Editing audio interviews for podcast I sometimes remove lots of "particles" as the author calls them (I just call them "ums and ahs"), TFA poses a question. Do particles have "meaning"? Don't think I ever heard a discussion of that in any linguistics class, but they do have an effect. Working in radio/podcast you get quite a deep feel for speech as more than just words.
I've heard there are effective "de-um" plugins, but I prefer to work with them by hand because they create non-verbal signals, mood, excitement, confidence or lack of confidence about a statement. So often I decide to leave them in. They can signal relations between multiple interviewees, like deference or conversational leadership. Some speakers are impossible to 'de-um' as it's so woven into their speech.
Unrelated but somewhat funny:
I read someone jokingly proposing we pronunciate "particles" and "molecules" like we do for greek nouns (think "hercules").
And now with these "articles", I'm going to do this in my head for one more day.
A.k.A hesitation markers, non-lexical vocables, disfluence or nonfluence, filler..
It's entertaining how many different labels uh, well kinda um.. names I guess, er, anyway how many er ways to say these thingamabobs there, er, well are.
Wikipedia posits that even neanderthals might have said Ummm.
When translating ancient Greek in class, one often slips into a weird translation-ese that would be pretty funny if you didn't know what was going on. You end up saying things like: "The going-into-the-temple men were on the one hand brave and on the other hand afraid."
Apparently Tai uses quite a bit of infix (not prefixes, or suffixes, but infixes). In in English we have infixes, but they are all expletives of the Nixon style: "Kings-bloody-cross" (a railway station in Sydney), "absa-f..king-luteley" ...
>> 4. Hildegarde swallowed, yeah, an entire disk drive.
Well now I must know.
Strange article.
Pretty sure the ancient greek translation is wrong in part too.
They say: 'theōrhiā' means 'review', whereas it is obvious to me that it means 'theory'.
Well, I'm glad I read these comments rather than trumpeting my new found knowledge of Greek particles to all and sundry. You have my thanks.
I really wish English had something like Greek ge, which is something like a sarcasm/snark marker. Socrates uses it a lot.
Lest anyone take this article at face value, please note that it was published in _Speculative Grammarian_, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.”
The range of meanings for the Greek entautha, gar, and de are all well-understood.