Link Haul - Old English Mann and Japanese Long Vowels

Some interesting links I've found this month.

Old English Mann

"Mann and Gender in Old English Prose: A Pilot Study" - A look at the use of the word 'mann' in Old English hagiographies and  whether it was applied to mean "man" (as in male human) or "person." It appears that mann was often used in the same way we would use "person" today, though it had already begun taking on the implication of "male." Contrary to my expectations, there are actual references to women as "mann," though they are not common. As such, "mann" in Old English appears to be genuinely gender neutarl. 

Contrast this with something like "generic he." We may say "a student must carry his books" to refer to a generic student, but "a kindergarten teacher must care for his students" sounds odd, even though "kindergarten teacher" is not gendered like words such as "mother." This is because we know, in real life, that most kindergarten teachers are women and not men. This shows that "generic he" is not gender-neutral but "masculine as default." "mann," in contrast, is genuinely gender neutral as it can be applied to women:

Þæs dohter wæs gehaten Ercongota halifemne, & wundorlic man.
(this daughter was called Eorcengota holywoman, and wonderful man)
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Peterborough continuation) • Oxford, Laud Misc., year 636.

Several other female saints are described in similar terms in the Old English corpus, for example, Helen and Agatha by Ælfric: His modor wæs cristen. Elena gehaten. swiðe gelyfed mann. and ðearle eawfæst; ‘his [i.e. Constantine’s] mother was a Christian; [she was] called Helen, a very devout individual and firmly pious;’ and Hwæt ða Agathes inwerdlice clypode mid astrehtum handum to þam Hælende þus, Eala ðu min drihten, þe me to menn gesceope; ‘Well then Agatha called inwardly thus to the Saviour with her hands stretched out: Oh you my Lord, who made me a human being’. Of the holy woman Romula it is said that seo wæs wundorlicre geþylde man, ‘she was a person of amazing patience’. Mary of Egypt says of herself ic eom wifhades mann, ‘I am a female human being’.

The word 'mann' emphasized the humanity of a person, whereas the words 'wif' and 'wer' emphasized their sex. The paper elaborates on the consequences of this as applied to descriptors of Jesus. Referring to Jesus as 'mann' foregrounds his humanity. In contrast, Jesus is not referred to as 'wer', presumably because it is not relevant to foreground his male-ness. Angels are explicitly not called 'mann' as they are not human.

Numerous references to Christ as mann can easily be located in the corpus of Old English prose, and are clearly linked to the concept of his humanity. His identity as the Son of Man appears as mannes sunu in Old English (ca. 153 occurrences), in a clear example of gender-neutral mann, here understood to refer to the Virgin Mary and her human ancestry; the hypothetical weres sunu by contrast seems to be unattested in connection with Christ, which is unsurprising since Christ cannot possibly be the son of a gender-specific wer, a human male.

There are already examples of 'mann' acquiring the masculine connotation it would have in the future.

he genam hi þa onsundron and sæde hyre gewislice hwæt heo man ne wæs and hwylcere mægþe
He took her to one side and told her firmly that she was no male and (asked her) what kind she was

I recommend reading the paper for more; it's very insightful.

Origins of Japanese Vowel Length

The Japanese long vowels ei and ou. I have been studying kanji recently, and noticed something curious. The 'on' (Chinese) readings often had long vowels, such as 'shuu', 'shou', 'tei', while the 'lun' readings rarely had those long vowels. I wondered if these long vowels were a result of the borrowing (and thus later introduced into Japanese). This blog post has the following to say about the origins of the long vowels 'ou' and 'ei':

[...] if you take a closer look at -ei, you will find that these pronunciations have Chinese origins, writes Shota Kumono:

First group: 英 (えい), 精 (せい), 兵 (へい), 霊 (れい), etc.
Second group: 系 (けい), 制 (さい), 低 (てい), 例 (れい), etc.

The first group came from the Chinese -ng coda. As Japanese does not have an -ng coda, and has not developed the moraic nasal ん back when these characters were borrowed (the time of Go-on and Kan-on), the -ng coda of Chinese became -i or -u depending on the preceding vowel sound: it becomes i after /e/ and u after /a/, /u/* and /o/. [...] Here are the TCC (Chinese) pronunciations of the above kanji:

英 yēng, 精 dsiēng, 兵 piēng, 霊 liēng
系 ghêi, 制 cêi, 低 tê̄i, 例 lêi

As you can see, the -ng in such cases and the -i from Chinese both got borrowed into Sino-Japanese as -i.

I wonder if this is influenced by pre-velar raising. Meanwhile, when it comes to 'ou', the case is a little different. It is caused partially by vowel deletion and partially by borrowing from Chinese:

About the case with “ou”, it’s a bit different. Interpreting what Shota Kumono has written, /o:/ did not originally exist in native Japanese. This makes sense, as Japanese syllables originally consisted of a consonant-vowel structure. In modern Japanese, vowels aren’t necessarily preceded by a consonant.

The modern /o:/ came from 3 sources:
1. Historical お row + ほ (modern お row + お)
2. Historical お row + を (modern お row + お)
3. Chinese -ung (通 rime; TCC -ung or -ong), -âu, -au, -əu, etc.

Interesting! If I'm reading the blog post correctly, this means that words written with 'oo' (おおい - ooi, many) and 'ee' (ねえ - nee, sister) are native Japanese words. This certainly explains the preponderance of long vowels in the 'on' readings for Kanji.

Party Games for Linguists

I recently encountered the following party game: Mumbo Jumbo, based on trying to pronounce a word while wearing a mouth-stretcher. Basically, you wear a mouth-stretcher, and then you are asked to read out a phrase. Your teammate has to figure out the phrase you're trying to say. 

The mouth-stretcher means that you cannot make labials. Of course, the words are selected to take advantage of this limitation as much as possible, asking you to make phrases like 'the moose makes molasses.'

But if you know about phonetics, you should be able to figure out a way to get around this limitation. For example, you could use a substitution of [n] for [m] since both are nasals: 'the noose nakes nolasses.' 'nakes' and 'nolasses' aren't words so hopefully your interlocutor will take advantage of error correction to figure out that the words are 'makes' and 'molasses.' 'noose' is a real word, so they may need to try twice to get the phrase correctly.

Similarly, what about something like 'feel the breeze'? [f] and [b] are not available to you. You know [f] is a fricative, so maybe you think to go with 'seel' as a substitution. But 'seal' is a real world and that might confuse your interlocutor. You could try a voiceless 'th' instead, which is more similar to 'f' anyway (as f-substitution shows). This produces the nonsense word 'theel', which hopefully your interlocutor will correct to 'feel'.

How about for communicating 'breeze'? You have a few voiced stops you can use like [g] and [d]. If the plastic mouth extender isn't totally rigid, you could also take advantage of the McGurk effect to move your mouth down as if making a [b] and then producing a [g], hoping that your interlocutor will take the hint that the labial movement matters.

While this game is based on using a plastic prop to force your mouth into not producing labials, I feel like you could extend the concept for linguists as a party game. How about a game where you cannot use stops? Or no alveolar consonants?

I've written about another game where knowledge of phonetics can give you an edge - karuta, a Japanese card game.