Favorite/least favorite features from natlangs

[mèþru]

Spoken and written French are almost two different languages, really.

[linguoboy]

Spoken and written French are almost two different languages, really.

Depends what register you're talking. There's plenty of written colloquial French out there.

Speaking of register, it's a terrific feature and languages without much in the way of register distinctions feel kind of sterile to me. But it does make for a steeper learning curve and it's very frustrating as a non-native speaker to not have full command of the range of registers you can access effortlessly in your native speech.

[mèþru]

It took me forever to understand black youth from middle-class suburbs in the US, who combine AAVE, local dialect and Valleyspeak.

[cunningham]

It took me forever to understand black youth from middle-class suburbs in the US, who combine AAVE, local dialect and Valleyspeak.

Gay black Southern middle-class youth is even harder to understand.

[zompist]

I frequent find myself referring to the nearest cognate in Catalan or Spanish when trying to determine the gender of a French word.

Me too, but there are quite a few trip-ups, e.g. color/couleur, miel, sangre/sang, planeta/planète. (The worst for me are Portuguese/Spanish gender mismatches, like viaje/viagem, leite/leche, mar.)

[mèþru]

I'm also learning Latin, but my Latin vocabulary is much more limited than my French, so that doesn't really help me.
On the other hand, my English is very weird, as I speak in an American dialect, but I sometimes use foreign sounding pronunciations, like [wikipediə] vs. [wɪkəpidiə]

[Xephyr]

An interesting thing about Manambu I just learned about: verbal cross-referencing for the gender of temporal/spatial extent. From Aikhenvald, 2009:

Nouns have two covert genders (feminine and masculine, marked via agreement in singular only) and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural) marked on modifiers and on verbs. Gender assignment for humans is sex-based; for other groups of nouns it is based on size and shape. So, a small location will be referred to as feminine, and a large one as masculine; a short stretch of time is feminine, and a long one masculine.

...

If a non-subject argument or oblique is more topical than the subject, it is cross-referenced on the verb, in the second cross-referencing position (following the subject markers). As shown in (3), a second cross-referencing position can respond to (a) a topical O, (b) location, (c) time, or (d) beneficiary. (3) is polysemous:

(3)
və-la-d
see/look-3fem.sgSUBJ.NPAST-3masc.sgBASIC.NPAST

(a) She sees/looks at him/it-- a topical human masculine O 'him' or 'it' (large non-human thing) is cross-referenced
(b) She sees/looks (at someone/something) in a large ('masculine') location-- topical location cross-referenced
(c) She sees/looks (at something) for a long ('masculine') time-- topical time cross-referenced
(d) She sees/looks (at something) for his benefit-- topical beneficiary ('for his benefit') cross-referenced

[Frislander]

An interesting thing about Manambu I just learned about: verbal cross-referencing for the gender of temporal/spatial extent. From Aikhenvald, 2009:

Nouns have two covert genders (feminine and masculine, marked via agreement in singular only) and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural) marked on modifiers and on verbs. Gender assignment for humans is sex-based; for other groups of nouns it is based on size and shape. So, a small location will be referred to as feminine, and a large one as masculine; a short stretch of time is feminine, and a long one masculine.

...

If a non-subject argument or oblique is more topical than the subject, it is cross-referenced on the verb, in the second cross-referencing position (following the subject markers). As shown in (3), a second cross-referencing position can respond to (a) a topical O, (b) location, (c) time, or (d) beneficiary. (3) is polysemous:

(3)
və-la-d
see/look-3fem.sgSUBJ.NPAST-3masc.sgBASIC.NPAST

(a) She sees/looks at him/it-- a topical human masculine O 'him' or 'it' (large non-human thing) is cross-referenced
(b) She sees/looks (at someone/something) in a large ('masculine') location-- topical location cross-referenced
(c) She sees/looks (at something) for a long ('masculine') time-- topical time cross-referenced
(d) She sees/looks (at something) for his benefit-- topical beneficiary ('for his benefit') cross-referenced

I love it too: I was please to discover a system where the masculine is unmarked, and even more pleased when I discovered that it's a common feature of the region. I also love Manambu's use of case suffixes for subordinate clauses, dative for purposive and so on.

[Travis B.]

It took me forever to understand black youth from middle-class suburbs in the US, who combine AAVE, local dialect and Valleyspeak.

Middle-class black people around here seem to mostly speak GA or GA mildly colored by AAVE, which stands out in contrast with the local dialect. I have not heard people speaking Valley-speak here regardless of race.

[mèþru]

Teenagers all over the US speak with widely understood Valleyisms in their lexicon (not really in pronunciation), more so than adults. Then again, I may have some misconception on what Valleyspeak really is.

[cunningham]

Valleyspeak is like the Kardashians. It's widespread in the younger generations because of Hollywood's dominance in the media and unfortunately, they see these celebrities as people they should mimic.

[clawgrip]

It's definitely not tone - japanese people are as confused by chinese pronunciation as we are. I think it's overhyped, as there are not that many minimal pairs, and pronouncing it the wrong isn't going to impede pronunciation. like i don't see how it's that different from having an elusive stress system.

My thoughts on this:

Japanese is spoken with a sentence-level pitch contour that either does or does not get modified by words based on lexical pitch drops. Once a word modifies it, the overarching pitch contour resets. For the record, this pitch contour starts low, quickly rises, then slowly falls. (this: ) Basically it's more like stress than it is like tone, but it is realized only through modification of pitch (no volume, length, or vowel quality changes, as in English).

Learning the proper accent for each word is not necessary for basic communication, because, as you say, there are not so many minimal pairs in everyday speech. When you start to get into more Sino-Japanese vocabulary, there are times where using the wrong stress pattern can leave the person you're talking to with a blank stare for a few moments, but they can probably figure out what you mean after a moment by correcting your pronunciation in their head, providing they already understand what you're talking about.

If you ignore pitch patterns you will have a super foreign sounding accent, because Japanese people are acutely aware of pitch accent (just as we English speakers are acutely aware of stress placement). But as Jean Chrétien proves, incorrect stress placement rarely hinders communication, and it is the same in Japanese. So if that is not a big issue for you, then you can effectively ignore it.

Japanese language courses I think generally try to teach general communication strategies, and determine that you're likely to have more trouble trying to learn proper pitch accent than you're going to have by misusing it, so they figure it's not worth it and just leave it out.

[linguoboy]

Valleyspeak is like the Kardashians. It's widespread in the younger generations because of Hollywood's dominance in the media and unfortunately, they see these celebrities as people they should mimic.

It's hard to judge the validity of this claim when I really don't have an idea what "Valleyspeak" is meant to cover. Usually it refers to a particular variety of English combining such features as the California vowel shift, certain intonation patterns, and distinctive youth slang. As mèþru says, certain of the slang terms have become widespread (many are very dated now), but I really only hear the whole package being used performatively, i.e. when someone is consciously putting on a Valspeak accent. Even in this era of mass media penetration, it's still the case that people sound more like their neighbours than they do people they hear on tv.

[Travis B.]

Valleyspeak is like the Kardashians. It's widespread in the younger generations because of Hollywood's dominance in the media and unfortunately, they see these celebrities as people they should mimic.

It's hard to judge the validity of this claim when I really don't have an idea what "Valleyspeak" is meant to cover. Usually it refers to a particular variety of English combining such features as the California vowel shift, certain intonation patterns, and distinctive youth slang. As mèþru says, certain of the slang terms have become widespread (many are very dated now), but I really only hear the whole package being used performatively, i.e. when someone is consciously putting on a Valspeak accent. Even in this era of mass media penetration, it's still the case that people sound more like their neighbours than they do people they hear on tv.

I remember clear ways other kids spoke when I was a teenager in Wauwatosa... but the thing is that none of this sounded like stereotypical "Valspeak" from them...

[linguoboy]

I remember clear ways other kids spoke when I was a teenager in Wauwatosa... but the thing is that none of this sounded like stereotypical "Valspeak" from them...

I'm wondering if part of what's being identified as "Valleyspeak" here is actually widespread intonation features like uptalk and vocal fry, which are viewed extremely negatively by middle-aged curmudgeons. (There was one woman who used to ride the same bus as me who had a combination of uptalk, vocal fry, and a posh English accent that made me want to pry open the window with my fingernails and hurl myself under the wheels.)

[Zaarin]

I remember clear ways other kids spoke when I was a teenager in Wauwatosa... but the thing is that none of this sounded like stereotypical "Valspeak" from them...

I'm wondering if part of what's being identified as "Valleyspeak" here is actually widespread intonation features like uptalk and vocal fry, which are viewed extremely negatively by middle-aged curmudgeons. (There was one woman who used to ride the same bus as me who had a combination of uptalk, vocal fry, and a posh English accent that made me want to pry open the window with my fingernails and hurl myself under the wheels.)

Vocal fry doesn't usually bother me, but the narrator of the Civ6 First Look videos makes me want to claw my ears off.

[mèþru]

I didn't finish any of the videos because of that voice. I was talking about vocabulary however, not vocal fry.

[Gulliver]

Welsh
I like the attitude of Welsh speakers. If you can more or less speak Welsh, kinda, you can speak Welsh. Due to the way that almost everyone in Wales speaks a bit of Welsh and there is a sizeable native speaker population, there is quite a lot of acceptance to people who kinda speak it but try.

Don't like: Dd and f sound the same to me half the time. Th and ff sound the same to me half the time. Ch and ll sound the same to me half the time.


BSL
Like: As long as it's grammatical and semi-obvious what you mean, you can be really, really creative and nuanced with the language in a way you can't in English.

Also, country names are uniformly amazing because many, many of them are based on terrible comedy stereotypes and that makes them really fun to learn. Also, the sign for abortion is this.

Don't like: it is ridonkadonks regional which is great in terms of diversity but a nightmare to learn. Numbers above five differ within the South West of England, which is pretty small an area. Days of the week differ a lot. Colours differ a lot. Most countries have two names - a formal one and one that people actually use but seems hokey or racist outside of BSL.

[Frislander]

Welsh
...Don't like: Dd and f sound the same to me half the time. Th and ff sound the same to me half the time. Ch and ll sound the same to me half the time.

For the first two its possibly people carrying over Southern English sounds changes. The second one is probably people having a hard time distinguishing them due to being native English speakers.

BSL
Like: As long as it's grammatical and semi-obvious what you mean, you can be really, really creative and nuanced with the language in a way you can't in English.

Also, country names are uniformly amazing because many, many of them are based on terrible comedy stereotypes and that makes them really fun to learn. Also, the sign for abortion is this.

Don't like: it is ridonkadonks regional which is great in terms of diversity but a nightmare to learn. Numbers above five differ within the South West of England, which is pretty small an area. Days of the week differ a lot. Colours differ a lot. Most countries have two names - a formal one and one that people actually use but seems hokey or racist outside of BSL.

Yeah, like how the sign for "German" is a depiction of a Pickelhaube, or America is a gesture of a round belly (or at least it certainly used to be, and the sign as given here seems to reflect that too).

BSL is one of those languages, like Welsh, that I really wish I could "speak" but can't. My mum knows people who work with the deaf church and has on multiple occasions done deaf services with an interpreter, but it's not something I've ever had the chance to learn either through school or anywhere else.

[Gulliver]

Welsh
...Don't like: Dd and f sound the same to me half the time. Th and ff sound the same to me half the time. Ch and ll sound the same to me half the time.

For the first two its possibly people carrying over Southern English sounds changes. The second one is probably people having a hard time distinguishing them due to being native English speakers.

I'm from the south east and live in the south west. I've got a mixture of suvven English and southerrrrrn English now.

BSL
Like: As long as it's grammatical and semi-obvious what you mean, you can be really, really creative and nuanced with the language in a way you can't in English.

Also, country names are uniformly amazing because many, many of them are based on terrible comedy stereotypes and that makes them really fun to learn. Also, the sign for abortion is this.

Don't like: it is ridonkadonks regional which is great in terms of diversity but a nightmare to learn. Numbers above five differ within the South West of England, which is pretty small an area. Days of the week differ a lot. Colours differ a lot. Most countries have two names - a formal one and one that people actually use but seems hokey or racist outside of BSL.

Yeah, like how the sign for "German" is a depiction of a Pickelhaube, or America is a gesture of a round belly (or at least it certainly used to be, and the sign as given here seems to reflect that too).

BSL is one of those languages, like Welsh, that I really wish I could "speak" but can't. My mum knows people who work with the deaf church and has on multiple occasions done deaf services with an interpreter, but it's not something I've ever had the chance to learn either through school or anywhere else.

The L1 course is really good to get you started and not that expensive. L2 is a massive step up but well worth it!

[vokzhen]

Welsh
...Don't like: Dd and f sound the same to me half the time. Th and ff sound the same to me half the time. Ch and ll sound the same to me half the time.

For the first two its possibly people carrying over Southern English sounds changes. The second one is probably people having a hard time distinguishing them due to being native English speakers.

I've heard from e.g. here that Welsh <ll> is actually pronounced [ç] by many Welsh speakers, while still being distinguished from /x/.

[linguoboy]

I've heard from e.g. here that Welsh <ll> is actually pronounced [ç] by many Welsh speakers, while still being distinguished from /x/.

Diddorol iawn! I learned Welsh pronunciation from a native German-speaker and I never recall hearing [ç] for /ɬ/. I wonder if it could be regional? But I've listened to speakers from all around Wales and never noticed it.

I would really miss [ɬ] if Welsh lost it, not least of all because I worked so hard on acquiring it. I still have trouble nailing it reliably in proximity to /x/ (despite having sung the chorus of "Lluchia dy flachlwch drosta i" literally hundreds of times), just as I have trouble with /x/ too close to /r/ in German.

[Jonlang]

I've heard from e.g. here that Welsh <ll> is actually pronounced [ç] by many Welsh speakers, while still being distinguished from /x/.

Diddorol iawn! I learned Welsh pronunciation from a native German-speaker and I never recall hearing [ç] for /ɬ/. I wonder if it could be regional? But I've listened to speakers from all around Wales and never noticed it.

I would really miss [ɬ] if Welsh lost it, not least of all because I worked so hard on acquiring it. I still have trouble nailing it reliably in proximity to /x/ (despite having sung the chorus of "Lluchia dy flachlwch drosta i" literally hundreds of times), just as I have trouble with /x/ too close to /r/ in German.

I've only ever heard ll pronounced as /ɬ/. And whereas I'm not a "Welsh speaker" the ll appears in like half of all place names in Wales, so I, like nearly everyone who grows up here, have no problem with pronouncing /ɬ/, we hear/say /ɬ/ pretty much daily. Most Welsh people can easily read and say Welsh words without being speakers due to having to learn a mandatory form of Welsh at school, which includes singing hymns and songs entirely in Welsh. So reading and saying dd, ff, ll etc isn't really a problem. Another note is that the Welsh people's attitudes to Welsh, particularly Welsh speakers, is that we're very protective of the language, and so I very much doubt people will be pronouncing ll as anything other than /ɬ/, unless they physically cannot do it because of impediments and such. A more commonly heard pronunciation of /ɬ/ heard in the North would be /kɫ/ but this is usually by English people who have moved to coastal areas and cannot, or won't try to, say /ɬ/, often to the annoyance of Welshies.

One sound which is more likely to be under threat though is rh - /r̥/. I've heard many Welsh speakers in the North using /r/ instead, which is a shame. It's not in every instance though, but I can't really figure out where it becomes /r/ (and no, I know it mutates to /r/...). Sometimes where it should be mutated it isn't, and sometimes it's /r/ where it should be /r̥/, so it must be something to do with sounds preceding /r̥/, but it's not a big deal as far as I can tell, I don't think there are any words where the only difference is initial /r/ or /r̥/ and if there are, it'll probably be obvious which one is meant.

[Yng]

hello everybody time for some welsh bombs

I would say with some confidence that in Welsh, no native Welsh speaker merges /D v/ or /T f/. It's certainly not at all common. They might do it in their dialect of English, but it would sound very strange in Welsh. It's much more likely that Gulliver's own not-entirely-distinct /T f/ and /D v/ in English are affecting his ability to perceive the difference. This happens to lots of people who are in the middle of sound changes (my girlfriend for example pronounces T and f distinctly most of the time, but struggles to perceive the difference and produce them accurately in series, etc), in this case people from the south of England.

wrt to /K/ being [C] (or whatever the X-SAMPA is - I've heard this, though I don't think it's all that common. You can hear it in the Derwyddon Dr Gonzo song Tomi yn y Coedwig in the line ti yw'r boi efo'r paraffin / llosga fi! for example.

So reading and saying dd, ff, ll etc isn't really a problem. Another note is that the Welsh people's attitudes to Welsh, particularly Welsh speakers, is that we're very protective of the language, and so I very much doubt people will be pronouncing ll as anything other than /ɬ/, unless they physically cannot do it because of impediments and such. A more commonly heard pronunciation of /ɬ/ heard in the North would be /kɫ/ but this is usually by English people who have moved to coastal areas and cannot, or won't try to, say /ɬ/, often to the annoyance of Welshies.

yeah, and also some of an older generation of people who couldn't pronounce Welsh names. I'd say almost everyone in my generation can pronounce the major consonant phonemes though yes. But your argument about people holding onto [ɬ] (and watch ur brackets) because of 'protectiveness' is dubious. Native speakers might not even (at least without being told) perceive a difference between their articulation of <ll> and the prescriptive ideal of how it's pronounced. This is sort of like saying that it is very unlikely any English speaker will pronounce /t/ with a glottal stop because we really care about our ts - obviously some people do and aggressively stigmatise this pronunciation, but that doesn't stop sound change.

One sound which is more likely to be under threat though is rh - /r̥/. I've heard many Welsh speakers in the North using /r/ instead, which is a shame. It's not in every instance though, but I can't really figure out where it becomes /r/ (and no, I know it mutates to /r/...). Sometimes where it should be mutated it isn't, and sometimes it's /r/ where it should be /r̥/, so it must be something to do with sounds preceding /r̥/, but it's not a big deal as far as I can tell, I don't think there are any words where the only difference is initial /r/ or /r̥/ and if there are, it'll probably be obvious which one is meant.

?? who have you heard from the north doing this? Do you have examples for us to have a listen to? The area which is famous for losing the voiceless r is not north Wales but SOUTH Wales.

[Jonlang]

So reading and saying dd, ff, ll etc isn't really a problem. Another note is that the Welsh people's attitudes to Welsh, particularly Welsh speakers, is that we're very protective of the language, and so I very much doubt people will be pronouncing ll as anything other than /ɬ/, unless they physically cannot do it because of impediments and such. A more commonly heard pronunciation of /ɬ/ heard in the North would be /kɫ/ but this is usually by English people who have moved to coastal areas and cannot, or won't try to, say /ɬ/, often to the annoyance of Welshies.

yeah, and also some of an older generation of people who couldn't pronounce Welsh names. I'd say almost everyone in my generation can pronounce the major consonant phonemes though yes. But your argument about people holding onto [ɬ] (and watch ur brackets) because of 'protectiveness' is dubious. Native speakers might not even (at least without being told) perceive a difference between their articulation of <ll> and the prescriptive ideal of how it's pronounced. This is sort of like saying that it is very unlikely any English speaker will pronounce /t/ with a glottal stop because we really care about our ts - obviously some people do and aggressively stigmatise this pronunciation, but that doesn't stop sound change.

I dunno... there are many more regional variants of English than Welsh. And seeing as Welsh is a minority language with a growing number of L2 speakers I think that people try harder to "do it properly".

One sound which is more likely to be under threat though is rh - /r̥/. I've heard many Welsh speakers in the North using /r/ instead, which is a shame. It's not in every instance though, but I can't really figure out where it becomes /r/ (and no, I know it mutates to /r/...). Sometimes where it should be mutated it isn't, and sometimes it's /r/ where it should be /r̥/, so it must be something to do with sounds preceding /r̥/, but it's not a big deal as far as I can tell, I don't think there are any words where the only difference is initial /r/ or /r̥/ and if there are, it'll probably be obvious which one is meant.

?? who have you heard from the north doing this? Do you have examples for us to have a listen to? The area which is famous for losing the voiceless r is not north Wales but SOUTH Wales.

To be honest it's mostly from watching S4C so I couldn't tell you where the people are from. I find I spend a lot of time rewinding and watching/listening to bits over and over to try to make sense of it as much of it is often clipped and shortened and I end up missing parts. The L1 speaker (Catryn) from SSiW, who is from Gwynedd, often doesn't mutate rh in stuff like nes i redeg i ffwrdd. Someone on Facebook told me that the mutations of Ll and Rh are "very weak" and could end up disappearing altogether. A few Welsh speakers I used to work with didn't always mutate Rh either, and sometimes pronounced Rh as R when talking about places like Rhuddlan, maybe because they're used to not using the Rh when speaking English?

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And to kinda get back on topic:

Something I dislike about English is how it has about 5 different uses for the word "have"! Why?!