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Great Vowel Shift

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Re: Great Vowel Shift

#191

Post by eyelidlessness »

forbiddenvoid wrote: post #181
Baeocystin wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 respond…

Then why not just say 'domain-specific meaning?' Term of art doesn't really have a clear meaning in general (native English speaker, and this is the first time I've heard this), and it's unclear/ambiguous as to what it actually indicates.

It’s pretty much exactly as intuitive as “state of the art”—a term of art I didn’t understand as anything beyond a superlative until I had heard it for 20 years and decided to give it a think. Which is to say, not very intuitive at all, until you just pick it apart and think about how it might relate in context, and then it’s just reflexive.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#192

Post by bradrn »

QuesnayJr wrote: post #119
aasasd wrote: post #37

Moreover, there wasn't just one or a few shifts: they happen all the time and there were plenty of them. Apparently a big discovery in etymology (in 19th century iirc, and I forget the guy's name) was that words mostly don't change pronunciation individually, but the same parts in different words change in the same way. Which allows to track those changes over time and thus backtrack how modern words should've sounde…

Is this Grimm's Law, by Jacob Grimm of "Grimm's Fairy Tales" fame?

The very same! He wrote a whole series of books about German — a history of German, a grammar of German, a dictionary of German, and, yes, a collection of old German stories.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#193

Post by desert_boi »

adamrezich wrote: post #134
asveikau wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Voiceless phonemes(?) tend to become voiced when they're between two vowels. Boise natives hypercorrect to say Boy-see, when most folks from outside the area say Boy-zee.

Historic shifts like that are loafes -> loaves.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#194

Post by bradrn »

jgwil2 wrote: post #157
eindiran wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -->…

Most of these examples are unambiguous in context. For example, C is always pronounced /k/ when preceding A, O, U, and always pronounced /s/ or /θ/ depending on the dialect when preceding E and I. The function from written Spanish to spoken Spanish (provided we are talking about a single dialect) is surjective, but darn close to bijective, especially if we exclude words of recent foreign origin.

From Mark Rosenfelder (https://www.zompist.com/spell.html):

> Many people expect … to predict the spelling from the pronunciations-- not realizing that few orthographies meet this goal. It's far from true of Spanish, for instance, which is often held up as an example of a good orthography. I stopped fervently admiring Spanish orthography when I saw a sign in a Mexican bakery with about one spelling mistake every third word.

So, no, hardly bijective!

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#195

Post by [deleted] »

forbiddenvoid wrote: post #181
Baeocystin wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 respond…

Then why not just say 'domain-specific meaning?' Term of art doesn't really have a clear meaning in general (native English speaker, and this is the first time I've heard this), and it's unclear/ambiguous as to what it actually indicates.

[deleted]

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#196

Post by etbebl »

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.

American young person here: I do the glottal stop thing with "button" but a flapped r with "butter." I think it has to do with the "n" - I would also do the glottal stop for "bitten" but not for "bitter." For me the second syllable is a pure syllabic /n/ - no preceding vowel or consonant.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#197

Post by suraj »

mywittyname wrote: post #36
ngokevin wrote: post #16

Here's what it'd look like (taken from Reddit): "The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English…

This is cute, up until the point where it starts reaching and makes changes which are important for the sound of the language. The e in many words isn't silent, it's a modifier. Kit and kite are different words. "th", "z", "w", and "v" are all really different sounds. While certain accents (or children) do occasionally conflate them, in basically every case, it's technically incorrect. Zebra, Webra, Vebra, and Thebra…

Well kite could be written as keit to match the pronunciation :)

For most non-native speakers, the backtracking of silent `e` is more confusing. It does not help in case of `sake` vs `saké` where most people do not add the acute mark and use context for disambiguation.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#198

Post by JJMcJ »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #191
forbiddenvoid wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not just say 'domain-specific meaning?' Term of art doesn't really have a clear meaning in general (native English speaker, and this is the first time I've heard this), and it's unclear/ambiguous as to what it actually indicates.

It’s pretty much exactly as intuitive as “state of the art”—a term of art I didn’t understand as anything beyond a superlative until I had heard it for 20 years and decided to give it a think. Which is to say, not very intuitive at all, until you just pick it apart and think about how it might relate in context, and then it’s just reflexive.

First time I read "term of art" I knew exactly what was meant. It doesn't seem that obscure.

However, I was already familiar with "start of the art" so it wasn't that great a leap.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#199

Post by chc »

westoncb wrote: post #182
chc wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A term in linguistics" is imprecise — it's also a term outside of linguistics. The phrase "term of art" means basically "I know that you think you know what this means based on the words, but it is a special defined term that means something particular in this field." It is generally used to correct someone who seems to be viewing a term of art as a common English phrase, so the precision is useful.

Seems like "idiomatic" already fits this perfectly. Is "term of art" in some way different? maybe has a more of a "you can't really understand it as an outsider," sense?: Idiomatic: A speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements, as in keep tabs on. A specialized vocabulary used by a group of people; jarg…

"Term of art" means that it has a technical meaning in a specific field, while "idiom" just means that a phrase has a meaning. For example, "a dime a dozen" is an idiom but not a term of art. If you wanted to avoid the phrase "term of art" for some reason, "idiom" would be a reasonable alternative.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#200

Post by mixmastamyk »

mason55 wrote: post #71
mixmastamyk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

c can then be used as "ch", as in Italian. x can then be used as "sh", as in Portuguese.

Speaking of Portuguese, I've always found the usage of "ç" to be interesting. I've never studied the language but just from looking at words it's clearly the way to represent the soft "c" sound before a "fat" vowel (a/o/u). How did those words ended up with a "ç" instead of an "s"? This thread finally made me remember to go look it up and it seems like the "ç" used to be a different sound (/dz/). I guess it evolved t…

Yes, I always figured it was related to the French usage. Not sure who used it first. Hmm, guess that leaves Þ | Θ - thorn or theta for "th", but I'm less enthusiastic.
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