I speak Russian (not natively), when I speak in Russian it always feels strange to do my native accent (south US) while saying Russian words. I'm sure the same thing happens with other native English speakers who speak a different language, they usually do the accent that corresponds to the language they are speaking. However, when my international friends (Mexican, for example) speak English, they retain their Mexican accent. Same with my Turkish and Indian friends. Why is this? Is it because English is seen as a default?

Hello linguists. Sorry if my question is overly complicated, I’m assuming this is a pretty semantic-concerned question. I asked this question on Quora awhile ago and never got an answer.

I’m a little familiar with the concept of ambiguity in language, primarily through “Seven Types of Ambiguity” by William Empson. Though, my question kind of veers off from the ambiguity mainly discussed in conventional theoretical linguistics. Or maybe I’m missing the bigger picture. I could perhaps use the term lexical ambiguity, but not how it is used in actual linguistics. More so, I am referring to the literal ambiguity of a lexicon. For example, let’s assume you can only speak English. For example, words like “do, thing, something, more, with, yes/no”. More theoretically, words like “elements, aspect, concept, input, unit”. These are words that would be additionally challenging to precisely define (without extensive clarification; or possibly self referential definitions). yet if a young human is exposed to it, it seems to naturally acquire its structure.

The brain clearly has a natural way to abstract/generalize information. If you teach someone the basic algorithmic steps of cleaning a space, they’d be able to clean different rooms no matter their different architectural structure, objects, or general data. The general knowledge carried over.

Ultimately, what I’m asking is how is this process related to linguistics and the acquisition of a lexicon? Where can I read about this further?

Most of what I have been able to find has been geared toward explaining basic spelling/pronounciation rules for people learning English as a additional language and list only a few basic rules of thumb, suggest looking words up int he dictionary and say the rules that govern the pronounciation of y in english are too many and too complex. I haven't been able to actually find anywhere the actual rules in their complexity. Maybe one of you can point me in the right direction?

For context, my search started with the fact that English speakers pronounce the coined word nylium (a portmanteau of nether + mycelium) in differing ways. Which led me to thinking about how English speakers make judgements when encountering a y in English (and pseudo-English) words.

Can someone please help me understand the difference between proper compounds and derivational compounds (formed by means of suffixation and formed by means of converison). The more i try to look it up, the more my head hurts.

Here is the task in question, im not here to get my homework done for me, but it'd be great if it happens:

Group the given compound words in accordance with the type of their bases into: 1. compounds proper; 2. derivational compounds. Give derivational patterns that will help you to distribute the derivational compounds into: a) those formed by means of suffixation; b) those formed by means of conversion.

Model: sky-blue, a show-off. Sky-blue is a compound proper (group 1). A show-off is a derivational compound (group 2). Its derivational pattern is (v + adv) + conversion (subgroup b).

Heavy-hearted, low-born, a buyout, a peace-maker, a scatterbrain, pea-souper, thoroughgoing, to blackball, a businesswoman, an old-timer, a side-track, to keyboard, ill-mannered, awestruck, a baby-sitter, a low-brow, a go-getter, a looking-glass, a getaway, a typewriter, one-eyed, a mill-owner, to blue-pencil, homemade, a sportsman, a teenager, stone-deaf, a castaway, a video disc.

Firstly, this is not "homework help" but it is related to a major theme of one of my courses. I have background in rhet/comp and am taking a sociolinguistics seminar this semester. The instructor focuses predominantly on stance and Alexandra Jaffe's work, and she said in passing 2 weeks ago "stance analysis is not rhetorical analysis. they are not the same thing."

And tbh that kind of upended my understanding of the course material because I've been thinking about stance as a product of rhetorical analysis. Instructor has, of course, cautioned against "getting into the heads" of the speaker, which is more acceptable in literary or rhetorical analysis. But then we talk about faultable behaviors, unintended stance taking, and stance attribution, and I'm back to seeing everything as a kind of rhetorical analysis. Can anyone clarify some of this for me? I'm more than happy to elaborate in the comments if it will help. Also, I'm meeting with her today to talk about this, but I'd like to get as much context from as many sources as I can.

I just started rewatching Atlantis: The Lost Empire and it got me wondering what other films about linguistics/with themes of linguistics there are. I can only think of Atlantis and Arrival, but I was hoping someone on here has other recommendations!

I wasn't sure if this or r/linguistics was better but that seems to only be links to academic works nowadays and these are the only two decently sized linguistics subreddits from what I could tell. Please do let me know there are any better places to ask

So I have my linguistics masters exam in a year or so and I’ve asked around for suggestions on what to read as my source and I bought I’d say ten books to read and some more just to test my ability on it. So many people and professionals told me to buy Douglas Brown’s books and I’ve bought two of them regarding my major but I’m not really interested in his style (?) of writing and explaining. I don’t know if it’s me or I don’t know to be honest… Anyways, any suggestions on what to buy for soon to be linguistic master? That’d really help me out! Thank you.

Can vowels be velarized like ɯˠ?

I basically want to transcript the vowel-like sound that happens when you say the English dark L but without the tip of the tongue making the actual L sound.

With languages like ancient Egyptian for example, how do we know which hieroglyphics make which sound?

I have noticed that lots of people put question marks at the end of statements when writing in English online. Most of them seem to be native speakers. It usually seems to happen when the person is afraid that what they write could be understood as somehow aggressive, or when they seem to be a bit unsure about what they write. (putting a question mark in the last sentence would fit with what I am trying to describe, for instance)

It "sounds" strange to me, probably because in the other languages I speak questions have the exact same syntax as affirmative sentences, and the question mark is the only way to tell them apart. My gut feeling is that the people who put question marks at the end of statements are trying to make it less "strong".

Does it make sense? What other reasons could there be for it to happen?

Thanks in advance.

I’m in my first year of my MA program. At the start, especially when considering PhD/career options, I was uncertain if I wanted to go into like syntax/semantics or more like sociolinguistics as I’m interest in both.

I’m doing my first dedicated sociolinguistics course now and working on the term paper (Japanese/Korean loanwords in English) has made me really appreciate how interdisciplinary it can be. Unlike my prior syntax paper that only used other syntax papers as references, my sociolinguistics paper is using a variety of references from both linguistic and non-linguistic sources.

Overall I’m pretty set on going the more syntax-focused path, but I’m kinda disappointed at the prospect(?) of not being able to do more interdisciplinary work—assuming that’s the case.

How much beyond syntax (and like -semantic interface) can a syntactician work with? Like with Japanese there’s an ongoing thing with passive and causative merging (or something like that) so if that’s reflected in like popular media or online discourse, would/could a syntactician be able to look into that? Or would like only formal experimental data be used whereas the sociolinguists would look at the media/online data?

Thank you.

I’m a MA student taking this book at the course. I was wondering if there a way to find students notes or summaries of the book if they ever got to take while they are/were a student. I hope there is one or if anyone knows were to ask.

The book title: Analysing English Sentences : A Minimalist Approach . By Andrew Redford. 2016 edition.

Thanks 😊

Does anybody have a good sourse about the historical phonology of Danish? all I can find is paper theorising about the origin of stød, but I'm more interested in the vowel system. Help?

Example, someone's recounting a conversation:

So some people were whining like "oh but this and that, such and such, it won't work, yadda yadda". Well, why don't you do something about it then?!

In Brazilian Portuguese:

Daí ele começou a reclamar "ah, mas não sei o que não sei o que lá, faz assim ao invés de assado". Po, que saco.

How does it go like in other languages?

In other languages does it start with an interjection too? Oh. Ah. Does it start with some kind of negation? Is there even a common structure? What do other languages use for the this and the such and such blablabla yadda yadda yadda part of the, air quotes, "quotation".

I am a native Cantonese speaker. Just had a thought about different words for eating (a particular type of food) in Cantonese, their pronunciations all resemble the motion of eating the food.

Here are some examples:

Eating chicken feet, in Cantonese we say "噒雞腳". 噒 has the sound of /lɵn/, which your tongue moves just like when you bite off the flesh from the feet and carefully spit the bones out.

Eating dried plums we say "燘話梅". 燘 is pronounced as /muːi/, just like the motion of crushing a dried plum between your tongue and palate. (燘 also describes chewing motion of a person with no tooth.)

Is there a term for words with this cool feature? Are there any examples of expressions like these in other languages? Thank you all!

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It says in the wikipedia entry for Early Modern Japanese that it allowed syllable final -t before being dropped and turnt into -tu.

It is quite common knowledge that -m used to be allowed in middle japanese before becoming -n. But I've never heard of a final -t anywhere else.

I know that it is due to chinese loanwords which is why -m and -n appeared but -t is surprising.

Are there any examples of final -t words that existed in japanese? Or anything relating to this would be good.

Thank you

So, I’m currently in America and have a weird accent, if that makes sense. It’s American, but hear me out. So, my parents are both Indian immigrants and have pretty thick Indian accents. My brother is born here with me, but he has a slight Indian tinge to his generic American accent. However, my accent is definitely American, but it’s so accented with the New York/New Jersey accent when I talk fast or when I’m comfortable. For some reason, my accent also switches slightly to mimic others. Like, when I speak with somebody with an Indian accent, I speak slower and have a slight Indianness, but can’t mimic an Indian accent intentionally unless I’m speaking in my mother tongue. If I’m speaking with a British person, same thing. My accent slowly starts to sound like theirs in conversation unless I intentionally force it to not do that. It’s weird and many of my family members have commented about how thick my American accent is(even more so than people that had generations of their family in the NJ/NY area) especially with Indian immigrant parents. I was wondering if anybody knows the reason why?

Does comparison of modern Formosan languages allow us to reconstruct an ancestral name for the island of Taiwan? If so, what is it?

I live in the Southern US so I occasionally come across older people with the initial w-wh distinction, but (I'm sorry I cannot come up with a more sensitive way to put this) I'm not exaggerating when I say that every single person I've heard with the distinction has been white as snow. Is it just my experience, or is it actually the case that the community of speakers with the w-wh distinction is overwhelmingly "hwhite"? I'm also curious about anecdotal experiences: has anyone in this subreddit come across a single w-wh distinguisher with even a trace of non-whiteness?

Agglutinative-> Fusional-> Analytical-> Agglutinative, I’ve heard this is the case in the evolution of most languages. Is this true and if so why?

To give some context I am a native Turkish speaker and some of the aspects of spoken Turkish are more becoming of a fusional language at times than an Agglutinative one. Younger generations tend not to strictly follow Agglutination rules as much as older speakers used to for example, and new hip phrases created online don’t really make sense with suffixes added at the end.

For context, my name is Noel and most people mispronounce it as no-yell. These people are mainly Malayalam speakers from south India, but I've seen Hindi (and any other Indian language) speakers pronounce it the same way. My question is why do they mispronounce it this way, more specifically why is the y sound introduced? A middle school teacher said the closest way to write my name in Malayalam is നോയൽ (or നോ് ൽ, though I was told that's not a valid word since the accent isn't on a consonant) and that's the reason. I would think something like നോൽ (closer to nole than Noel though) would be better since although the sounds are different, a new consonant is not introduced. Also, is the reasoning of "it's the easiest way to write it in Malayalam" a correct one? Any other ideas?

If X-bar theory assumes binary nodes and that complements are sister branches with the head, how can the structure of a VP with multiple complements be? For example: I give him a present.

Or even: I bet you a dollar that he will go.

So let's picture the following scenario:

Within a region are two ethnic groups: A and B. The population of A far exceeds that of B, and the languages of the two groups are not mutually intelligible. However, in this case, both group B claims that they speak language A, while group A thinks otherwise.

In this case where both communities claims the same name for its own language, how do linguists decide and determine how they are to be referred within academic works?

I'm aware of the ever-so-popular poster childs of Chinese and Arabic, but I'm looking for other examples. Also, bonus points if the two languages don't even share the same historical origin.

What category is a "general statement" under? Is this considered a linguistic feature?

I was listening to this song, Devil in a New Dress. And one of the lyrics was: "Looking at my bitch..." In this context, "looking" is a general statement. No one is particular is "looking" at the object, which is "bitch". What is this linguistic feature called? These "general statements"?

In Spanish, we do this as well. But we don't use the gerund; we use the infinitive. If I were to translate the lyric "looking at my bitch", it would be something like "mirar mi (bitch)". So for general statements with an object, you use the gerund in English, and the infinitive in Spanish.

"Knowing him, he's probably late", is another example. What do you call this? I apologize for the silly use of the word "bitch" in this post. I'm not trying to be funny. I only thought of this because of that song, so I'm using it as an example.

Phrases like "my gift" are ambiguous in English because, depending on the context, it may mean "the gift I am giving" or "the gift I received" (among other options).

This can be taken to ridiculous proportions like this scene in Alice in Wonderland (https://youtu.be/CENJTSMfwOM?t=112) where Alice says "I'm trying to find my way home" and the Queen of Hearts interrupts her and says "Your way? All ways here are my ways."(Misinterpreting "a route for me to get home" with "I own this route").

Are there languages which grammatically specify the directionality of possession in phrases like this? Is there a linguistic term describing this type of disambiguation?

My father (who is 80) said his grandmother called little potato pillows with farmer/dry cottage cheese phonetically “paad-a-hey.

I have seen a few people comment that their grandmother also did, but this does not seem common.

Does anyone know if this a more localized to a certain part of Lithuania?

I'm Brazilian, and a certain difficulty I've had with English was the difference in the semi-vowels of dyphtongs. In Portuguese, the only time [ɪ] or [ʊ] meet a stronger vowel is in words like "voo" (flight) which is pronounced as ['vo.ʊ], but it is a hiatus, not a dyphtong.

Basically the title!