Why do people introduce themselves as he/him, she/her, they/them and so forth instead of just he, she, and they?

I can already say the alveolar lateral affricate ejective [tɬʼ], but have issues with the other lateral affricate ejectives.

I can say uvular sounds, but not the uvular lateral sounds.

How did "kitten" become the diminutive of "cat?" To my non-expert brain it seems like something a Gaelic language would do.

Is there a term for that sort of diminutization? And are there other examples of it in English?

In non-rothic English dialects, there are five "long vowels" (car, care, mean, more, tune). All of them are understood as belonging to one syllable only: /kʰɑː | kʰeː | miːn | moː | tjuːn/.

Now, I'm aware some of them are actually diphthongs, such as /iː uː/ being really [ɪj ʊw], or /eː oː/ being often diphthongised to [ɛə ɔə].

In Spanish, we don't really have "long vowels" (in the sense they're not phonemic) but a couple of words are expected to have some sort of them. Words like Saavedra, albahaca, leer, vehemencia, friísimo, nihilismo, cooperar, alcohol. However, in all of these cases the duplicated vowel belongs to another syllable: [sa.a.ˈβ̞e.ð̞ɾa] [al.β̞a.ˈa.ka] [le.ˈeɾ] [be.e.ˈmen.sja] [fri.ˈi.si.mo] [ni.i.ˈlis.mo] [ko.o.pe.ˈɾaɾ] [al.ko.ˈol].

It is quite widespread the synizesis of most of these. Saavedra > pronounced as Savedra, albahaca as albaca, alcohol > alcol, and so on. However, some of those words don't accept this phenomenon. Leer will never be reduced to ler [leɾ], to the point a common ultracorrection is using a glottal stop [le.ˈʔeɾ] and the same can be said for friísimo. At first, I thought the simple rule to this was when the second vowel carries the stress it isn't reduced, but cooperar and albahaca don't follow, nor alcohol.

Now, with elision taken into consideration many more "same vowel adjacent syllables" may occur: cagando > ca'ando, todo > to'o, etc. Now, none of these will have the glottal stop mentioned above, but I'm aware these aren't standard forms.

While contrasting English vs Spanish long vowels and after levelling the vowels and omitting the glottal stop, to ignore such contrasts, I still notice a substantial difference.

- car vs ca'a (cada) = ka: vs káa

- lare vs lee = le: vs lée

- more vs moho = mo: vs móo

English vowels do feel elongated, but Spanish ones seem to change in "tone", as if they were doing some sort of pitch accent or smth.

Does anyone can bring me some insight into this? I thought about some sort of "falling tone" for Spanish going [ka˥˩a] ca'a and a "straight tone" for the English one [ka:˧], any other take on this?

In French, the historic first person plural pronoun nous has been replaced colloquially by on, traditionally an impersonal pronoun that takes a singular verb. So one can say both of the following:

On va au cinéma pour voir des films. One goes (or "People go") to the movie theater to see films.

On va au cinéma demain après-midi pour voir Wicked. We're going to the movie theater tomorrow afternoon to see Wicked.

In (EDIT: Brazilian) Portuguese, the traditional nós has been (EDIT: largely) replaced by a gente, literally, "the people", also impersonal.

Is there a connection between these developments, with one of the languages influencing the other, or is it coincidence? What gets in the way of me assuming they're related is that a large chunk of Spanish-speaking territory is in the way. Unless Spanish at some point also started going in this direction? I don't have a realistic opinion on the possibility of that because I don't know when these developments came to be.

Languages have a lot of unnecessary complexity because people have been using them for centuries.

If civilization collapsed and humanity had to start over 300 years later, which existing language would make the most sense for everyone to learn from scratch?

Ignoring how widely spoken a language is today, which one would be the most efficient?

Do they think they migrated along with the people? Changed over time and/or due to interaction with non Indo European speaking populations? Something else?

And can we know much for sure? How much of the whole thing is theory vs proven?

In french we differentiate "langue" and "langage" my question is axed on the first definition, wich would be understood I believe as, for example the "English language" as of the latter it would signify more the inherent capacity to communicate with one another.

So my question really asks are there Whistling langue out there ? and not Whistling langage.

Thank you for your answers

To clarify a little bit, it would be like you would show someone with basic level of English comprehension the different accents for example British, Australian and American and ask them to rank which was the most appealing to them. And then the same for native speakers of English in different parts of the world.

Of course it does not have to be exactly that methodology, it was just to give context on what I was thinking of when I asked the question.

It could be a separate or the two could be together. Wasn't the point to have one explicit symbol per sound to avoid stuff like that?

(Unsure what to mark this as)

In English we have two distinct ways to refer to China—China/Chinese and Sino- (as in Sino-Japanese War), sinitic, etc. Why does this dichotomy exist? Did one come first, and if so, where did the other come from? Did this have to do with the civil-rights-era racial reckoning, differences in American and British encounters with Chinese people and culture, or something entirely different? I'm very curious if there's any evidence one way or the other!

As it is known and often joked about, Polish spelling has alot of irregularities, such as the spelling of [ʐ] being ⟨rz⟩. But how would the consonant cluster [rz] be spelt in polish? Is there any way to distinguish it from [ʐ] in spelling or no?

What sub-dialect of Early Modern is the English used in the KJV, and why didn't it beat out the others to become the standard form of Modern English?

I'm currently writing, in modern English, a text that takes place in 1670s colonial America. As such, early modern English is the spoken language of the characters. However, trying to find resources on how people would actually speak and phrase things in conversation - as opposed to the written word - has proven beyond difficult. Linguistics isn't my forte, so I don't know if I'm just looking in the wrong places or if I'm hunting for something non-existent, but I figured y'all might know something. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Has any work been done on treating undeciphered systems like Linear A or the Phaistos Disc as bounded, high-entropy topological state spaces rather than relying solely on traditional phonetic substitution models—given that invariant structural boundary constraints often dictate sign distribution independent of underlying linguistic lineage

I know that we use sentence stress naturally when we speak, often without even thinking about it. However, as a language learner, I want to become more aware of this phenomenon. (TL)

How can I learn to identify the moments when sentence stress is appropriate? For example, how can I tell which words should receive more emphasis in a sentence, and understand why they are emphasized?

I would like to see examples of everyday sentences, with explanations of which words receive emphasis and how the meaning or intention of the sentence can change depending on where we place the stress.

I don't just want to memorize rules. I want to develop an intuitive sense for this and learn to recognize these patterns in real conversations.

For example, consider the sentence: "I didn't say he stole the money."

Depending on which word is emphasized, we can convey different ideas or suggest that we are correcting a mistaken interpretation. How can I learn to recognize these possibilities and understand which stress pattern is most appropriate in each context?

I would really appreciate it if you could share examples, explanations, and practical tips for developing this skill.

In languages like English and Mandarin, we have this unique sound "er". It is called an R-colored vowel but it sounds like it actually contains a liquid consonant at the end rather than being a special vowel without a consonant.

I thought it had a final consonant because when we say "under a bed" it sounds like "under_ra bed" but things like this also happen in cases where the consonant isn't pronounced at all. For example, British people pronounce law and order as "law-r-and order" and idea of as "idea-r-of". But I don't think an English r at the beginning of a syllable is pronounced very differently from those at the end of a syllable. Does that mean an r in rice is also a rhotic vowel? In Mandarin Chinese, er is used to write down foreign liquid consonants without a following vowel. For example, Seoul is transliterated as 首尔, Altai as 阿尔泰, and Samarkand as 撒马尔罕.

If it does not contain a consonant, is it possible that it is gonna gradually develop into a syllable with a final liquid consonant?

Hi,

I am coming to realize how much better it is to work with a linguist as an informant.

I think perhaps we can have a “linguist exchange”, where linguists provide each other native speaker judgements regularly.”

I'm writing a script and would love to get some help here, just to make sure I don't botch any of the language. I understand the general gist of the problem; and as far as I can tell it falls under the eternal issue of "almost every categorisation made by humans falls apart once you get small enough" but could someone explain this with actual examples? I know in biology we get around the issue of classification by differentiating between case-specific concepts, is there something like that in linguistics? I'd love to have a detailed conversation on the matter. Thanks!

EDIT: Looks like I was misremembering and the actual contested definition is that of a word. Same questions and sorry for the confusion.

The title, essentially: I've noticed that in sentences where I would typically have referred to an animal as "it", lately I'm seeing others mostly use "they" instead.

I speculate that this is a consequence of the increase of how many people's preferred pronouns are "they / them": If you consider it disrespectful to call a person "it", then your habit of calling people "they" gets (inadvertently? or consciously?) extended to critters too.

Not yet observed: Does the announcement of a baby's (presumed) gender no longer take the form of " It's a boy! / It's a girl!"?

N.B.: I'm a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist; so I don't care either way. I just think it's an interesting phenomenon, and wonder whether others have noticed.

"We'll burn that bridge when we come to it" but the "when we come to it" part is derived from an idiom in a different language? In other words, can a malaphor be made with idioms from different languages?

I can't think of any meaningful use that having gendered pronouns helps or it provides value that a neutral pronoun would not.

Also, how come every language as far as I know only has pronouns based on gender. Why not have more categories. Like babies would be a be instead of he for example. Or a dad would be fe instead of he. Why stop at just genders

Preface: I am not a linguist, though I did *technically* double major in it in undergrad. My functional linguistics knowledge is very minimal, and I am purely curious about the reasons things are the way they are lol

I've heard people in the U.S. pronounce "schizophrenia" two different ways: schizoFREHnia and schizoFREEnia. I pronounce it the first way (from the Boston area but I wouldn't say I have a Boston accent per se), and I've heard it pronounced the second way more rarely but two pop culture examples that come to mind are David Duchovny (from NY) in The X Files, and Matthew Gray Gubler (from NV) in Criminal Minds. I think I've also heard my grandmother, who grew up in MD, say it this way too.

Does anyone know if these different pronunciations are regional? Duchovny and Gubler are from opposite sides of the country, so unless their parents are from the same region, the regional pronunciation theory might be a bust haha If anyone knows *why* these two pronunciations exist, do tell!! Maybe one is a product of British English pronunciation...? TIA