Yes, “beh” is what goats say 
Don’t they say “waf” or “woef” here? “Blaf” is more like the verb, similar to “bark” in English.
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Why would it not be the case? It’s the basis of dialect continuums, i.e. the way languages actually exist on this planet. You don’t even need to search for any examples because the entire world is flooded with them, including the english speaking countries in case it’s the only language that you speak (and can search it up in).
Both, I’d say. If someone was imitating a dog and said “blaf blaf blaf”, that doesn’t sound that strange to me.
Why would it be the case?
You could make the hypothesis that one starts with two separate language, that merge together in the middle, and form a dialect continuum (compare it to water paint mixing). Or you could make the hypothesis that there is one language spread over an area, and that local changes maken tthis language drift apart more and more (compare it to how species form through evolution and geographical separation).
On Wikipedia the dialect continuum is described as:
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be.
which seems to suggest that differences accumulate over time, causing differentiation between languages / dialects.
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There is also a phenomenon called “sprachbund”, where geographically close languages can “contaminate” each other with some feature, even when the languages are from different families. An example is the pronunciation of “r” as [ʁ] in both French and German (and some Dutch variants), where in many other Germanic and Romance languages “r” is pronounced as [r].
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It’s a fairly confirmed thing in linguistics because you can observe it on the borderlines between all languages, unless it was artificially levelled. But since you still have doubts here are some basic reads:
Here’s a map with european dialects. Diglossia is more than anticipated on the borders between all of these dialects, as well as mixed sociolects, and it’s also easy to find resemblance of the neighbouring language in phonology and grammar: Europe - Carte linguistique / Linguistic map
As for examples, I wanted to dig into some obscure italian dialects bordering slavic and german countries, but actually there’s a much simpler example, the romanian language. The phonology is close to 80% slavic (a separate language group), the vocabulary is partially slavic too, but the language is romance at its core. It’s often thought of as being more OG comparing to other vulgar latin dialects even, despite its phonology. It’s unintelligible to slavic people but it’s fairly intelligible with other vulgar latin languages and it’d be on par with couples like italian-spanish if it wasn’t for the abundance of slavic origin words.
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The question of the sound of V and B in Latin is very interesting.
As you guys know, I’m no kind of expert at all.
Here is Luke Ranieri’s amateur reconstruction of the changing identities of the letters, from his phonological shift table.
For V, he seems to suggest six different possible or parallel progressions, though I’m not entirely confident in interpreting the data presentation. They might represent differences in location, class or social register.
As you can see, he has /w/ being lost by the end of the 200s, and /v/ appearing in the mid-late 100s, and a variety of intermediate forms being in use for much of the time.
I brought up the issue on Discord a couple of weeks ago, and received this response:
From I BC (Figulus) to Cicero the W sound is unanimously attested, but we know that in early Augustan period we have a V sound, but only in poor quality inscriptions like Graffiti… As late as the Fifth Century the sound is still described as vocalic in its Proper pronunciation (Consentius: K. V. 394)… So: the V sound existed since the 1AD (the golden age), but the W sound was always considered the proper way to speak Latin until at least the Vth century.
My wont right now is basically to try to sound a bit like a Germanic slave working in a tavern in Rome some time between 100 and 400 CE, so I use /v/ (and well as dropping all H-es).
For the evolution of B, Luke only lists a progression of its intervocalic occurrence. As you can see, in his opinion B never had the value /w/, even though it could have converged with V onto a different sound.
Sources cited for the table as a whole are:
- Vox Latina
- Social Variation and the Latin Language
- An Anthology of Informal Latin
- The Regional Diversification of Latin
- The Roman Pronunciation of Latin
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On another note, Latin has very predictable stress.
It can be described by the “penultimate stress rule”.
Consider moraic phonology, like in Japanese: a consonant is one mora, a short vowel is one mora, and a long vowel is two morae. As I understand it, a long syllable has at least three morae.
- If the penultimate (second to last) syllable is long, it’s stressed.
- If the penultimate syllable is short, the antepenultimate (third to last) is stressed.
What are stress rules in other languages?
I don’t feel confident in assigning any guidelines to English’ stress pattern.
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I’m not sure, but I think in Dutch usually the first long vowel in a word is stressed. But in Romance loanwords, I think stress can shift towards the last long vowel in a word.
In French, the stress is on the last vowel unless it’s mute. However the stress is very light compared to other languages, it almost sounds like there is no stress at all.
Can’t have a thread without a good shitpost.
I wonder what languages still retain both of these. Russian does.
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平々凡々
Japanese is a real language, I promise.
I can’t resist making the link…
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I’m glad I’m not an English native speaker, so I don’t see all grammar mistakes! On the other hand I can detect almost all spelling mistakes, and that’s rather annoying.
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You cannot have only benefits as an international language.
I’m pretty sure this would apply to any language.
I understood it to mean that native speakers of any language feel a stress response to grammar errors due to your native language grammar not really being learned exactly but acquired deep understanding from early childhood and so feels innate.
Yes of course, but on an international forum like this, participants make more mistakes than if everyone used their native language.
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