Re: How close is Vietnamese to Mandarin or Cantonese?
Re: How close is Vietnamese to Mandarin or
Cantonese?
Source: http://sci.tech−archive.net/Archive/sci.lang/2005−05/msg00932.html
• From: "Peter T. Daniels"
• Date: Sat, 21 May 2005 02:22:32 GMT
benlizross wrote:
> > Is there no such thing as an explicable, or principled, gap in _your_
> > theory?
>
> If I had a theory of my own, there would be, sure. The absence of
> initial /N/, or /hC/ clusters, would be a fact about the system.
> It might be more plausible if you argued that long vowels in general (I
> think this is true) don't occur before /N/. So we have sing, sang, sung,
> song, but not corresponding long vowel + N. The absence of /EN/ and /UN/
> words would be accidental, which is why "boong" fits OK.
I stated, not argued, that hours ago.
> > > ("Boong" was mentioned here a
> > > > few days ago −− as an insulting term for Australian native?, which makes
> > > > it an oddity, an "expressive," if you will, outside normal phonology as
> > > > "Bach" is.)
>>>
> > > What nonsense. I suppose this goes with your bizarre dogma that "names
> > > aren't words"?
>>
> > Another of I. J. Gelb's interests was prosopography, so maybe that's
> > where I picked it up. (He was president of the American Names Society
> > for quite a while.) If you don't accept the mainstream theory of the
> > nature of names (or "definite descriptions," to use an archaism), do you
> > have a better account of them?
>
> ???The only sense of "definite description" I know (from Russell) has
> nothing to do with phonology.
What does the nature of names have to do with phonology?
> Perhaps you could give an actual citation of somewhere this "mainstream
> theory" is set out?
>
> In the meantime, I'll say:
>
Re: How close is Vietnamese to Mandarin or Cantonese? 1
Re: How close is Vietnamese to Mandarin or Cantonese?
> − names are words (which are socially assigned to individuals);
> − some names (like some non−names) are foreign words, and thus may
> exhibit extra−systemic phonological features.
>
>>
> > > "Bach" is a foreign name (I don't mean [+foreign] or some
> > > such putative feature, I mean the name of a person from a non−English
> > > speaking culture.) Such names may be de−naturalized to taste, including
> > > the use of non−English phonemes like /x/, but most people use a /k/. (In
> > > fact in my native dialect, where we didn't have anything much like [a],
> > > we pronounced his name to rhyme with "rock".)
>>
> > "Rock" is /rak/. (That's why [a] is called "short o" in traditional
> > grammar.)
>
> I think you mean "traditional [in some personal sense] American English
> phonology".
Hardly. Phonologists call it "low central vowel."
When you learned in school to use a dictionary in Canada a few decades
ago, was that sound not represented as o−breve?
> In fact [a] is called "short o" only because, for some
> people, it is the vowel in a lot of words mainly spelled with . What
> I am telling you is that the composer's name rhymed with "rock" in my
> native phonology, and that I would not consider the vowel in question to
> be phonetically [a].
Then what?
> > > "Boong" may be offensive, but it is no more "outside normal phonology"
> > > than "dago" or "chink".
>>
> > Except it now turns out that it isn't an example of /uwN/ at all.
>
> Nobody ever said it was. You misread my /uN/ as equivalent to your
> /uwN/.
You offered it as an example to contradict my assertion that /uwN/ does
not occur in English, so what was I to think?
> And incidentally, you have not explained why Cantonese [U] would be
> expected to be borrowed as English /uw/.
Not [U], but [fUN55]. It came into English as /fuwn/. Nothing to do with
expectations, just a datum.
> > > > If, of course, Australian English has a plethora of words borrowed from
> > > > Australian languages that end in −oong, then a new (Firthian) subsystem
> > > > has arisen,
Re: How close is Vietnamese to Mandarin or Cantonese? 2
Re: How close is Vietnamese to Mandarin or Cantonese?
>>>
> > > Why on earth would you want to postulate a new "subsystem", Firthian or
> > > otherwise? They've simply acquired a new word which includes a phoneme
> > > sequence that wasn't previously instantiated.
>>
> > In nearly 2000 years of the English language, a certain sequence was
> > never "instantiated," and you think that's a coincidence?
>
> You think the phonology of English has been the same for 2000 years??
You think /N/ occurred after long vowels at some point in the history of
English?
−−
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.
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