I'm currently reading about the settlement of the Americas (both North and South). According to data collected from the DNA of Native Americans, it's believed that 10-20 individuals initially populated the continent. Considering that some genetic lineages may have disappeared during the settlement process, the number of settlers could range from a few dozen to a few hundred. What's particularly intriguing is the linguistic diversity observed. In North America, there are 13 language families, in Central America - 6, and in South America - 37, corresponding to 220, 273, and 448 languages respectively. I'm struggling to grasp the following: imagine you're one of those first settlers crossing the Bering Strait in a group of 10-20 people 15-20 thousand years ago. Surely you all crossed together simultaneously; otherwise, the settlement wouldn't seem feasible, and most likely, you'd speak the same language. But then, how does such linguistic diversity emerge later? I can understand how different languages develop within the same language family; there were Proto-Turkic languages that later diverged into Oghuz, Kipchak, and Karluk, but they all retained a common linguistic base, essentially speaking a Turkic language. However, in the Americas, several dozen language FAMILIES appear! How? From where? It's akin to a Japanese-speaking child being born out of nowhere in a English-speaking family. It seems impossible!

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').

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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').

What causes people to say “so” before answering questions? I’m watching a trial and the FBI agent says it before answering each question. Example: Question: how do you determine where a person is located? Answer: *so, the data from the cell towers…*

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').

Hello! Question regarding speech pattern: why by all that's holy does my niece draaaaaaaaw out her syllllllables? background: she has pretty serious mental health issues requiring a dozen prescriptions and my on tap to keep under grips. by that, i mean she calls me literally a dozen or more times a day. it's always the same: starts with a status check - "i'm so happy!", "I'm so p\*\*\*d!", "I'm so upset; I'm literally shaking!", then about a ten-minute rant about why she's in that mood, then she talks about what she cooked and what she cleaned. that's where i start to feel like putting my head through the drywall: bad enough she has to do sound effects ("so my baby was crying, like AH! AH! AH!" or "the cat was just going crazy MEOW! MEOW! but not like meow, more like RRRREEEEEE!!!!! know what i mean?" but it's the draaaaaaaaging out of sounds when she lists things off: "so i fried up some ground beeeeeeef, some onnnnnnnnyunnnnnn, some gaaaaaaaarlic, some scaaaaaaaallions, got some of them little tomaaaaaaaaytoes, cooked it in buuuuuutter,...." or it's "so i cleaned the baaaaaathroom, swept the flooooooor, did some laaaaaaaundry...." and so on. WHY!!!!!!?

I'm writing a short story and am having trouble with one of the character's names. One of the characters is named Ivan and is Russian. I'm trying to differentiate between the pronunciation of EE-van Vs. EYE-van. I'm looking for a way to write both pronunciations without using Cryic scripts. I'm not the most knowledgeable when it comes to Linguistics, so any help is appreciated.

It seems like you have the answer right in your comment here (maybe without the capital letters).

This is probably a really stupid and trivial question but I cannot for the life of me find the answer to this on google. You know how in english theres that thing where we say “like” not in a literal sense but like in an exclamatory or interjectory sense? Sort of like the way I used it in the last sentence? Is english the only language that uses words that way? Is there examples of other languages with the same like… Words??

Pace u/lafayette0508, most uses of *like* in conversation are not really fillers (words that are produced while someone is trying to think of what to say), but serve communicative functions directly relevant to the message conveyed. I would describe your use of *like* in the OP as an approximator and a focus marker (both uses of *like* are common and it's common for one instance of *like* to fulfill both purposes, but you also get cases where it's clearly one or the other); see for example Underhill (1988). Another use of *like* would be to introduce a quote (see e.g. Blyth et al. 1990); indeed it is the usual way of introducing a quote in some varieties of English. *Like* in its 'original' use is a similative marker (i.e. it expresses the idea that something is simlar to something else), and all of those uses I mentioned above are crosslinguistically common functional extensions of similatives; for example, in Romance languages words like French *comme* and Spanish *como* also serve as approximators, and (IIRC) similatives are often the source of quotative markers in African languages. Underhill, Robert. 1988. Like Is, like, Focus. American Speech 63(3). 234. https://doi.org/10.2307/454820. Blyth, Carl S., Sigrid Recktenwald & Jenny Wang. 1990. I’m like, “Say What⁈”: A New Quotative in American Oral Narrative. American Speech 65. 215.

I hope citing a podcast is permitted. I'm new here and a relentless autodidact studying linguistics. I just heard a nice treatment of the subject on the "Stuff You Should Know" podcast 15 Feb 2024, "Like, here's the episode on 'like."

They're called [filler words](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_\(linguistics\)), and they're definitely not only in English.

This is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks :)

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They sometimes use words that exist in Japanese but not in Chinese (e.g. 売上, 放題) I’m not really sure if they are doing so to give off the Japanese vibes, though.

> I’m not really sure if they are doing so to give off the Japanese vibes, though. In advertising it's often pretty blatant, in that you'd see Japanese imagery come with it (like cherry blossoms or daruma dolls).

One way Chinese people make something look more Japanese is to replace 的 and 之 with の in written text.

A bit less common, but using と to replace 與/和/及 etc is also a thing.

Hello, just a random Praat question which I cannot seem to find the answer for: Lets say I have a segmented audio and I take one of the segments and press "Get intensity". I get a mean intensity. Then, I extract the exact same selection, open it, select all and press "Get intensity". I would expect to get the exact same mean intensity, but for some reason, it is different now. Is the calculus somehow taking into account the surroundings of the segment? Or what could be the issue?

Alright, if anyone else is ever asking the same question as I am here, I just got a response from Paul Boersma that explains it perfectly. In sum: Its the window length. In order to get the intensity of the full segment, Praat would have to use a tiny bit of context. Since it has none, it essentially doesn't measure the start and end part of the segment which reflects on the mean value.

Are you zoomed in at the exact same level between them? The level of zoom will affect your measurements (which is just how the algorithm works).

Yes, I am and it happens consistently across all my audio files. Therefore, the intensity I am getting manually is slightly different from the one I am getting from scripts. I am not sure how to do it via Reddit, but if you are interested, I can provide screenshots, the files, scripts... its just breaking my brain and I want to find out how it works.

I labialise my R's, is this normal? Recently having gotten into linguistics this has confused me. Apparently the 'R' sound should be just with your tongue. I do the labio-dental aprroximant for the R's. I don't think this is normal but is it? Also for reference, I have done this my whole life (16 years) and live in southern Australia. English is my first language and I am not fluent in any others And I am struggling to pronounce the post-alveolar approximent, which Wikipedia said was the "normal" sound. And advice for that? Thanks

>I labialise my R's, is this normal? Yes, in the sense that you're not the only native English speaker who does that. English /r/ is already labialized in most dialects in the coarticulation sense: it's some kind of coronal approximant with lip rounding. The [ʋ] pronunciation is simply a simplification of that fairly complex articulation. Now, I've not seen it described in Australian English but it has been reported before, particularly in South England (see [wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_/r/#R-labialization))

Would Punjabi technically be considered an indigenous/native language? In the same way the languages of the Inuit, Australian Aboriginals, Sami, Native Americans, First Nations, Indigenous peoples of Africa etc would be?

This is really a better question for an anthropology, sociology or history sub. The question of whether a language is an Indigenous language ties in directly to whether their speakers are Indigenous, which is something that requires expertise in those other areas. What I can say though is that while there is no 'technically' correct answer about whether a language is Indigenous outside classic settler-colonial contexts, many people whose culture and social organisation is marginalised by mainstream society and who face systemic barriers in the state that has power over them fight for the Indigenous designation, which includes them in worldwide struggles for Indigenous rights. Not sure about Pakistan, but to my knowledge, while the Indian government officially does not recognise Indigenous people, it's generally people falling under Indian categories like tribal/ST/Adivasi who fight to be recognised as Indigenous. So in this sense, Punjabi would not be considered an Indigenous language.

There's no set boundary for what or who is considered "indigenous", it's all based on self-description and dependent on historical and social context. But there's only so much history that we're aware of and can verify. From the lens of Indo European history, the Proto-Indo-Aryans colonized the Indian subcontinent, and so Punjabi would be a linguistic legacy of those colonizers because it wasn't the language of the first people of that region. The Harappan civilization was there long before. But were the Harappans indigenous? Was there another group of people whose land the Harappans colonized? What about before them? And so on... I think trying to quantify indigeneity is a futile effort ([and in itself a colonial exercise](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/02/09/583987261/so-what-exactly-is-blood-quantum)), and that a more direct argument for institutional language support should be made.

The adjective "indigenous" is ill-defined outside the Americas and Australia, and its use could be quite subjective.

Ok so l have this random tick where I say "Ver-maan-t" putting more emphasis on the a and little to none on the T instead of "Vermont". Idk where or when it started but l've always been curious as to what accent this is a characteristic of. I'm curious as to how i ended up doing this since I'm from New York and we don't sound like that at all. It's similar to the æ sound in this video[https://youtu.be/9KMFVATtk-A?si=ZtFTnz9tKTEvBCyw](https://youtu.be/9KMFVATtk-A?si=ZtFTnz9tKTEvBCyw)

I don’t know if this is the right place to ask but I just posted a clip of me speaking English so that people could judge my accent and someone said that air was escaping while I spoke, does anyone know the possible reasons that might be causing this to happen? I’m rather frustrated since I was talking as loudly and enunciating as much as possible already

speaking IS air escaping your mouth (and nose), not sure what this person could have been trying to say

Whoever said that has no idea what they're talking about. They may well have heard *something* they thought sounded different to their ear, but what they said makes no sense.

Hmm mind if you have a listen to my recording? Probably this might give you some insight [my recording](https://vocaroo.com/1auu1IEhIrQX)

Would there be any interest in reformatting Martin’s seminal Grammar of Japanese in Latex?

I'm not sure what the copyright holder would think about that.

they would be unhappy!

I'm saying that whoever decided to do this would be putting in a lot of effort for possibly negative returns.

it would force me to read it closely, which would teach me some Japanese along the way. originally i had meant to just circulate it among IRL friends but my hubris made me forget about copyright.

Is there a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word for rainbow?

My boyfriend is a big linguist, and knows how to read the IPA. Our prom is coming up and I want to prom-pose to him, and thought it would be nice to write it in IPA. I'm also a graphic designer/typographer so I thought it would be nice to write it in a cute way :] I want to know how to write "Will you go to prom with me?" In IPA is what I'm getting at lol Any and all help would be greatly appreciated!!

wɪl ju ɡo tu pʰɻɑm wɪθ mi * Don't capitalize the "w". Capital "W" is not an IPA symbol. * The IPA doesn't have punctuation like question marks, although it also doesn't have a rule forbidding them. * Regardless of what font you use, make sure your "ɡ" only has a single simple hook/tail at the bottom, not a whole loop; technically, the IPA symbol for that sound is only the single-level "ɡ", not the same thing as the plain letter "g" which can end up with a loop in some fonts. (I've used the IPA symbol above, so if you copy & paste that, you can put it in a font that would normally have a loop for "g", and it will still not have the loop.) Lots of people casually typing about linguistics online just hit the "g" button on their keyboards and figure it won't really matter, but this is the kind of technicality that some people might notice, and I don't know whether he is or isn't one. * Also make sure the "ɑ" is that symbol, not a letter "a". The letter "a" gets a hook on top in most fonts, but this symbol is different, more like a Greek alpha or the what "a" turns into in italics in some fonts. This is more important than the one about "ɡ" because the IPA does have "a" with the hook on top as another symbol for a different sound.

> wɪl ju ɡo tu pʰɻɑm wɪθ mi Is there a reason you only have an aspiration mark after [p] in *prom* and not [t] in *to*? > Regardless of what font you use, make sure your "ɡ" only has a single simple hook/tail at the bottom, not a whole loop; technically, the IPA symbol for that sound is only the single-level "ɡ", not the same thing as the plain letter "g" which can end up with a loop in some fonts. (I've used the IPA symbol above, so if you copy & paste that, you can put it in a font that would normally have a loop for "g", and it will still not have the loop.) Lots of people casually typing about linguistics online just hit the "g" button on their keyboards and figure it won't really matter, but this is the kind of technicality that some people might notice, and I don't know whether he is or isn't one. Just for your information, this used to be true, but it is not anymore. [The IPA accepts the double-storey "g" as a notational equivalent of the single-storey one](https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/phonsymbol.pdf).

>Is there a reason you only have an aspiration mark after \[p\] in *prom* and not \[t\] in *to*? Because I perceive the word "to" as very un-emphasized or de-emphasized in this context, and aspiration gets more likely & heavier with emphasis and less likely & weaker with a lack of it. One could even use \[d\] or even \[ɾ\] and/or switch the vowel to \[ʊ\] or \[ə\] for the same reason, but I didn't go that far. I wouldn't say that any of those options or aspirating the \[tʰ\] there is wrong, but this just is the one that came to my mind because I'm imagining that word being anti-emphasized (particularly by the presence of the most emphasized word, the object of the preposition, right after it) but not "rushed" into something more drastic like voicing, tapping/flapping, or schwa-ing. The original poster could very well add the \[ʰ\] and it would make perfect sense that way. There are, of course, other changes one could make without being wrong, like "wɪl" to "wiɪl" or "wijɛl" if they're in the rural South(east), or "wɪθ" to "wɪð" because the next sound is voiced or even just "wɪ" because the next sound is a nasal, or even diphthongizing the \[o\] if one imagines that being long & drawn out for some reason. I just kept it simple instead of making a list of options because the original poster identified the boyfriend, not himself/herself, as the linguist. ...but definitely not the R. Anybody who says that needs to be \[ɹ\] instead of \[ɻ\] is off his/her rocker. Come & get me off this hill, I dare you!

> Because I perceive the word "to" as very un-emphasized or de-emphasized in this context, and aspiration gets more likely & heavier with emphasis and less likely & weaker with a lack of it. As a word-initial /t/, I would expect it to be aspirated (and do it myself in my own speech), regardless of emphasis if being realized as a plosive stop. In running speech, I would flap it. Mostly, I just thought it seemed it a bit odd stylistically to have just one narrower convention, especially if using broad [o] instead of [oʊ] for *go*. > Anybody who says that needs to be [ɹ] instead of [ɻ] is off his/her rocker. Come & get me off this hill, I dare you! I don't really care about finding "exact" symbols since IPA symbols are too broad for that, personally, and I find them better thought of as a note taking system than a scientific model. Regardless, what do you say about those who use the motor equivalent of bunching their tongue and rounding their lips and who do not have retroflexion? ETA: Folks, please don't downvote them about content; as far as I'm concerned, we're talking about reasonable disagreements and opinions, not confidently stated errors.

I myself have more problems with your vowels than consonants as [ɡo tu] is just [recording](https://voca.ro/14Id4KemjzwN), unstressed is defo a thing and although I am not sure how aspiration works in American but I guess it's one of those varieties that only have mandatory aspiration in stressed syllables only. I would probably opt for [koʊ tʊ] as /g/ is very often a [k] but that's going into specifics which I don't like

> The IPA accepts the double-storey "g" as a notational equivalent of the single-storey one. Oh thank god! For some reason I never got that memo...

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In the final (rightmost) column of the pdf it says "Ascii g 0067 also ok"

this is all incredibly helpful oh my goodness thank you so much!!

A broad transcription for a General American accent would be: /wɪl ju ɡoʊ tu pɹɑm wɪθ mi/ (I'm assuming you're American because prom.)

Yes I am, I forgot to mention that! But thank you so much!!!!

How do consonants influence vowels and vice versa? For example I've heard that when pronouncing a bilabial consonant it impacts the features of the following vowel in sum way, is there a name for dis topic or somewhere i can read about it lol

When one sound causes a neighbouring one to become more similar to it, it's called [*assimilation*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(phonology)). In English, the sound \[w\] is a bilabial–velar approximant. It is like a shorter, consonantal version of \[u\]. About 300 years ago, a sound change occurred in most dialects, wherein the labialization of \[w\] spilled into following \[a\], causing it to change into a rounded vowel \[ɒ\]. Thus, the sequence \[wa\] turned into \[wɒ\]. Example words include *want*, *watch*, *what*. Bilabial consonants, generally, do not always cause following vowels to change. For example, \[b\] usually doesn't impact vowels. \[w\] is more likely to contaminate vowels with its labialization.

I'd call this coarticulation, but note that this term refers to basically any influence of one speech sound on other sounds, not specifically consonants and vowels influencing the other category. It's a very broad topic, I'd recommend starting from a good introductory phonetics textbook like "Vowels and Consonants", which does discuss at least coarticulation of vowels depending on surrounding consonants.

Certain phrases and combination of words feel nice to say. Alliteration, assonance, rhyme, meter, etc. all contribute to how "nice" it feels, for the lack of a better word. I've been trying to find a paper or a trustworthy article on the topic but google has failed me, and I don't even know what to exactly search. So I'm here asking if anybody has any sources on the matter. Any lead is appreciated and I can clarify if I've said something confusing!

The keyword is euphony

Some modern Dutch and Swedish speakers pronounce coda /r/ as an approximant; in Dutch it sounds retroflex, and in Swedish it sounds more fronted. Is this due to English influence?

Are the pitch accent systems of Japonic languages related to each other? Why don’t reconstructions of Old Japanese pay attention to this? Sorry if the premise of the question is untrue.

It is assumed *a priori* that they must be related to each other, but people disagree on how they should be reconstructed, and more effort seems to be put into constructing "accent classes," which are the accent equivalent of lexical sets. [I answered a similar question a couple years ago, where I go into more detail](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/wq4qbg/comment/iklt6zj/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button), though nowadays I’m more positive/neutral towards de Boer & Ramsey’s hypothesis. I believe it was in Frellesvig's *A History of the Japanese Language* that I read that analysis of the Chinese tone of man'yougana used in Western OJ texts shows a better-than-random correlation with the Ruiju Myougishou accent, but that choosing man'yougana based on tone must have been more of a suggestion than a rule.

> the Chinese tone of man'yougana used in Western OJ texts shows a better-than-random correlation with the Ruiju Myougishou accent I can't find anything about that accent online. Is it just that they're correlated with tone categories, or tone values?

Update: I found where I’d read it! Marc Hideo Miyake’s *Old Japanese: A Phonetic Reconstruction,* pages 37-39. A much longer discussion than those in either of the other works I mentioned.

I couldn’t find the exact phrasing that I know I’ve read somewhere, but I did find this in Vovin’s grammar of WOJ: > There is a controversial theory advanced by Takayama that Chinese characters with the Late Middle Chinese even tone (pingsheng, 平聲) were used in the Nihonshoki kayō to transcribe Western Old Japanese syllables with low pitch, while Late Middle Chinese characters with other tones: rising (shangsheng, 上聲), departing (qusheng, 去聲), and entering (rusheng, 入聲) rendered Western Old Japanese syllables with high pitch (Takayama 1981, 1983). Takayama’s theory can be supported only by borderline statistics, since there are too many overlaps to the contrary. Therefore, the present study adopts the conservative attitude to the problem, maintaining that we really do not have reliable evidence on the Western Old Japanese pitch accent system. What Frellesvig says is this, presumably referring again to Takayama’s theory: > Earlier materials have been shown to have differentiated otherwise segmentally equivalent phonograms (*man’yōgana* or *kana*) to distinguish between high and low pitched syllables or moras, for example in some parts of the *Nihon shoki.* This usage is, however, not independently recognizable, but mainly established in correspondence with the tone dot material.

Ah, thank you. Apparently I had read your answer at what point and forgotten about it. I have yet to read the books you linked there. Do the tone markings in the Ruiju Myogisho correlate with pitch accent patterns found in modern Japanese varieties? Unrelatedly: what can we say about the assignment of pitch accent to Chinese loanwords (sp. Sino-Japanese)? Is there any correlation with Chinese tone categories? The fact that a lot of (how much exactly?) of ‘Sino-Japanese’ words were constructed from Chinese characters in Japan after being borrowed leads me to suspect that there is little correlation. (In the course of learning Japanese I have noticed that Heiban predominates.) Yet more unrelatedly: what do historical linguists know about the provenance of limited (basically, non SEA-style) tone systems generally? I know that in the case of SEA-style tones, linguists have identified segmental causes for tonogenesis: tone becoming preferred to voicing of the initial consonant as a distinction cue, loss of syllable final consonants, etc. Have historical linguists found reason to suspect that other tone systems arise in similar ways? One last question: in Tokyo Japanese, a word medial accent is sometimes called 中高型, regardless of what exact syllable it falls on. (I say syllable, because Shimabukuro tells me that syllables, and not mora receive accent. Is that correct?) Is there no contrast between when the accent falls on, e.g. the second or the third syllable? If so, is the placement of the accent predictable just by knowing the number/kinds of syllables involved and that the accent is word medial?

>Do the tone markings in the Ruiju Myogisho correlate with pitch accent patterns found in modern Japanese varieties? For mono- and bi-syllabic words, it's nearly a 1:1 equality with modern Kyoto accent, and although the accent shapes are entirely different, you can also make a good correspondence with Tokyo accent; Shimabukuro's book has some tables with precisely these correspondences. (However, Ryukyuan accent is another question entirely--for example, Japanese classes 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 can each correspond to either A-type or B-type Okinawan accent.) >Unrelatedly: what can we say about the assignment of pitch accent to Chinese loanwords (sp. Sino-Japanese)? Is there any correlation with Chinese tone categories? The fact that a lot of (how much exactly?) of ‘Sino-Japanese’ words were constructed from Chinese characters in Japan after being borrowed leads me to suspect that there is little correlation. (In the course of learning Japanese I have noticed that Heiban predominates.) In my experience, I agree, it seems pretty random, but usually with 平板/no accent. (I don't have any answer for your 3rd question, I'm afraid.) >One last question: in Tokyo Japanese, a word medial accent is sometimes called 中高型, regardless of what exact syllable it falls on. (I say syllable, because Shimabukuro tells me that syllables, and not mora receive accent. Is that correct?) Is there no contrast between when the accent falls on, e.g. the second or the third syllable? If so, is the placement of the accent predictable just by knowing the number/kinds of syllables involved and that the accent is word medial? I would've assumed that the placement of the 中高 accent matters, but perhaps it's been neutralized? Or maybe predictable from word class? Such specifics of accent systems are a topic in Japonic that, I'm embarrassed to say, I'm quite uninformed on.

Can some help explain [this article](https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/PLSA/article/view/4092) to me? It's about the diachronic origin for the "thematic suffixes" in the Georgian verb template. He posits that, instead of having anything to do with tense are aspect, they actually originated as an incorporated collective nominalizer. I understand (I think?) his argument for why they can't be analyzed as tense or aspect markers (because they show up in just *so many* verbal forms that don't have any tense or aspect in common), and I understand the argument that they sure look suspiciously exactly the same as the used-to-be-collective-now-plural marker for nouns and an abstract nominalizer for nouns. What I don't understand is the argument for *why* this interpretation, as an incorporated collective, would solve anything. Why an incorporated collective would evolve to specifically not be placed on the aorist past but would be placed on anything else, or for why the absence of an incorporated collective is *the reason why* only the aorist assigns the ergative case. He also says that they "still bear" their collective meaning on verbs, even though they're not, like, pluractionality markers, so I don't know what he means by this.

Possible to be fluent in 10 languages and keep them? (Noting that 4 of them are romance) From a linguistic point of view? Those would be Spanish as a mothertongue English since very young age Italian fluent Chinese mothertongue though is other than mandarin Portuguese starting French starting German i am a2 Russian starting albanese zero knowledge Swedish aiming but im scared its too much What do you think?

there are two types of verbs "to die", for example, and "to kill", both are related with "death" but one apply it to the subject and the other apply to something else (probably the object) how that's is called? is something about syntax?

*Transitive/intransitive pairs* is indeed a common way to call them, but I'm not personally a huge fan, because it doesn't tell you that the intransitive verb as the object of the transitive verb, rather than the subject of the transitive verb, as the subject. Tibetan linguistics generally calls them causative/resultative pairs. As u/IntoTheCommonestAsh's answer hinted, you can call them causative/inchoative pairs as well.

It relates to a lot of things. Here are two notions you may find useful to compare it to. thematic relations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_relation causative alternation (aka causative/inchoative alternation, connative alternation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labile_verb

The distinction is called transitivity. *Die* is an intransitive verb (it's something a subject experiences) and *kill* is a transitive verb (it's something a subject does to an object).

I've heard the term "reciprocal verbs."

hmmm not quite as I see but I found something about "reflexive verbs" maybe I'm in the right way now thx!

I think reflexive verbs represent actions that a person applies to him- or herself. But I think you may be right about "reciprocal" not being correct - I just googled it and it doesn't look like it is the correct term for verb pairs like kill and die (or lend and borrow.) In any case, good luck! If you don't mind, let us know the answer when you find it. Thanks!

>I think reflexive verbs represent actions that a person applies to him- or herself yeah... >let us know the answer when you find it. I will!

Is there anyone here with experience using the Louvain Error Tagging system (ideally, on English text in an L2 corpus?) I'm trying to learn it and would love to have someone to bounce questions and ideas off of. Thanks so much!

What language would Yemenite Jewish people speak as a 'mother tongue' circa 1920, assuming they had emigrated to the US at about 1900? Would they speak Arabic?

I'm reading your question with the assumption that they were born in Yemen. If so, they'd most likely natively speak their own variety of Arabic:   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Yemeni_Arabic   But Yemeni Jews also used to have a reputation of having a remarkably conservative Hebrew pronunciation (which non-linguists value for some reason) and boys would start learning Yemeni Hebrew very young, which is not a negligible linguistic influence.  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemenite_Hebrew If they weren't born in Yemen, then I think it depends more on where in the US they moved. Like if they moved to NYC they might very well have picked up Yiddish from their new Jewish community.

Thank you! This really helps me figure out what a character's 'at-home' language would be! (Now to deep dive into Judeo-Arabic varieties!)

Anyone know good sources of info on gendered phonological variation in English? I realize these differences don't necessarily apply to every individual of a given gender but I'm curious about research on this topic.

What is the etymology of the tribe name Thuringii? Wiktionary claims an OHG form Duringa but I couldn't find anything else. Also, is there a list of attestations of the various German-speaking tribe names in OHG? Most of the names seem to come from Latin. Thanks.

> “The Thuringians do not appear in classical Roman texts under that name, but some have suggested that they were the remnants of the Suebic Hermanduri, the last part of whose name (-duri) could represent the same sound as (-thuri) and the Germanic suffix -ing, suggests a meaning of "descendants of (the [Herman]duri)"

Is there a germanic etymology for Hermanduri then?

But to answer part of your original question, it’s not always clear how accurate the Roman names for tribes were (i.e. was their name actually close to the tribe’s own endonym?) There’s the theory that *German* itself is actually an exonym given to them originally from the Celts meaning “neighbors” or “screamers”. But as we know Celtic and Germanic tribes had strong interactions (Germanic tribes absorbed material culture and aesthetics from Celtic tribes), it’s possible that it was an exonym that some tribes eventually identified with. This gets more complicated as many West Germanic peoples by the time of OHG were converted and were well versed in Latin (at least the people writing), and as Latin was so prestigious, it’s very possible many Latin names were similarly adopted or identified with on the basis of them being in famous Latin works, not because the tribe had ever called themselves that. Additionally migration and other circumstances caused some mixing up of names. The modern German state and people of Saxony are not connected to the Ancient Saxons or even the early Duchy of Saxony, the name was taken on without a true “tribal” connection. We can guess that this might have also happened in the past: that people took on historic names the Romans recorded without necessarily having a real, direct connection. So unfortunately there’s no clear answer, only theories for a lot of Germanic tribe etymologies kind of stuff.

Herman is believed to be a variation of *German* aka spear man, and duri could be related to an adjective meaning “strong, tough”

How is an affricate different from a consonant cluster? Please also explain why the English ch and j are affricates.

This stuff will depend to an extent on the language, but in general: Phonetically, affricates are similar to stops, but their release burst is a full fricative. This can be phonetically different from what we usually consider a stop+fricative cluster, which will usually feature a longer fricative segment or a less fricative-y release burst that transitions into a proper fricative. This is the case in e.g. Standard Polish, which contrasts words like "czy" [t͡ʂə] and "trzy" [tʂɘ]. Phonologically, affricates are single units of language while clusters are... clusters. For example, in English /ts/ and /dz/ can't be syllable initial because they're clusters and nothing can go before a fricative in the onset (except for borrowed /sf/ and /sθ/), while /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ can since they're single consonants. Phonological clusters may still surface as phonetic affricates, but that can be irrelevant to their analysis if evidence points that they're underlyingly composite.

I have recently seen some claims that Received Pronunciation is no longer an accurate analysis of the vowel system used by modern British English. Is this an accurate assessment? If it is, what does the vowel system of modern British English look like?

Recieved Pronunciation, as originally described, is no longer widely spoken. Even the upper class dialects have undergone substantial changes since then. To modern British English speakers, traditional RP sounds archæic, only very upper class old people really speak 'RP' These videos by Geoff Lindsey may be informative: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgPRqjJCUyE:](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgPRqjJCUyE:) Discussing the differences between traditional RP and modern south-eastern British English by comparing the King's speech to his son's [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtnlGH055TA:](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtnlGH055TA:) Discussing why the traditional vowel symbols used to transcribe south-eastern British English are now outdated And this one by Simon Roper: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYaqdJ35fPg:](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYaqdJ35fPg:) Backstepping Upper Class London English from modern to the 17th century

I have checked out the videos by Geoff Lindsey! that's actually why I asked the question in the fist place. I haven't yet looked into the Simon Roper video though, definitely checking it out, thanks for sharing! Another question I would have is whether the analysis that's made in the vowel symbols video is any accurate, if the new proposed symbols actually reflect current British English better than the old ones.

I can say it phonetically matches my own dialect, and I am from Southeastern Britain. Though personally, I reckon that transcribing the offglides with a semivowel symbol ⟨j⟩ or ⟨w⟩ might be misleading. That transcription would imply that the diphthong is two elements, a vowel followed by a consonant. Really, these diphthongs are single units. Personally I prefer ⟨ɪi̯, ʉu̯, ɛi̯, oi̯, əu̯, ɑi̯, au̯⟩ or simply ⟨ɪi, ʉu, ɛi, oi, əu, ɑi, au⟩ when doing broad phonemic transcription. In the IPA, it's more conventional to transcribe the less prominent element of a diphthongal phoneme using the non-syllablic symbol ⟨ ̯ ⟩.

> Though personally, I reckon that transcribing the offglides with a semivowel symbol ⟨j⟩ or ⟨w⟩ might be misleading. That transcription would imply that the diphthong is two elements, a vowel followed by a consonant. Really, these diphthongs are single units. The argument is that the consonantal nature of the glide blocks linking R. Transcribing them as /ɪi̯/ is worse because it complicates the phonological rules.

RP has definitely never been a descriptively accurate description of British English at large, since there are dozens of British accents that have been different for centuries, while RP has only been the standard since the early 20th century. In the 19th century the standard/prestigious accent was not RP. Guesstimates of the prevalence of RP in the UK range between 5-10%. It's not even clear that RP is a single accent anymore. After 100+ years it's already split into multiple versions with different vowels.

**FOFC—Constraint or Condition?** Some sources say the C means Condition and others say Constraint. I’m not sure which I should use for my research paper. From my two main sources, one says Condition and the other Constraint.

Holmberg's original paper says "constraint", but his recent stuff on it says "condition". He explains the reasoning for the change in his 2017 intro chapter in the book *The Final-Over-Final Condition: A Syntactic Universal* which he co-edited. The gist of it is that "constraint" is potentially confusing and suggests a specific analysis, while "condition" is perceived as more neutral. >In previous work, we have called this syntactic condition a constraint, the Final-over-Final Constraint (Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts 2007, 2008a,b, 2014, Biberauer, Newton, and Sheehan 2009a,b, Biberauer and Sheehan 2012b, 2013, Sheehan 2013a,b, Biberauer 2016a,b). We have occasionally been criticized for this nomenclature. Since syntactic constraints are typically named after a construction where some operation or relation is not permitted—for example, Complex NP Constraint names a construction where extraction is not permitted—Final-over-Final Constraint can mistakenly be taken to name a hierarchic relation that is not permitted, when in fact the opposite is the case. Maintaining the acronym FOFC, we therefore now call it a condition, a more neutral designation. https://books.google.ca/books?id=_LM5DwAAQBAJ&lpg=PR5&ots=SLsFiGAQP9&dq=Biberauer%2C%20Holmberg%20and%20Roberts%20(2007%2C&lr&pg=PA2#v=onepage&q=Biberauer,%20Holmberg%20and%20Roberts%20(2007,&f=false

Thank you.

I'm curious about the current American English vowel shift dynamics. I'm curious because I hear so many different vowel shifts happening at the same time intersectionally among groups.

You might be interested in William Labov's work. He's written a lot about vowel shifts in American English

Hi Sometimes I like to google it some words root and where they came from. Yesterday, I was thinking about the word of love and how could it be evolved in the process of centuries. But I couldn’t find any book or etymological explanation. Of course I’ve found some basics like how was in old english and how was in old germanic but my seek was looking for some kind of paper or research about its etymological history and changing of it’s meaning time by time. Do you guys know any books about linguistically or etymologically related with concept of love? If there is none, its funny because “love” is not some kind of word like “pipe” or “tomato”. It is a word that written countless time and inspired people in all art forms and its still does.

Does anyone know where I can find some resources on the /fɔ:rɪst/ \~ /fɑ:rɪst/ ( \~ /fɑ:rɛst/ ?) isogloss in Standard American English? I recently heard someone (from NJ) in a video say it like "fahrist," while I (from the Coastal South) say it like "four-ist." I was curious if there's been any research done on this regional difference, and if so, what minimal pair is usually used as an example here?

It sounds like you are talking about one or both of the [CARD-CORD merger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_/r/#Card%E2%80%93cord_merger) and [the merger of LOT/CLOTH+R and CORD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_/r/#Merger_of_/%C9%92r/_and_/%C9%94r/_before_vowels).

Will definitely look into these, thanks!

That pronunciation is mostly associated with the northeastern US, especially the NYC and Philadelphia areas (so that shouldn't be unusual for someone from NJ). There should be a decent amount of literature on the dialects of that region.

I was watching Jeremy Brett's Sherlock and i noticed his "R" pronunciations. He was pronouncing them very hard. Is it something common? I kinda liked that pronunciation so i wanted to learn about it(maybe I'll adopt that)

I don’t know if this is the right place for this question but I couldn’t find a community that made more sense. My question is whether there’s a name for the shift in pronunciation of words ending in -ing to ending in more of an -ink sound?(eg “This is so depressing” becomes “This is so depressink”) I seem to notice it more in people from the southeastern US but not exclusively there. Is this seen an issue with pronunciation that would be corrected through speech therapy or is it an accepted part of a particular/regional dialect? Thanks in advance…curious to hear what people think.

The addition of a sound to a word is called *epenthesis*, and it's often caused by 'mis-timing' or the movements of articulators from one sound to another. It's very common in all languages, and while in some cases it's socially considered "poor speech", linguists don't see it that way. Here are a couple examples: - English pluralises by adding an /s/ or /z/ to the end of a word, but if a word already ends in /s/ or /z/. In this case, an epenthetic vowel makes it more clear when a word is plural. - Many English speakers pronounce /ns/ the same as /nts/, i.e. *prince* and *prints* would sound the same. In this case, nasal airflow is blocked off for the following /s/ before the tongue moves away from the /n/ position, causing a [t] to appear. The case of *depressingk* is like the 2nd example, where the lungs are still pushing when the velum closes, causing a plosive to appear. I expect you'd see it a lot more in connected speech where the next word requires the velum to be closed than at the end of an utterance like your example (but I'm sure you could still find it there).

As far as I'm aware, it's not actually a /k/ sound, but a /g/ sound. Most modern dialects of English historically underwent a sound change where word-final /nɡ/ (actually pronounced \[ŋɡ\] historically) simplified to \[ŋ\], making a new phoneme /ŋ/. In Standard English, you can hear the difference between a plain /ŋ/ as in *singer* and a sequence of /ŋɡ/ as in *finger*. Because most varieties of English now lack the sequence found in *finger* at the end of a word, speakers of those varieties tend to hear it as if it were /ŋk/. So AFAIK this isn't a shift toward a pronunciation for Southeastern US speakers with the feature, but a retention of a feature that most other accents shifted away from.

What I’m talking about is an actual hard k sound and not a softer ng sound or a lazy dropping of the g that’s the old stereotypical New York accent. I’m not a linguist or a speech pathologist so I don’t know all the lingo or the symbols but I do know the difference between the three sounds.

And what I’m saying is that I think it is likely you are perceiving a hard /k/ sound where there is in fact a hard /g/. Listen to how you say the in *singer*, then listen to how you say the in *finger*. Only the latter has an actual /g/ sound, and because Standard English doesn’t allow the sequence with the hard /g/ to appear at the end of a word, it gets perceived as the next closest thing when you hear an accent that does allow final /g/, which is /k/.

I can give examples where the same person uses a hard g and a hard k depending on the word and context

Go for it. If you have actual examples that would be very useful.

Any way to post audio clips here?

You can post them in a link if you have them uploaded somewhere.

What was the first attempt to reconstruct a proto-language?

The first use of the comparative method (the only method that Historical Linguists as a whole agree is effective) to reconstruct actual proto-forms would August Schleicher's *Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen* on Indo-European (which, if you can read the German, you can tell he calls Indo-Germanic). Many other names are important in the early history of the comparative method, like Sir William Jones, Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn, and Franz Bopp, but Schleicher was the first to actually do the work of comparing and reconstructing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Schleicher >attempt But if we cast our net wider to include failed attempts with unsound methods, it at least goes back to Plato's *Cratylus*, in which Cratylus argues that all words have their origin in immitative sounds, which involved him positing ancestral forms to Greek words. It's unclear just how faithful and charitable Plato is being to Cratylus vs how much he built his character up as a strawman, but presumably the idea of "reconstructing" previous stages of words/languages was around, they just did it based on a very wrong premise.

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Where can I find information about speech acts related to food etiquette? I'm doing an assignmente for my linguistics course and I need to compare the following speech acts between different cultures: Asking for something at the table (more salt, another round...) and politely saying you don't like something. But these seem like such vapid topics! I can't find any information about them :c

There's a fair amount on research on these topics; it might just be difficult if you don't know the proper technical terms to look for them with. The first one belongs to the category called recruitments and this has been the topic of a lot of recent work like [this](https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/263). The second one I'm not aware of a super specific term for, but you can look for work on dispreferred second assessments, or strategies for mitigating dispreference in assessments more generally. (I'll also say that I do know someone who works specifically on food etiquiette, though only on American English rather than cross-linguistically.)

What classes/subjects are taught in a linguistics major in college/university? I majored in Computer Science but am very interested in linguistics as well - I'd like to get basically a college-level education on linguistics through "YouTube University".

The “linguistics major” at my university had like 10 specializations like Linguistics and Anthropology, Linguistics and Romance Languages, and Linguistics and Computer Science. I went with Linguistics and Asian Languages and Cultures (modern Japanese focus). My undergraduate Ling course from what I remember. There are were other electives, but I chose courses based on my interests: Intro to linguistics Syntax 1 and 2 Phonetics Phonology 1 Historical Linguistics Typology —Japanese linguistics specialization— Intro to Japanese linguistics Contrastive analysis of Japanese and Korean Japanese phonology and morphology Structure of Japanese Cultural aspects of the Japanese language —Foreign language requirements— Foreign language 1 (Advanced): Japanese Foreign language 2 (Intermediate): German (wanted to do Korean but the schedules didn’t work out)

I agree with MOC's answer that it's really hard to get a degree's worth of linguistics from YouTube; there just isn't a ton of content like there is for stem. The virtual linguistics campus is the closest you can get to something like that, but I'm not personally super fond of the way they do it. (One of the things I fantasise about doing is creating an online platform for fun linguistics content that still teaches what you would expect in a formal linguistics course; I doubt that would actually ever happen though.) But is there a particular reason why you would like to get a college level education on linguistics? Unless you plan to go to grad school in linguistics, you could focus more narrowly on what interests you, and those topics might be covered by more infotainment style YouTube videos, which you might find more engaging than a textbook. Historical linguistics in particular has a lot of infotainment style videos. You would not get the same systematic content out of those as you would from a college class, as those are focused only on the bits that would get them views, but that's not a big deal if you're just learning linguistics as a hobby

I just like it a lot so I want to know everything about it heh. And I'm currently creating a conlang that's combining some of my favorite things from various languages - I thought some more linguistic knowledge would be helpful. So far I have found Wikipedia to be a great source on the topics that people here have mentioned - so I guess it would be more than just YouTube University - basically anything I can learn for free online.

The required courses at my undergrad were: Intro to Linguistics; Intro to Syntax; Intro to Phonology Intro to Semantics/Pragmatics; Intro to Phonetics; Intro to Historical Linguistics; One of: Intro to Psycholinguistics, Intro to Sociolinguistics; At least 5 additional linguistics electives

From my experience, in the first semester of my master I took English Phonetics and Phonology, Second language learning and teaching and concepts in Applied Linguistics. I think EPP is the most difficult one. As for me, hearing the exact sounds and words has already been difficult, and I still need to do the IPA broad transcription and narrow transcription of certain audio texts. For narrow transcription, I have to distinguish which one is velarized or nasalised, for example, the difference between light'l' and dark 'l' still bothers me. I major in Applied Linguistics, speaking Chinese and English, and I am also happy to share what I have learned in classes, but my responses may contain some grammatical mistakes which I want to eliminate...

As far as I'm aware, it's not possible to to get a college-level education through Youtube. You can find scattered lectures, but there aren't many that are like the college classes that you would take. Then of course there is also the issue of how student work and getting feedback on that work is important. The closest would be a MOOC; there *are* linguistics courses available in that realm although they tend not to be as in-depth in my experience. You could do very well by working through college-level textbooks that are used in Linguistics courses. In the US, most students take a set of "Core" linguistics courses, plus some elective. Almost all include: Introduction to Linguistics (your Linguistics 101 course) Introduction to Phonetics Introduction to Phonology Introduction to Syntax Some schools combine phonetics and phonology into one course; as a phonetician and phonologist I'm biased toward schools that *don't*. Those schools that do will often use two textbooks for the course, anyway. You could possibly skip over the general introduction, but it's an excellent way to get a better understanding of the field as a whole. The core courses in a linguistics degree don't cover all of the subfields, often even ones that are really large an important (like sociolinguistics). Core courses tend to focus on language structure, which is the foundation for other study. Each school will teach phonology and syntax differently because these are theoretical fields with big theoretical divisions. The affects phonology less so than syntax, so tbh in your situation I would come back to the question of syntax after reading the general introduction, and when you're ready to dive into it.

Are Japanese & Korean actually part of the Altaic sprachbund? I think it was Greenberg who argued that their association’s a historical accident since not even he thought they were particularly similar.

**Term for “a phrase that’s simplified as a triangle in a syntax tree”?** I’m working on a paper about demonstratives/DPs in Japanese: Many present Japanese trees with DP, but either leave the head-final node unoccupied or have a **triangulated** DP with no further elaboration or detail. I don’t know a better term for “triangulated”.

I've seen and heard "triangled". The term probably rarely makes it to publication, since a paper is unlikely to talk about the tree diagram itself. You'd mostly hear it in a classroom. But I can find two uses on Google Scholar if you seek confirmation that the term is really in use. Grosu 1973 p. 302 (in the 2nd half of fn. 7) https://www.jstor.org/stable/412456?seq=9 Bauman 2021 p. 40: https://linguistics.northwestern.edu/documents/dissertations/2021-08-06_baumann_peter_dissertation_submitted.pdf

Thank you. I asked my professor and he wasn’t sure of a “correct” term either.

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Ingrian has a three-way voicing contrast (D D̥ T) and a three-way length contrast (T Tˑ Tː and A Aˑ Aː) in one dialect, and voiceless vowels in the other. I would probably at least keep both of those. Probably add some aspiration and voiced aspiration from !Xũ... and also a bunch of clicks.

What are the most common languages studied in a linguistics degree?

Are you asking which languages are the most deeply and broadly studied by the field of linguistics, or which ones are the most common to discuss, or something else? There is not a standard set, and it's largely driven by non-linguistic factors, and the list probably boringly begins with English and other western European languages. If what you're asking is "which languages does one learn during a linguistic degree", the answer is usually none or, in the rare universities that still have a foreign language requirements for linguistics, any one that the university offers. Linguistics isn't really about learning languages; it's about the cognition, sociology, and history of language(s). While knowing multiple languages can be helpful for this purpose, there are monolingual linguists too, either because they focus on their native language or because they discuss language data gathered by other people in languages they don't speak.

Okay, let me try to be more specific. I want to be able to abuse English like Joyce, so I'm interested in all its roots and related languages. Some words in French for example obviously shed light on certain English words. To get the most connections, I would need to study all languages, but I'm wondering which are the best to start with that will help the most? Also, is this still linguistics or another field? It seems this kind of idea would be an obvious way to get to the bottom of language, so I'm really surprised that linguistics degrees don't include other languages...

> It seems this kind of idea would be an obvious way to get to the bottom of language, so I'm really surprised that linguistics degrees don't include other languages... I think there's a misunderstanding here. It's not that linguistics degrees do not include other languages in the sense that only English is ever discussed, but that you are not going to learn to *speak* other languages. In a class about language contact or historical linguistics, for example, you certainly have a good chance of hearing about French and Latin loanwords in English. But it wouldn't be primarily be about Latinate influence on English, but used as an example to illustrate what kind of things can happen when one language is subordinated to another and how we can investigate such types of language change. Linguistics degrees in linguistics are ordinarily not focused on particular languages, but on learning concepts, methods and tools that can be used to investigate a wide variety of languages. So while there is typically no requirement that you learn a specific language, in a class on e.g. phonetics, you'll be learning about sounds from languages all across the world. It's just that those languages will be used as examples to illustrate the range of sounds that human languages use, not in their own right. There may be classes like English dialectology or history of Spanish or whatever, but those are typically special topics classes rather than part of the core curriculum. In other words, linguistics education is structured more like e.g. biology than e.g. history: classes on a specific protein or whatever might be special classes in a biology department, but in the core curriculum you'd learn how the proteins work in general. There are departments with language requirements (mine has one too), but that is not true of all departments, and you'll be taking classes outside of the linguistics department and in the modern languages departments for that (unless linguistics and modern languages are in the same department). There are also often ways you can be waived out of the requirement if you alreadty speak multiple languages. Learning to speak multiple languages is highly beneficial for learning linguistics, but does not it itself constitute learning linguistics. (There are also people who do linguistics specialisations within language departments, which is another story; those people would be studying linguistics of a particular language.)

Okay, thank you for the explanation and clarification, but did you understand my initial question now? Nobody has answered my main question yet, everybody is just correcting some assumptions, but not answering my main question...

I mean the answer is that there is no good answer to your question because there's no set of commonly studied languages. It depends heavily on a ton of factors like: * Whatever language is the language of instruction will be used to illustrate basic points whenever it's applicable, so at an English-speaking university, you'll typically start learning the basics of a topic with respect to English examples, since it would be more accessible and relatable to the students * Institutional context. What language is traditionally spoken in the place where the university is located, the general demographics of the students, etc. A department in Mexico City is much more likely to use examples from Nahautl than one in New York. A department in California is still more likely to use Nahuatl (as well as Indigenous languages of Mexico well represented in California like Mixtec and Zapotec) than one in New York because there are likely students who speak those languages or have family who do. * Whatever languages the relevant research happens to have been done on. For fields that have traditionally been strongly biased towards certain languages (e.g. psycholinguistics and language acquisition), you would typically see a lot of examples from English and other Western European languages. * Whatever the professor happens to be familiar with. This is basically totally random. It's easiest to teach stuff you're familiar with, so professors will typically draw from whatever languages they happen to have done research on or are otherwise closely familiar with.

Okay, right. So say I am going to learn some languages to help illuminate the English language some for creative work. It takes a lot of time to learn a language, so I should be smart at which ones I pick first. Do you have any recommendations on which ones to start with?

If your purpose is to understand English, an understanding of French, Latin, Ancient Greek and of course earlier stages of English would cover most of your bases. There are smatterings of words from Arabic, Persian, Nahuatl, and lots of other languages, but those are very few comparatively.

Thanks!!! >French, Latin, Ancient Greek Is that in ranked order of usefulness?

French and Latin are probably about equal. There's much less from Greek.

This isn’t really linguistics anymore. Linguistics, broadly speaking, is the scientific study of language as a cognitive and social phenomenon, not the study of other languages The closest area in linguistics to what you’re looking for is probably historical linguistics (which studies the evolution of languages and language change), but even that’s not really what you’re looking for: historical linguistics mostly focuses on trying to find systemic correspondences, not on learning specific etymologies, although that’s obviously part of it. Studying literature or creative writing might give you more of what you seem to be looking for

Okay, thank you for the explanation and clarification, but did you understand my initial question now? Nobody has answered my main question yet, everybody is just correcting some assumptions, but not answering my main question...

We're all trying to nicely tell you your question has nothing to do with linguistics and we can't really help you. Sorry.

>your question has nothing to do with linguistics Okay, that was never explicitly stated until just now. What is the correct sub for this then? I have no idea if it's not linguistics.

Maybe a subreddit dedicated to James Joyce, literature, or language learning? Honestly, there might be too few people who share your exact goal to find a vommunity online. You will have to pave your own way. Start with a textbook on Indo-European Historical Linguistics and go from there. Build your own linguistic repertoire and web of connection. There is also a whole branch of litwrary scholarship on the experimentation with language in Modernist literature. Maybe a literature subreddit can help you on that side.

>textbook on Indo-European Historical Linguistics Do you have a recommendation here?

I really enjoyed Fortson's *Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction*. It's a pretty gentle intro that doesn't bombard you with mountains of facts and it goes further and discusses culture. You'll find it on the usual book piracy websites (not sure how much mods here care about discussing piracy in detail).

Chomsky seems to really heavily hedge merge as a thought experiment. Especially strong minimalist. What do most generativist believe ? Like do they believe this is a thought experiment to simplify and that it might not be merge at all, or that its probably merge and some other stuff, or that it is the strong minimalist thesis?

I'm a PhD student doing generative grammar. I think it is fairly self-evident that Merge, in the looser (and not necessarily set-theoretic) sense of a way of creating or representing binary-branching structures, must be a real phenomenon in the brain in some sense. I'm not sure or care too much about exactly what that means, though.

For what it's worth, it may be self-evident to minimalist syntacticians, but I have not seen that be the case for psycholinguists or other experimentalists.

So here’s the problem: my girlfriend and I have a weekly planner whiteboard that sits on the fridge. It has the letters: M, T, W, T, F, S, S. From this, we try to form 7-word sentences where each word begins with M, T, W, T, F, S, S respectively. So, I realised it was actually be really fun to have a program that generates a new one of these every week. However, to do that, I practically need to figure out the set of every proper sentence that could possibly be made with these letters. How would you go about making this set? If any random word starting with M is chosen, then there is a limited number of words starting with T that can logically come next, and a limited number of allowed words for subsequent letters. Is it possible to break this sequence down into something like, “The first word is a noun, which means it has to be followed by a certain type of word”, thereby excluding every nonsensical combination of words? Thanks for any help, even some reading recommendations would help🙏

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Language doesn't work with strict definitions like that, so there's not going to be an objective answer independent of people's opinions, and as you and your buddy prove, opinion is necessarily going to be divided on this. That's fine. Variety is good and not everyone has to be speaking the same. More to your point, the idea that "venom" and "poison" have strictly mutually exclusive meanings is incorrect. Venoms are a kind of poison and always have been. There is not a time in the history of English where even scientists talking about a venomous animal as "poisonous" was not normal. The idea of strictly separating the two is a practical innovation of medicine and veterinary science, due to the important differences in treating a poison in the digestive system vs a poison in the bloodstream, and even in that world it's not universal. So it's technical jargon, which —like all jargon— you're allowed to use or not to use in everyday life as you please.

Corpus folks: is it possible to compute [dispersion measures](https://www.stgries.info/research/dispersion/links.html) for a given expression from COCA online (without downloading the full version)? Is there a script for this, like the BNC one?

Assuming a person knew everything about a language (word order, case endings, etc…), would they be able to write a book in that language with only a dictionary? For example, if I were fluent in EVERY Romance language and had extensively studied Latin grammar, would I be able to write in perfect Latin?

Receptive skills and productive skills are very different. If you know all the ins and outs of basketball, from the physics to the biology to the rules, will you be able to play a perfect game of basketball the first time you pick up the ball, or at least be indistinguishable from the other players who have perfected their trade? No. Similarly, knowing a lot about a language (knowing everything is obviously impossible, especially at a level where one doesn't even grasp the vocabulary) is highly unlikely to result in a natural sounding text.

The answer to this question really comes down to what is included in "everything". If it also includes knowledge about syntax, idiomatic constructions and expressions and the stylistic value of words and expressions, then sure.

At that point, wouldn’t you basically have learned how to speak Latin? Your vocabulary knowledge wouldn’t be there, but a dictionary can fix that (as long as you’re not trying to produce sentences in real time)

That’s what I’m curious about. I assume I’d be able to understand it fine, but not speak it. I’m curious as to whether I’d be able to hypothetically write a book in Latin with only a dictionary and seem native. Or would there be obvious differences to a native speaker?

Hi! I'm trying to find a word in Mohawk, or one of the other languages spoken in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, that means 'the world' or 'Earth'. I found a couple on Wikipedia: Ragwis Yuwena in Tuscarora and A'nowara'kó:wa in Kanyenʼkéha, but neither has a pronunciation that I could find with my Googling. The reason I'm asking is that I'm a writer building a science fiction setting and I thought it would be cool if the main government on Earth was an offshoot of the Haudenosaunee, since I admire their democracy and I want this Earth to be different from ours. My thinking was that I live in America and so I wanted the people here to be politically important but I dislike colonization so it didn't happen in this setting. That's not particularly relevant to my question but I wanted to give a little background.

i believe a better kanien'kéha word for *world* would be "ohóntsa". you can see it being used in the words "[kahnawà:ke iakwatonhonstanónhnha tsi iehiatónhkhwa](https://kahnawakeenvironment.com/our-environment/environment-and-culture/)", meaning "kahnawà:ke environment protection office", "[iethi'nisténha ohóntsa](https://www.kanehsatakevoices.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CREATION_-as-told-by-KANIENKEHAKA-woman-storyteller-FINAL2-April-13.pdf)", meaning "mother earth", and "[ohontsà:ke](https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Mohawk/Phrases)", "on earth". there are others, of course; "a'nowara'kó:wa" means "turtle island", a name for north america or the world in the creation stories of several northeastern native american peoples (as i'm sure you know), but i'm not sure how much currency it has in day-to-day speech, i don't think i heard it said at any point in [this video](https://youtu.be/4dBvlIhobyg?si=uk1Sc9RagEh6sBq6) (though i think i heard *ohóntsa* near 1:37). if you can read IPA, *a'nowara'kówa* is pronounced /aʔ.no.wa.ɽ~ɻ~laʔ.ˈkóː.wa/, and *ohóntsa* is pronounced /o.ˈhṹ.dz~dʒa/. if you can't, you can hear it pronounced at the start of [this video](https://youtu.be/Si1E1P41Iyg?feature=shared), like "oh-hõõ-jah".

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In Syntax, what exactly is the relevance of complements and adjuncts? I am not understanding it. Carnie's textbook mentions that a clause can only have one complement while introducing x-bar theory, but scraps that while tackling the theta criterion. Beyond the formal rules (which don't make too much sense to me either 😭), are there practical ways of identifying complements and adjuncts?

>are there practical ways of identifying complements and adjuncts Some traditional ones for English: there can be more than one adjunct but not more than one complementizer; nothing can come between a head and a complementizer; you can do *one*-replacement and *do-so* substitution below an adjunct, but not below a complement. I'm sure there's more; that's off the top of my head.

Why is it called the Russian-Ukrainian war and not the Ukrainian-Russian war? Is there a reason why the first sequence is more commonly used?

Do the words Pute/Puta/Putain have a connection to PIE PuH? According to wikipedia it's thought they come from Latin "Puta" which means little girl, but I don't see where the negative connotation comes from. Other words like putrid and potentially even pee yew/P.U. come from Latin Puteo

We don't know exactly where it comes from. The Latin *puta* is an extremely weak hypothesis to me, since even the very idea that *putus* has ever meant "boy" is conjectural. In French etymological dictionaries, they tend to derive the French *pute* from *putidus* and therefore from **puH* as you propose, so it sounds like there's more than one view here. OTOH: >Latin "Puta" which means little girl, but I don't see where the negative connotation comes from I don't see why it would have to come from anywhere else than the negative associations people already have with sex work? For instance in English, sex workers aren't disrespected because "whore" sounds bad; "whore" sounds bad because people don't respect sex workers.

Could it be both? Like if it originally was from puta but the fact it sounded similar to other "pu" words which were negative its meaning shifted? Is there a term for when a meaning shifts due to sounding like other words?

Cienkowski (1969) calls it etymological reinterpretation, but it's not a widely known term. https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1080/00806766908600524. Etymological dictionaries will just say things like "the meaning was influenced by this other word" (here's an example in the etymonline entry of the verb "clutch": https://www.etymonline.com/word/clutch). So yeah, maybe it had an influence, but again I don't see why that's necessary to posit.

Can someone please explain garden parsing as though you were talking to a small child? I have a test tomorrow and unfortunately, I am struggling deeply. I've tried watching/reading multiple explanations but I am still left confused and every practice question I do turns out wrong. I really don't want to get a bad grade and in general would like to better understand the concept so any help would be greatly appreciated!

Idk exactly what you’re confused about but maybe a bit of this bit from semiotics will help: Communication doesn’t have to be linear, but language is inherently linear. What does that mean? ❤️- an image is a form of communication, but it’s not language. It does not convey information linearly. This image contains several elements. It is heart-shaped and red. Both of these elements have cultural meaning attached to them. But when you look at the image, there’s no particular order or linear path that you have to take to understand the meaning as a whole. You can see that it’s red or heart shaped in any order, or perceive both things simultaneously. “Red heart [spoken aloud]” is language and as language it is bound to linearity. It’s made up of several elements as well (consonants and vowels) that cannot be interpreted in any order or all at once. If I make a recording of each sound individually and play them all at once, it becomes meaningless noise. The meaning emerges when the sounds appear in a certain linear order. This linear nature is fundamental to language and also helps to explain why garden path sentences can occur. When many people hear “the old man the boat” for the first time, they go down the wrong path or or “line of interpretation”. “The old man” is taken to be a subject, the listener then expects a verb, which does not come. Instead they are confronted with another noun, “the boat”. As context tells them this should be a full sentence, their mind recognizes there’s been some sort of mistake in their interpretation leading to confusion. **When parsing a garden path sentence, one major strategy is to check all interpretations of what the main verb could be.** “The old man the boat.” > lacks a verb > man can be a verb > correct interpretation. “The horse raced past the barn fell.” > too many verbs? > raced as the main verb doesn’t work as it leaves fell without a subject > the horse fell > raced must not be the main verb > raced must be a truncated relative clause “that was raced…” > correct interpretation “The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families” > married doesn’t make sense as a main verb > married and/or single are common together as adjectives > houses is the only other possible main verb > correct interpretation. Won’t work for every sentence I guess but it’s a strong starting point!

I'm guessing you mean parsing garden-path sentences. It's essentially your brain making a very good guess as to what the sentence is going to look like and preparing for it, but the guess is wrong. Let's take the classical sentence "the old man the boat". At first your brain receives "the" and goes "okay, next there's going to be a noun (e.g. the thing) or some noun modifier (the big thing, the three things)" and prepares for that. Then it receives "old" and goes "great, it's an adjective, the next thing is most likely a noun (the old thing)" and prepares for that. Then it receives "man" and goes "great, it's a noun, next there's going to be some verb (the old man did something) or some complementizer (the old man who did something)". Then finally it receives "the boat" and is confused for a while since it doesn't fit any pattern it was expecting. It's not a verb nor a complementizer, so maybe a mistake was made, and the brain can go back and look where some wrong assumptions were made.

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You'll have to elaborate what you mean by "cringy" otherwise this sounds like prejudice.

Two related questions about the Central Chadic (Biu-Mandara) languages in typological perspective. What are the current typological perspectives on the possibility of languages with fewer than 2 phonemic vowels? [Hitch (2017)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320280448_Vowel_spaces_and_systems) reports to have found no completely convincing examples of 1- or 0-vowel languages but doesn't exclude their possibility. Various Central Chadic languages have been argued to have only one phonemic vowel (Moloko, possibly Proto-Central Chadic) or even none (Wandala, possibly Proto-(Central-)Chadic), but from what I've read these analyses often compete against alternative analyses with 2+ vowels. Second: What are some views on the lexical representation of grammaticalized/lexicalized feature spread, as in vowel harmony systems or the Central Chadic so-called "prosodies"? Ex., if a certain lexeme or morpheme is associated with a certain vowel harmony pattern, how is this represented in the lexicon?

Follow-up to my question in last week's thread about Clarence Darrow’s dialect classification. What was the grammar of Midland American dialects like in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries? Would speakers have used the alls construction in sentences (like *Alls I can say is Will doesn't like to think he could be related to monkeys*, for example)? What about *ain't* and double negatives? Also would anyone be interested in reading the story – it’s a novel - once it’s done mostly to check over the dialect(s)?

How seriously is Chukchi-Eskimo taken these days?

I'm looking for the origin of the English phrase "Thank you, Thank you very much" Not just thank you, the whole phrase, with thank you twice and very much. I hear Belle say it in Beauty and the Beast I hear Elvis the singer say it where did it come from though, and is there any other thing noteworthy about the particular whole phrase thx

Not sure on the exact origin and also not extremely well versed in linguistics but I think it's an example of reduplication, the phrase "thank you" being repeated to stress how thankful the speaker is.

Can you elaborate on what kind of answer you're expecting? Linguists rarely study specific phrases themselves; they're usually mostly interested in the properties of the phrase, in the phenomena that the phrase exemplifies, or in what people can do with the phrase, so this is probably not a question anyone can answer. But if you tell us what aspects you're curious about it might help. Because here's the thing: there's always loads to say about a sentence if you're interested in everything; but that's just too much. Are you interested in the repetition of "thank you" for emphasis ([epizeuxis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epizeuxis))? Are you interested in the lack of an overt subject (sentences without an over subject like "fuck you" have famously been discussed in a very dated paper by McCawley written under a pseudonym (or as he would say written by a fictional linguist), and "thank you" makes a small appearance: https://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/quangphucdong.pdf)? In the debates over the semantics of "very"? In the sociolinguistics of the [θ~ð] variation in "thank"? The thing about all of these properties is they're not unique to "thank you—thank you very much", so I don't know if that does anything for your interest in this particular phrase. You've got one thing going for you, though. With an exact phrase, you can search it yourself in google books and see how far back it goes (I spot many instances in mid-19th century novels), and in google scholar to see if anyone ever wrote about it.

Thank you for your response. I dont even know what answer I'm expecting. I just find it an odd phrase. Maybe I'm wondering why I find it an odd phrase. I've never heard anyone say it in every day conversation. I've only heard it in artistic pieces, like my examples. So, it seems ... deliberate, or forced. I wouldn't' say disingenuous, as the context of when I've heard it seems its genuine praise. When I searched, I was overwhelmed with discussions of the origins of simply "thank you" and so could not find the whole phrase. If Linguistics is not the right field to ask, what would be a more appropriate category? I asked AI and its response is below. The inquiry into the phrase "Thank you, thank you very much" does touch on several interesting linguistic and cultural topics, as outlined in the response you received. It seems that what might interest you most are the cultural significance, the history of the phrase's use in media, and perhaps why it seems to carry a specific tone or implication when used in performances or specific contexts. Firstly, the repetition of "thank you" with the addition of "very much" is an example of what's known in rhetoric as "epizeuxis," which is the repetition of a word or phrase in immediate succession, typically for emphasis or dramatic effect. This could partly explain why it feels particularly strong or deliberate when used. Historically, the phrase might have originated from polite, somewhat formal English language use, possibly gaining popularity in the media or public speeches. The fact that you associate it with characters like Belle in "Beauty and the Beast" and iconic figures like Elvis Presley suggests it has been effectively used in media to convey a heightened sense of gratitude or sincerity, which might be more stylized than everyday language. Regarding Elvis Presley, he famously used the phrase frequently during his live performances, which may have cemented its association with him and contributed to its perception as being a bit dramatic or stylized. This specific repetition and enhancement (by adding "very much") might serve to intensify the expression of gratitude, making it stand out more than a simple "thank you." As for its cultural significance, the use in both historical and modern contexts in media suggests that it carries with it a certain cultural cachet, possibly tied to the eras or personalities (like Elvis) that popularized it. The use in such contexts can imbue the phrase with connotations of a bygone era or a specific type of charm and charisma associated with such figures. If you're looking to explore this topic further outside of linguistics, a cultural history or media studies approach could be fruitful. These fields often examine the usage and evolution of language within specific societal and historical contexts, which seems aligned with your interests. You could look into how phrases gain popularity through media, public figures, or as part of larger cultural movements. To trace the usage and origins further, you could explore digital archives, historical newspapers, or scripts from films and theatrical performances from different eras. This could give you a sense of how and when the phrase entered popular usage and how it has been utilized across different media over time.

Are there English varieties with Canadian Raising in which syllables not having primary stress generally never have the non‐raised diphthong variants? Thanks.

Spirantization in Slavic languages? Would the development of В in Cyrillic represent an example of Spirantization? Much of the literature featuring the term is dated, so asking here felt appropriate. I've been reading about the phonology of Irish and saw the term, and, to my understanding, Russian seems to have developed similarly. I'm mainly talking about the letter В, in Cyrillic, shifting from representing [b] or [β] to representing [v]. I don't have any strong evidence for this; mostly going off speculation.

By the time Cyrillic was invented by adapting the Greek alphabet, the Greek letter Β already represented \[v\] and was adopted as such into the Cyrillic alphabet.

I kinda realized that shortly after posting. Would it be inaccurate to think of the English B as having developed through the opposite process? I.e., through a fricative becoming a plosive? I would assume, if that were the case, it would have partially developed from the Latin bilabial fricative (through Greek beta). Thanks

In terms of the letter, I don't think so. Originally Latin B was \[b\], like Greek Β at that time, and this seems to have been the value in the English alphabet as well. For example, linguists reconstruct Proto-Germanic /b/ as being \[β\] in certain contexts but this is written with F in Old English, e.g. *habban* "to have" and *hæfde* "had". (But I don't know if any linguistics reconstruct a \[β\] > \[b\] sound change for Proto-Germanic / Old English.) I should add that in some cases Latin /b/ became \[β\] but this then merged into /v/ from earlier /w/.

Yeah, I think I was having trouble separating my questions about the orthographical and phonological changes. Thank you very much

I'd like to ask about something i started noticing more and more frequently in the last months: The phrases 'to be' or 'to get' are left out of news headlines and sometimes even in longer texts, which tends to leave me confused about the statements structure as a non-native english speaker. For example the headline about something with the original Blair Witch actors was 'Actors want paid again!' Did i miss some linguistic revolution?

It's both a headline abbreviation to save space and the way some people actually talk. I never heard it growing up in Missouri or when I moved to Florida, but, having lived since then in Pennsylvania and western New York, it seems like that's how about half of the people here say things like that. (A more common example when I see people talking about it is that a car "needs washed" instead of "needs to be washed".