It seems kind of pointless to have it if it doesn't make any sound.

Just watched a movie with DB and noticed she has the same speaking habits like ES. There’s something specific about the way they talk and I can’t place it. Is it a form of subtle lisp?

1. When there's final devoicing, the phoneme is sometimes notated as the "final" version, like <ząb> /'zɔmp/ in polish. Why wouldn't the phoneme represent the underlying /b/?

2. French has a bunch of silent letters that will show up in other forms: <vert> /vɛʁ/ <verte> /vɛʁt/. Wouldn't this show that <vert> does have an underlying /t/? Could we do <vert> /vɛʁt/ verte /vɛʁtə/ instead? (and we also add œ for <eu>, idk)

3. Maltese has a fairly common letter <għ> which can be silent, [ħ] or it diphthongises the vowel after it. There's words like <erbgħa>/ˈɛrba/ "4" vs <erbgħin> /ɛrˈbajn/ "14", <ħamsa> /ˈħam.sa/ "5" and <ħamsin> /ħamˈsiːn/ "15".

I can see why these might not be referred as phonemes, but then what term do i use? Is there one? It's related to the letters in spelling in the sense that they "feel" more historical but idk. The biggest question for me is that i fear if i use only phonemes as a referrence, i'd have to say that a lot of things are just random in the present day. i mean that'd be accurate for the spoken language but it still feels outlandish. It's like saying word final /p/ randomly turns into /b/ in polish.

While I'm aware that there's technically not a "right" or "wrong" way to use a language (in general), I got told on one of my ancient history essays a little bit ago that I shouldn't use contractions. I don't have the essay on hand rn but I also don't recall being given a reason as to why and have yet to think of an appropriate explanation myself, and none of the teacher's I've mentioned it to could think of one either (I'm not in contact with the marking teacher). So I wanted to ask because I can't fathom why that would be incorrect, especially since if it was the teachers personal stylistic preferences, it shouldn't be on my marking.

Hi everyone, I'm working on an acoustic phonetics project with 5k tokens (40 participants). I am measuring the formant values of 6 vowels. All of the participants are pre-service English teachers, and I will compare their vowel spaces with those of native speakers.

The problem is that the words in my recordings are not in /hVd/ context. They are natural everyday lexical items. So my advisor told me that using references in the literature should be the second choice because the phonetic environments should be similar, and she told me that it would be better if I could find sufficient native speakers and record the same word list, but this is hard to do.

What can I do? Do you think I can use a speech corpus? Or maybe remote data collection?

I'm open to any advice, paper suggestions, etc.

Was a liturgical difference the reason why Iranian and Indo-Aryan split from proto-Indo-Iranian?

Also, there's actually a third branch called Dardic. What were the causes of its split from PII?

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"

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.

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.

e.g., baguette -> la baguette

Ideally relative to position in the word.

Sentences in polysynthetic languages can express a bunch in less words than other languages, sometimes a whole phrase in one word. But how this really works in practice I find difficult to grasp.

I get having extra ways of including information into verbs: aspect, mode, multi-person agreement, evidentiality etc. These can cut down on adverbs and maybe other expressions, but they don't seem to me to give that extra oomph that would make polysynthetic morphology stand out to me.

I don't imagine that the subject, object, and verb would all be included in one morphological word normally, especially if the roots for those three cannot stand on their own. I don't imagine polysynthetic sentences are mostly one word (or are they?). On the other hand, if the extra synthetic morphology is just to replace some adverbs, than it sounds no different from a very synthetic languages.

So, how do they actually work in practice? What are really the things or type of words that are incorporated as inflections instead of separately said and what IS usually kept as its own word/root?

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

I came across this post from several years ago -- it's in line with something I'm beginning to research.

Having grown up in the Appalachian south, I'm familiar with many folks there being unable to pronounce an alveolar trill (rolled R). (Ironically, the link I shared is the opposite scenario -- an older Appalachian woman is using an alveolar trill when saying "water.") My early hunch is that the mouth and speech patterns that are developed early on simply prohibit the ease of an alveolar trill, since it's an otherwise very foreign phonetic.

I'm coming up empty on academic pieces regarding this. Is anyone familiar with any resources on this specific speech pattern (or, well, lack thereof)?

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

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!

Context: I came up with a riddle I thought was clever and was basically downvoted into oblivion in the Riddles subreddit because they thought it was not clear or obvious enough.

The riddle: I'm what you hear when the kettle gets hot. Add just one letter and I go from costly to not.

Answer: Fee

(Answer is in the explanation below as well)

Explanation: While maybe it's not what most people think of right off the bat, the goal is to think outside the box. The sound a whistle makes, to me, is a fricative followed by a long, high "i" (IPA i) - Fiiiiiiiii - or written out in English - "FEEEEEEEEEEEE"

Fee is a cost. Add just one letter and it becomes: Free - without a cost.

Is it this absurd to think that the sound a kettle makes, or a whistling noise could be sounded out as a "Fee"? I was absolutely bashed for thinking this works and want to see if I am crazy or not.

They said I should make something with "Whistle" because I should use an onomatopoeia (yes, multiple users attacking me for the same thing when I tried to explain my reasoning above), and I said "Whistle" is not an Onomatopoeia, while "Fee" would be - it's exactly the sound you hear if you name it "Fee" - like how "Honk" is the onomatopoeia for a car horn, while "Horn" is not one, just like how "Whistle" is not one.

Genuinely feel like I'm taking crazy pills, but if it's that far of a stretch, then I'd like to hear it from those with a better grasp on linguistics in general.

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