Continuing our series on dragons, this note and illustration come from Juha Janhunen, the Finnish linguist:
Happy Blue Dragon Year to everybody! Below is the official flag (1889-1912) of the Manchu Empire (in the west misleadingly known as "China"), which happens to have a blue dragon on it. Manchu muduri 'dragon' still seems to lack an external etymology. Any suggestions?
(See at the very bottom of this post for a possible connection to "otter".)
Today is the Lunar New Year's Day, and it's the Year of the Dragon / /lʊŋ³⁵/ . As such, a kerfuffle is stirring in China and the English-speaking world regarding the English translation of lóng ⿓ / 龙 / 竜 (J), which is usually "dragon".
I will begin with the pronunciation of the word. In MSM, it is lóng (Hanyu Pinyin), lung2 (Wade-Giles), lúng (Yale), long (Gwoyeu Romatzyh [the configuration of GR tonal spelling for this syllable indicates second tone), лун (Palladius). They all represent the same MSM syllable. I will not list the scores of other topolectal pronunciations for Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakka, Hokkien, Xiamen / Amoy, Sichuan, etc., etc. and their dialects and subdialects.
So says Stuart Jay Raj, a Thai-based Australian polyglot who speaks several tonal languages. Here is a half-hour video by him which is linguistics heavy, but is actually an effort to simplify and systematize how tones work. For example, Raj makes a sharp distinction between pitch and tone, something that many people get all mixed up about. Not to mention intonation, which we have often discussed on Language Log.
In this episode, Raj focuses on Burmese, but in other presentations he focuses on different tonal languages and on general principles.
Abstract: This study was conducted to investigate how syllables and lexical tones are processed in Cantonese speech production using the picture-word interference task with concurrent recording of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Cantonese-speaking participants were asked to name aloud individually presented pictures and ignore an accompanying auditory word distractor. The target and distractor either shared the same word-initial syllable with the same tone (Tonal-Syllable related), the same word-initial syllable without the same tone (Atonal-Syllable related), the same tone only (Tone alone related), or were phonologically unrelated. Participants’ naming responses were faster, relative to an unrelated control, when the target and distractor shared the same tonal- or atonal-syllable but null effect was found in the Tone alone related condition. The mean ERP amplitudes (per each 100-ms time window) were subjected to stimulus-locked (i.e., time-locked to stimulus onset) and response-locked (i.e., time-locked to response onset) analyses. Significant differences between related and unrelated ERP waves were similarly observed in both Tonal-Syllable related and Atonal-Syllable related conditions in the time window of 400–500 ms post-stimulus. However, distinct ERP effects were observed in these two phonological conditions within the 500-ms pre-response period. In addition, null effects were found in the Tone alone related condition in both stimulus-locked and response-locked analyses. These results suggest that in Cantonese spoken word production, the atonal syllable of the target is retrieved first and then associated with the target lexical tone, consistent with the view that tone has an important role to play at a late stage of phonological encoding in tonal language production.
[This is the first of two consecutive posts on things Indian. After reading them, if someone is prompted to send me material for a third, I'll be happy to make it a trifecta.]
Our entry point to the linguistically compelling topic of today's post is this Nikkei Asia (11/29/23) article by Barkha Shah in its "Tea Leaves" section:
India’s classical language is making a comeback via Telegram and YouTube
The author begins with a brief introduction to the language:
The language had its heyday in ancient India. The Vedas, a collection of poems and hymns, were written in Sanskrit between 1500 and 1200 B.C., along with other literary texts now known as the Upanishads, Granths and Vedangas. But while Sanskrit became the foundation for many (though not all) modern Indian languages, including Hindi, it faded away as a living tongue.
Would you know of any ready reference that talks about vowels not getting articulated in specific places in the mouth, but rather being part of a system of vowels where the sound value of a vowel is determined by the vowel's relative position of articulation with respect to other vowels? I recall reading about this decades back, most likely, in a book by Henry Sweet.
The crispy R is a phenomenon that some linguists had noticed, but which had gone largely unstudied—until the phrase “crispy R” was bestowed on it by Brian Michael Firkus, better known as Trixie Mattel, the winner of the third season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, and later popularized via TikTok. The sound is easier to point out than it is to either describe or reproduce. Some of the most frequent users of this unusual-sounding R include Kourtney Kardashian, Max Greenfield of New Girl fame, Stassi from Vanderpump Rules, and Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend. It sounds, to me at least, like a sort of elongated, curled sound, a laconic way of saying R.
You know what I'd like? I'd like a qualified linguist with a good ear to listen to a Joe Biden speech and report back.
A couple of weeks ago I spent some time doing this, and Biden's problem is that his speech really does sound a little slurred at times. My amateur conclusion was that he had problems enunciating his unvoiced fricatives, which suggests not a cognitive problem but only that his vocal cords have loosened with age.
But this familiar sound raises at least two interesting biophysical questions.
In the first place, cats purr both while breathing out and breathing in, while most people can only produce voiced sounds (= laryngeal oscillations) while breathing out. What do cats have or do that we don't have or do?
In the second place, cats' purring is much lower in pitch than we'd expect given their size.
This is a simple-minded follow-up to "New models of speech timing?" (9/11/2023). Before getting into fancy stochastic-point-process models, neural or otherwise, I though I'd start with something really basic: just the distribution of inter-syllable intervals, and its relationship to overall speech-segment and silence-segment durations.
For data, I took one-minute samples from 2006 TED talks by Al Gore and Tony Robbins.
I chose those two because they're listed here as exhibiting the slowest and fastest speaking rates in their (TED talks) sample. And I limited the samples to about one minute, because I'm interested in metrics that can apply to fairly short speech recordings, of the kind that are available in clinical applications such as this one.
There are many statistics used to characterize timing patterns in speech, at various scales, with applications in many areas. Among them:
Intervals between phonetic events, by category and/or position and/or context;
Overall measures of speaking rate (words per minute, syllables per minute), relative to total time or total speaking time (leaving out silences);
Mean and standard deviation of speech segment and silence segment durations;
…and so on…
There are many serious problems with these measures. Among the more obvious ones:
The distributions are all far from "normal", and are often multi-modal;
The timing patterns have important higher-order and contextual regularities;
The timing patterns of segments/syllables/words and the timing patterns of phrases (i.e. speech/silence) and conversational turns are arguably (aspects of) the same thing at different time scales;
Connections with patterns of many other types should also be included — phonetic and syllabic dynamics, pitch patterns, rhetorical and conversational structure, …
The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people and that's got to be based in principle uh because if you're not rooted in principle uh if all we are is listless vessels that just supposed to follow you know whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning that- that's not going to be a durable movement
