Pavel Iosad

Join my campaign to enable this English by forcing people to acknowledge that ‘wee’ is a Standard English diminutive.

The sound patterns of Slavic and the origins of generative phonology The history of generative phonology is usually told as a more or less uninterrupted line that begins in Prague, moves to Massachusetts with Roman Jakobson and, by way of Morris Halle’s Sound Pattern of Russian, leads to Chomsky & Halle‘s Sound Pattern of English. But histories do not work that way: there are always forks in the road and paths not taken. The importance of Slavic languages in the history of phonology is often recognized; in this talk, I explore how developments in the analysis of Slavic phonologies hold up a mirror to the generative mainstream, which, I argue, should be considered just one of a family of approaches that took their lead from Jakobsonian ideas. Slavic phonologists rejected some aspects of the generative phonological enterprise, but their proposals could also prefigure what was to be rediscovered by generativists, often decades later. I argue that this demonstrates that these currents in Slavic phonology must be considered equal members of the same broad tradition as mainstream generative theory.

I’m giving a talk on how the study of Slavic phonology relates to the history of generative phonology, on Zoom next Tuesday (10th March), noon CST/6pm GMT. Abstract in alt text.

I obviously have no judgements re _yarmulke_, but surely it’s not *completely* true that English can’t have exceptional antepenult stress despite a closed penult? Cf. the cylinder-colander-lavender group.

With ME as long as you get the words you can arrange them in an order that sort of makes sense, OE is just soup.

Unlikely it would help much. Old English stops making sense compared even to Middle English not just because of the words (where the advantage from a different Germanic language isn’t that great anyway) but also bc there’s so much unfamiliar grammar stuck on that you stop seeing the roots reliably.

Yeah fair (my own handwriting is appalling so I can relate). Still, it’s a big inequality how it seems very few students we see at UG were ever taught anything at all serious about stuff like note taking and study skills, seems like they’re mostly left to figure it out even in quite posh schools.

Coming from a continental background (Russia) now teaching in the UK, we had oral exams for *everything* but I honestly have sufficient trouble ensuring *somewhat* consistent marking of written work for a 300 UGs course, shudder to think about doing it viva voce (even assuming workload is solved)

Not just the repeating: synthesising and thinking through as you go is where the learning happens. It’s not necessarily laptop vs handwritten, though the affordance of the laptop pushes you towards mindless stenography (which is less useful).

don’t be giving them ideas

Borshch in a fuck off massive thing of rye bread is how I knew the long years of Russification were powerless against my quarter Ukrainian heritage.

Witness Edinburgh where the ‘contribution rate’ for the College of AHSS is over 50% but the ‘future size and shape principles’ insist that subjects pay their own way or else. Who’s going to pay your 50%+ contribution when you’ve culled all the ‘loss-making’ programmes?

Ooh, good to know, thanks! In town shortly for the half marathon, looks worth a visit.

*in extremis

It’s all of these and more, agree — and people will have different priorities in this set, of course. I do like Campbell’s formulation that the central question of historical linguistics (understood very broadly, including eg large bits of typology) is ‘what happened?’.

Right, but the ‘same explanatory power’ caveat is doing very, very large amounts of work here. We’ll never know the past for sure, but I’m not sure I draw the same fully pessimistic conclusion. In extremes that’s just giving up on any historical enquiry (not just in linguistics).

We know so little about how language Really Works that such claims have no real basis. Armchair linguistics as a method is a completely appropriate way of exploring parts of the elephant. It just has to be good science that does not simply ignore results from other methods (and vice versa!).

Well, Honeybone 2022 says there isn’t any, really, and that’s quite all right www.lel.ed.ac.uk/homes/patric...

I would also gently push back on synchronic modelling being a complete Glasperlenspiel. I think any hard-headed This Is What’s Real And You’re Just Playing Games is basically a delusion.

Right, that’s what I mean when I say ‘feeds into’. You’re allowed to signal the uncertainty or to say ‘this isn’t “minimal” but here’s why I think that’s what happened’, you’re just not strictly doing comparative reconstruction any more.

Eh. The end game of the comparative method is the reconstruction-as-minimal-model. This is distinct from the end game of historical-linguistics-as-cognitive-reconstruction (Honeybone 2011), which is more ‘what was this language actually like?’. The former feeds into the latter but they’re both legit

Čym być hočaš? — Nia być skotam!

I have definitely had ‘fish tea’

[bale] ‘yes, yea’
Spaniards 🤝 Nabataeans

Very glad that the volume ‘The Reconstruction of Indo-European Stop Systems: From the Traditional Model to Glottalic Theories’ (edited by Tijmen Pronk and myself) has now appeared.

brill.com/display/titl...

Looking forward to hearing reactions to it!

Do orcs have fëa, longest thread in the history of forums <a single shot rings out>

It’s the laryngeal theory of Turkic comparative grammar, don’t look for consensus where you didn’t put it.

Locally, yes. Structurally, no. Unless there is a reckoning of some kind it will just shamble on with increasing divergence across fields, institutions and departments, as skills get lost to attrition, networks deteriorate and solidarity frays through the sheer grind of it all.

It does. That’s what I mean I say the UKHE model is dead. You can’t do all this research-led, high-autonomy stuff when you are Big School with large, standardised, prescribed courses. It a possible model! Just a different one. But no-one’s willing to front destroying the UK’s distinctive advantage.

and (3) is (disappointingly) being given up in a fit of pre-emptive compliance. So we do (2), except no-one wants to be the one to say out loud that this is the choice they’re making.

It’s basically true, I think, that UKHE has run up against the limits of the current model. We can choose only two out of sustaining massification, maintaining the distinctive student and staff experience of the UK system, or spending more money. No-one (really, despite rhetoric) is for (1)

I feel like it’s a combination of that and carefully tended Soviet Anglophilia (along the lines of ‘Livanov is the best Sherlock Holmes, even the English say that’).