentence without it turning into a multi-page flamewar

To be fair, this isn't a flame war, it's been relatively civil.

speaking of manx, is there a description of its orthography somewhere

Yes, I quite recently saw one. I might have googled pre just checked Wikipedia. It's a horrendous bastard* of Gaelic (the language family) and English (the orthography).


JAL

*No Swype, that's not a swear word.

Probably off topic:
I have /l/ become /ɬ/ after a voiceless occlusive. I'm not the only one. Even when the occlusive is on the preceding word. For instance, I pronounce athlétisme as /atɬetism/. For years, I thought it was a defect, now I know the name of the monster : lateral voiceless fricative.

Fixsme wrote:Probably off topic:
I have /l/ become /ɬ/ after a voiceless occlusive. I'm not the only one. Even when the occlusive is on the preceding word. For instance, I pronounce athlétisme as /atɬetism/. For years, I thought it was a defect, now I know the name of the monster : lateral voiceless fricative.

Well, this thread is derailed anyway, so thanks for something not Manx related :).


JAL

Fixsme wrote:Probably off topic:
I have /l/ become /ɬ/ after a voiceless occlusive. I'm not the only one. Even when the occlusive is on the preceding word. For instance, I pronounce athlétisme as /atɬetism/. For years, I thought it was a defect, now I know the name of the monster : lateral voiceless fricative.

Interesting, do more French (I assume) people do this?
I think it's a mostly phonetic effect, /l/ always gets a bit voiceless after a voiceless stop I think. A voiceless /l/ easily turns into the lateral fricative.

And yes, the lateral fricative is quite common in speech defects. Something can be considered a speech defect if it's abnormal for other native speakers of the language and if it's noticeable. I don't think your pronounciation will be very noticeable. An example of a speech defect is having uvular r when you live in certain areas of the Netherlands (such as my area Zeeland) where a uvular /r/ is very abnormal and does not belong to the native dialect. However, in most other parts of Holland having a uvular /r/ is very acceptable and sometimes even the normal /r/ to have. the pure alveolar /r/ is one of the main salient features of the Zeeuws dialect and it really sounds strange if you cannot make this sound. in some positions the /r/ also gets voiceless (even harder to produce if you cannot make the sound)