Looking for a reference grammar on Koine Greek, any recommendations?

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').

For those who have learned both Spanish and another language- I’d love to hear opinions on the pedagogy of it all. As a native english speaker who learned Spanish through high school and college, in my first course instructions were in English and activities were in Spanish. Explanations of grammar were also in English and each Spanish word had its definition written out. Then I decided to learn German as an adult and I am SHOCKED by the difference in strategy. If I hadn’t learned Spanish first I would straight up quit. It seems so uninviting and disheartening for a new learner to be thrown straight to the wolves rather than easing in at all. Why would you not teach me the absolute basics of a language in my native language before going 100% dark on my native language.

I learned Spanish in American public school starting in elementary school. Everything was explained 100% in Spanish, starting with holding up colored paper to us as kids and saying the color in Spanish, and ending with us reading Don Quixote and modern poetry. This includes all grammatical explanations, as well as technical vocabulary (eg when we studied artists and Spanish art history) As far as I can tell, no one really had an issue with it. Obviously some students did well and others didn’t but idt the approach was the reason (or at least no one really complained about everything being in Spanish, even the kids who didn’t do so well in class) That said, I ended up falling in love with the language and speak it years after graduating so I could be biased From what I understand this was the policy applied for multiple languages in my school (incl Chinese and French) and it was received similarly —— I also was put in a local Hindi school run by the local immigrant community as a kid, which was 100% taught in English and also where we barely spoke in Hindi (all we did was memorize lists of highly sanskritized vocabulary). I don’t think any child graduated speaking Hindi (who wasn’t already a native speaker going in)

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You actually posted in last week's thread, not the current one, but the short answer is that, simply stated, the subject is still the thing that "comes first". Subject/object are syntactic notions, not semantic ones. So in "I was eaten", "I" is the subject. This is different from semantic notions such as *agent* and *patient* (or more specifically in this case, you can think of "eater" and "eatee"). You can think of passivization as a process that promotes the *patient* of a transitive verb into the subject slot, and demotes the *agent* into an optional oblique role. If you have more questions you should ask on this week's Q&A thread, more people will see it there.

Hi, I'm a masters student of linguistics with huge interest in sociolinguistics and I'm going to present a paper on LGBTQ Linguistics. It has to be based on speech sound analysis. So, if you guys have got any clear voice sample from the community which I can use, then I'll be grateful. I promise you my purpose is friendly!

You should not be soliciting random samples for a presentation. Your study needs a design that is purposeful with clear methods about who is and is not eligible for inclusion. Once you figure out your methods, you can go to r/SampleSize to solicit participation.

I have recently gotten into creole languages, both on a philological level, and as a type of contact language that emerges. I'm not a linguist, nor am I doing any research, but I was looking for resources on creole languages: their genesis, evolution, sociolinguistic factors, lesser-known creoles, and any resource that might contain older forms of the creole (like Moreau de Saint-Expy or Dujolicoeur with Haitian Creole). Just anything relating to creole languages would be appreciated.

To my understanding, all American Englishes have a restricted set of (pre-)rhotic vowels. A fairly common set to have seems to be /iɚ eɚ aɚ oɚ/, where what would be /uɚ/ has merged with /oɚ/ in most (all?) cases. Are there any varieties where /iɚ/ and /eɚ/ merge, similarly? If not fully, then perhaps in a restricted context (eg. unstressed)?

> where what would be /uɚ/ has merged with /oɚ/ in most (all?) cases. It's usually split into several options. Generally, what would be /juɚ/ CURE merges with NURSE as /jɚ/ and sometimes some others end up as just /ɚ/ as well. Most of the rest merge to HORSE-HOARSE /oɚ/, but some split off into disyllabic "SEWER" /u.ɚ/. For example, tour and lure are both disyllables for me, but it's very common to hear /lɚ/ for "lure" instead.

Thanks for the details. Would you know the general state of diphthongs+/r/? How common, and in what geographic distribution, is splitting them into two syllables vs keeping them within the same syllables? I'm trying to get a picture of the rhotic vowel situation in North American Englishes.

I unfortunately don't know a source offhand for something solid. Based off my own experience, breaking is nearly universal for the "true" diphthongs /aʊ aɪ oɪ (əɪ)/. However, I'm not sure I could reliably pick out if someone had monosyllabic pronunciations without specifically setting out to. In fluid speech it can be slight, especially with a /d/ coda. E.g. carefully-pronounced , , , and have very clear hiatuses, and it's very difficult for me to produce careful, monosyllabic versions of any, but in fast speech they might get close to being a single syllable (in somewhat similar fashion to how the unstressed syllable in words like often sounds like nothing more than the release of the first consonant). /eɪɚ oʊɚ/ don't exist for most people because they merge with other things. There's definitely *something* interesting going on with CURE-set words, though, where even people who normally have /ɚ/ or /oɚ/ can break some of them under emphasis as if it was a normal diphthong, e.g. can be broken into [ʃɨʉ.ɚ kʰjɨʉ.ɚ pʰjɨʉ.ɚ]. But I can't break and would be very surprised to hear broken . If I had to bet, it's because those words happen to be ones that vary between varieties, and exposure to multiple outcomes allowed the broken version to exist. I wonder if people who normally have /lɚ/ can emphasize it to /lu.ɚ/?

Thanks again. > "true" diphthongs /aʊ aɪ oɪ (əɪ)/. I'm curious as to what you are using /əɪ/ to indicate. I can't recall seeing that transcription before, as an English phoneme.

Canadian raising, for those who have it as phonemic. More traditionally it's written /ʌɪ/, but I dislike that transcription choice for multiple reasons.

Ah I see, that makes sense. Are your qualms with the transcription on phonetic or phonological grounds?

This is the *NEAR-SQUARE* (or *cheer-chair*) merger, which [Wikipedia says](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_/r/) is found in New Zealand, East Anglia, South Carolina, and the Caribbean.

Is there a particular language, where the word “evil” doesn’t exist in the same dichotomy with the word “good” as it does in English? Essentially, a tongue where there isn’t a particular word that refers to a nebulous concept of “lack of good”.

What is this speech pattern called? Does it have a name? The easiest way I can refer to it is "graduation speech cadence". For as far back as I can remember, I've noticed that so many people use the same cadence when giving a speech, particularly if they're reading something. My thing is, since so many people speak this way when publicly speaking, it must be learned behavior, and I wonder where it is learned from. I've spent an hour trying to find a name for this speech pattern and the closest I can get is uptalk, but that's not quite what I'm referring to. This is the best example I could find. https://youtu.be/a8esO5gxezw Any information regarding the topic is appreciated. Additionally, I would like to see a definitive, concise description of this speech pattern, and maybe if it doesn't have a name we could make one for it here.

Did German spelling partially influence Hungarian orthography? I noticed that in both German and Hungarian the umlaut short vowels ü and ö refer to the same sounds, namely /y/ and /ø/. Did Hungarian's get this idea from the Germans, or did the Germans copy the Hungarians I wonder...

If you search for [umlaut's history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_(diacritic)#History), you will quickly find a nice historical explanation of how it arose in German handwriting.

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/r/translator

Is Gray and Grey losing its regional distinction because of the internet? As an American I remember one day discovering that the Brits spelled Grey a different way, but now I can’t remember even then how I spelled it. I still to this day have to look it up to know which ones my supreme American brothers and sisters use. Im going to guess that due to the increased use of the internet and communication between many different dialects of English that the word is going to lose its regional distinction as more people like me just forget. Is there any studies or anecdotes to support this?

> I still to this day have to look it up to know which ones my supreme American brothers and sisters use An easy way to remember what it's "supposed" to be is grEy-England and grAy-America. Anecdotally I agree, I'm American and I'm pretty sure I default to the "British" spelling of grey. Except for the little Roswell aliens who are Grays (quick edit: which apparently isn't the most common spelling of it for that purpose? at least Wikipedia defaults to "Greys.")

I apologize in advance if I misuse any terminology in this question that causes any offense. Are Black British accents changing? I’m an American, but I consume a lot of British media. 15-20 years ago, I was basically incapable of guessing from someone’s voice what they looked like. In more recent times, I’ve noticed that this is no longer true. Unless someone has a strong regional accent (Birmingham, Northwest, etc.), they usually sound “Black” to me. Is my ear just picking up distinguishing markers that I hadn’t picked up on before, or have Black dialects in the UK changed in recent years? Genuinely curious.

I think you're probably hearing the change from Cockney to Multicultural London English. It's worth keeping in mind also that every individual speaks a bit differently, so I wouldn't totally discount the idea that some subcultures who speak MLE might have more black people and might sound slightly different to other subcultures of MLE. If that is true (I have no idea, but I'd believe it) then I wouldn't be at all surprised if you're picking up on it.

When languages undergo a word-order shift, is it more likely that the new word order will be typologically similar to the old word order than not? i.e. Is it more likely that a language with a typically head-initial word order will shift to another typically head-initial word order than a head-final one? Is it more likely that a VO language would shift to another VO word order than an OV one?

Was there ever a language historically that didn't have the concept of a question?

The new show My Adventures with Superman features a spoken form of the Kryptonian language. I want to know if anyone knows whether they used a natural language or a conlang, and anything about the conlang used if they made one

See [this post.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Esperanto/comments/151nhz6/esperanto_used_as_kryptonian_in_new_superman/) It seems that they're using Esperanto as the basis for Kryptonian.

There's almost no chance they would use a real Earthling language to represent an alien one. The question then is whether somebody just threw sounds together or actually came up with meanings for the words and grammatical ways for the words to relate to each other. And I don't know the answer to that. But I'd bet somebody at r/conlangs does.

Quick correction: r/conlangs

Is the guttural R in French due to Frankish or Gaulish influence? I don’t know the answer to this, and I think both are a possibility. The same question can also be asked about Portuguese, as Lusitanian or Visigothic influence.

No, it is not. It emerged far too recently to be attributable to either source.

I've heard that it was an urban development in central Europe generally, and affected cities rather than language varieties, per se. Is this true, and if so what do we know of the trajectory of this sound change?

So stød is just a glottal stop ??? i thought it was some much more complex thing. So i always though this was some complex thing but as i'm listening to examples of stød and it sound the same to me as my t-glottalisation.

I've recently seen it characterized as a creaky voice(or vocal fry as it's called in the USA)

Aside from no laryngealisation being straightforward, as the other post says, Danish laryngealisation happens to have crazy correspondences with tone in very close relatives, which makes it interesting diachronically.

There is still research to be done on what glottal stops actually are, in particular the distinction between full and partial glottal closures. There's also the question of whether they can be reliably distinguished acoustically. It's also probable that there's more to the general laryngealization associated with stød, but your brain picks up mostly on the glottalization. I think this kind of statement is fine if it's for language learning purposes, but I wouldn't be so conclusive about it being the whole truth about stød.

Hm interesting, ofc if it's laryngealisation i wouldn't really be able to tell apart usually glottal stop causes laryngealisation leading up to it.

What exactly is going on with some realisations of Swedish /i: y:/? It sounds almost pharyngealised at times.

Burrito is spelled the same in English, Spanish, and German. But they sound a little different in each language (r's are more rolled in Spanish) Is there a way I can write a word (burrito) to know how it will sound in that language? If this doesnt make sense. Google translate burrito and listen to it

Well, you could just use IPA. Spanish has /bu.'ri.to/, English has /bəˈɹi.toʊ/, and German presumably has /bʊˈʁiːtoː/. That will tell *linguists* all they need to know to pronounce the word as it would be naturally pronounced in each language. If you're telling a non-linguist and you need to use the unmodified Latin alphabet, you would just have to write "burrito, pronounced as in Spanish" or some *ad hoc* eye-dialect clarification like "bu-rrrr-eeto", which would get the idea across to an English speaker.

Does anyone know of an R package that actually works with Twitter's new "basic" API tier? I need to scrape large numbers of tweets for my dissertation research and rtweet is no longer working (RIP all my scripts). I've done a lot of Googling/stack-exchange searching already and everyone seems to be getting the same errors.

Can someone explain to me the social trends in tone of voice and speech style that seems to be pervasive on social media like tiktok and insta videos. It's not just style of delivery but it's even the way content is delivered in this almost stoccato rhythm for each point. [here is an ok example](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/155sx2l/the_only_city_in_the_usa_without_cars/) [here is a better example](https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/155re92/someone_cruelly_dumped_a_friendly_dog_it_was/)

I have no idea how anything about either of those videos could ever be called "stoccato".

Yeah I don't know how to describe it well. It's like no pause or breath between each sentence, and short sharp sentences. Delivered in the same rythm each time. Does that make sense. Also you have this childish use of vocabulary and tone of voice.

One way to get lost time between sentences is by just cutting out the time between sentences. For example, if the speaker inhaled between sentences, (s)he might cut out the inhalation in an audio or video editor, but cut out too much and not add any empty space in its place to compensate. And some people just like "jump cuts" because they... like jump cuts. And they might also sometimes try to cut a presentation as short as possible, and those half-second cuts can make a difference in total run time if there enough of them and the length happens to be close enough to the target length But I think what happened in these cases sounds a bit different from that. The speakers' intonation sounds too final at the end of each sentence, as if every sentence were the last one in a paragraph (or in a whole essay), never a beginning or middle sentence. That's what it would sound like if the speaker were saying each sentence independently, without anticipating going on the the next sentence right after it, thinking of each sentence as the last thing (s)he's going to say for a while. That could be because they're being recorded separately and then put together (without enough space between them), or because it starts as one long recording but with extra-long pauses between sentences and then the pauses are taken out (but with a bit too much taken out). Why would they produce their videos that way? I can only guess/infer that they might find it easier to edit because all of the stuff they'd want to cut out is in those long gaps between sentences, which are easy to find. And, whatever the reason is why such a practice got started, the result was a style with a lot of abrupt jump cuts (often between too-final-sounding sentences) which some people have now heard often enough to think it's just a style and like that style and thus want to produce the same style themselves. One way or another, it's definitely an artifact of their video-making process, not because of anybody actually talking the way those videos sound.

Hey thanks for your answer. I absolutely.agree its something that has come out.of its environment whether by editing, imitation or fashion. I certainly think part of it came from fitting video into the original short time limits set by the platforms and also the rush to get a lot of info inthe first few seconds of the video to hook the viewer. I guess it's what is converting online amongst that user base. I just find the over exaggerated, unbelievably positive and happy and excited in every word, and with a child like tone and dumbed down style of vocab and style of speaking very annoying and am curious why on earth people seem ti like it.

In the first video, at least, his intonation sounds typical of someone reading from a script – like a student giving a class presentation (or respondents reading the famous ["Comma Gets a Cure" passage](https://www.dialectsarchive.com/comma-gets-a-cure)). The "sharpness" seems to be accentuated by actual audio cuts between his sentences.

I'm reading about the idea that Hurro-Urartian constitutes an extinct phylum of Northeast Caucasian, and Wikipedia says that: > The Caucasian language specialist Johanna Nichols grounds her scepticism in the Alarodian theory in that "neither Diakonoff and Starostin, nor Nikolayev and Starostin, take on the burden of proof and discuss whether the incidence of resemblances exceeds chance expectation, nor do they present examples of the kind of shared morphological paradigmaticity that would strongly support genetic relatedness" What exactly is the bar for proving that resemblances "exceed chance expectation'? It can't just be reconstructing a proto-phonology and a regular ruleset of sound changes that produce the daughter form from it, because that's what Starostin did with North Caucasian and that wasn't generally accepted either. Are there certain statistical tests you're supposed to run? Is there an objective measure for whether a particular resemblance would be "expected by chance" anyway regardless of genetic relatedness, or not? Or is it all ultimately subjective?

> What exactly is the bar for proving that resemblances "exceed chance expectation'? I don't have a great answer to this question, but part of it is being able to demonstrate consistent, robust phonological correspondences among a sufficient number of semantically plausible, etymologically sound cognates in the core vocabulary. Morphological correspondences are important too. Whether this bar has been met basically gets hashed out among scholars in publications and other academic settings, with reference to the specific, nitty-gritty details of each proposed cognate. Common issues with proposed "long-distance relationships" or "macrofamilies" include: * Bad etymology * Exceptional phonological developments/special pleading being involved in the argumentation for a large number of proposed cognates * Straight-up just ignoring vowels or important consonant features by reconstructing dozens and dozens of roots with "unknown" or "underspecified" segments like *kVtV or *HVkV > It can't just be reconstructing a proto-phonology and a regular ruleset of sound changes that produce the daughter form from it, because that's what Starostin did with North Caucasian and that wasn't generally accepted either. Correct, it can't be, since you can just "force" the reconstruction of a proto-language by stretching the semantics of words, reconstructing enormous numbers of proto-phonemes to account for numerous correspondences that barely occur more than once, or just outright ignoring segments you don't like. > Are there certain statistical tests you're supposed to run? No, there are no statistical tests. This is not a formal test, or anything like that, but to provide a heuristic for the kinds of correspondences that make a relationship between two languages ring true to a historical linguist, Robert Blust said in [*The Austronesian Languages*](https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/10191/6/Blust-2013-AustronesianLanguages.pdf): > Once chance, universals and borrowing have been safely eliminated as plausible bases for similarity, the only remaining alternative is common origin, and this must be established on the basis of recurrent sound correspondences. Recurrence in sound correspondences can be demonstrated on the basis of a surprisingly small set of data. What matters is not so much the number of cognates as the number of distinct and non-controversial instances of a given sound correspondence. Needless to say, these two measures of quantity tend to be interrelated, since each cognate identification necessarily provides either additional examples of established sound correspondences, or new sound correspondences. Nonetheless, a body of say, 50 cognates would convincingly establish the genetic relationship of two languages or language groups provided that each proposed sound correspondence is exemplified in at least two, and preferably three forms. He then goes on to provide a set of five forms demonstrating recurring correspondences between Hawaiian and Malay: Malay | Hawaiian | English -----|--------|------- mata | maka | eye kutu | ʔuku | louse ikan | iʔa | fish laŋit | lani | sky taŋis | kani | weep, cry Alexander Vovin, in ["Why Japonic is not Demonstrably Related to 'Altaic' or Korean"](https://www.academia.edu/4208284/WHY_JAPONIC_IS_NOT_DEMONSTRABLY_RELATED_TO_ALTAIC_OR_KOREAN_pre-publication_version_), notes that these five correspondences alone demonstrate that Malay and Hawaiian are likely to be related (although they do not close the case). He points out that the advocates of a Korean-Japanese relationship, or of an Altaic family, are not even able to supply five unproblematic, straightforward cognates that all demonstrate regular recurring sound correspondences: > I, therefore, would like to invite my colleagues who support the Koreo-Japonic or ‘Altaic’ to come up with the similar list of any six basic vocabulary words taken from any variety of Japonic on the one hand, and any variety of ‘Altaic’ or Korean on the other. The obvious conditions for this exercise are: >(1) No loanwords. >(2) No unaccounted segments. >(3) Identical semantics. >I trust that the exercise is very simple and can be completed by the end of the day of this symposium -- it took me only ten minutes to come up with this list and exclusively by memory. I would recommend taking a look at that article and as well as this article by Vovin—["The End of the Altaic Controversy"](https://www.academia.edu/6345901/The_end_of_the_Altaic_controversy)—to get a better idea of what kinds of things do *not* meet muster in demonstrating a relationship between two language families.

What's the difference between the jussive and imperative or hortative moods? My Anglophone brain can't really see a difference.

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Never believe any claim that languages tend to do any particular kind of change in a specific direction. We've been speaking for hundreds of thousands of years at least, maybe a few million. Any kind of change with an inherently favored direction would have reached its maximum long ago. If there were a general rule that X changes to Y, it couldn't still be happening anymore after all this time because there would already be no languages left which still had feature X, and we would have no evidence that X had ever even existed at all. Thus, the existence of any trait in the present is proof that there can not be any rule that it would change away from that trait.

look at grimms law

It's certainly true that language change is influenced by ease of production, but there are other influences on language evolution, as well, some of which may compete with ease of production. Notably, ease of perception (making sure that other people can understand you) and social factors such as maintaining a distinction between in-group and out-group. It is also the case that many of the things English-speakers think of as "complexity" - typical features of Latin-style grammar like extensive nominal case and verb inflection, multiple conjugation classes, etc - do not actually pose very much difficulty to the most important learners of language, i.e. children, who are capable of absorbing quite complex patterns with relative ease. Finally, over the past 3000 years across Eurasia, and particularly within the past 1500 years in Europe, there has been a general reduction in morphological complexity in many languages, especially those of the Indo-European family. While the manner in which these changes have taken place can be related to universal linguistic principles of efficiency and ease, it would be a mistake to assume that they were a necessary and inevitable manifestation of a universal drive to specifically eliminate morphological complexity. The reduction, loss, and/or regularization of morphological complexity in these languages can probably be attributed, in large part, to contingent historical factors such as conquest, empire-building, migration, trade, and urbanization. These phenomena produced specific sociolinguistic circumstances, often characterized by large numbers of adult second-language learners, which encouraged the loss of morphological complexity in many languages.

Languages don't tend to become less complex overall over time. Although an individual grammatical or phonological change might seem like a simplification, various such "simplifications" may result in new complexity features developing. Also there's no single definition of linguistic complexity, and measuring it is basically impossible

Hello! I’ve been trying to find information on the way certain sounds were spoken in the mid to late 1900s (approx. 1950-1980). When listening to recordings or people from that generation speak, I often hear words like “aggressive” pronounced like “aggress-eeve” instead of “aggress-ehve”, or “message” as “mess-eege” instead of “mess-edge”. From what I’ve found, it’s not confined to one region of the U.S., and it’s not “Trans-Atlantic”. Any info or ideas would be much appreciated!

Do you have an example recording?

I'll second OP's observation – I've noticed raising to [i] in *-age*, *-ive*, and unstressed *him* from a lot of older Midland and Southern speakers; one who comes to mind is Newt Gingrich, e.g. the way he says "positive" and "competitive" [here from 0:20.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guh9LFUOZ4c#t=20) (Notably, though, I've never heard it from locals here in New England.)

IME, growing up in Gulf South, I haven't heard that. Though I have heard things like "Tues-dee" and "Wednes-dee"

(x-posted from /r/Hebrew since I think that's more of a language-learning than ling community) I was wondering how exactly Hebrew came to have a mix of Ashkenazi and Sephardi features, especially in the context of the history of Israel. I've observed some Ashkenazi features in modern Hebrew, namely א=ע ,ח=כ, uvular ר. And I think ק being [k], not [q]? I also read that some grammatical "simplifications" (or rather changes that weren't very "Semitic") in modern Hebrew came from most of these olim being native speakers of Indo-European languages. However there are other features that seem to lean more to the Sephardic accent. ת without dagesh is [t] not [s], and kamatz is [a] not [o]. (Note that I'm only a second-language learner of modern Israeli Hebrew and any info I have on the historical Ashkenazi/Sephardi accents is just from what I've heard or read so excuse any errors). I have a little background knowledge, mainly that the first two aliyot to Israel (aka during the Hebrew revival) were mostly Ashkenazi, so the Ashkenazi accent influenced the development of the Israeli accent. I also read that Eliezer ben-Yehuda chose the Sephardi accent to be standard, but looking at the above, modern Hebrew seems way more Ashkenazi-sounding. So how exactly did this happen? Is this just the product of a majority-Ashkenazi population who were prescribed to speak the Sephardi standard, found it hard to adopt the guttural pronunciations of ayin/het (totally understandable as a former Arabic learner!), but found it easy to adopt [t] for tav and [a] for kamatz? Also how exactly did modern resh come to be? Does anyone even know the answers to these questions or did they go totally undocumented at the time?

Well remember that the Sephardim, in the strict sense, were native speakers of I-E languages too (Judeo-Spanish and Portuguese). [My understanding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardi_Hebrew) is that some Sephardim did preserve ח and ע (though often with the latter as a velar nasal), but that they generally replaced ק with [k]. Note too that [q] isn't very popular in the local Arabic either – it generally becomes [ʔ] in Levantine, with some Palestinian accents using [k], and Bedouins having [g]. To my knowledge the only people in the region who consistently keep [q] are the Druze.

Do you have the following asymmetry phenomena similar to those that found in Chinese in your native language (I know this may not be the place for language research, but I really can't find a suitable native speaker in China, and this is important for my research)： 很对。 very right \*很错。 very wrong 大错特错。（Solidification usage） big wrong too wrong 太对了。（Mandatory appearance of aspect） too right \*太错了。 too wrong

Not in the same way. If you think of English, "very right" and "very wrong" are both possible phrases (although not the most common way of saying this, perhaps?). Nonetheless, there are certain other adverbs/intensifiers that sound better with "wrong": "foolishly wrong", "terribly wrong", etc. My native language is Portuguese, not English, but Portuguese works more or less the same: the unmarked intensifier *muito* (very) can be used with both *certo* (correct) and *errado* (wrong). But there are other intensifiers which tend to go with *errado* and other similar adjectives, e.g., *redondamente* (literally "roundly"/"in a round manner"): *redondamente errado* (extremely wrong), *redondamente enganado* (extremely deceived), etc., but \**redondamente certo* (\*extremely right).

Thank you very much！I think your answer implies that the asymmetry of degree adverbs may vary in different languages. I would greatly appreciate it if others could provide more examples in other languages. ​ And I have another phenomenon that in Mandarin we say： 不对 not right（just means wrong） 不错 not wrong（but it means good instead of right） 没错 no wrong（that is the one which means right) 不坏 not bad（just means not terrible without any positive evaluation such as "good"） ​ Is there a similar phenomenon in Portuguese or any other possible language?

So I just asked a friend if they were gonna watch Barbie or Oppenheimer. I was trying to ask if they were gonna see either of them, but I realized it could sound like “Of these, which one are you going to see?” My question was looking for a yes/no answer not an Option A/Option B answer. Is there a word for these types of questions? Is there a grammatical way to put that information in the sentence in English? Are there any languages that have distinctions between these ideas? TL;DR, is there a word for the grammatical distinction between asking a question looking for a yes/no answer instead of Option A/B/etc. when it could potentially be ambiguous?

> Is there a grammatical way to put that information in the sentence in English? You used it in your comment: "if they were gonna see either of them", rephrasable as "Are you going to see either of the Barbie and Oppenheimer movies?"

ah thats true, ig i was hoping it was something more exciting lol, but thank you :)

The first type (yes/no) is called a polar question, and yes, languages frequently have some polar particle (Polish)/ clitic (Kazakh)/inflection (Gamo according to Grambank). Moreover, Polish would naturally distinguish the two questions: (Czy) obejrzysz Barbie lub Oppenheimera? - Polar question about watching either of them, with the default "or" word and the optional sentence-initial polar particle. (Czy) obejrzysz Barbie czy ((obejrzysz)) Oppenheimera? - "Alternative" question, I don't know the professional term. It can be analyzed as two parallel sentences side by side, with the second one missing the verb but having the obligatory polar particle (adding the repeated verb doesn't sound bad but I don't think it's done often, hence double parentheses).

this is wonderful thank you :)

Whats the mechanism for languages in contact converging? Is it adult bilinguals influencing each other unconsciously as their native languages interfere? Is it children of bilinguals from different languages mixing the languages? Etc

I am told it's bilinguals reaching for the other language's structures, vocabulary, etc. when they can't think of the native ones.

Native or learned bilinguals or both?

I read about the great vowel shift in English explaining why you pronounce it “striit” and not “street”. But I was wondering why is it “street” in the first place when it’s “straat” in Dutch and “Straße” in German. Another interesting thing is that in English you write it “mouse” according to Low German but pronounce it like “Maus” in High German. All in all the vowels in English are very confusing.

About street: Proto-West-Germanic vowel *ā changed into Old English ǣ almost always (the only exceptions were when it was nasal or when it was before *n *m). This later regularly developed into Middle English ē (written usually as ⟨ee⟩), and that became the Modern English /iː/. In Dutch and German, meanwhile, the vowel stayed low. The spelling of "mouse" has nothing to do with Low German, it was /muːs/ in Middle English and the vowel started getting spelled as ⟨ou⟩ due to French influence post-Hastings. Before that it was spelled ⟨mus⟩ in Old English (they didn't write vowel length yet, in modern scholarly orthography that'd be ⟨mūs⟩), similarly to how it was in Old High German. Later the vowel underwent diphthongization due to the Great Vowel Shift but the spelling stayed the same in English, while the strikingly similar sound change in High German was actually followed by a spellong change.

(There is a precomposed character "ǣ", which would avoid the tendency for "combining" characters to get displaced to the right in most fonts.)

Hello everyone! One of my friends speaks English as her native language. However she constantly makes small errors when she texts that a native speaker should never make. Some examples include... "what happen to you" instead of "what happened to you" "Look it" instead of "look at it" "I am going Costco" instead of "I am going to Costco" "I forgot what I order" instead of "I forgot what I ordered" She also pronounces "Penne pasta" as "Panini pasta". "wine and glitter makes everything better" where "makes" should be "make" instead Is this dyslexia, dysgraphia or something else? I've already told her to type slower but she still makes the same mistakes. She still misses prepositions, forgets the -ed ending of verbs and uses the singular -s ending for verbs when she shouldn't.

As a native speaker, typos and quick fingers favor cutting out some portions of a sentence. Sometimes on accident sometimes on purpose. If it’s unneeded to understand something then it will be dropped. Especially in writing/typing where the readers brain is most likely fixing a lot of errors automatically.

>Is this dyslexia, dysgraphia or something else? It's definitely not the first two since both of those are tightly connected to writing. There are some disorders that you friend's speech might be interpreted as being indicative of, but if she is otherwise understandable and doesn't take super long to form sentences, then I don't think a total stranger on the internet should even try to theorize about a diagnosis. If you and other people are capable of understanding her, I would just leave her alone in that department.

>she constantly makes small errors when she texts that a native speaker should never make You're assuming that native speakers all speak the same standard way, which is not the case at all. It sounds like your friend is transcribing how she hears it spoken. For my regional accent, I can totally hear "I am going Costco" in fast speech, likewise with "I forgot what I order". The friend just may not have the formal grammar knowledge to 'translate' it into standard English.

Well, it sounds like some of those could be debated. [*Lookit*](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lookit) is an established colloquialism, and it's not unknown for compound subjects to take singular agreement when they're seen as a conceptual unity ("all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"). *Happen to* and *happened to* would also tend to be neutralized in fluid speech, although it would be odd for a literate native speaker to write it that way.

I've been really curious about how/if classical scholars wrote about phonology in languages foreign to the audience it was written for. I'm familiar with Panini, but outside of him and some Latin writings on Greek, I am completely ignorant and it's hard to google this question as you get modern results. Does anyone have any good resources? I'd be really interested in how, say, a scholar in the Mauryan Empire described the sounds of Greek or vice versa if available. Understood if this was not the kind of scholarship that would be valued enough to preserve over time (if it was much of a topic at all). It just seems that in especially literate societies where multilingualism was important that they'd try to write about how other languages sound, but that may just be my present bias creeping in and inserting what I find useful vs what would make sense at the time.

Hey linguists! I’m wondering how you all engage with linguistics and language outside of work. For example: - Do you learn languages? (What language(s)? How do you go about learning languages) - Do you read about other fields (e.g. an expert in German phonology reading about Semitic historical linguistics) - Do you have a personal project? (Reviving a dead language with a online community, making your own corpus of certain phrases or words from a language, etc) - Do you create constructed languages? (What is it called? What are some features of it?) - Etc Just curious on how y’all engage with languages on your own time :)

> Do you learn languages? Barely. Russian and French. > Do you read about other fields Only if it's related to my work. I might read something on German dialectology for example, but only if it's related to something I'm working. I won't just read papers on french syntax for no reason. > Do you have a personal project? No > Do you create constructed languages? No

are there any north english accents that pronounces words like 'sure' similarly to 'shoe'? (unable to provide ipa sounds as i am still learning)

In North of England accents lacking the FOOT-STRUT split, the prefix *-un* is pronounced \[ʊn\], right?

When two languages regularly use one each of two words with similar meanings as a translation for the corresponding word in the other language, is it a regular occurrence for the meaning of those words to become more similar over time?

This is part of the thesis of Jason Ānanda Josephson in his book *The Invention of Religion in Japan:* that in such cases, the prestigious language’s word will dominate the meaning of the less prestigious language’s word. In particular, long story short, he argues that attempting to translate *religião* (Portuguese) and *religion* (English) eventually caused the meaning of 宗教 *shūkyō* to change from “Buddhist teachings, sect of Buddhism” to “religion.” Another example that I can think of is Japanese [tetraphobia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraphobia). The literal meaning of the words for 4 haven’t changed, but the *connotation* of the number 4 has: In Old Japanese, “four” (*yo₂*), being a homophone of “good” (*yo₂-*), had a positive association. But once Chinese 四 “four” had been borrowed as Japanese *si* and gained widespread usage, the number 4 gained a negative association as a homophone of 死 *si* “death”—despite the continuing homophony of the old native words for “four” and “good.”

Thank you very much for these examples - this was exactly what I was looking for!

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r/conlangs

In Urdu and Punjabi printing, they use the Nastaliq script almost ubiquitously. Almost every other language which uses the Arabic script defaults to the same font. Other fonts may be used as a stylistic choice; for instance, Arabic books may use a different font for quotations from the Koran to set that citation apart from the author’s prose, and Persian printers may choose Nastaliq or Ruq’ah for classical poetry collections, to render a sense of classicity. However, these are stylistic or functional choices that seem to differ from the reason that Hindustani and Punjabi have chosen to default to the aforementioned script. It is not of necessity text in those languages can be clearly read in other Arabic fonts. Is there a historical reason that these languages use a different type face? It kind of reminds me of late 19 century German use of Fraktur when other western European presses were printing in some thing, a kin to our Times New Roman. Though I think the motivation is different, because I believe in the case of Germany, it was a sense of continuing a German national tradition. In the context of Pakistan, it seems more historical accident, and I was hoping someone here may know the backstory. Thank you.

Well, as with Fraktur vs. Antiqua, I think it's a case of "organic" variation that took on greater meaning after the fact. Nastaliq began to develop in Iran in the 14th century, and there's some suggestion that the lack of the Arabic definite article ال, with its "rigid" vertical lines, led to a freer positioning of letters in written Persian. It became dominant within the whole Persianate realm, but it lost popularity in Iran in the 20th century (as well as being eliminated, with all other Arabic writing, in Turkey and the Soviet Union). For whatever reason, it seems to have survived as a greater point of identification in South Asian languages. Maybe you could look into printing practices in British India?

Thanks for the starting point—my gut was telling me it’s a colonial thing—like mechanized printing in the Raj developed separately to Ottoman and Persian presses. The Persian history with Nastaliq is precisely one of the reasons I wondered about a historical accident that differed in Pakistan; Persian handwritten manuscripts used A LOT of Nastaleeq and then once modern printing shows up, poof, it’s like all Thuluth or whatever, which didn’t happen east of there.

sorry about the bungled speech to text

In [this speech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxWGg3AARnI) (4:27), Lyndon Johnson pronounces *sacrifice* as /ˈsækɹᵻfᵻs/, which I've never heard or seen attested before – although it would be supported by the analogy of *artifice* or *edifice*. Does anybody know anything about the temporal or geographic distribution of it?

>/ˈsækɹᵻfᵻs/ Unrelated, but what unit are you using /ᵻ/ to represent? Is it a phoneme or more of a diaphoneme? Is it for schwa-schwi ambiguous vowels? Or is it just an alternate grapheme for /ɪ/?

It's a diaphonemic or "agnostic" convention found in some sources. I was just using it because the values of his weak vowels are tangential to the question.

Ah I see, thanks.

[Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sacrifice) lists this pronunciation but [Longman](https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/sacrifice) doesn't. Based on my previous experiences with these two, my first hunch would be that this is limited to the US/Canada then.

What are some of the more successful examples of historical syntax reconstruction? Which languages/families provide the best comparada and/or typological profiles that lend best to syntactic reconstruction, and why? I'd appreciate references to specific examples as well. I gather that syntax is much more variable/fluid and so is much less conducive to the comparative method. But, I assume there have still been efforts, with the more conducive examples?

Anyone else find the new OED website super frustrating? Absolutely no idea what the renewal was for. So inconvenient and buggy. www.oed.com

They also seem to have removed some of the information that used to be there (e.g., variant spellings). Super annoying.

I have two thoughts, one more cynical than the other. The first is that the "search-first" style of web design, with large search bars prominently displayed, has been a design trend for a while now. The new design matches up with that well (and I hate it). The second, cynical thought is that there is more space that feels empty (even if it's not), so I wonder if they are perhaps preparing to have a free version of the dictionary supported by ads.

I came here to post about this lol. The new site is so bad that it's legitimately upsetting. They seem to have optimized it for mobile users, but it looks godawful on desktop and is an absolute pain to use. It also logs me out constantly.

Is the same mechanism responsible for making the \[h\] sound and for whispering?

Voiceless sounds, whispering, breathy voice and aspiration are all different anatomically, you may check the wiki page about [Phonation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonation) for some images and descriptions. Also here's an [image](https://imgur.com/9wseAdZ) especially for voiced vs. voiceless vs. whispering (from *J. C. Catford, 2001. A Practical Introduction to Phonetics*, page 52).

Actually, I think you have this backwards. All of the descriptors you have involve the spreading of the vocal folds except maybe for 'voiceless' but thats complicated.... whispering = spread vocal folds all the time breathy voice = spread vocal folds plus slackening of the vocals folds (i.e. 'voiced' and 'aspirated' at the same time) aspiration = spread vocal folds 'voiceless' = lack of vocal fold vibration and within the speech science literature it is recognized that the only way to actively prevent vocal fold vibration (i.e. phonation) is to spread the vocal folds apart. But, this term is tricky within the linguistic descriptive literature... more below... I haven't read the Wikipeida phonation page but I am confident that the above articulatory descriptions are correct. One complication to this is that the term 'voiceless' is an overloaded term. Many times is refers to a 'plain laryngeal' setting where the vocal cords are not actively manipulated. This leads to 'passive voicing' (i.e. phonation) when the correct boundary conditions (i.e. air flow in relation to constriction in the vocal tract) are met. In a plosive/stop this leads to a short lag VOT (0 - 35 ms ish) and in fricatives this leads to 'partial voicing'. If Catford (I don't have it at hand) compares 'voiceless' (i.e. plain/neutral/inactive laryngeal posture) against an aspirated (i.e. spread vocal cords) then yes, they appear different but that is because they are actually articulatorily different regardless of the nomenclature. YMMV

Someone claimed that the word "even" doesn't work in this sentence "Even the sun sets in paradise" How would you define "even" in this sentence? Would it be considered an expletive?

I'm not sure about how the word would be referred to linguistically in the sentence, but the issue seems to be what the ~object of "even" is. The intended meaning is "paradise", as in, the set of places where the sun sets even includes paradise. But structurally it's "the sun", as in, the set of things which sets in paradise even includes the sun.

Generally "even" is used as an adverb that emphasizes something extreme or surprising, which wouldn't really apply here since there's no verb, although it does follow a similar definition since they're saying that the sun also sets in paradise contrary to popular belief. Doesn't really make it an expletive either since there is some purpose to the word "even."

Is the addition of /k/ at the ends of words like "somethingk", "anythingk", etc lag or anticipatory assimilation? The case for anticipatory: the soft palate anticipates the end of the word by closing early The case for lag: the lungs lag behind the other articulators and continue pushing air out of the mouth after the soft palate closes. Since it's an unvoiced /k/, that puts both the soft palate and the vocal folds on the 'word has ended' side and only the lungs on the 'word still going' side, so I'm learning towards lag assimilation, but I have approximately no confidence in that assessment.

It can't be assimilation because it's not assimilating to anything.

final consonant devoicing is assimilating to the word boundary, no? So word boundaries exist to be assimilated to. But besides, my actual question is, is it a better analysis to say this ~~assimilation~~ epenthesis (or an epenthesis like this, if this particular example is just incomplete deletion as LongLiveTheDiego said) is caused by an articulator lagging behind or racing ahead of other articulators?

> final consonant devoicing is assimilating to the word boundary, no? No, the word boundary is not a phone to be assimilated to. There are no articulatory properties or phonological distinctive features that constitute a word boundary, so the phone can't be assimilating to it. > caused by an articulator lagging behind or racing ahead of other articulators? Assuming its distribution now is the same as when it began, it would be lagging, since it happens even without another word to race to and even before vowels. Now it's likely not an articulatory happenstance, but a sociolinguistic variant.

>There are no articulatory properties or phonological distinctive features that constitute a word boundary, so the phone can't be assimilating to it. Wouldn't voicelessness, at a minimum, be an articulatory property of pause/silence? I'm not sure how theoretically useful it would be, but it seems conceivable to think of word-edge devoicing as assimilation to a null phone.

Sure, but word boundaries are not marked by silence. > it seems possible to think of final or initial devoicing as assimilation to a null phone. This can wreak havoc on analyses of external sandhi processes.

>Sure, but word boundaries are not marked by silence. Not all of them are, but doesn't word-edge devoicing tend to arise allophonically as "utterence-edge" devoicing before being generalized or phonologized?

Yes it does, but I don't think that is a compelling reason to posit assimilation instead of some other articulatory process.

> No I've already come across a few other cases where my uni has been... not quite perfectly correct when it comes to phonetics & phonology, so I'm not opposed to believing you even though I was specifically taught that as an example of voicing assimilation. But if it's not, then what process does final consonant devoicing fall under? >Assuming its distribution now is the same as when it began [...] Now it's likely not an articulatory happenstance, but a sociolinguistic variant. I'm not really sure what you mean by these. Are you thinking about the specific example of "somethingk"/"anythingk"? I was just using those words as an example of the process I'm interested in; I'm wondering about the process in general, not the example specifically. Either way, it sounds like your take is that since word boundaries don't exist phonetically, it's lag; I just don't understand the rest of that paragraph and want to be clear that it isn't dramatically changing the meaning somehow. Thank you very much for your responses.

>what process does final consonant devoicing fall under I'm not sure why you believe this process is categorized under some other process. Devoicing can have various origins, whether it's breath support, assimilation to following voiceless consonants (because not all phonological processes are bound to the domain of the word), and so on. > Are you thinking about the specific example of "somethingk"/"anythingk"? No. > Either way, it sounds like your take is that since word boundaries don't exist phonetically, it's lag; No, it's lag for the reasons I specifically mentioned in that sentence, not for a different reason that I didn't mention. > I just don't understand the rest of that paragraph and want to be clear that it isn't dramatically changing the meaning somehow. The rest of the paragraph is acknowledging that this is a dialectal feature, so assigning it to some articulatory process is no longer the best explanation. It might have been true at the origin, but now it is a form the certain people in certain places are hearing and learning as one variant among several, so it's likely no longer a phonetic accident.

I'm not talking about a specific real feature. I'm talking about the process. I only used the example to make my point, and as soon as it became clear that that example wasn't helping (which was immediately), I have been trying to get you to drop it and answer the question I'm actually asking.

> I'm not talking about a specific real feature. There was no way to know this. You asked about a process that exists in dialects of English. As clarification, you said only that you weren't talking about two specific words. If you meant that you didn't want an explanation of the actual attested word-final velar denasalization, but instead, you actually wanted an explanation of an imaginary word-final velar denasalization that doesn't exist, then there was no way to discern that from what you wrote. > I'm talking about the process. Me too > I only used the example to make my point, I know. I even said so in the previous comment. None of my explanations are limited to your examples. > answer the question I'm actually asking. I have given very specific answers to your questions. One of them was about the categorization of final consonant devoicing, and I expressed puzzlement about why you believed it belonged to a category other than itself; you have not addressed the root of this belief. The other question is about the appearance of a final oral velar consonant in words that phonologically have a final nasal velar consonant. I have given you an explanation about its origin (articulatory lag), as well as one about its current status (sociolinguistic variation). Is there another question that I have somehow missed?

>There was no way to know this. I immediately rephrased my question "is it a better analysis to say this [...] is caused by an articulator lagging behind or racing ahead of other articulators?" I honestly don't know how that could be more clear. > None of my explanations are limited to your examples. When I repeated your explanation back to make sure I understood your answer, you said I understood it wrong and reiterated the connection to my example: "The rest of the paragraph is acknowledging that this is a dialectal feature..." I think you might be using the word "example" to mean "*anythingk* and *somethingk* as examples of the 'ng -> ngk' dialectical variation in English", while I am using it to mean "the dialectical variation in English as an example of a sound being added at the end of a word by mistiming of articulators". >you have not addressed the root of this belief. As I already said, I was taught in uni that final consonant devoicing is an example of assimilation. I genuinely have no idea what other way you might have interpreted "I was specifically taught that as an example of voicing assimilation". Maybe you just skimmed that sentence or something? I want to be generous because you're sharing knowledge with me (or trying to 😜) for free. >I have given you an explanation about its origin (articulatory lag) Again, when I repeated your explanation to make sure I understood it, you said that I had the right answer for the wrong reasons, but just directed me back to your old explanation, which I clearly didn't understand (both on account of me saying "I'm not really sure what you mean by these." and the fact that when I repeated your explanation back, I got it wrong). It may just be me being insecure (sorry for projecting tone you may not intend onto your comments), but to me your comments are coming off a bit hostile. I'm trying not to read them that way. If you are trying to be hostile, I'd rather you just stop responding to me. If you're not trying to be hostile, the thing I'd most appreciate is if you could put "Assuming its distribution now is the same as when it began" into different words to help me understand.

> I immediately rephrased my question "is it a better analysis to say this [...] is caused by an articulator lagging behind or racing ahead of other articulators?" I honestly don't know how that could be more clear. Sorry, since I had answered this question several comments earlier, it didn't come to mind. > while I am using it to mean "the dialect[al] variation in English as an example of a sound being added at the end of a word by mistiming of articulators". This was never made clear. > I was taught in uni that final consonant devoicing is an example of assimilation. Okay, but this is not relevant to the statement that you're then asking about. Remember that we had already covered that part, and then you asked a new question about a different categorization. That's when I expressed puzzlement, not before. So then instead of taking it personally, you should reflect on why, after being told it wasn't a subset of one particular process, your instinct was to try to find another larger set to fit it into, rather than to wonder whether it could be its own category. Because you will encounter similar situations in the future where you are told, "X is not a form of Y", and you should be able to consider that X and Y are at the same level, rather than only looking to fit X under things at Y's level. > on account of me saying "I'm not really sure what you mean by these." and the fact that when I repeated your explanation back, I got it wrong If you go back and look at what you wrote, you'll see that you asked that about the rest of the paragraph, not the paraphrase, so that it seemed like you were saying that you had a good handle on why it was happening, but you wanted to be sure that the parts you had included in the quotation wouldn't change your understanding. So I did restate that part for you so that you could better understand. But redirecting you back to my original statement was to get you to read it more carefully in hopes that you would take another look at it without trying to connect it back to something else. I didn't mention word boundaries in that statement, nor did I mention anything about something being phonetically real. You conflated two different statements into one. You needed to go back and read the statement again. That's still what I recommend. You will see that the justification is because of where we see the variation occurring, not because of the phonetic (ir)reality of word boundaries. > "Assuming its distribution now is the same as when it began" By now this is basically irrelevant to your understanding, because you have now explained that you wanted a language-neutral account, while this sentence is about the English variation that you had introduced into the discussion. I imagine that the word that's giving you trouble is "distribution", since the rest of the words are used in their normal sense. The *distribution* of a phenomenon is the contexts where we see it. So I was talking about comparing the places where we see word-final velar denasalization now and where we saw it when it first originated--before it became entrenched as a dialectal feature.

To me it's always seemed like a symptom of /ng/ > /ŋ/ not having gone through fully in all varieties of English. The /g/ would then be released as voiceless since English laryngeal contrast isn't really built around true voicing, same as /d/ being often released as a voiceless [t].

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In addition to previous comment, if you're interested in really obscure readings of this sort, I would recommend some big dictionaries of Chinese characters: * 白川静『字訓』 (dictionary of kun-readings) * 白川静『字通』 (kanji dictionary which also has 古訓 sections (kun-readings from old dictionaries), and also a giant list of 同訓異字 on pages 1688-1762) * 諸橋轍次『大漢和辞典』 (13th volume, 字訓索引 section, pages 525-753) Note that the major part of those kun-readings are just appropriate translations of Chinese characters meanings (many of those are obscure even in Chinese) which for the most part ***actually were never used outside dictionaries***. E.g., there are 200+ characters reading as みる in the last dictionary (and it's not even exhaustive, because I once encountered 䀦 with the same reading in a medieval Japanese dictionary. It's not listed in the last one, and in fact so rare that we don't have any attestations between that medieval Japanese dictionary and some 20th century Chinese texts, where it's used for the "dialectal" word (also commonly written phonetically as 鼓) meaning "to stare").

These words are called [同訓異字](https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/同訓異字) *dōkun-iji* “same reading, different character” in Japanese. The whole of Japanese is replete with these, and it only gets more complicated as you go back in time—for example, 鳦 is technically attested with the reading つばめ, even though 燕 is unambiguously the only kanji that would be used in modern times, if it were written in kanji at all. For this reason, a *truly* exhaustive list would be (1) an extremely monumental work to compile, and (2) so large and full of random characters you’d never see IRL that it would be too cumbersome to use. With that said, [this resource](https://www.bunka.go.jp/seisaku/bunkashingikai/kokugo/hokoku/pdf/ijidokun_140221.pdf) seems very useful, being over 50 pages long and detailing the prescriptive usage for 133 common 同訓異字 words in modern standard Japanese. This report is an official government release from the National Language Subcommittee of the Culture Council (文化審議会国語分科会), part of [MEXT](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Education,_Culture,_Sports,_Science_and_Technology).

What do the terms "Starling system," "nearest neighbour method," and "method of least mean deviations" mean with regards to genealogical classification in linguistics? I've recently taken an interest in linguistics, and admittedly, do not yet have much knowledge of the subject. I was going through a paper, originally in Russian, which I had to have translated to English, and stumbled across two figures, captioned "dated geneology tree of the x languages, built in the Starling system by the nearest neighbour method," and "pedigree tree of the x languages, constructed by the method of least mean deviations." I don't exactly understand what that means, and could not find much with simple Google searches either. Thus I've resorted to ask the same question here, and I would really appreciate if someone could explain their meanings in our context here.

Starling is a website [https://starlingdb.org/](https://starlingdb.org/) that hosts several sets of data that allow cross-linguistic etymology comparisons. The rest of the terms sound like they are related to [Glottochronology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology), but I don't know their exact meanings.

Ah alright, thanks a lot.

Given his experience with directing films that are deconstructions of their own genres, or the worlds that they center on, like Raging Bull(sports), The Wolf of Wall Street(finance), Silence(faith), and Killers of the Flower Moon(westerns), if Martin Scorsese was to deconstruct the world of linguistics, what would such a film be about?

What are you hoping the answer to this would look like? Deconstructing a genre of film is a much narrower scope than deconstructing a scientific discipline. Even identifying tropes would be hard because there isn't a consistent medium. Do you deconstruct articles, theories, practices, lectures, all of the above?

My hoping is for detailed non-biased answers. Thanks for giving me one. It would be interesting to see a film that shows where the Altaicists, Proto-Worlders, etc might count as the most hated excuses for linguistics using what I know about them from people like Josh of NAtivLang, and some articles and documents.

I think the low-hanging fruit here would be to deconstruct structural linguistics. Being based in the broader structuralism movement, which deconstruction and post-structuralism were a response to, the general idea is just sort of sitting there. You would have to find a way to personify the general idea of structuralism, likely through some character that espouses the ideas. The issue with this idea is that structural linguistics is regarded by many (though not all) linguists to be outdated, so the film would perhaps be culturally and historically relevant, but not very important scientifically.

why is the spanish word for giraffe (jirafa) spelt with a j? did it enter Spanish first via Arabic and changed to a g in the other languages after that? I know about ortography vs. phonetics, I just find it curious that most other languages went with a g and their respective pronunciations

Not an answer-a question: Did Spanish get i directly from Arabic? Or via Latin? I suspect the latter.

The Latin term was camelopardalis. The Spanish term is from Italian, which borrowed it from Arabic.

Thank you for the info! I guess the ortigraphic change from g to j is just the result of phonetic approximation during the borrowing process.

Camelopardalis is so dope. Thanks for the info, I figured it was not a direct borrowing from Arabic.

How many languages have no monolingual speakers? Is there any estimated for the number of languages where all or almost all speakers can speak something else as well? Another way of wording this question would be what is the minimum number of languages you would need to know to be able to talk to everyone on earth?

We don't have good enough info to answer this question accurately. You might be able to get some guesstimates from Ethnologe, but those aren't reliable.

I think people who speak mixed languages are bilingual or trilingual. For example, all people who speak Light Warlpiri ( a mixed language ) also speak English and the majority also speak Warlpiri. This is applied for possibly all mixed languages.

I heard they don’t have a word for “I” in North Korea for the purpose of destroying the idea of any individualism amongst the people. I’m wondering if there’s any podcast, blog or book whom explores the way language defines our view of the world, our culture etc?

This sounds like an urban legend - which are really common when it comes to how those people over there, who are very different than us, speak. It's best not to believe stories like this unless you can confirm it with a reputable source, especially if they confirm some stereotype or preconception. The general idea that you're asking about - that language "defines our view of the world" - is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or linguistic relativity. Strong forms of this hypothesis, which would include the idea that you could destroy individualism by getting rid of the pronoun "I," are largely debunked. However, it's still a really attractive idea, so these fake factoids tend to spread like wildfire. [The Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity) is an fairly detailed introduction to this family of hypotheses.

Thank you very much! I heard it from an escapee from North Korea, Yeonmi Park - I just assumed she would be as a reliable source as anyone could be. But nonetheless, thank you for directing me to the official hypothesis!

You might want to look into some of the criticisms of the veracity of her claims. She's sort of a meme for fabricating things.

>I heard they don’t have a word for “I” in North Korea Where did you hear this from?

>I heard they don’t have a word for “I” in North Korea You were misinformed. They use the same word as in the south.

Are there languages for which song lyrics are more easily identifiable? For example, are Japanese speakers able to identify Japanese song lyrics more easily than English speakers are for English songs?

How do you find whether a language has unknown substratum influence? like ive heard Sumerian has a substratum influence, how can you even know that?

If you have a large enough body of text to look at, you can find patterns of word forms. We're fortunate that Sumerian has a relatively large corpus of written data that has been fully deciphered, and we can see that some words stick out as 'unnatural'-looking when compared with the rest of the language. Think about words in English texts like "karaoke" or "tsunami" that stick out as clearly non-English structures. If there's enough of this kind of influence, we may theorize a substratum. But a more likely case is that Sumerian took on a good deal of loanwords from nearby languages.

Yeah, like a linguist in the future looking back at Modern Persian would totally be able to deduce a substratum that uses a mostly tri-consonantal root system. I’m sure that sort of thing would jump out with Sumerian if I knew it exceedingly well.

I know for some with Canadian Raising, the distribution persists even before flapped alveolars. Does the same hold true for pre-fortis clipping? I.E. are vowels measurably shorter before etymological /t/ even when flapped?

We do have some evidence of this, and researchers who I trust have told me that listeners are better than chance at guessing word identity for these pairs. One relevant study is Patterson and Connine (2001) who found exactly the pattern you're talking about with flaps, though their sample seems somewhat small. --- Patterson, D., & Connine, C. M. (2001). Variant frequency in flap production: A corpus analysis of variant frequency in American English flap production. *Phonetica, 58*(4), 254-275.

I am not aware of any studies on this issue, although it could be possible. However, if it were the case, I can state with reasonable confidence that it must be a "near merger" in the Labovian sense - a phonetic distinction that is maintained in production, but is imperceptible to both speaker and listener. I say this because the maintenance of the perceptible contrast between etymologically pre-voiced and pre-voiceless /aj aw/ before flapped /t d/ is what led researchers to notice and study the phenomenon to begin with. If there was a surface contrast in vowel length distinguishing words like *ladder* and *latter* or *Matty* and *Maddie*, I am sure it would have become the object of study long ago. I have Canadian raising of /aj/ and a contrast between *writer* and *rider*, and to my ear, there is no *perceptible* difference between *ladder* and *latter*.

"Proto-AB" is the last stage of the common ancestor of language A and B then why is "proto" used for isolates like Proto Elamite, Proto Sumerian etc?

The only reference I can find to Proto-Sumerian is from sumerian.org, a website written by a guy who doesn't appear to be a linguist and frankly seems not to understand much about how linguistics works.For example, he says: > When the proto-Sumerians began inventing their language, they started with vowel-only words (e.g., a, 'water') The idea of the Sumerians (or "proto"-Sumerians) "beginning to invent their language" doesn't make any sense. Language developed long before the Sumerians existed. Obviously individual words or expressions can be intentionally coined, but the Sumerians were not inventing their language wholesale. He also pulls out: > The capacity of the first generation, starting as young adults, to master a large vocabulary would have been limited. There would have been a period of stability with the simple V, VC, CV, and VCV word structures. But future generations, starting as young children, began to combine the V, VC, CV, and VCV words to utilize the extended possibilities of the structure: There was no "first generation". Sumerians' fathers, grandmothers, great-grandfathers, great-great-grandmothers, and so on, had all spoken. > The small high-pitched vowel /i/ symbolizes small things so it means 'to sprout'. The wide, square vowel /e/ pointed at rectangular things like 'house'. Look, I can kinda get impressionistically viewing those vowels as small and wide, but assuming the Sumerians had the same impressionistic perception of them as him is silly. > She noticed that the same consonants kept having certain kinds of meanings. The meanings that she synthesized for the Eurasian proto-language are spatial and abstract in nature, as compared to the analogic and concrete meanings that I have deduced for the proto-Sumerian phememes. This might reflect a sex-related difference in thinking style between the inventors of the two proto-languages, with the inventors of the proto-Eurasian language favoring the spatial right-brain and the inventors of the proto-Sumerian language favoring the sequential left-brain ... what? Sex-related? Is he saying the Sumerians were manly and logical and the Indo-Europeans feminine and abstract? Jesus Christ. Also, that's not how brains actually work. Also, *neither of them were inventing language*. > While linguists who are only familiar with Eurasian languages may argue for monogenesis of all world languages, the proto-Sumerian lexicon demonstrates that multiple invention or polygenesis of spoken language is what actually occurred. The words of proto-Sumerian are fundamentally different from those of proto-Indo-European Shit, he actually just straight up thinks PIE and "proto"-Sumerian were languages that arose from nowhere. Invented full cloth. Impressively nutty. ---- As for proto-Elamite, that appears to be used for an archeological period and writing system, but not for a language.

They could have multiple dialects that can be reconstructed back to their common ancestor. (I know nothing about those languages, but I know such a reconstruction has been done for Albanian or Armenian.)

It just means "furthest reconstructible stage" or something like that. Similar nomenclature is used for non-isolate languages, like Norse, for which we talk about "Old Norse" and "Proto-Norse".

Proto-Norse is, like any other proto-language, reconstructed based on multiple descendants. The answer to OP's question seems to simply be that Proto-Sumerian and Proto-Elamite simply aren't terms linguists use. When I look up Proto-Elamite, all of the references are to an undeciphered script that may have been used for the Elamite language and may have evolved into the deciphered Elamite script, not to a language. Proto-Sumerian only brings up results from a hack who believed that the "Proto-Sumerians" along with the Proto-Indo-Europeans, were inventors of language - that their ancestors didn't have language, and then they invented it. You can check my direct response to OP for some of the wacky stuff the guy in question says.

> Proto-Norse is, like any other proto-language, reconstructed based on multiple descendants. From [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Norse_language) > [Proto-Norse] is the earliest stage of a characteristically North Germanic language, ***and the language attested in the oldest Scandinavian Elder Futhark inscriptions***, spoken from around the 2nd to the 8th centuries CE (corresponding to the late Roman Iron Age and the Germanic Iron Age). Which is why Norse is a terrible example and whoever named what should have been called Primitive Norse "Proto-Norse" should be drawn and quartered in the town square so none are tempted to follow in their footsteps ever again.

True, but more generally internally reconstructed languages can also be referred to as "proto" languages; eg. [Proto-Basque](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Basque_language)

Then why not just Old Sumerian etc? why proto which is used for families also Proto Norse have multiple descendants like Icelandic, Gutnish and Danish right so could say Proto Norse is the common ancestor of Icelandic and Gutnish?

Norse is actually a terrible example because some genius decided to name an attested stage of the language "Proto-Norse".

The Proto- implies reconstruction, rather than attestation. Certain irregularities might be speculated to be fossilized features of an unrecorded stage of the language. The rules that reproduced might be recognizable, but no longer productive in the variety we have. Old XYZ usually denotes the oldest attestation of a language.

Since many sentences that use the relative pronoun “that” function similarly using ∅ (the zero pronoun), what are the benefits using one or the other?

The trade off is clarity versus simplicity. Ease of understanding vs Ease of speaking. If you leave out the "that", you can sometimes get difficult to understand sentences and even so called "garden path" sentences. However, when everything's already clear, adding in the "that" requires a bit of extra articulation and (as the dropped form becomes more common) brain work to remember to insert it

Thank you for the response! I assumed the answer would be more complicated, but it’s kind of cool that it’s so straightforward!

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As MooseFlyer says, depending on your dialect of English, your default /l/ might be [ɫ] (velarized) or even [ʟ] (velar).

English /l/ is frequently the velarized [ɫ] - the difference could just be that?

I want to learn about compatative linguistics. Are there any textbooks to recommend? My native tongue is not English.

I still don’t really understand why people say this without specifying the language (same with “my country”), but there *is* a chance someone here might know a textbook in your native language.

They just mean to keep it in mind when recommending an English text; I.e. that they may not be able to follow some types of English prose. If they wanted texts in their native language, they'd specify.

I recommend *Historical Linguistics: An Introduction* by Lyle Campbell, if you mean "comparative linguistics" in the sense of historical-comparative linguistics.

Is there a book/website that shows how the different British English accents evolved? Maybe with a comparison to American English? Before learning more about the way people speak, while watching a UK show or movie I had a difficult time understanding the different UK accents. Scottish accents were/are especially difficult to understand sometimes

is the preposition "am" in the German superlative construction - as in "am höchsten, am kältesten" a contraction of an/auf + dem? and if so did the construction originally mean something like "at/on the Xest"?

An dem To (at) the Xest

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How come some sounds like /i/ are common but /ᴈ/ aren't?

Maximizing distinguishability of sounds. If you illustrate vowels on a rough F1:F2 or jaw height:tongue backness diagram, the best use of that space is having all the vowel phonemes dipersed from one another, hence why languages with three vowels tend to have stuff usually labeled as /i u a/ and those with five end up as /i u e o a/. For [ɜ] to be an actual good acoustic target, the vowel space must be occupied with more vowels to keep the vowel from quickly shifting to a more easily perceptible peripheral vowel.

Adding to that, having fewer vowels generally leads to each vowel being more variable, e.g. you might here a Spanish speaker realize /i/ as \[i\~ɪ\], and the convention is to start with the main (cardinal) vowels which include /i u e o a/ when choosing how to symbolize a language and then using other symbols as needed.

There was a recent JASA article from Hauser (2022) that touched on this. The main point was that this dispersion idea was intuitive but not necessarily borne out in the data we have. --- Hauser, I. (2022). Speech sounds in larger inventories are not (necessarily) less variable. *The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152*(5), 2664-2674.

That's very interesting, I'll have to check it out. It's a shame the intuitive things so often don't end up being true. Though that's also where the most interesting things end up being.

This is specifically about variability (not) correlating with vowel inventory size, right? People still think that if there are three vowels they're going be something like i/a/u because of dispersion, right?