Languages! Are! Weird!

The more I look into it, the more people I see who are convinced that the th sounds are either dying or fading away. And to be frank I can't blame 'em. While I grew up with 'Three' and 'Father' more and more here in Ohio I hear 'Free' and 'Fader'.

Which is odd considering ð becoming d and θ becoming f are two different changes.

In any case the changes are generally like this:

'Father' = ð 'Three' = θ Normal

'Father' = v 'Three' = f Th-fronting

'Father' = d 'Three' = t (Can't find a name for this)

Anyone here think this will become the norm, or will it blow over in time?

edited 4th Mar '14 7:57:41 AM by Blackcoldren

Sorry to double post but I think this would be more liked than by babbling about sounds.

Came across the Regional Dialect Meme and I'm curious how other's would answer.

1.What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?

2.What is the bug that when you touch it, it curls into a ball?

3.What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?

4.What do you call gym shoes?

5.What do you say to address a group of people?

6.What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?

7.What do you call your grandparents?

8.What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?

9.What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?

10.What is the thing you change the TV channel with?

My answers: 1. Tipin' 2. Pill Bug 3. Soda (sometimes pop) 4. Sneakers 5. Y'all 6. Daddy Long-Legs 7. Granma & Granpa 8. Shopping Kart 9. Summer Shower, Spring Shower, April Shower (Or in Flordia: 'Wait 5 minutes') 10. Remote (controller)

1. TP'ing or papering.

2. A woodlouse.

3. A fizzy drink.

4. Trainers.

5. "Hi, guys"

6. A daddy long legs.

7. Grandma and grandpa (although most children use grammy and gramps or nanny and grandpa, I think).

8. A trolley.

9. Do you mean a rainbow?

10. A remote or a remote control.

edited 4th Mar '14 10:26:46 AM by Telcontar

1. TP'ing

2. Pill bug

3. Soda or pop

4. Sneakers or tennis shoes

5. "You guys" or occasionally "y'all"^note Really only jokingly do we use "y'all"

6. Daddy longlegs

7. Grandma/Grandpa (usually comes out as "gramma" and "grampa")

8. [Shopping] cart

9. No word for this

10. Zapper or remote [control]

edited 4th Mar '14 10:54:04 AM by somerandomdude

1. No idea.
2. No idea, I hate bugs.
3. Annoying.
4. No idea.
5. Never had to.
6. Scary.
7. My grandmothers I call "Ouma" and my grandfather I call "Oupa". It's Afrikaans.
8. A trolley.
9. Not sure in English, but in Afrikaans there's an idiom - "jakkals trou met wolf se vrou", that would translate to "jackal married wolf's wife" or something like that.
10. Remote.

1. TP'ing
2. Rolly Polly
3. Soda
4. Shoes
5. You guys
6. Daddy Long Legs
7. Grandpa/ma
8. Grocery cart
9. Almost over
10. Remote

Regarding #9, I've heard English-speaking South Africans refer to it as a "monkey's wedding," which is apparently a calque from Zulu.

Hmm seems grit and pet as past tenses are becoming rarer... gritted sounds sooo wrong.

Since attempting to create a conlang, I can't understand why words are not spelled phonetically (at least in English).

A single sound can be written like 5 different ways, depending on context, and it can be hard to guess how words are pronounced just by looking at the written form. For example, here/tear. The conlang I was creating has exactly one pronunciation for each letter or letter pair, so there's no way you can fuck it up if you know what sound each letter makes. The only possible exception is the letter "X", which NORMALLY is used to telegraph certain alien sounds humans can't make (as it is an alien conlang), but can also be pronounced as "ecks" if not accompanied by an accented "Y".

There's also the fish/ghoti parallel but no one would actually think to pronounce "ghoti" as "fish", precisely because of how context-sensitive English sounds are... We know, for example, that a "G" at the start of a word is probably not pronounced as an "F" (as in "cough").

I understand silent letters are sometimes used to distinguish words that sound very similar or identical but it seems like we spell shit weird for no good reason. Well, it looks silli wen yoo spel Inglish werdz funetikli, but that's only because we're used to spelling English words a certain way.

I'm guessing it has to do with the evolution of English etymology. It does seem like the more natural way for languages to form. It makes sense to design a conlang that's one letter = one sound, but in the real world, naturally-evolving languages tend to take on all sorts of weird spellings over the ages, yes?

Most people also don't over-enunciate so most English vowels are schwas (kind of a lazy-ass half-vowel). But having a complicated set of vowels makes even less sense in that case. You should need only one letter to make a pseudovowel sound that makes up most of the vowels in the entire language.

In response to the dialect questions from earlier:

1. Tee-peeing, except nobody does that here (Western Australia). We just know it's called that because of American television.

2. Pillbug! Well that's what I'd call them. I'm pretty sure Aussies have their own word for them, but I forget what it is. "Slates" or something.

3. Now this one changes if you walk down the street in Australia, I personally call it soft drink. I've heard it called fizzy drink and pop and very rarely soda. There are also those rubes who call every kind of soft drink "coke".

4. Running shoes. In Sydney, they were "sandshoes". I don't know why because they are precisely the worst kind of shoes to be wearing on sand.

5. You lot, you guys, and sometimes "ya's". Like "youse", but shorter.

6. Daddy long legs.

7. Oma and Opa. My family is Dutch.

8. Trolley, shopping trolley.

9. Sun showers.

10. Remote.

edited 13th Mar '14 11:21:30 PM by Alma

Just for the heck of it I looked up common misspellings and archaic spellings for that stupid princess and her treasures passage. I really oughta find one that shows more sounds.......Anywho for words I didn't use archaic spellings for, I didn't go for anything overly phonetic, just a few small changes. Also, I like the letter þ

Wones upon a time, þe buetiful datter ov a greit majishan wanted more perls to put among her tresors. "Look þru þe senter ov þe moon when it iz blew." said her royal moþer in anser to her qestiun. "Yew miyt find yewr hartes dezire." Þe fayr prinsess laffd, bycaus she doutd these wirds. Insted, she used her imajinashan, and moovd into þe fotografy bizness, and took picshurs ov þe moon in color. "I perseev most sertanly þat it iz allmost holey hwite." she þot. She also found þat she coud make enuff money in eiht monþs to buy herself tu luvly huej new jewels to.

I also restored possessive 's to it's older es form. Thus heart's = hartes, hearts = harts, hearts' = hartses

þ is a cool letter, but there's more than one "Th" sound, and you use that letter for both.

There are actually 3 by my assessment... There's "th" in "think", "th" in "though" and the "th" in "father" which is kind of between the two.

I use it for both because Eth died off long before thorn.

Isn't that what that one that looks like a D is for,which as far as I know only Icelandic still uses

Nice signature, Terl.

Da ist das "zu" aber unnötig.

When I was working on a fictional alphabet for my eventual conlang, I was dealing with 'h' digraphs (sh/zh = ʃ/ʒ, etc), and a thought occurred to me: if English sometimes uses ph = f, then have their unvoiced counterparts ever been used in the same way (as in, bh = v)? As it turns out, yes— in Irish. So if you've ever wondered how the hell "Siobhán" is supposed to be pronounced, well, there you go.

On the same note, I was wondering if 'dh' is ever used alongside 'th', to differentiate between θ (think) and ð (they, which would instead be written "dhey"), and it is— Albanian, Cornish, and Swahili.

Well, for Fhaal (tentative name, it seems to change every five minutes), I had it set up thusly:

Th "think" = Fh (eg. Fhaal, it is pronounced "thaal")

Th "though" = Th

Th "father" = Vh

In another conlang, I wrote th "though" as tx. When conlanging, I generally use the letter X as a signpost for unusual sounds. I also just really like it.

But spelling and etymology was a minor issue as far as I cared when I set out to create this language. I was trying really hard to envision what a spoken alien language would work like. It's easy to just keysmash and call it an alien language, but I wanted something that came from a logical place while still sounding wildly different from anything humans have come up with. Klingon is probably the most "alien" of the alien conlangs, by that measure. Na'vi doesn't really sound "alien" to me, more like an exotic human language. Which isn't necessarily bad, since if you assume the aliens are humanoid and similar enough in their manner of thinking, their languages might not be very different from ours at all. The samples of the alien languages Lovecraft came up with were cool-sounding, but he never really bothered to expand them as a full conlang.

edited 18th Mar '14 5:05:18 AM by Alma

Well, my language(s— there are several languages in my world, but Arcane is currently the only one I'm planning to properly develop) is(/are) human. Here's how the Sanim alphabet (which is actually the second one I made for this project, don't ask) does it:

Ph/Bh = f/v (find/valley)
Th/Dh = θ/ð (throw/then)
Kh/Gh = x/ɣ (loch/these two are uncommon, because I'm a biased English speaker)
Sh/Zh = ʃ/ʒ (shove/measure)
Ch/Jh = tʃ/dʒ (chain/joke); C and J are placeholders for 'Ts' and 'Dz'.

The first alphabet I made has its own, non-digraph symbols for these, so English transliteration might vary— for instance, the nation of Čeve could also be written as Chebhe.

edited 18th Mar '14 9:02:29 AM by Blueeyedrat

Where are you getting that third th? Though and father are the same sound to me and the IPA.

Why does noone think to use the 'ċ' used in transcribing Old English for 'ch'?

For whatever reason I want to compare the word cheese. Ċēse (something like chay-sa) to chese (most likely cheez-a) to cheese (which you know is pronounced cheez)

I like that word, cheese. Ċīz?

They sound different to me, but only slightly.

I could probably explain it better if I actually knew a damn thing about linguistics, but th "father" sounds longer and smoother than th "though", which is short.

I think I want verbs in my conlang (progress!) to be double-conjugated— as in, a root word, one modifier for subject, another for object. My inner high school French student is telling me no, turn back, don't do it, but it's rather tempting.

Would the object be conjugated for person, number, both, or neither? (Hungarian conjugates its verbs based on the definite- or indefiniteness of the direct object.)

Both, ideally. First/second/third person, singluar/plural, so six variants in total. My original idea was [subject prefix]-[root verb]-[object suffix]; not sure if/how I would distinguish between direct/indirect objects.

I'll come back to the matter later; first I'm sorting out different forms (past/present/future, progressive/perfect/both/neither, etc).

In the meantime, I figured out most of my basic pronouns. No distinction between subject/object (so "I" and "me" are the same word— again, may be changed later), and most plurals are just the singular root with the plural suffix attached. Personal, there are nine for the six categories— two extra for third person (distinguish "he"/"she"/"him"/"her" and "it", singular and plural), one extra for first person (inclusive "we"); same goes for possessive^* "my"/"yours"/"theirs"/etc. and reflexive^* "yourself"/"ourselves"/etc.; reciprocal^* "each other", logically, has only plurals. Demonstrative has three pairs, whereas English only has two ("this"/"these" and "that"/"those", with the third "yon"/"yonder" having fallen out of use).

edited 23rd Mar '14 9:19:55 PM by Blueeyedrat

This is a general question for any troper who learned English as a second language as speaks it fluently:

How do you do it? How do you pick up a language like English and master it as if it's your native language? I'm having a bit of trouble learning Spanish (though lees so now than in high school), and I can't imagine being able to speak it so fluently (especially since I can't roll my 'r's).

I think I learned much of it by watching American and British TV.

edited 24th Mar '14 11:52:31 AM by Rosvo1