Linguistics

Archive link: https://archive.ph/cIz4A

It's dated to be from around 2400 BCE. The article doesn't clarify if it's a true alphabet or an abjad, but either way it's interesting.

EDIT: see also https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worlds-oldest-alphabet-discovered/ for a less pop-linguistics narrative of the same discovery.

Native English speakers, how do you use personal datives? Today I came across an interesting text on the phenomenon here. Here are some examples from the text:

4] a. I got me some candy.

b. You got you some candy.

c. We got us some candy.

5] a. He got him some candy.

b. She got her some candy.

c. *It got it some candy.

d. They got them some candy.

(5c is marked with * to mark its grammatical unacceptability)

As a non-native speaker, I find sentences (4a) and (4c) to be natural, although I'd probably never use them myself. However, other sentences are odd to me, and seem as if they would cause confusion, they could be interpreted as if the subject got the candy for someone else. (4b), with 'you', is even more odd to my ears, even though a cited study says it is much more common than 3rd person constructions.

How do you perceive these sentences, are they all acceptable/natural to you?

The dispersal of the Indo-European language family from the third millennium BCE is thought to have dramatically altered Europe’s linguistic landscape. Many of the preexisting languages are assumed to have been lost, as Indo-European languages, including Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Armenian, dominate in much of Western Eurasia from historical times. To elucidate the linguistic encounters resulting from the Indo-Europeanization process, this volume evaluates the lexical evidence for prehistoric language contact in multiple Indo-European subgroups, at the same time taking a critical stance to approaches that have been applied to this problem in the past.

Part I: Introduction

Guus Kroonen: A methodological introduction to sub-Indo-European Europe

Part II: Northeastern and Eastern Europe

Anthony Jakob: Three pre-Balto-Slavic bird names, or: A more austere take on Oštir

Ranko Matasović: Proto-Slavic forest tree names: Substratum or Proto-Indo-European origin?

Part III: Western and Central Europe

Paulus S. van Sluis: Substrate alternations in Celtic

Anders Richardt Jørgensen: A bird name suffix *-anno- in Celtic and Gallo-Romance

David Stifter: Prehistoric layers of loanwords in Old Irish

Part IV: The Mediterranean

Andrew Wigman: A European substrate velar “suffix”

Cid Swanenvleugel: Prefixes in the Sardinian substrate

Lotte Meester: Substrate stratification: An argument against the unity of Pre-Greek

Guus Kroonen: For the nth time: The Pre-Greek νϑ-suffix revisited

Part V: Anatolia & the Caucasus

Rasmus Thorsø: Alternation of diphthong and monophthong in Armenian words of substrate origin

Zsolt Simon: Indo-European substrates: The problem of the Anatolian evidence

Peter Schrijver: East Caucasian perspectives on the origin of the word ‘camel’ and some notes on European substrate lexemes

I have a question for folks here, mainly around English linguistics but would love to hear of parallels in other languages. If you're not big on cats, just skip the next paragraph, which I've include for the context to be clear and show why I have provided the picture.

This morning, one of my cats was acting up a bit, hopping on the table where I have an electronics project, and searching for something to pilfer. In order to halt this behavior, I distracted him with a good deal of play with his toys (he is very athletic, so, lots of tossing a toy mouse for him to chase, then walking over to where he's left it because he doesn't fetch anymore). The image is of the culprit now that he's worn out.

While trying to achieve this state, I had a modified aphorism occur to me:

Idle cats are the Devil's playground.

It occurred to me then that I'm not sure if there is an extant term to describe taking an existing aphorism and modifying it while still conveying the same or similar meaning. For those not familiar, the original aphorism is "Idle hands are the Devil's playground" (apparently of biblical origin), meaning roughly that busy people don't often get into trouble or conversely that bored people will get into mischief.

There is a term, if informal, to describe, often intentional, mismatch of parts of aphorisms (ex. "Not the sharpest egg in the attic"), malaphor. Can anyone think of a similar extant term for a modified aphorism? If not, after trying multiple prefixes, I think that the least clunky seems to be "transaphor" (trans- meaning to change).

Anyone have thoughts on the matter?

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/14265279

The upward intonation, the guttural “ck” and even the cheeky comeback to win the argument: at just 19 months old, baby Orla has mastered the crucial elements of speaking like a scouser.

Impressively, the toddler who featured in a viral video this week appears to have done so without the need for actual words.

A clip posted on TikTok, and now viewed more than 20m times, shows Orla babbling in a Liverpudlian accent as her babysitter, Olayka, tries and fails to coax her into taking a nap. Scientists say that the cute exchange is also a vivid illustration of the processes by which babies acquire language – and the surprising role of accents.

Babies are so tuned in to the musical ups and downs of speech that even as newborns they cry in distinctive ways that reflect the languages that they have heard while in the womb.

In one 2009 study, Prof Kathleen Wermke, a pioneer in the field of speech development at the Würzburg University in Germany, found that French infants tend to wail on a rising note and German babies favour a falling melody and other patterns have been seen for Mandarin, Swedish and African languages. “When I started 40 years ago, if I told people I was recording babies crying and making high-pitched sounds they’d look at you and think ‘Is this really science?’,” she said.

I'm sharing this here mostly due to the alphabet. The relevant region (Tartessos) would be roughly what's today the western parts of Andalucia, plus the Algarve.

Here are the news in Spanish, for anyone interested.

The number of letters is specially relevant for me - 32 letters. The writing system is a redundant alphabet, where you use different graphemes for the stops, depending on the next vowel; and it was likely made for a language with five vowels, so you had five letters for /p/, five for /t/, five for /k/. Counting the "bare" vowels this yields 20 letters; /m n s r l/ fit well with that phonology, but what about the other seven?

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/15125500

xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech

https://xkcd.com/2942

explainxkcd.com for #2942

Alt text:

Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.

they were taking part in an unusual experiment, which involved tracking their own voices over time. This was done by making 10-minute recordings every few weeks. They would sit in front of a microphone and repeat the same 29 words as they appeared on a computer screen. Food. Coffee. Hid. Airflow.

One of those changes was the "ou" sound in words such as "flow" and "sew" that shifted towards the front of the vocal tract.

I'm not actually sure what sound change they're describing there. Can anyone explain with examples or IPA?

edit: Cheers for the answers (turns out I misunderstood which part is the vocal tract)