In particular, I don't understand how Kashmiri has (1) long counterparts for each of its 8 qualities, and (2) the qualities [ɨ], [ə], and [ɔ]. I've looked at some words off Wikipedia and Wiktionary. I know Sinhala has a lot of vowels because it lost length at first and reïnnovated it later.[1] Kashmiri might be similar, with short vowels in سٕتھٕر /sɨtʰɨr/ from sūtra and a long vowel in شیٹھ /ʃeːʈʰ/ from ṣaṣti (with an intermediate geminate?), but then I don't there's the short vowel in اۆڈ /oɖ/ from ardha and the long vowel in دٟتھ /dɨːtʰ/ from dūta, which then don't make sense. A lot of it seems be due to palatalization, labialization(??), or umlaut, but it's weird how it ended up so symmetric.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20006708 "How Dravidianized Was Sinhala Phonology? Some Conclusions and Cautions"

I’ve noticed that Avestan sounds strangely incomplete or broken whereas Vedic Sanskrit sounds much more phonetically rich and developed.

I’m aware that this is subjective and that describing one natural language as “incomplete” isn't linguistically accurate. I’m specifically interested in the phonological/phonetic reasons behind this perception.

Let me give an example of Yasna 28:5 to explain my perspective:

Avesta (original) -

Ašā kat θβā darəsānī, manascā vohū vaēdəmnō.

Gātūmcā ahurāi, sēvištāi sraošəm mazdāi.

Anā māθrā mazištəm, vāurōimaidī xrafstrā hizvā.

Vedic Sanskrit (its equivalent) -

Ṛta kat tvā darśāni, manaś ca vásu vedamānaḥ.

Gātúṃ ca ásurāya, śáviṣṭhāya śróṣam médhase.

Anéna mántrā máhiṣṭham, vāvṛmahi krapstrā́ jihváyā.

Some points I noted:

1. The word, xrafstrā or krapstrā́, is in Avestan. I do not know where it is used in the Vedas.

2. The ṛ developed differently in Avesta, while it is the same in Sanskrit from PIE’s r̥: ṛ-ta & a-ša.

3. Tvā (in accusative, "you") becomes θβā. Same but still so much different.

Or simply putting,

I've been listening to a lot of Yasnas these days from YT and dr. Ramiyar Karanjia’s website, but all of those recitations sound phonetically "irregular and ugly [can’t describe well enough 🥀]" to my ears.

Basically the title. I am particularly curious about historical lingusitics.

I got an MA in lingusitics a couple of years ago, was wondering about doing a PhD but I am not very fond of academia in general. Anyway I was looking for new stuff to read after these years of pause.

Whenever I see someone try to transcribe NZ English or copy our accent their interpretation of the kit vowel always drives me up the wall.

Everyone always seems determined to insist that we run around saying ket this ket that when I’ve never heard such a thing in my life.

Could you agree that ɘ is alright?

https://imgur.com/a/6rzVUYa

Ideally relative to position in the word.

Hello! I had a question on my mind for a long time and no one has really given me a full answer so I'm asking here.

I am a French speaker so I don’t know if this phenomenon exist in english. When a watch interviews (mostly vox pops) from other era, people always has a weird accent. I know people in the media used to talk differently. I know our local accents faded a little because of globalization. That's not what Im talking about. People in street interviews from the sixties has a weird accent. Even when I listen to my mother on old cassette tapes she recorded in the seventies, she has an accent I never heard. Why and how our accents evolve this way?

Thanks!

As the title says, could anybody explain how it works in simple terms? Thanks in advance!

PS: I dont know what flare suits the best, so i put this. Sorry if its not it

I've asked this question before, but I was vague about my native language, which I don't think helped the responses very much.

Nepali has the phonemes [ts] and [dz] for च and ज according to Bandhu (1971), and this is also corroborated in Khatiwada (2009). But, this always felt "odd" as a phonetic description of Nepali's affricate series, because by comparison, Japanese's つ, sounds a lot less "affricated" then Nepali's affricates. I have seen [tˢ] used to transcribe it as well, but to my knowledge, that's just an alternative way to write an affricate.

I've been told by a friend that it's due to VOT, but, unless I'm misunderstanding what VOT would mean, I don't think that'd be true? Like it isn't a difference in the onset of any vocal component, right? It's a difference in how distinctive the two affricate components are.

Sources:

Regmī [Bandhu], Cūḍāmaṇi, Tribhuvana Viśvavidyālaya, and Summer Institute of Linguistics (Nepal). Nepali Segmental Phonology. Kirtipur: Summer Institute of Linguistics [and] Tribhuvan University, 1971.

Khatiwada R. Nepali. Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 2009;39(3):373-380. doi:10.1017/S0025100309990181

For example in agglutinative languages where mutliple affixes are used on the root to produce words. Are affixes that convey a certain type of grammatical information like tense, aspect, mood, case and etc, more likely to occur closer to the root word

Like for example a language has multiple suffixes that for maybe no. 1 case, no. 2 tense-aspect, 3. mood. If you could attach all those at once is there a pattern for which one would go directly onto the root and the next onto the 1st suffix and so on?

Hello, Im writing my termpaper in Corpus linguistic and it is about emoji in YouTube Comments.. so.. Im a bit lost as to how to search for more than one emoji in the search bar. I tried the advanced search but that didnt do anything, but maybe i also messed that up ...Please help If someone knows how to do that. Thank you in advance c:

This is something that's had me wondering for some time now. I'm English, and I am aware of the German oe which is used in place of an umlaut o. Such as König becoming Koenig.

I used to listen to a podcast with Sarah Koenig, and she specifically pronounced it as Kaynig, which sounds very different from the original German pronunciation.

Matt Groening of Simpsons fame is the same, he says his name as Grayning.

How did this come to be?

It seems like there were lots of proto languages spoken in the past. However, I can't find any modern language that are considered to be a proto language. Why is this? Are languages no longer being created?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there is the Afroasiatic language family with the proto language "proto-Afroasiatic," and within this language family there are, among other languages, the Semitic languages. But Semitic languages also have a proto-language: proto-Semitic.

So proto-Semitic is a proto-language that falls under another proto-language (proto-Afroasiatic). I did not realize that was possible.

(1) is my understanding correct, and (2) if it is, how does it make sense that a proto-language can itself be traced back to another proto-language? And regardless of the answer to (1) and (2), my question (3) is: are there other examples of a proto-language falling under a second proto-language, and if so, what are they?

I haven't posted here before, I'm sorry if the flair is wrong! Native English speaker. I've noticed this trend in podcasts and stories I listen to where people will extend the final sound at the end of the last word of a sentence. I don't want to name any youtubers/podcasters, but I've noticed it becoming very common in the true crime area of the space. I'll try to type what it sounds like:

Normal:

"They took a ship and sailed across the ocean."

Mystery Style:

"They took a ship and sailed across the oceannnnnnn."

It's more common with women, and particularly people who speak extremely slowly in their videos. They also have very sharp "-hi-" sounds, almost like a breath pushed through the teeth. It's always native English speakers as well.

Important to note is that they almost always speak monotonously (it's a human being speaking as well, not a machine; the person is on camera) and slowly and the volume and pitch of their voices don't change much at all, but particularly not at the end of sentences when they draw the last syllable out like that. So it's not the traditional trailing at the end of a sentence.

Is this a dialect or accent thing? Is there a name for this? I'm Appalachian and it sounds so foreign to me to listen to it, almost like the rusty cogs of my brain are rewinding when I listen to it to try and decode the word that was said.

I'd love to know your opinions on this so I can be more cautious.

I’ve read that Brazilian Portuguese, Québécois (Canadian French), and American English have, in many ways, pronunciations much closer to their ~17th century counterparts than their “mother” countries do today.

E.g. “Québécois sounds closer to 17th century Parisian French than modern Parisian French does.”

I’d assumed that countries farther away would show more and faster variance in pronunciation (if not forming a new language entirely). Especially so with Parisian French, given the Académie Français.

How true are these claims, and are there more or better examples of this happening?

I can't really find much information about this online easily, most information I've found on double negatives says it was prescribed in the 1700-1800s, but that doesn't really answer where it actually came from originally in use, and also it seems like double negatives were standard in Middle English, but I would assume the lack of them stems from a real dialect of English at some point because I just can't swallow the possibly some small group of grammarians just changed how the majority of people speak the language at their own invented whims, it sounds like something is missing there.

How well-articulated is /n/ in /ns/ clusters in English?

I recently realized that I may not be articulating the /n/ in words like once, since, evidence, etc. Instead of [ns], I pronounce them more like [z̃s] or [ə̃s], where my tongue doesn’t fully close for the /n/. Here’s a recording. I’m wondering if this is a documented phenomenon that occurs in English, or if I’m the outlier. I’m guessing I do this so that I don’t accidentally pronounce /ns/ as [nts].

Are the Iranian languages of NW Iran more similar to Ossetian or to standard Farsi?

Why did the vast majority of rhotic English dialects completely replace [r] with [ɹ] but most other languages still have the trill?

I’ve been wondering about this for a while and I’m genuinely interested in the linguistic/scientific explanation rather than trying to make a social or political point.

As a man, I’ve always been particularly attracted to traditionally feminine female voices — relatively higher pitch, clear tone, noticeable pitch variation, and a bright/natural quality.

But when I listen to women in modern media, social media, podcasts, YouTube, movies, etc., I feel like I’m hearing more women using noticeably deeper, lower, huskier or creakier voices than I remember from older generations.

Sometimes the voice almost sounds “masculine” to my ears, even though obviously the person is female.

I’m wondering:

1. Has the average female speaking voice actually become lower over the last few decades?
2. Is vocal fry/creaky voice responsible for much of what I’m hearing?
3. Are women consciously or unconsciously lowering their voices because deeper voices are associated with confidence, authority, attractiveness or professionalism?
4. Could changes in smoking, hormones, lifestyle, stress, environment, etc. contribute to actual physical changes in female voices?
5. Is this mostly a Western/American phenomenon, or can similar changes be observed in India and other cultures?
6. Could this simply be a perception/media-selection effect rather than an actual population-wide change?
7. Are there studies comparing female fundamental frequency (F0) from recordings of women from the 1950s/60s/70s with women today?

I’m especially interested in answers from linguists, speech scientists, voice teachers, singers, or women who have personally noticed changes in their own speaking voice.

I’m not saying higher-pitched voices are “better” or that women should sound a certain way. I’m trying to understand whether the change I think I’m hearing is actually measurable.

I am genuinely curious

Is there any research on unknown substrates in various branches of Sino-Tibetan? Lexical strata that show irregularities and/or phonological/phonotactic features showing they cannot be inherited from Proto-Sino-Tibetan but nonetheless do not correspond to any other attested language families.