User talk:David Marjanović

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Thanks, Khoikhoi!

(Parts that I don't need anymore deleted to save space.)

David Marjanović 12:12, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Hello. Thanks for the response on the Altaic talk page. Just a few ideas on the numerals in Turkic business: Well, I didn't consider changing the article at all. All I wanted to know was if there is actually any theory that deemed certain Turkic numerals as loans from Chinese. Here are the sound correspondences that I found (note: I added the sinic numerals in Japanese and Korean for comparison; of course none of them are exactly identical, just illustrating how the pronunciation can vary):

1 Turkic: bir ~ Chinese: yī ~ Korean: il ~ Japanese: ichi 2 Turkic: eki ~ Chinese: èr ~ Korean: i ~ Japanese: ni 6 Turkic: alty (alt) ~ Chinese: liù ~ Korean: ryuk/yuk ~ Japanese: roku 7 Turkic: yeti (jeti<jet) ~ Chinese: qī ~ Korean: chil ~ Japanese: shichi

The ones in brackets are my own interpretation (in kypchak.-Turkic, but without the suffix > for explanation see my elaborations on the Altaic talk page ('dough!)).

By the way are there any theories that claim the Turkic numeral five (besh/pesh) is a loan from Indo-Iranian (possibly Saka)? 134.100.32.213 10:08, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Hm. First of all, Korean and Japanese have two sets of numerals each, one native and one borrowed from Chinese. Off the top of my head, ichi belongs to the Chinese set of Japanese (Mandarin has lost the final -t which is preserved in J. as -chi).
Then you'd have to explain things like why Turkic has a /b/ in front while Chinese lacks any trace of it.
More importantly, however, Proto-Turkic was spoken quite a long time ago and probably not next to a Chinese-speaking area – of the two main branches of Turkic, the Chuvash-Old Bulgar branch has apparently never been spoken east of the Ural.
I have no idea on Indo-Iranian connections.
Thanks for your comments, anyway! :-) David Marjanović 15:48, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
I should have added: Japanese ni is borrowed directly from Classical Chinese (and still used today in puns in China). The modern Mandarin er is an entirely different word. David Marjanović 01:18, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Dene-Caucasian

Hi, David. Just letting you know I've made a rather large comment on the talk page at Dene-Caucasian languages that you'll probably want to give your opinions on. Take care, --Miskwito 20:32, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Oh, thanks. I'll have a look at it as soon (ha!) as possible. David Marjanović 01:14, 4 September 2007 (UTC) (that's 3:18 CEST…)

[edit] Haida

Hey, I'm sorry if I created inaccuracies in my revision of the table. I first removed the orthography from the table because it was cumbersome and awkward. Then I realized that the website(s) that portrayed the writing system gave different information than the article was giving so I removed the writing system information altogether. I suppose this was the lazy way to fix the problem but that's what I did. I'm certainly not opposed to showing that the language has an orthography but it's better to do it in a separate table somehow. Other than the deletion of the orthographic information, my edits were simply a reorganization of the information already on the page so there's no need to source it. I did remove the tie bars because they don't show up right on IE 6 but you are technically right. I'll have to research what you say about the font-family specification. The table doesn't look too different with it but I was under the impression that IE 7 had better unicode enforcement than IE 6. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 22:47, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

When the font family or the IPA template are specified, IE 6 displays the tie bars correctly. IE 7, like most browsers these days, doesn't need this -- if a character isn't present in the specified font, it takes it from another font. The downside is that it does this even within the IPA template; if Arial Unicode MS isn't specified, it doesn't use it.
The differences between the orthographies website and the table I made are that my table is more precise (phonetically) and doesn't call the epiglottals "pharyngeals". I also don't see why explaining the orthography in a separate table would be an advantage because that table would have to contain the consonant table anyway. You are of course right that the three orthographies make the table cumbersome, but I think I'll put it back. Any objections?
Sorry for having attributed other edits to you. David Marjanović 21:11, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I think I get what you're saying about IE7. The characters show up adequately, but unless you force the font for all of a given text, it will only use the IPA-ready fonts for the special characters. I have noticed that. That's part of the reason why I'm not looking forward to eventually switching to that browser. As for tie bars, they show up on IE6 but they aren't aligned the same as other browsers. For example, the tie bar for /t͡s/ shows up before the t. To display it correctly on IE 6 it would need to be like this /ts͡/ but that wouldn't look right on other browsers.
I think we should consider alternate ways of presenting the orthographies. It's not too weird to make a second table that is identical other than that it uses the language's orthography rather than the IPA, but I was actually thinking something more like this:
IPA orthography 1 orthography 2 orthography 3
b b
ɢ ĝ G r
qʰ ḵ q
t͡s ts ts
t͡ʃ ch
It could be in alphabetical order or in some other sort of order. I recall that another problem with the orthography as it was on the table was that it was not indicated which orthographies were being represented and there was (and is) no discussion of the orthographies in the article. We shouldn't use the table as a crutch for actual article prose. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 03:17, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
OK.
Still, we could reserve a table like the above for those sounds that are spelled differently in 2 or 3 of the orthographies, and include the others in the phoneme table – once instead of three times. That way we'd avoid the cluttering. What do you think?
I've also found another page that explains Haida phonology and all orthographies that have ever been used (if only by a linguist or two). I'll have to work that in. Notably, the vowels are included. David Marjanović 21:38, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
I forgot to mention that the misplacement of the tie bars is a well-known bug in Arial Unicode MS. There's nothing we can do about it. David Marjanović 21:40, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
Hmmm... I'm not sure how much benefit we'd have in splitting up the orthographic aspect into two different tables. If somebody only cared about the letters of Haida they'd have to look at both unless they knew which sounds were represented orthographically in different ways and which ones had the same letter for all three. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 16:20, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Avout your test userbox...

How are people who can't see it to tell you about it if they don't know of its existance? Also, your comment on Talk:WordGirl, though undeniably hilarious was not constructive. I'm sorry if I sound like I'm bossing you around, especially considering the staus of my registration. I'm just trying to help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.225.32.202 (talk) 14:55, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

First sentence: it's a (not terribly original) joke; also, I didn't create that userbox, I just find it funny, so I inserted it here. Second sentence: Oops, sorry, I somehow forgot the citation. (Such rich vocabulary is not my own.) I'll supply it ASAP. David Marjanović 14:15, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: you rocmments at Pinyin news

Dear David,

You made the following comment on Pinyin news:

[i]Is ["new" is closer to nǚ"] for a native English speaker? I have the ü sound in my native German and wouldn’t dream of considering that similar.[/i]

Basically, yes. Since English does not have this vowel, without training one normally tries to pronounce it as IPA "u," perhaps with some nasalization. It takes a while to get used to having the tongue in the /i/ position but the lips in the /u/ position. Hence the confusion. Jason 20:44, 17 December 2007 (Taiwan Time)
OK, thanks. I must have been extrapolating from the fact that speakers of many other languages without this vowel tend to substitute [i] instead. David Marjanović (talk) 13:38, 12 January 2008 (UTC)