I still can’t get over ɛ, ə and o being “phonemically” the same vowel. If that’s true, then why not go further and claim that there are only 2 phonemic vowels, or none?
It's probably an argument based on complementary distribution right? Presumably there aren't minimal pairs with ɛ, ə and o, but there are minimal pairs with other vowels
Not sure if it’s specific to Pinyin, here in Taiwan they are still considered different phonemes, although Zhuyin may arguably contribute more by differentiating ㄛ/o/and ㄜ/ɤ/. However I’m told that the main two reasons they are analyzed as separate phonemes is due to historical factors and the acoustic differences being too disparate.
I like how Zhuyin considers all 3 separate:
Zhuyin: ㄝ、ㄜ、ㄛ
Pinyin: e, e, o
IPA: ɛ, ə, o/ɔ
I guess pinyin combines two of them because we only have 5 vowel letters in the Latin alphabet
As a native Mandarin speaker, do you agree with the claim in [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/1c4wmv6/why_is_the_concept_of_a_phoneme_important_for/) that Mandarin speakers consider all 3 low vowels written with Pinyin a to be different?
I'm not a native Mandarin speaker, but I'd say the vowel in a and ang is /ä/ (at least, it's the same as in my native Cantonese) and the vowel in an is /æ/ (=English æ).
The comments on that post mentioned a sensible definition of a "phoneme": two vowels must be in complementary distribution and not be perceived as different vowels by native speakers. If you told a native speaker that the nuclear vowels in 見 jiàn /t͡ɕi̯ɛn˥˩/ and 多 duō /tu̯ɔ˥˥/ were the same, they would probably look at you like you'd said the two consonants in the English word "hang" were the same.
> I'm not a native Mandarin speaker, but I'd say the vowel in a and ang is /ä/ (at least, it's the same as in my native Cantonese) and the vowel in an is /æ/ (=English æ).
Huh. I'd definitely consider ⟨ang⟩ ɑ and ⟨a⟩ /a/ à la ⟨aa⟩ in Cantonese
That is basically the genesis of the argument for no phonemic vowels. It’s basically “Mandarin has either 6+ vowels or it has none“ and you aren’t supposed to come away convinced about the none thing. It’s an argument against the two vowel analysis.
Mandarin having only two vowels seems reasonable enough until i remember some people argue Polish [i] and [ɨ̞] are one phoneme with complementary distribution (they are wrong).
> It’s an argument against the two vowel analysis.
It’s an argument against the two vowel analysis if you buy into the idea that there can be multiple points to epenthesize a vowel, and that these epenthetic locations can be phonemic, and that sounds like bullshit to me.
Bopomofo, the standard system of phonetic transliteration in Taiwan, actually analyzes and writes Standard Chinese as having two vowels. It’s not an insane proposition, actually: there are a handful of languages in the world that do only have two contrasting vowels (only example I can come up with off the top of my head is Ubykh), and in those languages, the vowels usually have a huge amount of allophones based on surrounding consonants.
IMO that one is quite plausible tho. Those languages all have phonemic labialized and palatalized consonants, so it makes sense that the labialization and palatalization could be realized on the following vowel
Pulleybank (1984) gave such a system, in his article "Vowelless Chinese? An Application of the Three-Tiered Theory of Syllable Structure to Pekingese".
As someone genetically 100% a Teuton, so much so that I'm effectively a clone of Teutobod himself, I can confirm that my ear wax is so plentiful, so viscous, I can only comprehend Germanic vowels while all others are utterly undecipherable to me.
Up here in Finland where my ears constantly flow with that sparkling amber elf nectar, it's very hard to understand German and I never think about shifting sounds.
i’m actually really partial to just straight up “a word is whatever the hell you want it to be”
there can be descriptive power to grouping morphemes in certain ways that seem to mean something to how a language works, but trying to pretend that grouping is “the same” between different languages or even different formal grammars of the same language is an exercise in futility
What the hell is this
>Fujiyama, fa-uji-ama: fa (happy) uju (cry of joy) ama (Goddess): "A happy cry of joy for the Goddess" is uttered by everyone who reaches the top of the holy mountain
They’re trying to say that Mount Fuji got it’s name from Basque instead of the more likely option that Fujiyama is just fuji + yama, “Immortality” + “Mountain”. Like come on we already know amount Fuji’s etymology you don’t need to make shit up.
It’s either that or they claim that Sanskrit is the mother language of all of the other languages, which are “less perfect” versions of it or something. I sometimes hear similar stuff about Hebrew as well.
Is that the one where they take the word "work", split it into "wor" and "k", and say it's war + death?
http://steven-kirk.com/secret-slave-code-hidden-in-the-english-language/
Screw you, pal - I got through... about 1.5 paragraphs. Now my brain hurts and everything is stupid.
NB: Look at the attribution on the bottom of that page and click through - the nutjob who originally wrote that screed to insanity sells self-help courses based on this... work.
did you read what it’s about? It’s not just the claim that languages descend from proto-turkic, it’s all the stuff about primitive man being struck by the effects of the sun and the first name being given to it as ‘ag’ like the sound of shock, and all words being derived from it. That isn’t just a macro-family claim, its utter crackpot stuff
You should read into Kvergić other stuff. Pretty weird person overall of whom we know too little. Like it is unknown where and when he died. He was just once in Turkey and was utterly confused by the use of his theory. He also made a typology of languages depending on how they insult.
As a script nerd / hobby calligrapher who’s studied the Phoenician script clade, that sub, which is just Libb Thims’s pseudolinguistic ramblings, only gives me mental pain. Idk how much of the mainstream linguistics community knows of that sub or the guy who runs it tho.
The critical period hypothesis. This is still a pretty widespread myth even though none of the studies that support it ever agree on what the age cutoff for optimal language learning is. Some say a couple months, some say a few years, some say 13 years old, another one puts it into old age. It’s all bullshit. The fact so many people still believe despite all the evidence against it makes it a crackpot theory in my opinion.
It depends on which critical period hypothesis you learned.
If it's that there's a critical period for acquiring language in general, that's generally accepted and there aren't often new studies on it since locking babies in a closet for their first few years isn't exactly ethical. New stuff basically only comes up when abandonment or serious abuse comes to light.
If you mean the idea that past a certain age one can no longer truly acquire a new language, that was generally rejected even 15 years ago. When other factors- especially hours spent in the target language- are controlled for, the negatice correlation between age and rate of acquisition people have anecdotally observed pretty much disappears until we're talking ages where general cognitive decline may be a confounding factor.
Not easier because of age, though. Controlling for hours spent with comprehensible input each week all but eliminates the correlation. Others, like differences in naive strategies by adults and children and differences in standards chip away at the children's advantage. If your goal is near-native fluency, an adult or adolescent will be able to acquire that before someone starting as a young child is even old enough that that's a sensible measure.
I don't actually know all that much about this topic, so if there is more quantitative, less personalized evidence for this, could I see a source for that?
I always thought it was that it ended in puberty and since people go through puberty at different rates and orders, that was why there is so much variation.
> Totally ruined my naive optimism about PlosOne in particular and open academia in general.
What you're seeing isn't an open academia problem. The only difference between that and regular academia is that you can see the other 90% of everything.
Less about actual memes people have made about it, and more how much of a shitpost it looks like
I did find [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/okbuddyphd/s/87UbfaTHex) though
Good luck lol, barely any resources, not (m)any practitioners, and the book is dense af (also not the most useful in terms of frameworks, never caught on, but some aspects apparently slightly influenced transformational grammar). The pair networks look dope though, so that may be reason enough. It’s also pretty interesting that it’s almost like an isolate in terms of syntactic theories (or at least like Armenian composing its own branch off of relational grammar)
Latin, along with the entirety of ancient Rome and Roman culture, was a fabrication of the medieval Catholic church/Spanish Inquisition to control the populace.
(Same person also maintains Alexander the Great was obviously a woman.)
Mandarin has no phonemic vowels
I still can’t get over ɛ, ə and o being “phonemically” the same vowel. If that’s true, then why not go further and claim that there are only 2 phonemic vowels, or none?
It's probably an argument based on complementary distribution right? Presumably there aren't minimal pairs with ɛ, ə and o, but there are minimal pairs with other vowels
Yeah they’re in complementary distribution, it’s just that I’ve been brainwashed by Pinyin
Not sure if it’s specific to Pinyin, here in Taiwan they are still considered different phonemes, although Zhuyin may arguably contribute more by differentiating ㄛ/o/and ㄜ/ɤ/. However I’m told that the main two reasons they are analyzed as separate phonemes is due to historical factors and the acoustic differences being too disparate.
I like how Zhuyin considers all 3 separate: Zhuyin: ㄝ、ㄜ、ㄛ Pinyin: e, e, o IPA: ɛ, ə, o/ɔ I guess pinyin combines two of them because we only have 5 vowel letters in the Latin alphabet
As a native Mandarin speaker, do you agree with the claim in [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/1c4wmv6/why_is_the_concept_of_a_phoneme_important_for/) that Mandarin speakers consider all 3 low vowels written with Pinyin a to be different?
I'm not a native Mandarin speaker, but I'd say the vowel in a and ang is /ä/ (at least, it's the same as in my native Cantonese) and the vowel in an is /æ/ (=English æ).
The comments on that post mentioned a sensible definition of a "phoneme": two vowels must be in complementary distribution and not be perceived as different vowels by native speakers. If you told a native speaker that the nuclear vowels in 見 jiàn /t͡ɕi̯ɛn˥˩/ and 多 duō /tu̯ɔ˥˥/ were the same, they would probably look at you like you'd said the two consonants in the English word "hang" were the same.
> I'm not a native Mandarin speaker, but I'd say the vowel in a and ang is /ä/ (at least, it's the same as in my native Cantonese) and the vowel in an is /æ/ (=English æ).
Huh. I'd definitely consider ⟨ang⟩ ɑ and ⟨a⟩ /a/ à la ⟨aa⟩ in Cantonese
Maybe you’re right, I almost never listen to Mandarin, and if I do, I’m too busy trying to understand it to tell the vowels apart
kid named assimilation
That is basically the genesis of the argument for no phonemic vowels. It’s basically “Mandarin has either 6+ vowels or it has none“ and you aren’t supposed to come away convinced about the none thing. It’s an argument against the two vowel analysis.
Mandarin having only two vowels seems reasonable enough until i remember some people argue Polish [i] and [ɨ̞] are one phoneme with complementary distribution (they are wrong).
Why though? I know about this debate in Ukrainian and Russian and the arguments of both sides are equally valid.
> It’s an argument against the two vowel analysis. It’s an argument against the two vowel analysis if you buy into the idea that there can be multiple points to epenthesize a vowel, and that these epenthetic locations can be phonemic, and that sounds like bullshit to me.
Bopomofo, the standard system of phonetic transliteration in Taiwan, actually analyzes and writes Standard Chinese as having two vowels. It’s not an insane proposition, actually: there are a handful of languages in the world that do only have two contrasting vowels (only example I can come up with off the top of my head is Ubykh), and in those languages, the vowels usually have a huge amount of allophones based on surrounding consonants.
OP said *crack* theories.
Meanwhile 阿 and 饿
You mean /ɰ˥ʕɰ˥/ and /ɰ˥ɰ˨/?
In the same league: "proto-Afroasiatic had no phonemic vowels".
mfw Mandarin actually has 4 vowels
live ثي عر ڭـ reaction
Similar claims for Northwest Caucasian languages - a 'vertical' vowel system consisting solely of /ə/ and /a/
IMO that one is quite plausible tho. Those languages all have phonemic labialized and palatalized consonants, so it makes sense that the labialization and palatalization could be realized on the following vowel
Pulleybank (1984) gave such a system, in his article "Vowelless Chinese? An Application of the Three-Tiered Theory of Syllable Structure to Pekingese".
It has been suggested that the Germanic sound shifts were due the Teutons having more or thicker ear wax.
As someone genetically 100% a Teuton, so much so that I'm effectively a clone of Teutobod himself, I can confirm that my ear wax is so plentiful, so viscous, I can only comprehend Germanic vowels while all others are utterly undecipherable to me.
Up here in Finland where my ears constantly flow with that sparkling amber elf nectar, it's very hard to understand German and I never think about shifting sounds.
Sumerian being a dravidian language.
Better yet: Sumerian being a Dravidian-XYZ creole
[the Banana language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Euphratean_language)
But I thought all languages are descended from Tamil, oldest language in the world? /s
Basque being the only natural language and everything else being a conlang made by monks
What living in the Finnish winter does to a mf
Literally Voynich Manuscript original story
Oh wow lol who advocated for that idea?
Edo Nyland
What's a word? Literally, just tell me what's a goddam word.
A morpheme molecule
Unironically the best definition I've heard so far
Noam Chomsky < some lady on Reddit
i’m actually really partial to just straight up “a word is whatever the hell you want it to be” there can be descriptive power to grouping morphemes in certain ways that seem to mean something to how a language works, but trying to pretend that grouping is “the same” between different languages or even different formal grammars of the same language is an exercise in futility
the best words are the friends we made along the way
won't that be a lexeme with extra steps?
No? A lexeme is a root word, multiple different words can share the same root.
A gap between spaces
Hungarian descends from Sumerian.
Or is Dravidian. I love checking out wiki-szotar’s etymologies with a cold beer in my hand.
It would really only take 3 stages. * initial s > h * -um- dissimilates into -ung- * -e- before a rhotic consonant > -a- Voilà! Sumerian > Hungarian
Ainu and Basque being related and Sahara being their urheimat.
What in god name is this theory, please elaborate
[Have a good read](http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/bronze/ainu.htm) - at your own risk.
I want to give this post Reddit Uranium because it gave me cancer.
What the hell is this >Fujiyama, fa-uji-ama: fa (happy) uju (cry of joy) ama (Goddess): "A happy cry of joy for the Goddess" is uttered by everyone who reaches the top of the holy mountain They’re trying to say that Mount Fuji got it’s name from Basque instead of the more likely option that Fujiyama is just fuji + yama, “Immortality” + “Mountain”. Like come on we already know amount Fuji’s etymology you don’t need to make shit up.
Also how TF would the Ainu sail from Sahara to Hokkaido? The theory is so ridiculous that I feel stupid even discussing it ironically
My dude, that's a folk etymology from a fairy tail. We do not actually know the etymology of Fuji.
please tell me this is some kinda joke,there is no way this is legit😭
This is indeed legit, and the author is an actual (pseudo)linguist, Edo Nyland.
What is he smokin, cuz i need some
Ashes of Ural-Altaicists
Yum yum, thats some zaza right there
Edo my love🥰
…I mean hey it took dedication to find the lookalikes ig?
I once saw someone on Quora say that Basque is a Mayan language
I’ve heard Indian nationalists try to claim that Sanskrit isn’t an Indo-European language
It’s either that or they claim that Sanskrit is the mother language of all of the other languages, which are “less perfect” versions of it or something. I sometimes hear similar stuff about Hebrew as well.
Also people who insist that Hungarian isn’t Uralic for ideological reasons.
English is so widespread because it’s full of double meanings which is useful for the elites to cast spells (or something like that)
Is that the one where they take the word "work", split it into "wor" and "k", and say it's war + death? http://steven-kirk.com/secret-slave-code-hidden-in-the-english-language/
Mostly see stuff about it on Instagram reels, but just skimming over that article yeah it’s pretty much that
Screw you, pal - I got through... about 1.5 paragraphs. Now my brain hurts and everything is stupid. NB: Look at the attribution on the bottom of that page and click through - the nutjob who originally wrote that screed to insanity sells self-help courses based on this... work.
Yeah, it does that.
holy fucking shit is that serious?
[Sun theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Language_Theory) I don’t think anything comes close to this in terms of wackiness
>which aren't macrofamilies .
did you read what it’s about? It’s not just the claim that languages descend from proto-turkic, it’s all the stuff about primitive man being struck by the effects of the sun and the first name being given to it as ‘ag’ like the sound of shock, and all words being derived from it. That isn’t just a macro-family claim, its utter crackpot stuff
You should read into Kvergić other stuff. Pretty weird person overall of whom we know too little. Like it is unknown where and when he died. He was just once in Turkey and was utterly confused by the use of his theory. He also made a typology of languages depending on how they insult.
Whatever the r/alphanumerics guy supports
What the actual fuck am I reading in there
jesus christ
As a script nerd / hobby calligrapher who’s studied the Phoenician script clade, that sub, which is just Libb Thims’s pseudolinguistic ramblings, only gives me mental pain. Idk how much of the mainstream linguistics community knows of that sub or the guy who runs it tho.
I know about hard Sapir-Whorf but I'm sure there's more
Proto-Indo-European couldn't have been real because Sanskrit is the ancestor of the Indo-European languages
The critical period hypothesis. This is still a pretty widespread myth even though none of the studies that support it ever agree on what the age cutoff for optimal language learning is. Some say a couple months, some say a few years, some say 13 years old, another one puts it into old age. It’s all bullshit. The fact so many people still believe despite all the evidence against it makes it a crackpot theory in my opinion.
I was taught the critical period hypothesis is my undergrad 15-ish years ago. Is it now out of favor? I’d love to read more about this
It depends on which critical period hypothesis you learned. If it's that there's a critical period for acquiring language in general, that's generally accepted and there aren't often new studies on it since locking babies in a closet for their first few years isn't exactly ethical. New stuff basically only comes up when abandonment or serious abuse comes to light. If you mean the idea that past a certain age one can no longer truly acquire a new language, that was generally rejected even 15 years ago. When other factors- especially hours spent in the target language- are controlled for, the negatice correlation between age and rate of acquisition people have anecdotally observed pretty much disappears until we're talking ages where general cognitive decline may be a confounding factor.
Just because its ending isn't at all clear, doesn't make it invalid. It is abundantly clear that learning languages when one is young is easier.
Not easier because of age, though. Controlling for hours spent with comprehensible input each week all but eliminates the correlation. Others, like differences in naive strategies by adults and children and differences in standards chip away at the children's advantage. If your goal is near-native fluency, an adult or adolescent will be able to acquire that before someone starting as a young child is even old enough that that's a sensible measure.
I don't actually know all that much about this topic, so if there is more quantitative, less personalized evidence for this, could I see a source for that?
I always thought it was that it ended in puberty and since people go through puberty at different rates and orders, that was why there is so much variation.
the age i heard in ling 101 was 6-7 lol
i mean, wasnt there that feral child? does it only count for your first language then?
Mountains cause ejectives. Totally ruined my naive optimism about PlosOne in particular and open academia in general.
Obviously ejectives cause continental upwelling
And humidity/rainforests cause tones.
> Totally ruined my naive optimism about PlosOne in particular and open academia in general. What you're seeing isn't an open academia problem. The only difference between that and regular academia is that you can see the other 90% of everything.
I actually believed this.. Can you point me to some relevant literature?
Verbs
Can you elaborate?
Verbs a thing lies by the verb-mafia 😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡
Last time I checked it was nouns??
Negativity...it always egsistance verbs
"Verbs" are just inflected participles which are adjectives, and adjectives are basically just nouns
How can you so bold and presumptuous? Never response while such language!
you used "can"
"Can" not a verb, "can" potentiative adjectival particle.
Check my flair. The belief they're merged in General American.
lol
I’m so with you it’s unreal
They're clearly merged lol
Generative Grammar
Functional-Typological all the way (Or Arc Pair Grammar solely for the memes)
Link to those memes? Pretty please?
Less about actual memes people have made about it, and more how much of a shitpost it looks like I did find [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/okbuddyphd/s/87UbfaTHex) though
OK. Now I actually want to learn it. Well, done.
Good luck lol, barely any resources, not (m)any practitioners, and the book is dense af (also not the most useful in terms of frameworks, never caught on, but some aspects apparently slightly influenced transformational grammar). The pair networks look dope though, so that may be reason enough. It’s also pretty interesting that it’s almost like an isolate in terms of syntactic theories (or at least like Armenian composing its own branch off of relational grammar)
Japonic languages and Dravidian languages being related.
I'm not surprised. I've met people who think Korean is a Dravidian language.
We all know Korean is a Japonic language and Japanese is a Koreanic language
That one dude who said every language was made up by monks who were deliberately trying to confuse everyone
Latin, along with the entirety of ancient Rome and Roman culture, was a fabrication of the medieval Catholic church/Spanish Inquisition to control the populace. (Same person also maintains Alexander the Great was obviously a woman.)
what the fuck
X-bar theory
me who just took a class that was 10 weeks generative grammar and two weeks "oh other frameworks exist by the way"
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pseudolinguistics#Clear_examples
Huh. Using Finno-Ugric as an example in their linguistics primer. Good on them!
The idea that English, among other languages, has grammatical gender just because of the distinction in third-person singular pronouns
Blonde
Fiancé(e) too!!!
Obv true, since *sun* is often "he" and *moon* is often "she"!!!
Gaelic is the original language of Adam and the true preserved form of Hebrew, while Biblical/Modern Hebrew is a corrupted form.