Random Linguistics Thread

General discussion about learning languages
lichtrausch
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Random Linguistics Thread

Postby lichtrausch » Sun May 08, 2022 9:22 pm

"An exploration of the unusually restrictive syllable structures of Standard Chinese.“

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Querneus
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Re: Random Linguistics Thread

Postby Querneus » Fri May 20, 2022 12:03 am

lichtrausch wrote:"An exploration of the unusually restrictive syllable structures of Standard Chinese.“

To be fair, there's nothing unusually restrictive about having C(j,w,ɥ)V(n,ŋ), a form of CGVN, plus five tones, as a syllable structure. Lots of languages have the much more restricted (C)V structure, like Hawaiian and Old Japanese... The weird and fun part about Mandarin, which the video explores nicely, is that most morphemes are one syllable long, and that native speakers are generally quite well aware of what they mean. As the video points out, the writing system is very helpful to identify the meanings of morphemes, and there is furthermore a wealth of literary words in part maintained due to the nature of the writing system. It's a strange example of education keeping the number of cranberry morphemes down.
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lichtrausch
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Re: Random Linguistics Thread

Postby lichtrausch » Fri May 20, 2022 1:14 am

Querneus wrote:It's a strange example of education keeping the number of cranberry morphemes down.

Nice to learn the actual term for this concept.
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galaxyrocker
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Re: Random Linguistics Thread

Postby galaxyrocker » Fri May 20, 2022 10:58 am



An Loingseach is perfect for this, glad I can share him somewhere here. His videos tend to get a bit rambly, so they're not everyone's cup of tea, especially if you're not interested in Irish phonetics and the history of the language, but they're a goldmine for someone like me.
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sirgregory
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Re: Random Linguistics Thread

Postby sirgregory » Thu May 26, 2022 6:43 pm

Random linguistic thought I had the other day. English is of course famous for flexibility of nouns and verbs. When I come across a word with a dual role, like ship (boat) and to ship (send something), I usually try to guess whether it was originally a noun or a verb first. Usually this is pretty easy. Like in the case of ship, clearly it was a noun first. Wash would be an example of word that started as a verb.

Anyway, the other day I thought of one that stumped me: Prompt. This is a noun, a verb, and an adjective, with no morphological distinctions between the three. I won't spoil it here if anyone cares to guess. I'll just say that all three usages are quite old.

https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=prompt
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lichtrausch
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Re: Random Linguistics Thread

Postby lichtrausch » Tue May 31, 2022 2:23 pm

Similarities and differences in the neural representations of abstract concepts across English and Mandarin

"Recent research suggests there is a neural organization for representing abstract concepts that is common across English speakers. To investigate the possible role of language on the representation of abstract concepts, multivariate pattern analytic (MVPA) techniques were applied to fMRI data to compare the neural representations of 28 individual abstract concepts between native English and Mandarin speakers. Factor analyses of the activation patterns of the 28 abstract concepts from both languages characterized this commonality in terms of a set of four underlying neurosemantic dimensions, indicating the degree to which a concept is verbally represented, internal to the person, contains social content, and is rule-based. These common semantic dimensions (factors) underlying the 28 concepts provided a sufficient basis for reliably identifying the individual abstract concepts from their neural signature in the other language with a mean rank accuracy of 0.65 (p < .001). Although the neural dimensions used for representing abstract concepts are common across languages, differences in the meaning of some individual concepts can be accommodated in terms of differential salience of particular dimensions. These semantic dimensions constitute a set of neurocognitive resources for abstract concept representations within a larger set of regions responsible for general semantic processing."
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