Diacritiques

This is a reply to Mark Liberman’s challenge to a) guess the language on a recording and b) transcribe it. I’ve never transcribed anything but English, and this more often into phonemes than phonetically (ie, writing down actual heard sounds, which is much more difficult). Even though I’m not a card-carrying linguist (but seriously thinking about becoming one yet, despite the obvious practical and the less obvious psychological obstacles), I had a go.

Guessing the language turned out much easier than the rest. I may be wrong, of course, but I believe it’s Romansh or something very close to it. I’d have been totally lost had it been anything but a Romance or maybe Germanic language. This, though, is one I sometimes understand Latin in. After ruling out those among the bigger Romance languages I don’t immediately recognize (to wit, Romanian, Occitan and Portuguese), and Esperanto (just to be on the safe side) I browsed Wikipedia until I settled on Romansh. Or maybe Ladin? My opinion is influenced by my certainty to have heard the language before. This Romansch word list shows that Romansh has nouns/words ending in -un, -al and other syllables ending with a consonant, just like on the recording. And then there’s the word [griˈʒun]: its speakers call the language Rumantsch Grischun.

As for the transcription, there were many small decisions to take, and at one point I just stopped trying to be totally consistent (or even deciding in the first place) how open a particular a or e sound was or where it was articulated. Then of course there’s the question of where to make, for lack of a better term, gaps. Between words? But if you don’t know where the word boundaries are, you are lost. Whenever there is a pause? There aren’t enough of them! So I guessed, based on what I understood and guessed, and when I didn’t have anything to base myself on, I put dots between syllables and took the chance of letting words run into each other. Especially since what I take for articles is pronounced without separation from the head nouns, so they run into each other, too. Okay, here is the fruit of my labours:

la ˈʃkɔ:lɐ. ʃatṛ ˈtseintṛ ˈdəla səˈkunda part dil magaˈtsi:n. pi: ˈdjeʃtɐ pi: ɪndividuˈal. ɪn ʃkɔˈlar.sdɐ.ˈgɥi.rə ˈdβesṇ βiˈni.e.la ˈkɥi.dət.ni of moˈdel da ˈʃkɔ:lɐ. ən modˈel kə ˈkoreˌʃpondə ˈmiljṛ ɐ ˈlu:r habiliˈta:ts. pi ˌkontsilˈjant ɐ pi: tolɛˈrant. il plɐn ˌdinʃtrukˈtsjun dəˌreliˈdʒun pa.las ˈʃkɔ:lɐs el griˈʒun ˈle:vɐ a.vi.ʒiˈnal.ɐs du.as dɛˌreliˈdʒuns. da.pi ˈvargɐ i.ˈnon a.ɪl ˈplandɐ ton en ˈdruket. a ˈkɔ:vaɪ ˈvinə ˈvon.ku.la ˌinʃtrukˈtsjun də ˌreliˈdʒun ˈkɥi.ke.nus vein ˈe.ru ju: səˈvɐɪstlud stəˈpla: ˈsventṛ ˈlaura: ˈelɐ ˈbursa.

As for what it talks about, it’s the second part of a (radio?) news magazine, which deals with school issues: (changes in?) didactics to better adapt to the pupils’ abilities, and something about religious education (to be focussed on?) promoting tolerance. I have some ideas about the last sentence (the bit about the laura and the bursa), but all in all don’t get it.

On Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum links to an mp3 audio clip from Slate Magazine, in which John Kerry, visiting Haiti while campaigning, speaks a few words of French. According to Prof. Pullum, Kerry’s French is “atrocious”. Well, I have to disagree respectfully. Sure, the Mr Kerry on this clip doesn’t come up to the ankles of, say, Jean Jaurès, but first of all there are extenuating circumstances, and second, there’s more data available than just four seconds out of a 25-sec recording.  lire le billet »

I have long wanted to learn another language or two. Apart from the obvious choices (Arabic, Russian, Hindi, Japanese), I have been particularly attracted to the idea of learning a Celtic language (Welsh, in particular) and an African one (thinking of Wolof, Bambara or Soninké).  lire le billet »

Bloggers, this seems to be an emerging tradition, do some navel-gazing once in a while. Why do I blog? What do I blog? Where does blogging lead me? Who reads me? I have tried to avoid this, which I find difficult because I tend to do a lot of this sort of introspection. Still, I […]

Slowly emerging from my recent bout of thought and writing stupor, I am pointing out this post by Mark Liberman on Language Log only because it reminds me of some of my teenage musings: why it is that we leaf backwards towards the front of the book (while reading forwards to reach its back cover, […]

Visiblement, ou plutôt invisiblement, car cela fait bien trop longtemps que

Edit: As I was made aware of, this is a hoax. Unfortunately. … scientists from the RAND corporation conjectured that maybe, just maybe, people might own “home computers” 50 years on: However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not […]

Les recoins de l’internet (ou plutôt du web) : Un musée des mots allemand (ou allemands) étrangement dépouillé, sans étymologie ou notes d’usage. Un mot par semaine dans l’exposition et donc une collection de seulement 26. Seraient-ils ceux que les auteurs du site veulent consigner dans les archives de la langue, ou bien ceux qui mériteraient […]

Brian Weatherson at Thoughts Arguments and Rants, which is a philosophical blog of the analytical persuasion, has an interesting online experiment about vagueness. I won’t tell you what precisely it asks (be assured, it doesn’t hurt), but the question is akin to “how big is huge” or “how many pieces of underwear can I still […]

If you read this web log through a news aggregator you might be interested in the new French feeds: RSS 2.0 in French and Atom in French. They contain the French versions of every article that has one (the English version otherwise). For the moment, French summaries of English-only articles (or the converse) aren’t included […]