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Nov 23, 2021 16:40
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Randarkman posted:But there's also the schwarz-rot-senf on it. Go with one or the other, but not-Swastika and modern markings together is just confused. yeah, they shouldn't mix even notstikas with the official flag
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Nov 23, 2021 16:57
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Randarkman posted:But there's also the schwarz-rot-senf on it. Go with one or the other, but not-Swastika and modern markings together is just confused. i think that's just the nation the aircraft is registered in, like it has to be there to meet statutory requirements. same with the letters next to the flag
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Nov 23, 2021 17:04
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Cyrano4747 posted:
The Walter Cronkite bit at the end made me lose it lol. It’s great thinking what archaic language sounds like in other languages.
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Nov 23, 2021 17:41
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bewbies posted:i think that's just the nation the aircraft is registered in, like it has to be there to meet statutory requirements. same with the letters next to the flag It is, you see similar things on other old planes. For example, Zeroes generally didn't have N-numbers: 
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Nov 23, 2021 17:45
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While we're on it, can I ask about the romanization of Chinese languages? I've been playing some Total War Three Kingdoms, and listening to actual chinese speakers say historical chinese names makes me feel like our latin spellings of these names aren't imparting remotely the same pronunciation. Take Cao Cao - as an English speaker I read that as "Kow Kow", but in chinese it's pronounced "Sow Sow" (roughly, I know I'm not grasping tonalities here). Or Xiahou Dun, which to my english eyes looks like it would be pronounced Zee-how Dun, when it's pronounced more like She-hou Dun. (The only thing I can figure is it's supposed to be lke the greek chi (X) sound, but that's not helpful to native English speakers. ) So how did we end up with our romanizations of Chinese words, is there some system or rules of pronounciation around them? Seems like you'd want to strive to get as close to the chinese pronunciation as you can with english phonemes.
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Nov 23, 2021 18:47
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Cao Cao is the pinyin transliteration, created by the PRC government, which is the most accurate and modern one for Mandarin. Others are usually Wade-Giles, an outdated one from the 19th century. The other ones probably predate Wade-Giles or the author decided to go "phonetic."
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Nov 23, 2021 19:41
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Part of it is English doesn't have the strictest rules on how to pronounce things. Another part of it is that there's just an expectation of prior knowledge due to the aforementioned inconsistency. Sounds that don't exist normally in English... Well, you just gotta know them, right? None of this helps a first-time speaker. Sun Tsu vs Sunzi, which is more accurate? Both expect you to know the right sounds to reading it. It's just that when you usually encounter Wade-Giles, you're just running into it out in the wild and there's usually nothing to teach you how to read it. Meanwhile, a standard Mandarin course in highschool or university will drill the proper pronunciation into you while you're learning it such that once you are familiar, you will learn that the syllables sun and zi are read in a particular manner.
Argas fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Nov 23, 2021 |
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Nov 23, 2021 19:47
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Chinese tones for words changed over the centuries and usually matched where the dominant court was from or chose to draw their dialect or accent from. The current "official textbook" form is based on Beijing Mandarin and this is what is used in state media. Students usually learn this form of Mandarin but with a regional dialect similar to how Americans for instance have regional accents. Americans for instance, such as myself, usually learn the Beijing dialect, complete with -ers, pronounced like ar, added on to the end of words like yidianer, very little, or gemener, a colloquial form of brother(s), and someone from Shanghai would omit that ending, such as saying "yidiandian" to get the same less formal meaning. People from the southern provinces will often omit the h in sh sounds so it's pronounced si instead of shi, which is "is." The best way to pronounce Mandarin Chinese in a fashion where most will understand you who speak Mandarin is to learn the standard pronunciation you find online and in textbooks, try to do the tones, and often if you speak it fast enough, it's better understood. EDIT: The reason why stuff in Wade-Giles is still floating around is because the US, and I think the UK, didn't start to switch over until 1979. The ROC was going to carry out a program like pinyin and simplify Chinese characters like the PRC did but they never got a chance to really develop it due to being the ROC. Since the PRC did it first, Taiwan went the exact opposite route and used traditional characters and teaching using bopomofo, a system developed in a similar way to Japanese kana but is not used outside of elementary Mandarin study in Taiwan. It became a big propaganda tool in the 60's and 70's where Taiwan (ROC) presented themselves as the saviors of Chinese culture while Red Guards were literally destroying it. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Nov 23, 2021 |
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Nov 23, 2021 19:58
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Scratch Monkey posted:I like the nota-swastikas they put on the tails I understand why they wouldn't want to paint a swastika on a plane in 2021 but frankly I'd prefer if they just left that space blank than tried to rules-lawyer it with a fake one
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Nov 23, 2021 20:02
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How is it that during the foundation of the US, "Federalists" were the people pushing for a strong central government as opposed to the "anti-federalists" who favor the separate subdivisions of the country having more self-government, but then you go forward in time, and later arguments over how to organize the government end up with the "Federalists" being the ones pushing for regional autonomy. It feels like maybe Federation and Confederation have ended up in a flammable/inflammable situation.
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Nov 23, 2021 20:11
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Cyrano4747 posted:While we’re doing weird linguistics chat, Xiahau’s comment on how slang/jargon/dialect are kinda degrees of the same thing reminded me of something that happened when I was doing research in Germany. This was a fantastic story, thank you for sharing it 
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Nov 23, 2021 20:20
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zoux posted:While we're on it, can I ask about the romanization of Chinese languages? I've been playing some Total War Three Kingdoms, and listening to actual chinese speakers say historical chinese names makes me feel like our latin spellings of these names aren't imparting remotely the same pronunciation. Take Cao Cao - as an English speaker I read that as "Kow Kow", but in chinese it's pronounced "Sow Sow" (roughly, I know I'm not grasping tonalities here). Or Xiahou Dun, which to my english eyes looks like it would be pronounced Zee-how Dun, when it's pronounced more like She-hou Dun. (The only thing I can figure is it's supposed to be lke the greek chi (X) sound, but that's not helpful to native English speakers. ) Lightning quick cause I'm making pie for Thanksgiving : There have been several standards so that's part of the confusion. (The one you see that does stuff like "tai ch'i" with that silly apostrophe is Wade-Giles which was the academic standard a hundred years ago. The ' is to mark aspiration which is important if you actually speak it, but inside baseball if you don't.) Luckily, pinyin is the standard of the PRC so it's kind of won out, and it's the most sensible by a giant mile. However, it's designed for Chinese nationals to write Putonghua to each other phonetically so it gives precisely zero fucks about what letters are "supposed" to sound like in American English. You know, the notoriously well thought out English spelling system where all the letters make sense. Pinyin is pretty radically 1 symbol corresponding to 1 sound because it's a transcription not made by loving idiots. Yeah you have to spend a minute learning the letters, but after that you're golden in terms of knowing how it sounds. Still gotta practice making the sounds cause many of them aren't in English, but you're pretty close. Tones : English doesn't have lexical tone. All Sinitic languages do, i.e. your pitch accent changes what a word means. It's usually written with a diacritic that's literally the shape of the tone over the syllable, but that's annoying to type in ASCII so it's also written as a number after the syllable. 1 is high, level tone. 2 is rising tone, like an English question. 3 is mid to low back to mid (but really more of a steady low). 4 is sharp, descending tone. 5 is "neutral" lack of overt tone. e.g. ma1 "mother" vs ma2 "hemp" vs ma3 "horse vs ma4 "scold, mock" vs ma5 "question marker/?" The only syllable-final consonants in Putonghua NOTE THIS IS A SITE OF VARIATION are represented as "n" and "ng" which correspond to the English orthographic equivalents. Vowels : a - low back lax vowel, like "pot" i - high front lax, like in "keep" but sometimes it's de-emphasized so it can come out as an unstressed schwa kind of sound ou - mid back lax to high back lack like in English "slow" - nb this is a diphthong in English too and it's English being weird not showing this o - mid back lax, like in "caught" if you're one of the English dialects that has a "cot" vs "caught" distinction (mine doesn't) u - high back lax, like in English "put" e - VERY DIFFERENT FROM ENGLISH is a mid central vowel like in English "butt" so deng "to wait" sounds a bit like English dung This is the first in a line of Putonghua didn't have a sound that corresponded to the English, so they just took the symbol and did their own thing ei - mid front lax to high front lax, like in English "bait" ao - low back lax to mid back lax like in English "cow" Glides - these would be written in English as "y" and "w" (as in the first sound in "yellow" and "weather"), but they only occur before a vowel -i- is a palatal glide like in English "yaw" but Putonghua only has it as part of consonant clusters, NEVER AS A SYLLABLE by itself Also, just to gently caress with you "liu" like the word for six or the family name of the actress from Charlie's Angels should really be "liou" cause that's the "real" vowel, but there isn't an "actual" "liu" so they don't write the "o" because that makes sense if you already speak Putonghua and they're not making this transcription for outsiders -u- is the bilabial glide like in English "quite" yes they used the symbol as a vowel by itself too, context matters Consonants : p/ b bilabial stops (lips) k/g velar stops (the hard bit at the back of your mouth) t/d alveolar stops (hard bit right behind your teeth) ALMOST the same as English, close enough you can get by. The subtle difference is that in English the distinction is voicing (whether you vibrate your vocal chords) and in Putonghua is aspiration (how much air you release when you say the sound ; the Spanish for vacuum cleaner is "aspiradora") ; English actually does this, just not in contrast to anything : if you say "pie" vs "spy" or "key" vs. "ski" and put your hand in front of your mouth, there's a big rear end puff of air you can feel for the first ones. English doesn't "really" "care" about this distinction so the sounds in the second ones probably sound like a "b" or a "g". It has to do with a phonetic thing called voice-onset timing and how the mechanics of air and your mouth interact. It's cool but not relevant. s alveolar fricative m bilabial nasal n alveolar nasal all identical to English pretty much THE WEIRD STUFF none of these really exist in English c is two sounds mushed together, like the end of "its" or "butts" it's a kind of t+s, except it comes at the beginning of words which English doesn't like ; "Cao cao" starts with this sound z also two sounds (they're called affricates), but this time it's d+z like in English "buds" or "lids"* x post-alveolar fricative straight up just doesn't occur in any kind of English at all ever ; it's a little like the sound in "ship" or "sheep" but it's not made with the tip of your tongue behind your teeth, your tongue tip points down and you make it with the middle of your tongue. You can half-assed it with a "sh" sound but it just ain't an English sound q and j like c and z but made in the same place as the x above ; another place in the mouth that English doesn't use. They seem like the sounds in "church" and "judge" but they're made in a different place. You can muddle through with those sounds though until you have some fun mouth homework and just teach yourself the real sound. sh, ch and zh These sounds INTENSELY don't exist in English and they have the appropriately scary name "retroflexes" (i.e. bend backwards). You make them by pointing the tip of your tongue backwards in your mouth. They're sort of kind of like x, q and j above in general principles, but the difference between them is important for distinguishing a bunch of basic words shi to be chi to eat zhi to know (half of it) xi west qi air/weather/bunch of other stuff ji chicken It sucks butts when you're first starting out, but there's no way around it. There's just an import contrast between basic sounds and English has neither. That was a really quick thing that I just speed typed and I gotta go finish pie hopefully it helps back later byyyyyeeeeeee. *Yeah, sorry, the plural in English is actually a z sound most of the time and you just never noticed.
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Nov 23, 2021 20:21
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SlothfulCobra posted:How is it that during the foundation of the US, "Federalists" were the people pushing for a strong central government as opposed to the "anti-federalists" who favor the separate subdivisions of the country having more self-government, but then you go forward in time, and later arguments over how to organize the government end up with the "Federalists" being the ones pushing for regional autonomy. In tl;dr terms, you have: quote:1. A strong central government with little power at the local/state level. If there's a weak central government (As the early US had with the Articles of Confederation) "Federalists" are pushing to move from 3 to 2. If the central government is strong (or portrayed as such) "Federalists" are pushing from 1 to 2. Cessna fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Nov 23, 2021 |
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Nov 23, 2021 21:27
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I took a semester of “chinese (putonghua) for fun and pinyin reminds me of french: pronunciation looks terrifying, is actually piss easy compared to garbage english excepting sounds your native language doesn’t have. But like, it’s fine to have a foreign accent as a learner anyway.
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Nov 23, 2021 22:16
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I took a semester of “chinese (putonghua) for fun and pinyin reminds me of french: pronunciation looks terrifying, is actually piss easy compared to garbage english excepting sounds your native language doesn’t have. But like, it’s fine to have a foreign accent as a learner anyway. That’s a great reference, actually. I usually go with German but French is in the same category of “looks scary but unlike English’s titanic bullshit garbage spelling it’s internally consistent so after you get it down you can read anything out loud.” English has more inconsistency in its orthography than any other language I speak except maybe Japanese, and with Japanese it’s because they’re using Chinese characters to phonetically write Japanese words. (The onyomi vs kunyomi shenanigans)
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Nov 23, 2021 22:43
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Cyrano4747 posted:The Vatican? Monaco? Andorra? Lichtenstein? In some bizarro world any one of them could decide to throw down with France. But as much as Rhode Island might want to join in based on micro-state solidarity, it ain't happening. Incidentally there's a delightful book and movie adaptation called The Mouse that Roared about an Alpine microstate declaring war on the US with its army of twenty longbowmen and winning.
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Nov 24, 2021 00:20
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zoux posted:While we're on it, can I ask about the romanization of Chinese languages? I've been playing some Total War Three Kingdoms, and listening to actual chinese speakers say historical chinese names makes me feel like our latin spellings of these names aren't imparting remotely the same pronunciation. Take Cao Cao - as an English speaker I read that as "Kow Kow", but in chinese it's pronounced "Sow Sow" (roughly, I know I'm not grasping tonalities here). Or Xiahou Dun, which to my english eyes looks like it would be pronounced Zee-how Dun, when it's pronounced more like She-hou Dun. (The only thing I can figure is it's supposed to be lke the greek chi (X) sound, but that's not helpful to native English speakers. ) Xiahou wrote it out better than I could, but to emphasize, pinyin (the modern system) purposely isn't a romanization scheme, it's a pronunciation tool for native speakers. The older systems, Wade-Giles being the old standard but there were other attempts, are all trying to achieve that "as close to chinese pronunctiation as you can get with english phonemes" idea but there just isn't anything resembling a lot of the chinese sounds in english so you get weird poo poo like 'hsieh', 'ch'ih', 'ssu' instead. Pinyin stops trying to make it easy for foreigners and comes up with 'xie', 'chi', 'si' which aren't really any more obscure than W-G's attempt but are much more consistent, so the system is easier to learn. PS Xiahou thanks for addressing my ignorant question earlier in a very informative way
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Nov 24, 2021 00:46
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I have a more simplistic and hopefully answerable question: are there, or how many, different non-mutually-intelligible dialects (or full languages) are widely spoken in China? Like, I think of it as a pretty monolithic entity, but are there cities where basically everyone speaks language A and if they travel to a different city everyone there speaks language B which they can't understand? Or would they be reasonably assured that they would share a common language/dialect even if so? Like, if I was to answer this question for the US I would say there are large chunks of the country where Spanish is extremely common or even dominant, with it being pretty common everywhere. But mostly people speak English, with some small insular communities where other languages (Pennsylvania Dutch, Yiddish) are spoken. Obviously it's a big place and there's exceptions to every rule, I'm asking for sweeping generalizations.
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Nov 24, 2021 01:09
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I would say for English in the US that it's mutually intelligible everywhere. You can get an old man from Maine and a dude from Compton and a wealthy southerner together and they'll understand each other, although they won't like each other most likely lol. There are a fair number of distinct local accents or dialects but I wouldn't put them under different umbrellas.
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Nov 24, 2021 01:15
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bewbies posted:In terms of fun and readability I don't think there are many history books better than Fighter by Len Deighton. He reminds me a bit of Shelby Foote in that wonderful ability to weave very personal stories in with the history. Which makes sense, like Foote, he was a fiction writer before trying his hand at a history book. Also like Foote, his book is getting a bit old and has some factual errors in it (ie, I seem to recall him describing lift as a pressure differential thing), but I still think it is worth reading just for the quality of the prose and storytelling. Thanks much!
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Nov 24, 2021 01:46
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Uncle Enzo posted:But mostly people speak English, with some small insular communities where other languages (Pennsylvania Dutch, Yiddish) are spoken. Gullah on the southeastern coast and maybe deep Appalachian English are the two that come to my mind right away
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Nov 24, 2021 02:42
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Variants of english aren't really as distinct as sinitic languages no? Not A Linguist but, like, for personal anecdotes, I speak french natively, and can read through spanish and italian written without too many problems, and even got through a few cities like Milan and Barcelona with adequate hand gestures and making my words sound more local. Never studied either besides growing up with a lot of mexicans. Meanwhile, my girlfriend is russian and I would never have a clue what she says in russian if I hadn't studied russian. Chinese languages are more like the second- recognizable grammar and some cognates, but not even as similar as french and italian, let alone variants of english.
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Nov 24, 2021 03:47
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Uncle Enzo posted:I have a more simplistic and hopefully answerable question: are there, or how many, different non-mutually-intelligible dialects (or full languages) are widely spoken in China? Off the top of my head, cantonese, shanghainese, and sichuanese are not (or maybe barely) mutually intelligible with mandarin and those are just what’s spoken in three of China’s major cities. There’s also hakka, tibetan, uyghur and any of the other turkic languages spoken in the west, mongolian, native taiwanese… I’m sure there are pockets of like Manchu and other minority languages surviving somewhere too. You will certainly be able to get by with mandarin in most of the cities especially as the current nationalist drive continues, but China is in many ways still a diverse polyglot empire underneath the skin. e: I'm leaving out a ton. Shanghainese is a variety of Wu, Cantonese is a variety of Yue, there's Min which is a whole other branch. All of these have multiple mutually unintelligible dialects and all of them have tens of millions of speakers. Even beijing dialect, which is the basis for standard mandarin, can be challenging for non-locals when a speaker has a heavy "erhua" accent. As Xiahou has hinted at, the question is heavily political and probably nothing resembling a complete survey will ever be done, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese lists at least 7 major dialect groups; there are at least dozens and possibly hundreds of mutually unintelligible dialects. hypnophant fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Nov 24, 2021 |
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Nov 24, 2021 04:11
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Xiahou Dun posted:
Super cool posts, I really enjoyed reading them. Out of curiosity, was Classical Chinese any more consistent for the other East Asian countries? When I see it mentioned in e.g. court documents for Joseon it just seems to get mentioned as “written in Classical Chinese since that was the prestige language” and left at that. Since it was (maybe?) more consciously taught as a special non-indigenous thing might it have been more standardized? Although there would still have been Chinese texts learners etc read from that spanned thousands of years of Chinese history. For Joseon’s first half there were state-run schools throughout the country to teach it; in the latter half private local schools headed by random scholars won out, not that I have any idea if that’d impact things.
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Nov 24, 2021 05:04
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Uncle Enzo posted:I have a more simplistic and hopefully answerable question: are there, or how many, different non-mutually-intelligible dialects (or full languages) are widely spoken in China? So, first thing off the bat is that since this is a forum dominated by American English, it's very natural to think about it as kind of basic "normal" version of how things work. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do cause you're just going by background knowledge. The problem is that English in the US is a historical aberration for a variety of reasons (and in general is acting in weird rear end ways that don't have historical precedent). Things to keep in mind : Languages don't generally suddenly occupy an entire new continent over the course of a few hundred years. You're gonna think of counter examples like Mongols and the like but they had nowhere near the impact that the Colombian exchange seems to have done. Not dissing the ongoing efforts to revitalize Native American languages (I'm in fact a very vocal supporter!), but the amount of language death that happened is literally uncountable ; we're still working on trying to get an estimate on how many zeros there are in the number of languages lost(!!!!!) but it's well into the thousands and that's a comically low estimate, everyone knows it's more. Since a large part of language change happens from isolation, things like writing slow it down. We know that for a fact. True mass communication is still not fully known about because things like the internet are barely older than I am, but they also seem to slow change down, but maybe in a different way. And English spread in the US after the rise of the printing press was deeply ensconced. You'll note that there's significantly more regional variation in speech the more East you are and it slowly diminishes going West, specifically because the English speakers there haven't been around as long and had increasingly better communication. English in general has been just a very weird duck for the last thousand years or so. I know you want to go like, "Norman conquest, problem solved!" or look at other single historical causes, but trust me, this is a giant complicated issue and it's still up in the air. I can go over the hypotheses at some point if you want, and it's not a big deal, but it's worth keeping in mind that English has a past of not being very generalizable as is. (Highly tl;dr version : English did a couple of things that are rare in close proximity and it's a debate about how and why, or if that's even important because while rare they aren't impossible, it'd just be like a coin landing on its edge or something.) (Also keep in mind that English isn't actually special or anything. I swear to god the next English speaker who tells me that English has the largest vocabulary in the world is getting defenestrated like it's loving Prague.) Anywhow : So there's really two parts to this question. One is the fact that all of the languages spoken in places that some variety of the country/empire/fanclub that we label "China" gets treated as a unit, even though they're not really. The second is that they all are or have been in the past at least been a political or social unit of some kind (sort of). So a very simple way to think about language diversity in China is keep in mind that whenever you want to say "Chinese" swap it out for "European" and see if it makes sense. (Adjusting for specifics so you aren't talking about Shaghai being in the EU or something lol ; I mean make it an apples-to-apples comparison as much as you can. This is a test of scale, not the actual specifics.) If someone asked if everyone in Europe spoke the same language or were culturally identical, you'd start laughing. Like, keep in mind, 1 in 7 people is a Chinese national (ish, I'm rounding from billions to the closest person). Of course there are going to be some differences. And these different groups of people have had tons of time to accrue differences in their languages. Some kind of Sinitic language has been in the area since before we have any actual evidence of it : the earliest records we have make constant reference to past history. My work doesn't even go back that far, and I still know about what the grammar looked like by what it left. However, the PRC is a government, and so were the Nationalists and the Republicans and the Qing and everyone else, so there's always been someone trying to run things, and that usually involves some amount of intercommunication between groups being governed. It doesn't have to be one language (good job, Uruguay!), but it's very common and what they seem to have been doing. Classical changed but it was still a lingua franca and that's what Putonghua is trying to be today. At least in terms of on the ground, you can get by in most places in the PRC if you speak Putonghua, with it being easier the more urban and "educated" the place you're at is. But there are of course local differences in that too : Hong Kong has much lower amounts of Putonghua for pretty obvious reasons, for instance. To go back to the example of using Europe as a comparison, it's not that much different from how English is doing in Europe : poo poo tons of people speak [variety] because it's useful to talk to each other, but they all speak it in a way influenced by their backgrounds and to different levels of ability. (This is probably wriddled with typos. I usually try to do an editing pass, but I'm in a rush.)
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Nov 24, 2021 05:53
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On plane chat books, "The German Aces Speak" 1 and 2 are good reads despite most likely having some errors. A series of interviews with German pilots and their experiences.
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Nov 24, 2021 10:44
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Also, there is a ton of different englishes of varying mutual intelligibility - they just mostly get categorised as something else or are in the process of diverging now. Off the top of my head - Scots, Singlish, Nigerian Pidgin, and EU bureaucratic english are all english dialects or english influenced languages with varying degrees of intelligegabiliy with Modern American English, all of which will probably diverge further over the next century. And that's from a relatively brief period of first english conquest, then english international hegemony. English isn't any more or less able to drift apart than any other language, it just hasn't happened yet and a bunch of english speakers live in such a uniform enviromental it hasn't occurred them to them it has
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Nov 24, 2021 11:09
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Abongination posted:On plane chat books, "The German Aces Speak" 1 and 2 are good reads despite most likely having some errors. A series of interviews with German pilots and their experiences. Got any examples of this?
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Nov 24, 2021 13:11
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Got any examples of this? Not off the top of my head sorry, but the interviews were generally carried out in the 90's I think. Super interesting accounts though.
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Nov 24, 2021 13:27
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Also, there is a ton of different englishes of varying mutual intelligibility - they just mostly get categorised as something else or are in the process of diverging now. Off the top of my head - Scots, Singlish, Nigerian Pidgin, and EU bureaucratic english are all english dialects or english influenced languages with varying degrees of intelligegabiliy with Modern American English, all of which will probably diverge further over the next century. And that's from a relatively brief period of first english conquest, then english international hegemony. English isn't any more or less able to drift apart than any other language, it just hasn't happened yet and a bunch of english speakers live in such a uniform enviromental it hasn't occurred them to them it has True Scots is far enough from English to be a separate language, but you often get Scottish English speakers using some Scots vocabulary within English because the line between the two is fuzzy. A lot of Scots words are also used in Northern England dialects which muddies it up even more.
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Nov 24, 2021 20:04
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Also, there is a ton of different englishes of varying mutual intelligibility - they just mostly get categorised as something else or are in the process of diverging now. Off the top of my head - Scots, Singlish, Nigerian Pidgin, and EU bureaucratic english are all english dialects or english influenced languages with varying degrees of intelligegabiliy with Modern American English, all of which will probably diverge further over the next century. And that's from a relatively brief period of first english conquest, then english international hegemony. English isn't any more or less able to drift apart than any other language, it just hasn't happened yet and a bunch of english speakers live in such a uniform enviromental it hasn't occurred them to them it has There's regional divergence in America as well, although there's enough mobility around (as well as the constant example of media) to keep it from drifting too far. On the other hand you might have people deliberately lean in to dialect differences to assert identity at some point.
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Nov 24, 2021 20:09
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Xiahou Dun posted:
Thank you for this. Before I explain my influences I just wanted to be a little pedantic. Scots is not a Celtic language, it is a Germanic language with the same roots as English, parallel development to English, and a heavy influence from English. By Scots you mean Scottish Gaelic, the language brought over to Scotland by the Irish invasions from the 6th century on-wards. There is also a subdialect of Scots called Ulster Scots that is spoken by those who went over from Scotland during the Ulster Plantation and is causing all sorts of fuckery by bigoted people. So to the long bit. I know "Mandarin" is a bad term because there are so many regional dialects and languages in China but it is used in British English to show that there are different languages in China, even if most Brits wouldn't know more than Cantonese and Mandarin, due to the Hong Kong influence. I was told by a person from Taiwan that Manderin is an OK name, but that could be just him humouring a Brit. The way it has been described to me is that China was later than most western Europeans countries with creating a "standard" version of their language. English became as standardised as it was every going to get (ie not very) in the 18th and 19th century while French went through the same thing but with more coordination and force from Paris. So what we know as French is Parisian French, Spanish is Castilian Spanish (unless you live in the Americas) etc. So when this "standard" version of Mandarin was formalised it was then pushed from Beijing to the other regions to override the local dialects/languages/ethnicities to create One China that was a Communist* Han China. Now these local dialects/languages still flourished because there wasn't an active outlawing** but they were not taught in schools and only taught at home or the local community. The only Chinese taught in schools was the "standard" Chinese. Then there is the One China policy, where the PRC says there is only one China and the legal government of this one China is the CCP, with this covering the PRC and ROC. A small part of this one China policy was to make sure everyone spoke the same Chinese to help foster a singular identity. This may be wrong/overly simplified/biased but it was what i have been told/read. *The communism currently in china is communism in name only ** This may be different with the Uyghurs
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Nov 24, 2021 20:39
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Foxtrot_13 posted:Thank you for this. Before I explain my influences I just wanted to be a little pedantic. Scots is not a Celtic language, it is a Germanic language with the same roots as English, parallel development to English, and a heavy influence from English. By Scots you mean Scottish Gaelic, the language brought over to Scotland by the Irish invasions from the 6th century on-wards. There is also a subdialect of Scots called Ulster Scots that is spoken by those who went over from Scotland during the Ulster Plantation and is causing all sorts of fuckery by bigoted people. Full post coming in a bit (I’m editing it on and off while doing other things), but… did you just try to China-splain me? Short version, no, you’re wrong. If my posts were unclear that’s on me, but I did go over this in my giant word walls.
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Nov 24, 2021 21:33
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Do not tell a konger there’s no enforcement of mandarin unless you want an earful
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Nov 24, 2021 21:46
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Got to watch the recent Midway movie again today. I liked it better the 2nd time around than I did the first time I saw it in theaters because I let my annoyance at its missteps get in the way of its entertainment value, but boy I still stick by the fact that it's just too much. It covers too much time, too much material and the movie as a whole suffers for it. And I'm still pissed that not even a single mention was made of Jack Fletcher and that far too much screen time was given to a guy who wasn't even there. Hell, Halsey gets an entire section devoted to his post-battle career and he didn't play a role. I'm appreciative of the historical accuracy overall though and they mention some stuff that is hardly ever referenced. I also appreciate that the vast majority of the movie is about the pilots. Decent movie - hopefully moving forward I can not be annoyed about Fletcher not being named.
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Nov 24, 2021 22:25
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Foxtrot_13 posted:True Scots is far enough from English to be a separate language, but you often get Scottish English speakers using some Scots vocabulary within English because the line between the two is fuzzy. A lot of Scots words are also used in Northern England dialects which muddies it up even more. I mean let's not forget https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia - and apparently no-one in Scotland really noticed enough for it to become an issue for years. I feel this wouldn't happen with say Cantonese.
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Nov 24, 2021 23:33
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Ice Fist posted:Got to watch the recent Midway movie again today. I liked it better the 2nd time around than I did the first time I saw it in theaters because I let my annoyance at its missteps get in the way of its entertainment value, but boy I still stick by the fact that it's just too much. It covers too much time, too much material and the movie as a whole suffers for it. The 1976 movie was better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwqXU8DgjGc
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Nov 24, 2021 23:47
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Xiahou Dun posted:Linguistics stuff This has been really fascinating, especially the difference between "Taiwanese Mandarin" and "Regular Mandarin". I was in Taiwan, briefly, in 2007 and I obviously heard a lot of guoyo. Later that year I was employed in a casino back in Australia that had a lot of Chinese clientele and was puzzled why I never heard anyone speaking "Mandarin", not being aware of all the stuff you've just elucidated. I later realised that there was a Taiwanese accent and that Mainland "Mandarin" had the exaggerated 'r' sounds - the erhua thing - which I had heard plenty of in the casino, but hadn't realised was 'Mandarin' becuase I was expecting the sound of guoyo. I'm glad I can now put the actual proper nouns to all this and explain the difference without doing a weird, probably racist, impression of the erhua in putonghua.
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Nov 25, 2021 00:27
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Nessus posted:I wonder if modern media in the sense of recorded video and audio - which seems unlikely to go away short of total civilizational collapse - will have an impact on linguistic divergence, because people will be able to know for a fact how people in the past spoke, because there's thirty-seven seasons of The Simpsons on constant forever play from SimpSat1 in geostationary orbit. (I'm replying to you because I'm too lazy to scroll up* and you made a good jumping-off point , not cause I'm putting you blast or anything. I've been slightly jealous of your Pierson Puppeteer avatar for ages. I don't love those books, but it's still a cute reference.) This is kind of the general consensus but with lots more academic waffle (and also strong disagreement by randos with axes that have been ground to a razor finish) : it's almost exactly what I'd say if a student asked me. But to add, it should be kept in mind that while most linguists would say this, there'd at the bare minimum be an unspoken addition of "as far as we can tell right now". Recording technology is about a 150 years-ish old (drawing an arbitrary line on the question of "good enough to count" based on having a round number) and that's almost nothing on the timeline of language change. There's new vocab, some vowels moved around, etc. but nothing really big or sexy in US English for the most part**. And since there aren't bronze 8 tracks or whatever out there we don't actually have a direct comparison so we're going off of vaguely similar precedent (changes in writing systems, but that's a very muddy and complicated thing) and making educated guesses as best we can. It's science so we're doing the best predictions with the best information we have but it's only been a serious field of scientific inquiry since '57 (the dude whose dissertation changed the field is still alive and publishing, although he's a ridiculous little old man). The other thing I want to touch on is English dialectology : first, I haven't been going into too many specifics because it's not my subfield. I know a lot more than a rando about it, but if you scratch too deep I'd have to do research and ask people because it'd be less the case that I know it for a fact and more that I've heard some smart people talk about it. For example, I've never been to Scotland, I'm not an expert on it or it's languages : my expertise on the subject is pure academia and such whopping personal experience such as I have some Scottish friends and I'm very slowly learning a bit of Gŕidhlig for pure recreation (which, as I'll talk about in a second, is garbage nothing as far a evidence goes). But from my distant eye, a big problem when discussing the issue is that you have two things that are portrayed as poles, but are in a fundamentally more complicated arrangement. In a shameful but purposefully without nuance portrayal, there were the "original" Celtic language(s) and then the approach/influence/domination/fuckery that English caused***. I've heard "Scots" applied to everything from the dialects of Celtic spoken in Scotland, dialects of English historically influenced by Celtic languages, dialects of English historically influenced by individual variation that just so happened to be in Scotland, and all of those used for either pejorative or ameliorative political reasons ; the one thing I rarely hear is people talking about Scottish [any variety] without some political slant and just a simple state of empirical data. Also, "Scots" as a label is basically useless as a label cause it's used for everything even tangentially involved by someone. Also keep in mind that I say the words "dialect" and "language", but when I say it they're synonyms of "variety" or "version". Some people are still treating "languages" as discrete unit and that's my fault for just jumping in. When I cover this in lecture there's a whole week breaking down how I'm very specifically using those words so here it is : (Sorry, this is hinky when you first hear it.) Languages aren't real. They're just not, basta. Go out and point to a Tagalog or a Guarani or a Romansh or whatever. Go ahead, I won't actually wait cause you can't. Language is an abstract idea that is a categorization of an actual demonstrative phenomenon, that people talk and can communicate with each other. What a linguistic actually studies isn't languages, like Middle French or whatever, it's Language with a big stonking capital L. We're actually, secretly, very very specific psychologists interested in how the human brain uses language and how that integrates with the other parts of our lives. Language (still capital L) lives inside our heads though and actually getting to it is hard. We have the externalization of language to look at, but we can't cut open people's heads and poke around in there until words fall out. (There's morals, and also that wouldn't work and would be messy.) The parts of my research that aren't working with dead Chinese people, they mostly consist of making really, really weird sentences and then testing them on people to say if they give brain signals that mean they don't like it. (This is what I was rudely and crudely getting at when hypnophant commented on my "Chinese" (Sorry! I had made so. much. pie.) ; actually using language like a person is for free time and writing up results and stuff, testing materials use that stuff as controls, but the actual tests are weird sentences that often require elaborate set-ups : magic sometimes has to be invoked****.) This isn't impossible or even that hard, but it does require special training and laypeople are absolutely garbage at it. Not cause they're dumb and I'm Captain Fancy Pants, but it's a skill they haven't acquired and it's one that how language is commonly taught actively works against. Languages are usually taught in such a way to promote unity, and the whole point is to tease apart subtle variation. Linguistics is the formal study of language, not your tummy feels about it, otherwise it couldn't be an entire diverse field of study. Sorry, there's not a non-rude to say it, but you're opinions on how languages work are about as informative as your opinions on particle physics. You don't know how gravity works just because you throw a ball or whatever. Languages are actually made up of speakers. These speakers can often communicate with each other, despite differences. Many of these differences are incredibly fine-graned, but they're still there. Some speakers are much more adaptable/adaptive than other speakers or more willing to be accommodating or what have you, while some speakers can be much less so. Sometimes these differences can be confusing one way and not the other, like how Portuguese speakers often report being more able to understand Spanish than the other way around. And again, linguists don't actually give a poo poo, we're just collecting data. So when we say "language" or "dialect", we just mean "group of speakers that has [features we're discussing] in common". We might as well be saying a list of everyone who talks like that but "Steve, Bill and Francine all allow embedded tensed participle phrases, and in this discussion I shall prove..." is really unwieldy. We just really don't care that much about if you want to call your variety of English spoken in Scotland Scots or Scottish English or Kevin for all we care. I mean, we probably care cause we're people and we try not to be jerks, but it's not professional caring, I should've outlined that better but I'm very very tired from cooking. People were talking about Gullah and pidgins so I wanted to talk about that (pidgin is another technical term that is often used in a lay context so you get weird ideas about it : most things called pidgins are actually creoles), but I have totally lost the thread by now. I can explain another day if people want. Sorry for a super long and rambling post. Series of posts. *It's the day before Thanksgiving and I've cooked for 17 hours and counting. These are coming in when I take a break to sip some coffee while pie crust is baking or whatever. **I'm lying. There's really cool stuff, but it's pretty inside baseball. Like there's some evidence that things are slowly moving so we could have the foundation for negation to change, but even stuff like that's not "happening" so much as "if I quit smoking maybe I'll live long enough to see the generalization become more strongly supported". ***Comically broad generalization just to demonstrate. I know I'm leaving out the Pictish that was there originally, Latin influence, North Germanic influence, anything to do with the Scotch-Irish thing and my inclusion of the concept of Scottish independence as a concept is "it's a thing with stuff that happened". **** Like for the German speakers, I'm working on a whole project based around this paradigm : a. weil Klaus wahrscheinlich dem Pfarrer die Gäste vorgestellt hat because K probably the priest the guests introduced has b. weil Klaus wahrscheinlich die Gäste dem Pfarrer vorgestellt hat c. weil Klaus die Gäste wahrscheinlich dem Pfarrer vorgestellt hat d. weil die Gäste Klaus wahrscheinlich dem Pfarrer vorgestellt hat ‘Because Klaus introduced the guests to the priest.’ but then I shove in an "einander" and an "ohne anzuschauen" in there and move them around, so this gets really, really complicated pretty quick. I've had to demonstrate it with little dolls cause the relationships get so complicated.
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Nov 25, 2021 03:05
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