r/asklinguistics

Hi everyone,

I have a question about Spanish usage, and I am curious whether this is a regional thing, a broader trend, or something that happens in other languages as well.

In the area where I live, I often hear people use escuchar where the correct verb would be oír. For example, instead of saying “no te oigo”, people say “no te escucho.” This happens very frequently in my circles, and it has been one of my long-standing pet peeves.

For context, I live in Catalonia, so my first thought was that this might be influenced by Catalan. But Catalan has the same distinction between hearing and listening, and I haven't noticed this kind of substitution as much there. That made me wonder whether this is really a Catalan influence, a local Spanish usage, or something else entirely.

So my questions are:

1. Is this use of escuchar instead of oír common in other Spanish-speaking regions, either in Spain or in Latin America?
2. Is this kind of overlap between “to hear” and “to listen” something that happens in other languages too?

I would be interested both in dialectal explanations and in any broader linguistic perspective.

Thanks!

Usually "home" is a clear noun, but this is a rare case where it (in the singular) doesn't require any determiner. Another such example I've seen is "I will go downtown" (at least this is how I've observed it being used by users of "downtown", it isn't used in my idiolect).

I can also see how this could also be analysed as an adverb, modifying the exact nature of the "going". Normally to specify the location one goes to, a "to" dative is used instead eg: "I will go to the park" or "I will go to a friend's place".

I'm also curious about the cross-linguistic status of "home" being special in this sense because the other language I know (Marathi) also has a similar pattern. Old Marathi historically had a "-i" locative suffix which has since stopped being productive, and it only survives in a small handful of words which have come to have, much like the example in English, an adverbial use modifying the nature of a verb. Eg there's the word "घर​" (ghər) = "house/home" but adding that suffix gives "घरी" (ghəri) such as in "मी घरी जाईन​" (mi ghəri zain) = "I will go home". Again, this suffix isn't productive and cannot be applied to most nouns.

Again, this is a special scenario for the word for "home". "-i" is completely non-productive and cannot be applied to any arbitrary noun, much like most English nouns cannot be zero-derived into an adverb. "झाड​​" (zhaḍ) means "tree" yet trying to say "मी झाडी जाईन​" (mi zhaḍi zain) is ungrammatical much like "I will go tree" is ungrammatical. Is it cross-linguistically (or even just within Indo-European languages) common for "home" to have a specific adverb derivation or is it a linguistic coincidence between English and Marathi?

Sorry I don't know how to clearly formulate it.

But for exemple in french, there are the sounds /o/ and /ɔ/ are weakly separated. They are differentiated in the way they are pronounced. But, in term of meanings they are more considered two variants of the vowel "O" than really two distinct vowels. What I mean is compared to "standard french frome France" people from Marseille will replace /o/ with /ɔ/ in many words and on the opposite people from Lille will replace some /ɔ/ with /o/. Those switched sounds will be recongnized as different accents but will not hinder the comprehension between people with different accents.

On the opposite, the sounds /y/ and /u/ are strongly separated as two different vowels "U" and "OU", and typically english speakers when speaking french with a beginner level will often mix them, which are more likely to cause confusion and misunderstanding.

Is this something that is frequent in many languages. Are there official terms to describe those distinction between "weakly separated" and "strongly separated" sounds in a language ?

Firstly, my background: I am an Early Medieval/Late Antique historian by trade, but I have always been tangentially fascinated by linguistics, but it is much more of hobby for me than history, so bear with me if this is surface level or dumb. I also tried searching for this answer everywhere and I did not see one, so forgive if this has been asked/answered before!

I was recently reading about Celtiberian as I am deep in a Roman rabbit hole, which sent me down another rabbit hole about the "Insular/Continental" and "P-/Q-" hypotheses about the dissemination of Celtic languages across Europe and I kept running into the term "palatalization" being one of many factors on how and why languages change. This sent me down another rabbit hole...

I read up on the wikipedia page about this and I am left lacking with an explanation for why humans do this, and more importantly, how these (what seem to me) sloppy pronunciations of words ends up sticking and forming new languages. One example I see mentioned a lot is Latin centum (/k/ sound) changes to Italian cento (/s/ sound) as a result of palatalization. I understand that it has something to do with our tongues slipping, for lack of a better term, but like... didn't people realize that they were pronouncing the words wrong? and for that matter, is palatalization so foreign to me because we have modern, systemized, languages today with dictionaries, thesauruses, etc. that would make it easy for someone to correct themselves? I know sometimes I say "didya know?" instead of "did you know?", but I don't think anyone nowadays is going to argue for adding "didya" to the dictionary.

sorry if this is rant-like - like I said, I am deep in rabbit hole-ception while I am typing this and I have a million questions a second it feels like haha any help, answer, or point in the right direction would be extremely helpful!

Would love to see some examples as well. I'll start with some vocabulary:

English	Bokmål	Høgnorsk
To attack	Å angripe	Å åtaka
Electricity	Elektrisitet	Ravkraft
A genius	Et geni	Eit flogvit
A computer	En datamaskin	Ei telja
To prefer	Å foretrekke	Å kjosa
To slaughter	Å slakte	Å slåtra
A problem	Et problem	Eit vandemål
A helicopter	Et helikopter	Ei tvirla

In more layman/pop-science-informed circles the refuted nature of both linguistic relativism and determinism seem to be taken almost as categorical (as if something can truly be that categorical in the theoretical part of an empirical science). However, talking with many linguists in my university, especially in areas such as ethnolinguistics, it seems that some kind of linguistic relativism is not only accepted but entirely indispensable to research (Daniel Everett was actually a professor at my university so that can be a factor).

Researching a bit more, it seems that in academia the hypothesis isn't as universally contested as publicized in science communication. There are many, many very well-cited research as well as whole books collecting evidence in favor of it (showing, for instance, how numeracy is consistently worse in peoples whose languages which do not natively feature complex counting systems).

Anecdotally, not being a native English speaker, my whole life since I started to speak English fluently I dealt with not frequently expressing thoughts I would in my own language as they would take whole sentences in English and, in the converse, inventing neologisms and crazy schemes to be able to bring English and German-style compound-wording to my language in order to express things that English speakers take as basic. A very common phenomenon in my language is also the high import of anglicisms, as our translations truly couldn't convey the original meaning.

Also doing research in logic and computer science (thus in intersections of philosophy and mathematics) for me it was always quite obvious how much the specific aspects of a programming language would influence and sometimes put hard limits and determine someone's programming style and, in the end, the kinds of things they thought possible to do in computers (imagine for instance if we had stuck to von Neumann's advice of programming in machine code...); the same for doing mathematical proofs in different logical systems and mathematical foundations or even in different proof assistants or in a more natural language form (has this "Sapir-Whorf for formal languages" already been studied?). As someone with deep interest in music it also always felt obvious why some languages feature a higher percentage of speakers with perfect pitch than others (seemingly a manifestation of even a strong form of Sapir-Whorf - has this been claimed?).

Through this research it seems that most controversy around Sapir-Whorf come from two interpretations that I see as somewhat flawed of both the original hypotheses and their successors: 1) that an individual could never possibly transcend the limits of their language and 2) that the language could never be modified to be able to express more or less information. I think these interpretations are quite extreme and unjust, as it seems nobody who defends the hypothesis is truly talking about that.

The main point seems to be that the effort to express something naturally seems to be different for each language. If what you want to express is too hard to do naturally, it may be often the case that most people will hardly express or even give too much importance to it, thus effectively killing the possibility of this kind of thought becoming widespread. If you add new words to your language, bring many imports or deeply alter its structure and grammar, is it still truly the same language?

You could also do it without new lexical units, but either it will make your thoughts prohibitively verbose and unintelligible (think scientific language without terminology) or make high use of resignification, which at first glance will be confusing to many of your peers and will take a lot of time for speakers of your language to get used to the resignified terminology. The limitations (and expansions) on thought seem to consider time and effort and especially not on individual levels (because with enough time and effort individuals can learn anything, even if badly) and not considering extreme changes to the ordinary pragmatical language use. Opponents of Sapir-Whorf seem to have a warped view of "the common man" as almost a schizoid antisocial Western intellectual: 100% intellectually independent, individualistic and willing to change one's own language and expression to unrecognizable extents regardless of how this could affect their relation with their peers; that's almost never the case in society, people will more than often prefer to learn English to study sciences and philosophy than to learn it in their native tongue.

This is central to my studies in philosophy because, sadly, opposition to Sapir-Whorf and many strong forms of support for Universal Grammar-like ideas are rampant in analytical philosophical discourse. Philosophers of language, pragmaticians and metaphysicians constantly derive their arguments from examples of "ordinary men's English", conclude that it reflects some transcendental truth using indispensability arguments "that's the way we speak and it works" and when people argue that this is too contingent to the English practice of some few specific universities (such as Oxford) criticism is dismissed as "this is linguistic relativism and is proven wrong. Thus this argument generalizes to all languages". It may not be published like that, but that's the kind of discourse one can generally hear in more informal seminars and in the coffee time. In turn, this seems to generate a culture where every argument arguing that we should not generalize "Oxford's or Cambridge's view of what ordinary men's English practice is like" to transcendental arguments about universals is taken as controversial or speculative: the "default" in analytical philosophy seems to consider the pragmatics of English fully generalizable to talk about universals in all languages; opposition to this idea seems to be minority position, thus speculative. I would expect anyone to see this as obviously dumb and even dangerous.

Some opponents of Sapir-Whorf will even focus on very specific examples of names of more concrete objects (such as colors, sensations, objects, time), show how research for relativity in these concrete objects failed and generalize the argument motte-and-bailey to any abstracta and metaphysics; when I think this generalization clearly shouldn't be done. Some languages (like Pirahã, for instance) seem to base most of their declarative assertions on evidentiality markers, and I wouldn't be surprised the discovery of a language where no form of existential/metaphysical assertion (that something "exists, is/are, have, is true...") is possible. Is this generalization truly sound? Has this already been pointed out in philosophy of language? What is the relationship of linguistic relativity with 1) evidentiality assertions vs metaphysical assertions in philosophy in non-indo-european languages, 2) formal languages and 3) sociolinguistics?

I apologize for the size of the post (but I wanted to make myself 100% clear - English is also not my native neither my second language, so my verbosity may be an evidence of linguistic relativity itself xD) and appreciate everyone's time and attention.

Words like expensive, previous and joke do not exist in French whatsoever but somehow do in English. How and why did they enter the language?

I'm a bit confused on how the dialect continuum would've worked if history were a bit different and the English had contact mainly with German and Dutch speakers rather than the Norse and Normans. Would it have forced changes that make them mutually intelligible or would English still have been kind of a bit different?

Unsure if I picked the right flair, I'm not very well read on linguistics!

I'm from the PNW in the US and up until pretty recently I don't recall anyone saying "that needs charged" instead of "that needs to be charged". I always thought the shortened version sounded vaguely British, but I have heard people on the east coast say things like that as well. However recently I've noticed a lot of people around me who aren't British or from the east coast start using this phrasing as well for anything that would start with "needs to be". I'm not trying to be prescriptivist and say they're wrong, I just wonder if this is a recent language shift or if it's something that's always been part of American English, or maybe something people picked up on social media for whatever reason? I just find it odd because it's something I've really never heard before recently. I also understand that it's a shorter phrase to cut out "to be" so it makes sense from an information conveying perspective.

I know that *today* it's a popular theory that the Japanese and Korean languages are related or were in extended close contact at some point in the past. I also know that the Yamato Japanese have presumably always known that their Yayoi ancestors came to the Japanese islands from the Korean Peninsula. What I'm not aware of is the historical thoughts on the relationship between the languages.

To my knowledge, scientific analysis of a potential relationship between Japanese in Korean began in the mid to late 1800s in the early days of scientific linguistics. What did Japanese and Korean scholars think about the relationship between their languages before then? Did they see them as being related in any way before then? Did they take note of words that were similar in their languages that they couldn't find a Chinese equivalent to? Did they have any ideas about how their languages related to the *other* languages of East Asia?

the question is in the title. im asking this because it's werid to say tɹ instead of tʃɹ.

It seems weird for it to be spread like this across the other English speaking countries when the feature isn't common in the UK itself.

my girl is just over 3 years old and have a bit of a hard time with using her and she as pronouns correctly.. she refers to everyone as she but she can make complex sentences like “ mommy do you remember when I got stuck on the little slide at the park ? .. she is fine with the other pronouns but I can’t seem to be able to help her regardless of how many times I correct her ..

how normal is that in neurotypical kids ?

We all know of loanwords being mistaken for native vocabulary, but does anyone know of the opposite? Where it's not a loanword but people think its a loanword?

As far as I’m aware almost all languages have a variation of the ‘m’ sound for the word ‘mother’ in a language. Eg. Mother/Maman/amma/omma etc.

But in the Marathi language, the word for mother is ‘Aai’ which is devoid of the mm sound.

Does anyone know how this evolved to be? Are there other languages that don’t have the mm sound in their word for ‘mother’.

Thanks!

I hope this question is appropriate here. As a native English speaker raised on the English/American alphabet, I will always see n and ñ, c and č, i and ı, etc as variants of the same letter. Do native speakers of Spanish, Czech, Turkish etc. see them the same way--are they grouped together in their mental map of the alphabet--or are they as different as t and d are for me?

For example, if English had a diacritical mark for "voiced," d could be written as t‵ or whatever I know from reading the r/EnglishLearning that non-native speakers sometimes struggle with understanding the difference. But until I learned about voicing, it never occurred to me that the two letters were related any more than t and r are. I understand that ñ is formally a separate letter for alphabetization purposes etc., but I was wondering if native Spanish speakers saw it as like "n plus" or not like n at all.

Like, when we shout helloooo I would argue it’s /heˈloːːːːʊ/ rather than /heˈloʊːːːː/. If we sing a song where the word tonight stretches across several notes, it’s the /a/ we rest on before moving to the /ı/, not vice versa.

So I have two questions: 1) am I wrong about this impression, and 2) is this a tendency that diphthongs have in general or is this specific to English phonology?

Genuinely, what is the difference? I have convinced myself for years that I can hear a difference. Sometimes I still think I can, but sometimes I don't, and wonder instead whether I've just learnt which words in English are expected to take ɜ or a schwa.

Hi. I am having a really hard time understanding. the difference between topic and focus. It feels like every other language I’ve looked at has ways to distinguish them. For example, Slavic and Romance languages use word order, Japanese and Korean have dedicated topic and subject markers but English has nothing. The word order is so damn fixed and we don’t have any particles to mark topic and focus. Sone people say it is similar to saying, “As for x” in English but that construction sounds unnatural to me and I don’t think very many people use it a lot. I literally feel like a Newspeak speaker trying to understand the concept of freedom. Can anyone give me any tips about how to identify topic versus focus please. I’m having so much trouble wrapping my head around it and it is making me so upset. I literally feel like I am incapable of understanding certain concepts due to my native language not expressing them.