e2pandas

It was one of those grey winter evenings that always put English in a pensive and somewhat dejected frame of mind, making her feel as though she were very small and insignificant. The way the cold wind battered at the window panes reminded her of how harsh and unforgiving the universe could be, of how, ultimately, she too would die, and it would be as if she were never even born. She sighed, stretched, and sullenly exclaimed, “God help me, I’m in such a subjunctive mood today!”

“It is important, at times like these, that my accomplishments be remembered,” she cautioned herself, trying to boost her self-confidence. After all, if she were not around, so many great works of literature wouldn’t be either, from Shakespeare’s plays to the poetry of Charles Bukowski. If there were some alternate dimension, in which English had never come to be, it would be, literarily, a much poorer world than this one. The future was uncertain, but come what may, she would always remember the thrill of her very own vocabulary and syntax being built into subtle lines and intricate prose, strange plots and bawdy tales, fierce slogans of revolution and humble little nursery rhymes.

But today all that grandeur felt somehow hollow, and she couldn’t help but think of what her life would have been like if she were someone else. What if she were Russian, with flexible syntax and a Slavic soul, keeping Dostoyevsky company on those long cold nights he spent journeying into the heart of man? Or imagine if she were Mandarin Chinese, with that musical tonality, those whispery affricatives, and tens of thousands of vivid characters to illustrate her every word! Sometimes, she even longed for the simple, quiet life she would have had if she were some obscure language of New Guinea, spoken by a single highland tribe, instead of the sprawling global tongue that spawned ideas like ‘cyberspace’ and ‘ethnic cleansing.’

And so it went: despite her efforts to cheer up, she found herself forlornly wishing that she were someone else, anyone else. “I can only hope,” she said to herself, in a soft, sad voice, “that my mood be more indicative tomorrow.”

In English, these bear the inflectional categories of number, case, gender, and person. There are several subclasses of pronouns and they all behave and look quite differently:

Personal Pronouns

They distinguish participants in the speech event (e.g., speaker vs. addressee). They are what usually comes to mind first when we talk about pronouns.

e.g. I, we, you, y'all, he, she, it, they

Reflexive Pronouns

These are closely related to personal pronouns. They are easily identified because they end in self or selves. They commonly mark an object that refers to the same person as the subject.

e.g. Timmy hurt himself. We gave ourselves a present.

Demonstrative Pronouns

These typically "point out" the things they modify. They can be used to distinguish things on the basis of closeness to the speaker. Sometimes they stand by themselves.

e.g. That is a lie. I like those.

Interrogative Pronouns

These are question words, including who, which and what.

Indefinite Pronouns

These are pronouns that refer to non-specific entities. They may appear in combination with a noun, but more commonly appear alone.

e.g. some, somebody, every, everyone, each, anybody, nobody, none

Relative Pronouns

These introduce relative clauses. They look like other pronouns but they function differently.

e.g. I found a friend who likes cheese. The book that I read is on the table.

Anthro/Ling 2040

Intro:

To start off, pull up the IPA for reference. We also need to get some terminology out of the way:

• "phoneme = contrastive/distinctive sound within a particular language (notation: /…/)."
• "allophone (or variant) = sound which counts as an alternative way of saying a phoneme in a particular language (notation: […])."
• minimal pair = a set of words that differ in only one sound.

In linguistics, solving a phonemic analysis problem entails determining whether or not two sounds are assignable to two different phonemes. If not, you must specify whether they are allophones in complimentary distribution, or free variation. When allophones are in complimentary distribution, they appear in different environments within the language. For example, between the sounds [ð] and [d] in Osage, the Siouan language of a Native American people who originally lived in what is now western Missouri, [d] is only found before the sound [a]. [ð] is found everywhere else a 'd-like' sound is used (forgive me for the informal term). On the otherhand, allophones in free variation are generally attributable to a regional accent. Gritchka points out the example of [k] sound at the end of 'pack'. It may be said with an aspiration, an explosion of air on that last sound in the word, notated like this [k^h]. Or it may be said with a half-long unreleased [k`] sound. Despite their different sounds, the meaning of the word remains the same.

Algorithm:

What follows is an algorithm of sorts (in the vein of the old choose your own adventure books) for solving phonemic analysis problems:

• Beginning with two sounds from a language and a finite data set of words containing one or both of those sounds...

1. Is there a minimal pair for the given sounds? If yes, go to 2. If not, go to 5.


2. Do the words in the pair differ in meaning? If yes, go to 3. If not, go to 4.


3. The sounds are contrastive, i.e. separate phonemes.


4. The sounds are allophones in free variation.


5. Describe the phonetic environment in which each sound appears; e.g. list what comes before and after each sound. Do the sounds occur in the same (or similar) environments, or are their environments complementary? If same/similar, go to 6. If complementary, go to 7.


6. The sounds contrast so your best guess is that they're separate phonemes, and you'd expect to find minimal pairs with more data.


7. The sounds represent allophones of a single phoneme.

Example Problem:

Czech is a West Slavic language of the Indo-European language family, spoken in the Czech Republic. In Czech, among the various stops (plosives) are two alveo-dental stops,[t] and [d], articulated by the tongue tip against the boundary between the upper incisors and the alveolar ridge behind them, and two palatal stops,[t^y] and [d^y]. To how many phonemes are these four sounds assignable? Consider the data below and support your conclusion.

1. dej = 'give!'
2. d^yed^yit = 'to inherit'
3. d^yej = 'action'
4. d^yelo = 'cannon'
5. kotel = 'kettle'
6. kot^ye = 'kitten'
7. tedi = 'hence'
8. tele = 'calf (animal)'
9. t^yelo = 'body'
10. teta = 'aunt'
11. tikat = 'to be on a first-name basis'
12. titul = 'title'
13. t^yikat = 'to tick (clock)'
14. vada = 'flaw'
15. vana = 'bathtub'
16. vata = 'absorbent cotton'

Solution:

Step 1 - List any minimal pairs.

• 1 and 3
• 4 and 9
• 11 and 13
• 14 and 16

Step 2 - Determine if the words in the pair differ in meaning.

The words in all of the pairs differ in meaning.

Conclusion -

All of the four Czech stops, [t, d, t^y, d^y], are separate phonemes, /t, d, t^y, d^y/, because they contrast.

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Sources: Anthro/Ling 2040, http://www.spectrum.uni-bielefeld.de/~thies/HTHS/phonrules.html

If you're really uncertain, always use -ise. There are only about four words where -ize is obligatory, viz prize (= reward) and size, assize, and capsize. Now to business.

The -ise ending in English comes from various places. Where it's part of a Latin verb root, it has to be -ise. (Latin had no Z.) These roots are

• -cise 'cut', as in circumcise, excise, incise, etc.
• -mise 'send', as in compromise, surmise, etc.
• -prise 'take', as in enterprise, surprise, etc.
• -vise 'see', as in advise, revise, supervise, televise, improvise, etc.

In almost all these the bit before the root is a familiar Latin (or French) element like a preposition: circum- 'around', ex 'out', com-pro- 'with' + 'before', enter- 'between', sur- 'on', etc.

Then there's rise (and thus arise). The few other -ise-only words listed above (advertise, merchandise, franchise, chastise) are an odd bunch where no good reason can be given for the retention of S. (Or it's buried too deeply in Latin and/or Middle French to be worth thinking about.) These just have to be memorized. Z is occasionally used, but this is not the official spelling even in American style.

The doubt only arises with the EYES pronunciation. When it's something else (such as ISS as in practise or EEZ as in expertise), it's -ise rather than -ize. (Ignoring the fact that there's also a noun practice.)

Apart from these, the suffix is almost always from the Greek -ιζω or -izô, which was borrowed into Latin (though but rarely) as -izo (okay, Latin did have a Z when it borrowed it from Greek).

This is the living suffix, the one that can be freely attached to create new words: mesmerize, vulcanize, GUI-ize, etc. etc.

Historically, in English both -ize and -ise have been used for these. In Britain but not America, French influence (always -ise) preponderated, and most people apart from Americans use the -ise spelling in handwriting. The -ise is also used in newspapers and magazines throughout the British-language domain, if I may so call it.

In books however, it is different. British printed books from all (reputable) publishers always use -ize (in those words that allow both). This practice arose around 1900, as far as I can tell, under the auspices of Fowler and the OED. While the generic IANA tag for British English is en-GB, there is a specific one for Oxford dictionary style, en-GB-oed, which ensures that -ize is recognized as a British spelling.

This might surprise quite a few Britons who think the Z is an Americanism: no it's not. The Z is used by Oxford, Cambridge, Faber, Abacus, Picador, Penguin, Vintage, the lot. You have to go really downmarket to find S used. But although all publishing houses have adopted it, it has not passed into popular use; and the BBC and the Government still use S.

Oddly, Australian books do use S, and official government style guides in Australia stick to -ise.

The reason why analyse, catalyse, paralyse are still written with S in British books is that they are actually malformed Greek as they stand: the combination of Greek roots would give ana-lys-ize. One syllable has been dropped (haplology) and a compromise spelling adopted.

Archaic English, meaning "called" or "named".

"It is full fair to ben yclept madame" - Chaucer

"To be called 'Madam' is acceptable". Perhaps in Chaucer's day, it was. These days, "Madam" has many uses, and has fallen into disfavour. The word "yclept" (or "ycleped") has fallen so far from favour as to be used only in jocular or poetic senses. I call this a shame.

It is pronounced with a long "e", as in he. The etymology is seemingly straightforward enough, taken from the Middle English verb clepe (meaning to call), and originating with the Old English (possibly Indo-European) root of cleopian . Dear Webster mentions that the y- prefix was used to create the past participle of a verb (the equivalent of the German prefix ge- or the modern English suffix -ed). So there we have it.

The word is little-used nowadays, although Michael Quinion mentions that it still pops up from time to time in journalistic pieces, or where someone seeks to make a moderately humorous point about a name or nickname. Even though it ceased to be in common usage in England in the 13th century (dying out from North to South), it still appears in most modern dictionaries.

More modern uses include snippets such as "...the unfortunately yclept basketball player just makes matters worse: ‘David Putz dribbles away...’” (from the Jerusalem Post in 1997) . The 15th-century poet and mystic Gavin Douglas also used it in his work, but to little avail. It remains a curiosity now, largely neglected and possibly best avoided.

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http://www.quinion.com/words/weirdwords/ww-ycl1.htm
Gritchka

bookw56 says: Actually, I have to say that I still use "Ma'am" to talk to older women, despite being from the Northeast
My housemate Tim says "I have a computer named yclept"