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Great Vowel Shift

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Re: Great Vowel Shift

#201

Post by Koshkin »

hannasanarion wrote: post #75
gxqoz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McWhorter is a linguist (as well as a political commentator). His argument isn't that English is easier because people already speak it natively. Instead, English lost a lot of its complexity (especially around suffixes) during the Viking invasions when it was taken up by adult speakers. This doesn't mean that learning the language is easy--no language really is. And English has some things that make it harder to mas…

English's large vocabulary actually makes it easier as a second language. Adults are really good at learning new words, but struggle with morphological and gender systems. Complex morphology seems to have some benefits that push languages towards including them, but are only sustainable when those languages are predominantly learned by children, who can pick up morphological complexity easily, not adults, who can't.

> Adults are really good at learning new words

You have no idea :)

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#202

Post by bradrn »

eointierney wrote: post #186
mehwoot wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are references to heuristically derived conveniences That's every word in existence

Yes, and this is not trite. Every word we hang on to has special meaning. Think about the amount of words we've forgotten. Could a computational linguist chime in please? How many words in how many human languages will never be spoken again in 2021?

Not a computational linguist (or a linguist at all), but this is an area I know a bit about. The question you ask is at the centre of the study of ‘glottochronology’ [0]:

> The original method presumed that the core vocabulary of a language is replaced at a constant (or constant average) rate across all languages and cultures …

Unfortunately, the only major discovery glottochronology has revealed is that rates of change vary too much to be of any use:

> in Bergsland & Vogt (1962), the authors make an impressive demonstration, on the basis of actual language data verifiable by extralinguistic sources, that the "rate of change" for Icelandic constituted around 4% per millennium, but for closely connected Riksmal (Literary Norwegian), it would amount to as much as 20%.

And there are other factors affecting replacement rate as well. For instance, a curious trait about the non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea is that the word ‘louse’ is practically never replaced: it evolves according to normal sound change, but never gets thrown out entirely. By contrast, many languages have a taboo against mentioning the names of the deceased; this can speed up lexical replacement if those people have names homophonous with common words.

For these reasons, I suspect that a general answer to your question will be extremely difficult — if not impossible — to find.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#203

Post by Koshkin »

ajuc wrote: post #61
gxqoz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McWhorter is a linguist (as well as a political commentator). His argument isn't that English is easier because people already speak it natively. Instead, English lost a lot of its complexity (especially around suffixes) during the Viking invasions when it was taken up by adult speakers. This doesn't mean that learning the language is easy--no language really is. And English has some things that make it harder to mas…

> especially its very large vocabulary Vocabulary isn't a problem IMHO. The fact that I have to learn each word twice (how to write it and how to say it) - is. I was learning German for 3 years at school. After the first month I had no problems with pronunciation. Now after almost 2 decades of not using it I can still pronounce any German word I see. I've been learning English since I was 10 or so. I'm 36 now. I stil…

Especially when things like ‘row’ [rou] and ‘row’ [rau] are both correct (but the meaning is different).

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#204

Post by westoncb »

chc wrote: post #199
westoncb wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"a technical meaning in a specific field" is one of the definitions of idiom (as given above)—they literally list 'jargon' as a synonym ("The specialized language of a trade, profession, or similar group, especially when viewed as difficult to understand by outsiders."). That entry was from: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

Since idiom has both the structural denotation of a phrase being semantically 'atomic' (you lose the meaning if you break it into pieces), plus its synonymity with 'jargon', there appears to be nothing added in "term of art".

—but maybe this is a lesser known meaning of 'idiom'.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#205

Post by kosievdmerwe »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #29

I used to have an English lit professor who could read and conversationally speak Old English. To my ears, it sounded like a Lord of the Rings style movie, or the Silmarillion come to life. Very musical in a sort of imaginary elvish kind of way.

One of the things I like about Old English is kennings.

For instance, "battle-sweat" to mean blood.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#206

Post by Koshkin »

matkoniecz wrote: post #154
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It poses problem for native speakers as well. After all, there are no Spelling Bee competitions in France, or Germany ... or anywhere.

There are in Poland. I suspect that they are also elsewhere, any language will have at least some tricky words. See https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Og%C3%B3lnopolskie_Dyktando

Here’s one: Chrząszcz.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#207

Post by Koshkin »

Scarblac wrote: post #143
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?

I once lost a bet because I couldn't believe "finite" and "infinite" sounded so different. But the best examples are in the poem _The Chaos_ ( http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html ). Through, though, throw, tough... I know a trough exists but I have no idea how it's pronounced.

Or, “Steve was a fungi”.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#208

Post by Koshkin »

matkoniecz wrote: post #155
tialaramex wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the good news is that lots of native English speakers don't know how to pronounce things either. Of course I know how to say all the words I speak frequently and hear others using - but if I use a word I haven't heard there's a risk I'll say it wrong. You just learn not to worry about it (the biggest problem really is when you unconsciously try to correct somebody else and realise you've got not basis for your as…

> talk about liking the "seaside" never the "beach" because she's concerned she'll manage to make people think she said "bitch". Thanks for that anecdote, I somehow thought that I am alone living with fear of that happening :)

Also, try to avoid saying “it’s actually...”

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#209

Post by GlennS »

Koshkin wrote: post #161
keiferski wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is a great lingua franca IMO because of its inherent decentralization and willingness to accept new words. There is no academy regulating its use, as is the case with French and Spanish.

To be honest, I still wish it were Spanish, which is easier to learn/read and pronunciation of which is somehow easier for most people (except for native English speakers, as I've noticed).

Surely it will be a Romance/Germanic split? So Spanish is easier for speakers of French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian, and English for speakers of Dutch, German, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish?

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#210

Post by huachimingo »

eindiran wrote: post #135
irrational wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -->…

Laughs in chilean or andalucian rap god dialect
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