Final project

As part of the class I took last semester, we each analyzed a language that we had not studied. While my intention was not to choose a Romance language, French is where I had a native speaker willing to help. So French it is.

The point of this exercise was to tease out the way the language works as spoken. I don't know that I did the best job in the world, but I did learn a bit about French. I added a section on the history of French, since I knew a little about that. In all honesty, that may be the best portion of the project for non-linguists who are curious about French.
  French linguistics project

μέν and δέ

I've recently learned about switch-reference markers. Since I'm a native English speaker, I don't really know about know about such things. We don't have them (I don't think).

They're not traditionally shown as such in Greek, but I'm beginning to think μέν and δέ are switch-reference markers of a sort. Or if they aren't, they're very similar. For those who are familiar, consider what this means:

οἱ δὲ [non-noun]…

It should signal that whoever οἱ are, they are not the subject of the last sentence. Hopefully I'll learn more about switch-referencing and will be able to say more about this topic. So far as I know, this would make Greek and odd man out—so far as I am aware—in Indo-European languages.

Greek compound nouns

Since I'm reading some Greek, I might as well inflict a little Greek on the world. That and I've got some serious dislike of traditional Greek grammar—parathetic and synthetic compounds being the sort thing that the classics have too much of. Let's remedy that.

I'm at the halfway point in True Story, and the sheer promiscuity that Lucian tosses out compounds wholly invented for his book astounds me. For whatever reason, it makes the work seem less alien. Anyway, back to my point. He makes compounds, and for sake of reducing assumptions let's assume he is following the standard patterns of forming compounds that Greek uses. Let's see what we can learn from these compounds. Specifically, N-N compounds in book 1. Anything that looked questionable or that I couldn't find, I ditched. First up: pre-existing words.

Right headed endocentric compounds

γαστρο.κνημίη – calf

Ἡρα.κλέης – Hercules
Λυχνό.πολις – Lamptown
οἰνο.φαγία – feast
πελτ.αστής – light shield bearer

Right-headed do-er compound
σκευο.φόρος – porter


Copulative
Νεφελο.κοκκγ.ία – Cloudcuckootown

Well, um, yeah
οἰκο.δόμημα – building

Seriously, this thing means something like househome. Anyway. From the looks of these pre-existing words, it would appear that Greek uses right-heading as its main strategy when compounding. Sound like another language? That's right. English tends to use right-headed compounds as well. Yet another reason, Ancient Greek is more like English than you may think.

And here are Lucian's made up words. He used a lot of these, and they're fun.

 Right-headed endocentric
Ἀερο.κόρδακες – sky dancers
Ἀερο.κώνωψ – sky-mosquito
ἀερο.μαχία – air battle
Ἀνεμο.δρόμοι – wind walkers
Ἱππο.γέρανοι – crane cavalry
Ἱππό.γυποι – vulture cavalry
Ἱππο.μύρμηξ – horse ant
Κεγχρο.βόλοι – Millet throwers

Λαχανό.πτερος – Grass plumer

Νεφελο.κένταυρος – cloud centaur
νησο.μαχία – island fight
Σκοποδο.μάχοι – Garlic fighters

Right-headed do-er compound

Θαλασσο.πότης – Sea-drinkers

Copulative
Ψυλλο.τοξότης – flea archer

Exocentric compounds
θυννο.κέφαλος – tuna headed

Καθλο.μύκητες – stalk mushrooms
Κυνο.βάλανοι – dog acorns
Στρουθο.βάλανοι – Sparrow acorns

Ψηττό.ποδες – Sole-feet

In a book like this, you can't tell if he means that the creatures are just heads (κέφαλος) that look like tuna (θύννος) or some sorts of Doctor Who style tuna-headed alien. I prefer the latter interpretation.

Sadly, not everything was a compound. Drat.

Τριτωνο.μένδητες – Mergoat

When I saw this, I was truly hoping I could find how this was a compound. The Middle Liddell failed me. Of course, given Greek culture, there was almost no way that there aren't all sorts of words having to do with every facet of boats and seafaring. Which brings me to the most glaringly odd omission. All of these other things are  compounded, but this one isn't despite the free way Greek compounds.

χείρ σιδήρεος – hand iron

But you might like to call it a grappling hook, and I think it's cool. Even if it isn't a compound.

UPDATE
And then in Book 2, section 4, Lucian spells out exactly how he makes his compounds.

ἅπαντα ἡμῖν προσεοικότας, καὶ τὰ σώματα καὶ τὰμεγέθη, πλὴν τῶν ποδῶν μόνων· ταῦτα γὰρ φέλλινα εἶχον, ἀφ᾽ οὗ δή, οἶμαι, καὶ ἐκαλοῦντο Φελλόποδες.

…entirely similar to us in both body and size, except for their feet: those are cork, from which I suppose, they are called Cork-feet.

Greek compounds and English phrasals

I'm working my way through Lucain's True Story and the realization is hitting me again. Ancient Greek and English have some odd ways that they are alike. The biggest to me is in how compound verbs are interpreted. (And I'm sure as soon as I hit publish, I'll realize otherwise.)

I should be clear. The morphology of the verbs are completely unalike. English is virtually inflection free, whereas Greek has inflections for person and number that are much more like Latin. But the interpretation of the compound is more likely to be transparent to English speakers than Latin compounds. For example:

καταγράφω – I write on

The morphology breaks down like this:

/kata.grap^h.o:/
κατα.γράφ.ω
against.write.I

Ok, so maybe I'm cherry-picking a definition for κατα. But there are more. I'll divide the morphemes up with dots like I did above—they are in the same order.

περι.πλέκ.ω – I fold around
ἐπι.σκοπέ.ω – I look at

In most cases, the Greek compound fits more or less with its English phrasal counterpart. This is completely at odds with Latin. Latin forms its compounds exactly like Greek. Preposition + verb root + person/number inflection.

pro.mitt.o – I send for?
in.veni.o – I come into?
con.st.o – I stand with?

No, promise, find and agree (though that last one kind of works). It is almost as if you have to learn each Latin compound as its own new work, but in Greek you can guess and wind up close to the mark. The other nice thing about Greek is that it is a bit more promiscuous about noun-noun compounds. Latin does this to an extent with words like crucifer (cross bearer), but it usually prefers to phrase things like that as a phrase—typically with genitive case.

Greek is far more promiscuous with compounds, particularly in the right- vs. left-headedness of the compound. You're familiar with some of them already. Here are a few left-headed compounds.

ῥινό.κερως – rhinoceros (nose.horn)
ἱππο.πόταμος – hippopotamus (horse.river)
φιλο.σοφία – philosophy (love.knowledge)

You may not know my new favorite from Lucian, which is right-headed.

ψυλλο.τοξότης – flea archers

Phonology of Mandan vowels

For those of you interested in the phonology of Mandan, here's a summary of a presentation I recently sat in on.

Jonina Torres presented information about the way Mandan, a Siouan language spoken in North Dakota, differentiates its vowels. She had analyzed a recording of a Mandan speaker to see how the vowels varied in duration. Mandan appears to differentiate vowels in both length and nasalization. The inventory Torres investigaged is /a, a:, ã, ã:, e, e:, i, i:, ĩ, ĩ:, u, u:, ũ, ũ:, o, o:/.

Using a piece of software called Praat, she looked at sonograms and blocked off each vowel for duration. For the most part, short vowels were held for about 0.1s and long vowels were held for 0.2s. This doesn't surprise me given the describers long and short. Torres found two pairs that did not fit the pattern. The first is the distinction between /ã/ and /ã:/. The short /ã/ was held for about 0.25s, and the long /ã:/ was held for about 0.15s. This is odd, since the “short” vowel was in fact longer than the “long” vowel. The other surprise in her data was the variance between /ũ/ and /ũ:/. Short /ũ/ was held for 0.1s, which is in line with the other short vowels. On the other hand long /ũ:/ was held for 0.5s, which was more than twice as long as all the other long vowels, save /ã:/. Concluding, Torres suspected that these variations might be evened out if she sampled a larger data set.

Relatable presentation

The presentation went well. Or at least well enough that no one refuted my analysis. Here is the pdf of the presentation. If I get enough requests, I'll do an online version with voice and all.

Bottom line for non-academics: The word relatable has shifted meaning. It used to mean either "able to be retold" or "able to be correlated", but now it means "able to resonate with a person, usually emotionally". You will continue to see younger speakers of American English use it this way. Tough luck if you don't like it.

Relatable

Wading into X'

I'd tell you I get X' syntax, but I don't (yet). I'm sure I'll muddle through to an understanding some day.

Until then, I'll blow the classicists' brains with the syntax of Latin.

In Horace's Odes 1.37, he says "contaminato cum grege".  Well, there's more to it, but that's where I want to focus. It looks like Latin gets to move adjectives in front of prepositions—at least that's the rule we're taught. And it looks like it holds. After all, summa cum laude and quam ob rem and a bunch of other things like that are up and down Latin literature. Adjective before preposition.

Let's call it adjective movement for now. (If only because it looks like wh-movement.)

Here's what the normal version looks like: cum grege contaminato. Here's its syntax tree:

(Well, maybe N' doesn't break into N and AP just quite where I show it, but it wasn't easy to get the software to cooperate once I had started.) But watch what happens when we go to contaminato cum grege. Presto, syntax tree!

See where contaminato moved to? That's right. It took over the spec position under PP. Now I've not looked at the corpus in detail, but I can't think of any instances of this sort of thing happening where adjective movement allows for any position other than immediately in front of the preposition. If I'm right (remember my caveat), this is why—the adjective moves into the spec position. Of course there could be something even uglier going on. If there is, I'll update this post.

Quid est hoc?

Just what is this anyway? I was recently asked if this passed grammatical muster.

Q: Quid est hoc?
A: Hoc est mensa.

My gut feeling is that it did, but why you wouldn't ask "quid est?" I don't know. The interesting thing that I've found is that in a Google search, it only turns up 85 times at thelatinlibrary.com—I know, not the greatest source, but it responds quickly and has zero extraneous garbage. You know who said "quid est hoc?" in antiquity? Cicero. And no one else. Or at least no one else bothered to write it down. The interesting thing is that when Cicero says it, it almost seems to be saying "Just really, what is this?" As if he were straining to believe.

So on that ground, "quid est hoc?" passes grammatical muster—but no one uses it in the sense of "what is this?" It is far more "WTF?"

Hearing things in The Hunger Games

I went to go see The Hunger Games with my wife over the weekend. It was ok. Well, more accurately, it was subversive, but that's another post for another blog. There were a few interesting points.

Some of the characters had distinctly Roman names: Cinna, Cato and Caesar leap to mind. All of their names are pronounced English-style. /s/ for Cinna and Caesar. /k/ for Cato. I knew about the Roman names in advance, so I really was hoping for /k/ throughout. Oh well.

But then the really interesting part. After watching the movie, my wife referred to one of the characters, and I thought, "Hm. That's odd." In case you didn't know, my given name is Peter. She said /pitə/. Wait. Nice midwestern girls like my wife do not say /pitə/. Most midwesterners, my wife included, say /pitəɹ/, so I was surprised to hear /pitə/.

Since I've lived in New England, I've been called /pitə/. A lot. My coworkers were particularly fond of displaying their non-rhotic accents in this manner. Suffice to say when I heard the character was named /pitə/ in the movie, I heard Peter. After the movie my wife, without meaning to, set me straight.

Turns out the young man's name is Peeta. Our ears are liars.

Come see me talk

I'll be giving a 15-minute presentation at the NEIU Student Research and Creative Activities Symposium, which I almost spelled symposion. Silly fingers: that's Greek.

When? 13 April 2012
Where? Northeastern Illinois University, 5500 N. St. Louis Ave., Chicago, IL
What? A relatable tale of semantic drift

No, I don't know where on campus or when during the day. I'll fill in the details when I know 'em. I promise to wear a tie and not use too much jargon.