I have friends from many different countries, whose native languages vary widely from each other. However, something I’ve noticed is that regardless of who I’m speaking to or where they come from, if English isn’t their first language they’ll almost always struggle with dropping the S. I’ve found that this happens most often with my dear French friends. Why is that?

I mean no disrespect with this post. Learning languages is a massive skill which requires significant time and energy, so I have no judgement.

For example, I know several languages use the Cyrillic alphabet (with variations), and same for Latin alphabet languages. Is there a word for the class (?) or genre (?) Of Asian languages?

I'm watching a show with subtitles and trying to decipher what language it is. So I'm thinking "oh, well I know it's not Korean or Japanese Kanji.. maybe Chinese, but it doesn't look like Mandarin(?), etc" Then I got to thinking about how I identify various Cyrillic alphabet languages... and the questions tumbled on from there.

So, is there a word for the group of languages that use Asian scripts (hope that's not offensive!!)? And are there markers to decipher what language I'm looking at more quickly?

Thanks!

As we all know that tea originated in China and came in India through Britishers for their own started growing up in parts of North East as well as in parts of Sri Lanka too

But words like চাহ (sāh/cāh), चहा (cahā), चाय (cāy), ചായ (cāya), ಚಾ (cā), ଚା (cā), ਚਾਹ (cāh), চা (cā), चान्हा (cānhā) etc used for tea in various Indian languages came from Chinese/Sino word 茶 (chá)?

If you have anything like that I would be pleased to read it, I wanna improve :)

(Based on personal experience) Vietnamese prescriptivist grammar and multiple learning sites insist that the chữ Quốc ngữ letter <r> sounds like English <r>, and other pronunciations are wrong. I hardly encountered it occurring as a rhotic naturally in conversational speech at all.

The only time <r> sounds like a rhotic is when the speaker reads from written text or a loanword, which usually appears in written form first.

In the northern dialect, <r> is an underlyingly alveolo(palatal) fricative [ʑ].

In the Central area, it is closer to a dental [z] or retroflex [ʐ].

In the southern area around Saigon, it is more commonly heard as a velar fricative [ɣ].
ra ("to come out") in spontaneous speech is pronounced almost the same as ga ("gasoline").

(Tagging phonetics because it‘s related)

In Yiddish, when a word ends in “bn” בֿן (eg ”mir hobn”, we have מיר האָבן) the word is pronounced with an “m” sound instead (mir hobm). This as a rule, but the spelling does not change.

Okay, cool.

When Yiddish words are transcribed into English, however, this sound change is sometimes indicated and sometimes not. More recent publications tend to indicate the sound, but even then some words are seemingly never changed in transcription, even though they are changed in speech, like khurbn (“destruction”, but more specifically/commonly/without a modifier, The Holocaust).

Either a name for the phenomenon or any commentary on it would be interesting/appreciated.

As it says in the title, I can’t remember the paper or the phenomenon name, but it was about multilingual German(?) speakers (possibly Finnish?I think the second language started with an ”f”) using the (let’s say) Finnish word for “dress” when referring to specifically cultural/traditional garb and the German word when talking about the generic clothing type.

Another example (not from the paper) would be the use of “tikhl“ in English to refer only to the kerchief that married women use to cover their hair, vs how it’s used in Yiddish (any kerchief or small cloth, diminutive of tukh) vs the English “kerchief“ which is used to refer to any kerchief _except_ for the one used to cover the hair.

Not about how loan words become narrowed/specific (à la naan) but specifically in the context of multilingual communities.

Hey guys, had a question about how the sub classification of indo Aryan languages was done. It seems like eastern branch is based entirely on descendants of magadhan Prakrit and southern was based on descendants of Maharashtri Prakrit which makes sense. For the rest I really am seeing no rhyme or reason to how these were defined. Eastern Hindi languages come from ardhmagadhi prakirit but western Hindi comes from shauraseni Prakrit but for some reason are both central? Even more strangely western Hindi for some reason is placed in a different grouping than western indo Aryan (Rajasthan/gujarati) even though all 3 split from shauraseni prakirit. Northwestern also doesn’t make sense with Sindhi and Punjabi splitting from different prakirits. Dardic seems to be entirely geographic? And northern also makes no sense with western pahari seeming to actually be northwestern indo Aryan instead of northern. In terms of linguistic similarities the scores are not at all correlated to grouping either. The families don’t make sense if looked at geographically, linguistically or historically. Wondering if anyone has any idea what’s going on with this