Consonant Aspirations - Archive

The past few months, I've been learning a language here in Singapore that's been noted for its crazy mind-bending use of  tone sandhi . I thought I'd write a little about it in this post, since it's a   phenomenon that some linguists may not be familiar with (given the tendency for many to run away at the first 'hearing' of anything tonal). At the end of this post, I'm also going to throw in a little puzzle set that I created, just to give people a chance to see the sorts of data some linguists work with. I'm hoping it'll appeal to all the puzzle solvers out there. Tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese Experienced learners of Mandarin will already be familiar with the phenomenon, exemplified by the initially confusing and dreaded rule that specifies that Tone 3 becomes Tone 2 before another Tone 3. This prevents you from saying two Tone 3s, one after the other. For example, the word for 'you' in Mandarin is 你  nǐ  (with Tone 3) when said on i...

Last week I had a few friends ask me about a recently published study titled "Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia" by Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude and Andrew Meade. It's been making headlines all over the globe in articles with titles like "English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language" (Wired.com), "Ice Age language may share words with modern tongues" (News.com.au and various sites) and "15000-year-old 'fossil' words reveal ancestral Ice Age language" (LA Times). You can download their report  here . Also, the data for the study comes from the Languages of the World Etymological Database, which can be accessed  at this site . As always, Language Log has a great post by Sally Thomason that highlights many of the issues about the study here, including issues with both the data and methodology. Similarly, another post at GeoCurrents by Asya Pereltsvaig  rubbishes th...

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary , the English word hotel  was first recorded in the 1640s and denoted a 'public official residence'. The modern sense of the word as 'an inn of the better sort' (i.e. 'a place offering lodging, food and other services to travellers') was first recorded in 1765. The word comes from the French hôtel , which itself is derived from the Medieval Latin hospitale via Old French hostel . In French,  hôtel was used to refer mainly to public official buildings that frequently received visitors, but this has been largely replaced by the meaning of 'place offering lodging and food to travellers', as used in contemporary English. However, you can still see traces of this old usage in words like  hôtel de ville 'town hall' and hôtel des impôts 'tax office' and hôtel de police 'police headquarters'. In India, the term hotel  has taken on a slightly different meaning (and pronunciation, with st...

One of the things I was impressed with during my short stay in Taiwan was the  Taiwan Indigenous Television  (TITV) channel, which features programming for and by indigenous peoples of Taiwan, including news programmes, educational shows and variety shows. Here's a screenshot of a programme that is in (what I assume to be) the  Seediq language  (sometimes still classified with Atayal). And here's a screenshot of a news programme in what I assumed was the  Amis language  ('Pangcah' is the endonym for the group). Although I couldn't understand what they were saying, I did see that the story they were running was about Julia Gillard's  March 21  apology to victims of forced adoptions  in Australia. Her apology echoed Kevin Rudd's 2008 apology to victims of the Stolen Generation, a policy which I believe has some resonance among the indigenous people of Taiwan, given their own experience of institutionalised racism. Speakin...