Correction... how useful...?

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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Dragon27 » Sat Mar 25, 2023 7:52 pm

Cainntear wrote:Yes, and the accepted etymology of "castellano" is a folk etymology which I don't see as much more credible than a creation myth.

It is pretty much accepted that it came from the name of the region (Latin: Castella), which came from the word 'castellum' (although we're not 100% sure exactly how it's related to castles/fortresses), isn't it? Unlike 'catalan', 'Catalunya'.
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Cainntear » Sat Mar 25, 2023 9:09 pm

Dragon27 wrote:
Cainntear wrote:Yes, and the accepted etymology of "castellano" is a folk etymology which I don't see as much more credible than a creation myth.

It is pretty much accepted that it came from the name of the region (Latin: Castella), which came from the word 'castellum' (although we're not 100% sure exactly how it's related to castles/fortresses), isn't it? Unlike 'catalan', 'Catalunya'.

That's not something I'm heard specifically, and Googling castella region brings back a hit in France (Aquitaine) most notably, and other hits are mostly trademarks and stuff.

My understanding of the "received wisdom" version is that the claim was that Castile was so-called because it had a lot of watchtowers/castles, but nosing around on the internet, I see a claim that this is what gave it the name castella in Latin. And the French town of Castella is pretty near where Berber invaders pushed through to modern France before the reconquista pushed them back south.

Wikipedia cites Miguel Vidal as a source for the claim that an original -t- would have, by normal sound laws in the local Romance languages, developed into -d- and I've not been able to read the original source, but my problem with that is that a Latin intervocalic T would naturally undergo diachronic lenition to a D (sonorisation), but the hypothesis that it started as a variant of castellum/castella... well, that would mean it was a non-intervocalic T anyway, and if the process of lenition by sonorisation was already effectively complete by the time the S was dropped, well, there'd be no need to lenite it away.

For example the month setembre dropped the P but didn't voice the T. Even without the non-intervocalic thing, Ts can be retained: compare Catalan "botiga" with Spanish "bodega"; and then there's more recent borrowings like "patata" with its two intervocalic Ts.
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby rdearman » Sat Mar 25, 2023 10:10 pm

What is the acceptable correction when a thread changes from "when to correct a language student" to pictures of dinosaurs and discussing castles in Spain?
:lol: :lol: :lol:
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Cainntear » Sat Mar 25, 2023 11:20 pm

rdearman wrote:What is the acceptable correction when a thread changes from "when to correct a language student" to pictures of dinosaurs and discussing castles in Spain?
:lol: :lol: :lol:

You're just tilting at windmills now...
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby tractor » Sat Mar 25, 2023 11:34 pm

Cainntear wrote:What is ironic about that is that the upper classes have basically regained their H, which leads to posh people insisting that "an hhhhhhotel" is definitively correct and therefore correcting both Cockney "an otel" and rest-of-English "a hotel" while also displaying slightly xenophobic attitudes, completely ignorant of the fact that "an before h" was a rule that originated when ze 'igher classes didn't 'ave an 'aitch in their speech....

Apparently a hypercorrection because they only learnt half the rule. It should be "an before silent h" or, better still, "an before vowel sound".
Last edited by tractor on Sun Mar 26, 2023 6:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Dragon27 » Sun Mar 26, 2023 5:39 am

Cainntear wrote:Wikipedia cites Miguel Vidal as a source for the claim that an original -t- would have, by normal sound laws in the local Romance languages, developed into -d- and I've not been able to read the original source, but my problem with that is that a Latin intervocalic T would naturally undergo diachronic lenition to a D (sonorisation), but the hypothesis that it started as a variant of castellum/castella... well, that would mean it was a non-intervocalic T anyway, and if the process of lenition by sonorisation was already effectively complete by the time the S was dropped, well, there'd be no need to lenite it away.

The source says:
4. Castellani
An old theory, defended by Ocampo, Zurita, Andreu Bosc, Balari and Rubio García, connects català
with castellanu through a reduced form *castl(l)án-. The regular development can be seen in cat.
Castella and castellà, which obviously refer to another part of Hispania. In Catalan toponymy there
certainly are cases derived from a reduced form castl(l)an-, but the possible developments are either
catllà /kaʎʎá/ or carlà. A development *castlan- > català is quite impossible. Rubio García argues
that the development originally occurred in the South of France, to account for the loss of s before
the consonant cluster. It is true that the modern Occitan dialects have lost s in this position at the
northern fringe of the dialectal area, but that surely happened in modern times. Around 1100, when
the word Cathalonia first appears, the s had not even been lost in the langue d’oïl.


Cainntear wrote:For example the month setembre dropped the P but didn't voice the T.

Spanish 'siete' from Latin 'septem'. Those consonant clusters were regularly simplified (unless they were learned directly from Latin, I suppose).

Cainntear wrote:Even without the non-intervocalic thing, Ts can be retained: compare Catalan "botiga" with Spanish "bodega"; and then there's more recent borrowings like "patata" with its two intervocalic Ts.

That's why you have to have a specialized expertise, to know what kind of phonological developments were there at which time periods (and when did the word appear/was borrowed from a different language, which allows it to circumvent some of the phonetic changes) to assess the possibility of this or that transformation. If some kind of authority (or someone pretending to be an authority) says something along the lines of "this development is quite impossible and should have given this reflex", then I find myself unable to determine the validity of that by myself.

'Patata' was borrowed from Spanish, so why should it undergo the voicing? In Spanish it was itself borrowed from Taíno, which is a New World (Caribbean) language, the contact with which could not have happened until the 15-16th century. There are plenty of late learned borrowings from Latin which preserve all the intervocalic voiceless stops.

Don't know about the 'botiga', how it developed in Catalan. In Spanish there is also 'botica' (with both 't' and 'c' unvoiced), which is a borrowing from the French 'boutique', and a doublet of 'bodega'. The Catalan 'botiga' seems to be stuck in the middle of these two possibilities. The original word was Latin 'apotheca' (from Greek, of course), who knows about that "th"?
Last edited by Dragon27 on Sun Mar 26, 2023 10:29 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby tractor » Sun Mar 26, 2023 7:47 am

Cainntear wrote:S is retained before P and pronounced (eg esperar) but retention before T is more iffy -- aquest has a mute S, but castell has a pronounced one (see also the town of castelló -- big castle -- in Valencia, which also has a pronounced /s/ phoneme).

-st- is normal in Catalan. Aquest is a rather weak example in itself, since some dialects still pronounces the s, and it's pronounced in the feminine aquesta and often in the masculine aquest when followed by a vowel. The -s- is also pronounced in the alternate forms est and este.
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Le Baron » Wed Mar 29, 2023 11:54 pm

Have a look at this video (all of it!) at the Polyglot conference in Poland, and watch what happens when the interviewer, who I think is Dutch from the Easy Dutch, talks to the French fellow (from about 1:57). When he says 'mais c'est quoi le but ?' the French fellow recognising that 'but' wasn't pronounced correctly, since it's one of exceptions where you actually sound the ending, immediately repeats the word with quite some stress on the 't'. :lol: Then adds it in the sentence and repeats it again further on.

That is pretty much how I do it, but less obvious and and with less relish than French people, probably.

You might recognise some in the video. A good array of languages. Quite a lot speak Turkish and I really like the sound of the woman speaking Bulgarian.

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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby tastyonions » Thu Mar 30, 2023 1:33 am

But can be pronounced with or without the final T:

https://cnrtl.fr/definition/but

PRONONC. ET ORTH. : [by] ou [byt]. Transcr. [by] dans Pt Rob. ainsi que dans Nod. 1844, Littré et DG. Les 2 transcr. dans Passy 1914, Barbeau-Rodhe 1930, Dub., Pt Lar. 1968 et Warn. 1968. dans Lar. Lang. fr. [by] et [byt] devant voyelle. Cf. Rouss.-Lacl. 1927, p. 171 : ,,On hésite pour un certain nombre de mots : fa(t), bu(t), ne(t), c'est un fai(t).`` L'ensemble des ouvrages note comme Nyrop Phonét. 1951, § 87 et 260 : ,,But se prononce tantôt [by] (prononciation officielle), tantôt [byt]. On a surtout tendance à faire entendre le t quand le mot est final, [devant voyelle, notamment dans les locutions but à but et de but en blanc] ou marqué par l'emphase : voilà mon but [byt]; mais le but [by] principal.`` Fouché Prononc. 1959, p. 406, signale que l'on prononce toujours [byt] dans le lang. sportif. Buben 1935, § 220, explique la restitution du t final par l'influence du fém. butte ,,avec lequel but était quelquefois confondu``. Notons que l'orth. butte l'emporte au xixeet au xxes. dans l'expr. être en but(t)e à. Littré s'élève contre la prononc. [byt] même en finale : ,,Cela ne vaut rien et est un effet de la tendance vicieuse (...) à faire sonner les consonnes.`` Mart. Comment prononce 1913, p. 329, dit qu'on prononce toujours [by] à Paris et que la prononc. [byt] est provinciale. Pour G. Straka, La Prononc. parisienne dans B. de la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg, 1952, p. 26 et 27, les hésitations du bon usage quant à la prononc. de la consonne finale ,,sont compréhensibles et on aurait tort de les réprouver; le jour viendra (...) où l'un des deux doublets l'emportera; ce sera sans doute celui qui, d'accord avec la tendance phonétique générale, représente une innovation`` (prononc. [byt]). Enq. : /byt/.

There are tendencies to pronounce it one way or the other depending on context but I wouldn’t correct someone either way.

Reminds me of the famous four possible pronunciations of août.
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Le Baron » Thu Mar 30, 2023 5:04 pm

The passage shows how it has come to be pronounced with a 't', which is indeed the prevailing tendency. In my lifetime I've never heard a native speaker not pronounce the 't'. Or I've not noticed if it occurred.

The word is not the reason I posted the video! But the manner of repetition for correction examples.
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