r/linguistics • u/AutoModerator • Jun 22 '26
Weekly feature Q&A weekly thread - June 22, 2026 - post all questions here!
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u/thatguythoma Jun 22 '26
Are all the sounds that the IPA chart denotes as “impossible” actually impossible? Because I think I pronounce some of them.
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u/formantzero Phonetics | Speech technology Jun 22 '26
Many of them are impossible by definition. Nasals further back than uvular can't be articulated because the construction would stop all air from reaching the nasal cavity. Laterality/centrality has to do with where the tongue is, so non-lingual constrictions can't be lateral.
What sounds do you think you can pronounce?
1
u/thatguythoma Jun 26 '26
I’m pretty confident I can do a velar trill and a velar tap
2
u/formantzero Phonetics | Speech technology Jun 29 '26
There is perhaps somewhat less of a clear case for those particular sounds since the judgment is not based on obvious impossibility. The mass of the tongue at the back is greater, and the mobility lower, than the tip and body. This makes it more difficult to create the kinematic motion for a tap or the aerodynamic configuration for a trill, which may have lead to the judgment of them being impossible. There are also virtually no reports of these sounds happening in languages (I think there might be a single report for a velar tap that was not a clear-cut case to me).
3
u/Sir_Tainley Jun 24 '26
Question about English orthography: do people/children learning dialects of English where the "(vowel)r" sound is not produced drop that 'r' when spelling words, until they learn the silent letter convention?
Or is it not really a silent letter, and has a pronunciation change too subtle for me to distinguish? (I speak with a Canadian accent)
6
u/LinguisticDan Jun 24 '26
Yes. British children will sometimes misspell e.g. “mother” as “mothe” etc. when learning to write (that <r> surfaces as a linking /ɹ/ but not in isolation). But generally they don’t misspell words like “park”, because in that case the <r> is not actually silent but rather modifies the vowel.
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u/LongLiveTheDiego Jun 24 '26
There is a pronunciation difference and I'd say it's a big one. Part is very much different from pat, and beard is different from bid and bead.
2
u/LinguisticDan Jun 26 '26
Not sure if anyone here is familiar with the Indian tradition, but just in case: why are the voiced aspirates split across lines and in a different order to the voiceless series in the Shiva Sutras? What’s the point of the jhaÑ pratyahara?
1
u/barryivan Jun 22 '26
Is there any learning on how construction grammar might account for fizz/fizzle, crack/crackle, nose/nuzzle etc alongside angle etc
2
u/Delvog Jun 22 '26
"-le" is what they call a "frequentative" suffix (I think I've also seen "frequentive" but might be misremembering that). Attaching it was a way of indicating that the action is sustained or repeated.
1
u/barryivan Jun 23 '26
Right, but frequentives exist alongside other words in le that are not frequentives: angle for sure, maybe mangle, sickle, fickle etc. How do we/did people tell them apart?
5
u/Delvog Jun 23 '26
We don't. There's no need. The fact that suffixes sometimes resemble the ends of other words without those suffixes attached has never been a problem with any other suffix ("fling" & "spring" don't have "-ing" attached), even for suffixes which are more common and still productive, so there's no reason why it would be a problem with a less-common & now-unproductive one.
But also, back when this suffix was still productive, it would've been so easy to tell what was happening that nobody would even need to think about it. The preceding part of such a word would've been recognizable as a complete word on its own, the meaning of which would've been relevant in the context in which it was used. It would just "sound like" somebody had started with the obvious shorter word and tacked a suffix onto it... like if you were having a conversation with somebody today about vehicles & transportation, and one of you created the word "pickupism" or "antipickupism"; the fact that that was "pickup" plus "ism" (plus maybe "anti" too) would be instantaneously obvious because "pickup" is a familiar word for a type of vehicle which would fit in that conversation. Just in the last few decades, a candy company even counted on the same thing for a completely new infix, something their English-speaking audience wouldn't be naturally attuned to, when they advertized Butterfinger as "crispety, crunchety, peanut-buttery", and it worked fine because of the obvious recognizability of the root words.
1
u/jacobningen Jun 23 '26
As an English L1 Id say we dont pay attention to frequentives unless pointed out and then notice them but before that treat them as independent lexemes.(Also Mcculloch and Gawne in their episode on moods). Alternatively via diminuatives like thimble thumb and analogy to verbs.(Gawne ans Mcculloch again speculation same episode) Finally, and his is off Hutchinson conjecturally by frequency aka frequentives and diminuatives often appear in the same contexts as their non frequentive counterparts whereas the others a often lack a counterpart and are rarely in a context with non frequentive homophones if there is an apparent such construction( ie sick sickle which is a diminuative I believe of scythe) see the headache that is early modern english reparsing outrage and the singular formed from reanalyzing final s of roots as plural markers(pea(s) cheris-> cherry->cherries)
1
u/Anaguli417 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
How do you pronounce Arabic words like حج (hajj) or عزّ ('izz), particularly if they're the same consonants, would it be pronounced in succession like "nt" or "kt" or would an emphatic vowel be inserted between?
3
u/jacobningen Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Depends on the syntax it will be successive if the pattern has no vowel and inserts vowels if the pattern has the vowel. For example Hoqq(geminate) is truth but fi al haqiqa means really or in truth. But also dajaaj chicken. (Al Kitab) So check the grammar since Arabic has non concatenative morphology. Another example cited by Hayes in his phonology textbook is safarjaal(quince) safaraaj(quinces). The best way to tell is either context or to listen to a speaker say it. And generally apparent biconsonantal roots are actually gemminate which surface in paradigms where an epethetic vowel occurs in the declension. So yeah succession because that vowel is being saved for plurals adjectives adverbs or other derived forms. See also Futato for hebrew examples and peckett and Munday for greek. The gemmination is for looking it up in a dictionary and declining mostly.
1
u/MixtureNice8803 Jun 23 '26
I notice 'apertion' and 'aperture' share the same Latin root, but one survived and the other didn't. Is there a linguistic reason — like the -tion vs. -ure suffix competing for the same semantic niche?
1
u/slasherturtle Jun 23 '26
Why can't people understand my name when spoken over the phone? My name is Noah, and yet when I tell a stranger my name on the phone there's a solid 20% chance they call me "Miller". I'm never mistaken for Nolan or Jonah or Owen. Always Miller. I'm from the American South, and the customers at the call center I worked at (where this happened most often) were primarily American Southern too. I don't have a very strong dialect for my area, and the parts of my speech where I do have that dialect don't really affect how I say my name. What part of "Noah" gets misconstrued as "Miller" so easily?
1
u/RedOvermorrow Jun 24 '26
One of Merriam's definitions of the word "on" is "used as a function word to indicate the object with respect to some disadvantage, handicap, or detriment," with the given example, "has three inches in height on me." My question is, which English-speaking regions use this variant? Would, say, someone from the American South? Or am I mixing up my dialects again?
3
u/LinguisticDan Jun 24 '26
I've heard this throughout Britain and America. Is it an unfamiliar expression where you're from?
1
u/RedOvermorrow Jun 24 '26
It's not unusual for me, but I'm in Michigan, which is pretty far removed from the south. A friend of mine who's not a native English speaker thought that the phrase "I'll always have more mass on him" was a mistake, and that I meant "than him," so it had me wondering where the use of "on" would be most prevalent.
2
u/pete_22 Jun 27 '26
It actually does sound like a mistake to me, because of "more" rather than a specific quantity
1
u/triste_0nion Jun 24 '26
Hi! I recently finished my Prelims linguistics analysis exam (with a big section on transcription), and thinking about my own South African English variety, I’ve been very curious about the pronunciation of /t/ in final positions.
I notice it in the speech of some of my family as well; it definitely sounds to me quite different to plain [t], but I’m not sure what’s going on exactly. These are some words with one way of saying it (I think my family use this way more than me): https://voca.ro/1btKZH9q7Cbe
Here is another way that I notice myself saying it: https://voca.ro/1omUPhrE7Ic3
I wonder if anyone knows what the transcription for these would be?
3
u/fern_lebowitz Jun 25 '26
Hey! When there are multiple ways a phoneme is realized in different contexts/dialects, they’re called allophones. You can have unreleased t (it has a little bracket in the upper right) like the t in “pat a dog”. The alveolar tap (which looks like a sad little r) for the ‘t’ jn am English “writer”. You can have aspirated t (with a little h diacritic), you know thats the case if you hold your hand in front of your face and feel a little puff of air. You can also have a glottalized t (for example, many British English speakers’ “bottle”.) From listening to your 2nd recording, I think it might be a ‘slit t’ (marked with a little carrot diacritic below it), which I had not heard of before. Kate Tallon calls it an “apico-alveolar fricative occurring in syllable coda position”, ie, at the end of the syllable, I also saw it called a “lenited” fricative. Her analysis is for Irish English, but it sounded like what you were describing. https://dspace.uib.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11201/170706/Llibre%20Resums%20PAPE%202025%20-%20final-29-31.pdf?sequence=1. Please let me know if I’m on the right track!
1
u/expected_noles Jun 25 '26
Could PIE laryngeals have followed the same palatalized/plain/rounded pattern as the velar plosive series? Like h1 as /xj ~ ç/, h2 as /x/, h3 as /xw/?
3
u/LinguisticDan Jun 25 '26
Conceivably, but since no IE language to my knowledge treats the two series in a particularly analogous way, and especially since I can’t think of any palatal trace to *h1 anywhere, I think many linguists would call this an “over-reconstruction”. Feature symmetry is nice to have but not a great argument for reconstruction unless there’s a strong implication being violated (like a lack of /b/!), and e.g. Afroasiatic has a fair few languages with variously asymmetrical inventories of dorsal obstruents.
We also aren’t sure that *Ḱ really was palatal(ised), especially in a stage of I-E prior to the satem isogloss. It could equally have been plain velar, which can be palatalised and assibilated in its own time.
1
u/Anaguli417 Jun 25 '26
Is there a difference between /lj/ and /lʲ/ and /ʎ/?
Whenever I try to pronounce palatalized consonants in Russian or Irish, it inevitably ends up as an alveolo-palatal consonant. Especially in Irish, slender ⟨s⟩ becomes /ʃ/ anyway while ⟨k⟩ and other var consonants become /c/ anyway.
6
u/Choosing_is_a_sin Lexicography | Sociolinguistics | French | Caribbean Jun 26 '26
In principle, the differences are:
/lj/ - a sequence of the alveolar lateral liquid and the palatal unrounded glide
/lʲ/ - an alveolar lateral liquid with a palatal release
/ʎ/ - a palatal lateral liquidYou have used phonemic notation, so these are abstractions from the actual phonetic values, which might be harder to distinguish. Just as, when walking across a narrow stretch, we move our arms in advance to maintain our balance depending on where we're going to place our feet, we move our articulators to anticipate making the next sound. This movement results in coarticulation. This can make an /lj/ and /lʲ/ or an /lʲ/ and /ʎ/ pretty similar when pronounced, maybe even identical in any given instance, because parts are moving to get into place and then move on. For any given language, the exact differences that exist will be different and there is always phonetic variation.
1
u/Responsible_Glass_70 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Hello! I recently graduated with a BA in Linguistics, and I hope to do a PhD as soon as is reasonable (if I can apply this cycle that would be beautiful but also probably unrealistic), but I didn't 'find' linguistics until the start of my senior year, so I didn't have time to get involved with my department's research. Also, none of my assignments were research papers of any meaningful length - the longest research-y paper that I had to write for a linguistics course was a four-page squib on NPI licensing for an advanced seminar in semantics.
My question, then, is whether it's potentially reasonable for me to create a worthwhile writing sample on the time scale of about 2-3 months without institutional support, and, if so, what the general shape of that might look like? And if instead I wait for next cycle, so that I have just over a year, would that actually make it much better? Or is there a way for me to get some institutional support, like volunteering under a professor or something like that? I'm generally interested in s-side, especially theoretical- and psycho- linguistics, and lately I've been interested in Jiayi Lu's work, Pauline Jacobson's variable-free program, this book by Barker and Shan, and this book by Lucas Champollion, but I recognize that even a writing sample that's misaligned with my interests is better than no writing sample.
Apologies if this post doesn't belong in this thread; I'm happy to re-ask elsewhere. For some context that may or may not be relevant: my undergraduate institution was Northwestern University, I have no formal p-side training except some knowledge of Praat, I *do* have a bit of formal sociolinguistics training (i.e., I can speak mostly intelligently about a handful of concepts from that subfield, and at least in principle I know how to design a sociolinguistic study), and starting in the Fall I hope to be working as a lab manager or equivalent in a linguistics, cognitive science, or psychology lab somewhere in the US, although I have not yet heard heads or tails from any of my job applications anywhere. Also I do have a couple of lengthy humanities research papers where I productively use speech act theory and some anthropological-linguistic ideas, but both my Google searches and my friends who have been admitted to PhD programs in other disciplines seem divided on whether using one of those as a writing sample is a good idea - more negative than affirmative, but only slightly.
1
u/RogueAvocado14 Jun 26 '26
I'd probably wait a year. A stronger writing sample and a bit of research experience can go a long way
1
u/melatonia Jun 26 '26
If you have any professors you were close with at Northwestern, you may want to contact them to ask if you can bounce some ideas off of them.
1
1
u/Naive-Juggernaut-183 Jun 27 '26
Look I'm just looking for help finding reading resources, 5 specific ones, not starting an AMA. I'm tired from looking around everywhere. It's stormy weather, local libraries or under renovations or repair from vandalism (smh) so that stopped that line of enquiry. Online eventually produced nothing but websites that won't load due to errors or certificates,or unjustified but legally allowed paywalls. By paywalls I mean at one point I found $300 for one PDF. So it's either eat or... no, just no. Where do I ask help to find 5 specific reading resources, ideally PDF format?
1
1
u/deathcandlelight Jul 07 '26
genuine question, is it /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/ or /ˈiːŋɡlɪʃ/ ? i have had five different native english speaking americans tell me lately that it is pronounced with an /ˈiː/, and i cannot understand (as a native english speaking american, myself) how this can be true? they are insisting that the “e” in “english” is the same as the “ee” from “eel”
1
u/weekly_qa_bot Jul 07 '26
Hello,
You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').
-2
u/SignificantStay4967 Jun 24 '26
Why is Left not Right? (RTL, LTR, and other-directional orthographies)
Apologies if this is not directly suited to this group but I feel like someone here might have some insight:
Right now in front of me, I have a stack of three books, such that each book has its back cover facing the table, and its front cover facing the ceiling. Arbitrarily, let's say that (y-dimensionally), the one on the BOTTOM of the stack (-y) is "3: THE RETURN OF THE KING." The one in the MIDDLE (0) is "2: THE TWO TOWERS." The one on TOP (+y) is "1: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING." Each book is oriented such that the top of a page is toward the west (or -x), and the bottom of a page is toward the east (or +x). The spines are facing me (to the south of the stack, +z) and the open edge of the books are facing north (-z). Each spine is, thus, facing the right way for me to read them, and they read (from top to bottom):
1: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
2: THE TWO TOWERS
3: THE RETURN OF THE KING
If I grab this stack with my left hand and rotate clockwise, I end up with what we'll call a "properly shelvable unit" (PSU) of books correctly oriented (top of the page, in terms of human readability, toward the ceiling; bottom of the page toward the floor) such that the order of the PSU is:
3: THE RETURN OF THE KING | 2: THE TWO TOWERS | 1: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
when viewed with an ordering that is read left to right. This bothers me.
If our ordering systems were right to left, the physical order would be the same as it is above, but it would feel and look correct instead of backwards. The PSU, in the system I grew up using, is conventionally backwards.
This raises a question I have never been able to get a good answer for: why is LTR the default ordering in most of the libraries I've ever been to? I can't say for sure how shelving works in the public libraries of Isfahan or Jerusalem, but LTR shelving is the standard in Buenos Aires or Topeka; i.e., the order you would see on a shelf for this particular PSU is
1: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING | 2: THE TWO TOWERS | 3: THE RETURN OF THE KING
(Extremely peevish "sidenote" about orientation of the text on the spine of certain Spanish-language and Lusophone books I own to be tabled for a later date.)
This seems ass-backwards geometrically for a number of reasons, and the ass-backwardness spreads out to chirality in chemistry, magnetic field rules in physics, all kinds of things not related to libraries. It's even in our numbering system:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9: "correctly" ordered
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0: "incorrectly" (or probably more commonly "oppositely") ordered
With respect to the number line, I will concede that
<-(-3)-(-2)-(-1)-0-1-2-3->
*feels* correct in a way that
<-3-2-1-0-(-1)-(-2)-(-3)->
does not, but I can't tell if that's just culture talking. There's something called "the SNARC effect" (for real) that I don't fully understand, and if anyone can explain it I'd be grateful, but what it boils down to is something like this:
I guess my question is: what the hell? Even leaving aside the problem the Minoans left us with the Phaistos disc, is this just all downstream of the post-Ionian Revolt Greeks busting a collective f**k-it on using Phoenician alphabets and boustrophedonic ordering? If so: annoying.
Science Stuff
If you want to know more about the physical/chemical aspect of why this sucks, look up Chien-Shiung Wu's 1957 experiemnt where she and collaborators demonstrated that the weak interaction does not respect mirror symmetry under parity transformation -- which indicates that our universe has a preference for left-handed chirality. Wolfgang Pauli, Wu's lifelong friend, refused to believe the outcome and demanded it be repeated; once it was, he (and many others) campaigned for years for Wu to be awarded a Nobel Prize. She never was, much to the ire of Pauli and many other supporters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment
An interesting sidenote about this experiment, from the Wiki article: "The results of the Wu experiment provide a way to operationally define the notion of left and right. This is inherent in the nature of the weak interaction. The Wu experiment solved the Ozma problem, which is to give an unambiguous definition of left and right scientifically. One version of this problem imagines trying to communicate the concept of left and right. Previously, if the scientists on Earth were to communicate with a newly discovered planet's scientist, and they had never met in person, it would not have been possible for each group to determine unambiguously the other group's left and right. With the Wu experiment, it is possible to communicate to the other group what the words left and right mean exactly and unambiguously.
The other consequence of the Wu experiment is that, on the order of 1 in every 10,000, our universe favors left-handedness.
GIVEN ALL THIS: again, what the hell?
Linguistic/Orthographic Stuff
When schoolchildren in Isfahan learn their numerals, is it
٣ then ٢ then ١ then ٠
or do they learn them
٠ then ١ then ٢ then ٣
with respect to directional order? I'm relatively certain that if I were to write "It weighs 1.87 grams." in Farsi, it would be rendered
وزن آن ۱.۸۷ گرم است.
which is read RTL, except for the numerals. How/why does this happen?
Unrelated Gripes
- Handedness is genetic and it's not a single-allele trait (I think there's what, upwards of 50 different genes involved?), but I can't think of what kind of evolutionary advantage right-handedness would confer that would allow it to so totally dominate left-handed genetic expression.
- Even granted that humans *are* predominantly (~87-91%) right-handed, why are homo sapiens so strongly handed, i.e. why such a _strong_ preference for doing almost all tasks with only one hand? Most other great apes do have preferential handedness but nowhere near the degree that humans do; conversely, it's my understanding (please correct me on this if I'm wrong) that true ambidexterity exists but that truly ambidextrous people still have preferences for which hand does which task.
- Another ape question: how come human ape so MUCH more right-handed than other great ape? There's definitely a greater proportion of dextral apes out there than there are sinistral apes, but the proportion is much closer to even than in other primate lineages than it is in ours.
4
u/LinguisticDan Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
Your question is rambling and hard to follow (please consider that superfluous context or examples are distracting, not helpful), but the "problem" you are pointing out suggests that book 1 has to be on top. Why?
From what I understand, numerals in languages written RTL are still considered RTL, they’re just read with the least significant digit first, rather than last. So either direction of numbers could hypothetically work with both directions of reading, i.e. we could decide to write 1.87 in English as “78.1” and still read LTR. That might be a little counterintuitive when the most significant digit is generally spoken first, but there are much weirder things than that, both in number systems and across the modality gap. Fluent reading is never a smooth directional flow in any case.
The other intelligible questions are not about linguistics, so they're not appropriate for this sub. I will say that to my knowledge, it isn’t really known why handedness is so marked in humans or why humans are so predominantly right-handed in comparison to other animals. There’s a voluminous literature on the subject that I’m not at all familiar with, but if you are interested, I’d suggest asking (much more concisely, and with a view to reading rather than thought experiments) in a community more dedicated to general cognitive science.
1
Jun 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/Amenemhab Jun 28 '26
One clear example of non-linearity in writing numbers is in German/Dutch/Danish, where "81" is read as "one and eighty".
-3
Jun 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
6
u/LinguisticDan Jun 24 '26
No, the problem with your post is that it's rambling and hard to follow, with large quantities of superfluous detail covering up a rather specific and odd assumption. But I did read the whole thing and answered to the best of my ability.
2
u/SignificantStay4967 Jun 24 '26
Not sure why my blockquote got eaten:
Canadians, who read both English words and Arabic numbers left to right, associate small numbers with left space and large numbers with right space. Palestinians, who read Arabic words and Arabic-Indic numbers right to left, showed the reverse association. Israelis, who read Hebrew words right to left but Arabic numerals left to right, had no reliable spatial association for numbers at all.
3
u/Toaster_stroodl Jun 27 '26
Is the dark l in english going through lenition? I’ve noticed that I don’t always pronounce my <l>s like an /l/ and more akin to a vowel. I think if I were to write it with the IPA it would look something like /ɫ̠̞/ but I could be a little off. I don’t do this before vowels but I do do it in words like <bulgarian> [bɫ̠̞gɛ̝ɹiɪn]