The European Review of Books has a kind of busy website for a sedate old codger like me (LH is well into its second decade of unchanged minimalism), but I like this mission statement:
Great essays can resonate in more than one voice. The ERB seizes a linguistic paradox: the ubiquity of English can animate the multilingual. Global English – a post-American English, a low common denominator – lets a magazine reach beyond, al di là di, ötesinde, jenseits. Pieces written in Greek or Arabic or Italian or Polish or Dutch – or, or, or – will be available in English and in the original. A good essay, after all, is something you want to read twice.
(If you’re wondering, ötesinde is Turkish; it’s based on öte, for which Wiktionary gives no etymology.) And this is only their “campaign website”; they say here:
The full ERB will comprise three book-length print issues per year, and online pieces every week. […] We will prioritize the essay, that cocktail of aspiration and humility, and we want writers—old, young, aspiring—who will flourish in that open form. Every good essay is a pilgrimage to somewhere or other. But we’ll reach beyond the essay, too: poem, travelogue, rant, parody. Anecdotes, interviews, profiles, afterthoughts. The ERB will be multilingual, but how to make multilingualism beautiful and alive? It’s a thrilling design riddle.
Check ’em out.
It’s good to see the rant finally acknowledged as a literary genre.
Dostoevsky and Saul Bellow were masters of it.
…Without context, that’s going to be understood as referring to Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse, which is popularly (more or less deliberately) misunderstood as “even worse than bad”, “very low Rotten Tomatoes score”, “-1 out of 10, would not buy again”. But at least it’s not clarified as having this sense by being rendered as jenseitig…
@de
jenseits (as noun) would have for me more the association with Otherworld or Afterlife. The Old English [SCRIPT g]eond formed compounds with verbs, so there does not appear to be any *geon(d)sides. The ERB may have indeed been inspired by the Nietszche title, as it is prominent in searches for “jenseits” and “al di là” (but not “beyond”!) in book titles.
In my experience, jenseits as a preposition belongs to the literary register, outside of fixed expressions like jenseits von Gut und Böse. Colloquially, you’d use hinter “behind” or auf der anderen Seite von “on the other side of”.
Yes.
Apparently their reach exceeds their grasp of German (or what’s a Himmel for?).
@David Marjanović: …Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse, which is popularly (more or less deliberately) misunderstood as “even worse than bad”…
“По ту сторону добра и зла” functions in much the same way in Russian. Occasionally, it may also refer to someone’s views or ideas, especially if a generally sane and well-educated person holds grotesquely ill-informed opinions on a subject outside his core field. A physicist or a mathematician believing in alternative history or naive etymologies, perhaps.
There’s also a very fine 1931 novel by Andrei Egunov-Nikolev whose title, translated into German, would be Jenseits von Tula. The pun is on Beyond Thule by Antonius Diogenes: Egunov was a Hellenist scholar.
“al di là di” is considerably worse than jenseits, I would think. At least jenseits can function as an adverb and therefore works grammatically in this sentence. But “al di là di”?? Where’s the noun that should come after that preposition? They would have been much better off with “oltre” – not only would it have been grammatically correct, it also has a not-so-distant echo of Latin ultra.
There’s also a very fine 1931 novel by Andrei Egunov-Nikolev
To be clear, his real name was Andrei Egunov, but he wrote the novel as Andrei Nikolev. По ту сторону Тулы, which has been called “an uproarious romp” that “turned the emerging Soviet production novel on its head, fusing it with the remnants of classical romance (in this case between two men), and lacing the descriptions of landscape and factory floor with darkly funny dialogue,” was quickly banned; it was republished in Vienna in 1993.
@nat
I would parse al di là di as al “dilà” di, where “dilà” is a noun formation like Outback in (Australian) English. But I cannot say if this is accurate for L1 Italian speakers.
To my ear, “global English… lets a magazine reach beyond” sounds like (deliberately) incomplete English, so it’s perhaps a feature rather than a bug that the little multilingual parenthetical is grammatically a bit of.
“Ötesinde” implies that there is something specific with respect to which one is on the other side. The “-sin-” is a genitive “its,” and the locative “-de” implies that one is already there rather than reaching out to it. “Öteye” might be more felicitous: “öteye uzanmak” shows up as an equivalent to “extending/reaching out beyond something,” although still usually with a dative noun that one is extending beyond.
Thanks for explaining the Turkish!
there was a fantastic pan-eastern-european zine in the 00s that specifically published in “international bad english”. the editorial group (mostly polish, i think) did a pretty great job of holding to that approach and refusing to slide towards “proper” english in their own writing. this part of the ERB mission statement reads like a version of that approach, but aimed at an english-primary readership. i’m excited to see what they publish, and whether they actually stick to “global” (as opposed to “standard(ized)”) english!
But “al di là di”?? Where’s the noun that should come after that preposition?
It’s a calque of French au-delà, which works because delà, like dessous, dessus, dehors, dedans, etc. etc. can be nouns as well as prepositions/adverbs. Some of them, in particular au-delà itself, have specialized meanings (‘the afterlife’), but this is clearly secondary. The weirdest one is probably au-dedans ‘inside, within (adv.)’, which etymologically unpacks to à la de de enz, where enz is Old French ‘inside, within’ < L intus. This is obviously < in, but how, ain’t exactly clear.
Ooh, awesome.
Where was the “English as a dead language” paper again… here (pdf).
Very interesting paper, thanks! I like the explanation of -ent and -ant. But what’s this about falling rates of literacy? Is it about reading proficiency, or not being able to read at all?
I would not call a child who spends a half of time typing and reading messages in a game chat “illiterate”.
If “low reading proficiency” implies this, then it is already confusing: increased exposure to texts must mean improved relationship with letters, this must be distinguished somehow from [worsened?] relationship with any given genre of texts.
But while the noun “au-delà” is quite cromulent French, I can find no trace of “au-delà de” used on its own.
Oh, I haven’t read the paper in… not actually 20 years, but easily 15. And now I’m too tired to do it. Maybe tomorrow 🙂
I would not call a child who spends a half of time typing and reading messages in a game chat “illiterate”.
Relevant XKCD.
What English does seem to be heading towards is diglossia – a high-class dialect based on spelling pronunciations with spelling-based vowels, and an almost entirely spoken low-class dialect [EDIT: or, rather, a bunch of different such dialects for all the regions where the original language is still extant] extremely diverged from whatever is actually written. (IIRC something similar is already happening in French.)
and an almost entirely spoken low-class dialect
Or, rather, probably a bunch of different low-class dialects in different locations. (I wanted to add this to the original comment, but the edit function didn’t cooperate until after I’ve already posted this one.)
Perhaps eventually the low-class dialects would themselves be standartized, creating a Bokmål/Landsmål situation.
Thande’s novel Moonstruck features a future version of this: the languages of the assorted planets/systems have significantly diverged, and (e.g.) 24th century Lunarian [or whatever it’s actually called, I forgot] is as far from 2010s English as the latter is from Early Modern English [there’s an early scene in the novel where this correspondence is explicitly used], but interplanetary communications use a separate dialect called Interplanetary Standard English, which is essentially unchanged from the late 21st century (which means it’s basically the same as 2010s English aside from some bits of future slang).
“Perhaps eventually the low-class dialects would themselves be standartized, ”
And an Iranian PhD student will have to pass two IELTSes instead of one. (as langauge schools will tell you, to “read scientific papers” you need to have CEFR C1 competency rather than to know the science in question – and Iran seems to have many more L1 math speakers than L2 English speakers)
P.S. having this said, Ferguson – a pioneer of diglossia studies – was the head of the team tht designed TOEFL
I usually think about it in one of the following ways:
1. Each language is characterized by the distance between its literary and vernacular registers. Thus one can introduce a scale where Arabic or medieval European situation is one extreme and the Russian situation is closer to the other extreme.
2. [more precisely] Each langauge is characterized by an unique relationship between its literary and vernacular registers.
3. [precisely] Each langauge (understood as a sociolinguistic system) is an unique space of registers and styles.
Words “literary” and “vernacular” can sometimes be useful in referring to (langauege-specific) subsets of this space.
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For English this distance is larger (or is imagined as larger) than it is for Russian.
I oversimplified: apparently (per Wikt) al di lá di is a merge of the calqued form al di là and Old Italian di là da.
the ubiquity of English can animate the multilingual. Global English – a post-American English, a low common denominator – lets a magazine reach beyond, al di là di, ötesinde, jenseits
I am glad the staff includes those who would still include Turkish in a European journal—the people of Turkey will need the good will of the rest of Europe as Turkey faces economic and political crisis in the future.
Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdan olmasın!
And, of course, in the new International English, “will + verb” will be the Future Tense, because that’s what they learn in English classes.
Here’s an interesting discussion (in Italian) of al di là di, di là da and other possible forms (di là di and al di là da).
I looked up “diglossia” in Russian Wikipedia, my loose translation:
“…when constructing a socially correct utterance in various language situations a native diglossic speaker will choose not only the functional speech style but also the langauge (dialect) of the utterance…”,
Their italics.
“…using the literary [Arabic] langauge in speech is proscribed…” (…не допускается)
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The end goal of scientific research is uncovering the Norm behind the chaos, apparently. But I am not sure if Arabic speakers actually correct their toddlers when those speak literary Arabic (from cartoons):-)
—
…При диглоссии в зависимости от языковых ситуаций индивидом — носителем языков, в различных речевых ситуациях для построения социально корректного высказывания производится выбор не только функционального стиля речи, но и язык (диалект) высказывания. …
…в быту в устной речи (а также в фильмах, песнях и т. д.) используется исключительно местный разговорный язык («диалект» арабского), а использование литературного языка в устной речи не допускается, и большинство населения им слабо владеет….
As I said, that’s changing – Kids Today Over Here are being taught the will future and the going to future as two separate future tenses that are to be used for different purposes.
(25 years earlier, I was taught the going to construction outside of the neat Latin-inspired 6 x 2 tense system, and I was not explicitly taught when to use it and when to use will.)
I’ve reread the paper now. So that’s where I got everything from that I know about -ent & -ant… also, that the paper is so short explains why I don’t remember more of it! 🙂
The US in particular has long had higher levels of illiteracy than the richer parts of Europe; and the use of Bush, uppercase, as an example of the FOOT vowel drives home the fact that the paper was written during the time of “Is our children learning?” and the No Child’s Behind Left Act. Texting was only beginning to take off in that distant era.
The US in particular has long had higher levels of illiteracy than the richer parts of Europe
But I still don’t know what’s meant by “illiteracy.” To me, that implies not being able to read.
the neat Latin-inspired 6 x 2 tense system
I was taught a 3×4 tense system (really 3x2x2, but usually framed as 3×4), which became 4×4 when Future-in-the-Past was included, and IIRC 7×4 with passive forms. I did learn “going to” as well, but I forgot how it was framed; it didn’t fit into the neat system very well.
At the time (2008-ish, I think) I’ve been taught that “going to go” was impossible (I forgot what the prescribed alternative was). This no longer appears to be true (if it ever was), but I have no idea if it’s still taught.
and the No Child’s Behind Left Act
…Google finds a few more instances of this exact spelling, so it’s not just you, but i still don’t get the joke.
as an example of the FOOT vowel
Which reminds me: their chart is simplified. The vowels in “food” and “good” are indeed homophonous in International English, but as far as I’m aware the vowels in “did” and “deed” are not: they’re /i/ and /i:/. Of course this would put them in the same position on the chart; but that does not make them homophones.
I, personally, would probably further use (something like) /u/ in “Bush” but /u:/ in “wood” and “boot”. [I’m not sure about “rude” because I’m not very confident if there’s a /j/ in there.]
(I’ve seen this exact point – regarding /i:/, at least – discussed on LH a few days ago, but I forgot where it was, and Google is surprisingly unhelpful.)
they’re /i/ and /i:/
I do not think that I ever heard anyone saying [i] and [i:] respectively.
If you listen to Arabic long vowels in Wiktionary, (say, this one. Not the best recording maybe, I just opened the list of entiries with audio. Or just salaam), you will notice that in terms of length quite often those sound much like what a Russian would produce if you write салаам and ask her to read it aloud.
It is quite clear that English “length” works differently.
The difference in length exists, but one is not tempted to apporoximate beach with биич (as in пиит).
The difference in length exists, but one is not tempted to apporoximate beach with биич (as in пиит).
In fact биич is exactly what I would expect from one of those “learn English in six weeks” booklets. IIRC in school we were just taught that the vowels are “long” and then the poor pupils were supposed to interpret that however they felt like.
The specific minimal pair I’m used to is “ship” and “sheep”, which has the advantage of both words being innocuous. (There are of course plenty of other options.)
(The relevant comment, which I finally found, and which you were apparently alluding to.)
Yes, I was alluding to what I wrote there. The thing about Arabic is that you can write -uw- (-uu-), -ij- (-ii-) and -aa-, and learners, who hear how Arab pronounce it, won’t actually articulate “u-and-then-a-glide-w” but they will have it in mind, pronounce it in a slightly more relaxed way approximating what they hear and approach a pronunciation phonologically close to, at least, exaggerated native pronunciation. It is a comfortable starting point.
Needless to say, when you have -ij- [i:] in one form and /-aju-/ in another form, the transformation is much more intuitive when you think about [i:] as /ij/ rather than /ī/. But this morphology, it is not in conflict with phonology:)
Maybe I am not correct when saying “one is not tempted”.
For me, when I was a child and barely knew any English, geminated “биич” was already strongly in conflict with English phonology. I failed to make sense of “length” in any other way (“less than gemination, but still longer” etc.). I only felt that I understand what’s going on here when I thought about it differently: as a tenseness contrast (with resulting change in quality and length). This way the difference in length arose naturally. And only then I read that it is a tense vowel of different quality (when I invented it I did not even know who is “tenseness”:))
But I can’t remember a Russian who would actually say [i] and [i:] (same quality, different length), so I think it is not just me. They all know that beach is “long i” and they systematically say “bitch” and “beach” the same way. Studyibng Arabic speakers’ accents (are not they tempted to apply their length contrast to English?) is in my to do list.
It’s the No Child Left Behind Act, which had effects opposite its stated intent.
Both illiteracy in this sense and “functional illiteracy” (things like having great trouble reading a previously unknown text or unknown words) have long been a bit higher in the US than in the richer parts of Europe, though I don’t know if that’s the case right now.
The implied prediction that L2 learners will all pronounce International English with the same accent, rather than each with their own, has not come to pass so far. Whether someone distinguishes, say, FOOT and GOOSE depends on whether their L1 does (Standard German does, for instance, so L1 German speakers always do in English, even if the difference isn’t always phonetically identical to that of any native English accent) and, if it doesn’t, how well they’ve been taught (and that is generally improving).
Wood, though, is a FOOT word; it rhymes with good, not with food. …which of course brings us to the paper’s point about spelling-pronunciations; oo is one of the more unnerving features of English spelling, up there with ou, ow and ea.
There isn’t; morpheme-internal /rj/ doesn’t survive anywhere in English.
That kind of thing is common, of course. In German there’s a long tradition of equating the TRAP vowel with ä. (This goes so far that the Big Mac was sold as Big Mäc for decades.) The trick is that most kinds of German just barely have a phoneme /æː/: it is used as the name of the letter ä by those who don’t say “Umlaut A”, for reading Latin ae aloud if it’s not too unstressed, and nowhere else. Every other ä is a purely etymological spelling for /ɛ/ if short, /eː/ if long. The consequence for L2 English accents is a merger of TRAP and DRESS, mostly in favor of DRESS, but also with copious hypercorrectivisms for those who get TRAP right on the phonetic level. Also, TRAP is widely interpreted as a “long” vowel, while it’s unambiguously “short” in the English system, bad/lad split excepted; this leads to spelling-pronunciations that would be impossible otherwise.
Yes, Russians know /a/ (father, summer) and /ɛ/ (man, men)*.
Russians also know /e/ after a soft consonant.
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Moving “man” to /a/ group could help, but then you will have to learn the “summer” vowel, and it is the harderst sound ever. An ESL teacher (and a native speaker) said so, but I know why: because people do not even know that it is some strange sound anyhow different from normal Russian /a/:)
And needless to say, I am describing an idealized Russian accent ehre. Maybe i should have said “Soviet accent”: today many young people must pick English sounds correctly, but in USSR any foreign langauge was more or less esotheric.
It’s the No Child Left Behind Act, which had effects opposite its stated intent.
I understand that part; I’m just not sure why the rephrasing is implying it. There seems to be a pun involved that I’m not getting.
Yes, Russians know /a/ (father, summer) and /ɛ/ (man, men).
Pretty much. I know there’s a difference, but I can barely hear it and I probably couldn’t reliably produce it.
(English isn’t supposed to have soft [i.e. palatalized] consonants, though IIRC some English consonants sound that way to Russians.)
Still, the question is whether there are accents where the length contrast is primary for bitch-beach distinction (as opposed to quality or tenseness).
Pretty much. I know there’s a difference, but I can barely hear it and I probably couldn’t reliably produce it.
Actually, there are several different issues for a learner here.
1. you want to sound more or less like natives
2. you want to be understood by them at least
3. you want (just for yourself) to memorize “man” and “men” as two phonologically different words, irrespectively of how correct your sounds are.
This was a serious issue when I first encountered Semitic langauges. They have these “emphatic” consonants. I am not going to learn to pronounce them correctly today. But as long as I read words containing letters for these I need to distinguish them from other consonants somehow, just for myself. But how?
With man-men (and the whole summer-father-man-men range) a Russian learner faces problems (2) and (3), not just (1).
Problems with the paper:
1) The notion that Latin and English are unique for having more L2 than L1 speakers is absurd. Ethnologue data says that French, Urdu, and Swahili are also in this position; Russian certainly held it in the past; Thai is neck-and-neck. I’m surprised that Hausa is two-thirds L1: David E?
2) Latin-speakers became illiterate because their society collapsed around them. There is no reason to believe that the same thing will happen in the Home Englishes, unless indeed there is a collapse of civilization in all or most of the world. Spelling errors have been a feature of English since about 1500, and mostly people still learn how to spell.
3) The paper conflates dialects of English with accent distinctions in Basically Standard English. The former are under a lot of pressure: the latter are diversifying all the time, but they don’t create mutual unintelligibility and aren’t likely to in a highly connected world. The variation in vocabulary and spelling is No Big Deal either. I glitch a little when someone says I may do in circumstances when I’d say I might or I might do that, but it’s easy to get used to it.
4) The point’s been made above that there is no single International English phonology (or prosody). International Englishes are being spoken around me all the time, but I have no trouble telling the L1 Spanish-speakers on the street from the L1 Arabic-speakers in the corner store. Indeed, prosody is often a bigger problem for intelligibility: from my perspective, Spanish-speakers (mostly from PR or DR) sing whereas Mandarin-speakers mumble. (A Taiwanese cow orker of mine mangles a particular technical term so badly I always think he is saying Facebook until I have time to consciously rethink it.)
For that matter, International Latin had similar barriers to intelligibility until the 19C or so: there’s a remark in the Aubrey/Maturin books about how the Irish understand the English fine when speaking English, but not at all when speaking Latin.
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No Child’s Behind Left Act
The pun is on behind, which is an (AmE?) euphemism for ‘buttocks’.
proscribed in speech
“Speech” should be “conversation”. MSA is used in many-to-one situations like political speeches, and using it in cartoons is seen as giving kids a leg up on the MSA they will soon have to learn anyway; all per Lameen.
This is much more accurate. But one must have a very funny mindset to describe speakers’ attitude to communication in literary Arabic as “не допускается” (“is not allowed”).
I think the idea is that there (objectively) exists somethign called “the literary Norm”, and grammarians uncover it by studying perception and usage of educated speakers. Then sociolinguists come and say they are going to study the whole thing and that among Arabs the “norm” is only applicable in certain contexts while the dialect is thought by speakers to “have no grammar”. And even professors use vernacular at home.
Fine. Then let us find what is the Norm of applying the literary Norm! Bargaining in a souq in fus·ha is a sociogrammatical error.
The Norm.
Yes, and on his website the author actually thanks you for that correction.
They’re pharyngealized or uvularized… the trick is that in Russian, basically everything that’s not palatalized is velarized, which is close enough for some confusion.
However, the non-emphatic plosives are generally aspirated, and the emphatic ones never are (because they used to be ejectives – and still are around the Gulf of Aden). Maybe that helps.
(A Taiwanese cow orker of mine mangles a particular technical term so badly I always think he is saying Facebook until I have time to consciously rethink it.)
So what is that technical term ?
That’s what I was wondering
The “emphatics” are still ejective rather than pharyngealised in Ethio-Semitic. The pharyngeal realisation seems to have been an Arabic innovation, which has spread to other Semitic languages from Arabic. I gather it’s infiltrating Modern South Arabian nowadays (unsurprisingly.)
“which has spread” – I see how Arabic (whatever it is) can be a vehicle for the spread of features over the south-eastern half of the Former
Yugoslav Republic ofRoman Empire.But Arabic did not exist in isolation, tracing the source of such a feautre must be tricky.
I rather like the idea of referring to the Former Roman Empire (the QIR) in the same spirit as Former Yugoslavia.
It might lead to some border disputes with scholars referring to the Former Greater Parthian Entity, however.
There is the argument that the preferred use of the letter Q with back vowels in early Greek (and early Latin) tells us something about Phoenician, though.
Russian Arabist transcription for Arabic -ka- is -кя- and for -qa- is -ка-.
I am not tempted to transcribe ka this way though, but maybe it depends on dialect…
And it leads to artifacts. They transcribe qibla as кыбла, and in Russian velars with ы are avoided (or not, when we imitate evil goblin laughter). They are not comfortble to pronounce and sound ugly*. When some poet translated Persian “qibla of beauty” as кыбла красоты, readers (Russian, Soviet atheistic but with Christian background) who have no idea what is qibla found it hilarious. If he wrote кибла it would not be half as bad – but apparently кыбла seemed “proper”.
(actually Russian has “to pray on X” with a meanign “to pray in the direction of X” and it is in romantic context.)
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*Arabic -i- in -qi- indeed sounds similar to -ы- to a Russian. But the thing is, it is not unpleasant after /q/. It is unpleasant after Russian /k/: it means pulling your tongue back to articulate a velar and then pulling it further back/
I find a number of Russian transcriptions odd. Why is Japanese /ši/ rendered as си rather than ши?
Russian Arabist transcription for Arabic -ka- is -кя- and for -qa- is -ка-.
Modern Turkish spelling of Arabic loans does this sort of thing pretty systematically, transferring (for example) the Arabic consonantal distinction between /ki/ and /qi/ into a vowel distinction between ki and kı; cf also kebap, from Arabic kabāb, versus bakkal “greengrocer” from baqqāl. (It gets more complicated before /a:/, with a somewhat confusing set of conventions using circumflexes and vowel symbol doubling.)
This reflects the fact that even in Arabic, the cues to the listener about pharyngealised consonants are as much in the neighbouring vowel pronunciation as in the consonants themselves.
I had an enlightening conversation with a (completely non-linguistic) Saudi once about pharyngeal consonants, in the course of which it emerged that he actually heard English alveolars as pharyngeal before /ɔ/ (he was astonished at my evidently false claim that English lacked pharyngeals.)
Because it’s [ɕi], and that’s much closer to си [sʲi] than to ши [ʂɨ̯i].
(Whoever came up with this may also have known that si is [ɕi] in Polish, as opposed to szy [ʃɘ ~ ʂɨ], but that’s not necessary.)
Why is Japanese /ši/ rendered as си rather than ши?
Because it is part of a sequence sa-si-su-se-so. Besides, some Japanese people do actually pronounce it as si. Russians don’t write дядя as дзядзя or тётя as цьоцьа either, although it would fit the actual pronunciation much closer.
I strongly suspect that the transcription as кя isn’t meant to represent anything about the consonant, but alludes to the fact that the Arabic “a” is [æ] more or less by default, but [ɑ] or so when there’s something uvular or pharyngeal around.
Because it’s [ɕi], and that’s much closer to си [sʲi] than to ши [ʂɨ̯i].
Fair enough.
Once upon a time when I were a lad, we were taught (pace juha) that し/シ was part of the sequence sa-shi-su-se-so. Which was admittedly a somewhat irregular-seeming sequence when compared to e.g. ka-ki-ku-ke-ko (although not quite as irregular as the subsequent ta-chi-tsu-te-to), but that’s what we were taught. Perhaps if we had been L1 Russophones using a Cyrillic transliteration rather than romaji as a learning aid we would have been taught otherwise, I suppose.
Wiktionary audio and how I mishear it (without analyzing anythign seriously):
sounds like /си/ to me: シ, shiitake, woman’s voice(s)
sounds like soft sh with sibilant quality… or /си/ with fricative quality…: 4, 7, a male voice, possibly the same)
ш/щ range (but unlike Russian щ, these are easy):
ш/щ, possibly with s-like quiality too: 塩, salt
ш/щ: shogun (‘The “shogun” sense is originally short for 征夷大将軍 (seii taishōgun, literally “commander in chief of the expeditionary force to expel barbarians”).’)
щ 種類[ɕɨᵝɾɯ̟ᵝi]
ш, because the following velar affects my perception. Otherwise ш/щ: しか ([ɕi̥ka̠])
Some related facts:
– Russian ш is considered “hard”. Not too hard though: the vowel in ши is fronted compared to the one in бы. So maybe its hardness was not a problem. Since around 2000 they usually transcribe -si- as -ши-, following English, and I am too used to this transcription.
– Russian щ is long and tense.
– Russian does have soft /sʲ/. English does not. It means: there must be some foreign sounds that we map to Russian /sʲ/ and you will have to mishear as either s or sh. You simply can’t mishear them as /sʲ/ because you don’t know this sound (you personally can, though).
– Japanese pronunciation is outcome of palatalization of /s/
I strongly suspect that the transcription as кя isn’t meant to represent anything about the consonant, but alludes to the fact that the Arabic “a” is [æ] more or less by default, but [ɑ] or so when there’s something uvular or pharyngeal around.
Russian /k/ is deeper than /k’/. Arabic /q/ is deeper than /k/ Both affect the following vowel. ки-кы is an even better example. But I have seen Russian books insisting that Arabic /k/ is “more similar” to soft Russian /k’/. Which is not what I hear:/
/k’/
/kʲ/
I understand what you meant (and without the slashes I wouldn’t have even corrected you), but the clash with the ejective notation is too obvious.
that the Arabic “a” is [æ] more or less by default
…that might explain why I pretty definitely hear салям (except of course with a longer vowel in the second syllable) in the recording of salaam linked here about thirty comments ago.
(This might also have to do with some quality of the Arabian /l/ as opposed to the respective Russian sounds; IIRC the distribution of /l/ versus /lʲ/ as heard by Russians in foreign languages/words can be pretty weird.)
The Russian “plain” /l/ is famously velarized. And English confuses matters further, because its /l/ is apical, while those of Russian and Arabic are laminal – being apical, it sounds “darker” even when it isn’t velarized (which it often is).
Russian щ is long and tense
Is it any different when final, e.g. in борщ?
have to do with some quality of the Arabian /l/ – I think, the quality of /l/. Compare /æ/ after /k/:
كَانَ /kaː.na/ “be”
a shorter and more raised variant:
كَلْب /kalb/ “dog”
and now /-ll-/:
كلما /kul.la.maː/ “every time”
Sounds like куль-ляма.
Meanwhile Allah is Аллах and indeed in this word it is /ɫ/.
—
And thank you for ’. It is an open quiestion for me, how to type it. 🙁 I certainly need two modes (pendantic and relaxed), possibly even a third mode. The sign that I type here is a simple vertical stroke, and a similar sign used to be a common way to represent palatalization, but the script transfoms it in ’.
’ is similar to IPA’s supersript j now adopted by Wikipedia, which is not bad (the vertical stroke represented superscript i, I think). But it did not occur to me that it can be confused with ejectives.
I have reasons to be mischievous in general and in slashes in particular, and of course / … / is not always IPA, but these are unrelated issues. I need something that does not cause confusion and is easy to type.
But it did not occur to me that it can be confused with ejectives.
I apologize. As I’ve mentioned, after a few seconds I understood what you were going for, but in the context of weird Arabic sounds my first thought was something to the effect of “hold on, where did an ejective come in?”
(It actually wasn’t exactly that, because I forgot the word “ejective” and had to look it up. But I was definitely thinking in terms of “weird sound that doesn’t exist in Russian”, and didn’t immediately remember that it didn’t exist in Arabic either.)
I tend to just copy the correct IPA symbol from somewhere (in this case, from David Marjanović’s comment above; if I don’t see any nearby comments with it I look it up in Wikipedia and copy from there) and paste it at an appropriate place.
Come to think of it, I don’t actually recall if the /k’/ thing is in fact the correct IPA notation for ejectives either.
IIRC, I’ve also seen an actual vertical stroke used to signify stress placement, though of course it would not have made sense in this particular context.
Here’s a prime symbol, if that helps: ′
I’ve found a fascinating discussion (in Italian) of al di là di and di là da, as well as the less common al di là da and di là di. However, my comments keep disappearing whenever there are links in them, whether as HTML or as plain text. I’m inserting a long enough quote from the opening post of that thread so that anyone can find it by Googling.
Whoever came up with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polivanov_system
It is.
Yes, this one ˈ in IPA, together with this one ˌ for secondary stress.
I’ve found a fascinating discussion (in Italian) of al di là di and di là da, as well as the less common al di là da and di là di. However, my comments keep disappearing whenever there are links in them, whether as HTML or as plain text.
I’m very sorry about that — I have no idea why Akismet decided it was spam (it wasn’t even in the moderation queue). But I’ve rescued it, and your original comment is now in the thread. But it’s way up there, so I left your recent comment with the quote, and I’ll add your URL here just to save anyone the trouble of looking for it:
https://www.achyra.org/cruscate/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=336
I apologize. As I’ve mentioned, after a few seconds I understood what you were going for,
I did not apologize because I don’t know what is the optimal solution in this particular case. As I said, it it an open question. But it did not occur to me that /…/ affects perception and that IPA ‘ (ejective) can cause confusion. I would love to avoid confusion. Again, thank you for your correction.
I just need to arrive to a clear idea of what is the “good practice” in this case:/
Yes, ˈ for stress. It wouldn’t cause confusion in this case, but a convenient palatalization sign is a good thing when you mark palatalization in phrases. And it is there it can be confused with stress:-( ’ is better in this respect.
As I said above, I find the prime symbol ′ useful to mark palatalization. It does not get turned into a curly apostrophe.
As I said above, I find the prime symbol ′ useful to mark palatalization. It does not get turned into a curly apostrophe.
Yes. But it can be confused with the stress mark, and it is not in my keyboard.
I think, “typing” is an issue.
20 years ago we used 1. books 2. pen and paper 3. chalkboards. Now we have PowerPoint, MS Word and HTML and many a PhD student has cursed MS Word since then. Pretty formatting is still a very good thing, but it is an objective need for the community to have romanization systems that look pretty and are easy to type. Else we just have thousands men with long beards and women in long skirts wasting hours on what previously was the job of people who print books. This is not to say that we should not try to be “pretty”. But ‘typeability’ must be a requirement.
MS Word actually lets you define a lot of shortcuts for special characters so you can type them. I wrote some of my Russian homework that way back in the late 90s without changing the German keyboard layout.
IPA intorduced superscript j in 1989, a palatal hook ⟨ᶄ⟩ was used before. Perhaps phoneticians did use this hook, but can’t remember Slavists ever using it. I used to see a vertical stroke in books and in some Russian disctionaries (the orthoepic dictionary) it was a superscript i.
Then the Internet came. Many of its Russian population were emigrants and people working abroad who did not have a Russian keyboard. They, accordingly, communicated in transliteration. Several converters appeared on the Internet too, where you could type in Latin and then copy and post a Cyrillic version.
Of course -ке- was simply -ke-, but ′ represented the soft sigh: -кь -k’. It was displayed similarly to the vertical stroke in books, so for me these two merged.
Then Wikipedia switched to IPA (including superscript j) and greatly popularized IPA. Superscript j is a good thing: not optimal for texts (IPA is not really good for reading texts…) but it is unambigous and neet enough. I like it.
The problem here is typing.
Yes. But it can be confused with the stress mark, and it is not in my keyboard.
The stress mark is straight, this is slanted. Anything can be confused with anything else if you don’t pay attention to detail. It’s certainly better than an apostrophe. Of course the keyboard issue is annoying, but it can be copied and pasted, or you can use Character set (I presume you have some equivalent).
I used to see a vertical stroke in books
That’s the way to mark palatalisation in the Slavicist tradition; it’s what I was taught at university.
“MS Word actually lets you define a lot of shortcuts for special characters so you can type them. I wrote some of my Russian homework that way back in the late 90s without changing the German keyboard layout.”
True. And I can define shortcuts for special characters here. Not everyone can do so, but I can. Actually all these tools are useful.
But the need for a “pretty but easy/convenient” way to represent things must be recognized by the community. I hesitate to switch to systematic use of ⟨◌ʲ⟩ not because I am too lazy to learn how to assign ʲ to a key on my keyboard. I am not convinced that it is a good practice.
“it’s what I was taught at university.”
Yes, and I think ′ can work here. But I I do not think it is a good idea to imitate books just because they are books.
I am quite fed up with Arabist transcription that only exists because Men Who Write in Latin [and suck in Arabic] are always more “scientific” than children who write in Arabic, even when in reality it is the kids who are smarter here.
My Russian schoolbook used apostrophes for palatalization – with Cyrillic letters, confusingly enough, where ь would have been a better idea.
My rather small Russian dictionary (Langenscheidt) uses the hook, all the way to [ʃ̡t̡ʃ̡] (it looks much better in their font) for щ.
Edit: whoa, it looks horrible. Maybe it’ll become recognizable with spaces: [ ʃ̡ t̡ ʃ̡ ].
My Russian schoolbook used apostrophes for palatalization – with Cyrillic letters, confusingly enough
That’s a pretty common thing, yes. Not sure why.
(Probably because that way they can write sequences like с’т’э [i.e. сте] and not worry about how the digraphs interact with each other.)
I think I came up with a brief explanation for what I mean above.
I can be pedantic or intentionally sloppy. And my pedantic self thinks that politeness requires a transcription that is clear and can be reproduced by my reader with ease.
/c′и/ makes the different quality of the consonantal segment explicit compared to /си/.
Unfortunately, /ся/ makes the different quality of the vowel segment explicit :-E.
I would honestly prefer something like s̃ẽ , s͠e, ͠se, s̰ḛ (just neat and not like these), to make the shared quality of palatalization more explicit.
Anyway, back then they were so much excited by the idea that /c/ and /c′/ are two different Phonemes.
languagehat: The stress mark is straight, this is slanted.
Unfortunately, they are both straight upright in the font used on my phone (although they can be slanted over with an italics tag).
Woops! Why must the online world be so complicated??
Typing by clicking is certainly not optimal, but if you are willing to do it, then make use of the redoubtable Weston Ruter’s clickable IPA chart. If a letter is on your keyboard, type it; if not, find out where it is on the chart, click on it, and Robert is your mother’s brother. All letters appear in a text box at the bottom of the chart, which you can edit locally or (when all is well) copy to the clipboard.
Even if you don’t know where everything is, there are enough English-language labels to orient you. For example, if you know that the n in Italian inferno is a labiodental nasal, then in the first part (pulmonic consonants) you look at the row labeled “Nasal” and the column labeled “Labiodental”), and at the vowel chart in the second part (which is basically a mouth with the open end to the right), and at the suprasegmental marks in the third part, we can type and click and copy and paste [iɱˈfɛrno] right here in the text box. Note that diacritics must be entered after the letter they apply to.
I keep the chart in a pinned browser tab, but His Hatness might want to add it to the right-hand bar. As an alternative, there is the TypeIt page, which groups the IPA symbols based on their ASCII look-alikes: for example, [ɾ ɹ ʁ ʀ ɻ ɽ] are grouped under R.
His Hatness might want to add it to the right-hand bar.
Done!
So what is that technical term? [that sounds like Facebook]
Alas, I don’t remember. He and I used to share an office, but for the past year we have not communicated viva voce except in formalized meetings. It’s data-scientist jargon rather than programmer jargon, I think.
“Phase”-something ? Phase hook ? In the ‘net I find a product called Vue (a javascript framework?) that inserts hooks for you in life cycle phases (like AspectJ ??)
IT jargon (including data analytics) maintains an appearance of being in the know. Many people I deal with don’t understand what they’re talking about, as I discover in the course of conversation. I avoid jargon in favor of analogies and outright metaphors in everyday language – but the jargonists don’t understand that either.
“Model-view-viewmodel” FFS.
# Vue.js (commonly referred to as Vue; pronounced /vjuː/, like “view”[4]) is an open-source model–view–viewmodel front end JavaScript framework for building user interfaces and single-page applications.[11] #
My cow orker’s idiolect in English, like most varieties of Chinese, doesn’t do final stops.