Linguistics Thread

>Artifexium
link?

youtube.com/user/Artifexian/videos
Done the name wrong, didn't I.

It's a pretty mixed channel, more concerend with "world building" but his later videos on his conlang are pretty nice.

youtube.com/watch?v=sFWc0sBO62c
Watch this and watch in order ideally.

Adapt a new alphabet inspired by Germanic runes.

Consonants:
Have separate letters for th, ch, sh, etc.
Have there be a diacritic that indicates whether a letter is "hard" (G in golf) or "soft" (G in gel).
Replace ph with ff.
J as a letter will cease to exist. It shall be replaced by soft G and soft Z (think the Zh in "Zhou").
With the exception of foreign loanwords, C will generally be replaced by K for hard C ("crown") and S for soft C ("cell"). Double-Ks as a result of replacing ck will just drop the C.
The -tion suffix will be replaced with a "shun" suffix.

Vowels:
The five vowels will remain the same.
The hard-soft diacritic will be used to distinguish however the main vowels are pronounced on their own (Ay, Ee, Eye, Oh, Yoo).
As a result of that, double-vowels will be replaced with what's most convenient (AI, AY, and AE would be replaced with an accented A), and the E at the ends of words following the noun-consonant-E rule ("Hate" would become "hat" with an accented A).
Y at the end of words next to vowels will be dropped ("Play" becomes "pla" with an accented A).
Y as a vowel will be replaced with an accented I.
Augh shall be replaced with O or Off (depending on how it's used).
Ough shall be replaced with O or Ow (depending on how it's used).

Sure, it doesn't distinguish from the ten billion-letter glorified Greek alphabet known as the IPA, but fuck those guys.

>he uses terms like "hard" and "soft" to describe letters.
>ph should be ff
Why not just "f"?
>tion -> shun
This just raises further questions.

Also, I'm not getting half of your readings for your vowels.
The hell is "AI" "AE" and "augh"?

Nigga learn to IPA or at least distinguish your phonemes better.

Just what the hell is the difference between the upside down v and schwa. Maybe it's my accent, but the o in other and the u in suppose sound the same

The point of the schwa is that it's never stressed. You never put any emphasis on it so it sounds more like just a noise with a rested face.
'a', as in about [əˈbaʊt]
'e', as in taken [ˈtʰeJkən]
'i', as in pencil [ˈpʰɛnsəl]
'o', as in memory [ˈmɛməri]
'u', as in supply [səˈplaJ]
'y', as in sibyl [ˈsJbəl]

Watched xidnaf and artifrxian already, others look interesting though. I was looking more for books that won't cost an arm and a leg to buy.

What areas are you most interested in?

My Intro to Linguistics course used Linguistics for Dummies (not joking). It was written by linguists and gives a general overview of a lot of sub-fields and enough to get a general gist of some major ideas in each. Cheap, and then you can branch out into fields you find most interesting with texts that will admittedly cost a little more.

Language doesn't need to be fixed, language is fine.

General Semantics, google it. How people communicate needs to change, not with what they communicate with.

I've noticed that I tend to be interested in phonetics, phonology, and prosody. I don't know a damn thing about computational linguistics or neuronlinguistics, but they sound cool

I used "The Sounds of Language" by Zsiga, probably around 60 bucks online.

This program is great for learning phonological features:

linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/120a/Pheatures/

Bump

But that is something that is even more difficult to change, you prescriptivist.
The language spoken changes constantly and we need to change our tools to express it, accordingly.

Sociolinguistics is ascended tier.
When you get bored of a person, you ignore what they say and start paying attention to how they are saying it.

Germanfag here. I have found a way to write down my own idiolect in a completely phonemic and partially phonetic way with slight adaptions to the Latin alphabet. I'd love to come up with something similar to English, but my knowledge of the language isn't perfect and I sway back and forth between different dialects. I'll show you an example of my own script below.

I have found a way to write down my own idiolect in a completely phonemic and partially phonetic way with slight adaptions to the Latin alphabet.
Standard German
>Ich habe einen Weg gefunden, meinen eigenen Idiolekt komplett phonemisch und teils phonetisch niederzuschreiben, mit leichten Anpassungen des lateinischen Alphabets.
Idiolect
>Ic hab n̄ vēc gefundn̄, maīn aignen idiolekt komplet fonēmiʃ un tails fon̄etiʃ nīdaţūʃraibm̄, mit laictn̄ anpasuŋ̄ des latainiʃn̄ alfabēts.

A system I thought of a while back

consonants:
nasals m n ng
stops p b t d k g
affricates č ǧ
fricatives f v þ ð s z š ž h
liquids r l
approximants j w

vowels:
near-close i u
open-mid e y o
open æ a

dipthongs:
ij uw
ej oj ow
aj aw

The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak.
They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other.
Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him;
and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak.
And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

Ðy Norþ Wind ænd ðe Syn wyr dispjuwting wič wyz ðy strangyr, wen y trævylyr kejm ylang ræpt in y worm klowk.
Ðej ygrijd ðæt ðy wun huw fyrst syksijdyd in mejking ðy trævylyr tejk af hiz klowk šud bij kynsidyrd strangyr ðæn ðy yðyr.
Ðen ðy Norþ Wind bluw æz hard æz hij kud, byt ðy mor hij bluw ðy mor klowslij did ðy trævylyr fold hiz klowk yraund him;
ænd æt læst ðy Norþ Wind gejv yp ðy ytemt. Ðen ðy Syn šajnd awt wormlij, ænd imijdijytlij ðy trævylyr tuk af hiz klowk.
Ænd sow ðy Norþ Wind wyz yblaiǧd tu kynfes ðæt ðy Syn wyz ðy strangyr yv ðy tu.

Explain those diphthongs and expand č ǧ please.

Also, if you're german do you not have /pf/ like in Pfirsiche?

>Spelling reform?
>Customise the Latin Alphabet to fit our language?
A combinatin of these two. A radical spelling reform on phonemic principles, taking inspiration from shallow orthographies such as Finnish, Turkish or Czech.
Based on the phonemic chart posted here , I'd suggest the following consonant letters:
>b
>c for /ʃ/ (such as in sheep)
>Č, č for /t͡ʃ/ (such as in chat)
>d
>f
>g for hard /g/ only (such as in go)
>h only syllable-initially (such as in have)
>j for /j/ (such as in yes)
>k
>l
>m
>n
>p
>r
>s for /s/ only
>t
>v
>w
>z
>Ð, ð/đ for /ð/ (such as in there)
>Þ, þ for /θ/ (such as in throw)
>Ʒ, ʒ for /ʒ/ (such as in vision)
>Ǯ, ǯ for /d͡ʒ/ (soft g/j)

The vowels though are a whole different story.

Now this is what I'm talking about, especially liking the thorns and yoghs.
But I'm not liking the accents. I Like English being one of the few languages of the area that don't use them at all ,aside from loanwords.

The study of writing and thus of orthography is linguistics, graphematics to be more specific. Setting up rules for writing is not the domain of linguistics, but it really, really should take linguistic insights into account more often.
Nope. You have absolutely no idea what you're doing. You're not solving any problems, just making things more convoluted.
Train your ear and speech tract, you'll notice the difference in time. It is quite possible that the vowels merged in your dialect in most contexts. Think of it like that: /ʌ/ is the sound made by short u in many words. It is a low-mid back vowel. /ə/ is the neutral vowel. You can produce it by just using your vocal chords and not doing anything with your speech tract at all.

Pretty good, I like it.
Not the guy you replied to, but the German guy here. I'm from the North. /pf/ is an exotic sound down here. Syllable-initially, we pronounce it as /f/. Pfirsiche would be something like [fʏ͜ə.zI.çə] for me. Syllable-finally, it would be [kɔp̪͡f] with a labio-dental plosive at the start of the africate, or [kɔp], depending on how far off standard you go.
I'm glad you like it. Thorn and Edh are aesthetic letters that have no reason not to be in English. Yogh has split into too many different sound over time, so I don't know how to include it in a sensible way.
You're probably talking about diacritics, which I understand seem off to native speakers of English. I dunno how to do it any other way though, since there are only 21 consonant letters in the standard Latin alphabet, but your language has 24 consonant phonemes.

You excluded the X, Q and Y symbols, why not just reassign them?
Q is already a serviceable /t͡ʃ/ in Pinyin (Chinese language Romanised Symbols)

I'd like to reserve Y for vowels because English has so many. Q and X could very well be reassigned to /t͡ʃ/ and ʃ, that is true.

Then why not save W for vowels as well?

Because we need it as a consonant letter and it has a one to one correspondence with the IPA.

Yes, and it is more important than working with a broken system which doesn't even explain what you are thinking.

Read pic related, you will see. It posits the idea that many, if not all world conflicts happen because people are using a flawed system of communication, it proves how their grand vocabularies and grammar have literally no meaning and we fight wars and people die over words and ideas which are in the most explicit sense, meaningless. (not really, but that's the main point I took form it).

Language is inherently broken, and not because the script itself isn't perfect, humans simply have no idea how to properly communicate with one another.

It will honestly, if you are interested in language and communication, blow your fucking mind.

>These three investigators- Korzybski, Ogden and Richards agrees broadly on two besetting sins of language. One is identification of words with things. The other is misuse of abstract words.

>Odgen and Richards contribute a technical term, the "referent", by which they the object or situation in the real world to which the word or label refers.

>indeed the goal of semantics might be stated as find the referent.

>When people can agree on the thing which their words refer, minds meet. The communication line is cleared.

>labels and names for things can be classified, roughly, into three classes on an ascending scale.

>1, labels for common objects, such as "dog", "chair" or "pen". Here difficulty is at a minimum
>2, Labels for clusters of collections of things- "mankind",, "consumer goods", "germany", "white race". These are abstractions of a higher order, and confusion in their use is widespread. There is no entity "white Race" in the world outside of our heads, but only some millions of individuals with skin of an obvious or dubious whiteness.

Con't.

>3, Labels for essences and qualities such as "the sublime," "freedom," "individualisim," "truth,". For such terms there is no discoverable referents in the outside world,, and by mistaking them for substantial entities somewhere at large in the environment, we create a fantastical wonderland. This zone is the especial domain of philosophy, politics and economics.

>we normally bed the hard question of finding referents and proceed learnedly to define the term by giving another dictionary abstraction, for example, defining "liberty" by "freedom" - "thus peopleing the universe with spurious entities, mistaking symbolic machinery for referents." We seldom come down to earth, but allow our language forms or symbolic machinery to fashion a demonolgy of absolutes and high-order abstractions, in which we come to believe as firmly as Calvin believed in the Devil.

>you doubt this? Let me ask you a question: Does communisim threaten the world? Unless you are conscious of the dangers lying in the use of abstract terms, you may take this question seriously. You may personify "communisim" as a real thing, advancing physically over the several continents, as a kind of beast or angel, depending on your politics.

>but you have identified the word with the thing, and furthermore you would be very hard put to it to find lower-order referents for the term. I have been searching for them for years. The question as it stands is without meaning.

It was written in the 50's is why it's pretty old timey.

this is not linguistics

this is correct

They're the same phoneme, at least in American English. Schwa is the unstressed realization, wedge/caret is the stressed realization. I took phonetics from a distinguished phonetician who said that's the only difference in most American English dialects.

see

>They're the same phoneme
>in my dialect
I don't think you know what a phoneme is, kid.
It's objective how you pronounce /ə/ or /ʌ/ or any phoneme, the only difference is WHICH phoneme you say for certain letters and certain words. That's the difference in dialects.

Why does it need to be changed? Sure, simplification makes it a bit easier to learn but it also erases much of the history of the language from all but academia. Spellings carry hints about the origins of words. This doesn't strike me as very Veeky Forums. English is currently nowhere near as arcane as Chinese (which for the record, has a very rich and meaningful writing system, though admittedly very difficult to learn.) Are you proposing we give up our language's history for maybe a tiny increase in literacy? Not worth.

I assure you you're the one who's confused. A phoneme is an abstract category which can have multiple realizations. English /t/ and /d/ for example are realized as an alveolar tap intervocallically in American English. Nevertheless, the alveolar tap in "writer" is underlyingly a /t/, while the alveolar tap in "rider" is underlyingly a /d/. The term "phoneme" refers to the abstract category that underlies the surface segment. The schwa in "about" and the schwa in "ugly" are underlyingly the same phoneme, though they surface differently due to the effects of stress in English. Notice that almost every vowel in English surfaces as schwa when unstressed.

*I mean the wedge in "ugly"

So, I'm not a linguist and I could be being stupid here, and it's not related to Orthography, but I had a question about linguistics

>Hebrew Alphabet
>Aleph, Bayt, Gimel Dalet.

>Greek Alphabet
>Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta.

To suggest those letter names arose independently dumps a lot of weight on poor coincidence. But at the same time, I'm pretty sure that Semitic and IE languages have very little actual relations. Is the development of the alphabets separate to the development of the languages? And how did the similarity arise, whether the previous question's answer is yes or no?

Hebrew writing and Greek writing both derive from Phoenician script; the names of the letters were borrowed from the same source. You're right that semitic and indo-european languages are unrelated.

You are confusing phonology with orthography now.
A /t/ is a /t/ no matter what. If your dialect of it makes it an alveolar tap, then it's not a /t/ it's /ɾ̥/ or /ɾ/.
This is why the IPA has diacritics for allophones and variations of certain phonemes.
The reason you can pronounced almost any vowel in English as a schwa is because when you do that, you stop pronouncing that phoneme.
If you make a different noise, then it's a different phoneme/variation of that phoneme, it is that simple.

He's right, dumbass. You're confusing phones with phonemes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme

OK, I stand corrected.

Don't forget the Etruscan's, lad.