Extended break

I'm not planning on doing any more updates until probably early next month, since I've started classes now, in addition to developing ESL materials for PronouncePro and working on some abstracts, papers, and a book review. Check back on October 3. If there are topics you're interested in hearing about this semester, feel free to post them in the comments section.

Two stories

I recently picked up the second season of the NBC police procedural show "Life" and have been watching it this weekend. In one of the episodes a crime takes place on an unnamed reservation in the desert near Los Angeles. As I watched, I tried to figure out what tribe it was supposed to be, mostly based on the language (after all, I am a linguist). What could it be? Western Pomo perhaps? I'm not familiar with many Uto-Aztecan languages, so I attempted to look the episode up online to see what language the actors were speaking during the few non-English lines of dialog. But suddenly I caught the word wašiču, 'white man' in Lakota (which, ironically, I learned not from my Lakota textbook or dictionary, but from my wife, who has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the movie "Dances with Wolves"). This could be taken two ways. If we want to nitpick, we could get offended that the producers saw no need to use actual tribal members from the area or research the correct language for the tribe. Or if we want to be charitable we could be grateful that in a major network sitcom they actual decided to use Native actors speaking a Native language.

The second story is short, and comes from Bruce Rigsby via Phil Cash's Nez Perce mailing list. I've removed the name since I'm not sure if it would appropriate to reproduce here.

"Years ago several Old People on the Umatilla Reservation told me much the same account about ------, but it centred on the parable that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The old man meant to say quu'ys haama "rich man", but mistakenly said k'uuys haama "indecently exposed man"!"

Qeciyew'yew', Bruce, for showing us that Freudian slips don't just occur in Indo-European languages.

Why linguistics is useful when learning a foreign language

Betsy Lowe has been keeping me up to date on her endeavor to learn Hungarian, and the frustrations that go along with any attempt to learn a foreign language. She commented specifically on exceptions in vowel harmony, to which I replied:

"After a while those irregularites will start to resolve into patterns. For instance, my dad, who got his degree in linguistics, was at first puzzled by the Arabic definite article, which is usually al-, but the -l- changes to the first letter of the noun it attaches to in some cases. After a while he figured out that the -l- stays an -l- only when the first letter of the noun isn't a coronal consonant, and once he realized that he no longer had to memorize the cases; it was easy to figure them out."

As another example, in many languages velar stops become post-alveolar stops or alveolar fricatives before front vowels. Thus in Italian syllables originally beginning with /k/ now begin with tʃ, e.g., cibo, 'food' is pronounced tʃibo. In Italian the pattern is not difficult to remember even if you don't know any linguistics: c is k before a, o, and u, and tʃ before i and e. However, a little linguistics knowledge makes it even simpler: tʃ before front vowels, k elsewhere. Such knowledge is especially helpful in situations like the Arabic case, where without linguistic knowledge the learner merely has to memorize a long list of letters that take the article al- and another long list that take aC-, where C represents the first letter of the noun the article precedes.

The derivation of "Missoula"

As you know if you've read my little info box on the right side of this page, I currently live in Missoula, Montana. The derivation of the word name "Missoula" is somewhat opaque, but is generally agreed to derive from the Flathead (Selish) word nmesuletkʷ. However, not everyone agrees on the meaning of this word. I have heard perhaps most commonly from white people and historians "river of ambush/surprise", and from Native people "icy water", referring to glacial lake Missoula. Naturally I'm inclined to give more credence to the latter (though of course indigenous people are just as prone to folk etymologies as we Euro-Americans are). After doing some research it seems that my hunch was justified.

The easiest part of nmesuletkʷ to deconstruct (for a non-speaker of Salish) is the suffix -etkʷ, which means "liquid", often specifically in the sense of "water" in place names, cf. ntx̣ʷetkʷ, 'river'. The nmesul- part is a bit harder, but there are clues in several of the Salishan languages. The root sul seems to mean "cold" or "frozen": slsulčsti, 'his hands are freezing'; suł, 'froze'; cf. Spokane sul, 'cold'. The initial n- is presumably the locative marker present in many Salishan languages, including Spokane and Okanagan. The me- is the only part for which I was able to find an unequivocal answer, but may be a stem formative cognate with Okanagan -m-. So a rough translation would presumably be something like "place of the frozen water", quite likely a reference to glacial lake Missoula.

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Garden path sentences

I came across a headline recently that momentarily stumped me: "Judge accused of sex crimes impeached". This was because I automatically parsed this as "a certain judge has been accused of sex crimes", but then I came across "impeached" and had to fit it in somewhere". This happened because I initially interpreted "accused of sex crimes" as a verb phrase, whereas semantically it functions as a relative clause modifying "judge". These types of sentences, where we assign an initial interpretation and then have to revise it when we get to the end, are often referred to as "garden path" sentences, because we get led down a figurative garden path before getting to the actual meaning. A classic oft-repeated example is "The horse raced past the barn fell". Can't make sense of it? Try "The horse that was raced past the barn fell". (This doesn't work for everyone, because for some people racing a horse past a barn just doesn't feel right semantico-syntactically.) We initially think this is going to be just "The horse raced past the barn", with racing as the action the horse is performing, but when we get to the end we realize that actually the horse is falling, not racing, and "raced past the barn" is a relative clause modifying "the horse".

Onsets

Betsy Lowe emailed me an interesting observation last week, noting that in the song "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", the lyrics go "He drew his bow across the strings and it made a evil hiss" (not an evil hiss). She commented that she commonly hears this a-before-a-vowel pattern in native Southerners, and thought "that was incredibly unusual because Italian and the other Romance languages I've dabbled in, and now Hungarian, go to great lengths to PREVENT two vowel sounds from running into each other. E.g.: not 'e una altra cosa,' but 'ed un'altra cosa,' in Italian. In Hungarian, 'a' is 'the' or 'that', and if the following word begins with a vowel, then it becomes 'adz.'" This brings up an interesting point about syllable markedness, which is that syllables without onsets are marked, and thus many languages have epenthetic consonants or allomorphs to avoid a sequence of two vowels across a morpheme or word boundary. Besides English, Italian, and Hungarian, there are the Algic languages, which all have personal prefix allomorphs that are CV or CVC, depending on whether the stem begins with a consonant or a vowel. For instance, in Blackfoot the stem for 'dream' is paapáó'kaan, while 'my dream' is nipápao'kaani. The stem for 'boat' is aahkioohsa'tsis, but 'my boat' is nitááhkioohsa'tsisi. The 1st person prefix has allomorphs ni- and nit- to avoid onsetless syllables. Feel free to post examples from languages you're familiar with in the comments.

As a native of Atlanta, GA, I can't say I've noticed the prevalence of "a V-" pronunciations in Southern English, but as a native of Atlanta, GA, I didn't have much contact with natives of the deep South. Please comment if you have supporting or complicating evidence for Betsy's intuition. I'll close with a link to the song on YouTube, where you can hear that it really is əivl̩hɪs, rather than ejivl̩hɪs or əʔivl̩hɪs. The part in question is around 1:20.