What’s an intonational morpheme?
…so asked one of the people in my prosody class during my presentation today of Gussenhoven’s 2002 paper on biological codes and universal vs. language-specific intonational meanings.
My response? “It’s a…a…an intonational thing that carries meaning.” I was looking for the word unit, grr. Instead, the whole class laughed at me. D’oh.
emma :: Mar.13.2007 :: misc, phonology, linguistics :: 16 Comments »
Romance/Germanic word derivational ridicule—good old English ;-)
‘Unit’ doesn’t have the same meaning as ‘thing’; it has a more specific meaning and is also not a common filler word. Maybe it has more to do with that than elitism about romance-derived words?
Would they have laughed if she had said ‘entity?’
Yes, yes, of course ‘unit’ and ‘thing’ have different meanings. And ‘unit’ is the better word in this context. But no-one would have laughed had she said (and had the group understood) « C’est quelque chose d’intonationelle qui porte de signification » or ‚Es ist was betonung-spezifisches dass Bedeutung trägt‘, both just as informal and as unclear as ‘thing.’
I don’t know French or German well enough to comment on those examples, but as for ‘entity’: like ‘unit’, it is also not a generic filler word the way ‘thing’ is.
Now it may or may not be the case that our filler words are all of Germanic origin because of some long-ago elitism; I have no idea. But even if that is the case, the issue here seems to me to be the status of ‘thing’ as a filler word and is not directly related to etymology.
… it is also not a generic filler word the way ‘thing’ is.
‘Thing’ isn’t a generic filler word. It means something. Saying ‘thing’ where you would say ‘uhh’ or ‘ehh’ or ‘I mean’ sounds idiotic or quirky, it’s not typical. And, to be honest, if you can’t compare the context to a similar one in a language without English’s particular set of Romance/Germanic hangups, I don’t think your perspective on this is informed.
So pretty much, I think I’m going to start using “thing” as a filler word because of how quirky it will be :-)
I do agree that probably why everybody laughed was due to “thing”’s status in (American) English. “Something”, even, might have been better. But “a thing” = “something”, and something is in no way vacuous semantically, so though I could have been maybe more precise in word choice, I didn’t say anything completely low in information content. Therefore, those who laugh at me shall be punched :-)
Jeez, wanna talk about elitism? Remember, there are other languages besides German and French. You’re not smarter and more world-wise than everybody else just because you can speak those two.
Fine, ‘filler word’ is the wrong term. I apologize for accidentally using a technical term when I meant something else. The point is, it can stand in for almost any noun, while ‘entity’ (in its colloquial usage) and ‘unit’ can’t. That may historically be because of their etymologies, but I guarantee you the students weren’t thinking “Hah, listen to that stupid girl using those stupid Germanic words! She’d sound much smarter if she used something derived from a Romance language!”.
If your point is only that the set of such words we find to be laughable coincides with the set of such words with a Germanic origin, then I’m not saying you’re wrong. But it sounded to me like you meant that modern speakers of English actually have some elitism regarding the ’superiority’ of latinate words over Germanic ones. That’s impossible, simply because a good number of speakers of English don’t even know that English has Germanic origins.
A good number of speakers of English couldn’t articulate the difference between a relative clause and a hole in a ground; that doesn’t prevent them from using relative clauses, though. It may be that no such elitism exists; however, when English is being taught as a second language (at least in this part of the world) talking about the rough distinction and the association of Germanic with the everyday and Romance (with Greek-based words) with literary, high culture is perceived as useful, which is an empirical mark in its favour.
Well, if you’re in a position where you can relate the phenomenon to other languages, please do so. I do think cross-linguistic comparison is useful in these things; if you speak Japanese, for example, is there a different feeling to the word ‘tobacco’ than to other borrowings from Western languages, as a consequence of it being written with Kanji rather than Katakana?
Oops, my mistake—there exist Kanji for ‘tobacco’: ç…™è‰, but today apparently it’s mostly written using Katakana.
It’s interesting that the etymologies are taught to ESL learners. But I can tell you for a fact that very few native speakers (at least of American English) know anything about it. And even if they do, they don’t give it any conscious thought. I personally know that the two groups of words exist, but until now never had any idea that the split in etymologies corresponded to a split in register, except for the tons of latin medical terms.
Note that they aren’t; which is not actually a problem if you’re coming from a Germanic language that’s less of a mongrel, because you’ll often recognise the cognates and say to yourself ‘ah, Germanic.’
Oh right, duh. I forgot that you were talking about Germanic speakers.
aaron,
in no way does asserting that germanically derived words have a higher status in english than romance derived words entail that this is something english speakers need to have conscious knowledge of. some words are just fancier than others, and this tends to have significant overlap with their etymological history and the introduction of romance vocab (both french and latin) into english after the norman conquest.
this is a pretty common and widely accepted way to look at these things.
Simon, I suspect you meant the inverse there :-) .
thanks aidan. indeed i did.
Simon, I realize that.
“If your point is only that the set of such words we find to be laughable coincides with the set of such words with a Germanic origin, then I’m not saying you’re wrong.”
It just sounded like Aidan meant something stronger than that.