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All humën beings are born free and equël in dignity and rights. They are ëndowed with reasën and consciënce and should act towards one ënother in ë spirit ëf brothërhood.

clicks. ejectives. pulmonics. implosives. long ago, the four consonants lived together in harmony. but everything changed when the Pulmonic Consonants attacked. only the Dahalo, master of all four airstream mechanisms, could stop them, but when the world needed them most, they vanished.

Any ideas what an Eastest might be?

1. new alphabet (brand new a priori glyphs) in a bunch of different fonts
2. one character per phone (based on individual speaker)
3. one color per phoneme (based on individual speaker)
4. split each character in horizontal stripes, each representing a past era
5. one font per ancestor phoneme, applied separately to the different stripes (based on localised reconstructions)
6. (after all this) replace spoken english with protogermanic (with loanwords from english adapted to protogermanic phonology based on their pronunciation in the specific speaker's previous modern english dialect)

I’m not a linguist and I’m dumb as nails but I have a model in my head that makes a lot of sense to me and I want to know if other people see it too. I put it together with a friend while eating ramen.

You’re probably familiar with the experiment where across most languages, when told to label two shapes as either ‘kiki’ or ‘bouba’, most will label the rounded curvy one as bouba and the sharp pointy one as kiki.

But since I was a kid, I had a concept in my head of (high pitched sound/sharp feeling or sharp pain/vinegar, tangy or acidic taste/bright white light) vs (low pitched sound/dull blunt feeling or dull pain/umami savoury flavours/dim warm lighting/). And that night over ramen, I realized that in my mind, this whole thing basically aligned as an expanded form of the kiki-bouba concept. I didn’t always have words to describe it, but I had basically always thought of all kinds of sensory experiences along these parallel alignments.

Like if I was going to go get bubble tea. Some days, I might be in the mood for a really kiki flavour, like pineapple or tropical fruit. Other days I might want a very bouba drink flavour like brown sugar milk tea, taro, or a caramel macchiato coffee. Things like honeydew melon or apple cinnamon flavour would fall somewhere closer to the middle of the spectrum.

The most kiki sound would be, like, a spirited melody on piccolo or tin whistle. The most bouba would be basically brown noise or that low pitched slow sleep music stuff. Getting poked with a pin is kiki, getting punched is bouba.

Even random items my friend and I were able to classify. Like, for trees, trembling aspens were more kiki and old oaks were more bouba. A delicate metal spoon was more kiki, a wooden soup spoon was more bouba.

Please tell me when and where I should submit my PhD thesis on the kiki-bouba model of human sensory experience. Thank you for your time.

Guys do you know a new native Brazilian language has been discovered to have the longest geminate ever found in human language. Here's one of the words if any of you want to try pronouncing it: 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From my understanding what happened was Proto Iroquoian had a 5 vowel system with *e and *o only have nasal equivalents, which is maybe bit odd but not that odd, (I'm pretty sure Proto Slavic was the same) and all vowels could be short or long. Proto North Iroquoian, which is pretty much all of them except Cherokee then merged oral *o(ː) and *a(ː) as *a(ː), then *u(ː) lowers to *o(ː) to fill the gap, still pretty normal.

Then in Mohawk just nasal *õ (length distinction is gone, kinda) raises to /ũ/ which then drags *ẽ to /ʌ̃/, resulting in this very unique vowel system.

I don’t get r/alphanumerics and their misconceptions of the origins of the Phoenician clade’s letters

For one, the letter Aleph cleary derives from an ox head, not a plough

Also from the top of my head there’s the “Pictographic Hebrew” and Lashawan Quadash types, who both have misconceptions of how Hebrew orthography works

So, this band sings in Mongolian (and, as far as I know, they're all from "inner Mongolia", so in politically Chinese territory). They've got 2 singers (well, 3 but the third only does throat singing, good luck parsing his phonology).

In the studio version (and some live versions) of the following song, guy A does verse 1 and guy B does verse 2. In other live versions, it's switched.

Here's the problem: I feel like their pronunciations are WORLDS apart. Like, full on multiple metatheses per word different.

Here's the studio version. As you can hear, the original title, Altan Namar, inflected in the sentence " Altan namrïn šim yumaa" at the end of verse 2, is pronounced [aɬ.tə.nə.na.mri.mɪnᵊ.ɕi.mə.ju.maː].

Here's a switched live version. That same section, this time, is pronounced [aɫ.tanᵊ.na.mrin.ɕɨm.mi.u̞.ma]. Note, among other things, that while in the other version the "al-" at the start has a voiceless lateral alveolar fricative, this one has a voiced, velarised L.

Here is the lyrics, in cyrillic and with romanisation.

Does anyone know anything about Mongolian?

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkmen_alphabet https://astanatimes.com/2018/02/kazakhstan-adopts-new-version-of-latin-based-kazakh-alphabet/

How can I began understanding russian palatalization?