Ok Is Not Okay

Last night I was playing Scrabble with two friends and I played the word "ok" (commonly spelled entirely with majuscules as OK) and my opponent decided to challenge me on it (I would like to comment that during the game we allowed several ficticious or non-English words such as aled and ozo (from עוזר) respectively, by agreeing not to challenge them; I'm not a crazy Scrabble-guy). It turned out that according to our 1978 Scrabble dictionary, ok is not a word, but the argued as less standard variant okay is. I was quite surprised to find this, but after some thought I decided that the Scrabble dictionary is a bizarre corupus as it is, so I shouldn't be too shocked. I double-checked with the contemporary online Scrabble dictionary, and it is the same in this regard.

It's strange to me that something as solidly lexicalized as ok is not considered a word by anyone, but all sorts of archaisms, non-standard spellings, clearly non-English words, and all sorts of onomatopoeia are allowed. Greek letters and solfège are also usual inclusions. While it's nice to have a clear and easy way to settle disagreements by agreeing on a dictionary beforehand, it's just too easy to want to argue with the source. It's the same with the OED or the Diccionario REAL, that they have such broad inclusion rules, that it's hard for them to be useful as an indicator of a word's validity. I even try to avoid using them sometimes, just so I don't have to deal with all of the archaisms and variants. Anyway, I lost 28 points and my turn from that, and ultimately would up losing the game, with well over 200 points, by 3 points to the guy who challenged me.

Indonesian Rap Son'

Recently I had the pleasure to listen to some music from Indonesia that is apparently considered to be part of the rap genre. I don't know how much it would fly under that label in this country nowadays, though I'm not sure when the song was made and much of that is neither here nor there. In context, I was able to pull out a few examples of reduplication, which is always fun when dealing with a language that has this phenomenon. What I found specifically interesting was that a lot of words seemed to elide the ultimate consonant, either completely, or partially, by not articulating it particularly. I don't think that it was for the purpose of rhyme or meter, but possibly it could've been for the purpose of being able to spit out the words smoother and quicker.
This happens quite a bit I know in American rap music, but I always had the association as being more cultural, rather than having any foot in the music. Perhaps they do just work well together. I can't say that I've noticed it in the various Ukrainian, Brazilian, and Japanese rap that I've come across, but I can't say that it wasn't ever there either. I'll have to keep my ears and eyes open in the future to observe it. If I can get ahold of the song, maybe I can do some further investigation.

A Raised Question

In reference to a recent post about my personal speech patterns regarding the words when and went, I commented that I produced these with the vowel [ɪ]. I thought that it had something to do with the pattern of w_n, and maybe it does, but it was recently pointed out to me that I have another alternate pronunciation. The part of the conversation went something like this:

I'll just have to talk to them.
[aɫ.ʤʌst.hæf.tə.tɔk.tʌ.ðɪm]

Them?
[ðɛːm]

This leads me to believe that maybe there is some other reasoning behind it. It comes to some problems, though, since the only similarity is that they both precede a nasal sound, and maybe that they follow a voiced sound, but I don't think that's the case. Even the words whence and then which have very similar contexts, but both have the [ɛ] and not the [ɪ], so it doesn't even look like an automatic change. The only thing I can think of that groups these words is that (1) these words are both quite frequently used "basic words" and (2) not likely to be confused with similar words with a higher vowel, such as then and possibly thin (or whence and wince, but rule one takes care of that). Another possible rule or set of rules is (3) certain phonetic constraints must occur, such as voiced_ or _nasal. I can only say that these might be possible reasons, and I really cannot conclude anything past these as to the mechanism(s) for why these words were chosen. One thing though, about the [ɛ] to [ɪ] switch, is that the latter is relatively shorter vowel, and requires less articulation. It's possible that a large part of this change is merely in order to ease pronunciation, I do also tend to like higher vowels (such as my substituion of [eʲ] for [æ] in front of [ŋ]). I'm going to start keeping track of similar contexts and words and see if there is any more of a pattern.

Handkerchief Of Idioms.

Mark Liberman just posted about the French expression dans un mouchoir de poche. Basically, he was discussing the meaning that something like an election or sports event is going to be close, that is to say, the competitors are evenly matched. This meaning is extrapolated from the fact that a handkerchief is small, I guess. In Spanish, we have the expression el mundo es un pañuelo, or literally in English the world is a handkerchief, and it is meant to express roughly the same thing as the English expression "small world." I'm curious how far this spreads, and if anybody else has noticed this, or even if the two are directly related. Personally, I never really thought anything particular about a хустка or a handkerchief's size, but it does seem that un pañuelo must be something small.

One of my teachers once told me that you should never translate directly between Spanish and English, because they are deceptively similar. Of course this is true, and one should always translate the semantic notion, but over the years it's been surprising how often parallel idioms come up (though the different ones can be spectacularly fun and difficult to translate). I'll have to keep my eyes peeled from now on and start jotting some of these guys down.

Basic Level Concern

While browsing the Ukrainian Wikipedia, I made it to the article on Птахи (Birds, you might call them) and I noticed something quite unusual. The picture they used for Birds was of some flamingos. I flipped through some other languages just to see what pictures people had, and many were relatively petite birds that you might consider to be prototypical as an English speaker (Robin is always given as the prototype in English, for Americans, it's effectively the bird-iest of the birds; incidentally, English Wikipedia has a wren) and quite a few had gulls, or birds that I would say were parrot-like. And there were a few other types that I thought might have some kind of basis, like the Cherokee stub for Birds having a picture of a turkey vulture.

As it looks, and I'll admit I haven't checked all of them, only Ukrainian and Russian Wikipedia features a flamingo as the primary picture of a bird (The Occitan article has an Owl though). I remember some time ago I was discussing basic level naming and prototype theory with a colleague and it was pointed out that you are more likely to produce typical members of the group. This makes a lot of sense in general, if one asked me to name a piece of furniture, I am more likely to say "chair" than "ottoman." Maybe this is just the case with animals, but, I tend to know a lot more "atypical" animals than "typical "ones. With the previous example of birds, the first birds that come to mind, and they won't be in any useful order for data since I've been looking at pictures of birds, would be:

sparrow, flamingo, vulture, parrot, hawk, crow, penguin, ostrich, robin, owl

Now, that's not a great sampling, but I bet that I could probably quickly come up with a good number of atypical birds:

flamingo, vulture, parrot, hawk, penguin, ostrich, owl, albatross, turkey, pelican, quail, emu, chicken, eagle, duck, goose, swan, falcon, kiwi, crane, stork, dodo, auk, booby, archaeopteryx

Probably more than typical, and certainly faster, and most of the typical would have at least one very distinct feature:

sparrow, crow, robin, wren, bluejay, cardinal, woodpecker, canary, dove, oriole, ?hummingbird, ?seagull, ?pigeon

It's probably the same for most animals, that the more distinctive they are, the easier they are to produce [I suppose this excludes animals you have reason to be around, which would probably trump this group, but after that, go straight for the most distinct, I asked a friend from Brooklyn and of course the first bird he gave was pigeon]. That seems pretty logical; most of the birds I came up with in the second catergory I consider pretty specific, whereas most of the former group of birds are quite "basic" to me, even if unusual. Regardless of how likely I am to come up with Wren before I get Flamingo in asking people to name a bird, I don't think somebody just picked the first bird they could think of, and I still don't think it's a great exemplar of Bird, but certainly it's a great example of how we index these kinds of things.

You Say じんじん, I Say Тьин Тьин

In speaking to a native Japanese (and English) speaker, a small dilemma came up. I can speak Japanese, but of course not perfectly. We were discussing restaurants and I mentioned one called Tin Tin which I pronounce as something like [tʲɪn.tʲɪn]. My acquaintance responded with several comments about the restaurant, and it became eventually apparent that we were discussing different restaurants. She had been saying something more like [ʤ̥ɪn.ʤ̥ɪn]¹ for the restaurant (spelled Jin Jin, maybe?). I guess it was just a case off people not being fully enough aware of the subtle nuances that are different beween different phonologies. Both of those are Chinese restaurants anyway, but I guess our assumptions about the pronunciation differs. It's interesting to me though, at least from an orthographic point of view, English /t/ and /j/ are rarely confused.
Incidentlly, most English monolinguals I know call it [tʰɪn.tʰɪn] would call the other [ʤɪn.ʤɪn].

Note ¹: I can never figure out how to insert the partial-devoicing sub-diacritic, pretend there is one under each /ʤ/. The worst part is that it shows up properly in the preview, but it doesn't seem to work ever in the actual post.

Apparently, for at least one other similarly named restaurant, Tin Tin means "fresh made daily." 天天, as seen here could be tiān tiān, meaning "every day," tin1 tin1 in Cantonese. The other restaurant may've also had 填 tián, tin4 in Cantonese, which can mean "make good," it seems.
Also, Jin Jin probably would have one of the characters as 金, jin1 (or jin4), meaning gold or golden, quite common in names of Asian restaurants, brands, and the like, but I can't determine just yet what the name could be.

Cyriggles

Somewhere I once saw a list of a few words that when written in Ukrainian (or some related language) cursive looked like a bunch of repeating squiggles. Perhaps my non-technical explanation suggests that examples would be better. I can't find it again, or remember any, but the ones I can produce would look something like this:

мили (washed, plural subject)
мити (to wash)
пити (to drink)
пиши (he writes)

You'll have to pretend that the characters are tied together. In that form they really do look just like a bunch of little lines. Basically any sequence that contains only и л м п т ц ш щ, й і ї if you include diacritics. You could probably even have something like *шишкебаб (for shish-kebab) which even not linked looks unusual. Maybe one day the list will make itself apparent.

When Did It Change?

It has basically always been the case that I have pronounced the word when as [wɪn], homophonous with the word win rather than as [wɛn] (Incidentally, I also say [wɪnt] not [wɛnt]. I considered the two to be distinct completely, unlike say, lie and lye, which I thought had a phonetic similarity. I didn't even realize that I was doing anything unusual or different from anybody else until somebody didn't understand me one time. I realized that it was in fact true that I pronounced the two the same, and decided eventually to take some pride in it. This all came crashing down the yesterday when I caught myself switching to the ɛ form completely naturally. It had always taken effort to produce the ɛ form and often came out as [ʍɛːn], but this time it was almost as if I had always been using that form, probably from all of the practice I get pointing out the thing that I don't say. I haven't seen any instances of [wɛnt] so far, though I wouldn't consider it to be at all unlikely. Hopefully I can keep my usage of [eʲŋ] in place of what is apparently far more common [æŋ], though it looks like the same kind of thing is happening.

And That's How It Works

I have just finished my watching a child I regularly do, and I wanted to make a quick note about something said earlier. Blake, let's call him, just picked up the food I had just finised preparing for him, french bread pizza cooked in the oven, and was bringing it in to the other room where we were watching some television on the box and quickly dropped one piece onto the floor with a splat, and immediately went:

And that's why you should never let me carry anything

Something I found quite humorous immediately, but also became a bit curious about shortly thereafter when I reflected a bit.
(Sorry for the delay here, if it seems disjointed it's because then I was at the house and now I'm in a lecture on Tzeltal folk taxonomy)
Anyway, the humor probably was immediate because it reminded me a lot of Bender's quote, from episode [2ACV19] of Futurama:

Fry: That was great!
Bender: And no one suspects a thing.

The other characters are scowling at them. Part of a wall collapses nearby.

Bender: And that's how we learned our lesson. [Fry nods]

Now, while Blake added a little something to his version to his, specifically implying that it was effectively my fault that the pizza fell, it's still very interesting to see these usages. The coordinator AND is well known to be able to start off sentences, despite what many "authorities" seem to suggest. R. W. Burchfield, in the a usage guide said that using AND can be useful for writers as the narrative continues. That seems to be the case in the first sequence where Bender starts a sentence with AND, effectively continuing in with what Fry just said. The subsequent AND, as well as Blake's, both don't seem to be continuing any narrative, but are the sole unit. The unifying feature of both is that they follow an action, and it seems that, syntactically, the unit that is being coordinated with is the action istelf. Or perhaps not the action, but rather, a description of the scenery? It's hard to tell in some cases. Either way, an interesting thing that I've noticed in various searches for and that's why and and that's how is that they are not generally used to continue a narrative, but rather are very final. The largely occur either isolated, or at the end of sequences. Another feature that seems to have become ingrained into the why sequences is that the statements are often very...I suppose I would group then as "aggressive." Something like:

And that's why you don't fuck with me!

While the how statements are much more on the solely terminitive side, à la:

And that's how you make pudding!

And that's how I learned all about these types of sentences.

A Book Can Only Show You So Much

I'm a little bit annoyed that in every lecture I attend or in any book I read where they have cause to mention the triconsonantal roots of Arabic and similar languages, I am always presented with the example of k-t-b, book, (or libro the first time I learned about it). One text I have makes brief mention of a second root x-l-f, Caliph. It's barely used to illustrate anything, but at least they are trying.

A + B = А + Б

It's always been pretty aparent that in the sequence of the word азбука /alphabet/, it was representing the letters /a/ and /b/ to some extent, just like you can see in the English alphabet. Of course, though, it's actually a sequence of the two first letters of Greek, Alpha + Bet(a), from which our writing system comes. I was reading up on an old form of the Cyrillic alphabet and I noticed that the first two letters were presented as:

Літери	Назва літер
А	азъ
Б	боѵкы

(Pardon my characters, I don't any for old Cyrillic, nor do most people I think. The 3rd chatacter in боѵкы is supposed to be a lower-case Cyrillic upsilon)

It then struck me that the names of the letters are something like [az] and [bukɪ], very similar to [azbuka], the word for alphabet. It seems that things aren't so different after all between languages. Incidentally, in my youth I sometimes inserted a /в/ into азбука creating азбуква. I guess deep down I just wanted it to go one letter further.

Diminutivies

Can anybody tell that I have to spend a lot of time around kids? Earlier today I noticed that this one young boy, he just turned six, adds the diminutive suffix -y rather frequently. Moreso than one might expect. Words I have noted are socky, booties, undies, and my favorite, booky-bagy. I thought this was an interesting phenomenon, and spent a little time thinking about the basis for his diminutive usage. I can only speculate, and I'm going to have to keep my ears open for more data, but it seems that based on these words here, that he uses this form for some things that have some relation to his person, things he wears. Since he is small (maybe not for a six year old, but certainly compared to say, me), he might use the diminutives to clarify that his possessions reflect his size. He is a small person, and thus has sockies, and not socks. He doesn't exclusively use these forms, that might be part of the basis for his choice. Or maybe he's just like the child in my last post and being adoreable by saying silly things that grown-ups find amusing.

Piggybank Ride

I love it when little kids just say things that aren't quite in line with what we do. An instance today happened when a girl of 6 or so was being given a piggyback ride, said:

Yay! I'm gettin' a piggy bank ride!

This was more just for fun, and everyone enjoys them, and I'm forever calling them piggy bank rides. Already I didn't know the etymology of piggyback, so this just seals the deal. Conversely, a different child on another occasion was referring to my at-the-time-existent pony-tail as such, but I thought she said pointy-tail, which I just loved the sound of.

A(n) N Problem

In writing the previous post, I initially wrote (emphasis added):

It's a great example of an MCP aspect of English.

But I paused for a second when using the word "an" instead of "a." It seems that it is still entrenched in my mind that you put "a" in front of words that start with consonants, and "an" in front of words that start with vowels.
This doesn't word for all sorts of words that I've already automated because I know the sound is a vowel sound or a consonant sound, such as: a union, a eulogy, but an honor, etc.

The natural unfamiliarity that arises in acronyms and initialisms might have something to do with my hesitation. To investigate, I googled some various word combinations:

	W/ "a"	W/ "an"	f¹
MBA	688,000	1,310,000	1:3
NBA	271,000	1,090,000	1:5
Honor	309,000	1,470,000	1:6
USA	1,600,000	144,000	11:12
Union	1,250,000	201,000	6:7
Eulogy	420,000	39,200	11:12

(Note¹: f is the likelihood of "a" occuring)
It's clear that some of the results, particularly those with 'a,' are not exact examples of what I was searching for, but, this should still give enough of an indication as to what is happening with people's fingers on the internet. There are some discrepencies; For example: X-Ray is much more common with an, but F-Stop was very close (about 4:9), slight preference for an.

Even more interestingly, I get comparable results for LSAT, but there are about three times as many instances of a SAT over an SAT. This can be explained by some instances of homophony, such as SAT meaning "saturday" or "satisfiability" and quite possibly pronounced [sæt]. To combat this, I did searches for "a SAT score" and "an SAT score" with about five times as many results for "a SAT score." Almost ironic, no?

Yes Sir, Ma'am

(This is old news, but it's something I've been wondering about and I think is still interesting, even if the basis is provided.)
Ron Moore was asked about why female officers in Battlestar Galactica are all addressed with SIR. His response:

...I liked the way it played and the implication that the honorific had become gender neutral at that point. [...] My personal feeling was that there was something vaguely condescending about "Yes, ma'am" versus "Yes, sir" in context and that by addressing everyone as "sir" it made a point about the egalitarian nature of Starfleet. It's certainly a debatable point [...] When I was writing the miniseries for Galactica, I decided I wanted to use sir for all the female characters and I even toyed briefly with the idea of calling Laura "Mister President" but that seemed like a step too far. Billy does call Laura "ma'am" on occasion, so the term itself does exist in the Galactica universe, but the military invariably calls her "sir."

I think this is an interesting observation. I don't really have any particular evidence, but I do too get the impression that, (thinking of children at least), when one goes "Yes, Sir," they are much more likely to be submissive, if not respectful. "Yes, Ma'am" seems to be rather more inclined to a sort of smarmy response. Perhaps this is just the fact that we're not too far from the very patriarchal male-dominate society, where father runs the family and mom just tends to the house and kids. It seems that everyone in the military could be called "ma'am" for egalitarian reasons, but that just wouldn't fly now, would it? It's a great example of an MCP aspect of English. (One influential, male, professor I had used this term, it's for Male Chauvinist Pig) How egalitarian is that? Regardless, it's still an interesting phenomenon that I embarrassingly actually thought for a few episodes was characteristic of the military.

Interlingual Humor Points

Mark Liberman just posted about interlingual taboos. The basic idea is that a speaker of one language will avoid using a word because they know it sounds like an inappropriate word in another language. Growing up speaking Ukrainian and English, we had a few of these types of things, but they weren't so much taboos; moreso, they were a point of humor, but then again, I also spent most of my time with males between, say, 16 and 25, so that's not impossible as a contributing factor. And speaking of contributions, here's mine for a short list of words¹ that a funny for people who know both languages.

бубен - drum - compare: boob, or booby
['bubɛn]/[bub] or ['bubi]
(possibly from Polish bęben, maybe?)

підносити - pick up - compare: penis
['piʔnosɪtɪ]/['pʰinɪs]
(from під "under" + носити "carry/bear")

просто тут - straight here - compare: prostitute
['prosto.tut]/['pɹastətʰut]
(as in "Я хочу лінія просто тут" "I want a straight line here")

and of course, the best of the best, and also the most ironic:

важай на мова - watch your language - compare: vagina
[ʋa'ʒaʲ.na.'moʋa]/[və'ʤaʲnə]
(according to my only handy resource, вáжати is "to weigh," no listing of важáти "to watch out (for)." In terms of watching out, though, it can be applied to anything, and is still humorous, just best with мова)

(Note¹: For anyone who can't tell from the examples, this is quite non-standard Ukrainian)

In terms of specific contexts, I had a buddy who when asked his hobbies, stated that he likes to play the drums, and used the aformentioned term, with some stress. I don't know if he normally said this and just added emphasis, or if he actually selected against using the standard term (барабан). Either way, it was meant to elicit a chuckle. Also, a lifeguard at a pool who had a bit of a funny side to her once asked everyone who was taking a lesson to form a straight line in front of her, and it was clear she used this form specifically for it's sound. I'm sure there are others that are escaping me, but that should probably be good for now.

Wordie: A Place For Words

Now, I'm sure I'm not the first to discover the completely useless, but somewhat spectacular Wordie, but I'd still like to comment on it.
I love the idea and think that it has great potential, but the biggest deterrent to me fooling around with the site that much is that there is no "random" feature, which I think is an essential, for both words and for lists. Possibly asking a little too much, but it'd also be nice if the search feature maybe gave you a google-style "did you mean?" and go for the closest word in alphabetical order, or maybe ever at one point the closest words (a la, word donk comes up for not-work tonk). That can wait though. I'll have to check back periodically for my fix of lexemes.

English Needs A Thneed

One of the categories I previously suggested for consonant cluster onsets included "ones that seem to be perfectly fine for usage, maybe sound a little foreign, but nobody would have trouble saying them, preferably with some kind of attestation that isn't a loanword"

THNEED doesn't seem to be a loan word, and I can't imagine too many people not being able to handle the sequence. It doesn't even sound particularly foreign to me, but then again, I might not be the best judge. Thneed is also interesting in that it looks as if it is a sort of compound word, of TH(ING) + NEED, or similar elements. In terms of candidacy, I think thneed is pretty good. Dr. Seuss, while being known for making up lots of unique words, usually did not make words that did not fit the constraints of English. In fact, in On Beyond Zebra!, I would say the two most curious new letters would be VROOM, which is homophonous with the onomatopoeia, and THNAD, another [θn] onset cluster. So, we have THNEED, THNAD, and of course THNADNERS. It doesn't seem so bad; maybe a little worse that [sn] in onsets.

I say, we go for it. Everyone needs a thneed, and that includes Funk, Wagnall, Merriam, and Webster.

Ukrainian: A Real Mother Tongue?

It happens occasionally that I'll have a little slip and Ukrainian will be about to come out of my mouth, but my tongue catches it before I confuse the daylights out of the people around me. It's quite infrequent as my English has dominated, and is considerably better than my Ukrainian at the present time. In fact, I almost never use my Ukrainian except when speaking with my mother these days. So, during a discussion where a friend and colleague was explaining how in a certain context when she only uses Spanish, she reverts to English solely when she is quite angry or frustrated. I thought about this and realized that all of the slips that I can recall are when I am around children (a regular occurence in my current field) and I want to yell at them I have to stop myself from saying it in Ukrainian. When I was a child, Ukrainian was much more common for me, and it was not uncommon at all for me to be commanded in the way I seem to be wanting to do deep down to these kids now. But the real question is, why?

My only theory is that there is a typle of conceptual "slot" for certain grammatical forms that each person has inside. In English, most of the forms just default back to the root, so for example the verb PUSH has the same form for many different tenses (I push, you push, we push, you all push, they push) and the imperative mood (push!), while in Ukrainian, there is a unique form for the imperative mood, пхай¹, and this form seems to occupy the default for the imperative. Of course, for this to be true for this reason alone, I'd probably have to default on other distinctions in form, such as tense, that exist in Ukrainian and not in English. Most likely, this is not the case, but I wouldn't doubt it as being a significant factor.

Incidentally, the reason I chose пхай was because the only instance I know of my mother unknowingly slipping out of English and into Ukrainian was when helping a small child with his shoe and wanting him to push his foot into the shoe.

Maybe Ukrainian is just naturally suited for guiding young ones. I suppose that is just as plausible as anything else here.

Note¹: пхай might not be best translated as push in all contexts (it's also the word for pick as in don't pick your nose!), but it's certainly the one to use for when you are telling somebody to shove their foot into a shoe.

Lost Sans Translation

There seems to be a trend in some television shows I see where people will speak in a language other than English. This occurs in several forms, all of which I enjoy and find daring. Lost is a great example of this, where lots of conversation occurs in other languages. In today's episode alone, all three of the following were used.

Form 1: Speakers use a foreign language, and subtitles are used to convey the meaning to the audience since there is little to no English in the scene.
Form 2: Speakers use a foreign language without subtitles, and then proceed to explain what was said, usually paraphrased, in English.
Form 3: Speakers use a foreign language without subtitles, and without any clarification afterwards. This one is used quite sparingly.

I couldn't make out all of the Russian, but she said at the end: Ти знаєш що мушеш робити. "You know what you must do." And yes, I know I wrote that in Ukrainian, it was just simpler that way for me.

Post Berriak

Firstly, I don't actually know anything about Basque grammar or word order or anything really related to Basque. To enlighten myself, I decided to do some guided translations. I had a translation of a work in Basque, sentence by sentence, and I set out to deduce what each word seemed to mean. This would look something like the following, but trust that mine were more complicated (bolded for what I add):

Hau etxea da. (This is a house) [this/house/is]

Nothing technical, this was just to practice and expand my horizons. There were some difficulties in establishing the exact meaning of some function words, but overall it was pretty straightforward. With my confidence high, I took to finding random other Basque phrases, expressions, and the like to play with. I was able even to figure out some grammatical aspects to the language looking at all of these expressions. Then I came across Berri txarrak. I immediately recognized the content value, but was confused when I noticed that the adjective seemed to mark the plural, but the noun didn't. I glossed it as follows

Berri txarrak. (Bad news) [news/bad+plural]

I searched around to see how I managed to foul this one up. Multiple instances of berriak were found meaning news, and I did also find the following:

Txiste berriak (New jokes) [joke/new+plural]

The translation is certain, and the gloss is probably quite on, so here is a parallel where you can substitute those same units and have the meaning parallel. I did discoverd usages of berri occuring by itself, as in Hampshire Berri for New Hampshire. It looks like berri occuring after the noun give it the significance of new. When it occurs first, and before another adjective, it becomes the noun news. I guess you would then have:

Berri berriak (New news) [news/new+plural]

and not

?Berriak berri (New news) [news+plural/new]

Maybe there's some other stuff that has to do with whether something encompasses a phrase or not, especially since it seems to be the last unit. Still though, I love how the plural agreement morpheme seems to fall on the adjective, but not on the noun. I don't think I've seen that anywhere else.

Note: a quick check of a Basque grammar reference tells me that -ak is added to the end of a phrase. That made things simple.

Sound Thwymbolism

There's something about the sequence THW that crossed my mind during the last post. All of the contemporary words I was able to come up with have this aspect of intensity to them thwart - to stop somebody, thwomp - a giant stone creature who can crush you and obstruct your path (from the Mario video games), thwack - onomatopoeia of something hitting something else, thwip - the sound of Spider-Man's web-shooter firing.

There are derivatives of a secondary meaning of thwart that don't seem to convey this, but they seem to be fairly specialized or poetic (if not stilted), and not all usages of the sound sequence are necessary for the symbolism anyway (Though thwartwise still just makes me think of the symbolic usage).

In all honesty, I can't produce any other examples (Pathway and lathwork have it but not as on onset) , and I'll admit that the tying together of the three newer productions is tenuous, but I still think there is something there. The sequence of the interdental [θ] followed by a labial sound [w] is the perfect setup for this explosion of sound that I just can't see as being used for the new extra soft pillows you'll be buying soon enough.

Incidentally, there was a neologism produced by myself and a friend thbiper (something like [ðbʌɪpɚ] or [θpʌɪpɚ], but I don't remember the exact meaning (some kind of creature, I think).

Consonant Cluster Classes

I was always told that I can't use interjections or onomatopoeia or names as a good source of linguistic data about a language, certainly at least its standard form and function, but there is a lot of insight that I think these can illustrate. In particular, lately I've been looking at two aspects of the sound system of English (you will see a good number of posts on this topic), and there are some quirks that came up in debate. So, with syllable onsets, we created a chart that had the purpose of illustrating what are viable syllable onsets, but some debate arose over what counts as an acceptable cluster and what doesn't.

First, there are some clusters deemed to be perfectly viable for English onsets that only have a few words in English (and their derivatives). THW (thwart), DW (dwindle, dwarf, dwell). GW was deemed /not/ to be included on this list despite having many perfectly accepted loan words, mostly for plants, animals, and foods (guava, guanabana, guacamole, guar (gum), guano) several perfectly accepted place names (Guam, Guatemala) and even the name Gwen, and its variants.

Now, I'm not here to say that we should not consider THW legit, it still has some uses in English (thwomp, thwack, thwip) but I think that GW needs to be considered in some kind or organizational group. I propose three categories of distinction for these clusters. First, native cluster, where the effective requirement is that there is at least one "native" word which has this cluster, and all the better if you have some other words (like Dwight and Dwayne the names). Second, viable clusters, ones that seem to be perfectly fine for usage, maybe sound a little foreign, but nobody would have trouble saying them, preferably with some kind of attestation that isn't a loanword (such as the band Gwar or the Mushroomhead song Bwomp). The third catergory would include clusters that are quite unlikely to occur in English, such as TL, VW, or SR. Perhaps a fourth category could be used to account for certain unusual clusters that effectively produce a closed class of words, such as the PF in the interjections pff and pfaugh

Reduplicationatration

There is an interesting semi-productive phenomena that is occuring in a house belonging to somebody I know. To demonstrate the unusual size of an object, you take the objects name, add a schwa to the end of it, then repeate the last syllable of the original word, with tr as the onset sound. The two things I observed were the remotatrote and the bongatrong.

The labelling is largely ornamental, nobody uses the terms to distinguish between two objects, and the larger ones are not always referred to with the reduplicated name. Nonetheless, I still think that it is a curious development. I would be interested to see how outsiders would interpret a word such as remoteatrote were they asked to produce a definition, or even to see what people might do if they were given the situation where they had to change elements of the word remote to signify a larger remote, but the final result must also be one word.

Get Your Hands Off Me, (Wo)man!

An interesting phenomenon I observerd recently was two young boys, both 5 if I remember correctly, who have developed an interesting emphatic element to their speech. The first boy, let's call him Mac, was misbehaving in some way or another, so I intervened, which required putting myself in his path, and preventing his escape with my physical person, specifically my arms. Upon running into my arms he exclaimed Get your hands off me, woman! Now, I may've had hair longer than your average Joe at this point, but Mac definitely knows that I am male. I sadly don't remember exactly what the next boy, Greg let's say, said, but it was basically an echoing of Mac's sentiment along the lines of Yeah, woman! and it's quite possible that Greg was merely parroting Mac's words. Mac did however produce another sentence with woman! tacked on that has since escaped me, but even had he not, we are still left witht the original generation of woman in Mac's speech.

So, why did Mac seem to think that this was something to say to me? Sure, little kids seem to say silly things all of the time, Greg himself is notorious for confusing me with another grown-up he knows but I don't think that this is the case. It looks to me, that at some point Mac heard a sentence produced by a man something like Do the dishes, woman! quite possibly as part of a gag on a television program, (a teacher I know half-jokingly suggested Spongebob as a culprit) and observed that that sentence seems to have a lot more force than the relatively wimpy Do the dishes!

I am sure that he is able to tell the difference between men and women, and knows what the word woman means, I think he just chose to focus on the position at the end, since it seemed to be the significant change to the amount of emphasis in the sentence. I also truly don't think he was trying to emasculate or demean me by calling me a woman. In fact, Mac would probably have said something like Get your hands off me, man! if he had a better sense of productivity. Apparently lacking this, he defaulted to the original as he still needed something in the slot to better drill his point home.

(Thanks to Rachel for significant feedback)

Sound Symbolism For Neanderthal Names

So, there is evidence that there are some crosslinguistic truths in terms of sound symbolism. I remember being presented with the argument that if you give the made up words takeet and ulaama (or something like that) to speakers of any language, they would say that the former is sharp and edged, but the latter is round and smooth, due to the features of the sounds. It's clear that there is an element of truth to this, but I think it doesn't extend so much. For example, there are a lot of sn- words, (the ones I can think of: snarl, sneer, sneeze, snicker, sniff, snivel, snooze, snore, snort, snot, snout, snuff) that have to do with the nose, and even still some more that don't literally but still make you think of a nose (such as snub, snooty, snotty, and maybe snide, which are all semantically related as well), but this is only in English, and maybe some genetically related languages.

What I am ultimately trying to get at, is that in English, we have names like GROK. I think that many people would say that this sounded like a name for a caveman, and even that some people would produce this or something similar if asked to make a caveman name (A friend of mine produced TROG at this question). The curiosity lies in what other cultures have for this type of thing, and whether or not ours (or theirs too, why not?) is based on some historical passing down of caveman type names that we have all just gotten used to.

Incidentally, I found a caveman name generator online I was hoping to use to gather data, but it seems to just spit out weird semi-stereotypical Native American type names, such as Black Eagle With Yellow Leg or Prancing Buffalo.

Please Prepay First

There is a gas station not too far from where I live. On the pump it reads PLEASE PREPAY FIRST. What exactly is going on here? At first I figured that this must be some kind of oversight. With the adaption of "prepay" in most stations, I thought that maybe somebody just changed pay to prepay to follow suit, but forgot to read the finished product. But maybe what is happening is that the first is implying that the first step is to prepay. This seems somewhat plausible, but it then renders the pre- prefix sort of meaningless, since you could just then Please Pay First to convey that meaning. The only thing that I can think of, however likely it may be, is that this is an instance of reduplication of semantic content as an emphatic.

This type of thing can happen with repetition of words Your friend is an ugly ugly man or with syllables as in the Spanish Su amigo es feisisimo (Your friend is very very ugly), or even with the extention of a single phoneme as in Your friend is u-u-ugly, but I can't actually think of an occurence where I have seen this specific type of phenomenon.

The closest that I can produce would be something like a double negative for emphasis, which occurs in some people's speech in English. This would be something like I don't know nobody here, where the nobody is not obligatory, as it is in some dialects. In that case we have two distinct elements, don't and nobody which have the semantic value of negative and one merely adds to the other. The other I came up with was reduplication, of all words, which, according to my etymological dictionary, is composed of a prefix that means "again" and a root that seems to also have semantic value for "again." In other words, why isn't it just called duplication?

In any event, I think it was just a little blunder on somebody's part, but maybe the clerk was just sick and tired of people not paying in advance.