KILL ME

I think it's tl;dr for
>english pronunciation makes no sense

>>9230073
English is a rather comical language because it's just a bunch of simple words that, when strung together and formed into derivatives, actually mean something profound? It wasn't developed to be very beautiful or whatever?

aaaaaaaaaaaaaa why are academics such utter wankers. JUST MAKE IT SIMPLE AND STOP TRYING TO FLEX MUH VOCAB

>>9230073
English uses punctuation marks that break up phrases, sentences, etc., and others like question marks and exclamation points that affect intonation and change meaning for a listener (like upward inflection to indicate you are reading a question). More or less.

>>9230296
THANK YOU. I've been trying to google these terms and most of them don't even exist on google (except morphemes which has an extremely vague definition that doesn't seem to correlate with what is trying to be said here)

File: 1488685097269.gif (3MB, 480x270px) Image search: [Google]

3MB, 480x270px

kek why the fuck does every Professor Asshole, PHD feel the need to write like this?

>>9230307
because that's how you write about linguistics? it's like saying "why do these physics professors always have a bunch of asshole equations in their papers, wtf is up with that, can't they just explain it in english without all the math?"

>>9230321
I'm not even doing a linguistics course though. This is part of my English major. I have no knowledge of linguistics yet the readings assume a comprehensive knowledge of all these fucking terms.

File: 1475465639660.gif (54KB, 750x264px) Image search: [Google]

54KB, 750x264px

>>9230306
Roughly speaking, morphemes is a term often used for smallest writing units ("letters/characters") that don't represent a sound. For instance "e" is a phoneme: it has no meaning beyond its pronunciations, so our language is mostly made up of phonemes. Japanese, on the other hand, is mostly morphemes, because their ideograms represent concepts and not just sounds. But some of our symbols are morphemetic (like semicolons): they affect meaning but have no verbal aspect. You can't really say a semicolon, except as a small pause. Question marks, however, don't have their own phonological feature ("sound") but they affect the way you say the words before them (upward inflection) so they are intonational morphemes.
I enjoy this paratextual shit.

>>9230321

Three people in the thread rewrote that sentence in a way that the average undergrad and any professor could read and comprehend.

>>9230110
>>9230124
>>9230296


So why go with the original option with might as well be ancient greek to most students?

>>9230323
morphemes are the bits of meaning like adding "post" to something makes it after, or adding "ing" to a verb makes it function as a noun (a gerund) etc. whole phonemes are the sounds of the language, which in english, and probably most germanic languages happen to correspond to our alphabet, but other writing system like chinese or arabic, etc. do not, not sure what the segmental shit is about, but i'm my linguistic knowledge comes from natural language processing, not human language understanding

>>9230307
Libarts majors need to keep the facade of being useful to society.

If paratext interests you, start with Jerome McGann (Black Riders), and then go for Johanna Drucker. They really redpill semiotics and paratext with some humour and style.

>>9230326
Thank you so much. This actually makes sense to me. Do you know any sources that will help me understand this shit easier?

>>9230323
they are pricks looking to give you a hard time to "weed you out lmao"

>>9230356
>Roughly speaking, morphemes is a term often used for smallest writing units ("letters/characters") that don't represent a sound.

he's wrong tho, morphemes are the parts of that combine to make their meaning, they are not "alphabet sounds". "ing" is not a letter, "pre" is not a letter, "homo" is not a letter, and so on and so forth

>>9230369
the saddest part is simply googling the definition of morpheme would have revealed this:

a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided (e.g., in, come, -ing, forming incoming ).

>>9230073
segmental morpheme: something like 'dog' or 's' in 'dogs'

segmental phonological features onto which those map: /dag/ and /z/

intonational morpheme: polar question marker

intonational phonological feature onto which it maps: rising intonation at end of questions: compare 'You are wet' to 'Are you wet?'

>>9230372
>'You are wet' to 'Are you wet?'

this doesn't tell anything about intonation tho, you are wet with a rising tone is a question just as much as are you wet is

>>9230375
The statement 'you are wet' has a falling intonation. You CAN question it, 'you are wet?' but that wasn't what I was talking about, and it's a different construction

File: 1480733201377.jpg (134KB, 550x535px) Image search: [Google]

134KB, 550x535px

>>9230307
>No girl will ever look at you the way that Asian girl looks at hitchens
Why even live lads

>>9230323
So what? you want someone to make a more accessible version of every academic text just so you don't have to work as hard? And at the risk of losing information. Scientists use those words so that everyone knows exactly what they're talking about all of the time. Its consistent. Discussing linguistics would be a mess without an agreed upon and defined set of terms.