u/Glum_Entertainment93

Hi. I'm looking for my first job. I just had an interview to work as a retail associate with one of UPS's ground stores, and it was kind of strange. The manager seemed like he was trying to intimidate me (intentionally or unintentionally) about the environment of the job, talking about how he's terrible to work with and a brutal supervisor; he also asked me a ton of weird / possibly illegal questions to try to gauge why i applied i think? (He asked me if I had Anxiety/ADHD, who I live with, how long I've lived here, how long they've lived here, what kind if car I drive, when I got my driver's license, just to name the worst ones) He was super adamant about me being sure I needed this job because it was apparently going to be very intense. He described the training process and it seemed pretty alright to me -- carry a notebook around, listen watch and learn, learn on your feet kind of thing. But this supervisor is giving me a ton of red flags and I don't know if this is going to be a good choice for my first job.

Is working as a package processor in store really that intense? Or rather is the learning curve as brutal as he's making it seem? I'm going to be paid minimum wage ($12) so I don't know if it's going to be the most insane job on the planet.

I mean, this is all depending on if I pass the 'first round' or not to even give me the option to move on to training, but I'm getting really bad feelings about this manager. Despite his brutal attitude, it didn't seem very professional at all.

Anything helps, thanks :)

sorry if im using the wrong flair. i'm just curious about how the "to" preposition became required in an infinitive verb form like "to dance" in english; whats the history of this construction from PIE? how does this preposition+verb construction differ in other languages? how are infinitives formed in other languages? is this construction unique/common to PIE languages, or does it occur in other language families?

thanks for any info! :)

I've been thinking about this for a while and I'll try to explain what I mean. I'm working on a conlang, so I wanted to have a fuller understanding of what the word "become" is and how it works semantically, in English and in other languages; I didn't want to face-value translate from another language because I feel the construction of English "become" isn't universal -- in that, I mean that presumably the word is literally the two words "be" and "come" put together into one. I would assume that words in other languages that mean "to come into existence; to come to be; to undergo change or development" wouldn't be constructed the same way or be similar to the English word at all. Like, what if one language just has the single verb? Am I making sense? I don't know if I am. Getting into linguistics has me thinking way, way too hard about words and their definitions. Thank you for your patience. :)

hello! i'm developing the next stage of AZA, (early middle ages / around 10th century AD) and i had an idea for some phonological changes to help tighten up my inventory and make it more unique. my main borrowings are proto-slavic and proto-germanic, as well as old norse/north germanic influence as i come into this new stage. the idea is that the north germanic parent is coming in and being configured to comfort for the native proto-(balto)-slavic speakers. i SWEAR ill come up with names for these fictional parents soon.

current phonology:
vowels
ä ə ɛ ɪ i y u ʊ o/ɔ (still figuring it out)

consonants:
p b t d ɟ kʰ g m n (f) v s (ʃ) z ʒ ɕ ɹ j h l ɫ t͡s d͡z

- right now, i have a release distinction with /t/ and /t̚/ the latter which occurs mostly at the end of a word, and at the end of a syllable before the consonant of a new syllable, mostly nasals and voiced plosives. i also have the unvoiced stop /kʰ/ which occurs at similar places to my unvoiced released stop /t/. i'll come back after explaining this second part with my voiced consonants.

- /d/ and /g/ are slowly starting to lose distinction in favor of the more universal palatal-influenced consonant /ɟ/, especially because at this point in the language's timeline, unvoiced stops at the end of words, alone or when a morpheme is attached, would become voiced.

- i'm thinking about bringing my unvoiced consonants /kʰ/ and /t/ together in a way similar to this, (as /c/) as they occupy a similar niche in my phonology, occurring alone between vowels or at the beginning of words/syllables.

- i'm also brainstorming that perhaps /f/ could become lost somewhere in favor or prioritizing the more sibilant/voiced fricatives.

- same situation as my /ʃ/ assimilating into /ɕ/ as palatalization strengthens, or becoming lost as /h/ and then /h/ disappearing.

i also have one or two ideas on how to trim down my vowels.

- /y/ can revitalize a vowel lengthening distinction i had in early drafts, being interpreted as either /i:/ or /u:/ depending on surrounding consonants (though i'd have no idea how to come up with those rules) or through a revitalized umlaut which was also in early drafts lol. OR i could retcon and construct this umlaut as i go to create all of the vowel-harmony leftovers i wanted to have when i first started!!

-/ə/ and /ʊ/ could also have something funky happening, like losing their distinction, as they're both the unstressed versions of their counterparts /a/ and /u/ (/ʊ/ actually being the result of a vowel change happening when the old-norse/north-germanic parent was introduced)

- in terms of everything else, i'm not sure. i could say the core is a e i o u and then have the other possibilities just be realizations of those core vowels. the general idea was that the vowel inventory had to explode for a second so that all of the north germanic influence could fit, like throwing two piles of rocks into one bucket, and as the language evolves as one everything chills out and assimilates into a new core set.

do these changes sound feasible/realistic? if they're kind of a stretch, how could i go about making these changes in a realistic way?

i think i provided all important info, but if you need anything else, just let me know! :)

thanks!

Hello! I'm bearing down and working out more and more nouns for my conlang AZA; right now in the developmental timeline, the lang has reached the "adjustment" phase of my two proto-langs coming together (proto-slavic inspired meeting proto-germanic influence) where the germanic injections have developed their first stage of slavic assimilation ↓

eírveka --> eírvegja (earth; tilled soil)

(I'm also flying by the seat of my pants a little bit with these sound changes, just going with what sounds like what would happen while I still have a pretty small batch of nouns to work with)

I wrote this process up to explain some of the changes that are happening while I run through my list of germanic-sourced nouns through the slavic-parent's phonotactics/phono-aesthetics.
- A sound that's developed is dhj --> /ɟ/, which is a new phoneme that I didn't think I would have in my inventory. It was the product of a beginning "d" of my germanic nouns meeting my slavic-parent's tendency to palatalize.
- What's also begun to happen is I'm developing a pattern of nouns that end with "a" or "ja", which would actually circumvent a lot of my very recently re-established noun cases (which all depend on a different class of declension patterns lol)
- I feel like a lack of distinction from /ʊ/ and /ə/ could develop, as /ʊ/ is treated as an unstressed /u/ and /ə/ is an unstressed /a/. Same thing with /o/ and /a/, but I'd have no idea how to apply that assimilation from an orthological standpoint.
- I'm struggling to identify what phones/phonemes I could place in my IPA chart and which I should leave out, lest it becomes too cluttered.

I feel like I'm progressing very quickly into an entirely different phonemic inventory, which I'm riding the wave of, just a little bit, but I'm nervous about how I'm going to keep up. It feels like I'm looking at my proto-lang and going "what's in your mouth" and then it runs away, lmao!

I'm sure I could just let it happen. The discovery is part of the fun, lol. Am I accidentally simulating now what I've been trying to do on purpose? I've been stuck on developing my lexicon (especially while simulating two proto-lang's lexicons coming together) because I don't know how I would go about sound changes, but said sound changes are seeming to appear before my very eyes just as I tinker. I suppose I could let the changes run for a few more "generations" and then just document what I see. Is that a good idea? I'm mostly just thinking out loud, lol.

If you need a screenshot of my current phonemic inventory I'll be more than happy to provide it.

Thanks for any help/thoughts! :)

Hello! I've just dipped my toe into this subreddit, and I'm having fun, but I'm having trouble with a few different orthography/grapheme/phonemic concepts that maybe somebody could explain for me here.

This confusion might be coming from my using the latin script for my conlang on default and just now experimenting translating it into ılkaíŋaluš (my cyrillic-based script), but shouldn't spelling be letter-to-letter? I'm seeing a lot of examples where script spelling differs or should differ from romanized spelling (or vice versa).

Like this -> /ıł.kaiŋ.a.luʃ/ -> ılkaíŋaluš -> ѵлкаѝњалущ

This is adapted letter for letter, but reading the transliteration wiki page for the greek script describes different graphemes in the script when the translation would all translate to the same phoneme/romanization. Should this also be true for my conlang? Can/should the native script spelling differ from their romanized counterparts?

I legitimately might be confusing the wrong things for myself by centering romanization rather than how theoretical speakers would use their native script...

Any help would be really great, even if a quick lingo-for-dummies on any terms I should know for when I really get into orthography.

Thanks! :]

Hello! I'm developing my AZA lexicon currently, and while I've been doing it, I've noticed a pattern that grew with how I pronounced the words in my head, and I was wondering how I'd notate it;

I have a sound change established that a voiceless plosive (t, p, k) will become voiced, (to d, b, g), but then it became more complicated than that. It then became a transition from an aspirated [tʰ] to a softer, dental [t̪], and then I began to think about a stop that has the tongue pressed against the back of the teeth like to pronounce a dental t, but never let go of the air.

Like, for example, here's the word /stat/. It would be transcribed as [stʰat̪] according to the current rules, but I find myself closing the sound in preparation to pronounce the plosive, but I don't pronounce the actual "tuh" sound and instead let it go, so it seems like a kind of stop (like the glottal stop). Sorry if I'm overexplaining, I just want to be very specific with the sound to see if it's a phonetic possibility. Is there a unique symbol for this stop that is in the IPA, or is there a way to notate the [t] to achieve this effect?

(I'm thinking that there could be a similar stop with the other voiceless plosives, (like k), but it might be cool to just have both of them evolve into the same stop).

Thanks! :]

Aíjel! Hello! This question is actually a bit of a trojan horse, because it'll broaden out to more of a "how to simulate sound/phonetic changes" type discussion.

Just to give a rundown, my conlang AZA is inspired by north germanic and slavic languages, and has the leftovers of a vowel harmony system that has developed into an active/passive voice and a dynamic/stative verb dichotomy -- not super important info, but it might be necessary. It currently has the vowels, /ɪ, i, y, e, ə, a, u/ and the diphthongs /ei, ai, au, ou/.

While developing my lexicon, leaning into more slavic/baltic languages for inspiration, i realized that it seemed like i was missing some essence to really replicate the sound of those languages, which was the /o/ vowel (i'm assuming. it's what i hear). First, I figured I could just add it into my vowel inventory and retroactively edit my vocabulary, but that felt a little uninteresting, so then i thought "what if i shifted the vowels or created a gradual introduction to include the vowel /o/?"

Which brings me to my question(s):

1. How do vowel shifts work in natural languages? Does it usually occur when another language is introduced and melds a bit into the original language? Are there different causes? What exactly happens to the phonetic inventory *and* the graphemes in the written words?

2. Overall, with that knowledge, how do I simulate a vowel shift in a constructed language?

3. Have there been any vowel changes in the slavic, baltic, or north germanic languages that I could reference to help me achieve my goal of introducing the /o/ vowel to my conlang?

4. Are there any other sound changes I could make in the meantime, with consonants or other sounds? Are there changes that usually coincide with other changes and develop around the same time? Or are they all independent movements? If need be, I can provide a list or screenshot of my consonants.

5. I already know about a type of sound change where a consonant sound becomes less enunciated over time and eventually disappears, though I can't remember the name of it (lenition, I think? assimilation?). Are there other types of consonant sound changes I could simulate?

6. How can I get really weird about it? I know English famously has had multiple really intense vowel shifts which has made its spelling basically nonsensical, and I think it would be fun to replicate it for my own conlang. This is kind of an open question, but I feel my spelling is too simple/regulated/uniform to appear like a natural language. I already have a few cases where multiple consonant graphemes relate to one sound, (like <zh, dj, dz>, /ʒ/ or <sj, sk, skj, ts, tš> for /ʃ/) but I want to push it as far as I can and include vowels. Just for funsies.

7. Are there feasible ways I could simulate this vowel shift while preserving as much of the grammatical/morphological structures I've already set up? I can and am prepared to mess with it a little bit, but I like what I have for now. It would seem like just slapping on a new coat of paint to the sound inventory, right? I'm also willing to trim or add onto my consonant inventory through other sound changes.

I know that this isn't 7 concise questions. Sorry about that. This is a hobby I've desperately wanted to get back into (as I'm finding vocabulary development very boring (because I have yet to research ways to develop vocabulary)) and this prospect has me very excited. I love you conlangs. I love you linguistics.

Thank you for any help you can spare! :)