Assorted Language Questions

[Gori the Grey]

Yeah, don't get me started on how they spell ny.

 

[Hygro]

nuevo york?

 

[Gori the Grey]

You're a funñ guy.

 

[QarQing]

So in Irish, the letter V is now widely seen in many Irish loanwords (Ex: Veain, Voltas, etc.). However, this is not the same for letters K and W. There usage hasn't expanded at all in Irish! Why is that?

 

[Gorbles]

Why do all of these language-related threads feel like homework?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Moderator Action: I merged threads and changed the title broaden the topic.

 

[amadeus]

So in Irish, the letter V is now widely seen in many Irish loanwords (Ex: Veain, Voltas, etc.). However, this is not the same for letters K and W. There usage hasn't expanded at all in Irish! Why is that?

Adding KW without expanding the grid would just overload the system and then what would we do?

 

[Quintillus]

Although I've since forgotten my Spanish, after having studied French, I found Spanish to be easier, particularly in terms of most pronunciation (no more, "is this silent?" question like in French). The exception being rolled "r"s, which do not come easily to a lifelong English speaker. I can sort-of-kind-of-halfway do them now, but couldn't when I was actually studying Spanish.

Spelling reforms... I'd like to see a reform not of Spanish, but of IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. They have all these letters like upside-down e's ("schwa"?) that aren't in any language that I know of, and you basically have to take a course on IPA to have it be useful. Why is it the standard? I find it much easier to have guides that say, "this is like n with a tilde in Spanish" or "this is like the ée in fiancée in French" or something like that. All those Wikipedia how-to-pronounce guides in IPA are useless to me (although where there are sound recordings, that is often useful).

There's probably a good-to-a-linguist reason why IPA is the way it is, but as a layperson, it leaves a lot to be desired. If I could understand it more easily and it could tell me how to pronounce things in Polish, I'd find it a lot more useful.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Although I've since forgotten my Spanish, after having studied French, I found Spanish to be easier, particularly in terms of most pronunciation (no more, "is this silent?" question like in French). The exception being rolled "r"s, which do not come easily to a lifelong English speaker. I can sort-of-kind-of-halfway do them now, but couldn't when I was actually studying Spanish.

Spelling reforms... I'd like to see a reform not of Spanish, but of IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. They have all these letters like upside-down e's ("schwa"?) that aren't in any language that I know of, and you basically have to take a course on IPA to have it be useful. Why is it the standard? I find it much easier to have guides that say, "this is like n with a tilde in Spanish" or "this is like the ée in fiancée in French" or something like that. All those Wikipedia how-to-pronounce guides in IPA are useless to me (although where there are sound recordings, that is often useful).

There's probably a good-to-a-linguist reason why IPA is the way it is, but as a layperson, it leaves a lot to be desired. If I could understand it more easily and it could tell me how to pronounce things in Polish, I'd find it a lot more useful.

YouTube has a lot of short "how to pronounce _____" videos.

They made one for "how to pronounce Denis Villeneuve" (director of the two latest Dune movies). A lamentable number of people were clueless that he's French-Canadian and kept pronouncing his name "Dennis Vil-la-NWAY-va."

To someone who knows how to pronounce French words, this sounds BIZARRE.

 

[Quintillus]

I 100% agree... it's like they're trying to pronounce it in Spanish, but with an "a" at the end rather than an "e".

One of the major downsides of knowing how to pronounce words in French is knowing just how badly they're often pronounced by people who don't know anything about French.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I 100% agree... it's like they're trying to pronounce it in Spanish, but with an "a" at the end rather than an "e".

One of the major downsides of knowing how to pronounce words in French is knowing just how badly they're often pronounced by people who don't know anything about French.

Or written. I had to give up on a long Harry Potter fanfic because the author thought she was being so sophisticated and had such a superdupersmart beta reader when it came to the French, Russian, and Croatian dialogue.

Well, I can vaguely recognize a few Russian words and know what maybe two of them mean. I gained that from the international livestream chat when watching the Wuauquikuna livestreams on weekends (the guys sing in Spanish and Quechua, but the chat is in multiple languages). So I couldn't say how good or how bad her Russian dialogue is.

Same for Croatian, except that I know NO Croatian. Not one word.

But the French...

JFC, her French dialogue is a mangled mess. She makes the French-speaking characters sound like idiots. Honestly, "N'est pas" and "n'est-ce pas" do NOT mean the same thing! They are not interchangeable.

Chapter after chapter after chapter... at one point I sent a polite note to let her know about these and other chronic errors, and what the corrections should be.

Most fanfic authors don't actually bite people's heads off if they get useful feedback. This one just ignored it and kept on having her adult characters, one of whom is a native French speaker, keep babbling away in words and phrases that mean the opposite to what she wanted them to mean.

So I quit reading. I was already over 200 chapters in, and that thing, if it's still going, is probably over 400 chapters by now (by far not the longest fanfic I've seen; there's a Merlin fanfic that's over 3000 chapters - though they're very short ones!).

 

[Quintillus]

The interesting thing about it is, if she'd been writing in French and Croatian and so forth and making mistakes, but then learned from the audience and improved over time, it would be a good way to improve her French/Croatian/etc. writing skills. Which isn't necessarily easy when learning a new language if you don't have an audience. But it does require listening to feedback and iterating on skills over time.

Yet I'm also reminded of non-native English speakers who move from overseas; I don't expect perfect grammar on day 1. But I'm occasionally amazed by the errors that persist for years or decades, with no attempt to improve. It's certainly not everyone, but some people stick with what they consider good enough even if with a little bit of effort they could become much better. And I kind of get it; "good enough" is in fact just that. But if you're going to move somewhere for the rest of your life, I'd expect that learning the native tongue very well would pay dividends over the long haul. Maybe not in direct financial terms, but in social terms I think there is some currency, even if it's subconscious, in people being able to easily understand you.

Others have almost indistinguishable command of a second, third, or fourth language.

Whether I'd actually wind up in the "99.9% fluent French" camp if I moved to Quebec and stayed there for several years, I can't say for sure... but I at least have the ambition that if I should, I'd make the effort to finally fix the errors in those less-common conjugations that counted as "good enough" for high school French and a vacation to France, but still make it clear I'm not from around there in extended conversation.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The thing to remember about French is that it has regional differences, as much as English does. "Parisian" French is what I learned in school, rather than Quebecois French. There are differences in vocabulary, idioms, slang, and accents.

I read it much more easily than I speak it.

 

[Angst]

spelling reform?

*coughs in danish*

 

[Arwon]

I'd like to see a reform not of Spanish, but of IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. They have all these letters like upside-down e's ("schwa"?) that aren't in any language that I know of, and you basically have to take a course on IPA to have it be useful. Why is it the standard? I find it much easier to have guides that say, "this is like n with a tilde in Spanish" or "this is like the ée in fiancée in French" or something like that. All those Wikipedia how-to-pronounce guides in IPA are useless to me (although where there are sound recordings, that is often useful).

There's probably a good-to-a-linguist reason why IPA is the way it is, but as a layperson, it leaves a lot to be desired. If I could understand it more easily and it could tell me how to pronounce things in Polish, I'd find it a lot more useful.

IPA isn't designed solely to make phonetics more accessible to ordinary English speakers, and the letter correspondences that seem intuitive to you aren't necessarily going to seem intuitive to others. It's there to represent all sounds including the ones that are different within different varieties of a single language.

For example, which of the numerous R sounds in different languages should /r/ represent, and then what do we use for others? If /n/ is going to represent the English N, how do you represent the numerous other voiced nasals in other languages, without characters like /ɳ ɲ ŋ/.

How do you represent the dozens of possible vowels in single characters without using unfamiliar ones? The broad IPA for how I say the vowels in cot and caught, /ɔ/ and /oː/ respectively, can't really be the same ones used for how Americans say them (usually as /ɑ/), otherwise we can't distinguish when describing each variety.

 

[Arwon]

This "just say X like Y in your language" thing is also more problematic than it perhaps seems. I just looked up a guide on Polish pronunciation which illustrates some problems:


O is like "author or cord." (In rhotic North American accents those aren't necessarily the same sound, which makes me suspect the author is from the UK)

Ó is like "the same as u, like tool or soup" (those aren't the same sound for me)

Y is "Somewhat similar to sit or myth." and E is "like in met" (To New Zealanders the first one is a schwa and the second one is a lot like the first one in many other varieties of English).

 

[Valka D'Ur]

There's an "o" sound in "author"?

Those two words sound nothing alike, with regard to vowels.

 

[Arwon]

That means to say the Polish letter O is pronounced like the sound usually called /oː/ in IPA, found in author for the probably British dialect of the person who wrote that.

You also obviously pronounce the R in cord, whereas I don't, it just influences which vowel is used.

Both words also that same sound for me, because in Australian English the vowel at the start of author is the same as the one in cord, thought, ore, caught, but isn't the same as in in cot, cloth, rod.

You as a North American anglophone most likely have the cot/caught merger in your dialect, and don't have this relatively high/close mouthed pronunciation of the author/caught vowel like I do

You probably have a much more low or open mouth articulation of the cot-caught vowel there, which I would in my ears associate more with an "A" like in father even though it's further back in the mouth and not quite the same vowel as that.

(We don't have a vowel that is both that far back plus that open, so aren't accustomed to distinguishing it as listeners... and I can barely really make the sound without going "cat" "cart" "cawt" or something to feel the place of articulation moving successively backwards, and it feels really weird like I'm doing a caricature).

 

[Mise]

There should be more vowels in English. At least 30. No double letters either - every sound should have one single letter with a unique form. "Long" vowels should have their own unique letter too. Also the different ways of pronouncing similar vowel sounds should be rendered with completely different characters, to avoid confusion. It should not be possible, for example, for me to pronounce "cot" differently to an American reading the same word - rather, an American should look at the word, realise that the particular "o" sound that I am writing and speaking is not in their exotic dialect, and conclude that they do not know what that word is. If this renders written American English unintelligible to English speakers in London, then so be it. Indeed, if it renders the English as written by my neighbour to be unintelligible to me, then so much the better. Why are they even writing me in the first place? I doesn't make sense anyway, they're Canadian.

Another added benefit: this would require larger keyboards, rejuvenating the keyboard industry and providing much-needed jobs to keymakers across the English speaking world.

 

[Arwon]

Let's start with these

(for reference American and Canadian "caught/cot" or presumably "author" is bottom right ɒ, my caught is more like the o towards the top right and my cot is the ɔ below it, so get used to that spelling change I guess)