Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 August 23

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August 23

What language has the 'best" monophthong chart coverage?

Not in the sense of most monophthong phonemes but in the sense of no pixel of the vowel chart trapezoid is more than x pixels from the edge of the nearest phoneme or center of gravity of the nearest phoneme, which language has the smallest x? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:53, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Abkhaz would be a good candidate, but unfortunately we do not show a vowel chart. By the way, the metric distance on these charts is not a good metric for how distinct the sounds are.  --Lambiam 20:54, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Is there a better distinctness metric? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:53, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Probably not. Vowel sounds exist on a continuum; there are infinite variations which exist on the vowel spectrum, which is not just two dimensional, but multidimensional, especially when we take into account vowel length, tone, and the ability to make not just diphthongs, but tripthongs, etc. --Jayron32 12:36, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

A good metric should take the whole spectrum into account. This study compares several metrics for spectral spaces, but in the context of visible-light spectra. They can applied to vowel spectra as well, though. A weighted root mean square of the difference between normalized spectra, using for example the weighting filter of ITU-R 468 noise weighting, is likely to give a better correspondence with the differences as perceived by human listeners – especially if these listeners are not familiar with the language.  --Lambiam 18:20, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Mississippian period

This term has 2 different meanings: one for paleontologists and one for North American archaeologists. How come this doesn't confuse anyone?? Georgia guy (talk) 16:41, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Maybe because Mississippian (geology) is from many millions of years ago, while Mississippian culture is relatively recent and specific. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:48, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Maybe because archaeology and palaentology are completely different disciplines, even if archaologists get sick of being asked about dinosaurs. Field has completely different meanings to a physicist, an algebraist, and an agronomist. ColinFine (talk) 17:18, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

And in your case, none of the meanings are contradictory, and so it's not a good analogy. It would be a better analogy if to most people, The Great War means World War I (1914-1918) but to some people it means the Hundred Years War of the 14th century. Georgia guy (talk) 19:31, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Something cannot be a field in the maths sense and at the same time a field in the physics sense, so these senses are just as mutually incompatible as the two senses of "Mississippian period". For a more advanced case of polysemy, take this

• Functional analysis (linguistics)
• Functional analysis (mathematics)
• Functional analysis (psychology)

 --Lambiam 20:43, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

That's not a bad example. The Great War (disambiguation) was possibly confusing in Poland for a couple of decades between the World Wars. "Mississippian period" is possibly confusing in any conversations between people who happen to be both archeologists and paleontologists. Such is life?  Card Zero  (talk) 20:44, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

I expect people from Neandertal face similar annoyances :-) Alansplodge (talk) 22:13, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

People from Lesbos certainly do, and have complained about it. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.208.90.29 (talk) 23:10, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

This reminds me of something I had already written here on Wikipedia years ago: English speakers can get confused by the word "Indian", but Finnish avoids this by having two different words: "intiaani" as in Native American (a direct loan from the English word "Indian") and "intialainen" as in citizen of India (naturally inflected from Intia, the Finnish name for India). JIP | Talk 00:12, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

So is -ani not a meaningful suffix like -lainen is?  Card Zero  (talk) 03:31, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

That's right, it's not a suffix, but an integral part of the word intiaani. Note also that Finnish distinguishes between long and short vowels, so if it were a suffix, it would be -aani in this case. -Lainen, on the other hand, is a suffix, roughly meaning "from or related to something". JIP | Talk 06:15, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Similar in Swedish, indier for 'Asian Indian (person)', indisk for 'A. Indian (adjective)', indian for 'Native American/ Indian person' and indiansk for 'NA Indian (adjective)'. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:41, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

90.208.90.29/87.81.230.195 -- I was told by a Greek teacher decades ago that modern Greek has separate words for the meaning "inhabitant of the island of Lesbos" and "woman who loves women" (not sure what those words are)... AnonMoos (talk) 23:41, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

• Linguists use the term Semantic overload for when a word or phrase has multiple distinct meanings which can only be discerned by context. The word "set" for example, is often cited as being the word in English with the most definitions, the OED has several hundred distinct meanings. Just about any word has at least 2-3 distinct definitions. Mississipian has at several more than the OP cites (a resident of the state of Mississippi, and relating to the Mississippi River, for example). People are actually quite adept at using context to determine what they are talking about. In a conversation about native American history, we understand Mississippian to mean something different than we do in a conversation about geology. People are usually not confused because words don't exist in isolation. They are spoken by people, in conversations or in writing passages, where there is LOTS of context clues to discern meaning. Does that mean, of the several hundreds of million English speakers, in all of history, no one has ever once been confused by the two meanings? No, I'm sure at least one person has at least one time. But on the balance, humans are shockingly adept at discerning meaning even if a word means different things in different contexts. --Jayron32 12:33, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm unshockable. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:27, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm quite positive thats disprovable with sufficient voltage. see what I did there? That's semantic overload at work--Jayron32 11:46, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Do you (or anyone) understand the distinction between semantic overload and polysemy?  --Lambiam 18:55, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Semantic overload and polysemy are distinguished by the semantic overloads that are not polysemes when their meanings are unrelated, and these would be homonyms. In other words, polysemes and homonyms are distinct subsets of semantic overloads. Modocc (talk) 09:29, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Another aspect that is a distinction to add to what Modocc has said is that semantic overload has an element of psycholinguistics built into it. Which is to say that what is being overloaded is, in some sense, a person's ability to extract meaning from an utterance. The sort of confusion that the OP expresses is a symptom of possible semantic overload. --Jayron32 11:44, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Can you give one or two examples of semantic overloads that are not polysemes, so that we can add them to the article Semantic overload? Currently, it merely states that the concepts are related without further elaboration. All examples given in the article are IMO also examples of polysemy.  --Lambiam 15:47, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

"Skate" is one example from our article on homonyms: "A distinction is sometimes made between true homonyms, which are unrelated in origin, such as skate (glide on ice) and skate (the fish), and polysemous homonyms, or polysemes, which have a shared origin, such as mouth (of a river) and mouth (of an animal)." Perhaps the cited references name more "true homonyms", I haven't looked yet but I know I have come across other examples. :) At the moment, I'm a tad too exhausted and distracted dealing with the machinery of various important tasks and gremlins. Modocc (talk) 16:05, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Here's an example: Gandalf's dying commandment "Fly, you fools!" from Bridge of Khazadum in Lord of the Rings. Fly in this context comes from the Old English "flion" meaning "to escape" (c.f. "flee") while there is a different word "fly" meaning "to soar through the air, from the Old English "fleogan". People think he's telling them to hitch a ride with the Eagles, because of semantic overload due to the two homonyms "fly" and "fly". --Jayron32 18:54, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

From "Some Enchanted Evening":

Some enchanted evening, when you find your true love

When you hear her call you across a crowded room

Then fly to her side and make her your own

Or all through your life, you may dream all alone.

-- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:18, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

I thought fly evolved to include any fast fleeing then evolved back or it was hyperbole. Guess not. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 12:43, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

A flea and a fly in a flue,

were trapped so what could they do?

"Let us flee" said the fly.

"Let us fly" said the flea.

So they fled through a flaw in the flue.

Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:49, 30 August 2022 (UTC)