Other linguistic treadmills?

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gmalivuk
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Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by gmalivuk »

I suspect most of you are familiar with what Stephen Pinker calls the "euphemism treadmill", whereby words that start out as euphemisms become themselves impolite through their association with something deemed undesirable. (For example, "toilet" started out as a euphemism but now, at least in the US, it refers directly to the porcelain thing you poop into and is thus seen as impolitely direct.)

There is also something like a "profanity treadmill", where words once deemed wildly offensive in polite company are now seen as fairly normal, having been replaced with something stronger for actual swearing (e.g. most expressions with "hell" and "damn" now seem to contain variations of the word "fuck"). This is in some sense the opposite of the euphemism treadmill, because there words that start out with good connotations become worse, while here words that start out with strong negative connotations become better (or at least less bad). I'd call it a dysphemism treadmill, except I don't know of any expressions that started out as actual dysphemisms for some particular concept and later became fairly neutral.

So, are there dysphemistic expressions that have gone through this particular change? And more generally, are there other types of linguistic "treadmills", where the semantic drift seems to be in pretty much the same direction for a whole group of words, occasionally necessitating the introduction or co-opting of new words to fill vacated semantic roles?

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Terra »

Sound change.

Also, "hell", "damn", and "fuck" are still not polite speech.

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by zompist »

A few similar phenomena:

* In English at least, every generation needs new slang terms for "good" and "bad".

* Terms for mental illness become stigmatized, requiring new terms. "Moron" and "retarded" started as euphemisms.

* In Portuguese, second person pronouns move from formal to familiar-- e.g. intimate você was originally formal. A similar process in Japanese makes 1st and 2nd person pronouns seem more and more impolite, requiring replacement-- e.g. boku 'I' is borrowed from Chinese 'servant', but is now perceived as almost aggressive.

* In many languages aspect seems to be unstable: old aspectual distinctions are lost and new ones innovated. An example is the French perfect (e.g. j'ai venu) becoming a simple past.

* Individual lexical items can seemingly randomly move up or down in value (e.g. marshal 'horse-servant' > 'rank above general'), but it's probably fair to say that words for lower social classes tend to become dysphemisms (e.g. villain, peasant).

* Diminutives seem to lose their diminutive force over time, sometimes replacing the original word-- this is common in Romance (cf. Fr. soleil < 'little sun'), but also seen in Mandarin, where many nouns now permanently sport the diminutive -zu. In Spanish one diminutive often isn't enough, you need two, as in chiquitito.

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by clawgrip »

Japanese has a few.

This can happen with pronouns. For example, the standard first person pronouns now are watashi, ore, and boku. Watashi can be abbreviated to atashi for women, but it also has an abbreviation washi, which is now stereotypically considered old people speak. There are also a number of purely archaic pronouns now, such as wagahai, ware, wa, sessha yo, onore, maro (all first person pronouns). Due to the way in which pronouns and regular nouns are often not clearly distinguished in Japanese, this is likely to continue in the future.

There is also a politeness treadmill, which also sometimes involves pronouns. There are some 3rd person pronouns that are respectful and polite in form, but are actually informal/confrontational in practical use: omae "(the) honourable (person in) front (of me)" is informal and only used with friends or when the speaker is clearly of higher status. Despite its seemingly polite structure, you should not use it with people of higher status. Also, calling someone kisama "honourable sir" is extremely confrontational and could get you into a fight.

Some words taking the polite prefixes o- or go- have incorporated this prefix into the word, so while o-mizu "water" and go-tsugō "condition" are the marked respectful forms of mizu and tsugō and contrast with them, some words, like ocha and gohan, are never used without the prefix, which no longer conveys any sort of respectful connotation that is present in the other two examples.

Two other noteworthy examples are omikoshi and omikuji, which contain the respectful prefix mi-. This has the same meaning as o- and go-, but it's no longer productive, so people don't always recognize it as a respectful prefix anymore and came to think of it as just part of the word. Because of this, these words got stuck with an additional respectful prefix o-. On top of this, just like ocha and gohan, these prefixes have been incorporated into the word and no longer carry any particular respectful connotation. These two words technically should be written 御御輿 and 御御籤 (showing the redundant polite prefix), but because it looks dumb, they are often written お御輿/御神輿 and お御籤/御神籤.

There are also instances of polite phrases no longer appearing polite, e.g. mōshiwakenai ("inexcusable/I'm sorry") is considered a single word that should be made polite as mōshiwakenai desu in keeping with how -i adjectives are made polite. However, it's nearly universal now that mōshiwakenai is (incorrectly, according to traditional rules) made polite as mōshiwake gozaimasen (gozaimasen being the honourific of nai) because many people misanalyze mōshiwakena-i as mōshiwake-nai. On the other hand, the similar phrase mottainai ("wasted") never gets misanalyzed this way, probably because where mōshiwakenai appears exclusively in apologies, mottainai is used to admonish or show regret, so there is no pressing need to show politeness.

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by gmalivuk »

Terra wrote:Sound change.
Which sound changes are unidirectional like the semantic treadmills?
Also, "hell", "damn", and "fuck" are still not polite speech.
I never said "fuck" was polite, but rather that its forms had replaced "hell" and "damn" in a lot of phrases, because those two, while not nice things to say by any means, are nowhere near as bad as they once were.
zompist wrote:In Portuguese, second person pronouns move from formal to familiar-- e.g. intimate você was originally formal. A similar process in Japanese makes 1st and 2nd person pronouns seem more and more impolite, requiring replacement-- e.g. boku 'I' is borrowed from Chinese 'servant', but is now perceived as almost aggressive.
clawgrip wrote:There is also a politeness treadmill [followed by interesting details thereof]
Yeah, it seems reasonable for that sort of thing to happen in a lot of languages. In an effort to be polite, the formal form is used in more and more cases, and eventually passes something like a tipping point where it's too common to really be formal any more, and so a new formal replacement shows up.

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Vuvuzela »

This often happens to negations, since a negative statement that sounds like a positive one can cause a good deal of confusion. The classic example is French.
Old French: Jeo ne dis. "I do not say"
Negative particle precedes the verb.
Modern Literary French:Je ne dis pas.
"pas" originally meaning "step" is appended, probably going through a phase of being something like "at all". This is obligatory in all registers of Modern French outside of certain fossilised expressions.
Modern Colloquial French: Je dis pas
"ne" is dropped entirely, "pas" is the sole negative marker.

This also happened in the history of English. The older negative particle "ne" was strengthened by the addition of "nawiht" following the verb. "ne" was dropped and "nawiht" became NE "not" in unstressed position (the stressed variant becoming "naught").
The Wikipedia article doesn't mention any cases where this repeats itself, but alludes to the possibility.

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by clawgrip »

zompist wrote:A similar process in Japanese makes 1st and 2nd person pronouns seem more and more impolite, requiring replacement-- e.g. boku 'I' is borrowed from Chinese 'servant', but is now perceived as almost aggressive.
I missed this one. Boku is not considered aggressive. The one you're thinking of is ore, which is an abbreviation of now-archaic onore, which was originally a second person pronoun (the confrontational 2nd person pronoun temee was also originally a first person pronoun, so person-switching of pronouns also seems to be a thing with Japanese; modern jibun can be 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, depending on context).

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Terra »

Which sound changes are unidirectional like the semantic treadmills?
1) Palatalization. (The one-way-ness of it is one of the reasons why I find it unlikely that PIE originally had a separate palatal series to go along with it's velar series.)

What else...
2) Maybe vowel rounding where back-rounded vowels become front-rounded vowels. (u -> y, o -> 2)
3) Maybe p -> f (Proto-Celtic, Japanese, Ket) and f -> h (Spanish, Japanese, Ket).
Does anybody know of any times of these happening backwards?
This often happens to negations, since a negative statement that sounds like a positive one can cause a good deal of confusion. The classic example is French.
This happened in Welsh too, iirc.

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Hallow XIII »

Vowel fronting is a subtype of palatalization.

h -> f can happen conditionally (ie before u); some mandarin dialects have merged <hu-> into <f> (Mandarin h varies between /x/ and /h/).
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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by zompist »

Terra wrote:2) Maybe vowel rounding where back-rounded vowels become front-rounded vowels. (u -> y, o -> 2)
The rounding can be lost, as happened in Greek and English. And I don't see any reason the resulting front unrounded vowel couldn't get backed.

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Nortaneous »

gmalivuk wrote:
Terra wrote:Sound change.
Which sound changes are unidirectional like the semantic treadmills?
Tonogenesis, debuccalization, vowel reduction, l-vocalization, probably r-dorsalization (r > ʁ or gʟ or somesuch).
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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Drydic »

Terra wrote:
Which sound changes are unidirectional like the semantic treadmills?
1) Palatalization. (The one-way-ness of it is one of the reasons why I find it unlikely that PIE originally had a separate palatal series to go along with it's velar series.)
There's been suggestions (and respected IEists who held this as well) nigh well since the dawn of Indo-European linguistics that the palatal/velar contrast is really a velar/uvular one. This also now seems to be coming back into fashion.
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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Abi »

Homosexual terms. Gay > Queer/Homo > Fag. Each one seems to be adopted by the gay community and it looses its bite.

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by gach »

There's movement towards > purpose > infinitive. I won't repost anything so just check this and my post after it for some reconstructed and currently happening examples.

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by ObsequiousNewt »

Abi wrote:Homosexual terms. Gay > Queer/Homo > Fag. Each one seems to be adopted by the gay community and it looses its bite.
"fag" has lost its bite?


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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Terra »

The rounding can be lost, as happened in Greek and English. And I don't see any reason the resulting front unrounded vowel couldn't get backed.
English had y -> i from Old English, and then y -> ju from Old French. Greek had y -> i too. None of these is y -> u.

(I guess, some of /ju/ has eventually become /u/ in certain environments. Ex: "dew, tube", but not "few, cue".

Edit: Derp, I suck at reading. Anyways, do you know any actual cases of i -> u/ (whatever the symbol for the back unrounded vowel is) -> u ?

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by ---- »

Arapaho has /i/->/u/ after /oC/ in some conditions (unstressed syllables? I have no idea).

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

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Vuvuzela wrote:This often happens to negations, since a negative statement that sounds like a positive one can cause a good deal of confusion. The classic example is French.
Old French: Jeo ne dis. "I do not say"
Negative particle precedes the verb.
Modern Literary French:Je ne dis pas.
"pas" originally meaning "step" is appended, probably going through a phase of being something like "at all". This is obligatory in all registers of Modern French outside of certain fossilised expressions.
Modern Colloquial French: Je dis pas
"ne" is dropped entirely, "pas" is the sole negative marker.
Something similar seems to have happened in Greek.

PIE: ne
Later PIE: (ne) h₂eyu kʷid, lit. "not in a lifetime"
Ancient Greek: οὐ, οὐχί
Greek: όχι
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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by LinguistCat »

I'm surprised that no one's brought up starve (to die from lack of food) > starve (to be hungry), tho I can't say i can think of other words in the "death in a certain manner" group having gone through similar changes. Though several terms for mental disorders have gone through a similar change. Depression coming to mean just being sad, so that one has to say clinical depression or chronic depression, OCD coming to mean being "overly" neat or wants things a certain way, etc.
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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by KathTheDragon »

The phrase 'dying of thirst', maybe?

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Thry »

zompist wrote:* Diminutives seem to lose their diminutive force over time, sometimes replacing the original word-- this is common in Romance (cf. Fr. soleil < 'little sun'), but also seen in Mandarin, where many nouns now permanently sport the diminutive -zu. In Spanish one diminutive often isn't enough, you need two, as in chiquitito.
Or more: chiquirrinino.

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by CatDoom »

vampyre_smiles wrote:I'm surprised that no one's brought up starve (to die from lack of food) > starve (to be hungry), tho I can't say i can think of other words in the "death in a certain manner" group having gone through similar changes. Though several terms for mental disorders have gone through a similar change. Depression coming to mean just being sad, so that one has to say clinical depression or chronic depression, OCD coming to mean being "overly" neat or wants things a certain way, etc.
Honestly, I think that's mostly a matter of hyperbole. When one says "I'm starving," it's most literal interpretation is still "I am in the process of dying of hunger," but based on context one can surmise that the speaker is, in fact, experiencing a less life-threatening degree of hunger. "I'm starved" would literally mean "I am a thing that has died of starvation" (a grammatically correct use of the adjectival form of "to starve," I think, as in "the remains of a starved man"), which takes the hyperbole one step farther for the same effect.

I can think of plenty of other phrases that use "death" words to similar effect, like "drowning in x," "suffocating from the heat," or, more euphemistically, "dying on stage." In each case they may actually emphasize the severity of a situation or one's frustration with it, but may alternately simply act as more colorful turns of phrase regardless of the context in which they are used.

Incidentally, does anyone else find it slightly odd that English has a word for "dying of hunger," but not one for "dying of thirst"? I wonder if it's the other way around in languages originating in more arid parts of the world.

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by gmalivuk »

Yeah, "starving" still definitely can mean "dying from lack of food", just like "boiling", "freezing", "on fire", and the like can still have their literal sense in spite of expressions like "It's boiling/freezing in this room" and "less habanero next time, dude, my mouth is on fire over here".

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Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Abi »

ObsequiousNewt wrote:
Abi wrote:Homosexual terms. Gay > Queer/Homo > Fag. Each one seems to be adopted by the gay community and it looses its bite.
"fag" has lost its bite?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagbug

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fag

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fag-suffix

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