I shouldn't post much about language.

[conuly]

The truth is that descriptivism only hides my real feelings, which is that as a New Yorker my speech is utterly perfect and everybody else's can be judged by how much it diverges from what we say in New York. I know, I know, everybody secretly (or not so secretly) thinks this about their own dialect, but it's only here that we're right when you think that. The rest of you are merely being provincial because you can't accept the utter rightness of New Yorkers in this respect.

Not sure if I'm being sarcastic or not? Neither am I!

But seriously (seriouslier), I'm now in the position of talking over in one place about whether or not it matters if we have a number marker in a word that no longer marks a specific number (well, it's either that or give up use of the word decimate entirely, don't you think?) and in the other about whether or not we can have a word without a meaning. That conversation will probably be shorter, which is why I'm posting it for general consumption: Words without any meaning attached whatsoever - are they still words? Yes, no, kflipin?

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

As a New Yorker, you speak one of a dozen or more New York dialects of English. They may not be as distinct and class-specific as London dialects, but they're still distinguishable even to the non-local ear. The accent that used to be the old-family linguistic marker in NYC is actually Dutch - I don't know if that's true any more, since everyone grows up with movies and TV, but time was, one could pick out the Dutch elements in the older peoples' speech. In Bryn Mawr, PA, the old-school 'society' accent is Welsh-influenced, because that's what all those Railroad Barons were, who built all those great houses along the fashionable Main Line.

I don't think any accent or dialect of English is more 'correct' than another: they're all correct in their own contexts and more-or-less incorrect outside them. Strong regional accents tend to seem provincial, whether from Bar Harbor or from Mobile, because they make it sound like the speaker's never left his or her hometown.

Words without any meaning attached are called 'nonsense words', and there are a lot of them in the folk-music tradition: toora loora ring-a-ma derry down, whack fol de rol fizoola and so on. They are definitely words, definitely part of the song, but they convey no sense and aren't intended to convey any. Outside of folk music and childrens' poetry, nonsense words don't serve much purpose - the first question an adult asks about an unfamiliar word is "What does it mean?", and if the answer is "Nothing", the reasonable response would be "Shut up then."

[conuly]

I was reading one of the Opie's books, on singing games (that might actually be the title, come to think) and they mention that one such game had a nonsense refrain that had, in a certain town, eventually morphed into "kiss my toe". And so the children did, even though the instruction made no sense whatsoever. The song said to kiss their toes every verse, right?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Sure, why not? Children have to listen to a lot of nonsense.. When I was little, I thought the second-to-last line of 'Silent Night' was "Sleep in heavenly teepee", because y'know those little creches one always sees, like a lean-to wickiup? Obviously that's what BabyJesus was sleeping in, and it had an angel on the roof, hence the 'heavenly', so I didn't question it till I learned to read and discovered my error. Who knew, right?

In grade school I learned the Revolutionary War song 'Buttermilk Hill', which has this chorus:

Shule, Shule, Shule a roo
Shule a rack shack
shule a barbecue
when I saw my sally babby beel
come bibble in the boo shy lorry

... wasn't till I was grown up that I learned the original song, 'Siúil A Rún', the chorus of which is:

Siúil, siúil, siúil a rún
Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin
Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom
Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán

... not that that's a bit better, but at least it does mean something in Gaelic, as opposed to meaning nothing in nothing because the American colonists didn't speak Gaelic but still had to sing something when the chorus came 'round.


'

[conuly]

The chorus I learned runs mostly in English.

Shule, shule, shule agra
Sure, oh sure, and he loves me
And when he comes back we'll married be
Johnny has gone for a soldier.

Which is definitely a lot less silly than what you learned first.

[conuly]

And yes, I know there are multiple NYC accents, though most of the "classic" ones have moved. (Don't believe people who tell you they're disappearing, that's absurd. It's just that as the people who speak that way get more money and move to Jersey, that's where the accent goes.)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

New York and New Jersey were still distinct accent-groups when I was a girl - in people my own age, even if they've lived in the West as long as me, I can still usually tell which of the New England/Atlantic states they grew up in. Not so much with the younger people - accents don't disappear, but they do blur, merge, mutate and lose their cohesive regional identities.

I should think one would find the oldest and purest 'original New York' accents still up along the Hudson, where they will have undergone less erosion than in the city proper. That's where the real old Knickerbockers migrated at the turn of the last century, and I'll bet that's where they still are. But even they have grown up with movies and TV in a very mobile society, so they won't have the kind of regional accent that develops when people never hear anyone from outside their region.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

as a New Yorker my speech is utterly perfect

See, I am CONVINCED that you're being sarcastic. XD

[pne.livejournal.com]

Words without any meaning attached whatsoever - are they still words?

What about modal particles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_particle), which don’t have a specific meaning attached them but “flavour” the entire sentence?

German is fond of them, and they’re notoriously difficult for speakers of other languages to master.

For example, the difference between “Das hab’ ich nicht gewusst” and “Das hab’ ich halt nicht gewusst”: on the surface, both mean, “I didn’t know that”, but the second is a bit more apologetic and marks the sentence as a reason due to the presence of the particle “halt”, which you can’t easily translate, and therefore arguably has no meaning of its own.

[conuly]

Hm... I'd say I don't know enough about this to offer an educated opinion, but my ignorant opinion which I'll stand by no matter what is that they're definitely words with meanings, but that German is just a strange dialect of Yiddish and therefore not really a language.

Also, that I have no idea what to really make of them and more research is clearly necessary. Wikipedia is not very helpful this time around, do you have another link?

[pne.livejournal.com]

Apparently, there’s even a Wikipedia article specifically on German modal particles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_modal_particle).

Here are a couple more things I found, which may or may not help:

An article from the Goethe Institute (http://www.goethe.de/ges/spa/siw/en6370073.htm) (which says that while they may have no specific meaning/semantic contribution to a sentence, not using them will make you sound un-German and wooden, so it’s worth mastering them if you want to speak German)

A book called “Abtönungspartikel” (http://books.google.de/books/about/Abt%C3%B6nungspartikel.html?id=UdgIMAEACAAJ&redir_esc=y) (which is another name for those German modal particles) on Google Books, which I can’t “look inside”, but which you might be able to

An article from a journal called “German modal particles and the common ground” (http://helikon-online.de/2012/Bross_Particles.pdf) (PDF format)

A forum discussion on wordreference.com (mostly on the particle ja (http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1064902) (my favourite bit was where, at the end, it contrasted the uses of ja in “Mach das ja nicht!” vs. “Franz macht das ja nicht.”: in the first, it’s accented and means something like “Don’t you dare”; in the second, it’s unaccented and means something like “as you know”)

A forum thread that’s really about something else (http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?258598-40k-In-the-Salzburg-Area) but where in the middle someone (a learner of German) calls modal particles “words that don’t really have a proper meaning but have to be in the sentence for it to maek sense”.

One of the sources (I think the Goethe Institute one) also doubted the claim that they can be removed from sentences without any loss; this may be true for scientific written German, perhaps, where you talk about facts, but in spontaneous spoken language, they play a vital part in “colouring” or “flavouring” discourse in various subtle ways.