u/Hopeful-Banana-6188

🔥 Hot ▲ 74 r/AskAnthropology

What are the oldest myths we can reconstruct?

I've read that there are themes in myths of people groups separated by tens of thousands of years that are too similar to be a coincidence, indicating that the myths were inherited from the ancient ancestral groups of these peoples. However, the information I've read so far has been overly focused on specific groups (e.g. focusing on the connections between Indo-European speaking cultures and Native American cultures without saying anything about Papuan cultures for instance).

Are there global "myth families" that we can identify similarly to language families? Can we say anything about the myths of the first people to populate Eurasia or even earlier? I'm interested in a global overview rather than something that focuses solely on say Indo-Europeans, and naturally literature for further reading would be greatly appreciated.

reddit.com
u/Hopeful-Banana-6188 — 14 hours ago

Does American English ever use /æ/ in loanwords?

Generally American English uses /ɑ/ to represent low vowels in loanwords from foreign languages, but are there any cases of (recent) loanwords that use /æ/?

reddit.com
u/Hopeful-Banana-6188 — 1 day ago

How do I determine what my conlang actually sounds like?

I've found this to be one of the most frustrating things when starting to get into conlanging. Usually when creating a conlang one would design a phonemic inventory for the language represented in the IPA. However, I feel that the IPA isn't detailed enough to capture what a language actually sounds like to me.

As a specific example, the Forest Enets language has a vowel inventory of something like [i e ɛ a ɔ o u] similar to Italian, whereas the Ket language has a much more complex vowel inventory with various central and back unrounded vowels. However, Forest Enets doesn't sound like Italian at all like the IPA transcription alone might suggest, but I hear a fair amount of similarity with Ket in its sound however it's difficult for me to pinpoint exactly what makes them sound similar. Something to do with the voice quality and pitch?

The issue for me is that these kinds of subtle aspects of voice quality that are hard to transcribe with IPA often have a more significant impact on what a language sounds like to me than the actual sound inventory itself. I can't imitate them either if I don't know what is causing these phonetic features.

Is the only answer spending a lot of time analyzing languages with spectrograms? If so, how do I start? I don't have any experience in articulatory phonetics, and when I played around with Praat I found it intimidating as I had no idea how to interpret the results.

u/Hopeful-Banana-6188 — 4 days ago