5 ms·

It's fascinating, but I wonder how one accounts for bad poets or works that otherwise cheat a good rhyme for artistic reasons? Surely linguists 500 years from n

It's fascinating, but I wonder how one accounts for bad poets or works that otherwise cheat a good rhyme for artistic reasons? Surely linguists 500 years from now aren't wouldn't want to look back on 2chainz's "My favorite dish is turkey lasagna / Even my pajamas designer" and decide that "lasagna" and "designer" rhymed. (I mean, they'll have recordings, but you get the idea).

cylon13 6y ago
They kinda do rhyme with the right enunciation. How is that bad poetry or cheating? Language is complex and bending how you say things is part of good rhyme. I imagine historical linguists are very familiar with this and factor it into their work.
- ggm 6y ago
  Patrick OBrien wrote historical Napoleonic naval fiction and got obsessive about verified facts from letters. He writes of a captain who cannot stand an "arriviste" lieutenant who stresses balcony on the first syllable not the last. These kinds of things exist right back to roman rhetoric, written accounts of the "nice" way to say things.
  - gerikson 6y ago
    Calling Tom Pullings "arriviste" is a slander. He was already a master's mate (midshipman) at the beginning of the series, and advanced through a combination of excellent seamanship and Aubrey's patronage (not always a positive thing!). If anyone was "arriviste" it was the captain who complained who arrived at his station mainly through birth and class instead of seamanship.
    - ggm 6y ago
      It's his class which defines him, not his competency. The captain can't stand a man who breaks social class barriers, the question of his "rank" goes to the socialised meaning, not the naval one. Pronunciation was a class thing.
- sellyme 6y ago
  > They kinda do rhyme with the right enunciation. Which is a somewhat more positive way of saying that they rhyme with the wrong enunciation. Which is a totally valid way to construct lyrics in music - you have a bit of artistic leeway and the exact "correct" pronunciation isn't exactly important - but it's probably not too helpful for a listener who's trying to work out how those words were actually spoken in conversation. That said, I'd be far more concerned about a future linguist discovering Prisencolinensinainciusol.
  - ggm 6y ago
    Future linguists are going to be dealing with americanised Korean and Chinese. Mandarin and Cantonese share orthography and not much else. I still don't understand how Portuguese and Spanish speakers can understand each other. Farsi speakers tell me Dari speakers (one of the Afghani languages along with Pashto) sound like they speak with a 16th century accent. Greek has Demotic and Katharevousa. Louis de Bernieres writes in "Captain Correli's mandolin" implying that the English officers in ww2 sounded to the Greek peasantry like Shakespearean actors, all taught Greek in boarding school, but only speaking "high" Katharevousa Greek, not the common Demotic. He does this by using archaic English writing. English code switching .. is that really that different yo? Yeet me out of here. Valley girl speak.. the list of dialect and pronunciation in contemporary US culture of the last 50 years is immense.
    - barry-cotter 6y ago
      > I still don't understand how Portuguese and Spanish speakers can understand each other. I bet that without a relatively large amount of exposure they can’t and then suddenly it’s really obvious what the other person is saying. That’s my experience listening to Nigerian English. Didn’t realise the guy working next to me was speaking English with his compatriot for two weeks and then suddenly I understood. Written Portuguese and Spanish are very similar, like Norwegian and Danish levels of similar, or Scots and English.
      - szopa 6y ago
        One interesting thing about Portuguese and Spanish is that the comprehension isn't symmetrical: Portuguese speakers understand Spanish ones all right, but vice versa is a bit of a struggle.
woah 6y ago
They do rhyme
jfengel 6y ago
It's always a hazard. All reconstructions have to be taken with a grain of salt. "Slant rhymes" like this have been used throughout history. Shakespeare is known to have used them in some places: some of his rhymes aren't consistent through his works. It does help that sound change isn't arbitrary. When one sound changes, other sounds change as well. An entire category of consonants may lose or gain voicing, or shift in point of articulation. When one vowel changes to another, a lot of words can become homonyms, so usually every single vowel changes at once. These are called Chain Shifts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_shift So a single instance of a rhyme is a weak piece of evidence, but when you take into account all of the texts at the time -- and the texts from surrounding times, both before and after -- you can make a good hypothesis. That hypothesis can then be tested against future discoveries, and modify as appropriate. That's why all Proto Indo European reconstructions are marked with an * to say "We've never actually heard this word so we don't know if anybody ever said it". They're aware that all hypotheses are tentative. But that's how progress is made.

cylon13 6y ago

They kinda do rhyme with the right enunciation. How is that bad poetry or cheating? Language is complex and bending how you say things is part of good rhyme. I imagine historical linguists are very familiar with this and factor it into their work.

ggm 6y ago
Patrick OBrien wrote historical Napoleonic naval fiction and got obsessive about verified facts from letters. He writes of a captain who cannot stand an "arriviste" lieutenant who stresses balcony on the first syllable not the last. These kinds of things exist right back to roman rhetoric, written accounts of the "nice" way to say things.
- gerikson 6y ago
  Calling Tom Pullings "arriviste" is a slander. He was already a master's mate (midshipman) at the beginning of the series, and advanced through a combination of excellent seamanship and Aubrey's patronage (not always a positive thing!). If anyone was "arriviste" it was the captain who complained who arrived at his station mainly through birth and class instead of seamanship.
  - ggm 6y ago
    It's his class which defines him, not his competency. The captain can't stand a man who breaks social class barriers, the question of his "rank" goes to the socialised meaning, not the naval one. Pronunciation was a class thing.
sellyme 6y ago
> They kinda do rhyme with the right enunciation. Which is a somewhat more positive way of saying that they rhyme with the wrong enunciation. Which is a totally valid way to construct lyrics in music - you have a bit of artistic leeway and the exact "correct" pronunciation isn't exactly important - but it's probably not too helpful for a listener who's trying to work out how those words were actually spoken in conversation. That said, I'd be far more concerned about a future linguist discovering Prisencolinensinainciusol.
- ggm 6y ago
  Future linguists are going to be dealing with americanised Korean and Chinese. Mandarin and Cantonese share orthography and not much else. I still don't understand how Portuguese and Spanish speakers can understand each other. Farsi speakers tell me Dari speakers (one of the Afghani languages along with Pashto) sound like they speak with a 16th century accent. Greek has Demotic and Katharevousa. Louis de Bernieres writes in "Captain Correli's mandolin" implying that the English officers in ww2 sounded to the Greek peasantry like Shakespearean actors, all taught Greek in boarding school, but only speaking "high" Katharevousa Greek, not the common Demotic. He does this by using archaic English writing. English code switching .. is that really that different yo? Yeet me out of here. Valley girl speak.. the list of dialect and pronunciation in contemporary US culture of the last 50 years is immense.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    > I still don't understand how Portuguese and Spanish speakers can understand each other. I bet that without a relatively large amount of exposure they can’t and then suddenly it’s really obvious what the other person is saying. That’s my experience listening to Nigerian English. Didn’t realise the guy working next to me was speaking English with his compatriot for two weeks and then suddenly I understood. Written Portuguese and Spanish are very similar, like Norwegian and Danish levels of similar, or Scots and English.
    - szopa 6y ago
      One interesting thing about Portuguese and Spanish is that the comprehension isn't symmetrical: Portuguese speakers understand Spanish ones all right, but vice versa is a bit of a struggle.

woah 6y ago

They do rhyme

jfengel 6y ago

It's always a hazard. All reconstructions have to be taken with a grain of salt. "Slant rhymes" like this have been used throughout history. Shakespeare is known to have used them in some places: some of his rhymes aren't consistent through his works. It does help that sound change isn't arbitrary. When one sound changes, other sounds change as well. An entire category of consonants may lose or gain voicing, or shift in point of articulation. When one vowel changes to another, a lot of words can become homonyms, so usually every single vowel changes at once. These are called Chain Shifts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_shift So a single instance of a rhyme is a weak piece of evidence, but when you take into account all of the texts at the time -- and the texts from surrounding times, both before and after -- you can make a good hypothesis. That hypothesis can then be tested against future discoveries, and modify as appropriate. That's why all Proto Indo European reconstructions are marked with an * to say "We've never actually heard this word so we don't know if anybody ever said it". They're aware that all hypotheses are tentative. But that's how progress is made.