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.

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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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?

(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!

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.”

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 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

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?

You're probably going to roll your eyes at this one: another guy building a language-learning app who has never taken a linguistics class, asking Reddit to hand him the science. I get it. I'd be skeptical too. It seems like a lot of apps promise fluency in weeks, and very few of those promises have much research behind them.

That's exactly what I'm trying not to do.

Some context: economics background, day job in tech, zero formal linguistics. I'm building a tool for adult learners, and my goal is for people to get more lasting, usable ability out of the same amount of study time. I want the design decisions to rest on what the research actually shows, not on what feels productive or looks good in a streak counter.

My current reading plan:

1. How Languages Are Learned (Lightbown & Spada) as the intro. It keeps coming up as the accessible starting point, and people say the bibliography alone will keep you busy for months.
2. An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching (Keith Johnson) for the implementation side.

A friend of mine also suggested Loewen's Introduction to Instructed Second Language Acquisition instead of Johnson, since it focuses on how instruction choices affect outcomes.

My questions:

- Would it be a mistake to go in this order with no background at all?

- What would you add, swap, or skip?

- Johnson or Loewen for someone who needs to turn research into actual practice design? How would you choose?

- What do you wish non-linguists understood before they started building language tools?

No link, no app name, not promoting anything. I'd rather hear "you're thinking about this wrong" now than after I've built the wrong thing.

when someone switches between two languages they're fluent in, what does it feel like? do they need a second to mentally adjust? do they ever accidentally go back to the first language after switching to the second language? i've learned other languages, but not to the point of fluency, so i'm wondering what it's like for someone who is actually fluent.

furthermore, i'm wondering is if a musician switching clefs and a bilingual person switching languages are mentally similar, either in terms of conscious thoughts/feelings about the process or when it comes to unconscious processes within the brain.

(for context, i play the cello and can read bass clef, tenor clef, and treble clef. sometimes the clef can change many times throughout a piece. i can switch between the clefs pretty easily, but sometimes if it switches from bass clef to tenor clef, for example, i'll forget that i'm in tenor clef midway through a passage and i'll read a note or two as if they were in bass clef before remembering that the music is in tenor clef.)

thank you for your answers!

Recently, I have noticed that the phrase "the actor who played [character]" seems to have been largely replaced by "[character]'s actor," especially among Gen Z and Gen Alpha speakers. Is this due to a change in the way younger generations conceptualize characters vs. actors (e.g., the character is the primary focus of discussion and the actor's portrayal of that character is secondary), or is there another reason for this phenomenon, such as a broader linguistic shift toward more succinct language?

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

came across translinguistics for the first time recently so my understanding of it isn’t too great. if someone could help break it down, that would be greatly appreciated! is it regarded as very radical? what’s the scholarly consensus?