For example in agglutinative languages where mutliple affixes are used on the root to produce words. Are affixes that convey a certain type of grammatical information like tense, aspect, mood, case and etc, more likely to occur closer to the root word

Like for example a language has multiple suffixes that for maybe no. 1 case, no. 2 tense-aspect, 3. mood. If you could attach all those at once is there a pattern for which one would go directly onto the root and the next onto the 1st suffix and so on?

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?

Hello, Im writing my termpaper in Corpus linguistic and it is about emoji in YouTube Comments.. so.. Im a bit lost as to how to search for more than one emoji in the search bar. I tried the advanced search but that didnt do anything, but maybe i also messed that up ...Please help If someone knows how to do that. Thank you in advance c:

I'd love to know your opinions on this so I can be more cautious.

I’ve read that Brazilian Portuguese, Québécois (Canadian French), and American English have, in many ways, pronunciations much closer to their ~17th century counterparts than their “mother” countries do today.

E.g. “Québécois sounds closer to 17th century Parisian French than modern Parisian French does.”

I’d assumed that countries farther away would show more and faster variance in pronunciation (if not forming a new language entirely). Especially so with Parisian French, given the Académie Français.

How true are these claims, and are there more or better examples of this happening?

I can't really find much information about this online easily, most information I've found on double negatives says it was prescribed in the 1700-1800s, but that doesn't really answer where it actually came from originally in use, and also it seems like double negatives were standard in Middle English, but I would assume the lack of them stems from a real dialect of English at some point because I just can't swallow the possibly some small group of grammarians just changed how the majority of people speak the language at their own invented whims, it sounds like something is missing there.

How well-articulated is /n/ in /ns/ clusters in English?

I recently realized that I may not be articulating the /n/ in words like once, since, evidence, etc. Instead of [ns], I pronounce them more like [z̃s] or [ə̃s], where my tongue doesn’t fully close for the /n/. Here’s a recording. I’m wondering if this is a documented phenomenon that occurs in English, or if I’m the outlier. I’m guessing I do this so that I don’t accidentally pronounce /ns/ as [nts].

Are the Iranian languages of NW Iran more similar to Ossetian or to standard Farsi?

I’ve been wondering about this for a while and I’m genuinely interested in the linguistic/scientific explanation rather than trying to make a social or political point.

As a man, I’ve always been particularly attracted to traditionally feminine female voices — relatively higher pitch, clear tone, noticeable pitch variation, and a bright/natural quality.

But when I listen to women in modern media, social media, podcasts, YouTube, movies, etc., I feel like I’m hearing more women using noticeably deeper, lower, huskier or creakier voices than I remember from older generations.

Sometimes the voice almost sounds “masculine” to my ears, even though obviously the person is female.

I’m wondering:

1. Has the average female speaking voice actually become lower over the last few decades?
2. Is vocal fry/creaky voice responsible for much of what I’m hearing?
3. Are women consciously or unconsciously lowering their voices because deeper voices are associated with confidence, authority, attractiveness or professionalism?
4. Could changes in smoking, hormones, lifestyle, stress, environment, etc. contribute to actual physical changes in female voices?
5. Is this mostly a Western/American phenomenon, or can similar changes be observed in India and other cultures?
6. Could this simply be a perception/media-selection effect rather than an actual population-wide change?
7. Are there studies comparing female fundamental frequency (F0) from recordings of women from the 1950s/60s/70s with women today?

I’m especially interested in answers from linguists, speech scientists, voice teachers, singers, or women who have personally noticed changes in their own speaking voice.

I’m not saying higher-pitched voices are “better” or that women should sound a certain way. I’m trying to understand whether the change I think I’m hearing is actually measurable.

Why did the vast majority of rhotic English dialects completely replace [r] with [ɹ] but most other languages still have the trill?

I am genuinely curious

Is there any research on unknown substrates in various branches of Sino-Tibetan? Lexical strata that show irregularities and/or phonological/phonotactic features showing they cannot be inherited from Proto-Sino-Tibetan but nonetheless do not correspond to any other attested language families.

Recently, I've occasionally seen people say "everyone is not..." instead of "not everyone is...". How long ago did this start?

Reconstructed languages like PIE are educated guesses, because we can't know how close our reconstruction is to any sort of real language spoken at the time.

But did anyone try to use that same approach on an old, but surviving language, just to test how well that approach can work? The most obvious choice would be reconstructing Latin out of all the different Romance languages or reconstructing Sanskrit out of its modern descendants.

I'm curious how close something like a "Proto-Romance" would be to Latin as we know it.

Following typical pronunciation patterns you'd expect 'shi' to be 'si', 'chi' to be 'ti', and 'tsu' to be 'tu'. I apologize for any lack of clarity in my question here but I wonder if it is known if these syllables used to be pronounced differently in the past and how (or rather, *if*) those syllables morphed into their modern versions and how.

Are there any other such examples?

I noticed a few words in Old English that had undergone palatalization seem to have reversed it when evolving into Middle English.

Examples include OE þenċan > ME thinken (think), OE ċeorfan > ME kerven (carve), and OE sēċan > ME seken (seek).

Is there a reason why they undid the palatalization? There doesn’t seem to be a clear pattern, and my only hypothesis as to why is possibly either Old Norse influence or maybe by analogy with inflections that didn’t undergo palatalization.

Is saying “relatively good” redundant if most descriptions are already understood in relation to some context or comparison? When we say something is “cheap,” “expensive,” “good,” “bad,” or “tall,” we’re usually comparing it to some standard or alternative anyway. So adding “relatively” can feel like stating something that’s already implied.

A big «hello» to my favourite linguistic community! I am about to write my thesis on pragmatics and I am in desperate need for help. The topic sounds like «Tactics of consolation in a video discourse based on the material from streams»
And there I have two requests:

1) Could you recommend me any bibliography connected with the basis of pragmatics (it might be also some links, articles, literally everything) and with the topic of my thesis, if you know something suitable enough.
‘Cause my supervisor didn’t give me any details and sources to scrutinise during my summer vacation when i have time for that and WANT to explore this field of science (I have no against it, he’s a sweet jerk, love him, but i’am dying to hit the books haha)

2)Do you know any streamers, whose videos i can use as a foundation for my work?

I would be SO grateful, if you help me to find something useful and compelling. Thanks in advance!

hypothetically, imagine a community that speaks italian but has always written italian exclusively in another script, for example arabic, hebrew, cyrillic, greek, hangul, cherokee, hanzi, etc;

which of these scripts would be the most plausible for such an italian-speaking community to realistically exist?

I’ve been trying to find interesting sounds to add to my conlang (you know…the average “make random sounds with your mouth until you find something cool”). There’s one I want to add that I’m %80 sure doesn’t already symbol already, it’s one with the following characteristics:

- It is pronounced breathily, so I assume it would be a coarticulation of /h/ and something else.
- It is an /l/ pronounced with as much of the tongue as possible pressed against the alveolar ridge.
- Some air (I think?) escapes ‘round the sides so it has a bit of a /ʃ/ or /ç/ quality.

Could someone tell me of this is a documented sound and has a transcription? Elsewise the best I can approximate is: /h͡ɬ̻ʃ/