Language Log

Language Log has been blogging on the "crisis = danger + opportunity" trope since at least 2005.  Our latest iteration is "'Crisis = danger + opportunity' redux" (2/19/20), with a list of references to earlier posts in the series.  By now, the "crisis" meme has become so dull and hackneyed that Tianyu M. Fang has subjected it to a withering deconstruction / reconstruction:

https://twitter.com/tianyuf/status/1233844564475174912

According to Yannis Haralambous, "Grapholinguistics, TEX, and a June 2020 conference in Paris", TUGboat 2020:

Grapholinguistics is the discipline dealing with the study of the written modality of language.

At this point, the reader may ask some very pertinent questions:“Why have I never heard of grapholinguistics?” “If this is a subfield of linguistics, like psycholinguistics or sociolinguistics, why isn’t it taught in Universities?” “And why libraries do not abound of books about it?”

Our recent discussions about syllabicity ("Readings" below) made me wonder whether it's possible to have syllables, words, and whole sentences without vowels.  That led me to this example from Nuxalk on Omniglot:

Sample

clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' / xłp̓χʷłtłpłłskʷc̓

IPA transcription

xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ

Translation

Then he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant.

This is an example of a word with no vowels, something that is quite common in Nuxalk.

Souce: Nater, Hank F. (1984). The Bella Coola Language. Mercury Series; Canadian Ethnology Service (No. 92). Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.

Joe Farrell wrote in to ask:

Do you know whether the word "handbook" (Gk encheiridion, Lat (liber) manualis) can be found in any other ancient or medieval languages? And, if so, whether it is clearly a loan word or it simply arises spontaneously in different languages from a similar conceptual and material relationship between books and hands.

Listen to this sound, and describe it in the comments below:

You can learn what the sound is, and why I care how you hear it, after the fold.