The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
TomHChappell
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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by TomHChappell »

Qwynegold wrote:
TomHChappell wrote:You left out French and Hindi.
French is there.
Oops! :oops: I missed it.

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by jmcd »

Nancy Blackett wrote: it can be most disconcerting to learn that Fhionnlaigh is actually pronounced /"ju:.L@/,
What's your source for this? Because my wee brother who speaks fluent Gaelic says Fhionnlaigh is [fIn5@G]. And the form with the h is the lenited form like finlay says. I suppose there is still a significant amount of dialectal variation to account for though.
TomHChappell wrote:
finlay wrote:But from my limited experience of all of them, these all at least seem to be in the same "league":
Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Thai, Tibetan, French, Gaelic in all its flavours (Irish, Scottish, maybe Manx), Swedish, Danish, Norwegian
You left out French and Hindi.
I certainly wouldn't include Hindi. Remembering a different script makes it harder but it's basically regular. The pronounciation, especially [d`_h\], is a hard bit too.

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by TomHChappell »

jmcd wrote:
TomHChappell wrote:You left out French and Hindi.
I certainly wouldn't include Hindi. Remembering a different script makes it harder but it's basically regular. The pronounciation, especially [d`_h\], is a hard bit too.
I was referring to the way that in Hindi orthography, the word "hindi" is spelled, in effect, like "ihndi".
That's not weirder than English, but IMO it's as weird.

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

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jmcd wrote:
Nancy Blackett wrote: it can be most disconcerting to learn that Fhionnlaigh is actually pronounced /"ju:.L@/,
What's your source for this? Because my wee brother who speaks fluent Gaelic says Fhionnlaigh is [fIn5@G]. And the form with the h is the lenited form like finlay says. I suppose there is still a significant amount of dialectal variation to account for though.
My knowledge of Irish pronunciation tells me that 'Fhionnlaigh' should be pronounced something like ['inˠlˠə], elited(?) f is always silent. but I've read as well that there's a lot of dialectical variation in Irish Gaelic so the pronunciation could be completely different in separate places.

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by finlay »

TomHChappell wrote:
jmcd wrote:
TomHChappell wrote:You left out French and Hindi.
I certainly wouldn't include Hindi. Remembering a different script makes it harder but it's basically regular. The pronounciation, especially [d`_h\], is a hard bit too.
I was referring to the way that in Hindi orthography, the word "hindi" is spelled, in effect, like "ihndi".
That's not weirder than English, but IMO it's as weird.
That's... not really weird spelling, though, that's a quirk of the scripts of the area. It's regular, unlike a fair amount of English. Even though we tend to vastly overstate the "weirdness" of English.

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by AnTeallach »

jmcd wrote:
Nancy Blackett wrote: it can be most disconcerting to learn that Fhionnlaigh is actually pronounced /"ju:.L@/,
What's your source for this? Because my wee brother who speaks fluent Gaelic says Fhionnlaigh is [fIn5@G]. And the form with the h is the lenited form like finlay says. I suppose there is still a significant amount of dialectal variation to account for though.
The pronunciation guide on Akerbeltz supports Nancy/Geoff's [ju:], but not the rest. But I suspect there's enough dialect variation that your brother is right too (except I think the pronunciation you gave corresponds to the spelling Fionnlagh).

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by finlay »

I don't think it'd be /ʎ/ given that it's broad rather than slender. But I don't really know gaelic. All I know is that the anglicised pronunciation /fɪnleɪ/ derives from one or other of these spellings. I've always remembered it as Fionnlaidh, although I think here dh/gh are interchangeable. They'd be slender in that position, so /j/ or something. And yeah, I think aspirated F becomes silent.

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by jmcd »

AnTeallach wrote:
jmcd wrote:
Nancy Blackett wrote: it can be most disconcerting to learn that Fhionnlaigh is actually pronounced /"ju:.L@/,
What's your source for this? Because my wee brother who speaks fluent Gaelic says Fhionnlaigh is [fIn5@G]. And the form with the h is the lenited form like finlay says. I suppose there is still a significant amount of dialectal variation to account for though.
(except I think the pronunciation you gave corresponds to the spelling Fionnlagh).
Oh yeah I'd copy pasted it and apparently forgotten to remove the h.

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by Nortaneous »

yes, fh is silent. i'd also expect gh to be silent there, but apparently it's not? iunno maybe he meant scottish gaelic or something
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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by jmcd »

Nortaneous wrote:yes, fh is silent. i'd also expect gh to be silent there, but apparently it's not? iunno maybe he meant scottish gaelic or something
He did mean Scottish Gaelic yeah. But I think I might have got a bit confused at first here; anyway, it should have been -aigh (which is ) not -agh [@G].

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by hadad »

English, it can't just have one spelling or pronunciation for a sound, its gotta have more. It's also got more irregular verbs and homophone words than it knows what to do with.

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by alice »

jmcd wrote:
Nortaneous wrote:yes, fh is silent. i'd also expect gh to be silent there, but apparently it's not? iunno maybe he meant scottish gaelic or something
He did mean Scottish Gaelic yeah. But I think I might have got a bit confused at first here; anyway, it should have been -aigh (which is ) not -agh [@G].


Or maybe it was my fault; it's actually Fhionnlaidh, with dh instead of gh, although of course that shouldn't affect the pronunciation.
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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by finlay »

hadad wrote:English, it can't just have one spelling or pronunciation for a sound, its gotta have more. It's also got more irregular verbs and homophone words than it knows what to do with.
We've been over this. You're wrong – we can find examples of each of those that are "worse" than English. (Burmese, Tibetan and Thai have irregular spelling in their native scripts with often lots of different letters for the one sound, and they're all trumped by Chinese and Japanese anyway; French, German and most other IE languages have more irregular verbs and, notably, a greater level of impact that this has on learning the verb itself, because in English you learn three parts to a verb (ie, present, preterite and participle), but in French, for example, you have to learn an extensive paradigm; Chinese omg Chinese and fucking Japanese are so much worse for homophones... although this is mitigated by the morphemic writing system. Still, this puts both of them in two camps. Korean's also bad for homophones.)

English's main problem is the non-intuitive orthography, but quite frankly, we could be putting up with a lot worse than we are.

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by marconatrix »

Fhionnlaidh is the vocative (and genitive) of Fionnladh. You just have to remember Seumas and Hamish ...
Kyn nag ov den skentel pur ...

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by Radius Solis »

No it isn't

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by clawgrip »

TomHChappell wrote:I was referring to the way that in Hindi orthography, the word "hindi" is spelled, in effect, like "ihndi".
That's not weirder than English, but IMO it's as weird.
This is not quite as weird as it seems, since the matra (vowel sign) is considered something like an adornment or modification to the akshara (consonant sign), rather than an individual letter in its own right. In that sense it is not really any different from using a macron above a Latin letter rather than after it to indicate vowel length (according to this reasoning, a- is more visually intuitive than ā). Another example that is similar to Devanagari yet not really considered strange is the curve or bar that indicates the /a/ vowel in Ge'ez script. It sometimes extends to the left past the main body of the letter, like in the last letter of this image. the /i/ vowel sign of Devanagari is just the result of a gradual extension of that line further and further until it eventually reached the same height as the main letter.

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by finlay »

I couldn't remember writing that...

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by Drydic »

2 years is a long time bro

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by Radius Solis »

Oh, that date was for 2011. I fail at reading. I didn't think a few months was worth complaining about, but yeah okay that's pretty necro.

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by clawgrip »

I made the same mistake.

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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by 2+3 clusivity »

2011, yeah. Whatever, the battle rages on.

Yeah I'm not buying the Hindi thing. The vowel markers coming before the main glyph, or around, or under, or stacked, or w/e are pretty common in south and southeast Asian orthographies.

As for Hindi, after a day or two of reading the script such "tail before head" issues click. It's really a matter of information chunking: the consonant symbol is key, then consider the vowel markers. Hindi orthography could get more specific complaints like schwa syncope, but I suspect that can be learned fairly quickly.

Otherwise it's a pretty normal SOV two gender language with agglutinative suffixes, a split ergative in perfective, and few irregularities outside of causatives (which are perhaps better thought of as a vocab).


I think English and German are both replete with irregularities and I blame a long and active literary tradition coupled with a sclerotic orthography and a love for inserting Latin prescriptivism grammatical features. When people tell me to not split infinitives or use hanging prepositions I get so ticked off. Keep your fused infinitives.
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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by Nesescosac »

Am I the only one who thinks Tibetan orthography isn't actually that bad? I'm glad there's just one way to read a word.
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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by Viktor77 »

Someone suggested the least batshit natlang, and for that I easily nominate Danish.
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Re: The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

Post by Hallow XIII »

You are boring, Victor. Batshit = awesome.

That's the reason my hatred for Esperanto has quietly subsided.

As far as Finlay's years-old comments on Gaelic go, it stande to reason that Scottish is worse in that regard than Irish. Consider these:

oíche - oidhche (night)
[iːhə] - [ɤ̃ɪ̃çə]

donn - donn (brown, dark-haired)
[dˠɔnˠ] - [dˠãũnˠ]

mac - mac (son)
[makʰ] - [maxkʰ]
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