The Linguistics Thread so You Don't Ruin My Other Thread Thread

[JamesC]

In sociology and in political science, the noun bourgeoisie (/bʊərʒwɑːˈziː/) (French pronunciation : [ˈbuʁʒwazi]) and the adjective bourgeois are terms that describe a historical range of socio-economic classes. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present, the bourgeoisie are a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital, and their related culture".[1] Therefore, a member of the bourgeoisie is a bourgeois and a capitalist; in Marxist philosophy, and in contemporary academic and sociological theory, the term bourgeoisie also denotes "the ruling class" of a capitalist society.

So...

It's a French word that we adopted? I knew it.

Omar, that seems like cheating. Just sayin'.

[wenshu]

IMO, Wenshu, most all of that is extraneous. It's an interesting exercise in describing the aural characteristics but pretty much all of those consonants are contained within the single chart I posted. The vowel chart is, IMO, outdated as the one on Wikipedia is way more efficient and less subjective. For example, the concept of a "tense" vowel is subjective. The difference between /i/ and /I/ can be described in more objective terms by describing jaw and tongue positions. The "tense" sound if formed by simple opening the mouth slightly and withdrawing the tongue. High, low, back, rounded and tense get replaced by a pair of simple x/y axis of 'open/close' and 'front/back'.

I/i are both high, front the only difference is +tense

Distinctive feature analysis is generative phonology, you are thinking strictly in terms of applied phonetic descriptions.

You don't actually list all of the phonetic properties as + or - when doing distinctive feature analysis, you only list the + or - feature that distinguishes that phoneme from for example allophones of the same class.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguisti...1F10_lec04.pdf

[David Jamieson]

So...

It's a French word that we adopted? I knew it.

Omar, that seems like cheating. Just sayin'.

There's quite a lot of that actually.

Your garage, your laundromat etc etc.

Here's something to stretch your noodle. This is English:

Whawne that April with his shoures sote
The droughte of March hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veine in swiche licour,
Of whiche vertue engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eke with his sote brethe
Enspired hath in every holt and hethe
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Bam his halfe cours yronne,

As you can see, it's old, but still english.
It's a passage from The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer.
Our language changed immensely with Shakespeare's additions to it and it is always growing as we invent new technologies and ideas. English is an interesting and yet heavily Bastardized language.

[omarthefish]

I/i are both high, front the only difference is +tense

high and front are not binary terms. They are relative. /i/ is both "higher" (more accurately, more open) and ****her to the front than /I/. All you have to do to make the change is slightly open your mouth and slightly depress the top of the tongue.

Distinctive feature analysis is generative phonology, you are thinking strictly in terms of applied phonetic descriptions.

You don't actually list all of the phonetic properties as + or - when doing distinctive feature analysis, you only list the + or - feature that distinguishes that phoneme from for example allophones of the same class.

Sure. But that still makes phonology a more subjective topic. Also, as an ESL teacher, it's not particularly useful to me. It's totally abstract to me. Phonetics provides clear descriptions of the actual physical changes that need to be made to accurately produce the sounds. Think about that funny clip of the Persian guy trying to pronounce "squirrel". I don't know if he can even hear the difference or not (phonology). I could explain to him more clearly what he's doing wrong with phonetics though.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguisti...1F10_lec04.pdf

[/QUOTE]

I just downloaded the .pdf. I'll read it later when I have the time as linguistics is definitely a pet hobby of mine. I would have really enjoyed more of it in college. All I got was 1 semester though. OTOH, as an ESL teacher I've kept the information really fresh.

Gotta run . . .

[wenshu]

high and front are not binary terms. They are relative. /i/ is both "higher" (more accurately, more open) and ****her to the front than /I/. All you have to do to make the change is slightly open your mouth and slightly depress the top of the tongue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance...ed_tongue_root

There is argument about what tense/lax actually represents physically (muscle tension vs tongue root position for instance). But describing the tongue body as high front is what distinguishes it from a sound produced with the tongue body low back.

I'm not sure what to make of your insistence on binary or how it applies exactly. Phonology is not anywhere near as subjective as you assume.

For example, [pʰ] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin) are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language. Although a phoneme's allophones are all alternative pronunciations for a phoneme, the specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable. Changing the allophone used by native speakers for a given phoneme in a specific context usually will not change the meaning of a word but the result may sound non-native or unintelligible. Native speakers of a given language usually perceive one phoneme in their language as a single distinctive sound in that language and are "both unaware of and even shocked by" the allophone variations used to pronounce single phonemes.[2][3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone

Sure there are variations in the way every human produces all possible speech sounds, the idea behind phonetic transcription and phonological distinctive feature analysis is to determine a generalized threshold of contrast between sounds by describing place and manner of articulation.

You'd probably be surprised by how much phonology would help you. Phonetics is just a description, phonology actually maps out the underlying rules within a system of language that govern the production of sounds in relation to each other. It would show you the structure behind the common mistakes native Chinese speakers make when learning to produce unfamiliar sounds in English. I realize it's not focused upon in applied linguistics, but for instance you naturally listed the minimal pairs that your students have trouble distinguishing between (because +ATR sounds don't exist in Chinese so they don't distinguish the difference)

[wenshu]

Omar, man, you got me digging out textbooks. I'm never going to get any work done today.

Check it out. Basically, your initial points about vowels is actually more in line with phonological distinctive features than my own reliance on the IPA vowel model.

Interestingly the problems you saw in the IPA vowel model can also be applied to the consonantal model as well.

A range of opinion has arisen on the role of phonological versus phonetic considerations in the development of a feature system to represent the articulation of the Saussurean sign(“phonological form” in generative parlance). One extreme, represented by Hjelmslev’s glossematics see(Anderson 1985), claims that phonological behavior involves patterns and categories that are unconstrained by phonetics (the physical realization of language as speech). On the other side, much work in phonetics concerns itself with discovering and quantifying systematic articulatory and acoustic differences in the realization of members of the same phonological category. Most generative theorists have taken the position that both phonological and phonetic considerations are important. On the one hand, the gestures of speech reflect abstract linguistic categories and can be expected to differ from possibly identical physical movements that do not realize linguistic categories. On the other hand, the phonological categories we do find empirically attested are constrained by the vocal tract and the human auditory system – anatomical apparatus not specifically evolved for the articulation and perception of language. Phonological distinctions and categorizations display gaps that appear arbitrary from a purely abstract, classificatory point of view but seem to reflect contingencies of the articulatory and scoustic systems that realize language in speech. Finding the proper balance between these phonological and phonetic considerations in an explicit representational scheme for the sounds of language continues to be a central question in linguistic theory.

We may distinguish two general approached to phonological features; those that see features as realizing a certain action or movement adnd those that see features as static targets or regions of the vocal tract. The latter represents a more traditional point of view embodied in the IPA. For example on the basis of their own extensive language sample as well as a survey of phonetics literature. LAdefoged and Maddieson (1988) isolate some seventeen distinct consonantal constrictions that would be categorized as “places of articulation” in traditional phonetic terms.

Although minimal pairs are not available in all cases because of the rarity of certain types (e.g., epiglottals), we assume that these categories are capable of distinguishing one sound from another on a systematic absis. But if we accept the thesis that phonetics represents the physical realization of abstract linguistic categories, the important question is how these various sound types behave phonologically. As we will see, there is good reason to believe that a much simpler system underlies the notion “place of articulation”. By concentrating on articulatory accuracy, we are in danger of losing sight of the phonological forest among the phonetic trees,
…

The IPA system describes vowels with a system of articulatory targets that differs radically from the one employed for consonants: the highest point of the tongue arch. There are major problems with this system; we will look at two. First, it is simply not accurate as a description of the actual location of the tongue. For example in a critique of this model, Wood (1982) finds that the highest point of the tongue arch for the lax high front vowel [I] is actually lower than for the mid vowel [e]. If we were solely interested in achieveing phonetic accuracy, we could simply rearrange the relative positions of these two vowels. However, because the sounds represent phonological categories, this move is not open to us. We must be able to group [i] and [I] together as a natural class to the exclusion of [e]. The proper conclusion to draw is that the articulatory definition of vowels in terms of highest tongue arch is incorrect.

These problems prompted Halle (1983) to develop an alternative model in which features are viewed as neural commands to activate certain articulators with specific muscle gestures.

“The process of speech production consists in moving an articulator from one position to another, where by an articulator is meant a recognized anatomical entity such as the lower lip, the body of the tongue or the vocal cords, but not an entity defined purely ad hoc such as the highest point of the tongue arch which varies constantly in the course of an utterance.”

In Halle 1983 and much subsequent work, generative phonolgists have developed a model for representation of speech sounds that is premised on a close relation between phonetics and phonology in which the articulators involved in the production of speech play a central role. This articulator model postulates a set of six articulators with special formal properties. Certain features reflect general properties of strictures made by the various articulators; other features are bound to particular articulators, implying a hierarchical organization.

tl;dr

Distinctive features classify articulation based on neural commands that initiate muscle movements to produce speech sounds rather than arbitrary static positions.

[Syn7]

not only do neither exist in Chinese, Chinese speakers struggle to pronounce them.

You can tell which sounds don't exist in Chinese when you hear enough broken English. Any language, really. If you are exposed to enough non native speakers speaking English you can really start to sort out what they have and don't have in their own languages. Know what I mean?

Like how a lot of cultures have a ton of trouble with R's.

Apparently English is one of the hardest languages to learn. Agree? I wouldn't know. I found French pretty easy to learn when I was a kid. Even though English is NOT a Latin based language, for some reason or another all Latin based languages make complete sense to me. Way easier for me than Russian or Hindi.

[Syn7]

There's quite a lot of that actually.

Your garage, your laundromat etc etc.

Here's something to stretch your noodle. This is English:

Whawne that April with his shoures sote
The droughte of March hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veine in swiche licour,
Of whiche vertue engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eke with his sote brethe
Enspired hath in every holt and hethe
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Bam his halfe cours yronne,

As you can see, it's old, but still english.
It's a passage from The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer.
Our language changed immensely with Shakespeare's additions to it and it is always growing as we invent new technologies and ideas. English is an interesting and yet heavily Bastardized language.

The terminology for that particular phenomenon is called "Loanword".

I've read some really tough English when reading old files from The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. Some of the stuff written in the 1600's are REALLY tough. And to top it off it's peppered with OLD Latin.

The passage you wrote out reminds me of the first page in Twains Prince and the Pauper.
I read it when I was around 11 and I had never seen anything like that before. I thought D1ckens was awkward. LOL

P.S. It's so annoying to have to correct names like D1ckens! Time for a small upgrade guys. It's not 2006 anymore, they have solved this one!

[IronFist]

I heard Icelandic hasn't changed much in the last 1,000 years because of their isolation. People today can still read stuff that was written way back in the past.

Truth?