Episode 9: Sandhi School

10/30/19 • 35 min

Today, Matt and Rowan talk about every sort of flavor in the ice cream Sandhi bar (ow! Rowan! that hurts!)

Sandhi is an umbrella term for phonological processes that occur at boundaries - between words (external sandhi, like in Sanskrit vowel blending) or within a word between morphemes (internal sandhi, like in Latin assimilation)

It can occur between two vowels (Sanskrit vowel blending, Latin elision, English intrusive R), between two consonants (Latin assimilation), between vowels and consonants together (French and Korean liaison, English linking R), between two tones (Mandarin tone sandhi), a weird mix of tones and syllable boundaries (Soyaltepec Mazatec tone sandhi), or even between two tones depending on consonants in between (Taiwanese Hokkien tone sandhi)

References:

Beal, Heather D. "The segments and tones of Soyaltepec Mazatec." (2012).

Today, Matt and Rowan talk about every sort of flavor in the ice cream Sandhi bar (ow! Rowan! that hurts!)

References:

Beal, Heather D. "The segments and tones of Soyaltepec Mazatec." (2012).

Previous Episode

Episode 8: Non-Default Case Marking

This episode has Matt and Rowan talking about case marking, a way to indicate what each noun is doing in the sentence. Specifically, what Matt refers to as "non-default case marking" - parts of languages where cases behave in ways that don't fit with their canonical uses in the rest of the language.

Paper mentioned: https://mitcho.com/subjex/aldridge.pdf

Many of the examples are from Ergativity by R.M.W. Dixon

Next Episode

Episode 10: Standard Average European

Join Rowan and Matt as they discuss the Standard Average European sprachbund (SAE). This is a language area that is centered mostly on Western European Romance and Germanic languages (think, French and German), but some features of it extend much farther into the Caucasus Mountains, etc.

Haspelmath's formulation of the sprachbund can be found in this paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247869081_The_European_linguistic_area_Standard_Average_European

A summary of that paper, intended for conlangers: http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/sae.html

Wikipedia for the overlapping (or subset, depending on definition) Balkan Sprachbund: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund

WALS chapter on Haspelmath's feature 12, intensive vs. reflexive pronouns: https://wals.info/chapter/47

WALS chapter on comparative constructions: https://wals.info/chapter/121

Paper on equative constructions: https://zenodo.org/record/814964/files/EquativeConstructions_2016b.pdf?download=1