Magical Deductions: Parseltongue in IPA
(I’m no expert. Corrections welcome.)
/saijaχasaʃi || saijaχasijɛθ/
Clip of this scene: on YouTube
/xɛʃ χa sa/
/ʃjaχs aŋgaʈas sɛliθɨin/
/saθai hɛθɛs/
Nagini: /χalχ sakaθ aχa/
Harry: /sanaχ/
Nagini: /sɛlɛtɛs/
/saija χasaθ alasajaʃɛ/
/sɛs lɛθjo loçin || haʃɛʃ nana…
I can so relate to this….
![lingllama:
[Picture: Background: 8-piece pie-style color split with alternating shades of blue. Foreground: Linguist Llama meme, a white llama facing forward, wearing a red scarf. Top text: “ Friend makes glaring grammar ‘error’ ” Bottom text: “ Struggle to resist the dark side—prescriptivism ”]
Story of my life.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ljwar4T8X91qhh9hgo1_500.jpg)
[Picture: Background: 8-piece pie-style color split with alternating shades of blue. Foreground: Linguist Llama meme, a white llama facing forward, wearing a red scarf. Top text: “ Friend makes glaring grammar ‘error’ ” Bottom text: “ Struggle to resist the dark side—prescriptivism ”]
Story of my life.
Popular Linguistics
I haven’t tweeted anything linguistic for a long time, but here you go, a new interesting online magazine about linguistics.
The Linguists - We Are the World (via TLPdiak)
Kudos to these Hungarian linguists!
If you can correctly pronounce every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.
Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation.
(via lovelywings)
Haha, oh, that’s hard! But I got them all…. stupid English language, though. It’s funny that we don’t really think of it as difficult, like we would think of Chinese or, I dunno, Arabic? (What DO Americans think of as hard language?)
OKAY. A few things from a linguistic lover…
Not that I knew all the words and could pronounce them correctly, but it was not that hard. It is hard for me to pronounce it “correctly” because I have Japanese accents, but I know they don’t sound the same even though they are written similarly.
My question is, though, “what is the CORRECT pronunciation?” Putting aside second language speakers (because this will make things messy), every native speaker has accents. We can set up a standard accent though, what should be standard in America? English in Washington D.C. because it’s the capital? (Lots of countries state their standard language as their language spoken in the capital). New York because it’s a big city? Does it mean everyone who does not speak the “standard accent” is considered as incorrect speakers?
Also, this is just a matter of orthography. English has deep orthography. The spelling does not tell us everything about the pronunciation. It’s hard for the speakers of language with shallow/transparent orthography like French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, etc. Chinese also has deep orthography. Arabic has relatively shallower orthography, but their alphabets are different from Latin alphabet and that is why it feels like it is a hard language (which means Chinese is twice as hard as English to read for speakers of, for example, Spanish). I learned Hebrew and Korean alphabet in a few hours, it is not really hard just to read once you figure it out. Note that I am just talking about “reading” here, not about learning the language per se.
Finally, not any language is essentially stupid, weird, or crazy (well, maybe crazy in an intriguing way!), although they might seem bizarre for the speakers of other languages. Or, we can say, that every language is crazy because they are all so unique.
Okay, too much linguistic ranting :) I am not blaming you, rococonokokoro, and I don’t deny this poem is interesting. But I just could not overlook a few things.
University of Arizona Linguistics Department on the "Teachers’ English Fluency Initiative" (pdf)
They are of course against the horrible initiative that says that teachers with “heavily accented” English are to be removed. These are their main facts; (7) and (8) are my favorite points:
- ‘Heavily accented’ speech is not the same as ‘unintelligible’ or ‘ungrammatical’ speech.
- Speakers with strong foreign accents may nevertheless have mastered grammar and idioms of English as well as native speakers.
- Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach English to Spanish‐speaking students better than teachers who don’t speak Spanish.
- Exposure to many different speech styles, dialects and accents helps (and does not harm) the acquisition of a language.
- It is helpful for all students (English language learners as well as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign‐accented speech as a part of their education.
- There are many different ‘accents’ within English that can affect intelligibility, but the policy targets foreign accents and not dialects of English.
- Communicating to students that foreign accented speech is ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ is counterproductive to learning, and affirms pre‐existing patterns of linguistic bias and harmful ‘linguistic profiling’.
- There is no such thing as ‘unaccented’ speech, and so policies aimed at eliminating accented speech from the classroom are paradoxical.
They later elaborate on (7), and it’s pretty interesting:
Evidence exists that listeners’ perceptions of ‘foreign accented speech’ are often inaccurate – listeners’ predisposed to view a speaker has having a ‘foreign’ identity are likely to perceive that person’s speech as accented, even when it is not (Rubin, 1992; Derwing and Monroe 2009). Nancy Niedzielski’s (1996, 1999) work shows that people think the same sounds are [more ‘standard’ or less ‘standard’] depending on whether they are told the speaker is from Canada vs. right over the border in Detroit (participants, of course, viewed their own dialect as ‘standard’). In Rubin’s work, these beliefs lead to lower comprehension scores for listeners who think that they are listening to ‘foreign accented speech’ (even when they are not). To the extent that policies like this further stigmatize foreign accented speech, therefore, they are counterproductive to learning.
Words wholly related: sit and set
Tristan and I were nerding out- (as we often do- and the topic turned - as it often does- to language. Specifically, we were talking about the semantics of verbs. I asked him what he knew about verbs that seem to come in transitive/intransitive pairs and are phonologically similar, like sit/set and lay/lie.
My theory was that the these pairs originally had one root and that the vowel was ablauted depending on whether the form was transitive (requires an object) or intransitive (doesn’t require an object). So (intransitive) “I sit myself down” but (transitive) “I set down a glass”.
Tristan was skeptical. He did some digging and turned up that they had separate roots. At each level (Old English, Old High German, Teutonic) the verbs were represented separately but analogously- meaning that the ablaut goes way back. But there, buried in the Teutonic, it seems like “set” is defined as “the causal of to sit”. AHA.
Sit: [Common Teut.: OE. sittan (sæt, s
ton,
eseten), = OFris. sitta (WFris. sitte), MDu. sitten, zitten (Du. zitten), OS. sittian, sittean (MLG. and LG.sitten), OHG. sizzan, sizzen (G. sitzen), ON. and Icel. sitja (Norw. sitja, sitta, sita; MSw. sitia, sittia, Sw. sitta; Da. sidde):
Teut. type *sitjan, for which Goth. had sitan. The stem *set-, pre-Teut. *sed-, is widely represented in the cognate languages, as in Lith. sedeti, Lat. sed
re, Gr.
(cf.
seat), etc.
Set: [Com. Teut.: OE. s
ttan = OFris. setta (mod.Fris. sette), OS. settian (MDu., MLG. setten, Du. zetten), OHG. sezzan beside sazzan (MHG. sezzen, G. setzen), ON. setja (Sw. satta, Da. sætte), Goth. satjan; causal of *setjan (sitjan) to SIT.
tristan: hey this is a really funny etymology: set O.E. settan “cause to sit, put in some place, fix firmly”. sit O.E. sittan “to be seated, to seat oneself”.
lolo: what makes you think that’s funny?oh snap
It indeed is funny.
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Patty/Paddy
- St. Patrick’s Day
- St. Patty’s Day
- St. Paddy’s Day
I have seen these variations on how to call the day. My friend suggested that “Paddy” is due to intervocalic alveolar flapping seen in American English (and Australian English?). Indeed, so far as I seen, only American and Australian residents use “St. Paddy’s day”. It’s interesting how people started to use the “d” orthography instead of “t” when they pronounce “Patty” and “Paddy” the same.
Also, I found it interesting that “St. Patrick’s Day” is “Lá Fhéile Pádraig” in Irish Gaelic. Do we see something phonological here too? Is “Paddy” also related to “Pádraig”? I am curious about the phonology of Irish Gaelic and also English variety in Ireland.
Ireland. I really wanna go there some day.
I love your thinking. Maybe the /d/ is just the normal way for this reflex to surface in Irish. I’m not highly versed in Irish phonology. Highly interested, yes. It’s a shame my department focus primarily on older and southern-er languages (Mycenean Greek, Hittite, Sanskrit, etc.). I’d love a course on Irish poetics or Irish phonology. *sigh*
Also Ireland. Such a beautiful place! :)
Thanks :)
Another friend told me that “Paddy” actually is pretty commonly accepted in the UK/Ireland but they do not really like the form “Patty”. The flapping in American English sorta explains why we have both Paddy/Patty as they sound the same (whether they realize it or not), but there still remain the question why “Paddy” is more accepted than “Patty” in the motherland of this holiday.
I love learning older languages! It gives us historical insight into languages. But Irish must be a very interesting language to learn; it is pretty different from other European languages too. I really hope the country would maintain their original language as long as possible - I have heard it is increasingly being replaced with English, which is not hard to imagine.
Patty/Paddy
- St. Patrick’s Day
- St. Patty’s Day
- St. Paddy’s Day
I have seen these variations on how to call the day. My friend suggested that “Paddy” is due to intervocalic alveolar flapping seen in American English (and Australian English?). Indeed, so far as I seen, only American and Australian residents use “St. Paddy’s day”. It’s interesting how people started to use the “d” orthography instead of “t” when they pronounce “Patty” and “Paddy” the same.
Also, I found it interesting that “St. Patrick’s Day” is “Lá Fhéile Pádraig” in Irish Gaelic. Do we see something phonological here too? Is “Paddy” also related to “Pádraig”? I am curious about the phonology of Irish Gaelic and also English variety in Ireland.
Ireland. I really wanna go there some day.
kreol genisis
we studiez it
