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  #26  
Old 08-31-2018, 08:31 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

OH NOW CEP WANTS TO FIGHT TOO :angrychickenmob:
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  #27  
Old 08-31-2018, 10:35 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

Start off with a link to the highly useful Language Log: Language Log: Lie or lay? Some disastrously unhelpful guidance

There are a handful of verbs like this in English, with related verbs that clearly have some derivational connection at some point in the past (not always being clear which one is the original form and which is modified). There probably used to be more, but the process for creating these types of pairs doesn't exist in modern English.

Other verbs like this are:

rise-rear/raise (rear* is from Old English, raise comes from Norse, from the same Germanic root)
sit-set
fall-fell (e.g. to fell a tree)

Some have changed meanings or are rarely used this way, but

bite-bait (you can see how "bait" might've originally meant "cause to bite")
drink-drench ("drench" used to mean "to cause to drink" but nowadays it's only used that way specifically to refer to forcing an animal to drink medicine)

Other Germanic languages have similar pairs of words:
English Swedish German 
lielayliggaläggaliegenlegen
sitsetsittasättasitzensetzen
fallfellfallafällafallenfällen
bitebaitbitabetabeißen?
drinkdrenchdrickadränkatrinkentrenken

Like in English the meanings may have shifted or narrowed. Swedish dränka means to drown (transitive) rather than cause to drink or give a drink to. They also have pairs that don't exist in English like brinna and bränna which correspond to "burn" transitive vs. intransitive.

The more common way in English to alternate these types of meanings is simply to use the same verb transitively or intransitively.

For example:

I'm burning the papers.
The papers are burning.

He broke the glass.
The glass broke.

But you can also alternate between completely different verbs (like die-kill or buy-sell).

As for lay vs. lie... Yes, people do not consistently distinguish them. I'd say that the past tense is more likely to be mixed up this way, since the fact that the past of "lie" is "lay" makes it more easily confused. Lots of people use "laid" as the past or past participle of "lie". I definitely have preferences for one or the other for certain uses, especially when not in past tense... "I laid in bed all day" sounds fine, for example, but I'd somewhat prefer "I'm lying in bed" to "laying in bed". And I'd definitely never say "he was lying it on pretty thick."

In fact, using lay-lain sounds almost... old-fashioned? or overly proper? to me. "The dog lay in the shade" or "I've lain in bed too long." I'd probably say "The dog laid in the shade" or "I've laid in bed too long." I suppose you might even hear "lied in bed", but that is very rare based on Google hits. You do actually get more Google hits for "have/has laid in bed" than "have/has lain in bed" though.

Sit and set are also not consistently distinguished by all speakers, but I think this is more dialectal. It seems to me to be more common in the South in the US than elsewhere, and I don't think it varies by tense. I don't think I ever conflate these verbs, by contrast.

*This one looks less similar to the intransitive verb, but change of /z/ (spelled with 's') to /r/ is a sound change that occurred in Germanic in a number of words. This is also the source of the alternations between /z/ and /r/ in conjugations of 'be', 'is'/'was' with /z/ and 'are'/'were' with /r/. Paradigm leveling eliminated these alternations in verbs like "choose" and "freeze", whose Old English ancestors had conjugations with /z/-/r/ alternations.

Last edited by erimir; 08-31-2018 at 11:25 PM.
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  #28  
Old 08-31-2018, 11:15 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

Hast thou too long abed lain?
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  #29  
Old 08-31-2018, 11:46 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

Manig morgen hæbbe ic gelegen in bedd oferlice, hit is soþ.
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  #30  
Old 10-07-2018, 11:55 AM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

It came as some surprise to me that sata, the Finnish word for one hundred, shares a common root with hundred itself.

(a) It doesn't sound even vaguely similar, but that's evolution of language for you; French cent and hundred aren't immediately obviously related, let alone Russian сто.

(b) Proto-Finno-Uralic languages aren't supposed to have any common roots with Proto-Indo-European languages ... ah OK, it's a loan word.



Evolution of “hundred” in Indo-European languages
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  #31  
Old 10-07-2018, 10:07 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

Topic is Finland?

How the Finnish lifestyle of getting drunk while wearing pants became the new hygge | Life and style | The Guardian
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  #32  
Old 01-18-2019, 01:49 PM
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  #33  
Old 01-18-2019, 05:45 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

Checkmate LINGUISTS!
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  #34  
Old 01-18-2019, 06:38 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

Soon, all the crispyams are gonna get all o'erwrought about Easter.

Now, I'm clear on telling east from west, but I'm still waiting for somebody to explain Eastest. When is that? Or, is it where?
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  #35  
Old 01-27-2019, 07:12 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

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  #36  
Old 01-27-2019, 09:30 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

SO THEIYR'RE!
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  #37  
Old 01-27-2019, 11:00 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

What do the people who write u for you do with all the time they save?
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  #38  
Old 01-27-2019, 11:58 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

My pedantry requires me to note that it should be "your a idiot" or "your and idiot" if they really want to go for the maximum trolling game. By using A Idiot, they would also be following the official Wonkette style guide. A for effort though.
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  #39  
Old 01-28-2019, 01:37 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by The Man View Post
My pedantry requires me to note that it should be "your a idiot" or "your and idiot" if they really want to go for the maximum trolling game. By using A Idiot, they would also be following the official Wonkette style guide. for effort though.
:fixed:
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  #40  
Old 03-18-2019, 11:00 AM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

The title alone is worth a mention.

What the F? (Economist Espresso)

Quote:
From common vowels like “i” and “u” to the rarer click consonants of southern Africa, the many different sounds that make up the world’s languages have been thought to exist since the dawn of recognisably human speech. A new paper challenges this notion by arguing through a mix of biomechanics, ethnography and linguistics that the consonants “f” and “v” are newcomers. The research reveals that these two consonants are hard to make without an overbite in the jaw, and that while this is present in all children, it is lost by adulthood in people who do not routinely cook (and thereby soften) their food, and is absent in the fossils of adults who lived in populations without food-processing technologies. Thus, as cooking became more common during the Neolithic, so too did Foxtrot and Victor: the f- and v-sounds are just a quarter as frequent in the languages of today’s hunter-gatherers.
That's the entire article. It quotes a 20016 article as background, You tell me that it’s evolution? - Johnson, but not a source for the "new paper" mentioned.

---
ETA: Aha. Via New research suggests “f” and “v” are recent speech sounds worldwide — Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics I find that the article is "Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration", and may be here (paywall): Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration | Science.

Perhaps the Economist writer just wanted to get a snappier title on record and I totally respect that.
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  #41  
Old 07-30-2019, 11:29 AM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

Linguists of :ff:, yes?

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  #42  
Old 07-30-2019, 07:42 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

As far as I know, most of that is mostly true, but they're making some pretty confident assumptions there, including when they 'guarantee' that patriarchy has nothing to do with the evolution of man vs. woman. As though a folk etymology or back formation or anything could NEVER POSSIBLY influence the evolution of language. Nobody knows how or why that happened, but it's definitely not that! Similarly in point 4, assuming that any kind of sexist influence would have to be part of some literal, conscious 'conspiracy.'

It's kind of weird how prescriptive and how narrow their thinking is, like they've memorized it specifically as a pretext for that inarticulate little rant at the end about the "faulty ideology" and "misandry."

So while they're not entirely wrong about at least most of those origins, they should stay in their lane.

Edit for PS that this is a fairly stock rebuttal that's been going around the internet forever. I think it used to be in the FAQ for like soc.org.linguistics or whatever the newsgroup was.
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  #43  
Old 07-30-2019, 08:10 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

Ya, I was reading that thinking, "This could be written more matter of fact and less dramatic incel."
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  #44  
Old 07-30-2019, 08:44 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

Wow, talk about a ton of insecurity and dick waving. This isn’t really a conversation about linguistics, it’s two people who feel insecure and unheard trying to feel better about the confusing world by shouting at the bad guy and ‘winning’.

Like on #2 that really gets their goat, my reply is... so the fuck what? Sure maybe Man *didn’t* used to mean male, but it does now, get used to it! Language may not have started patriarchal (claim not in evidence) but it’s clearly there now. Language usage changes, get used to it bitch!

This kinda feels like the type of person who went around calling people “Gay” and then when called on it had an already built rant in their head about how “Gay” means happy and you’re silly and ignorant if you think they used it as an insult.

Ahahahaha! Holy shit! To be proven right a few sentences later, In bold ”Man dropped its “wer” stem for reasons mostly unknown but I can guarantee have nothing to do with “patriarchy” because [thing not in evidence].” Just lol! In short, No one knows, but I’m sure I’m right, trust me... trump said.

I Like the use of ‘Guarantee’ and how it’s playing on the previous appeal to authority given above to stand in for whatever the author wants, while at the same time placing it after the part where they say no one knows, so that readers will ignore that part and fixate on the guarantee made to try and bolster their fake authority on the topic. At this point it’s obvious they are talking to others who have already made up their mind but need someone with authority to justify it.

The rest is quite similar, true or not, it’s clear they came up with the answer first and filled in the spaces to get there. At no point has the author ever said to themselves “but what if?” And searched for evidence to disprove their idea. I kinda wonder if that one referenced undergrad linguistics course was the only course they took on the subject and it was mentioned to give clout to those who consider taking a class makes one an authority on the subject.

Overall I’m seeing someone who thinks themselves more clever than they really are, who needs to constantly be justifying it to others so they can keep the narrative alive in their head, Oh, hmm, was this not supposed to be an analysis of the author and why I think their insecurities are ripe for scamming?
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  #45  
Old 07-30-2019, 09:37 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

It's annoying that that's a picture so I can't quote specific parts of it, but I notice several mistakes and omissions in the self-proclaimed linguist's explanations.

1. she vs. he
It is true that 'she' comes from a demonstrative pronoun meaning "this, that" (or "the", these were not necessarily distinguished). It is worthwhile to note that since Old English (OE) had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, that this demonstrative pronoun was the feminine form. The original feminine pronoun was heo/hio and the reason forms deriving from OE seo/sio replaced it was probably too much similarity to he. But the original root survives in her/hers which start with h, not s/sh. His explanation makes it seem as if he derives from words meaning "this" and she derives from words meaning "that" which would still seem a bit sexist ("this" and "that" having an "us" vs. "them" sort of quality).

2. woman
The origin of woman is correct, but it seems that both OE wif and wer could stand on their own meaning "woman" and "man". wer is cognate to Latin vir (seen in words like virility) and survives in modern English werewolf. OE also used cwen (origin of queen) to mean "woman", cf. Swedish kvinna "woman".
His origin of the word man, however, is incorrect. The modern form did not come from the wer of werman dropping off for mysterious phonological reasons. And in any case, since man was already an existing word, even if the first syllable did elide, this would mean a conflation with gender neutral man. In other words, it can't be seen as independent of OE man. But I find his claim particularly dubious since English tends to stress the first syllable, and this tendency was stronger in Old English since it had not yet been heavily influenced by Old French, which has different stress patterns. It is also difficult to find information about the word werman in online resources - online OE dictionaries have wer but not werman so I question how common a word it was really. It's also possible that werman wasn't used at all, as far as I can tell.
It is far more likely directly derived from the OE man which retained its original gender-neutral meaning but came to be used for specifically male humans as well, eventually the male human meaning becoming more predominant than the gender neutral one. This happened in other languages as well, cf. Latin homo "human" with Spanish hombre, French homme, Italian uomo, etc. all meaning primarily "male human". More directly relevant, most other Germanic languages also use man with a predominantly masculine meaning, which would be unlikely if the derivation were from werman rather than man. This type of narrowing certainly seems sexist, since it treats males as the default human. Why the linguist is so defensive about this, as if English society of centuries ago wasn't obviously sexist, I don't know.

3. female vs. male
The words do not sound similar by mere coincidence. While it was originally borrowed from Old French femelle, English speakers assumed the second syllable derived from male and thus altered it. This called folk etymology resulting in reanalysis. So while female doesn't ultimately derive from male, the modern form derives from the assumption of English speakers that it must have. But this is understandable given the phonetic similarity so perhaps we can say that's not sexist.

4. human
Human is from Latin, the same root as Germanic man and was gender neutral in Latin. It does not derive from English man.

5. person
The author is correct that this word has no etymological connection to English son.

Some of these issues (particularly he vs. she) are exacerbated by English orthography which makes the words seem more similar than they are. He and she have the same vowel, but the consonants have no connection except that the sh sound is spelled with h. If it were spelled <še> or something like that, there would be no s+he = she connection to make.

I share the author's annoyance with such simplistic claims about language, but etymology is basically esoteric knowledge, which is why folk etymology is a thing. The average person can't be expected to know these things. Many men over the centuries have suggested that woman derived from woe + man because women bring "woe" to men. That's a much more ridiculous assumption than that woman is derived from man plus a prefix because of sexism. Many words were shaped by such misconceptions about the origins of words. Of course, when feminist academics or the like write academic articles containing such misconceptions, I become much more annoyed because I hold academic writing to a far higher standard and do expect them to actually investigate the etymologies of words they're making etymological claims about. Which isn't to say that there aren't arguments they could make based on the average person's perceptions of words, regardless of the true etymologies.

Far worse is the author's seeming insistence that sexism has had no influence on the development of English and words. That is simply incorrect and he has a clear anti-feminist agenda.

A much better example of sexism in English, rather than trying to make something out of human and person, is to note the difference in the meanings of words like:
mister vs. mistress
governor vs. governess
spinner vs. spinster
sir vs. madam (given that madam can mean the manager of a brothel)

Things like that reveal the more negative connotations attached to female equivalents. They are either far less important (governess), or they are outright negative.

The idea that you need faulty, evidence-free ideological thinking or misandry to find sexism in language is ridiculous.
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  #46  
Old 07-31-2019, 07:52 AM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

Sometimes I've found myself reading those calm and patient people who take the time to explain where things went wrong, in the voice of Mister Rogers. I've tried to write in that voice when correcting people as well. (Sometimes I'm just fine with pissing people off so there's my natural voice for that. ha)

Then there's this guy:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ari View Post
Language usage changes, get used to it bitch!

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  #47  
Old 11-16-2019, 09:13 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

The third most common language (with caveats, explained below) in each American state, after English and Spanish:



I found a few aspects of this curious:
  1. The gap in Chinese between Utah and the the West Coast states. I'm sure there's a story there (the Chinese speakers in Utah are presumably descendants of the railroad labourers, and obviously there's a larger Filipino population in Nevada than there are descendants of railroad labourers there), but I'm ignorant as to it.

  2. The wide distribution of German. I'd have expected French to be more widely distributed than German, since the French colonised this continent and the Germans didn't. Immigration has obviously had a large impact on the languages spoken here. But at the same time, so has colonialism, given the prevalence of Spanish here. There's undoubtedly some historical explanation for why Spanish is so much more heavily rooted here than French, but I'm again missing some context. French obviously took heavy root in Canada, though, and not just in Québec - there are many native speakers in the Maritime Provinces, in particular, and even some in Ontario and elsewhere.

  3. TIL that the dialect of French spoken in Louisiana is not considered a creole language/dialect, even though the term "Creole" is used to describe descendants of French settlers in the New World (Louisiana, particularly). I'm sure there's some explanation for this that I'm missing as well, but the terminology seems to have been chosen purely to confuse people.

  4. This is also the first I realised that there was a large population of French speakers in New England.

  5. I don't know what I expected Florida's third most widely spoken language to be, but it wasn't French Creole. I guess it makes sense, though, given our geographical proximity to Haiti.

  6. Arabic being Tennessee's third most widely spoken language is also... not something I expected. Michigan was completely expected, of course.

The above map may be something of an oversimplification, however, because the following map from Wikipedia suggests that a few states have other languages as their second most prevalent:



(Map key: red = Spanish; blue = French; green = German; purple = Tagalog. Authors: Hihellowhatsup [JPG version], JCRules [SVG version]; CC BY-SA 3.0,
File:Second Most Prevalent Languages in the US.svg - Wikimedia Commons)

However, they may also be using different signifiers of prevalence (native languages versus languages spoken at home versus languages spoken overall); I haven't looked further into the data, and since I'm about to head off for dinner, I won't have time for now. There's definitely discrepancies, such as the bottom map listing German for SD and the top map listing Dakota for SD. Dakota makes sense, because it's literally the source of the name of the state, but :shrug:.
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Last edited by The Man; 11-16-2019 at 10:30 PM.
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  #48  
Old 11-16-2019, 10:53 PM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

Quote:
Originally Posted by The Man View Post

I found a few aspects of this curious:
  • The wide distribution of German. I'd have expected French to be more widely distributed than German, since the French colonised this continent and the Germans didn't.
The German state(s) may not have established territory in North America but millions(+/-) of German people did.

If the Irish all spoke Gaelic in the 19th century you wouldn't be surprised to see that on your map.
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Old 11-17-2019, 01:00 AM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

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Originally Posted by The Man View Post
I found a few aspects of this curious:
  1. The gap in Chinese between Utah and the the West Coast states. I'm sure there's a story there (obviously there's a large Filipino population in Nevada), but I'm ignorant as to it.
If I were going to guess why Chinese is less prominent there, it would be this:

1. Nevada was not a destination for immigration until after the rise of the Vegas Strip
2. Chinese immigrants may prefer areas with more settled Chinese communities, and NY/Philly/DC metros and the West Coast have very long-established Chinese communities
3. Chinese immigration today has a higher percentage of educated/professionals than it did during earlier waves of migration, and Nevada is fairly working class (many jobs in the service industry, cleaning hotels, food service, laundry, etc.)
4. But that doesn't explain why Tagalog is more common than other languages...

5. A somewhat tangential point is that it says "Chinese" even though there are many Chinese languages. It would be interesting to see the breakdown of Cantonese, Hokkien/Teochew, Hakka, Mandarin, etc. Mandarin is much more common among Chinese immigrants today, because the areas that sent the most emigrants from China (to the US or elsewhere in the world, really) were in the South. So much so that overseas Chinese communities usually had a southern Chinese language like Cantonese (in the US, for example) or Teochew (in Southeast Asia) as the lingua franca, not Mandarin. This despite Mandarin being the lingua franca in China - but notably many overseas Chinese communities have existed since before Mandarin was really well-known among southern Chinese due to government policies more strongly promoting it. More recent Chinese immigrants to the US tend to know Mandarin due to government education policy and to be from a larger area of China, reducing the dominance of Cantonese speakers, so...
Quote:
The wide distribution of German. I'd have expected French to be more widely distributed than German, since the French colonised this continent and the Germans didn't.
The French never immigrated in as large numbers as the English aside from in certain obvious locations (Quebec, some other parts of Canada and Louisiana). Some areas where they had been more prominent they got flooded by Anglophones and immigrants (St. Louis was a French city, for example, but had a population under 2k when bought by the US in 1803, while it was over 100k by 1860). If the population of the French areas had grown slowly, there would've been a possibility of the language surviving like it has in Quebec due to the founder effect. But they just weren't numerous enough to withstand massive waves of immigration of non-Francophones.

Meanwhile, German-Americans are the largest group of European-Americans other than groups that would be Anglophone or Hispanophone* anyway (English-Americans probably are the largest group when you account for the ones who identify simply as "American"). Combine that with fairly little non-white/modern** immigration to those states in the middle of the country, and German wins due to patterns from long ago. I'm guessing that there aren't that many German speakers in those states generally (aside from the states with large Amish populations, like Ohio), it's just that there are even fewer speakers of other languages.

*Most Hispanics are at least partly Spanish heritage, but they don't tend to identify as Spanish if they have roots in Latin America

**Due to racist immigration policies, the time period when those states were being settled and did, in fact, have large immigrant populations, is also when non-white groups weren't allowed to immigrate in large numbers. But since not many immigrants settle in Idaho now, you won't get as many Chinese speakers moving there to overcome the German speakers.
Quote:
Immigration has obviously had a large impact on the languages spoken here. But at the same time, so has colonialism, given the prevalence of Spanish here. There's undoubtedly some historical explanation for why Spanish is so much more heavily rooted here than French, but I'm again missing some context.
Aside from parts of the Southwest, where Spanish speakers had decently large populations prior to annexation, Spanish is so common in the US due to the large numbers of more recent immigrants from Latin America. Even in those areas, more recent immigrants are probably a larger group than Spanish speakers with US roots from before the Mexican-American war. Spanish in Florida isn't rooted here from colonial times, it's from Cubans fleeing Castro and other more recent immigrants. Spain was unable to hold onto Florida against US expansion precisely because they didn't have much of a presence there.
Quote:
TIL that the dialect of French spoken in Louisiana is not considered a creole language, even though the term "Creole" is used to describe descendants of French settlers in the New World (Louisiana, particularly). I'm sure there's some explanation for this that I'm missing as well, but it seems to have been done purely to confuse people.
Creole, as a term, originally referred to people born and raised in the colonies (other than the indigenous inhabitants). The linguistic meaning is newer, due to black Creole populations in the Americas developing creole languages. But not all Creole people spoke creole languages, in particular, white Creole people usually don't, hence the confusion. The linguistic term is also detached from the original meaning in that many creole languages are spoken by communities that could not be described as creole in the original sense (creoles spoken in Africa, for example, are mainly spoken by people indigenous to the region).

There is a Kreyol la Lwizyan which is fairly similar to Haitian Creole/Kreyol Ayisyen, with some differences. They use a more Spanish-like r, for example, I which probably has something to do with weaker influence from Metropolitan French in general in Louisiana, and perhaps patterns of migration from France in much the same way that differences between US and Latin American dialects have connections to which part of England or Spain the early settlers came from.
Quote:
This is also the first I realised that there was a large population of French speakers in New England.
Northern New England doesn't get that many immigrants and doesn't have that large of a population, so proximity to Francophone parts of Canada making it attractive for those immigrants would outweigh immigrants coming from farther afield. Northeastern New York has a similar proportion of French Canadian Americans, but since the NYC area has such massive immigrant populations, they're small as a percentage of the state's non-English speakers.
Quote:
Arabic being Tennessee's third most widely spoken language is also... not something I expected. Michigan was completely expected, of course.
That is a bit more surprising.

I also note that Chinese is the most common language in NC after English and Spanish which is a little surprising since I feel (looking it up, this is correct) there are more Indian immigrants than Chinese in NC. Now, as I mentioned, they group all Chinese languages together. If all Indian languages, or even just all Indo-Aryan languages, were grouped together, the numbers could change in a number of states. But we accept that Hindi and Bengali are different languages in a way that Cantonese and Mandarin are not always recognized as clearly distinct languages (the difference between Cantonese vs. Mandarin is comparable to English vs. German*, for example).

In NC, according to Wikipedia, just combining Hindi and Gujarati would almost push Indian languages above Chinese languages in NC, so I imagine adding in Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, etc. would put them above Chinese easily.

*Some people will tell you that the Chinese languages all have the same written form. This is incorrect. To the extent it's true, it's because they use the same symbols for many words. But if the Cantonese word order differs from Mandarin, the written form will use the Mandarin order. If a symbol is meant to indicate pronunciation (many Chinese words combine a character chosen for semantics with a character chosen for pronunciation), it will indicate the Mandarin pronunciation. If Mandarin uses a word with a different root from Cantonese for the meaning, it will use the character connected to the Mandarin root, not the Cantonese one**. There is not a single writing system that is equally good for Mandarin and Cantonese or any of the other Chinese languages. Non-Mandarin speakers are usually just familiar enough with Mandarin that they can usually read it. That's all.

**Imagine that Spanish and Italian were written with a Chinese-like system, and the characters have roots going back to Latin, and Spanish stands in for Mandarin in this case. In Spanish, the word for "go" is ir, while andar means "go" or "walk" but is less common. In Italian, the word for "go" is andare and ire is archaic and unused. In Spanish, the word for eat is generally comer and while cognates of Italian mangiare exist, they're dialectal/colloquial. "Romance" writing will use the symbol for ir and comer for "go" and "eat" despite them being unused in Italian, but then people will tell you that the writing is equally good for Spanish and Italian, they just pronounce them differently. Well, Italians can pronounce ir as ire and so on and if this were the case, they'd probably be familiar with the character for comer even though they say mangiare, but it isn't really representing Italian at that point, it's just saying that most of the symbols correspond to something in Italian or that Italian speakers can understand it because this is the main form of writing they're exposed to. This is the way in which generic "Chinese" writing represents non-Mandarin languages like Cantonese or Hakka, etc. Cantonese does, in fact, have its own writing system, and it's not very intelligible to Mandarin speakers because it uses specifically Cantonese characters, uses other characters differently, and writes things in different orders... and since Mandarin speakers aren't required to learn Cantonese in school, they aren't familiar with these differences.

Last edited by erimir; 11-17-2019 at 02:40 AM.
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  #50  
Old 11-17-2019, 02:55 AM
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Default Re: Linguistic miscellany

I suspect that map to be entirely wrong, because Russian is very very common in Oregon and Chinese is more common?

That just seems off

Also Russian translators were way more in demand than any other in Pennsylvania when I worked for Medicad there.

I am basing my observations about medical translation services requested. Oregon also has lots of Somalia/Ethopian/Vietnamese.
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