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Great Vowel Shift

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Re: Great Vowel Shift

#131

Post by JackFr »

yesenadam wrote: post #125
eindiran wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vowel shift is a term of art in linguistics, so I'm not sure the pun would be worth it.

> Vowel shift is a term of art in linguistics Aside: I see "term of art" everywhere on HN lately. Why?! What does it add to saying "Vowel shift is a linguistics term" or "a term in linguistics"? Why do people want to sound like patent lawyers? Am I missing something?

It’s shorthand for “in context, that might not mean what you think it means.” I would use term of art to distinguish something that has a particular meaning for the context. For example “clobber” has a useful meaning, a meaning that many people use, but when programmers use it, it’s a term of art that means something specific and non-obvious.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#132

Post by taeric »

irrational wrote: post #78
anticristi wrote: post #15

Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))

It really is a shame Spanish didn’t become the lingua franca since it does have almost a 1:1 spoken and written. Of course, it could have been worse. We could have ended up with French as the lingua franca (yes, I know what franca means) where there is almost no correlation between written and spoken language.

I confess being super happy that English is not so hung up on the gender of words. So, it has that advantage over Spanish.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#133

Post by Baeocystin »

yesenadam wrote: post #125
eindiran wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vowel shift is a term of art in linguistics, so I'm not sure the pun would be worth it.

> Vowel shift is a term of art in linguistics Aside: I see "term of art" everywhere on HN lately. Why?! What does it add to saying "Vowel shift is a linguistics term" or "a term in linguistics"? Why do people want to sound like patent lawyers? Am I missing something?

I've found that using 'term of art' more effectively communicates 'this word has a domain-specific meaning that might differ from what you would naively think, pay attention' than simply saying 'x is an x term' or the like, which people tend to gloss over.

[edit] I am pleased to see that HN readers as a group love to define things, and also that I need to learn to refresh tabs I've had open for a while before responding

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#134

Post by adamrezich »

asveikau wrote: post #113
adamrezich wrote: post #98

related, but has anyone noticed younger Americans pronouncing a few specific types of words differently as of late? I'm 29 and grew up in the Midwest, so in my accent, when I say "button," the "tt" is nearly silent. however, at my last job doing remote web development, one guy who was a bit younger than me (and also American) would pronounce it "BUH 'in," with noticeable "stop" between the two syllables. I have since…

I tend to associate this with Brits. I have definitely noticed a rise in young Americans doing this in the last year or two though. The typical American "nearly silent" one you are describing tends to be more of a flapped /ɾ/, by the way. is often the same.

> The typical American "nearly silent" one you are describing tends to be more of a flapped /ɾ/, by the way. is often the same.

yes, exactly! also out here in South Dakota we specifically pronounce the "t" in "Dakota" as a "d," I've noticed.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#135

Post by eindiran »

irrational wrote: post #78
anticristi wrote: post #15

Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))

It really is a shame Spanish didn’t become the lingua franca since it does have almost a 1:1 spoken and written. Of course, it could have been worse. We could have ended up with French as the lingua franca (yes, I know what franca means) where there is almost no correlation between written and spoken language.

The phoneme-grapheme correspondence in Spanish is better than English, but let's not pretend it is 1:1. Does it account for assimilation in rapid speech? Does it account for coarticulation of adjacent consonants? Does it account for regional/dialectal variation? Does it account for secondary articulation?

Even ignoring all of these, its clearly not bijective. For example:

C --> /k/, /θ/

Z --> /θ/ [0]

K --> /k/

Q --> /k/

G --> /ɡ/, /x/

J --> /x/

N --> /n/ (with several distinct secondary articulations), /m/ (rarely)

M --> /m/

R --> Can be tapped or trilled.

Etc. You can go here and see many bijection-failures here: [1]

I am being intentionally unfair to Spanish (which truly does have a much, much better phoneme-grapheme correspondence than English[2]), mostly to illustrate the point that there aren't really any languages which have a 1:1 mapping between spellings and pronunciations. Even if you decide to use the IPA to write your language, non-standard dialects end up needing to read words that don't match their pronunciations. What happens when inevitably the language undergoes change - do we update all of the books to use the 'new' spellings of words?

The ideal orthography shouldn't be completely 1:1, but it should be relatively shallow. From that perspective, Spanish orthography is a fairly attractive option.

[0] The non-1:1 situation with /θ/ gets much worse in most dialects of Spanish, where it is not distinguished from /s/. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography#Alphabet_i...

[2] Look at how effective Spanish-speakers are at reading without "decoding" compared with Portuguese, which also has a good p-g correspondence. In particular, look how much faster the Spanish students are at pseudowords, on page 141: https://www.academia.edu/17872463/Differences_in_reading_acq...

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#136

Post by pseudalopex »

yesenadam wrote: post #125
eindiran wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vowel shift is a term of art in linguistics, so I'm not sure the pun would be worth it.

> Vowel shift is a term of art in linguistics Aside: I see "term of art" everywhere on HN lately. Why?! What does it add to saying "Vowel shift is a linguistics term" or "a term in linguistics"? Why do people want to sound like patent lawyers? Am I missing something?

Maybe you just noticed it lately.

Term doesn't imply a specialized meaning. Term of art does. And it doesn't have a negative secondary meaning like jargon.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#137

Post by jcranmer »

ajuc wrote: post #107
mason55 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still have many English words I know (and use correctly in writing) that I'm not sure how to pronounce. Do you mind sharing some examples? As a native English speaker, I'm so curious! Do you think that if you heard them without seeing the word you'd realize what the written form was? Or might there be words where you know the written form and the spoken form and don't realize it's the same word?

"Vocabulary" is one. I just checked it and I almost guessed right. I thought the u was more of an oo and the second a was ah not eh. Parallel - for some reason the second a is eh not ah. Can't remember that, have to check it every time. I play a lot of D&D over the internet in English and even as common word as "sword" is for some reason hard to remember. Every time I have to guess if the "w" is pronounced or not. be…

> the second a was ah not eh

> for some reason the second a is eh not ah

> been == bin ? - the rules for that are just evil

Actually, the rules are rather simple. They all have to do with unstressed syllables in English: unstressed vowels are reduced to /ə/ or /ɪ/ (the latter is what comes to play in your been -> bin use). Stress rules in English are not simple compared to other languages, and I can definitely see where non-native speakers might get confused.

One downside of the schwa reduction rules is that it can trip you up when you realize that you need to spell a word with a reduced vowel and you're not sure how it's actually written, because every vowel can be reduced to /ə/.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#138

Post by ithkuil »

HDMI_Cable wrote: post #80
anticristi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont vant tu teik saids, but German haz diklention und konjugation, vich maiks it a suboptimal lingua franka. Not tu mention meni iregular verbs. Mai vot gos tu som nordik languag like Svedish.

I don't think declensions and conjugations matter all that much, seeing how Latin was the Lingua Franca for 2000+ years, and _the_ Lingua Franca : French, has a load of irregulars too. But we all know that it should be Esperanto.

Esperanto is more like Go. Rust is more like lojban

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#140

Post by kaesar14 »

ajuc wrote: post #120
HDMI_Cable wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for those languages (I know French and German have them, unsure about Polish) there is a central body which "controls" the language, meanwhile in English we don't have one.

There is one for Polish but I think English speakers overestimate the power such bodies have over people :) The only power they have is influencing the way kids are taught at school. Everything else changes by social pressure and exposure - most media choose to follow the new convention and people get used to it over time. The changes are very gradual - the only big one I remember was in 90s - changing how "not" was…

So the only power such bodies have is being able to influence the entirety of the next generation of the speakers of the language? That's surely some amount of power that nobody holds whatsoever on the English language. Israel was able to use the educational system to revive a millenia-dead old language, that's quite a lot of power.
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