Ryukyuan Languages

I fell into the youtube rabbit hole and stumbled upon some videos uploaded by user wadoku2008 and wadoku2012. In the video below, Byron Fija, a native of Okinawa born to an American father and Okinawan mother, discusses the different languages of the Ryukyu Islands in the Uchinaaguchi language. There are some Japanese words interspersed and the grammar seems very Japanese, but the sound and intonation of it is very different. There are glottal stops in strange places (coming at it from a Japanese language point of view) and sometimes it almost sounds like Korean. I don't know much about the historical roots of languages of the islands of Japan, but this has made me more interested in getting a deeper understanding of it.

"Why Do Girls Talk Like This?"

It seems like whenever you people complain about modern speech patterns or vocabulary, they're complaining about the way girls talk. I'm not sure why that is, although I think I do recall reading an article about how girls are the trendsetters for language. They start (or at least spread) the 'fads' that become normal fixtures of a generation's language (before the trends change again).

Before I go any further, let me Google that.

Here it is - Young Women Often Trendsetters in Vocal Patterns, from the New York Times.

That said, it does sound pretty crazy. Or as my co-worker says, "That's cray cray!"

Japanese Lenition

Ugh, insomnia. I have to wake up at 7, brain! Go to sleep!

But I guess now is the time to look up a bit more of this very interesting lenition stuff I initially saw in a post on reddit: Why do /k/ and /g/ go to /i/ in Japanese? For example, /kak + ta/ (stem write + past) -> kaita. What is the motivation for turning a velar into a vowel? 

According to Wiki lenition is "a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin lenis = weak)." So it's similar to what happens in American English, with all those ɾ's getting up in the t's circumference without regard to lexicography. 


I remember thinking up something kind of like this (and by that I mean not really anything like this at all) when I learned passive conjugations. I didn't think about one kind of verb taking  られる　and the others taking あれる; I just stuck あれる on the end of any "plain" verb and imagined the う in between eroding away. So たべる＋あれる＝たべるあれる⇒たべられる and かく＋あれる＝かくあれる⇒かかれる. Actually now that I write that out it seems a lot more complicated than just remembering る⇒られる、う⇒あれる. 


Anyway, the top comment by limetom is very enlightening, so now I'm looking through the preview of the book they cited ("A History of the Japanese Language" by Bjarke Frellesvig) on Google. Yeah! Making can't-sleep-time into learn-something-time is the greaɾest!

I Go "La la la la la" - the Quotative "Go"

Maybe this is an early indication of my soon-to-be-discovered linguistic genius (yeah right, ha ha ha ha), but as a kid I often puzzled over the use of 'go' as a quotative. Obviously it wasn't considered 'proper'. Sure, they put it in songs and things, but you wouldn't write 'goes' instead of 'says' or 'said' in an essay. But I couldn't think of how to better convey that I was about to say what someone else said without sounding too literary and 'fake'.

Besides, half the time I wasn't saying just what someone was 'saying' -- it felt like it was something more than just 'saying', and just using 'say' to convey whatever that was felt strange. "And he said, Whoooaaaa, duuuude, is that a Charizard?" It just didn't sound right. For some reason 'go' sounded much better, but that wasn't proper, right? Maybe I should just say what they said/how they acted without using either...Well, that seemed weird, too.

I never really came to a conclusion, either because I lacked the mental fortitude or because the many horse figurines that I owned were whinnying for me to play with them (probably the latter, because PONIES). But later, as 'like' came into more use, I began to think about the same kind of things. 'Like' seemed kind of inelegant, but what else really (besides go) was so completely convenient? And it seemed so apt! I mean, if I had never actually said 'God, I'm about to up and die of boredom' aloud, why would I use 'say'? Or even 'go', for that matter?

Then yesterday I started reading David Crystal's blog. I don't know why it never occurred to me that he might have a blog, but I just discovered it the other day while looking up the difference between 'three-story' and 'three stories', or 'three-year-old' and 'three years old'. He has an entry from March on using 'go' as a quotative.

"First, the historical point. This use of go has been around for quite a while. The online OED has a draft addition which reflects its recent increase in frequency, but the earliest recorded instances are over 150 years old. It defines it thus: 'to utter (the noise indicated) with direct speech... now often in the historic present'..."

 Hey! And what's more, just as my younger self intuited, 'go' "offers a dramatic alternative to say. Say is used when the language is more factual; go when the speaker in the narrative is more involved in the action." It's also often used when "direct speech begins with an interjection or similar vocal effect."

" In one study, it was found that 76 percent of uses of quotative go occurred with a following vocal effect, often with accompanying gestures or facial expressions. The function is sometimes described as 'mimetic' - the speaker is trying to recreate exactly the audio-visual character of the discourse being reported."

 Like is even more broad, and can encompass 'unspoken' areas of expression like thoughts or emotions.

So now I won't feel so bad when I use 'go' or 'like' and can't think of how properly express myself otherwise without becoming verbose. Yeah! I do what I want!

"A Picture of Language" by Kitty Burns Florey

A short article about early sentence diagrams, which were invented by S.W. Clark over a hundred and fifty years ago.

Mr. Clark was not the first reformer to identify its problems, but he was the first to solve them by arranging the parts of a sentence into diagrams. He didn’t consider the idea particularly radical. As he notes in his preface, making the abstract rules of language into pictures was like using maps in a geography book or graphs in geometry.

But there are differences. Maps and geometric diagrams are ancient; both go back at least to the Greeks. Geometry, of course, can’t be taught without recourse to geometric figures, and schoolchildren can draw a map of their classroom or their front yard without much instruction from the teacher. But making a picture of the sentences we read and speak every day was a concept with no real history behind it: it was invented not by an ancient on the other side of the world but in Mr. Clark’s study, in his classrooms, on long meditative walks around the town of Homer.

I like sentence diagramming (although I hadn't seen it done like this, just the phrase structure grammar trees you see in Syntax class). It's methodical, which I like. I'm terrible at math but I can get the same feeling out of sentence diagramming. Not that I completely understand what the heck I'm doing with all these X-Bars quite yet.

Reading Phonetic Transcription

I came across a post from John Wells's Phonetic Blog and was happy to see that I could read the transcription.

wən ɪz ʌ. sɪns STRUT əŋ commA ə nɔʔ məədʒd fə mɪj, ɑjd lɑjk tə bɪj ɛjbl tə kəntɪnjɵw tə jɵwz ə sɛprəʔ sɪmbl fə ðə foomə. ɑjd bɪj hapɪj tə mɛjk ɪt ɐ rɑɑðə ðən ʌ. bəʔ dʒɛf dɪsmɪsɪz STRUT əz ə məəkjɵwərɪjəl (məəkjɵɵrɪɪl) ən fəŋkʃən lɑjʔ ɡrɛjl (fə wɪtʃ hɪj wɪnz tədɛjz mɪkst mɛtəfə prɑjz).

Unfortunately, like most of scholarly abilities, my reading skill does not transfer to my production skill. It could take me hours to write a full post in transcription. I'll keep practicing, but in the meantime I'm going to read it over once more. Thanks to phonetics my British accents are getting better all the time.