r/asklinguistics

e.g., baguette -> la baguette

It seems kind of pointless to have it if it doesn't make any sound.

1. When there's final devoicing, the phoneme is sometimes notated as the "final" version, like <ząb> /'zɔmp/ in polish. Why wouldn't the phoneme represent the underlying /b/?

2. French has a bunch of silent letters that will show up in other forms: <vert> /vɛʁ/ <verte> /vɛʁt/. Wouldn't this show that <vert> does have an underlying /t/? Could we do <vert> /vɛʁt/ verte /vɛʁtə/ instead? (and we also add œ for <eu>, idk)

3. Maltese has a fairly common letter <għ> which can be silent, [ħ] or it diphthongises the vowel after it. There's words like <erbgħa>/ˈɛrba/ "4" vs <erbgħin> /ɛrˈbajn/ "14", <ħamsa> /ˈħam.sa/ "5" and <ħamsin> /ħamˈsiːn/ "15".

I can see why these might not be referred as phonemes, but then what term do i use? Is there one? It's related to the letters in spelling in the sense that they "feel" more historical but idk. The biggest question for me is that i fear if i use only phonemes as a referrence, i'd have to say that a lot of things are just random in the present day. i mean that'd be accurate for the spoken language but it still feels outlandish. It's like saying word final /p/ randomly turns into /b/ in polish.

Context: I came up with a riddle I thought was clever and was basically downvoted into oblivion in the Riddles subreddit because they thought it was not clear or obvious enough.

The riddle: I'm what you hear when the kettle gets hot. Add just one letter and I go from costly to not.

Answer: >!Fee!<

(Answer is in the explanation below as well)

Explanation: While maybe it's not what most people think of right off the bat, the goal is to think outside the box. The sound a whistle makes, to me, is a fricative followed by a long, high "i" (IPA i) - Fiiiiiiiii - or written out in English - "FEEEEEEEEEEEE"

Fee is a cost. Add just one letter and it becomes: Free - without a cost.

Is it this absurd to think that the sound a kettle makes, or a whistling noise could be sounded out as a "Fee"? I was absolutely bashed for thinking this works and want to see if I am crazy or not.

They said I should make something with "Whistle" because I should use an onomatopoeia (yes, multiple users attacking me for the same thing when I tried to explain my reasoning above), and I said "Whistle" is not an Onomatopoeia, while "Fee" would be - it's exactly the sound you hear if you name it "Fee" - like how "Honk" is the onomatopoeia for a car horn, while "Horn" is not one, just like how "Whistle" is not one.

Genuinely feel like I'm taking crazy pills, but if it's that far of a stretch, then I'd like to hear it from those with a better grasp on linguistics in general.

Hi everyone, I'm working on an acoustic phonetics project with 5k tokens (40 participants). I am measuring the formant values of 6 vowels. All of the participants are pre-service English teachers, and I will compare their vowel spaces with those of native speakers.

The problem is that the words in my recordings are not in /hVd/ context. They are natural everyday lexical items. So my advisor told me that using references in the literature should be the second choice because the phonetic environments should be similar, and she told me that it would be better if I could find sufficient native speakers and record the same word list, but this is hard to do.

What can I do? Do you think I can use a speech corpus? Or maybe remote data collection?

I'm open to any advice, paper suggestions, etc.

Sentences in polysynthetic languages can express a bunch in less words than other languages, sometimes a whole phrase in one word. But how this really works in practice I find difficult to grasp.

I get having extra ways of including information into verbs: aspect, mode, multi-person agreement, evidentiality etc. These can cut down on adverbs and maybe other expressions, but they don't seem to me to give that extra oomph that would make polysynthetic morphology stand out to me.

I don't imagine that the subject, object, and verb would all be included in one morphological word normally, especially if the roots for those three cannot stand on their own. I don't imagine polysynthetic sentences are mostly one word (or are they?). On the other hand, if the extra synthetic morphology is just to replace some adverbs, than it sounds no different from a very synthetic languages.

So, how do they actually work in practice? What are really the things or type of words that are incorporated as inflections instead of separately said and what IS usually kept as its own word/root?

Basically the title. I am particularly curious about historical lingusitics.

I got an MA in lingusitics a couple of years ago, was wondering about doing a PhD but I am not very fond of academia in general. Anyway I was looking for new stuff to read after these years of pause.

I’ve noticed that Avestan sounds strangely incomplete or broken whereas Vedic Sanskrit sounds much more phonetically rich and developed.

I’m aware that this is subjective and that describing one natural language as “incomplete” isn't linguistically accurate. I’m specifically interested in the phonological/phonetic reasons behind this perception.

Let me give an example of Yasna 28:5 to explain my perspective:

Avesta (original) -

Ašā kat θβā darəsānī, manascā vohū vaēdəmnō.

Gātūmcā ahurāi, sēvištāi sraošəm mazdāi.

Anā māθrā mazištəm, vāurōimaidī xrafstrā hizvā.

Vedic Sanskrit (its equivalent) -

Ṛta kat tvā darśāni, manaś ca vásu vedamānaḥ.

Gātúṃ ca ásurāya, śáviṣṭhāya śróṣam médhase.

Anéna mántrā máhiṣṭham, vāvṛmahi krapstrā́ jihváyā.

Some points I noted:

1. The word, xrafstrā or krapstrā́, is in Avestan. I do not know where it is used in the Vedas.

2. The ṛ developed differently in Avesta, while it is the same in Sanskrit from PIE’s r̥: ṛ-ta & a-ša.

3. Tvā (in accusative, "you") becomes θβā. Same but still so much different.

Or simply putting,

I've been listening to a lot of Yasnas these days from YT and dr. Ramiyar Karanjia’s website, but all of those recitations sound phonetically "irregular and ugly [can’t describe well enough 🥀]" to my ears.

Was a liturgical difference the reason why Iranian and Indo-Aryan split from proto-Indo-Iranian?

Also, there's actually a third branch called Dardic. What were the causes of its split from PII?

Ideally relative to position in the word.

Hello! I had a question on my mind for a long time and no one has really given me a full answer so I'm asking here.

I am a French speaker so I don’t know if this phenomenon exist in english. When a watch interviews (mostly vox pops) from other era, people always has a weird accent. I know people in the media used to talk differently. I know our local accents faded a little because of globalization. That's not what Im talking about. People in street interviews from the sixties has a weird accent. Even when I listen to my mother on old cassette tapes she recorded in the seventies, she has an accent I never heard. Why and how our accents evolve this way?

Thanks!

It seems like there were lots of proto languages spoken in the past. However, I can't find any modern language that are considered to be a proto language. Why is this? Are languages no longer being created?

In particular, I don't understand how Kashmiri has (1) long counterparts for each of its 8 qualities, and (2) the qualities [ɨ], [ə], and [ɔ]. I've looked at some words off Wikipedia and Wiktionary. I know Sinhala has a lot of vowels because it lost length at first and reïnnovated it later.[1] Kashmiri might be similar, with short vowels in سٕتھٕر /sɨtʰɨr/ from sūtra and a long vowel in شیٹھ /ʃeːʈʰ/ from ṣaṣti (with an intermediate geminate?), but then I don't there's the short vowel in اۆڈ /oɖ/ from ardha and the long vowel in دٟتھ /dɨːtʰ/ from dūta, which then don't make sense. A lot of it seems be due to palatalization, labialization(??), or umlaut, but it's weird how it ended up so symmetric.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20006708 "How Dravidianized Was Sinhala Phonology? Some Conclusions and Cautions"

As the title says, could anybody explain how it works in simple terms? Thanks in advance!

PS: I dont know what flare suits the best, so i put this. Sorry if its not it

This is something that's had me wondering for some time now. I'm English, and I am aware of the German oe which is used in place of an umlaut o. Such as König becoming Koenig.

I used to listen to a podcast with Sarah Koenig, and she specifically pronounced it as Kaynig, which sounds very different from the original German pronunciation.

Matt Groening of Simpsons fame is the same, he says his name as Grayning.

How did this come to be?

German here, I got into a slight debate on reddit. My understanding is that "common" means that something happens regularly and "not uncommon" means that it happens often enough to not be a rare thing. The counter argument is that they mean exactly the same thing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there is the Afroasiatic language family with the proto language "proto-Afroasiatic," and within this language family there are, among other languages, the Semitic languages. But Semitic languages also have a proto-language: proto-Semitic.

So proto-Semitic is a proto-language that falls under another proto-language (proto-Afroasiatic). I did not realize that was possible.

(1) is my understanding correct, and (2) if it is, how does it make sense that a proto-language can itself be traced back to another proto-language? And regardless of the answer to (1) and (2), my question (3) is: are there other examples of a proto-language falling under a second proto-language, and if so, what are they?

I haven't posted here before, I'm sorry if the flair is wrong! Native English speaker. I've noticed this trend in podcasts and stories I listen to where people will extend the final sound at the end of the last word of a sentence. I don't want to name any youtubers/podcasters, but I've noticed it becoming very common in the true crime area of the space. I'll try to type what it sounds like:

Normal:

"They took a ship and sailed across the ocean."

Mystery Style:

"They took a ship and sailed across the oceannnnnnn."

It's more common with women, and particularly people who speak extremely slowly in their videos. They also have very sharp "-hi-" sounds, almost like a breath pushed through the teeth. It's always native English speakers as well.

Important to note is that they almost always speak monotonously (it's a human being speaking as well, not a machine; the person is on camera) and slowly and the volume and pitch of their voices don't change much at all, but particularly not at the end of sentences when they draw the last syllable out like that. So it's not the traditional trailing at the end of a sentence.

Is this a dialect or accent thing? Is there a name for this? I'm Appalachian and it sounds so foreign to me to listen to it, almost like the rusty cogs of my brain are rewinding when I listen to it to try and decode the word that was said.

I am genuinely curious