So, I've done some research about this as it popped in my head as a random question and there actually was one (emphasis one was, as it was spoken before north Africa even became part of the arab speaking world). I was wondering if any of you all had researched it as well and maybe has any research material for me, as I can't really find much aside from the Wikipedia article and a couple youtube videos. I'd like to learn more about this as I'm growing more and more interested in romance languages by the day!

I apologize if that was the wrong flair.

This has happened to me, an ESL speaker, a few times: I'll remember a song in English I used to hear when I was little (and thus didn't understand the lyrics) and, out of nowhere, I now know the lyrics.

This is very counterintuitive to me. As a child/teen, if the lyrics were essentially meaningless, I shouldn't have been correctly storing their sequence of phones, let alone phonemes/morphemes and whatnot, in my brain. Even if I'm more acquainted with English nowadays, I shouldn't be able to retrieve this information because it was never there in the first place (I assume).

I understand it could have something to do with me "filling in the blanks" like an autocorrecting keyboard (I know this analogy might be suspicious in Ling circles but humor me). But I'm wary of taking this far, without some restrictions. This is because some of these lyrics are very uncommon, e.g. in grammar or vocabulary, so it seems weird to me that I'm able to "unearth" them by simply being more fluent nowadays.

I hope I was clear in describing what I'm talking about. Does anyone know what causes this, or are there some tentative explanations at least? Thank you in advance.

I recently learned that consumption is the 19th century term for tuberculosis. This got me wondering, does the transition of replacing one word with another happen over time (in my mind, a decade or more), or does it happen rather suddenly (say any length of time up to a few years).

I was thinking that maybe medical terminology had a sudden and widespread change at some point in recent history that is more medically accurate and might last longer than medical words may have in the past. I don't imagine we still name diseases with such vague words as consumption.

Note: Unless relevant to the answer, I'm not so much interested in why or how words/language as a whole changes, there are lots of posts in this subreddit regarding that, but simply as to how words (medical terminology in this case) get replaced.

Hi everyone! Im currently taking an intro to linguistics course, and I just can’t wrap my mind around x-bar theory and syntactic trees. What is a bar level, and where the heck does it go?

Thank you for your help!!

I've noticed in (at least some) Mayan languages, transitive and intransitive verbs are quite morphologically distinct, taking completely different sets of mood suffixes and different person marking*, with valency-changing suffixes arguably being more derivational than inflectional (often being less than fully productive), almost as if they're two separate categories of words. I'm curious how far this can be taken. Are there languages where that kind of analysis is even more appropriate?

* besides the obvious double marking for agent and patient, some dialects of Mam are losing/have lost person and number agreement for transitive patients, making transitive person marking even more different from intransitive

Hello.

I'm writing a thesis on the etymology of finger names in various languages, especially Indo-European ones. May someone suggest to me some works which already have explored the topic? I already know Ela Filippone's work about fingers in Iranic languages. I'd like to know if there are books or articles which analyse finger names in other languages.

Thanks for the attention

I was watching a movie about the development of the Korean dictionary by the Korean Language Society, (Mal.Mo.E. if anyone is interested. It may sound like a dry topic but it was very exciting).

At the end they offered a statistic that said that few languages survive colonization efforts. Korean is one of those languages. It also said that there aren't actually a lot of monolingual dictionaries. I'd love to learn more about the relationship between colonization and language. Can anyone recommend a book or two?

Hi. I am a native Korean speaker, and I started wondering about the topic after I talked with my friends who are fluent in English and Japanese.

In Korean, we have the word '알다'/ɐldɐ/, which means 'to know'. The negative form is '알지 못하다'/ɐl.dʑi motʰɐdɐ/, but this form is not used frequently in my opinion. This word is usually used in situation where you know a person or a subject etc.

However, we also have a word '모르다'/molɯdɐ/, which means 'to not know'. The negative form is '모르지 않다'/molɯdʑi ɐntʰɐ/. This word is used ... in the exactly same contexts, in my opinion.

Both words are used frequently in daily life. '알다' and '모르지 않다' are used interchangeablely, and the same applies to the other two.

In contrast, English only has 'know'. As far as I know, there are words such as 'ignore' or 'misunderstand', but they don't exactly match 'to not know'. I guess there might be such word, but I do not think it is used in daily life as frequently as 'know' itself.

In Japanese, you have '知る'(to know), and '分かる'(to thougroughly understand/'very' know), but as far as I know, there is no separate word for '知らない' that is used as frequently.

Is what I just said about English and Japanese correct? What other languages have separate words for 'to know' and 'to not know'?

When I say key the K is aspirated and my throat is open. However, when I say the unaspirated k in ski it isn't, and I can feel some muscles flex at the top of my throat after I say the 'S'.

What's the name of those muscles, or, what is going on more generally?

I thought it was interesting. Arabic is even similar with "mawt" and a lot of European languages have similar words. Also Bangla and Hindi have similar words so I was curious about it

In the bible there are a few texts written in aramaic, like in the book of Daniel, there is also the Tergum Onqelus and Tirgum Yonatan for the Torah and Nevi'im respectivelly. When printed they are fully pointed with Nikkud. Where does the pronounciation tradition come from? is it part of the Mesorah? and if so, are they influenced by the Tiberian pronounciation of the Baale HaMesorah? Do we know how was the Aramaic there actually pronounced?

Sorry if this is a broad question but what are the defining features of Hmong-Mien that show they're not the same family?

I'm putting together a cheat sheet for trying to figure out how to make a parser to split words into their component parts. I got the words from Claude AI, so they might be wrong, but they at least demonstrate the possibilities of the complex types of morphology you might encounter in the wild.

What I'm missing, but I think might exist, are examples of words where more than just the "word fragments" (morphemes/lexemes) change when combined. For example, the word beautiful has the y change to an i and then add -ful. When I ask Claude for examples where more than just the join point changes (i.e. y/i in beautiful), it says things like:

• strong -> strength
• redeem -> redemption
• destroy -> destruction

But those are iffy, to me those are more than just base word "destroy" and suffix "tion", it is completely different. Or is that what I'm actually looking for?! I'm not quite sure, hence this question.

I am basically looking for cases like this:

• foo + bar = fobrao (mixing)
• foo + bar = foorba (end of bar r is placed at end of first word foo, and remaining ba is used afterward).
• foo + bar = flarbloo (swap ar and oo, and add l)
• etc..

Basically just looking for somewhat structured "joins" of word fragments, where when they get joined they change form greatly with the two+ fragments that are joined. The 3 examples I posed are just 3 of possibly a huge number of cases, so it's not limited to just those cases.

In my cheatsheet, Claude gave this example:

• word: m-damy-o (slept)
• base: damikh (to sleep)
• circumfix: m-*-o (past participle)

So there, the base is changed significantly (ikh -> y), while the circumfix is unchanged. Maybe there are cases where (a) the circumfix changes from m-*-o to my-*-yo in one situation, but my-*-a in another, or where (b) the middle word changes more, so damikh becomes dramy (ikh -> y, and insert r before a). That sort of stuff. Does it ever get that complicated?

I've long suspected that Mandarin (obviously excluding Cantonese, Wu, etc.) is a language with dialectal variation in timing.

Beijing Mandarin and similar local dialects are infamously known for contracting syllables extensively. The more extensive erhua compared to Standard Chinese often contracts bi-syllabic words into single syllables (这里→这儿).

Taiwanese Mandarin is known for lacking the neutral tone, a tone that is related to syllable reduction processes, which in itself is related to stress-timed languages compressing syllables.

Perhaps the northern and southern dialects are more similar to Portuguese, specifically European and Brazilian Portuguese and their respective differences in timing.

I heard people say that nasal vowels in french are phonemic cause they contrast with oral vowel + nasal consonants, is this true? if yes could you give some examples?

Sometimes when people are singing or giving a speech or acting in a play, they'll say sounds in words they wouldn't ordinarily. Like here in the first few seconds, you can hear the actor lean into the d in lend and the t in not. Usually those would be said differently.

Obviously they're doing it to speak more clearly and it must work because everybody does it, but I'm curious what's really going on here. When we enunciate clearly, are we pronouncing words as they "really" are - as in we all know that final d and t are there but we elide them in everyday speech in order to speak more quickly? Or are they pronouncing those letters because they're in the written words, so we think they ought to be emphasized rather than elided?

Lots of languages seem to be voluntarily latinising themselves. For example: Turkish, Malay, Vietnamese, etc... even Japanese and Chinese are doing it via Romaji and pinyin. This means the partial or full conversion of languages using non-latin scripts into the Roman Alphabet is increasing.

Second to this is Cyrillic-fication such as Mongolian and other central Asian languages that were influenced by the former USSR. It's not a leap to think that at some point in the future, these languages which changed into Cyrillic might then change to using a Latin script, especially since they already have to learn English for trade and politics reasons.

Chinese is contending that with a stronger economy in the future, it will start dominating in terms of being spoken and written for business, science, diplomacy, etc... which I just don't see happening. You cannot adopt Chinese language as easily as English was adopted, and this is definitely the case with Chinese script, no comparison with latin in terms of ease of adoption should a non-Chinese language want to use it.

This begs the question as to whether or not mass Latinisation is desirable on a global scale. You lose a lot of history when languages change script. But at the same time, the fact that everyone is using the same set of basic letters means that it gets easier for people from other languages to learn your language.

Let's say fast forward to 500 years from now, other than Chinese /Japanese/ Korean still stubbornly holding out, most other languages have completely latinised their written language. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Would it make a lot of languages lose their identities because historically they were written in non-latin scripts and have histories or religions connected with this?

Myanmar was a larger colony than Malaysia and had a higher population than Malaysia at the time.

However, the British never borrowed any loanwords from Burmese, except for technical terms only found in Burmese.

Meanwhile, the British borrowed many more terms from Malay such as amok, bamboo, caddy, cassowary, cockatoo, compound, durian, gecko, gibbon, gingham, gong, Japan, junk, ketchup, lory, mandarin, mangosteen, orangutan, paddy, pangolin, rambutan, sago, tea, tokay, etc. are all borrowed from Malay and is widely used in English.

Why is it that Malay, a language of lesser significance, is able to influence the English language so much while the Burmese language, a language of higher significance, didn't even influence English?

Hi all,

I'm looking for information on how clitic doubling is analyzed in modern generative frameworks. I understand there is a debate on whether or not it's really a clitic/object or whether it's some sort of phonologically expressed agreement system on the verbal complex. I would appreciate anyone more knowledgeable on the topic helping me understand the current opinions on it, as well as pointing me in the direction I should go for reading to be a bit more up-to-date.

​

Thanks in advance

I need books about (semantic taxonomy) of the Lexicon.. who can guide me? 👀

I follow some slavic people on the internet and saw a lot if them saying that they didnt have that much troubles understanding other slavs. Like i've seen a pole claiming people understood him in croatia. It baffle me that east west and south slavs understand eachother so well despite covering such a big area. As a french, i can go to a western latin country and be understood and vice versa, but it isnt that much, people will get the point after some time while romanian is totally ununderstable. I've noticed too that arabic despite being classified 1 language, a lot have trouble with other's dialect, especially darija.

I know that English has some triphtongs, but what is the longest "vowelcluster"?

5000 or so, where can I read about it?

What is the correct pronunciation of a word if it sounds so much different in so many different accents?

EDIT: I was just using the American common accent as an example. I do not know much about the English Language as I'm not a native speaker. It was just a fleeting thought I felt compelled to ask about. I'm content with the answers I got. Thank you.

Wikipedia labels these two below examples as "disguised romanisation".

Cantonese to English transliteration, then English to Cantonese literal translation:

荷蘭銀行支票 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%8D%B7%E8%98%AD%E9%8A%80%E8%A1%8C%E6%94%AF%E7%A5%A8#Cantonese

Calque of English Holland bank cheque, a disguised romanisation of Cantonese 好 (hou2, “very”) + 撚 (lan2, “fucking”) + 笨柒 (ban6 cat6, “stupid”)

白色太陽槍 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%99%BD%E8%89%B2%E5%A4%AA%E9%99%BD%E6%A7%8D#Cantonese

Calque of English white sun gun, a disguised romanisation of Cantonese 衛生巾／卫生巾 (wai6 sang1 gan1, “sanitary napkin”).

I'm reading a news article and it sometimes says "America" and sometimes says "Americans." Is there a difference in effect between referring to the people as the country and referring to the people as the people? Hope this makes sense. Is there a name for this writing technique as I would like to search more on this. Thank you.

I'm doing some research and noticing that although mean female F0 over several decades has swung like a pendulum literally, in around 2010 it plateaud and has remained regularly stable since. As I know vocal fry would lower F0, I'm wondering if other trends could be causing this stability?

I don't have any more body text to add.

Where in the U.S. is zero copula a thing?

"This the one I want." "You so tall." These sound totally normal to me. ("This the way I talk.")

But my idiolect is a big mush, I tend not to notice dialects (Bawlmorese? That guy has an accent?), and my memory is shit. I've been poring through lists of linguistic features from all the cities I've lived in, and come up null.

Where this from?

Walloon is a vast group of oïl dialects, some easily understandable for French, and some very difficult.

My question is, is it possible that Belgian French arose from the mixing of Parisian French and a Walloon dialect to form a koiné that eventually converged on French? If not, then what’s the origins of this peculiar dialect?