Diacritiques

Back in September, Language Log had a lot of interesting stuff on the obstacles faced by language communities that speak a Turkic language in the Soviet Union, between intense alphabetisation and soviet-style nationalist language policies.

Today I am reading in this AP wire story (fr) that the trials of the Tatar-speaking part of the population of Tatarstan aren’t over yet. No wonder, as they are part of a nationalistic Russian Federation.

[Note: The, I believe, erroneous qualification of Tatar as a “dialect turque” seems to stem from confounding two distinct senses of the French word turque, for which English offers turkish and turkic, respectively. It’s as if they called, say, English or Swedish a German dialect.]

The Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation overturned a ruling of the Tatar Supreme Court, which would have allowed the Tatar-speakers to settle on a Latin alphabet with diactitics. The AP story, unfortunately, leaves us in the dark about the legal grounds on which non-Cyrillic alphabets can be ruled unconstitutional.

In cases like this I’d like to know more about how far the court’s influence extends in reality. Surely they can’t regulate the (written) language itself, the characters someone pens a shopping list or a poem in? Except for totalitarian states, lawmakers and courts have a say about language in two areas: administration and the educational system. This is arguably acceptable: someone, somewhere has to lay down rules on how curricula are devised or what to write on traffic signs. But Tatar speakers might be able and allowed to write and publish books and newspapers, or conduct business transactions in whichever writing system they prefer. This is maybe a naive view, and the option would, indeeed, put less educated people at a disadvantage. Navigating two writing systems isn’t easy, especially if the one you’d rather get rid of is what you are forced to use in dealing with officialdom.

Update: I should have expected that Mark Liberman would provide more information and English links shortly.

Mark Liberman at Language Log has posted a second transcribe-and-guess-the-language quiz. I believe most readers of this blog interested in this sort of question, so you probably know this already. As one of those who got the first one right, I couldn’t resist of course. (More seriously, though, it’s an excellent exercise.)

I have followed my new fondness of wikis and used first my local one, then my new (and still quite empty) online wiki to work progressively on my solution. To be fair, my brother and I conferred a bit on Jabber: he was surprisingly enthusiastic, and provided support and his remarks.

Now, the wiki page (which has a timestamp) won’t be changed (spelling errors and all) until Mark has come out with the solution.

Once the work was as complete as it’s likely to get, I did have a look to find out whether caelestis at sauvage noble might have taken up the challenge, too. It turns out he has — I swear, I didn’t change a letter of my wiki post after looking, and won’t.

Caelestis’ transcription and mine are reasonably similar. He transcribes some sounds as a where I opt for an (open) o, and he might be right. Especially if the language is Somali or a close relative. His morphological analysis is more sophisticated than mine. He rejects Somali, however, on grounds of prosody. I’m not so sure about that. Somali is supposed to have tonal accent (caelestis calls it “pitch accent” for the samples), which is a point in favour. Still, I’m far from convinced myself.

Edit: My certainty level, which has been rising over the day after listening to the Somali recordings on this site (via caelestis) , has just taken another hike. Thanks to my dear brother, who doesn’t have a web presence yet (even though his sister has been nagging). Mark Liberman’s tantalizing “European Event” immediately made me think of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s murder — but I failed to see the in reality obvious connection to Somalia: His film Submission about violence against women, which is said to contain a harsh criticism of Islam, was written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and now a liberal (ie conservative) member of parliament in the Netherlands. Letters containing death threats against her were pinned to his body with a knife.

Update: The mystery language was indeed Somali. I have updated the documentation of my efforts on the wiki — conclusions and general remarks added.

First of all, I was right, and so was caelestis at (or le?) sauvage noble: the mystery language is Romansh. It is interesting to look at the differences between our approaches. Caelestis writes in his comment section:

For the record, I should state that all I went on was the MP3, the exercise having been billed as a quiz. I just played it looped and trascribed and transcribed.

Well, that’s what I did, too, except that I googled first and only started transcribing after settling on Romansh. But then he goes on:

I also decided not to transcribe too narrowly, opting instead to approximate orthography, on the principle that hints about historical spelling might also betray something of the text’s language’s history.

I, on the other hand, took it as an exercise in using IPA, playing around with the values of the symbols and trying to get them right. Of course, I was also keen on actually understanding the recording, so I did think about the sense (adjective + noun combinations were particularly easy to identify, pi might mean more (plus in French); I neglected to look for possible occurrences of the conjugated forms of be, which would have been logical to do).

Focussing on the sound and the intricacies of IPA led to a few difficulties. For example, the speaker says religiun(s) several times, but sometimes the stressed syllable comes out as [dʒun] (with a voiced postalveolar fricative), sometimes in my ears more like [djun] (palatal approximant) or, between the two, [dʝun] (palatal fricative). Should I have made a distinction between the occurrences? I decided against a transcription that narrow.

One of those light bulbs that go on in ones mind came after I wrote the last entry: Grischun is the canton of Graubünden, Grisons in French. (I’m really bad at French geographic names for places outside France that I already know the German and/or English version of. Imagine the consternation of the French friend who once told me he liked Aix-la-Chapelle, when I replied I had no idea of what place he was referring to.)

As far as understanding the recording is concerned, caelestis’ has, in my opinion, the edge. I understood two more snippets from reading his. Other meanings came to me later. For example, the passage un model che corresponde miglier a lur habilitats (in an approximation of what the spelling might be) obviously means a model that better corresponds to their capacities. So the sentences before that should contain the antecedent of their, presumably referring to pupils. But where and what is it? It took me a thorough look through this page in Romansh dealing with school questions (actually, with the very issue of the place of the language in education) to find out that it is scolasts (for boys) or scolastas (for girls). Which in turn points to a tentative acuire as the verb of the third sentence. For the rest of it, caelestis is quite helpful: some aspects of the school system “come into question” (similar to the German idiomatic expression which could be calqued as put something into question). And so forth.

The bits on which we don’t agree (l/m/n? o/u?) don’t seem very important, and may be very hard to get “right” anyway: the language is called Rumantsch by its speakers and Romansh in English, most of the time, anyway. The presence or absence of the t illustrates a similar difficulty: saying [nʃ] is hard without an intruding stop/plosive ([t]). Is this stop part of “how the language is pronounced” or just of “how a particular speaker sometimes pronounces it”. It may be one or the other, depending on the particular language. But since it was unknown in the first place …

The transcriptions that the unique and in many ways excellent speech accent archive proposes aren’t totally uncontroversial either, however instructive they may be. There’s rarely a distinction between clear and dark l, and most pronunciations of the English w are transcribed as [w], even though there are quite a few instances of [v] and [β] in their samples.

The standard variety Rumantsch Grischun appears to be the the equivalent of Hochdeutsch in German: a normalized compromise agreed upon for teaching purposes, to have a unified written language and, in the case of Romansh, to keep the language alive and legitimize it, but one that hardly anyone speaks in its pure form. It is, with tudestg, franzos and talian, one of the four “national languages” in Switzerland. (Calling French franzos makes a German speaker smile with amused embarrassment since this sounds vaguely insulting in German.) In German, it is prefectly acceptable if the phonetic features of one’s region of origin’s dialect shine through even in the most formal speech situations. Romansh apparently has five distinct dialects, and I agree with the Debian geeks (er, and thanks for providing the OS that runs my computer!), and Mark Liberman’s justification, that the speaker’s dialect is Surmiran. Any French reader who has made it to this point of this post will easily recognize the text used in the dialect samples. Yes, I know you prefer the version that every French school kid learns by heart.

I have not made any headway to speak of with Welsh. Those conjugation tables of bod need learning by heart, and as long as I’m hampered by a very vague understanding of the pronunciation, I hesitate. For not too long, hopefully.

Edit: I originally was wrong about the official status of Romansh in Switzerland. Corrected now. Thanks, Steph!

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 […]

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