r/asklinguistics

Misleading title but I'll explain.

My family is Colombian and I've noticed a lot of them struggle to pronounce names like "Jan," for example. It sometimes comes out like "yahn," with a [ʎ] sound.

I understand why, I think. The closest they have in Colombian Spanish is ⟨ll⟩ and it can sound similar to [j] or [ʒ] in different regions, so to them it probably sounds interchangeable. (Is that correct?)

Here's my confusion: whenever they talk about Medellin, they always use [ʒ]. (Or if it isn't [ʒ] it's something similar, idk.)

So if they can intentionally pronounce "Medellin" differently from the ⟨ll⟩ in "pollo," why don't they just do the same thing with English "J" names?

For context, I’m an American English native speaker trying to improve my pronunciation of the alveolar trill rolled R (as spoken in Polish, for example). I’m also a beginner when it comes to linguistics, so please bear with me if I’m not explaining this well.

So far, I am only able to produce a rolled R by heavily aspirating the consonant. In other words, by forcing enough air through my mouth, I can create just enough tongue wiggle to trill the R. This is what it feels like to me, anyway. I can’t fully tell whether I’m aspirating or pre-aspirating the consonant.

So I have a couple questions:

1. How the hell do I trill this consonant without aspiration?

2. Out of curiosity, do different languages actually have aspirated vs unaspirated versions of the alveolar trill? I‘ve never heard anyone (besides myself) pronouncing something with an aspirated alveolar trill.

Guys,so i am going to go to university this summer. But i need to choose from 2. I need advice so listen,The first path is studying Linguistics in a little university that has no campus life and little groups,less diversity on people, environment and then for bachelor going abroad and doing computational linguistics with a degree of linguistics.

The other is, studying french or german department of translation or english literature vs. (i didnt choose rn) in a REAL prestigious,developed,in qs ranking,a lot groups,events most diversified environment and people good campus uni then in bachelor doing computational linguistics. Guys,which one is the best one for being linguistic in a computational way? (In the second path i can study comprative study,spanish literature etc.) which one is good for computational linguistics more or more suit?

Most other spelling systems that I see on other European languages are very phonetic, English, French and Irish are the only ones that I notice that, above all, chose to preserve historical pronunciations instead of current ones, I might be wrong, though.

By the way, I'm specifying European ones because I know that outside of Europe, some languages like Vietnamese and Tibetan have varying degrees of etymology preservation too.

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/?

I know a lot of my fellow Tagalogs who were able to land desk jobs in Malaysia, and they were able to learn Malay pretty fluently in about 6-7 months. They told me that the grammar syntax of Bahasa Melayu/Indonesian is pretty easy, and the syntax and grammar of Tagalog is actually more sophisticated and difficult. I've also noticed a lot of posts of Malays and Indonesians on social media, they try to learn Tagalog, but they are having difficulties with the affixes and syntax.

From a linguistic perspective, despite belonging to the same language family, which is Malayo-Polynesian, why does Malays and Indonesians find it difficult to learn Tagalog, while Tagalog speakers find it pretty easy to learn Indonesian/Malay?

I would appreciate your insights.

Maraming Salamat/Terimah Kasih ❤️

Hi so I know this is a pretty niche question, but I've been looking into my German ancestry. I'm from South Australia, and during the mid to late 19th Century many Old Lutherans from what we now call Germany settled in South Australia, especially in the Barossa Valley.

However, they all came from different places. Quite different places, especially linguistically. How would a German from say Lower Silesia, speaking a dialect of Eastern Mitteldeutsch, be able to understand a settler from Oldenburg speaking a dialect of Plattdeutsch?

Perhaps inter-regional communication was done through common vocabulary in their Lutheran bibles? As religion and a broad cultural similarity were the two things that united these disparate German settlers.

If anyone has any clues they would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Hi all,

I have a few questions for those of you in linguistics. I am currently deciding whether to pursue graduate studies in linguistics. For context, I am in my early thirties and currently teach English literature at a high school in an affluent suburb in the US. I earn a salary equivalent to that of most associate professors and work with many PhDs who want out of the academic rat race. However, I have been interested in transitioning into the field of linguistics for some time now. Because my undergrad is in a different field and I don't have a background in Linguistics, I am currently looking at a Master's first and then a PhD to follow. The current institutions I have been admitted to are 1) Lancaster for an MA in Linguistics, 2) Edinburgh for an MSc in Linguistics, or 3) UVA for an MA in Linguistics.

I specifically want to study discourse analysis and language evolution in conflict areas. I would like to learn how to analyze large datasets in areas like Sudan or Myanmar, predict where conflict is increasing due to rhetoric, develop policy recommendations based on that data, and collect linguistic evidence in post-conflict zones. (Also, as a side project, I'd like to look at the cognitive effect that over-usage of AI has on adolescent language production).

I was hoping to get some advice on whether jobs like what I mentioned above exist. Are there think tanks and organizations that use linguists to comb through large sets of linguistic data to make assessments and policy recommendations for conflict zones? Additionally, would pursuing a PhD after an MA or MSc be helpful/necessary? Lastly, would any of the aforementioned schools help with admission to PhD programs in either Europe or the US?
,

I'm a bit curious about this. French is classified as a Romance language, but compared to other Romance languages such as Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish, it sounds so different. Even in pronunciation, French has a lot of silent letters that doesn't exist in other Romance languages. Other Romance languages are spoken the way these are written, that's not the case for French. For example, the word "Thank You" in Portuguese is "Obrigado", it is pronounced the same. Spanish is the same, " Muchos Gracias" is pronounced the way it is written. But the French "Merci Beaucoup" is pronounced as "me-zi-vou-cou".

I will really appreciate all of your insights here. Thank you so much!

I really like linguistics but I can't afford to get a whole degree just for a hobby! My friends call me a linguist cause they know I love this subject lol but I wondered if studying on my own was enough to rightfully claim that title. I'm pursuing a degree in something else and although I've thought about going back for another degree, it just seems like such a waste of money since I'm not doing it for work. I also don't have the time or money to pick up a few linguistic classes because these things are expensive, and I'm already doing school part time to work and pay for this degree, so I don't want to delay graduation even longer. If only tuition was cheaper, I'd absolutely go to school for the fun of it.

Could I ever call myself a linguist? My current plan is to find some books, articles, textbooks online and in the library, and practice writing some research essays just for myself. Is it worth it to save up to just get the degree? At the college I'm looking at, it appears that I'll spend over 30k for a 4 year program. I know a lot of people here do it for the love of the game, but damn I don't know if I can spend that much on a hobby.

Oh and btw, my career goal is actually related to linguistics: SLP. BU has a dual SLP linguistics program that I dreamed of doing but I swear I'd spend more than getting two bachelors haha. So I am taking a linguistics class rn as it is required for SLP, but it's not really necessary to take any more and I need the time to take SLP-specific classes.

I guess what I'm really trying to ask is, can I learn enough on my own or will it not even compare to the kind of education I'd get at university? The one I'm looking at is UNR: An English degree but heavily linguistic/language-focused.

Honestly, I love school over working tenfold. I'd collect degrees if I could.

Like I said, no background in Linguistics, and I'm not an academic at all. I majored in math in my undergrad, which has helped me a lot with the mathy/comp-sci side of what I'm attempting.

My biggest fear is being or being perceived as a crank; I'm well aware that I'm not the first outsider to think that they've come up with some Grand Universal Theory of Language that turns out to be trivial, at odds with basic evidence, or Not Even Wrong in Pauli's sense.

That said, I have pretty good reasons to believe I'm not a crank:

1. I use mathematical proofs for my more unusual claims (of which there are a few), defining terms clearly and formally deriving results from them

2. In the process of making this, I kept trying to disprove myself by deriving formal predictions and assessing empirical evidence when possible. In fact, I only continued this project because not only did these falsification attempts fail, the evidence my model predicted tended to be considered unexplained by existing frameworks.

3. The other non-Linguists who have read it (i.e people with some bachelor's or master's level linguistics training but are not academics) agree that it's interesting and non-trivial

4. Repeated searches have not indicated that this has been done before

The problem is that what I've got is neither small nor particularly aligned with any existing framework. It's an attempt at explaining language production, reception, and acquisition all together in one model, and I know that each one of these is a whole field unto itself. But the predictions it generated endogenously are non-trivial. To give some examples

• Well documented aphasia profiles fall directly out of the model. In particular, the specific comprehension difficulties of Broca's Aphasia and Conduction Aphasia are, to my knowledge, still considered open problems in Linguistics (Like why would damage to one part of the brain only be associated with issues with repetition and comprehension of highly specific structures?). I actually hadn't heard of Conduction Aphasia when I started writing this - At first I thought it would break my model, because the only way my model could account for someone who could produce fluently but struggle with repetition was if they had the same comprehension deficits as Broca's Aphasia. And then I looked it up further, and only then found out that Conduction Aphasia patients do have the same comprehension deficits as Broca's aphasia.

• A similar moment occurred was when I realised that I'd inadvertently predicted that head-final languages couldn't exist unless they had something like topic-prominence - Again, I thought this ruined the model, but then I actually looked it up and found out that head-final languages having topic-prominence (or something similar to it, like Basque's focus-prominence) is apparently a well established typological observation that has thus far eluded easy explanation.

• It also predicts that non-context-free structures can exist, but are rare, typically marked, and almost never occur in deeply nested contexts, which is apparently an open problem, but I'm not sure if I can count this one because I knew a little bit about this before I started

So while from the inside I'm pretty sure I'm not a crank, I feel like there isn't much infrastructure for someone in my position to really move forward? I'm pretty sure the empirical strength of what I've derived so far should warrant some interest, but given my lack of an academic background I'm fairly sure there's no way I'll get this into a publishable state without some help from someone who actually knows what they're doing. At the very least, if I am completely off and there's nothing of value in what I wrote, I'd at the very least like somebody to explain why I'm wrong rather than just assuming that I am because I'm admittedly quite crank-shaped.

That said I'm also aware that this is something of an imposition; I've written quite a lot (54 pages, and it's still very unfinished), and given that it doesn't fall neatly into existing frameworks I expect that there's a lot that can't be skimmed.

So my question is: Does anyone know how I could find someone who actually knows enough about linguistics (especially the relevant subfields of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, UG, or maybe language acquisition) to read over this and engage with it?

I'd really appreciate it if anybody could help!

An example would be one of the functions of malay's "rthymic reduplication"

Warna (colour) > warna-warni (colourfull / assortment of different colour)
Kuih (cake) > kuih-muih (assortment of different cakes)
Huru (problem) > huru-hara (chaos)

Hello, I'm looking for allophonic/narrow transcriptions of English words in the modern Received Pronunciation accent. For example, cat - [kʰat]. Of course, I don't expect to find a full dictionary but at least some transcriptions.

So far the only thing I've found is Wiktionary, but it's a collaborative dictionary (with a terrible admins), so I'm afraid it may be inaccurate

Thanks in advance

Most languages I know have formal vs informal "you" but I've never seen formal vs informal "we" except in French.

Sign language is mindblowing to me because it makes use of both time and space while spoken language mainly comes out as a linear string of sounds. Signers have a set of hands and countless facial expressions to work with during a single instance of time, and the hand sign/expression can be held/moved for multiple instances while the sentence continues itself.

But what does that look like in syntax, specifically for ASL? How would you draw a tree for a sign that is held continously? More importantly, compared to spoken languages, is ASL word order actually more flexible, or is there just a lot more movement going on within the SVO structure? I so far have been assuming the former because I imagine sign languages are more flexible by nature (due to the characteristics mentioned above).

(And so far the movements I've looked into have been DP movements that also exist in spoken languages e.g. topicalization)

I am creating my first conlang and I really wanted it to have a specific phoneme that I really like. When I entered the international phonetic alfabet I listened all of the sounds, but none of them where the one I want to add. I don't really know why, any ideas?

I've been hearing more and more Americans (can't say for Brits or other native English speakers) approximate pinyin <x> (as in Xi Jinping or Liu Cixin) as /ʒ/. Obviously, as the /ɕ/ sound doesn't exist in English, it has to be approximated but one would expect something that sounds a bit closer (and at least a voiceless consonant) like /s/ or /ʃ/ or something calqued on English approximations of Spanish x, which Americans are more familiar with (/h/ instead of /x/ or /χ/). In the latter case, it would be wrong, but there would be some logic behind it. I fail to see how /ʒ/ came to be the go-to approximation. Does anyone know why and when that happened? Does Brits, Canadians, Kiwis and Aussies also use /ʒ/ or something else entirely? Thanks in advance!

I need some tips on transcription. How should I know which vowel sound to use correctly? There are many similar sounds, and it's difficult to distinguish between them, especially the schwa sound.

Hi, just had a thought. Do, for example, Chinese people speaking English apply the tones they use for the Chinese word to the English translation?

I.e. subconsciously speaking the english word with the same or similar intonation as the Chinese equivalent.

Thanks!

Obviously, there are other Romance languages descended from Latin, but I’m going with standard modern Italian since it’s spoken where Latin was originally spoken, just as modern Greek is spoken where Ancient Greek was spoken.

This is really a multi-part question, so I’d break it up into:

(1) How well could a literate native speaker of standard modern Italian, with no prior exposure to Classical or Ecclesiastical Latin, understand someone speaking in Classical Latin? How well could they understand a text written in Classical Latin (e.g., something by Cicero)?

(2) How well could a literate native speaker of modern Greek, with no prior exposure to Ancient Greek, understand someone speaking in Ancient Greek? How well could they understand a text written in Ancient Greek (e.g., Plato’s Republic)?

As a native English speaker, so much of our vocabulary has been borrowed from other languages over the past thousand years that it’s hard to know how much of Old English is confusing because words/grammar evolved, and how much is confusing because words were outright replaced. So, for languages that I presume have a far greater share of native words than does English, I’m curious about their mutual intelligibility with the languages they’re descended from.