Linguistic round-up: prepositions on the bus; Cornish; Quebec; bad article title
- Overheard on the bus just now (while on my way to see "The Interpreter," before I realized I was two hours early for the next showing):
"I've been practicing in some pretty inappropriate places. Like the Widener microfiche room, of which I got kicked out of. Wait - of which I got kicked out."
As Geoff Pullum notes in his classic LanguageLog post ( Read more... )
As Geoff Pullum notes in his classic LanguageLog post ( Read more... )
i am working on an orthography that aims for consistency, yes. that's also why i tend to write iedd for "speech, language" (like welsh iaidd) rather than official yeth. i'm always rewriting the rules for language transliteration, and that's what this is, really - translating a revived language that has no set orthography into the most sensible transliteration i can find.
of course, this makes people furious, but i don't care. you should see what i do to transliterate biblical hebrew or the fact that i'm learning Urban Meccan Classical Arabic, whose orthography qur'anic arabic uses but whose speech is replaced by an ancient non-urban koine. they say banâ (y-hamza), i say banê with no hamza; all hamzas are lost, turning to y,w or h intervocalically, causing vowel lengthening 2/V_C & either simple loss or consonantal gemination in 2/C_.similarly, they write *aYa, *aWa > *â but i learn *ê, *ô.
& cetera.
it's especially fun because i'm active on MWU! (muslim wakeup!), so when we argue about as-sûrôt - from *su2ra-wa-t, which later writers interpreted through their own rural dialects as as-su2rât - i defy their slapdash, irregular romanisations for a rigorous and highly unorthodox reinterpretation based on modern scholastic understandings of the text and the original meccan speech community. makes for interesting fireworks.
incidentally, i'm interested in the parallel evolution of semitic languages in urban/rural dichotomies. meccan urban loss of the hamza and some vowel shifts parallel the situation 2000 years previously between the urban (eblaite, akkadian) and rural ("amorite") dialects of east semitic, the situation a thousand years earlier between the urban (phoenician-punic) and rural (canaanite-aramaic-hebrew) dialects of "Common Canaanite", and five hundred years earlier the split between urban and rural dialects of aramaic and hebrew (say, in elephantine and in babylon for hebrew versus the non-urban forms).
there quite a few a common patterns of de-emphaticisation and shift that are fascinating: the urban loss of hamza and laryngeals (h, x, 7, 3ayn, ghayn, etc.), shift from glottalic to emphatic consonants, thence to word-wide emphasis, and thence to loss of "creaky voice" entirely. these have similar effects on nearby vowels etc. and the time and cultural distance between these groups is too much to assume an areal feature.
*sigh* my tummy hurts.
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