Oh Hey There

English speakers also tend to weaken or omit final coronal consonants, a process that linguists call t/d deletion: thus [lɛf] for left.  Although t/d deletion is stigmatized, in fact all normal English speakers do it some of the time, at least in some contexts.  As a result, fixed expressions that start out as participle+noun are sometimes re-analyzed so as to lose their -ed ending.  This happened long ago to ice(d) cream, skim(med) milk, pop(ped) corn, wax(ed) paper, shave(d) ice, etc. It’s happened more recently (I think) to ice(d) tea, cream(ed) corn, and whip(ped) cream.

— Language Log » The population memetics of un-ed-ing — Whoa. I had never noticed this phenomenon, but I love it already.

Supernatural Collective Nouns [via wondermark.com]

re onomatopoeia

tragos:

I know nothing—and I mean nothing—about linguistics. Which means I constantly have stupid questions about the subject, such as:

Is there any objective standard according to which we can say that one language is more onomatopoetic than another? Because it sure as hell seems to me that Spanish trumps English on that front (except for ‘oink’).

Also: What might it say about the cultures in or through or across or by which languages develop that one might be more onomatopoetic than another?

There is no such thing as a stupid question when it comes to linguistics—language matters tend to be plagued by the incoherent blather of reactionary armchair experts—thus I have no problems fielding any questions on language and giving you The Straight Dope.

One of the foundations of modern structuralist linguistics is the Saussurean sign which says that there is an arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified. What this means is that there is nothing iconic or “stop”-like about the shape and make-up of a stop sign. That is, a red octagon with giant white lines and curves has nothing to do with the act of slowing down and ceasing forward motion. This assumption that there is an arbitrary relation between form and meaning, as I understand the history of linguistics, pushed us towards the abstract, symbolic and computational study of language forms (since there was nothing iconic or inherently meaningful about words and sounds) and this was a good thing.

But as a result of arbitraryness, your question about comparative onomatopoetic capacity is somewhat incoherent. That is, by assumption all language is arbitrary, so it’s not possible to be “more or less onomatopoetic”. But we recognize that onomatopoeia, like reduplication or phonesthemes, flirts with iconicity (by which I mean, standing for something in a clear, non-arbitrary way) and sound symbolism, and it would be unprincipled to throw out the question entirely.

There is also, however, the dangerous ethnocentric subtext to your second question: If we assume that all language is imitative in origin—I’m thinking of cavepeople on cartoons—then a language that is more fit for onomatopoetic imitation is more iconic and more “primitive” than the more “developed” languages that do not readily facilitate such imitation. So let’s just be mindful and try to think about sound imitation scientifically.

We think of onomatopoeia as the process of imitating nonhuman sounds using the sounds of human language. This rules out things like raspberries and tongue-clucks since these are universally not used in language sound systems. The tools at a speaker’s disposal therefore are things like stops, vowels, fricatives, nasals, or whatever else in the sound inventory. The question therefore is to what extent—or perhaps at what resolution—a particular language sound system can capture a nonlinguistic sound.

Intuitively, it therefore seems that a language with more consonants and vowels would be better off, so here’s an insightful list of cross-linguistic onomatopoeia. Looking through these examples, I get the sense that all language needs to accommodate most of those examples are some vowels and at least two classes of consonants—stops, glides (y,w), liquids (l,r), nasals (m,n,ng) and fricatives (s,z,f,v,sh). Each class of sounds has its own properties that are useful for imitation: stops interrupt the speech stream and make natural boundaries, fricatives provide turbulent noise, nasals provide humming, and so on.  Phonological breadth therefore boosts imitative capacity, as there are more tools at one’s disposal.

But then again, we are dealing with simple sounds whose onomatopoetic imitation becomes conventional and standardized: I’m thinking of oink which sounds nothing like a squeal but that’s how we communicate that noise in English. This kind of standardization reinforces the notion of arbitraryness: All you need, it seems, for onomatopoeia is a set of sounds to perform a passable imitation and a language to codify and reinforce the onomatopoetic mapping. This latter point seems most important to me: Even with a shortage of speech sounds, an imitation can stick and be useful in communication only when everyone agrees on it.

[kʁwasɑ̃] →

Fr-croissant.ogg

thedailywhat:

Sign Of The Times of the Day: Spotted at AutoZone.

This sign makes perfect no-sense.

Also: ¿Necesita ayuda en inglés? Dígale a un empleado que necesita “Help in English” y le pondremos en contacto con alguien por teléfono.

[reddit.]

¿Espeaky espanol? ¿Necesitar el helpo?

…barring any overseen circumstances…

— 

Avatar Takes 5th Straight, Passes $500 Million - News in Film

Neat eggcorn in the wild.

Knowledge Bomb

Trivia question for the grammar nerds: When is “the” not an article?

When it is an adverb, as in the following:

• The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
• …and no one will be (none) the wiser.
• Raynor really is a weirdo, the more I think about it.

The usage requires a comparative, that is an adjective/adverb modified by more or the affix -er.

[NB: This has been in my drafts folder for a while. I’m not sure where I meant to take this point or why I meant to wrinkle your brains.]

Found in Translation →

“Translation”, wrote Anthony Burgess, “is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.” In making intelligible the cultures of other tongues, translators have shaped the culture and history of the English-speaking world. No book has influenced British life more than the King James Bible — the most famous of English translations and the greatest work of literature ever written by committee. The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Arabian Nights are part of the nation’s cultural inheritance, yet few native English speakers now read ancient Hebrew, classical Greek or Arabic — or, for that matter, any other foreign language. These works have been absorbed by generations through the efforts of translators.

The understated art of translation will be recognised this evening at the Times Literary Supplement’s Translation Prizes. The translators of seven books published in English last year, each out of a different language, will be honoured. The paradox of their work is that successful translators pass unnoticed. A good English translation will read as if the book were written in English in the first place. A translation that is clumsy or stilted will scream its presence.

words of the year, words of the decade

Sent a few nominations to the American Dialect Society’s word of the year and word of the decade poll.

For 2009 words, I chose birther, tea party and beer summit on the grounds that a person sent in time from 2008 might not comprehend a sentence like “birthers held signs at the tea-party protest”. One might say “beer summit, how dated!” which is the point of these things: WOTY for 2005 was truthiness, 2006 plutoed (nowadays we’d probably say plutowned), 2007 subprime, and 2008 bailout.

For decade words, I chose the adjective meta which is very zeitgeisty (and diagnostic) for the “hip young people online” subculture to which we all deny being a part of. I also picked meme because I was thinking about meta and then I remembered that Xzibit “yo dawg” meme which is meme about things being meta (how “meta”). No real chance in hell for these tetragrams (at least against blog), but I wanted linguists, lexicographers and philologists of all stripes to think about them.

I still have to come up with more interesting words to send in, so I’m opening this up to answers and I’ll send in whatever submissions I get. For the record, tweet and tw- appeared on the 2008 list.

What words can you think of?

Suppose that Edward is married to Susan and Michael is married to Susan’s sister Judith. Edward is therefore Judith’s brother-in-law, and Michael is Susan’s brother-in-law. In my usage, and what I think is standard English usage, there is no named relationship between Edward and Michael. […]

There are languages in which the relationship between Edward and Michael has a name. In Carrier, this is the -loh relationship. One could say Lhloh ‘uhint’oh “they are each other’s spouse’s sibling’s spouse/sibling’s spouse’s sibling”.

— Language Log » Co-brothers-in-law