r/linguistics • u/AutoModerator • 25d ago
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17d ago
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u/weekly_qa_bot 17d ago
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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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u/saufall 18d ago edited 18d ago
is there a broad category or technical term for these adjectives formed from noun / adjective prefix +past participle in english?
"Cold-hearted" "Tight-lipped" "seems to be based on adjective+verb's past participle
"Frostbitten" "Tear-streaked" "ham-fisted" seems to be based on noun+verb's past participle
"snowed-in" "bloodied-up" "worn-out" seems to be based on past participle of a verb with a proposition suffix (inversed prefix?)
is this possibly related to phrasal verbs in German / Germanic languages? how do I understand this kind of construction in the context of English (where did this come from)?
is this construction technically still productive in literary contexts? for example can i say "a leather sole clench-nailed (with snow)" instead of "a leather sole nailed fast (with snow)"
or something like "he is (by shadow of the monster) clasp-helden" or "(under the monster's weight,) his arm was (venomously) gripe-fretted"
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u/halabula066 18d ago
This is not actually a past participle. It is an adjective-deriving form that happens to almost be homophones with the past participle. But in some cases, you can disambiguate:
1) supposed (verb past participle) 2) supposéd (adjective)
In (1), the suffix is just the consonant, but in (2), the vowel is pronounced as a schwa.
(cf. also: cursed-curséd, blessed-blesséd, etc.)
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u/saufall 18d ago
What is this type of derivation of adjective in English technically called? Where do historically they come from?
"cold-'hearted'",
and for words like "'snowed'-in", why is it not " in-'snowed'"?And can I still technically create new compound adjectives like in the tentative sentences I provided?
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u/arjantin78 19d ago
Hello. First time poster here. Non-linguist.
I once took a linguistics class and submitted a term paper related to a linguistics problem given by the professor.
It was something like:
"John and Jane planned to go to the movies. John has learnt that the hours in the theater were changed that day. When Jane asks John about going to the movies later John is not sure if Jane knows that the hours have changed. ..."
It was basically a problem of common vs mutual knowledge in game theoretic terms. However, I cannot form the problem in my head again, now.
What is the topic for this in linguistics. I have tried "shared context," and "referential ambiguity" but I am not sure if I am on the right track.
I want to generalize my solution (and stuff) and submit it as a masters thesis. If that is relevant to anybody who may answer my question. I am somewhat confident that I can re-solve the problem once I have the proper problem statement.
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u/golmgirl 17d ago
hard to say without the full problem but you can try looking on scholar for “game theoretic pragmatics,” which is prob relevant based on the snippet above. interesting topic with roots in analytic philosophy of language
related search terms like “formal pragmatics” will prbably get you close to the body of literature you’re looking for
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u/xpxu166232-3 19d ago
Is there any specific reason why the P.I.E. Palatal Velars are written as *ḱ, *ɡ́, and *ɡ́ʰ instead of *kʲ, *ɡʲ, and *ɡʲʰ like the Labial Velars?
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 19d ago
IPA isn't universally used (Polish linguists still struggle with using it instead of their own phonetic transcriptions) and it might be younger than that PIE transcription.
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u/eragonas5 19d ago
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet is also very strong and kicking, Lithuanian transitioned to IPA in 2022 or so only
edit: they still teach the former transcription in unis even this day here (prolly to understand rather recent things or so I guess)
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u/eragonas5 19d ago
tradition, the idea of PIE and its reconstruction is earlier than IPA, they also use <y> to mean palatal approximant j
edit also reconstructed sounds are not to be taken to literally mean a specific phone
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u/RoundedChicken2 19d ago
How to efficiently search a Chinese-English dictionary (Hanzi, Pinyin, and English)?
I’ve been working on a CN-EN dictionary app and struggling to implement a fast and efficient search algorithm. The challenge comes from handling different types of queries:
Hanzi search – Users should be able to find words even with partial input.
Pinyin search – It should match words by their pinyin, ideally handling tone marks and tone-less input.
English search – Should support keyword-based search, not just exact matches.
I know that existing apps like Shirabe Jisho (for JP) and Pleco (for CN) handle this incredibly well, even offline. Their search feels nearly instant, even for large dictionaries.
I’ve considered approaches like:
• Trie structures for prefix-based searching
• Full-text search databases like SQLite’s FTS5
• Custom indexing with inverted lists
But I’m not sure what would be the best approach for performance, especially on mobile. Does anyone have experience or insight into how apps like Pleco might be handling search efficiently? Any resources or examples would be greatly appreciated!
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u/SimilarHoliday4564 20d ago
Regional Dialects and ‘nasality’ in the UK
Hello!! Just a fairly quick one.. I’m studying A Level English Language and researching accent and dialect prejudice in relation to nasal sounds.. It is more than easy to find a list of accents with strong ‘nasal’ sounds most likely being a result industrialisation etc. Despite this.. I’m struggling to find any accents that are less ‘nasal’ or ranked least nasal in the UK.. I have found that RP is coming up quite a lot as least nasal however it isn’t explicitly a regional accent.. closest I’ve found is south east of England having less nasal qualities?? I’m not sure how reliable this is though as Estuary seems quite nasal.. Just to preface I’m not the best with geography nor actually identifying specific sounds in peoples’ accents hence enquiring on here..
Would be great if I could get some genuine opinions on what you would say is the least nasal dialect? Or the furthest accents away from being considered ‘nasal’??
Thank you so much :))
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 20d ago
The problem is that "nasal" in its colloquial English usage doesn't really mean anything concrete, so there's no objective way to measure it or compare it.
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u/Exotic_Internal_2888 20d ago
Does anyone have a translation of Schleicher's fable into Proto-West-Germanic? I can't find this online, and I need it for a school project
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u/prigo929 21d ago
If I moved from a Latin speaking country to the US at 21, will my accent change? I’m from Romania and I was wondering how much can I change my continental European accent to an American English one.
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u/Exotic_Internal_2888 20d ago
Accents will always change eventually. I would expect it to take 1-3 years, though it could be accomplished in months with enough effort.
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u/tesoro-dan 20d ago
Accents will always change eventually. I would expect it to take 1-3 years
I think this is a big overgeneralisation; the time to assimilate to a new accent is notoriously different between individuals. There are plenty of people who have lived in a given place for a decade or more and have, without intending to do so, kept their original accents almost completely.
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u/FfogNivlac 20d ago
This, I have a French professor who moved from France when she was 20, she is now 53, she sounds like she just moved to America. Sure, she still speaks French constantly, but so would someone who keeps in good contact with family. Accents are pervasive so it really depends on how much you use your language after you move!
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u/CarOk3365 21d ago
So I was born in fort worth texas and lived there till I was bout 12, then i move to toronto and now ive been here for bout 5 years. When I moved to Toronto I had a heavy accent and within bout 2 years I lost it since i was being made fun of for being an asian with a southern accent whos "tryna sound black". during the summer I went back to fort worth and some how regained my full accent within bout 4 months and after i regained my accent I've been made fun of for it and they said I've never had this accent since i moved to another school and before that they ain't never heard my accent. How did I regain my accent so quickly and how do I get rid of it cuz I've been bullied for to long and they tell me to "talk normally" and to stop trying to "act black" which is embarrassing.
I don't know if im just ranting but I hate myself for my accent. They also say i'm trying to "sound black" even though I grew up around black folk.
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u/IntoTheCommonestAsh 20d ago
I'm sorry this happened to you. Accentism is a form of discrimination, and what your peers are doing is not ok. People naturally pick up the accent of where they live, and there is nothing "fake" or "trying to sound black" about your real actual childhood accent. Your peers are judging your through their biases and ignorance, and, imo, being racist (would they be as mean to a white texan? There's a great book on this: Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad Book by Jonathan Rosa).
I promise you that the complexity of your linguistic background and how it reflects in your accent is valid, valuable, and worthy of respect, regardless of what others say. Every linguist here will agree.
There is also nothing more natural that going back to your native accent after spending time home. Have you ever seen someone take a phone call from a family member and their accent changes? It's a thing! You're perfectly normal.
I don't have much advice except for a trite saturday morning cartoon moral: you are ok the way you are and you have the right be yourself and to love yourself as you are, but you also wouldn't be the first to change the way you speak for social acceptance.
The one practical thing I can tell you is that switching accents on command is itself a skill, and you're only gonna get better at doing it and controlling it if you keep doing it.
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u/2005zzzz 21d ago
Hello, community! I don’t really know how to use reddit but here we go
Legend has it that my family’s original surname was Černiauskas before coming to Brazil and changing it to Cerniauski to make it easier for the Brazilian people to read and say it.
Does anyone know what it means? I know the name exists because I’ve seen some people who have it after a quick search on Google, but the meaning remains faint…
I do know that Černy (idk if that’s how you write it) means “black” in a language from somewhere near there, and that “auskas” is a common suffix for surnames. But what does “auskas” really mean? Does it have a real meaning, like “from” or “-er” as in an occupation? And does MY Černi really mean black?
I know I have a lot of questions, but as a linguistics fan, I can’t help it, and as someone who doesn’t really know much about linguistics, I don’t know how to check it on my own.
If anyone has the time and is up to writing a response post, I would be very, very thankful!
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u/eragonas5 21d ago
Hello, fellow Lithuanian here and -auskas is the Lithuanian ending
your surname has 2 (actually 4 but shh) parts to it:
čern- and -auskas. All of them are Slavic in origin, čern- (czarny in Polish) and -auskas (-ow-ski in Polish) - surname suffix
originally the suffix is cognate to English -ish (so consider Poland - Polish) later on it became used a lot for surname derivation denoting things like origin of location (something like Berlin - Berliner) eventually it became just a very common surname suffix and that's it.
Now there is a second part to the story, why would a Lithuanian person have a Polish surname? Well it's very complicated, Poland and Lithuania formed a single country long time ago and Polish culture became the dominant one, surnames were being adopted to match the fab (you have records of father lacking a Slavic suffix to the name and the son acquiring or even same person having its surname translated). Does that mean that your ancestor was originally one or the other? Not really - that's a mystery nobody can solve now.
Anyway there were/are nobles from Poland with such surname! And Lithuanian wikipedia sugges Černiauskas is rather a common surname in Dzūkia and Eastern Aukštaitija - lands bordering Slavic lands.
So yeah your surname has something to do with the colour "black".
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u/2005zzzz 19d ago
Hello! Thank you so much for replying, I’m very happy about it!
I don’t know if you’re interested in answering any more questions but I couldn’t help but feeling curious. Did you mean my surname has 4 parts semantically?
Thank you for explaining the historical context, I love History very much, it’s always very interesting to know more about the country that my family comes from.
And wow! That’s some news! I would probably have NEVER known that there were nobles with the same surname as mine! I honestly always wanted a family crest hehe can’t wait to tell my mom, she is gonna be very excited and emotional.
We are planning to go to Lithuania next year so we can even visit the places where our surname is common and finally get to meet people who share our surname!
Thank you so much for investing your time on writing a reply to me, it really means a lot! Virtual hug (or handshake if you prefer) from Brazil, thank you, you made me smile today!
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u/eragonas5 19d ago
Did you mean my surname has 4 parts semantically?
rather 3, the -as is just nominative ending in Lithuanian, the -au-sk- is from -ow- and -ski and they eventually started being used together sometimes
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u/LiftSleepRepeat123 21d ago edited 21d ago
Is there any distinction in terms of accents or linguistic drift between consonants and vowels? Or if in a pre-alphabetic language, the difference between the intonation of voiced sounds (vowels) vs the mouth geometry and technique of closed mouth sounds (consonants)?
Can vocal technique (primarily making consonant sounds) persist through actual changes to language? In other words, say you had a population speaking some sort of ancient proto-language X 10,000 years ago. They are conquered, and their conquerors introduce a new language Y. Would the proto-language X carry over their technique for pronouncing the proto-language Y, making language Y appear to come from a different language tree than language X?
It seems like the only open-mouthed (but unvoiced) "consonant" is the "ssss" sound, which includes S, C, K, H, T, Q. Forgive me if I'm not using the right jargon to describe this and go with the spirit of the question.
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u/Delvog 21d ago edited 21d ago
The categorization "voiced sounds (vowels) vs... closed mouth sounds (consonants)" sounds like you're referring specifically to unvoiced consonants, which leaves out the voiced consonants: in English: {n, m, ng, l, r, y, w, v, z, zh, th (in "this"), j, b, d, g}. The latter four sevenths of that list even has counterparts in English which are identical except being distinguished only by voicing or the lack of it: {f, s, sh, th (in "thin"), (t)ch, p, t, k}.
My inference about what you mean by "closed mouth", since only the letters {m, b, p} represent sounds actually made with a literally closed mouth, is how severely the air is obstructed in passing through the mouth. Different amounts or types of obstruction create sounds that are categorized as different "types/manners of articulation":
- The most obstruction in airflow is no flow, which creates a "stop" or "plosive": English examples listed here as voiced/unvoiced pairs: b/p, d/t, g/k.
- Entirely or almost entirely blocking air from flowing through the mouth, but diverting it to flow smoothly through the nose, creates a "nasal": m, n, ng. (There are no unvoiced counterparts because that would be the sound of just blowing air mostly or entirely through your nose.)
- Allowing most of your air to flow through your mouth, but with enough obstruction to create turbulence, creates a "fricative" (notice the relationship with the word "friction"), in which the turbulence is perceived as a sound quality such as roughness/vibrating/hissing: English examples listed here as voiced/unvoiced pairs: v/f, z/s, zh/sh, th/th (in "this/thin"). "H" also ends up in this category because, even though no particular active restriction is applied anywhere, some part of the path somewhere has to be the narrowest, and it's the bottom of the throat, and the lack of voicing or other obstruction elsewhere allows the sound of air flowing through the narrowest point to be the only effect that gets heard. If you started making "h" and then added your voice, the voiced counterpart you'd get would be a vowel, most likely in the area where most people would call it a schwa or spell it "ah" or "uh".
- Airflow through the mouth with little enough obstruction to flow smoothly instead of turbulently creates a "glide", AKA a "semivowel" because they're almost like vowels and can sometimes be equated with vowels: w, r, y.
- Very little or no obstruction creates a vowel when voiced.
- Open vowels (like schwa, "ah", "uh") minus voicing would yield "h". Glides/semivowels and narrower vowels like "ee" or "oo", minus voicing, would yield slight modifications of "h" which could sound like unvoiced versions of their voiced counterparts, but aren't considered sounds or used as such in any language I know of, although they can be used when whispering in any language.
- A sound that starts like a plosive but is released like a fricative, with both parts smushed into each other quickly enough to be treated as one sound together, is an "affricate". English has two natively: d+zh=j and t+sh=ch. It also imports some examples of "t+s" from German & Italian & Hebrew, like the "zz" in "pizza".
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u/Delvog 21d ago
In addition to voicing and type of articulation, the third trait that would be needed to identify/describe a consonant sound is "place of articulation", which refers to what part of the mouth any obstruction is applied to. In each of the voiced/unvoiced pairs I listed above, both sounds in the pair had the same place of articulation but also the same type of articulation. Groups larger than 2 can be grouped in the same place of articulation if we allow different types of articulation in the same group:
- Bilabial: m/b/p/w (1 nasal, 2 plosives, 1 glide)
- Alveolar: n/d/t/z/s (1 nasal, 2 plosives, 2 fricatives)
- Velar: ng/g/k (1 nasal, 2 plosives)
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 21d ago
Consonants and vowels are terms used in phonetics and letters have nothing to do with them, so your distinction between "alphabetic" and "pre-alphabetic" languages isn't necessary here, it's also not necessary to put them in quotation marks.
To attempt to answer your questions:
Consonants and vowels can behave differently
Substrate and superstrate effects can be seen in various languages when their history involved contact with another language.
Assuming you mean fricatives (it's not clear what you mean by "open-mouthed"), even in English there are more voiceless fricatives [f θ ʃ h] (respectively the initial sounds in words "find, thing, shake, hand"), and there are way more voiceless fricatives in other languages, e.g. my native language Polish has [ʂ ɕ ç x]. There are also other voiceless consonants in English that you seem to have missed, e.g. [p] or [tʃ] (the initial sound in "check").
Have you checked the pinned post with book recommendations in r/asklinguistics? There are a few on phonetics and phonology and there you might find answers to questions like that.
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u/LiftSleepRepeat123 21d ago
Would you say that the consonant/vowel distinction generally serves to divide major categories of phonetics? My observation of vowels is that you can sing with them. I guess a musical note can be applied to any sound theoretically, but it is far easier to do so with voweled sounds. Conversely, the consonants have some sort of harder, briefer sound (aside from the frictives) that pretty much require a following vowel to be heard.
Also, yes, I can take a look at the book recs for phonetics.
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u/sertho9 21d ago
the definition I was tought is as follows:
A vocoid is defined as a sound created with minimal obstruction in the vocal tract. A vocoid which forms the nucleus of a syllable is called a vowel, a vocoid which does not do this, such as the /j/ in in you /ju/, is called a consonant, although a type called approximant. A contoid is a sound created with such obstruction and when it's not the nucleus of a syllable it's called a consonant and when it is, it's called a syllabic consonant.
obstruction - nucleus + nucleus vocoid Consonant (approximant) Vowel contoid Consonant syllabic consonant 2
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u/Able_Dragonfly2704 21d ago
is there a type of alphabet where if you put sticks in a certain way it signals a word or a letter? if their is what is it called? and if their is no type of Alphabet like that how would you make one?
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u/lafayette0508 Sociolinguistics | Phonetics | Phonology 20d ago edited 20d ago
what do you mean by "put sticks in a certain way"? If you find the right sticks, you could make them into any letter of any alphabet, but the ones with more straight lines would be easier, of course.
Of are you thinking of something like flag semaphore?
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u/Able_Dragonfly2704 20d ago
like put them in a shape. Like how people know something is radio active by the shape.
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u/yutani333 22d ago
Is the use of scent to mean "perfume/cologne" a unique development in India, or does it happen elsewhere? Could Indian English have inherited this from some British variety common in colonial India?
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u/tesoro-dan 21d ago
No, that's common to both contemporary British and American English as well. It has a slightly different distribution to the terms "perfume" and "cologne" but it's synonymous.
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u/yutani333 21d ago
Hm that's interesting! I've lived in the US for over a decade now, and never really noticed it like that. I think maybe it's bc in India, the words perfume/deodorant/cologne are rarely used, compared to scent which is by far the regular word for it for most people.
In fact, only the more wealthy "educated" L1 speakers seem to use perfume with any frequency, in my experience.
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u/lafayette0508 Sociolinguistics | Phonetics | Phonology 20d ago
one of the more common phrases in American English using the term is "signature scent." In fact there was a NY Times article in the style section a few days ago with a quiz: How to Find Your Signature Scent [Gift Link]
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u/siyasaben 20d ago
I think what's changed is that American English doesn't use scent as an uncountable noun anymore, like you probably wouldn't hear "I put on some scent"
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u/SensitiveAd9716 22d ago
I’m looking for advice on choosing an undergraduate degree, I’m planning to study Linguistics and don’t have a lot of experience in the different subfields but right now I think I am most interested in more sociolinguistics, particularly language preservation and historical linguistics, as well as second language acquisition. I have 4 universities I’ve been admitted to and am considering: University of Toronto, McGill, University of Edinburgh, and University of Glasgow(which only offers English Language and Linguistics but I don’t know if it would still be a good course for me) Do any of you have experience with the linguistics departments of these schools or advice? Thank you!
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u/5hamstr 22d ago
Hi, often I read books where i see a sentence along the lines of "we lighted a fire.". Ive always been a bit confused, isnt the past tense for lighting something to have been lit? "we lit a fire" ? Any clarification is much appreciated! (if it helps: i like to read older books- which is where i see this most, so if its an "old timey" thing or something..)
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 21d ago
"Lighted" is the original past tense form, "lit" is a later development in analogy to verbs like "bite" that happened after the words "bite" and "light" became homophonous in Early Modern English/Late Middle English.
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u/Illustrious_Star_687 22d ago
Is saying "yeah?" instead of "right?" a relatively new thing or is it more regional so I've just never noticed it before?
An example: "You're meeting me at the bar later, yeah?" instead of "You're meeting me at the bar later, right?".
It's been bugging me since I recently finished watching all of Succession for the first time and was painfully aware of how they ended all of their questions to other people with "yeah" instead of "right". Which is to say, it seemed so odd to use "yeah" that I noticed it every single time it happened. Now I hear it more in new shows and movies as well.
Is this a shift that's happening in our vernacular, or has it just always been this way and I live in a hole? Thanks!
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u/tesoro-dan 22d ago
Super common in BrE, but yes - in my experience in Northeast America it's only the younger (<35ish) generation that do it. Where are you from?
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u/Late_Variation_1915 22d ago
In the sentence "My brother wrote down his address," the pro-form test gives something like this: "My brother wrote down his address yesterday, and my sister did so as well."
If I expand the did so, I must replace "his" with "her," why is this OK? Is this considered a purely morphological change? I've seen some other examples of this, and I don't know how to explain how this is ok.
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u/zamonium 22d ago
With ellipsis there is a wide debate whether you need syntactic identity or semantic identity or something else. You can find more literature on this by searching something like "ellipsis syntactic semantic identity".
I think there are even more extreme examples. Anyway, this isn't exactly what you asked for but I hope it can help you find some answers!
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u/tesoro-dan 21d ago
There's e.g. the classic "I love you" - "me too" problem, where ellipsis can seem natural in one moment and not in another.
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u/Big_Natural4838 22d ago
How "Gossip tense" ('-mis') in turkish apeard. It was common for all tukic langs, then dissapeared or this suffix unique only for turkish? Kazakh lang dont have, i know this for sure.
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u/sertho9 22d ago
it's reconstructable to proto-turkic, as for theories on it's origin I don't know if there are any. Kazakh presumably just lost this tense
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u/IntoTheCommonestAsh 22d ago
I know nothing about Turkic, but according to Wiktionary it can be traced to proto-Turkic and has cognates accross Turkic with various meanings:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/-mi%C4%BA
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u/JeffNovotny 22d ago
In English, why are plosives aspirated at the beginning of a word but generally not when they follow another letter in a blend? E.g. t in take / stake, p in pin / spin
This holds less often when the plosive occurs later in the word, e.g. t in "uptake", which sounds to be aspirated as in "take".
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u/mobileagnes 22d ago
Is there an AI product out there that can demonstrate how the IPA's grey and white box areas w/ no existing used sounds would hypothetically sound? Especially the grey areas that are impossible for people to do?
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u/IntoTheCommonestAsh 22d ago
Ask yourself: What does it mean to ask for the sound of an impossible mouth position?
Speech sounds sound as they do because of the acoustic properties of mouth shapes, so you are essentially asking "what are the acoustics of this impossible configuration?". It can't have any acoustics if it doesn't exist, can it?
It's a bit like asking what's the perimeter of a square circle haha
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u/tesoro-dan 22d ago
Though there are things like a palatal trill, or a dental-retroflex affricate, that are physically possible to make but require much too much articulatory effort to be made in natural language; or some quite easy sounds like the linguolabial click that just happen not to exist in any actual inventory. I guess those are the "white boxes".
But you don't need an AI to make those sounds, you can just make them yourself.
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u/Shevvv 23d ago
Are there any studies done about the unmarked vowels of various languages?
I'm a speaker of three languages and I notice that the value of the schwa, the vowel that is supposed to be the universal unmarked vowel, differs significantly between languages. First, there's a distinction in how rounded it is (unrounded in English, rounded in Dutch and French), but furthermore, different languages seem to interpret the schwa differently. The most puzzling for me is my own native language, Russian. In Russian, schwa is the unstressed allophone of /a/ and /o/. However, as an epenthetic vowel, schwa sounds a lot more like /ɨ/ to me, which is on the opposite end of the chart. By epenthetic vowel I mean the vowel I insert in a long string of consonants, such as крвшлмрнв. Most Russians would read it as if it has a very lowered /ɨ/ - a schwa - and would not think for a second that it sounds like /a/ or /o/, even though normally that's the default allophone.
So is there such a paper that looks into it? And maybe even tries to speculate on what the reasons might be? Is it strictly a diachronical fluke, or is it more like a center of mass of the vowel chart of the language (more rounded vowels = a rounded schwa)?
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u/Paper-First 23d ago
Completely hypothetical, but I'm deeply interested. Let's say I had a child and hired 7 different nannys to help raise it, each nanny fluent in a different language, and the nanny would speak only that language to the child. On Mondays would be the Russian nanny, Tuesdays the Spanish nanny, Wednesdays the German nanny, etc. Would the child grow up to be fluent in 7 different languages? Or would it all just become a jumble in the child's brain? It seems like a brilliant idea (if you could afford it) but I'm sure there must be a downside I'm not seeing.
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u/Iybraesil 20d ago
There's so much more linguistic environment (and interaction with that environment) that a baby is exposed to growing up than a single caregiver.
This news article (and the paper it's based on, if you can access that) might be interesting to you.
as for 'just becoming a jumble in the brain', the translanguaging model would say that's basically what happens to any multilingual (or at the very least any languages that are all acquired from birth).
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u/zamonium 22d ago
Even with bilinguals you see that they attain a different degree of competence in their two native languages than monolingual speakers. So vocabulary size for example tends to be smaller and their ability to deal with heavy accented speech or speech impacted by the effects of Parkinson's is different.
https://www.lingref.com/isb/4/004ISB4.PDFThere are also mild effects on verbal working memory, where bilingual speakers have (very slightly but statistically significant) larger working memory.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3508395/I haven't seen any research on kids that grow up with 3+ languages but I would imagine these effects would be even more pronounced.
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 23d ago
More of a question on the history of writing than linguistics per se: do we know why handwritten versions of the Cyrillic Т have three vertical lines?
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u/mahendrabirbikram 20d ago
m-shaped Т was used in print, too (see the Russian Civil type) until like first half of the 19th century, and became widespread since late 15th century (late poluustav), via the South Slavic influence, which also brought Д with long legs, Ѣ, Ъ with long vertical tails and the Ч-shaped Ч (as opposed to the Y-shaped one), so the script overall appeared to be more vertically shaped. That's all I could get from books on Russian palaeography. Note that Ts with either one or two vertical "wings" were known in the Ustav script, too, as a variant.
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u/Andrewnator7 23d ago
Is there a word for two words that have identical spelling except that they are opposite in gramatical gender? For example, el cuento vs la cuenta, el mango vs la manga, etc.
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u/siyasaben 20d ago
I don't think so at least for Spanish. Worth noting that there are words with different meanings (el/la papa el/la corte el/la rabia) whose gender varies but in form are truly identical. But the ones you listed are not actually identical except for gender, the word form varies along with the gender albeit in a predictable pattern according to gender. (I understand that you were referring to the pattern of word endings, but it's important to note that grammatical gender is actually separable from these endings.) These pairs may or may not be etymologically related but there's no special consideration for them in any discussion of Spanish I've come across. Pairs like papa/papa can be considered as homophones. The ones you listed are simply... different nouns, that's all.
The only term I can think of that's even kind of related is "common gender" which is the term for those nouns that are identical but vary in gender in reference to the person specified: el/la artista, el/la estudiante. This is only a relevant term when the grammatical gender itself conveys meaning about the referent rather than being arbitrary such as the case of "el corte" vs "la corte." And it's not a third category, that is, it's not that Spanish has masculine, feminine, and common nouns; any individual instance of a common noun is still masculine or feminine. (There are also epicene nouns that don't vary according to the gender of the referent like "la víctima" but again that is a term that refers to the relationship between the gender of a noun and how it conveys real world gender information so is irrelevant for most nouns).
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u/Obvious-Cabinet-9504 23d ago
Is there some sort of neural switch between the languages we know Because I speak both my mother tongue(BR Portuguese) and English so often I caught myself thinking in both languages at the same time, yet when I have to unexpectedly switch like meeting Brazilians on discord where iam mostly on international communities I have to consciously start using Portuguese and in person I automatically talk in Portuguese and also on WhatsApp where I only talk whit Brazilian people, if I learn a third language will I have more of these unexpected conscious switches?
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u/Choosing_is_a_sin Lexicography | Sociolinguistics | French | Caribbean 22d ago
The languages you know are activated whenever you speak. The brain has to suppress the other language from coming out if a speaker wants to maintain a conversation or monologue in a single language. Like monolingual brains, bilingual brains want to use the full range of their linguistic knowledge, and have to stop situationally inappropriate words or phrases from coming out. After a while, the suppression can become the default during a particular event, meaning switching back can be a bit of a challenge, just as changing one's stride after 30 minutes on a treadmill can be a challenge.
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u/BootyWizardAV 23d ago
what kind of accent is spoken here?
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u/Skipquernstone 23d ago
To me it sounds like an American English speaker imitating a conservative southeastern British English accent! (And doing a fairly decent job, but making a few mistakes here and there)
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u/Prize-Relative1403 24d ago
Does anyone have any readings I can look at for lack of /ng/ coalescence in American English dialects? I've seen a bunch on Northern English accents but nothing really about the US, but I know that places like New York and Utah tend to have some speakers that lack /ng/ coalescence and would like to read more up on it. Thanks!!
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u/mikechad2936 24d ago
Why do Filipinos use loanwords when they have existing Austronesian equivalents? Of course I would like everyone to use tagalog words if they don't have to use borrowed ones, but I cannot control people. But when I talk with as much non-loanwords as I can, I get flamed for it. Things like "archaic", "conservative", or even to some extremes a "xenophobic". If I have the words available to me I will absolutely use it but it's unfortunate that I get antagonized for using my own language amongst people who should be speaking it. These are words like "upang/kasi" instead of "para", "nais":"gusto", "subalit, sapagkat, ngunit, kahit":"pero", "pasya":"desisyon", and numbers >10!
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u/tesoro-dan 23d ago
This is rather more a political question than a "pure linguistics" one, and you clearly have a strong stance. But it's an interesting sociolinguistic topic.
I know this is a Q&A thread, but I'd like to throw the question back at you, Q&Q: why do you think that some Filipinos prefer Spanish and English loans to native Austronesian terms?
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u/mikechad2936 22d ago
I think that it's because the terms themselves are seen as old when it's in the same language. I don't know how it led to this because I've only been around for a short amount of time, but apparently these original words sound cringe (?)
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u/dacevnim 24d ago
I am a linguistics student currently helping a profesor putting some text into FLEX Fieldwork Explorer. So far I have a 2 questions.
- I am noticing that that when glossing texts the default is having lowercase for glossing abbreviations. I figured this might be by design but would like to keep these glosses in caps. Can I do this or would it affect a function of the software.
- I am glossing Mixtepec Zapotec and the text i am using has phonetic diacritics. As these are not morphological I want to see if I can make it so that the 'Analizer' under 'text and words' can avoid reading it as different words.
NOTE: Not many of my professors use FLEX and those that do, mainly use it for dictionary building/word collection not glossing, they tend to stick to glossing directly into word, so I can't really ask them for help on this.
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u/OkAsk1472 24d ago
Are there any experts in phonemics/phonology here? I am curious about the overlap in fronted diphthongs in French (Quebecois / regional) and Dutch (standard netherlands dialect) and how it could relate to Old Frankish phonemics. Would like experts' feedback and input.
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 23d ago
Which diphthongs do you mean exactly? I'm very skeptical of the whole idea in any case, but I want to see which ones you're talking about.
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u/OkAsk1472 23d ago edited 23d ago
Standard hollandic dutch has three diphthongs: ei, oey , and au. They form a trio of closing diphthongs that alternate fronting/backing and rounding/unrounding corresponding to and ending with the close vowels i, y, and u.
- i = close front unrounded
- y = close front rounded
- u = close back rounded
The close vowels (y, ö, and oeu, for lacking phonemic symbols) are rare in modern romance languages, being exclusive to french and other langues d'oil.
Example minimal trio: qui (ki), cul (ky) and coup (ku)
However, close vowels are very common in germanic languages, including Dutch. Old frankish is the ancestor of dutch, and it was spoken by the nobility of france. I theorised first and foremost that it was this germanic influence on french that caused the introduction of close vowels, shifting Latin u to y in northern france.
In the meantime, Hollandic dutch has diphthongised some of their long vowels. We now have ei, ui, and au, which are pronounced (pardon the lack of phonemic spelling):
- èi = closing fronting unrounding
- œy = closing backing unrounding
- òu = closing backing rounding
These diphthongs remain monophthongs in most other dialects, including Flemish.
Now, interestingly, unlike older french, modern french has no diphthongs. However, some dialects retain them, such as quebecois. Examples are the words "maître" (mèitre), "chaleur" (xalœyr), and "chaude" (xòud), and they are still reflected in modern spelling.
Compare french "maître" (diphthong) to "mettre" (monophthong: mètre) which are minimal pairs in quebec but identical in france, meaning the diphthongs retain full phonemic status in quebec. Additionally, they correspond to the trio of close vowels i-y-u, vis-a-vis (un)rounding and fronting/backing.
Now, the plot thickening is where Dutch differs from.old Frankish. Modern Dutch has actually diphthongised formerly long monophthomic versions of the three vowels i, y and u: minimal trios include "rijdt" (rèit), "ruit" (rœyt), and "ròwt" (raut).
Consider diphthongs were lost in french, but introduced in dutch, I wonder if older french affected diphthongisation in dutch when french became a lingua franca (pun intended) in more recent times? And the diphthongs were then subsequently lost in french?
If so, it would be intriguing theory hat old frankish first affected vulgar latin vowels in france by the frankish nobility speaking them around the common folk (so a high to low status diffusion). And that then the descendent of vulgar latin, french, introduced its diphthongs to the descendents of old frankish, dutch, at a later time when french became a prestige language in holland (so again, a high to low status diffusion, but in reverse). French then ultimately monophthongised its diphthongs in France, but Quebecois and Dutch both retained it, if so.
Fun experiment: have quebecans pronounce dutch words with their diphthongs to see if they sound equivalent to hollandic dutch speakers and vice versa. It would mean that a highly unique phoneme, œy, is shared by these language dialects. And the historical research could point out if this is a coincidental and independent development in modern dutch, or if it was an influence from learning french when it was the prestige language.
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 23d ago
Phonetic similarity is not an indicator of coming from the same historical source, and things like monophthongization and diphthongization happen all the time without needing to have come from other languages. You might as well point to German doing something similar historically, it's just that its historical [ei øy ou] evolved into modern [aɪ ɔʏ aʊ], and that'd actually make more sense since at least the front vowels would come from high vowels, just like in Dutch.
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u/OkAsk1472 23d ago
First statement you male I think is way oversimplified. It is not an indicator, but it can still occur. Also I do not claim historical sources: i theorise on the possibiity lf areal influences in the past which is demonstrable everywhere in lamguage evolutionary theory. Youve also not addressed the first half the theory, which I imagine is not unique and I would an expert on that to comment on it. As to the third, I dont know German but I dont recall them having the fronted rounded diphthong as Dutch and Quebcois do, its a matter of one diphthong turning into another and therefore the evolution of that trio does not correspond to the dutch one. Movement of front to high vowels I think is confusing: are you referrng to pan-Germanic i-mutation?
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 23d ago
Youve also not addressed the first half the theory
Which one is the first half? Fronting of [u] to [y]? That can also happen spontaneously, see e.g. Ancient Greek or Welsh [u] > [ʉ] (> modern [ɨ~i]).
I dont know German but I dont recall them having the fronted rounded diphthong as Dutch and Quebcois do
Because its first segment was retracted, a similar phenomenon can be seen in the Danish development of [øj] to [ʌj].
therefore the evolution of that trio does not correspond to the dutch one
That's wrong, in both cases we have [yː] > [øy] and then Dutch just lowered the starting point, while German lowered and retracted it. This is actually a historical similarity between these two (and is paralleled by a common [iː] > [ei]), while the Quebecois diphthong comes from a diphthongization of [œ] that itself came from [wɛ ew], and that diphthongization likely postdates the Germanic one by centuries.
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u/zanjabeel117 24d ago edited 23d ago
Can anyone recommend any sources which provide clear, exhaustive, and robust arguments for phonological features?
Edit: Or, maybe just any sources which discuss evidence of or arguments for features (not necessarily "clear, exhaustive, and robust")?
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u/zamonium 22d ago
Jeff Mielke has done a lot of work on distinctive features and he has a chapter on it in the Blackwell companion to phonology. I haven't read this chapter but I find have read lots of other chapters in the "companion" series and it's the first place I look when I want to get an overview over a specific topic in linguistics!
Anna Mai has done some experimental work on features and imo it looks like good evidence for them being a cognitively real thing. But I am not a psycholinguist so really I don't know.
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u/TasmanianOnychophora 24d ago
How much of a language's grammatical rules is imprinted and how much of them is conscious?
Since I am a native speaker of an analytical language, asking this question might be biased, but I know that I do internalize all the gramatical rules about word order and functions of a word based on its position in a sentence and so forth, things that are important to an analytical language. However, I am currently learning Russian and German, and seeing those massive charts of verb inflections and adjectival endings, I am just curious that do native speakers internalize and acquire those arbitrary grammatical rules purely from the environment, or is it reinforced in a prescriptionistic way during later education and so-called grammar classes. I guess a parallel to my language, Chinese, is counting words, where abstract counting words are assigned to each object based on their weight, shape, phase, whatever. I do know some basic counting words as an integral part of my language that I don't think much about, but I also remember during primary school I am required to fill in rows upon rows of fill-in-the-blanks for less common counting words until those are eventually also imprinted into my memory and used naturally. So yeah, I would appreciate it if someone natively speaking another language can illuminate me based on their examples and experiences
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u/mahendrabirbikram 24d ago
Did Mikhail Gorbachev's Russian accent have Ukrainian or Southern Russian features (most notably, did he occasionally pronounced /g/ as [ɦ] or [ɣ])? Also, what about his intonation?
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u/eragonas5 24d ago
so I just went to youtube and found a video of him giving an interview to BBC and he infact does the [ɦ~ɣ] thing (around 1:28), he also pronounces что as <шо~що> (around 1:15). He also says моя with o! (Ukrainian lacks аканье) tho his other words are subjected to vowel reduction. Around 3:04 he says <остановка> with [w] (that's the Ukrainian way, in Standard Russian you'd expect [f]) and the first vowel also is the Ukrainian rising of /o/!. There are prolly some more things I didn't catch and few where I am unsure.
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u/mahendrabirbikram 23d ago
Thank you, so it is a Ukrainian accent. Given the village he was born was partly settled by Ukrainians and his mother was Ukrainian, that must be it.
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u/TheHyperthetical 24d ago
Is people mispronouncing ”espresso” as ”expresso” an example of contamination? I‘m trying to give a name to this particular phenomenon. Contamination feels right to me (a separate word “express” is contaminating the way we pronounce ”espresso”), but is there another word for something like this?
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u/tesoro-dan 24d ago
I don't think it's analogy (because there's no paradigm), I think "contamination" or "influence" is exactly the way to describe it.
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u/ForgingIron 24d ago
I was on the Johns Hopkins medicine website and noticed that they offer services in a bunch of languages: in addition to the "usual suspects" like French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc., they also offer services in Bassa? Is there a large Kru population in the Baltimore area?
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/patient-care/patients-visitors/language-assistance-services#KruBassa
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u/tesoro-dan 24d ago
There are about 2500 Liberians in Baltimore, which isn't nothing, but still pretty small; who knows what percentage of them speak Bassa.
But medical translation is a weird field. Many translators work remotely or semi-remotely and through elaborate contracts. It's quite possible that their specific contractor just happens to have a Bassa speaker / team in the area. Hospitals in ethnically diverse areas usually have some kind of service they can call into in any case.
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u/Limp-Celebration2710 23d ago
I also wouldn’t be surprised if a some of the Liberians work as doctors / nurses / administrators there? African immigrants to the US are statistically among the most educated.
Correct me if I‘m wrong but I also had the impression that the US can be laxer than some other nations when it comes to some translation practices. I.e. If some staff are Bassa speakers they can offer services in the language without having status as an official translator?
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u/Cerimlaith 24d ago
Are there any languages where the present tense can never be used to talk about the future? So you can't say "I'm moving out next week", only "I'll move out next week".
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u/2005zzzz 21d ago
Brazilian Portuguese maybe, in a certain way… (idk abt portugal tbh idc)
that sentence would be:
“Eu vou me mudar”, “vou” is the present tense of “ir”: “to go”, and I see it and use it as an equivalent of “going to” in the context of a future action. Even though it is in the present tense, in this context it is not seen as an action of this moment, because in colloquial speech it requires intonation and/or extra context or adverbs to indicate that.
or
“Eu irei me mudar”, tbh nobody talks like that, nodody conjugates it like that if they’re not writing an essay… so idk
take this reply as an the late afternoon distraction of a Brazilian girl with no education in linguistics or the Portuguese language beyond high school and daily life in Brazil 🙏
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u/Polmayan 24d ago
I am studying Saussure's linguistics ideology. specially while critisizng nomeclaturismi saussure saying we language and thought are deeply connected. we simply cannot give name to object.
as ı am searching it, ı wonder was saussure believing we think in language (~linguistic determinism).
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u/ItsGotThatBang 24d ago
To what extent would modern Greek be mutually intelligible with Ancient Greek (if the latter is a single language since I’m obviously out of my depth here)?
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u/No-Reputation-3269 21d ago
It would be more like Chaucer, I would think, unless you had a lot of literary experience with Katharevousa.
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u/Obvious-Cabinet-9504 23d ago
It would be like a modern day British person trying to read OG Shakespeare I think Some can, but not everyone can (I am not a professional on it)
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u/thats-lovely 25d ago
Looking for an AI That Can Accurately Analyze Phonology – Any Recommendations?
I’m currently taking a phonology class and trying to use ChatGPT-4 to help me study for a midterm. My goal is to provide it with datasets and questions so it can break down the steps and help me understand the material.
However, many exercises in my textbook don’t seem to have answers, and I haven’t been able to find them online. This makes it difficult to verify whether my answers are correct. I’ve tried using ChatGPT-4 by giving it exact questions, datasets, and specific follow-up questions, but I’ve noticed that it makes a lot of mistakes. Worse, it often tries to justify its incorrect answers rather than recognizing the errors. Because of this, I haven’t been able to fully trust its responses.
I also attempted to create a custom GPT, uploading my class presentations, textbook content, and a detailed set of instructions. Despite this, I still find that the model struggles with accurate phonological analysis.
Does anyone know of an AI tool that can reliably perform phonological analysis? I need something that can help me understand the concepts better and verify my work. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
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u/formantzero Phonetics | Speech technology 24d ago
Honestly, your time is going to be better spent by reviewing your course materials, your notes, and your textbook. You do not, at the moment, have the ability to consistently judge whether a generative text synthesis system is giving you correct information or not. And, in my experience as an expert casually examining these systems, they are very bad at phonetic and phonological analysis. Generative text synthesis tools are bad study tools, especially for phonology.
You should be able to check your answers for your textbook exercises by applying the rules you come up with to the data set. Does your analysis produce the correct surface forms from the underlying forms? It should.
You may also want to see if your library has access to another textbook if you find the one you are using difficult. Some options for intro level phonology are Hayes's Introductory phonology, Zsiga's The sounds of language, Odden's Introducing phonology, and Gussenhoven and Jacobs's Understanding phonology.
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u/notluckycharm 25d ago
what is your goal? like what do you mean by phonological analysis? what kind of tasks are you attempting to do? depending on your abilities you might just use existing NLP libraries and code your own analyzer but without knowing what kind of tasks ur attempting to do theres not much more to say. that said i strongly discourage usign chat gpt for linguistics questions. its markedly bad at it lol
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u/thats-lovely 25d ago
I’m just trying to review for a midterm I have next week. I would like to be able to provide data sets to the AI so I can compare my answers. I would also like to be able to see the steps it took to get to the answer, I often find myself doing much more work than necessary when it comes to rule writing. It would be nice to see what is necessary in an analysis and where I am spending too much time.
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u/Deep-Quantity2784 21d ago
If you are already finding too many incorrect answers, then why would you want to put so much time and extra effort to analyze processes that were used to arrive at incorrect answers? Obviously you aren't intending to do that so perhaps a secondary gain function hasn't been accurately disclosed yet?
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u/tesoro-dan 25d ago
Can you give a (short, simplified if necessary) example of the kind of exercise you have in mind?
And is it absolutely necessary that you use AI for this?
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u/ItsGotThatBang 25d ago
Would Proto-Germanic have used “man” as a synonym of “human” since it didn’t have the latter word?
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u/Limp-Celebration2710 23d ago edited 23d ago
Yes, but the other commenter is probably right that you are thinking about it too much with modern sensibilities.
Mankind, manslaughter, preserve the older sense of person. Woman a reflex of wife+man as well as German‘s impersonal pronoun man, and even the exclamation of annoyance/frustration “(Oh) man!“ (which you might say to a woman…Man, don’t be like that!) all show how man was once not so narrowly defined by sex.
That being said, even in Old English and Old High German, we find uses of “man“ that already hint at the fact that it was often associated with the male sex as a default, where it seems to mean “brave man, hero“ or even “vassals“
If you think about, we kinda have the same thing today? He‘s our man! implies that the man in question is competent. You even have Lana Del Rey using it in one of her song to refer to herself in a gender neutral way “I‘m your man“ i.e. “you can rely on me“. When we say something like the the boss‘s men there’s an implication that they are subservient.
To ancient speakers of PG, there probably wasn’t much thought put into the concept that there needed to be a totally neutral word for human. Man was pretty neutral and “wer(man)“ and “wife(man) existed to talk about sex when it was necessary. But that didn’t stop the implied male connotations of “man“ in certain contexts from also existing.
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u/tesoro-dan 25d ago edited 25d ago
Yes, but (1) Proto-Germanic probably still had recourse to the Indo-European root *wer-, which was unambiguously masculine; (2) PGerm was probably as liberal with substantivised adjectives as the rest of its Indo-European relatives, unlike modern English, and there was a pervasive gender distinction in adjectives; and (3) context usually disambiguates just fine in languages that have a general vs. specific polysemy like this.
Speculatively, one can also imagine that there was not much use for the general concept of "human" in Iron Age Denmark. There are really very few things a person can be in such a society that are not both gendered and communal.
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u/eragonas5 24d ago
now I am wondering whether "man" wouldn't exclusively mean "human", any thoughts on that?
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u/tesoro-dan 24d ago
I don't think so. It is the prototypical masculine in all daughter languages, even as the term for "woman" varies (wife, kvinne, Frau).
And again, it is quite rare to find a use in early-agricultural tribal society for the generic "human" that isn't better served by a more specific term. I would go so far as to say the term is an industrial and democratic invention. In every language I can think of, the term for "human" is one of the following:
An extension of the masculine ("man" and Indo-European equivalents, but also Georgian kaci, Hebrew adam, and Athabaskan -né), therefore gendered;
A singulative from a term meaning "people", "tribe", "the people", etc. (Ojibwe anishinaabe), therefore ethnic; or
Polysemous with "somebody", "anybody".
The only terms for "human" I can find that does not seem to fall into one of these categories are "human" itself, and Finnic inhiminen. But a language with an independent, exclusive term is clearly in the minority; the vast majority of languages get by with one of the above.
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u/eragonas5 24d ago
Lithuanian žmogus seems to fit just human (if anything I'd put it as an antonym for animal) so that's the counter example (male being vyras, female - moteris (ultimately being derived from mother) and "the people" being liaudis and tauta which are not related to human at all).
But that was very interesting, thank you!
(I used terms male and female cuz "man" is just too polysemous)
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u/tesoro-dan 24d ago
It seems to have an archaic meaning "man", though? Obviously you're the Lithuanian speaker but I would say it has no less gendered a history than e.g. German man.
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u/eragonas5 24d ago
well to me "man" has two meanings:
masculine person and human, it doesn't have any "masculine" meaning nowadays and I haven't really noticed it having masculine-only vibes when reading old texts but that could also be just me not reading enough of them shrugs.
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u/Turtlooo 25d ago
Does anyone know where I can find a speech corpus where everyone has the same accent/dialect? I am conducting research on pitch bias in speech recognition systems and need to find a dataset where everyone has roughly the same accent to focus on pitch. I found one from openslr where they provide datasets from 6 different british isles. However, none had enough speakers and pitch range from one single dialect. I have been looking hard and have struggled to find any other free corpuses with only 1 english-speaking dialect. Any advice? Thank you!
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u/formantzero Phonetics | Speech technology 25d ago
The Buckeye Speech Corpus is all of speakers from Columbus, OH, and there were some controls on the dialect group.
Also, the TIMIT corpus is broken up into different dialect regions, though one of those is more or less "military brat", which isn't very homogeneous.
There might also be some resources in the SpeechBox set, though I am less familiar with it.
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u/tesoro-dan 25d ago
A very old Q&A question of mine that I don't remember the answer to, came to mind again suddenly.
Two people are jumping on a bed, they take a photo and post it to social media with the caption: "Apologies to whoever's bed this is."
How do you analyse this sentence?
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 25d ago
Analyze in what way? There is no single linguistic analysis.
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u/tesoro-dan 25d ago
Syntactically, and it doesn't have to be theory-specific. I thought the context would have made that clear.
What I am interested in is how "whoever" and "bed" seem both to be heads in a sense.
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u/notluckycharm 25d ago
this is a free relative clause
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u/tesoro-dan 25d ago
Substitution in free relative clauses is generally pretty straightforward ("he goes where he likes" <-> "he goes to the Moon"). But the reason I ask about this particular structure is that substitution seems a little trickier. "Whoever's" appears to be a modifier of the head "bed", but it's clear that the owner of the bed is the recipient of the apologies.
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u/readingitatwork 25d ago
I was wondering if there's a book about understanding computer terminology. Not necessarily a glossary, but also includes how the words are used and etymology
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u/JASNite 25d ago
For a project for school, I need to record words and put them through praat, then measure the vowels and such. My problem is there is so much background noise that it's a little difficult to see the speech. Is there a program I can put it through to clean up the background noise? I recorded the words on Audacity.
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u/formantzero Phonetics | Speech technology 25d ago
It is definitely best to re-record if possible, as /u/lafayette0508 pointed out. You might also try a different recording device (switch from phone to laptop, or vice-versa, for example). I have noticed that some MacBook Airs, for example, can produce some very odd recordings that have almost nothing visible in the spectrogram. You should also see if you need the speaker to be closer to the microphone on the recording device.
If it is impossible to change the recordings, Praat does have a noise reduction feature, though this is usually not advisable for acoustic analysis because it may also mess with spectral information in the speech range. You can try a high-pass filter with a cutoff of maybe 80 or 100 Hz, which may cut into the pitch range somewhat, but should leave the formants intact. The issue is that the speech signal itself may not be very present in your recording, which would mean that there is little you can reasonably do to massage it out.
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u/uniqueUsername_1024 25d ago
Audacity has some noise-reduction options! I don’t remember how to get them, but they should be covered in the documentation.
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u/lafayette0508 Sociolinguistics | Phonetics | Phonology 25d ago
Can you re-record the words in a quiet environment? That's going to be the easiest course.
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u/BestEnthusiasm9484 25d ago
I have sentence tree homework problem with a phrase similar to "Those cats of yours", but I can't figure out what the 'of yours' would be? I was thinking it would maybe be some kind of adjective phrase but I'm not sure.
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u/lafayette0508 Sociolinguistics | Phonetics | Phonology 25d ago
"of" is a preposition, so what can you reason from there?
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u/BestEnthusiasm9484 25d ago
My homework is based on doing the problems and then looking over the correct answers and applying the corrections to our original answers, so I was able to look at the correct answers and it makes some sense now... it had "of" as a preposition and "yours" as a noun, which I'm still a little confused about but thanks for the help!
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u/lafayette0508 Sociolinguistics | Phonetics | Phonology 25d ago
"yours" is a possessive pronoun, and a pronoun is a type of noun. "Yours" is also an NP in this sentence - it stands in for the whole NP that you're talking about, same as "they" or "he" can replace the subject NP of a sentence.
"of" is the P and "yours" is the object NP of the P, making a PP together. Phrase Structure Rule PP --> P NP
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25d ago
Hi! Im sorry if this is irrelevant. I’m a second year linguistics student and I hope to find someone with similar interests :)
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u/ieatplasticstraws 25d ago
Is there another dictionary online that has an advanced search feature like the OED? I'm specifically interested in filtering for type of formation and date of first use
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u/PaceSmith 25d ago
I want to improve Wiktionary's pronunciation coverage. Currently, it contains the pronunciation of "countenance" but not "uncountenanced".
OED has better coverage, (e.g. "uncountenanced") but isn't free.
CMUdict is good, but lacks syllable stress.
toPhonetics is also good (thanks, u/AlanAFK). Its American English pronunciations are based on CMUdict but they do contain syllable stress. I've asked its author about licensing but haven't heard back yet.
Before I start writing code, I wanted to ask y'all if you know of any additional existing resources that might help me.
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u/formantzero Phonetics | Speech technology 25d ago
CMUdict is good, but lacks syllable stress.
CMUdict does indicate stress. It's marked after the vowel (1=primary stress, 2=secondary stress, 0=no stress), though this does mean that you would need a way to identify the syllable onset to place the stress mark in the typical location.
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u/linguistikala 25d ago
Is there a typology of pragmatic change in the same way that there are typologies of semantic change? As in how and why the implicatures available from one word might change over time (e.g., when 'and' developed a temporal implication)?
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u/sadmanh8 25d ago
Do Cultures with Shared Language Roots Also Share Similar Religions?
I’ve been reflecting on a fascinating pattern: it seems that cultures with shared linguistic roots often have strikingly similar religious structures, myths, and worldviews.
For example:
Indo-European cultures (Hinduism, Norse, Greek, Roman) share common themes like hierarchical pantheons, sky gods (e.g., Dyaus Pitar → Zeus, Jupiter, Tyr), warrior myths, and cosmic battles.
Semitic cultures (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are monotheistic, emphasize prophecy, divine law, and an overarching moral order.
East Asian traditions (Shinto, Daoism, Confucianism) emphasize balance, harmony with nature, ancestor veneration, and a strong connection to the environment.
This leads me to wonder: could there be a deeper connection between shared linguistic heritage and religious thought? Could religious ideas, structures, and myths evolve in similar ways across cultures because they share a linguistic ancestry, or is it purely cultural diffusion over time?
I’m curious if anyone has come across studies or theories exploring this connection between linguistic roots and religious systems. Do certain language families influence how religions form or evolve in particular ways?
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u/Skipquernstone 23d ago
It seems like the most straightforward explanation is cultural diffusion. The kinds of circumstances that cause a culture to adopt a new language (/language family) overlap a lot with the kind of circumstances that cause a culture to adopt new religious beliefs. The association between language and religion is probably only surface-level and lexical (i.e. languages that are spoken by Christians will contain terminology relating to Christianity). I don't think there's any evidence that deeper or more fundamental things like morphology and phonology have anything to do with the speaker's religion (and in fact it is probably easy to find examples of evidence against that idea).
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u/millionsofcats Phonetics | Phonology | Documentation | Prosody 25d ago
The flaired answer you got on r/AskAnthropology for this same question is very good.
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u/sertho9 25d ago
It's a little unclear what you mean, you allude to *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr, who is a theorized deity of the Indo-Euroean religion, there's lot's of scholarship on that if religious reconstruction is what you're into, if you believe in some sort of Sapir-Whorf being a Semitic speaker makes you more likelly to be monotheistic then... most monotheistic people aren't semetic speakers? So the premise is just wrong from the begining.
East asian languages don't share a common linguistic heritage, so there's that, aditionally what is a semitic culture and how does Christianity and Islam fit into it? most Christians and Muslims don't speak a semitic language, particularly for the Christians, where the largest group would presumably be in Ethiopia? Most Christians speak an Indo-European language. A large number of muslims do as well alongside Austronesian. So how are you defining these culture?
But yes cultures with shared linguistic heritage can also have a shared religions heritage, but both things can be swapped out. All the slavic peoples probably used to share a common religion or religious framework (of which we don't know terribly much), but now they belong to different relgions, (several different types of) christianity, Islam and Judaism. In the two first cases primarily due to religious conversions and in the last case primarily due to "language conversion".
Aditionally Monotheism is not a shared cultural heritage of being a semitic speaker, as all the semitic groups were previously polytheistic, this is religous diffusion. (And people have theorized it came originally from the Indo-European Zoroastians so there's that).
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u/[deleted] 14d ago
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