Other linguistic treadmills?

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
Radagast revived
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 87
Joined: Sat Apr 07, 2012 7:41 pm

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Radagast revived »

Pole wrote:
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
Yes, it is a very common phenomenon in the world's languages and it is called the Jespersen Cycle after the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen who first described it.

User avatar
Arzena
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 240
Joined: Sat Jun 14, 2008 1:19 pm
Location: ¡California, Tejas, Marruecos!

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Arzena »

ObsequiousNewt wrote:"fag" has lost its bite?
I've heard it (and used it) appropriated positively, although I still would consider it aggressive if a person were to throw it against, say, me and my boyfriend holding hands.
A New Yorker wrote:Isn't it sort of a relief to talk about the English Premier League instead of the sad state of publishing?
Abi wrote:At this point it seems pretty apparent that PIE was simply an ancient esperanto gone awry.
Shtåså, Empotle7á, Neire Wippwo

Shm Jay
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 823
Joined: Thu Nov 14, 2002 11:29 pm

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Shm Jay »

Arzena wrote:
ObsequiousNewt wrote:"fag" has lost its bite?
I've heard it (and used it) appropriated positively, although I still would consider it aggressive if a person were to throw it against, say, me and my boyfriend holding hands.
So I guess twenty years from now, no one will get the point of those scenes in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie where two passing-by women, who are always passing by at just the wrong moment, scornfully call out "fags" to the protagonists. (Unfortunately, I can't find a clip on YouTube to illustrate the scene. The description can be found on the TV Tropes page for the movie under "Mistaken for Gay".)

User avatar
Drydic
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1652
Joined: Tue Oct 08, 2002 12:23 pm
Location: I am a prisoner in my own mind.
Contact:

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Drydic »

Yes Jay sometimes movies become dated by the passage of time.
Image Image
Common Zein Scratchpad & other Stuffs! OMG AN ACTUAL CONPOST WTFBBQ

Formerly known as Drydic.

User avatar
clawgrip
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1723
Joined: Wed Feb 29, 2012 8:21 am
Location: Tokyo

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by clawgrip »

Thanks for that Jespersen's Cycle, I didn't know about it. If I adapt it to past tense then I can use it to explain the past tense prefix in my language Naduta, which otherwise uses just suffixes for verbs.

User avatar
R.Rusanov
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 393
Joined: Sat Jan 05, 2013 1:59 pm
Location: Novo-je Orĭlovo

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by R.Rusanov »

Almost any sound change can act in a non-stereotypical fashion if its source is not the thing it's becoming.

So, say, palatalization from following iota will rarely delete itself, but compare: ikóna > kʲona > köna.
Or nasalization from VN will usually avoid transposing back to VN (exception: polish, but this happened more than a millenium after the nasalization had began, and it's still variable)
On the other hand, nasalization from hV wouldn't shock anyone if it became VN: hoda > õda > onda

I guess what I'm saying is sound changes usually avoid cancelling themselves. Maybe because they usually begin in the speech of the elderly, and some individuals with the archaic pronunciation are still around in the consciousnesses of speakers as they grow up, and that becomes considered an old-timey accent, and no one wants to start talking all old-timey again, or something... Maybe because - at least from the languages I've researched - native sound changes usually maintain distinctions between words but transpose them somehow, say codas to tone, or unstressed syllables to length on the stressed syllable, or unstressed front vowels to umlaut, etc. When mergers occur I've noticed it's mostly marked members of category A with unmarked members of category B, for example Western Romance merging ē with i, but this isn't always true, just a tendancy. Sardinian just dropped the length distinctions.

Just some thoughts
Slava, čĭstŭ, hrabrostĭ!

User avatar
Pole, the
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1606
Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2012 9:50 am

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Pole, the »

R.Rusanov wrote:Or nasalization from VN will usually avoid transposing back to VN (exception: polish, but this happened more than a millenium after the nasalization had began, and it's still variable)
Isn't colloquial French another exception?
And are these exceptions really exceptions?
The conlanger formerly known as “the conlanger formerly known as Pole, the”.

If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.

User avatar
Chuma
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 387
Joined: Sat Oct 28, 2006 9:01 pm
Location: Hyperborea

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Chuma »

One thing I can think of from Swedish is words that denote people of a certain age. Presumably young adults don't want to refer to themselves by the terms that were used for their parent generation.

Examples:

tant
aunt -> lady, woman -> stuffy old woman

dam
lady, noble woman -> lady, woman -> little old lady

User avatar
Terra
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 571
Joined: Tue May 24, 2005 10:01 am

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Terra »

Chuma wrote:One thing I can think of from Swedish is words that denote people of a certain age. Presumably young adults don't want to refer to themselves by the terms that were used for their parent generation.

Examples:

tant
aunt -> lady, woman -> stuffy old woman

dam
lady, noble woman -> lady, woman -> little old lady
This happens in English too: Uni-aged men are guys. Uni-aged women are girls.

This happens with names in general: All the Esther's and Margaret's that I know are my grandmother's age or older. Why some names start to sound old, but others don't, I don't know why. There's plenty of both old and young John's and Robert's, after all.

User avatar
R.Rusanov
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 393
Joined: Sat Jan 05, 2013 1:59 pm
Location: Novo-je Orĭlovo

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by R.Rusanov »

It has happened. Even more specifically, it has happened in your people's history. That doesn't mean it *happens*.

You cannot conclude "X > Y but Y >! X" from a single example of X > Y.
Slava, čĭstŭ, hrabrostĭ!

User avatar
Chuma
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 387
Joined: Sat Oct 28, 2006 9:01 pm
Location: Hyperborea

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Chuma »

Terra wrote:This happens in English too: Uni-aged men are guys. Uni-aged women are girls.
Indeed, we have those too.
Terra wrote:This happens with names in general: All the Esther's and Margaret's that I know are my grandmother's age or older. Why some names start to sound old, but others don't, I don't know why. There's plenty of both old and young John's and Robert's, after all.
Perhaps partly because those are so common. The rarer ones might get noticeable peaks (perhaps due to a celebrity, real or fictional - I think Harry is popular right now), which then starts a kind of pendulum thing, but with the common ones, you don't notice the peaks.

User avatar
Terra
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 571
Joined: Tue May 24, 2005 10:01 am

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Terra »

Chuma wrote:
Terra wrote:This happens in English too: Uni-aged men are guys. Uni-aged women are girls.
Indeed, we have those too.
Where are you from again?
Chuma wrote:
Terra wrote:This happens with names in general: All the Esther's and Margaret's that I know are my grandmother's age or older. Why some names start to sound old, but others don't, I don't know why. There's plenty of both old and young John's and Robert's, after all.
Perhaps partly because those are so common. The rarer ones might get noticeable peaks (perhaps due to a celebrity, real or fictional - I think Harry is popular right now), which then starts a kind of pendulum thing, but with the common ones, you don't notice the peaks.
I dunno. Where are all the Mary's, Henry's, and Howard's then?

And yeah, media has an effect. Nobody reads the bible anymore, but they do watch movies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_(name)

And then there's the whole phenomenon of Black names, and Whites who want to give "original"/strange names, but not those that are so exotic that they sound Black.

User avatar
Tropylium
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 512
Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2005 1:13 pm
Location: Halfway to Hyperborea

Re: Other linguistic treadmills?

Post by Tropylium »

gmalivuk wrote:
Terra wrote:Sound change.
Which sound changes are unidirectional like the semantic treadmills?
It's not completely unidirectional, but the typical development of vowel length/height/tenseness has some treadmillyness to it.

1) Open vowels acquire length spontaneously
2) Long vowels are raised
3) Long close vowels are shortened
4) Short close vowels are reduced
5) Close reduced vowels are lowered
6) Low reduced vowels become full again

E.g. Old to Modern English does a whole lot of #2, 4 & 5; in e.g. Australian English also #6, and then there are the ʟᴏᴛ/ᴄʟᴏᴛʜ and ᴛʀᴀᴘ/ʙᴀᴛʜ splits which are basically #1. Mainland Scandinavian has gone thru most of these too, ditto the Samic languages. Things like the Vulgar Latin, Middle to Modern Persian or Old to Modern Hungarian vowel shifts mostly take cues from here as well. The Ob-Ugric languages have some very good examples of this, too.

OTOH this pattern only really holds as long as there is a long/short or tense/lax contrast around.
[ˌʔaɪsəˈpʰɻ̊ʷoʊpɪɫ ˈʔæɫkəɦɔɫ]

Post Reply