u/Hopeful-Banana-6188

Ideally relative to position in the word.

Is there any research on unknown substrates in various branches of Sino-Tibetan? Lexical strata that show irregularities and/or phonological/phonotactic features showing they cannot be inherited from Proto-Sino-Tibetan but nonetheless do not correspond to any other attested language families.

As an example of a system that looks quite different from English, a system that is found in Turkic languages is one whereby the word for elder brother is the same as the word for father's younger brother.

This question was brought up by a thread in another subreddit about this topic. Everyone would agree that Indo-European is the language family with the most developed historical linguistics, and Uralicists have expressed opinions that Uralic is next after Indo-European; in the words of Ante Aikio:

>Uralic comparative linguistics is recognized as a highly advanced field of research, surpassed in depth and breadth of research only by the Indo-European family (Campbell 1998a: 164-5)

Juho Pystynen has echoed the same sentiment:

>A particular strength is thoroughness, in which Uralic is surely the world leader among families of compareable size and age. Over the last 150 years, all of the still extant Uralic varieties have been documented at least phonetically and lexically in meticulous detail (10+ topolects from all but the smallest-and-most-homogeneous of the traditionally recognized languages, 100+ from all three major national languages), and all of these have received at least some detailed comparative study. In total amount of published work, only the much larger families Indo-European and Austronesian are clearly ahead.

My anecdotal observation is that this seems to be true when comparing Uralic to other families I've looked at such as Sino-Tibetan. For example, it's not a very difficult task to list out all the regular sound correspondences between relevant modern languages for the subgroups of Uralic, including minor nonstandard varieties that have preserved some archaisms. However, it seems to be an incredibly laborious task to do this for the vast majority of non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan branches, even if one restricts it only to standard varieties (and making no mention of possible archaisms in nonstandard varieties).

However it could be that this is just bias due to being more familiar with Uralic and not knowing where to look, and it's possible that the Uralicists that have expressed such opinions suffer from the same bias. So my question is, are non-Uralicists broadly in agreement with this assessment?

On Bilibili, after watching a video for a certain length of time there is a modal that will pop up asking you to create an account. When it shows up, the video will also automatically pause at the same time. This can be replicated by watching any Bilibili video while logged out. Is there a way to block this and block the video-pausing behavior?

Since conlangs are created by humans, their designers usually prefer to have symmetry in the phonology. ("If my language has /b/ and /d/, surely it must also have /g/.")

What aspects of your phonology did you choose to not make symmetrical, and why? E.g. a gap in voicing or a missing diphthong? I imagine missing /ŋ/ will be the most frequent since it is quite prevalent in natural languages as well.

I'd like to use this sound change in my conlang but I'm not aware of any examples of this occuring, although I know of examples of the opposite (/ɲ/ and /ŋ/ merging into /ɲ/, which occured in some dialects of Northern Saami). Does anyone know of examples of this occuring in a natural language? How likely is it to occur?

https://preview.redd.it/epbpx8x1lngh1.png?width=290&format=png&auto=webp&s=feafc34ec3b2418dda68de695630858123e78773

There seems to be little agreement among linguists on how many vowel phonemes there are in Mandarin (except that it's probably not more than six). What do Mandarin speakers themselves think? I guess it may be somewhat complex to get an objective answer given that virtually everyone now knows Pinyin.

I've come across an interpretation that the relationship between David and Jonathan in the Bible is a depiction of a homosexual relationship. At the same time, the historicity of David is frequently challenged. It seems a little puzzling to me that, if David were a character invented to justify the legitimacy of the nation of Israel, an invented story about David's homosexuality would be included. So:

• Is the idea of David's homosexuality legitimate?
• If yes, is that consistent with the idea of a mythical David?
• If yes, does that suggest that attitudes to homosexuality may have been more liberal at the time when the story was written?

Stuff like AMM or Stockhausen's Aus den sieben Tagen. Looking for something as abstract and genreless as possible (so not rock type stuff).