[HN Gopher] Great Vowel Shift
___________________________________________________________________
Great Vowel Shift
Author : docdeek
Score : 156 points
Date : 2021-04-14 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| automatoney wrote:
| For anyone wondering about the field that studies this sort of
| phenomenon, welcome to the wonderful field of historical
| linguistics!
|
| Historical linguistics is a really cool intersection between
| anthropology and linguistics - in short the idea is we can look
| at languages around today and use certain well-founded
| assumptions about how languages change to understand the
| languages of the past; essentially the words we speak and sign
| today are the fossils of our linguistic history!
|
| Suggested reading is Historical Linguistics by Lyle Campbell, and
| Language Files for a more general Linguistics textbook.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Canadian English is going through a vowel shift right now. The
| shift is much smaller than the great vowel shift, but still
| notable.
|
| https://www.macleans.ca/society/life/in-the-midst-of-the-can...
| firstplacelast wrote:
| In the US there is a Northern Cities Vowel shift going on right
| now, that this linguist claims is the biggest vowel shift since
| "The Great Vowel Shift." See this video starting at 7:10
| https://youtu.be/IsE_8j5RL3k
|
| Maybe related to what's happening in Canadian English?
| perardi wrote:
| Huh, glad that is real, and not just my ears.
|
| I'm an American, recently back from 2 years in Toronto, and the
| Toronto accent is just not the stereotypical Canadian accent
| that I imagined I'd hear. Far less Minnesota, a bit more New
| Jersey.
| mbroncano wrote:
| Thanks for the link, it was fascinating!
| kebman wrote:
| I'm amazed! Late Middle English 'boat' sounds just like modern
| Norwegian 'bat.' :p I heard the stories that Scandinavians could
| go to Britain and it would only take a short while to get used to
| the language. Kind of like Norwegians going to Denmark today. In
| writing Danish and Norwegian is almost the same, but it takes
| some getting used to the pronounciation.
|
| There's a fantastic dialogue illustrating the similarity of Old
| Danish / Norse vs Old English by Jackson Crawford and Simon
| Roper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKzJEIUSWtc
| simonh wrote:
| My mother's family is from the Durham area in the north east so
| I'm very familiar with the broadly Geordie accent. To me
| Norwegian sounds a bit like German spoken by a Geordie.
|
| It's not really surprising considering that region of England
| used to be colonised by "Danes" and was called The Danelaw
| before the Norman conquest, as against the south Germanic
| tribes that settled southern England. I suppose the Norman
| french influence peters out the further north you go.
| anticristi wrote:
| Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we
| need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and
| written?
|
| This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))
| irrational wrote:
| It really is a shame Spanish didn't become the lingua franca
| since it does have almost a 1:1 spoken and written.
| jccooper wrote:
| Well, that, and no one wanting to update the orthography.
| Though speaking of lingua franca, that language also has a very
| outdated orthography.
| irrational wrote:
| It really is a shame Spanish didn't become the lingua franca
| since it does have almost a 1:1 spoken and written.
|
| Of course, it could have been worse. We could have ended up
| with French as the lingua franca (yes, I know what franca
| means) where there is almost no correlation between written and
| spoken language.
| eindiran wrote:
| The phoneme-grapheme correspondence in Spanish is better than
| English, but let's not pretend it is 1:1. Does it account for
| assimilation in rapid speech? Does it account for
| coarticulation of adjacent consonants? Does it account for
| regional/dialectal variation? Does it account for secondary
| articulation?
|
| Even ignoring all of these, its clearly not bijective. For
| example:
|
| C --> /k/, /th/
|
| Z --> /th/ [0]
|
| K --> /k/
|
| Q --> /k/
|
| G --> /g/, /x/
|
| J --> /x/
|
| N --> /n/ (with several distinct secondary articulations),
| /m/ (rarely)
|
| M --> /m/
|
| R --> Can be tapped or trilled.
|
| Etc. You can go here and see many bijection-failures here:
| [1]
|
| I am being intentionally unfair to Spanish (which truly does
| have a much, much better phoneme-grapheme correspondence than
| English[2]), mostly to illustrate the point that there aren't
| really any languages which have a 1:1 mapping between
| spellings and pronunciations. Even if you decide to use the
| IPA to write your language, non-standard dialects end up
| needing to read words that don't match their pronunciations.
| What happens when inevitably the language undergoes change -
| do we update all of the books to use the 'new' spellings of
| words?
|
| The ideal orthography shouldn't be completely 1:1, but it
| should be relatively shallow. From that perspective, Spanish
| orthography is a fairly attractive option.
|
| [0] The non-1:1 situation with /th/ gets much worse in most
| dialects of Spanish, where it is not distinguished from /s/.
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Sp
| anis...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography#Alphabe
| t_i...
|
| [2] Look at how effective Spanish-speakers are at reading
| without "decoding" compared with Portuguese, which also has a
| good p-g correspondence. In particular, look how much faster
| the Spanish students are at pseudowords, on page 141: https:/
| /www.academia.edu/17872463/Differences_in_reading_acq...
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Most of these examples are unambiguous in context. For
| example, C is always pronounced /k/ when preceding A, O, U,
| and always pronounced /s/ or /th/ depending on the dialect
| when preceding E and I.
|
| The function from written Spanish to spoken Spanish
| (provided we are talking about a single dialect) is
| surjective, but darn close to bijective, especially if we
| exclude words of recent foreign origin.
| supergarfield wrote:
| This might be somewhat subjective, as I don't know how you'd
| measure correlation between spoken and written, but French
| seems to have a much higher match between written and spoken
| language than English.
|
| Going from spelling to pronunciation in French follows
| (admittedly complex) rules that are rarely broken except for
| common words (or endings such as -ent). Vowel pronunciations
| for a given spelling are far more variable in English, and
| often depend on the etymology of the word. Plus, English has
| word-level stress that is not marked in writing (French has
| none, and it's marked in Spanish), and moving the stress will
| usually make a word unintelligible! That alone makes writing
| => pronunciation very difficult.
| gecko wrote:
| French spelling is unidirectional. I can comfortably say
| any French word (albeit with a couple key exceptions, such
| as "et" or "clef", that break rules), but I can't reliably
| go from someone talking to how to spell it. "Eaux", "eau",
| "au", and "aux", or alternatively e.g. "ou", "oux", etc.,
| all have identical pronunciations, but different spellings.
|
| Unsurprisingly, we can vaguely quantify this by looking at
| dyslexia amongst languages. English and various Southeast
| Asian languages that rely on Chinese ideographs are by far
| the worst, followed by things like Arabic, French, Hebrew,
| and German that have fewer exceptions but less guidance,
| and then followed last by things like Spanish, Cherokee,
| and so on that are truly one-to-one.
| eindiran wrote:
| > how you'd measure correlation between spoken and written
|
| There are a number of ways currently used, but I have a new
| one to propose: compare the size of two G2P models (1 for
| each language), which have similar RMS errors. Assuming
| they are generated using similar techniques, the one which
| requires the bigger model probably has a less clean
| phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| It's not subjective; French is better than English in this
| regard, and Spanish is better than French. English has more
| complex pronunciation rules and many, many more exceptions
| than those languages.
| taeric wrote:
| I confess being super happy that English is not so hung up on
| the gender of words. So, it has that advantage over Spanish.
| Umofomia wrote:
| Changes to written representation of languages tends to be much
| more conservative compared to the changes in the spoken
| languages they're based upon. This is often due to the desire
| to preserve continuity in the ability for people to gain
| literacy without having to relearn a new system and retranslate
| all works that were written in the previous system. This
| generally lasts until the difference between speech and writing
| becomes bad enough to hinder literacy, at which point script
| reforms may happen. Many of the more "phonetic" writing systems
| encountered in continental European languages were due to the
| fact that they had relatively more recent script reforms that
| made spellings closer to how their words were pronounced in
| their modern languages. Written English, on the other hand,
| still tends to conserve spelling that reflects older
| pronunciations.
|
| An example of a language that has it worse than English is
| Tibetan, which hasn't had a script reform since 800:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug
| everybodyknows wrote:
| The other side of that coin being that the more the script is
| reformed, the less accessible to non-specialists become a
| culture's great works of literature. Shakespeare being the
| obvious example.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It was my second language, do I started out assuming that this
| was a problem with any language you'd learn.
|
| I do, however, wish natives English speakers were more aware of
| this for their own sake. Most seem to default pronouncing
| vowels in foreign words as if it was English, whereas they'd be
| much closer to the correct pronunciation of they defaulted to
| pronouncing it like words for any language other than English
| they might know even a little of. To me this should be one of
| the first things you learn when learning your second language
| as a natives English speaker. It even holds true for
| romanizations of Asian languages like pinyin for Chinese or
| Hepburn for Japanese
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does
| not map 1:1 spoken and written?
|
| I think the fact that it is a lingua franca is one of the main
| reasons keeping any spelling reform from occurring actually.
| It's in far too wide-spread use and there isn't any centralize
| authority that would do the spelling reform. Maybe take solace
| in the likely fact that it written English and spoken English
| will probably only be _more_ different as time goes forward. In
| other words, you have it easier than all future generations.
|
| Also as much as spelling matching pronunciation is a
| convenience, it isn't really necessary. The variety of spoken
| Chinese languages using the same characters is greater than the
| spoken romance languages. Maybe English really slowly becoming
| more character-like over time. There are languages that can
| undergo spelling reforms, and there are languages people
| actually use.
| bluGill wrote:
| To be considered a competent reader of a standard newspaper
| you need a 6 years of education in English, while only 5 in
| Spanish. I understand Japanese requires 9 years of school for
| the same feat (I'm don't know how to verify this claim, but
| it seems reasonable).
|
| There there is a very real cost to not mapping spoken and
| written languages: kids need to spend more time in school
| learning basic reading skill - time that could be spent
| either learning something else, or playing.
| gxqoz wrote:
| John McWhorter has argued a few times on the Lexicon Valley
| podcast that although English has many problems (especially
| spelling), it's not a terrible lingua franca. Many complexities
| from other languages do not exist in it.
|
| Obviously, any artificial language is going to be much simpler.
| But these have never caught on for a variety of reasons.
| anticristi wrote:
| I don't know John McWhorter, but is this the "second
| languages are hard" argument? I tend to get annoyed when
| people compare the relative difficulty of learning a language
| they spoke 16 _365_ 18 hours vs ... 18 hours.
| gxqoz wrote:
| McWhorter is a linguist (as well as a political
| commentator). His argument isn't that English is easier
| because people already speak it natively. Instead, English
| lost a lot of its complexity (especially around suffixes)
| during the Viking invasions when it was taken up by adult
| speakers.
|
| This doesn't mean that learning the language is easy--no
| language really is. And English has some things that make
| it harder to master, especially its very large vocabulary.
|
| Some of it is covered in this recent episode:
| https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley/2021/03/english-
| la...
| inglor_cz wrote:
| From a Slavic perspective, the really complex thing about
| English grammar is the sequence of tenses.
|
| Having spoken English for almost 30 years by now, I am
| still not sure if "X has died" or "X died" is correct, or
| in which context.
|
| But the other direction would be worse. Languages like
| Czech, with its 20+ classes of declension, must be a true
| nightmare for any English native speaker to learn.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| A good guideline I've heard is that you say "X has
| died/eaten/gone" but "X died/ate/went this morning." So
| simple past if there is a specific time attached and
| present perfect if it's a general statement. More
| examples:
|
| "Have you [ever] been to New York?" "Did you go to New
| York last week?"
|
| "Have you seen Star Wars?" "Did you see Star Wars this
| afternoon?"
|
| Might not work in every circumstance but a good rule of
| thumb.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Even we don't know sometimes.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Having spoken English for almost 30 years by now, I am
| still not sure if "X has died" or "X died" is correct, or
| in which context.
|
| Okay, strictly speaking, this is a distinction in
| _aspect_ , not _tense_. But colloquially, tense, aspect,
| and mood are all referred to as "tense", especially
| since the conflation is present in most Indo-European
| conjugation patterns.
|
| "X has died" is the present perfect. The perfect aspect
| is kind of like the past tense in that it is referring to
| something that has happened. Indeed, the past perfect ("X
| had died") is usually described as "the past of the
| past". But in keeping the tense in the present, the
| present perfect means that the past occurrence has
| relevance to the present. This can carry a few
| connotations. It can be a recent past, especially if you
| use "just" as an infix (c.f., "X has just died"). Or it
| can highlight the consequences of the event having
| occurred (e.g., "Our lord has died. What will become of
| us now?"). In any case, the speaker is drawing the
| listener's attention to the connection between past and
| present when they use the perfect aspect.
|
| So which is correct? "X died" you would expect to find
| more in a biographical context or maybe a novel. "X has
| died" would be common in a news report, or someone
| informing you that a loved one died not too long ago.
| Which is more correct in a given scenario can usually be
| informed by the dominant tense in surrounding text; after
| all "X has died" is the present tense, despite conveying
| an action that happened in the past. If there's not
| enough text to dictate a tense, then it's often the case
| that either form will end up being acceptable--it just
| sets the tense that will be used.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| English's large vocabulary actually makes it _easier_ as
| a second language.
|
| Adults are really good at learning new words, but
| struggle with morphological and gender systems. Complex
| morphology seems to have some benefits that push
| languages towards including them, but are only
| sustainable when those languages are predominantly
| learned by children, who can pick up morphological
| complexity easily, not adults, who can't.
| ajuc wrote:
| > especially its very large vocabulary
|
| Vocabulary isn't a problem IMHO.
|
| The fact that I have to learn each word twice (how to
| write it and how to say it) - is.
|
| I was learning German for 3 years at school. After the
| first month I had no problems with pronunciation. Now
| after almost 2 decades of not using it I can still
| pronounce any German word I see.
|
| I've been learning English since I was 10 or so. I'm 36
| now. I still have many English words I know (and use
| correctly in writing) that I'm not sure how to pronounce.
| mason55 wrote:
| > _I still have many English words I know (and use
| correctly in writing) that I 'm not sure how to
| pronounce._
|
| Do you mind sharing some examples? As a native English
| speaker, I'm so curious! Do you think that if you heard
| them without seeing the word you'd realize what the
| written form was? Or might there be words where you know
| the written form and the spoken form and don't realize
| it's the same word?
| AareyBaba wrote:
| Some examples from I Love Lucy :
| https://youtu.be/uZV40f0cXF4?t=9
| jadinvt wrote:
| epitome. I knew what the word meant written and spoken,
| but didn't realize it was the same word until well into
| adulthood.
| dmitriid wrote:
| This reminded me of "catastrophe". I'm still unsure :)
| dmitriid wrote:
| For me it was "awry" and "lichen". I didn't even
| recognize "lichen" when I first heard it spoken (on an
| episode of QI).
|
| There are quite a few others that tripped me up over the
| years like "cleanliness".
|
| In general, "Chaos" aka "Dearest creature in creation"
| shows this problem (I would still struggle to read it
| even if I know every word there):
| https://pages.hep.wisc.edu/~jnb/charivarius.html
| ajuc wrote:
| "Vocabulary" is one. I just checked it and I almost
| guessed right. I thought the u was more of an oo and the
| second a was ah not eh.
|
| Parallel - for some reason the second a is eh not ah.
| Can't remember that, have to check it every time.
|
| I play a lot of D&D over the internet in English and even
| as common word as "sword" is for some reason hard to
| remember. Every time I have to guess if the "w" is
| pronounced or not.
|
| been == bin ? - the rules for that are just evil
|
| > Do you think that if you heard them without seeing the
| word you'd realize what the written form was?
|
| Sure, from the context if not instantly. I listen to a
| lot of English media with different accents (I watched
| the whole Big Bang and IT Crowd and I listen to Critical
| Role when I'm commuting).
|
| > might there be words where you know the written form
| and the spoken form and don't realize it's the same word?
|
| Leicester and queue. But these are famous enough that I
| remember them now. I obviously won't be able to give you
| examples that I still haven't realized ;)
| jcranmer wrote:
| > the second a was ah not eh
|
| > for some reason the second a is eh not ah
|
| > been == bin ? - the rules for that are just evil
|
| Actually, the rules are rather simple. They all have to
| do with unstressed syllables in English: unstressed
| vowels are reduced to /@/ or /I/ (the latter is what
| comes to play in your been -> bin use). Stress rules in
| English are not simple compared to other languages, and I
| can definitely see where non-native speakers might get
| confused.
|
| One downside of the schwa reduction rules is that it can
| trip you up when you realize that you need to spell a
| word with a reduced vowel and you're not sure how it's
| actually written, because every vowel can be reduced to
| /@/.
| Scarblac wrote:
| I once lost a bet because I couldn't believe "finite" and
| "infinite" sounded so different.
|
| But the best examples are in the poem _The Chaos_
| (http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html).
|
| Through, though, throw, tough... I know a trough exists
| but I have no idea how it's pronounced.
| tialaramex wrote:
| So, the good news is that lots of _native_ English
| speakers don 't know how to pronounce things either. Of
| course I know how to say all the words I speak frequently
| and hear others using - but if I use a word I haven't
| heard there's a risk I'll say it wrong. You just learn
| not to worry about it (the biggest problem really is when
| you unconsciously try to correct somebody else and
| realise you've got not basis for your assumed
| pronunciation).
|
| For example I'd seen adenovirus written down, but never
| heard it said out loud, I was describing the vaccine I'd
| had to friends, one of whom works in medicine (a doctor,
| but not of medicine) and she corrected my pronunciation
| because she's used that word plenty of times so she
| (presumably) knows how to say it correctly.
|
| Even for a completely native immersed speaker, there's
| just no clue in English how to correctly say a completely
| new word you've only seen written down, so you're at no
| disadvantage there. For "real" words there may be an
| etymological clue, but those aren't reliable. In fiction
| it's anything goes. Hearing fictional words I've read
| pronounced out loud in movies is as weird for me as
| seeing the (inevitable) transformation of a woman
| described as plain in the books into a beautiful Holywood
| actress...
|
| It's obviously a bigger problem with some common English
| words - either where they are actually two separate words
| with different pronunciations but the same spelling, or
| worse, one word but with different stress patterns. But
| once you've got a fair-sized vocab the new words you're
| learning won't have that sort of weirdness.
|
| It's definitely true that if you're not confident
| pronunciation can really be an obstacle, fortunately the
| huge vocab helps again - a (non-English native but UK
| citizen) friend of mine will carefully choose to talk
| about liking the "seaside" never the "beach" because
| she's concerned she'll manage to make people think she
| said "bitch". She has a few other words like that, in
| each case English provides convenient alternatives.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > never the "beach" because she's concerned she'll manage
| to make people think she said "bitch".
|
| Is her native language Spanish?
|
| It's really cool how you can have "blind spots" depending
| on your native language. To me, the difference between
| beach and bitch is _huge_ , because my native language
| uses short and long vowels extensively, and there are
| tons of words that only differ in a single vowel length.
|
| But at the same time, I have other blind spots in
| English. For example, I have to make an effort to
| remember to use sounding "s" and "j" where appropriate,
| and the lack of those is a dead give-away for identifying
| Swedish English speakers.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| She could also be French, or a speaker of any other
| romance language, or really any language that doesn't
| have the vowel [I]. For speakers of such languages,
| "beach" and "bitch," as well as "sheet" and "shit," can
| be very hard to distinguish from one another.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > talk about liking the "seaside" never the "beach"
| because she's concerned she'll manage to make people
| think she said "bitch".
|
| Thanks for that anecdote, I somehow thought that I am
| alone living with fear of that happening :)
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| It poses problem for native speakers as well. After all,
| there are no Spelling Bee competitions in France, or
| Germany ... or anywhere.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| There are in Poland. I suspect that they are also
| elsewhere, any language will have at least some tricky
| words.
|
| See
| https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Og%C3%B3lnopolskie_Dyktando
| keiferski wrote:
| English is a great lingua franca IMO because of its inherent
| decentralization and willingness to accept new words. There
| is no academy regulating its use, as is the case with French
| and Spanish.
| Koshkin wrote:
| To be honest, I still wish it were Spanish, which is easier
| to learn/read and pronunciation of which is somehow easier
| for most people (except for native English speakers, as
| I've noticed).
| soldehierro wrote:
| In the case of Spanish, I can't speak for French, having an
| academy (the RAE in this case) regulating the language
| sounds like a problem on paper, but really isn't a problem
| in practice. The RAE accepts Americanisms and treats
| American Spanish just as it would European Spanish
| (referring to the continent(s), not the country) and
| encourages lingusitic diversity. Anglicisms are only
| discouraged when an acceptable Spanish alternative is in
| WIDE use (but never prohibited, as can be evidenced by the
| sheer quantity of anglicisms in the Spanish language.)
|
| Spanish is very willing to accept new words, and as diverse
| as English in terms of decentralization. Grammar doesn't
| make or break a lingua franca, number of speakers does,
| which is where English really shines.
|
| So what does the RAE do you ask? They write grammars and
| compile dictionaries, describe phonology and answer
| people's questions on Twitter. Just like what Merriam
| Webster or Oxford would do, but the RAE has official
| backing and creates consensus among the hispanophone
| countries. English is a regulated language, just not
| _officially_ regulated.
| kube-system wrote:
| I'd say it's more accurate to describe Webster and Oxford
| as documenting established usage, rather than being
| informal regulators. They generally view their role as
| being purely observers and not as active influencers of
| the language.
|
| Some other language authorities do not take a usage-
| evidence-based approach to defining their dictionaries,
| and take into account cultural or historical concerns.
| orwin wrote:
| I which french academy was this tolerant.
| Bayart wrote:
| The problem of the French Academy isn't that it's
| intolerant, there are linguistic bodies in Europe that
| are far more conservative, it's that it's too slow and
| simply cannot keep up.
| yongjik wrote:
| Oh how I envy you. Here in Korea we are stuck with the
| tax-funded imbeciles of National Institute of Korean
| Language, whose hobby is saying "ALL you Koreans are
| using the Korean language wrong!" with a straight face at
| every occasion.
| vidarh wrote:
| Similarly in Norway the authority in charge often
| _proposes_ Norwegian alternatives to Anglicisms, but they
| 'll yield if an import becomes dominant, and will even
| reverse official reforms if they fail to gain traction.
| Kranar wrote:
| All languages are decentralized regardless of regulation by
| official government bodies.
|
| The role of regulation is mostly a legal role employed by
| countries that use a civil legal system. Most English
| speaking countries use a common law legal system and so
| interpretation of words is fairly fluid and subject to
| interpretation by the courts. Civil law does not have this
| kind of flexibility and room for interpretation, so courts
| will make use of regulatory bodies to uniformly interpret
| language.
|
| This is why almost all countries with a civil law system
| have a regulatory body, while countries with a common law
| system do not.
| uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh wrote:
| Imagine the github issue tracker for the synthetic lingua
| franca. "Cannot express...", "ambiguity in..."
| Kranar wrote:
| Any lingua franca will end up deviating in pronunciation from
| how it's written. For example, Finnish is said to have very
| shallow orthographic depth (the technical term for this
| phenomenon), but you can imagine if people from across the
| world began speaking and writing Finnish that over 100 years
| you'd end up with different accents and different variations of
| the original Finnish. The language would branch and merge and
| branch in unpredictable ways as it gets incorporated into
| various cultures and you'd end up with a situation similar to
| English today.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| I don't think Finnish (or any language in a state of
| diglossia) is the best example here. That is, Finnish is
| already essentially two separate languages. Written Finnish (
| _kirjakieli_ ) is a somewhat artificial language that was a
| compromise between different dialects, because at the birth
| of Finnish literacy there was no longer an "original Finnish"
| on which to base writing.
|
| Written Finnish is mainly a written thing, and while there is
| a close correspondence between the orthography and how it
| would be read aloud, when Finns actually speak they use
| spoken Finnish ( _puhekieli_ ), which isn't standardized and
| varies from region to region.
| Kranar wrote:
| I am referring strictly to the correspondence between a
| written language and its pronunciation. The fact that
| people speak differently from how they read/write is an
| altogether separate matter.
|
| When reading Finnish, one pronounces the words very closely
| to how the word is spelled, regardless of whether when they
| speak they do so in an altogether different manner.
| User23 wrote:
| In German e is a, and i is e. It really is striking.
| lottin wrote:
| It isn't striking for speakers of German nor for speakers of
| Romance languages. These are the vowels that these letters
| originally stood for in the Latin alphabet, and they still do
| in many languages. But English obviously isn't one of them.
| User23 wrote:
| I'm a native speaker of both English and German and it was
| striking to me when I was learning to write.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some good previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774428
| adamrezich wrote:
| related, but has anyone noticed younger Americans pronouncing a
| few specific types of words differently as of late?
|
| I'm 29 and grew up in the Midwest, so in my accent, when I say
| "button," the "tt" is nearly silent. however, at my last job
| doing remote web development, one guy who was a bit younger than
| me (and also American) would pronounce it "BUH 'in," with
| noticeable "stop" between the two syllables. I have since noticed
| this in other younger Americans as well, and for other words I
| cannot recall right now but with the same general pattern.
| asveikau wrote:
| I tend to associate this with Brits. I have definitely noticed
| a rise in young Americans doing this in the last year or two
| though.
|
| The typical American "nearly silent" one you are describing
| tends to be more of a flapped /r/, by the way. <d> is often the
| same.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > The typical American "nearly silent" one you are describing
| tends to be more of a flapped /r/, by the way. <d> is often
| the same.
|
| yes, exactly! also out here in South Dakota we specifically
| pronounce the "t" in "Dakota" as a "d," I've noticed.
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| Is that the same thing as "D-Troit" verses "Duh-Troit" for
| Detroit? That's one of my favorites.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| I think I've always said with a stop. I'm from the East Coast,
| though.
| Aromasin wrote:
| Funny enough, this has almost become the common British
| pronunciation of most "hard t" words. It's quite common for
| people to say "a bottle of water" like "a boh-ell of wah-er",
| or "butter" like "buh-ah. The sound comes from the back of the
| throat instead of the tip of the tongue.
| tabtab wrote:
| I had the impression such is considered "lower class" talk,
| for lack of a PC way to describe it. _Please_ hear me out
| before giving me negative points.
|
| If you are "educated", then you are "supposed to" pronounce
| the middle constantans, as skipping them is considered
| "lazy". I'm not making a value judgement, but reporting that
| this is what parents often tell their kids _in private_. All
| things being equal, parents want their children to _sound_
| wealthy and well educated. Similar for certain rural or
| "redneck" talk in the US. Example: "Murica" instead of
| "America". My mother used to lecture me against certain
| verbal shortcuts so that I didn't "sound ignorant". Her
| words, not mine.
| Veen wrote:
| It is (or was) considered "lower-class" to drop your Ts in
| the UK. But these days, it's not fashionable to talk like
| Boris Johnson, even if you went to Eton, so many upper-
| middle class people emulate aspects of "lower-class"
| speech, including the glottalization of "t" when it's
| followed by an unstressed syllable (like water). Even
| someone as indisputably posh as Prince Harry will
| T-glottalize on occasion.
| gugagore wrote:
| It's no big secret that different social groups exhibit
| language variation, and that while there's nothing
| inherently lesser about certain dialects, they are
| nonetheless coded as e.g low or high status.
|
| You might feel a lot more comfortable talking about this
| subject and find useful alternatives to your scare-quoted
| words if you skim
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics
|
| Also due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection
| ,I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English
| is a fascinating and accessible example. A terrible
| summary: dropping the R is lazy (dropping anything is
| "lazy"), but at the same time sounds British and therefore
| fancy to some American ears. But other people, to avoid
| laziness, add Rs. But then their speech can sound low-
| status in some cases too.
| kiliantics wrote:
| it's called a glottal stop, it's also pretty common in Irish
| accents to substitute this for a T
| TheLocehiliosan wrote:
| I'm 46, also grew up in midwest, and I say "BUH 'in".
| dkuder wrote:
| Glotalization of T
| https://linguistics.byu.edu/faculty/deddingt/t-glottalizatio...
|
| My anecdata says we covered this dialect in intro linguistics
| back in the 80s. I have been hearing it from New Jersey natives
| for a long time.
| skywhopper wrote:
| I don't think it is a new phenomenon in the language. I
| associate this with Northeast US accents and many British
| accents. It may be that regional accents which use a glottal
| stop for this pattern are leaking into younger people's accents
| around you simply because YouTube and TikTok are making less
| common accents heard more widely.
| Bayart wrote:
| That sounds like the glottal stop you hear quite a bit in
| England. _Bu 'hu_ for "butter", _wa 'hu_ for "water" and so on.
| I've been in heated discussions with Englishmen arguing my
| pronouncing the Ts in the middle of words is incorrect. I
| personally hold to the notion that at the very least if you go
| to the length of putting the letter T *twice* in the same spot,
| it really wants to be pronounced.
| nemetroid wrote:
| The pre-shift vowels are quite similar to how modern Swedish is
| pronounced.
| hashmush wrote:
| For the front ones, maybe. But for the back ones Old Swedish
| went through "stora vokaldansen" (the great vowel dance)
| leading to "ut" (out) being pronounced /u:t/ rather than /u:t/.
| ngokevin wrote:
| Here's what it'd look like (taken from Reddit):
|
| "The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby
| English will be the official language of the European Union
| rather than German, which was the other possibility.
|
| As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that
| English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a
| 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
|
| In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this
| will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be
| dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and
| keyboards kan have one less letter.
|
| There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when
| the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make
| words like fotograf 20% shorter.
|
| In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be
| expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are
| possible.
|
| Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which
| have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
|
| Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the
| languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
|
| By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing
| "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
|
| During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords
| kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi
| bl riten styl.
|
| Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi
| TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum
| tru.
|
| Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey
| vunted in ze forst plas."
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| c can then be used as "ch", as in Italian.
|
| x can then be used as "sh", as in Portuguese.
| mason55 wrote:
| Speaking of Portuguese, I've always found the usage of "c" to
| be interesting. I've never studied the language but just from
| looking at words it's clearly the way to represent the soft
| "c" sound before a "fat" vowel (a/o/u). How did those words
| ended up with a "c" instead of an "s"?
|
| This thread finally made me remember to go look it up and it
| seems like the "c" used to be a different sound (/dz/). I
| guess it evolved to the "s" sound we hear today sometime by
| the 1700s.
|
| I wonder if that means only words older than the 1700s have
| the cedilha and newer words would just be spelled with an
| "s"?
| mbroncano wrote:
| That is lovely, thanks for 'ze laf'. One minor note, it reads
| much more like Dutch to me :)
| User23 wrote:
| As someone who speaks both English and German natively, I can
| say Dutch makes my brain hurt whenever I hear it. It's like
| my brain can't pick which neural pathways to use and the
| dissonance is awful.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| You still need c for "ch" so perhaps, like Indonesian, you can
| just use "c" in place of "ch."
|
| Oh, and Indonesian is my favorite lingua franca. Super easy to
| learn for anyone and also simple, phonetic spelling.
|
| I had only ever learned Indo-European languages (ie English,
| Spanish, French) and a bit of Japanese (also unrelated to
| Indonesian), but I was able to pick up a useful amount of
| conversational Indonesian in about 3-4 weeks. Indonesian is an
| Austronesian language (actually a standardized variant of
| Malay) and totally unrelated to my mother tongue (American
| English), yet it was the easiest thing to pick up. Sounding out
| new words in Indonesian is actually easier than English to me.
| fbellag wrote:
| I've half-jokingly, proposed a similar change to Spanish,
| basically:
|
| z, c (as in "ce", "ci"): use "s" (non european spanish speakers
| do not distinguish these sounds anyway)
|
| v: always use "b"
|
| c (as in "ca", "co", "cu"), q(u) (as in "que", "quiso"):
| replaced with "k"
|
| w: why do we have this letter?! use "u"
|
| y (as vowel): use "i" (basically only used as "and" in Spanish)
|
| y (as consonant): stays like it is now (important in some
| variants where it sounds pretty much as "sh" in English)
|
| ll as in "lluvia": replaced with "y"
|
| h (mute as in "hueso", "humano"): Just remove it (ueso, umano)
|
| ch (as in "chorizo"): replaced with "c"
|
| r, rr: Couldn't yet find a good replacement that's not
| ambiguous for the soft and vibrant sounds in all the use-
| cases...
|
| n: this stays. it gives the language personality!
|
| I've got not much traction with my friend, though!!!!!
| fbellag wrote:
| Adding to my post, with regards to "y": In school we are
| teached there are 5 vowels "aeiou" yet the "y" sound when
| used alone is a vowel!
| mywittyname wrote:
| > n: this stays. it gives the language personality!
|
| We can remove it and call the entire transition the
| Convergencia ano-ano.
| fbellag wrote:
| LOL! Nooooo
|
| I stand by the N!
| young_unixer wrote:
| I would prefer B and V to keep being disctint letters.
|
| As far as I know, when properly pronounced, the V in Villa
| doesn't sound the same as the B in Billete.
|
| Sure, sometimes they blend into each other, but not always.
| fbellag wrote:
| Yes, in "proper" spanish they sound different. That said,
| except when exaggerating, I know noone who makes the
| distinction in day to day conversations!
| fbellag wrote:
| At least not where I live, that's it!
| opencl wrote:
| That one predates Reddit's existence, it was already being
| passed around the internet in the 90s. There are a couple of
| slightly different variations floating around.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19991006200917/http://users.ox.a...
| zentiggr wrote:
| Very adept adaptation of the Mark Twain original!
| mywittyname wrote:
| This is cute, up until the point where it starts reaching and
| makes changes which are important for the sound of the
| language.
|
| The e in many words isn't silent, it's a modifier. Kit and kite
| are different words. "th", "z", "w", and "v" are all really
| different sounds. While certain accents (or children) do
| occasionally conflate them, in basically every case, it's
| technically incorrect. Zebra, Webra, Vebra, and Thebra are all
| totally different words to a native English speaker.
|
| I'm absolutely behind the idea of simplified English where
| spelling and pronunciation match. But that's a lofty goal, as
| first one would have to canonize English, which is basically
| impossible at this point. Then they'd have to tackle homonyms,
| like cot and caught (assuming canonized English has these
| pronounced the same).
| anticristi wrote:
| So basically English spelling is trapped in a local minimum.
| An small change will make spelling closer to _some_ dialect,
| and further from _most other_ dialects. The current situation
| is suboptimal for everyone, but at least it 's a Nash
| equilibrium.
| rootbear wrote:
| I personally think there's a lot of room for improvements
| that would work in nearly all English dialects. The "ough"
| mess, for example, could stand some clean up. But in
| general, yes, there is too much variation in English around
| the world to "fix" it now.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| That's certainly true for things like vowels, but there are
| other situations where spelling could be changed with no
| ambiguity problems in any dialect. For example, basically
| every word that contains "gh" can be simplified, as <gh>
| represents a /x/ sound like German "Bach" that dropped out
| of the language in the 1200s. Nobody is confused by "tho"
| and "thru".
|
| Another easy example is just fixing "island". The <s> was
| _never_ pronounced. Medieval scribes put it there because
| they incorrectly guessed that the word was related to Latin
| "insula".
| anticristi wrote:
| I dont vant tu teik saids, but German haz diklention und
| konjugation, vich maiks it a suboptimal lingua franka. Not tu
| mention meni iregular verbs.
|
| Mai vot gos tu som nordik languag like Svedish.
| sltkr wrote:
| Does German have (significantly) more irregular verbs than
| English?
| dmoy wrote:
| No.
|
| German has significantly fewer irregular verbs than
| English.
|
| It's ~200 to ~300. (French is double that?)
|
| There's enough to be moderately annoying, but not that bad.
| Also (in my personal opinion), German irregular verbs tend
| to be not-as-irregular as English.
| gecko wrote:
| The fuzzy thing with counting French irregular verbs is
| that there are so many that follow similar _patterns_
| that they really can 't be treated as fully irregular.
| More, like...oddly specific variants of the -re/-ir/-er
| verb classes. (You can get into this with English, too,
| in things like "to come", "came"/"to become", "became",
| or "to hold", "held"/"to behold", "beheld", but we
| actually IIRC have fewer groupings like this.) So the raw
| French number is higher in a strict sense, but
| potentially between English and German overall.
| vidarh wrote:
| If you want to go that route, it's fun to imagine a "unified
| Germanic" achieved by systematic reform to bring the main
| Germanic language closer together.
|
| Start by purging English of French influence, starting with
| words where words of Germanic origin exists with a similar
| meaning. Simplify German grammar. Undo some consonant shifts.
| E.g (the German and Dutch I had to check/adjust w/Google
| translate; no guarantees for accuracy):
|
| Swedish: En dag kan vi alla tala samma sprak
|
| Norwegian: En dag kan vi alle snakke samme sprak (or "det
| samme spraket")
|
| Danish: En dag kan vi alle tale det samme sprog
|
| German: Eines Tages konnen wir alle dieselbe Sprache sprechen
|
| Dutch: Op een dag kunnen we allemaal dezelfde taal spreken
|
| English: One day we can all speak the same language
|
| Now consider "speech" as an alternative to "language" in
| English (alternatively: "tale" is valid but archaic in
| Norwegian in this context and we have the English cognate
| "talk"), and undo that D->T consonant shift in German (e.g.
| compare Tag to Low German "Dag"), and replace "the" (compare
| det/de/die/das/der etc.).
|
| There are a whole lot of simple spelling and sound changes
| that'd bring the above languages a lot closer together very
| easily.
|
| Of course it's easy in theory - in practice I've lived
| through multiple Norwegian language reforms and know how
| excruciatingly slow it can be to get people to adapt (e.g.
| Norway changed the spoken form of numbers above 20 in _1952_
| from the equivalent of "four and fifty" to "fifty-four"; my
| parents learned the new forms in primary school, yet I still
| picked up the old forms from them in the late 70's and still
| switch back and forth between the old and new forms now)
| yongjik wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: Declension and conjugation are nice! It
| means different forms for the act of watching X (watching
| birds), X that is watching (watching eyes), or X that is used
| for the act of watching (watching post). So you immediately
| know which one is which, instead of trying to figure that out
| from context (you have 200 milliseconds before the next
| sentence starts, good luck).
| HideousKojima wrote:
| In English it's not based on context, it's based on word
| order. Declension is a cool concept but it's far more
| confusing to foreigners because word order basically
| doesn't matter.
|
| For example in Czech:
|
| Jan zabil Petra
|
| Jan Petra zabil
|
| Petra Jan zabil
|
| Petra zabil Jan
|
| Zabil Petra Jan
|
| and
|
| Zabil Jan Petra
|
| are all equivalent to the English "John killed Peter."
| Change Jan to Jana and Petra to Petr and all 6 of those
| become "Peter killed John." Even more confusing to a
| foreigner learning it is that Petra and Jana are the
| feminine forms of those names in the nominative case.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| I don't think declensions and conjugations matter all that
| much, seeing how Latin was the _Lingua Franca_ for 2000+
| years, and _the_ _Lingua Franca_ : French, has a load of
| irregulars too.
|
| But we all know that it should be Esperanto.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Esperanto is more like Go. Rust is more like lojban
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| You're not going to get a lot of support here, unless you
| change your vote to Rust.
| soldehierro wrote:
| Esperanto > Rust
| gxqoz wrote:
| The Economist had a recent article on why spelling reform never
| really gains traction. Basically, those in power to change it
| have no incentive to do so: https://www.economist.com/books-
| and-arts/2021/04/10/why-its-...
| ajuc wrote:
| But other languages (like Polish or German for example) have
| spelling reforms from time to time.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| I think it's easier when there's a single polity that
| represents the "entirety" of that languages speaking
| community. Nobody controls English in the same way - I'd
| say the US and UK have equal claim to being able to
| formalize language changes, but good luck getting 2 billion
| people to follow them.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| I think for those languages (I know French and German have
| them, unsure about Polish) there is a central body which
| "controls" the language, meanwhile in English we don't have
| one.
| ajuc wrote:
| There is one for Polish but I think English speakers
| overestimate the power such bodies have over people :)
|
| The only power they have is influencing the way kids are
| taught at school. Everything else changes by social
| pressure and exposure - most media choose to follow the
| new convention and people get used to it over time.
|
| The changes are very gradual - the only big one I
| remember was in 90s - changing how "not" was written with
| adjectives and adverbs. The rules got much simpler so few
| people complained.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| So the only power such bodies have is being able to
| influence the entirety of the next generation of the
| speakers of the language? That's surely some amount of
| power that nobody holds whatsoever on the English
| language. Israel was able to use the educational system
| to revive a millenia-dead old language, that's quite a
| lot of power.
| ajuc wrote:
| I meant the direct influence would only be noticeable
| after decades, but because of media and social pressure
| after a few years most adult people switched.
| anticristi wrote:
| Also Norwegian and Swedish.
|
| Romania also had some spelling reform, albeit it was more
| motivated by a desire to distance itself from a communist
| past and not cleanup of tech debt.
| mywittyname wrote:
| People also fucking haaaate changes in language. Especially
| older people.
|
| I had a 85 year old (yes) technical writing professor in
| college who insisted that we do our papers using the "Queen's
| English" that he learned growing up in Catholic school. He
| even went so far as to write a damn book outlining his rules
| for English writing because none of the existing style guides
| out there matched his view of the language.
|
| You'll never get people like that to adopt any sort of change
| to the language.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| That's not universal at all. Many languages have spelling
| reform every couple of decades. French spelling was updated
| in 1991 and German in 1996. Dutch was reformed in 1996 and
| 2006.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Yes. In British English, one problem with any sort of
| spelling reform is that the pronunciations of many words have
| significant regional variations. For example, in a Southern
| English accent, words like Bath and Castle are pronounced
| with a long vowel (almost as if they were spelt 'Barth and
| 'Carstle') compared with the much shorter Northern English
| versions ('baf', 'cassl').
|
| To pick a particular pronunciation-based spelling of words
| would therefore be to prefer one region over another. This
| would at least trigger a monumental North vs. South argument,
| assuming that the plans survived the inevitable knee-jerk
| reactions / incredulity of the usual media suspects.
|
| Probably best if we stick to arguing about daylight saving
| time, or changes to the format of cricket matches.
| mason55 wrote:
| There are a few changes that I believe are universal. I'm
| thinking hard/soft "c" becoming "k"/"s" and soft "g"
| becoming "j". I don't think I've heard any dialects where
| there's a difference between whether you pronounce the "c"
| in a word as hard or soft.
|
| But then again, those rules are pretty standard (c/g before
| e/i [the "skinny vowels"]) are almost always soft and they
| are hard otherwise. If you need a soft "c" sound before an
| "a" then you just use the letter "s". So maybe it's not
| even worth the effort.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > I don't think I've heard any dialects where there's a
| difference between whether you pronounce the "c" in a
| word as hard or soft.
|
| Um, yes, I can't think of regular words where a "c"
| changes.
|
| <thinks a bit more>
|
| Place names. Place names - at least in England - can have
| significant differences between spelling and
| pronunciation, and the locals will often use or be aware
| of a local pronunciation that isn't obvious to outsiders.
| Examples include Bicester ('bister'), Leicester
| ('lester'), Salisbury ('solsbry'), Tottenham ('totnam')
| and many others. It's not quite the same effect as with
| dialects but it certainly complicates spelling reform.
| dang wrote:
| Believe it or not, that joke originated in a 1946 issue of
| Astounding Science Fiction. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26468884 and the links
| back from there.
|
| (We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26809658.)
| jbverschoor wrote:
| The recordings sound very Dutch!
| valarauko wrote:
| The Frisian languages are the closest living relatives to old
| English, so perhaps there's a connection there?
| fatiherikli wrote:
| I recommend to read the following article before reading that
| wiki post. So we need to understand what does a Vokal (Vowel)
| mean first.
|
| https://github.com/yogurt-cultures/kefir/blob/master/kefir/p...
|
| Also I shifted one Const sound in the wikipedia article.
| khy wrote:
| If anyone finds this subject interesting, I recommend The History
| of English Podcast: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Also the ITV series "The Adventure of English" with Melvyn
| Bragg. They're all on YT.
| bps4484 wrote:
| A a great podcast that has started a personal hobby/interest in
| linguistics and etymology.
|
| I love that history is able break your notion of what is or
| isn't possible and this podcast is great at that; it repeatedly
| shows how no language is set in stone, it is a human construct,
| and how languages are interrelated.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Oh wow, I've never seen anyone rep that podcast elsewhere, but
| I _highly_ recommend it. It 's absolutely fascinating. I'm not
| much of a podcast listener, but this one pretty much
| immediately captured my attention and has held it (I'm now a
| ~70 episodes in IIRC).
| beermonster wrote:
| And 'Mother Tongue' by Bill Bryson.
| WaldoLydecker wrote:
| Mein Held!
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Can't upvote this enough; it's a great podcast. If this seems
| just a little too esoteric, might I appeal to everybody's
| prurient side and recommend Chaucer's Vulgar Tongue [0] as a
| gateway episode?
|
| [0]
| https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2019/09/25/episode-129-c...
| gchucky wrote:
| The vowel shift is one of the major reasons why Shakespeare's
| poetry doesn't rhyme when spoken with modern English. There was a
| rather fascinating video that went around awhile back of a father
| and son demonstrating the changes.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
| ljm wrote:
| It's fascinating how much of this holds out in various accents
| across the UK, most particularly outside of London and going up
| north. My mother and grandparents on her side have similar-ish
| pronunciation of some words with their thick Lancs accents. Not
| quite farmers accents but still quite archaic in sound
| sometimes.
|
| (Imagine other examples, like pronouncing 'couch' a bit more
| like 'cooch')
| pablodavila wrote:
| Another slightly related video by Tom Scott
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUnGvH8fUUc
| coolreader18 wrote:
| It's funny, for at least the first example, original
| pronunciation just sounds like Hagrid from the Harry Potter
| movies, which is especially interesting considering that's
| intended to be a less formal/"lower class" accent. Reminds me
| of something I heard once that the modern american accent is
| actually closer to the british accent at the time of the
| revolutionary war, and it's the british accent that's changed
| more since then. No idea if that's actually true, but it was
| really interesting when I heard it.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Poetry does not have to rhyme.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Shakespeare's plays post-date the bulk of the Great Vowel
| Shift. The reason they don't rhyme is only partly because of
| the very last phases of the Great Vowel Shift, and partly due
| to the changing English dialectal landscape.
|
| The classic English author for whom the Great Vowel Shift is
| most relevant, in terms of audiences today not pronouncing the
| text anywhere near as society then would have, is Chaucer.
| zarq wrote:
| I learned about another vowel shift yesterday: the (US) "Northern
| Cities Vowel Shift" -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Northern_American_Engli...
| aent wrote:
| Very good demonstration of how that sounds:
| https://youtu.be/IsE_8j5RL3k?t=433
| pdevr wrote:
| Wow. I was (again) reading about this whole thing last week. Lot-
| cloth, Father-brother, cot-caught, Psalm by itself...
|
| If you are interested to know more, take a look at the way native
| speakers of other languages utter "a" and "o" and their
| variations. Fascinating, to say the least.
| canadianfella wrote:
| Cot and caught are different to you???
| [deleted]
| kindall wrote:
| They really missed an opportunity by not calling it the Great
| Vowel Movement
| tabtab wrote:
| Maybe because "V" and "B" used to be pronounced the same ;-)
| Koshkin wrote:
| In Spanish they still are.
| eindiran wrote:
| Vowel shift is a term of art in linguistics, so I'm not sure
| the pun would be worth it.
| yesenadam wrote:
| > Vowel shift is a term of art in linguistics
|
| Aside: I see "term of art" everywhere on HN lately. Why?!
| What does it add to saying "Vowel shift is a linguistics
| term" or "a term in linguistics"? Why do people want to sound
| like patent lawyers? Am I missing something?
| Baeocystin wrote:
| I've found that using 'term of art' more effectively
| communicates 'this word has a domain-specific meaning that
| might differ from what you would naively think, pay
| attention' than simply saying 'x is an x term' or the like,
| which people tend to gloss over.
|
| [edit] I am pleased to see that HN readers as a group love
| to define things, and also that I need to learn to refresh
| tabs I've had open for a while before responding
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Maybe you just noticed it lately.
|
| Term doesn't imply a specialized meaning. Term of art does.
| And it doesn't have a negative secondary meaning like
| jargon.
| eointierney wrote:
| Terms of art are pre-scientific jargon that survive mainly
| due to utility. They are common in crafts such as pottery
| or the Law. They are references to heuristically derived
| conveniences. They're linguistically cool.
|
| In Math, lemma is a term of the art.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| > I see "term of art" everywhere on HN lately. Why?!
|
| Probably a combination of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon and
| virality (meme).
| chc wrote:
| "A term in linguistics" is imprecise -- it's also a term
| outside of linguistics. The phrase "term of art" means
| basically "I know that you think you know what this means
| based on the words, but it is a special defined term that
| means something particular in this field." It is generally
| used to correct someone who seems to be viewing a term of
| art as a common English phrase, so the precision is useful.
| JackFr wrote:
| It's shorthand for "in context, that might not mean what
| you think it means." I would use term of art to distinguish
| something that has a particular meaning for the context.
| For example "clobber" has a useful meaning, a meaning that
| many people use, but when programmers use it, it's a term
| of art that means something specific and non-obvious.
| echelon wrote:
| The article doesn't explain what evidence we have of this. How do
| we know this happened?
| bloak wrote:
| It's a good question. It turns out that linguists can discover
| quite a lot about how some languages were pronounced before
| audio recording existed. I got some insight into this by
| reading the first chapter of an academic book on the
| pronounciation of Latin where there was a summary of the
| different kinds of evidence that can be used. Unfortunately I
| don't have the list to hand so the following is just my random
| brainstorming:
|
| * the pronunciation of descendent languages, especially when
| there are lots of them, or lots of different dialects
|
| * comparison with languages that have a common ancestor
|
| * how words were transcribed from one language into another
|
| * how words were changed when adopted from one language into
| another
|
| * what spelling mistakes were made, particularly in cases where
| the writer was less educated or being less careful, such as
| graffiti
|
| * rhyme and metre in poetry
|
| * in literature, cases where someone is mocked for their
| pronunciation
|
| * puns and wordplay in literature
|
| * and of course cases where ancient authors have written more
| or less explicitly about pronunciation, either descriptively or
| prescriptively
| jcranmer wrote:
| > * the pronunciation of descendent languages, especially
| when there are lots of them, or lots of different dialects
|
| It's worth calling this out as being one of the key elements
| of historical linguistics. Establishing genetic relations
| between languages requires proposing systematic sound shift
| laws that can explain why cognates sound the way they do, and
| this means that cognates in modern languages may not bear
| much resemblance to each other (English five and Sanscrit
| pankan are cognate yet share 0 sounds!). For example, there's
| a rule in the Germanic languages that shifts /k/ to /h/, so
| words like Latin "centum" instead become English "hundred" or
| "canis" to "hound" [1].
|
| Now these pronunciation shifts often have caveats in them,
| such as shifting only before certain kinds of vowels or
| consonants. These restrictions can give you some clues as to
| why certain words seem to undergo a change while other words
| with seemingly similar pronunciations didn't. In Proto-Indo-
| European, this leads to the notion that there are several
| consonants (specifically, laryngeals) which are no longer
| present in any modern Indo-European language but whose
| existence in the original is responsible for sometimes
| shifting vowels that otherwise appear somewhat anomalous in
| descendant languages.
|
| [1] To be clear, Latin is not the initial word and English is
| not the final word. I'm just using Latin to illustrate a word
| closer to the original Proto-Indo-European pronunciation and
| English to illustrate what the Proto-Germanic pronunciation
| shifts towards.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| English orthography is a dead giveaway. For example, why does
| the letter "i" in most continental European languages represent
| the vowel /i/, while in English it represents a diphthong? The
| way French loanwords or Latinisms are pronounced in modern
| English is similar evidence.
|
| Also, vowel chain shifts are exceedingly common across the
| languages of the world: compare Tatar and Kazakh to the other
| languages of their subgroup (Kipchak) within the Turkic family,
| for instance. Sometimes a vowel chain shift can even be
| observed in progress, as in the case of the Northern Cities
| Shift in the USA. [0]
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Northern_American_Engli...
| aasasd wrote:
| Moreover, there wasn't just one or a few shifts: they happen all
| the time and there were plenty of them. Apparently a big
| discovery in etymology (in 19th century iirc, and I forget the
| guy's name) was that words mostly don't change pronunciation
| individually, but the same parts in different words change in the
| same way. Which allows to track those changes over time and thus
| backtrack how modern words should've sounded in the past.
|
| This is why folk etymology usually misses the mark--since it
| focuses on single similar words that in fact often turn out to be
| unrelated. Also afaik spelling is irrelevant for etymology, at
| least until the very recent times.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| Is this Grimm's Law, by Jacob Grimm of "Grimm's Fairy Tales"
| fame?
| aasasd wrote:
| Sure sounds like it. Though I'm fairly certain that I
| wouldn't forget Grimm's name like that (the tales are
| childhood's staple where I am)--so maybe Rasmus Rask or Karl
| Verner was instead mentioned when I heard of the general
| concept being attributed at all. Which, rather weirdly, was
| only one time in a lecture by Andrey Zaliznyak on Youtube,
| even though I heard of how shifts work before and after that
| --you'd think such an important discovery would at least
| _more often_ bear the name of its author.
| dhosek wrote:
| Of course, when I first heard of this, it was referred to as the
| "Great Vowel Movement."
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I used to have an English lit professor who could read and
| conversationally speak Old English. To my ears, it sounded like a
| Lord of the Rings style movie, or the Silmarillion come to life.
| Very musical in a sort of imaginary elvish kind of way.
| yesenadam wrote:
| I thought this fascinating video lecture[0], _History of English
| - The Great Vowel Shift_ by Jurgen Handke, explains things very
| well, using the diagram and by his demonstrating all the vowel
| sounds in question. It even explains the origin of some other
| modern English accents.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyhZ8NQOZeo
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I wonder if our new age of global culture and free information
| exchange will slow down language mutations?
|
| Surely tons of existing movies and songs and other media should
| give a clear idea of a speaking norm so spoken language doesn't
| deviate much from it. Or it doesn't?
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