Reposted by lɪl
I'm so glad Bonny Sands' 'Click Consonants' book starts with this. Now I can cite it as scientific fact.
lɪl
@lilloolooet.bsky.social
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English | 日本語 | 中文 | español Every time I look in the mirror I feel nauseous Every time I look in the mirror I see monsters
![One solution to the dilemma might be to create a new English word that intentionally has all the ambiguities of fangyan. This John DeFrancis has attempted to do in his important recent book, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, where he ingeniously proposes "regionalect".15 As an alternative, I would suggest "topolect", which -- aside from being fully Greek in its derivation -- has the added advantage of being neutral with regard to the size of the place that is designated whereas "region" refers only to a rather large area. Both of these words patently represent efforts to render the literal semantic content of fangyan. Their drawback is that they do not fit into established Western schemes for the categorization of languages.
Another solution would be for linguistics writing in Chinese to devise a more etymologically precise translation for "dialect" (e.g., xiangyan ["mutual-speech"]), but it is highly unlikely that such an unnatural coinage would make any sense to all but an extremely small circle of cognoscenti. Or fangyan could be rigorously redefined so as to match "dialect" more exactly, but it might be difficult to detach the word from its long heritage of a much broader signification. In Chinese passages that are not written according to the standards and practices of modern linguistic science. On the other hand, in analyses that are originally composed in English, we should eschew such usages and concepts of language taxonomy that they imply. We must do so in order to avoid mixing two different, and partially incompatible, systems of classification.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:svjc22rncygecys3egf44x66/bafkreieasdxoyrnnd6bgyliflvqda2sgjigchpo3ytly66w7wuflfhicfe)
![Screenshot from The Interplay of Morphology and Phonology, p.139
Henry, professional football (soccer) player), Lori → Lolo (Lori Jones, track and field athlete), Sisleide → Sisi (Sisleide do Amor Lima, professional football (soccer) player), and LeBron → Bron-Bron (professional basketball player). One could argue that Didi, Coco, etc. were previously established nicknames that were assigned to Dietmar and Covelli on the basis of alliteration; however, LeBron is an uncommon name and the nickname Bron-Bron appears to have been created on the fly for this particular athlete.
Double truncation of this kind has been attested as an established grammatical construction in several languages. Perhaps the most striking comes from Guarijio (Uto-Aztecan, Tarahumaran) inceptive reduplication, which applies to verbs denoting iterated punctual events (Caballero 2007; data from Miller 1996: 65–6):
(30)
toní ‘to boil’ to-tó ‘to start boiling’ [Guarijio]
sibá ‘to scratch’ si-sí ‘to start scratching’
čonó ‘to fry (INTR)’ čo-čó ‘to start frying’
nogá ‘to move’ no-nó ‘to start moving’
kusú ‘to sing (animals)’ ku-kú ‘to start singing’
suhku ‘to scratch body’ su-sú ‘to start scratching the body’
muhíba ‘to throw’ mu-mú ‘to start throwing’
According to Caballero (2007: 278), “There is no independent process of truncation in the language, and the base is only shortened in this reduplicative construction.” These Guarijio inceptives are thus structurally parallel to Bron-Bron, but without the wordplay dimension that can enter into nickname formation.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:svjc22rncygecys3egf44x66/bafkreicmvhbsvjie4o6ptlwjegakk2bx6ivnj3jionero2xahsph332pim)
