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I noticed a possible phonetic resemblance between Italian ragazza and Arabic rāqiṣa (راقصة, “female dancer”), particularly when considering dialectal realizations of Arabic q. Given the historical Arabic presence in Sicily, could there have been an intermediary Sicilian form or semantic shift that connected the two? I realize the resemblance alone isn't evidence of common origin, and I'm…
In Slavic languages, the words for Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday are numbered two, four, and five. For example, “úterý”/“čtvrtek”/“pátek” in Czech or “вто́рник”/“четве́рг”/“пя́тница” in Russian. Weekday Bulgarian¹ Czech Polish Russian¹ Slovak Etymology Sunday nedélja neděle niedziela nedélja² nedeľa “no work” Monday ponedélnik pondělí poniedziałek ponedélʹnik pondelok “after Sunday” Tuesday…
I was wondering if a plosive like [k] could be pronounced at the end of a word without having any sort of modification to it. When I try to do it, I either end up making it an ejective or releasing a weak schwa after, similar to [kᵊ].
Are there different terms for allophony that occurs no matter how carefully one speaks and allophony that only occurs in fast/casual speech? For example: English /p/ is, as far as I know, always an unaspirated [p] in words like "sport" no matter how carefully one speaks But: Assimilation like "in pain" being said as [ɪmpeɪn] can be avoided if the speaker choose to speak carefully
I'm making a list of reflexes to illustrate the evolution of certain phonemes between Proto-Slavic and all its big descendants - decided to include Old Church Slavonic for comparison too.I would like to ask someone to help me retrieve the OCS forms of all the following Proto-Slavic words: The definite adjective ending family: *dobraja, *lisaја *vьlčaja, *tretaja *dobrъjь, *velikъjь, *dьlgъjь,…
Are there Spanish varieties that realize /ɲ/ ⟨ñ⟩ – parallel to their (non-lleistic/non-lateral) realization of /ʝ/ ⟨ll, y⟩ – as [ɲʝ, ɲɟʝ, ɲʒ, ɲʃ] etc. so that, e.g., se llama caña is pronounced like se llama cañlla ?
I am working on Problem 2.3 (Tagbanwa, JOL 2022) from Vlad A. Neacșu’s Linguistics Olympiad Training Guide, and I am confused about how the syllabification of the words in part (b) is determined. I understand the reconstruction of the writing system from part (a): the characters represent CV units, and a consonant occurring at the end of a syllable is not explicitly represented. However, I am not…
Early in Proto-Slavic, short ‘a’ in most cases turned into ‘o’, making the differences in vowel length in Proto-Slavic appear in modern Slavic languages as if they were differences in vowel quality. The Slavic invasion of the Balkans occurred before that sound change, and that’s why Latin ‘a’ in the toponyms almost always gets reflected as ‘o’ in modern Croatian, such as Košljun from Latin…
In Chinese (Hong Kong Cantonese) by Eric Zee in Part 2 Illustrations of the IPA in Handbook of the IPA , the symbol which is said to mean "low-mid to low, falling" means "extra low" in the IPA chart: "Extra low" is a level/height of tone, whereas "low-mid to low, falling" is a movement/contour. Aren't they different things, and why is the symbol used for both meanings?
In the section for American English (by Peter Ladefoged) in PART 2 Illustrations of the IPA of Handbook for the IPA , there is a vowel space chart The symbols in the above chart for American English don't seem to appear in the same places as in the vowel space in the IPA chart in the following. I was wondering why? Does that mean that each vowel symbol isn't pronounced the same according to the…
Handbook of IPA says: 5 Broad and narrow transcriptions A connected text represented in terms of phonemes is known as a 'phonemic transcription', or, almost equivalently, a 'broad transcription'. The term 'broad' sometimes carries the extra implication that, as far as possible, unmodified letters of the roman alphabet have been used. This restriction may facilitate printing, and might be…
Basically what it says in the title. I'm making something related to the Interslavic project now and I'm looking for examples, since I wonder if I may have overlooked something. I'm only aware of *květъ and *gvězda and of course their derived words, which do not count for the purposes of this question. I'm looking for stems. Or if it turns out these are actually the only ones, that's fine too -…
Does anyone know what the standard way to transcribe schwa is in American English? According to a lot of linguists, GenAm makes no distinction between KIT and schwa in some environments and STRUT and schwa in others. I've noticed in my own idiolect that I pronounce both unstressed KIT and unstressed schwa words before /n/, /t/, /d/, /s/, /f/, /z/ and /k/ roughly as [ɘ], while before /m/, /p/, /b/,…
Acculturation ad- (“toward”) + culture + - ation (“a process”); equivalent to acculturate + -ion https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/acculturation#Etymology Why ad- instead of the intermediate ac- ?
Vietnamese number 5 "năm" changing to "lăm" to avoid confusion with "năm" (years) : "15" vs. "five years", makes sense to me. But why do 1 and 10 also change tones starting after 20? I don't quite buy the "to match the lighter, faster cadence required for higher double-digit numbers" argument.
I am a student of phonology, and I'm doing extra practice - not an assignment from a professor - with the 1979 book Generative Phonology:Description and Theory, by Michael Kenstowicz and Charles Kisseberth. The book provides very interesting practice exercises, but it does not include any answers or solutions to the problems. While I am reasonably confident I've figured out the answers to various…
I have been reading questions about the Pirahã language, where some comments mention recursion . The following is a naive take without a linguistics background, but it should be justified because Stackexchange started out as a programming board and the Chomsky Hierarchy is relevant in either case. From what I remember of functional programming in high school, recursion does allow for some ellegant…
I live in Chicago, and I've always wondered why some people pronounce the city's name as Chi-caw-go (/ʃɪˈkɔːɡow/) rather than Chi-cah-go (/ʃɪˈkäːɡow/). The same's true with cities like Wichita, and states like Arkansas and Utah. Personally, I've noticed this as more of an East coast phenomenon, especially among older people. I read that it might be because of the LOT-CLOTH split, but this doesn't…
Considering the evidence that people often derived new words for new concepts by changing the vowels in existing words, I was wondering if any of the linguists here could tell me how people who subsequently heard or read those new words could have known what they meant? Thanks in advance for helping me answer this question
I can understand why you write something 'down', because as you write, the text goes down the page. But why then do we have a write-up?
In The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CaGEL), Huddleston and Pullum argue that constructions like While in Paris (in the sentence “ While in Paris, he visited his brother ”) are verbless clauses. They analyze these as subordinate clauses that lack a verb phrase but still function predicatively, with the subject and the verb ‘be’ being recoverable from the clause:“ While [he was] in…
I am developing a small moral/philosophical ontology and want to check whether one of its key definitions is linguistically coherent rather than merely rhetorically appealing. The ontology defines several English abstract nouns as follows: Truth: that which withstands falsification. updated 11:57cst Honor: truth's eternal integrity Virtue The devoted practice of honor Zeal: joyful perseverance in…
In the pulmonic consonant part of the IPA chart , why do the three columns dental, alveolar, and postalveolar share symbols in all rows except fricatives? When I click each of the symbols shared across the three columns, why do their descriptions only mention "dental/alveolar" without postalveolar? For example, the description of [t] is "voiceless dental/alveolar plosive". Does [t] cover the…
English uses a remarkable number of letter names to describe the shape of mechanical and other objects. For example: A-frame C-clamp I-beam L-couch O-ring P-trap S-hook T-junction U-turn V-engine W-engine Y-column Are there examples of such names with non-Latin-derived alphabet letters?
Why is the stress on "kumah" in Numbers 10:35 milra i.e., on the last syllable (in the phrase "kumah hashem veyafutsu oyvechah etc.")? Usually the verb "kumah" is stressed mil'eil (first syllable).
It's an old joke: never ask a wizard to make you a sandwich. It works because 'make' has two ditransitive constructions (meaning it takes two objects, both without a preposition). The first is the usual dative construction, where the second object is the usual direct object, what is made, while the first object is the beneficiary or indirect object, who receives what is made. To disambiguate, the…
In X-Bar theory, what meaning do the X' nodes themselves represent? I (believe I) understand the meaning of the XP items: they are the constituent syntactic category phrases. The constituents of a sentence that have syntactic function are XPs (is that correct?) I also believe I understand the X items themselves, the heads of the XPs. It is the lexical item that gives the constituent it is in its…
I just saw this insightful and touching video by John Green where he makes the connection between 'to gather' and 'together'. One could say "let's gather at the bus stop" for instance, causing the together-ness. In the comments , people started going into this and found that this is similar in their language as well. German: "zu sammeln" and "zusammen" Polish: "zbierać" and "zebranie/zbieranina"…
I am learning about Hunt’s (1965) system of parsing writing into T-units (minimal terminable units) and clauses. In this system, a T-unit is, one main clause with all the subordinate clauses attached to it [if any] … An and between two main clauses would always go with the second clause, beginning it just as coordinating conjunctions so often begin the sentences of mature writers. Hunt (1965, p.…
Farsi does not distinguish between ث (soft 'th' in Arabic, like "think") and ذ (hard 'th' in Arabic, like "that"). A native Farsi speaker pronounces ث like the 's' in "sing" and ذ like the 'z' in "zoo". For example, a Farsi speaker would pronounce Arabic loan words like ثریا and ذوالفقار as as " S oraya" and " Z olfaqar" respectively. However, I've noticed some Persian words that are written using…
Okay, so I was just doing a bit of conlanging, and I was coming up with a verb ending /æɸ/. Because of the way I have begun this, /ɸ~ʍ/ are interchangeable. When I first tried saying /æʍ]/ I accidentally rounded the /æ/, which is 100% natural and to be expected. I am currently writing this rounded /æ/ as /æ̹/--it's the only thing I can do. This rounded /æ/ is honestly the most repulsive sound I…
Apologies in advance for any ignorance, I'm a non-linguist hoping to better understand the methods in the field (if any) to answer a question I have. In particular, I want to know when a word first appeared in a language tree. For instance, if we take the word "iron," I see that the earliest version in the Wiktionary ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iron#Etymology ) is from Proto-Celtic, derived…
In both Lao cuisine and Vietnamese cuisine there exists a noodle dish with a similar name. Lao ເຝີ (feu) and Vietnamese phở . Each Wikipedia article discusses the possibility of the dish/word being related to French pot-au-feu but the articles do not even mention each other. In looking for other sources you might find the Lao and Vietnamese dishes/words discussed but with no mention of the French.…
When a loanword enters a language, does it usually replace an existing native word or phrase? Or does it more often lead to an increase in the size of the language's vocabulary? Regarding Japanese's influence on English, most of the words are new words describing concepts that did not exist before, such as karaoke, kimono, and sushi, with only the occasional word replacing existing terms (tsunami…
The ablaut system was in Proto-Indo-European . It also is present in some English, German and Greek. Are there ablaut changes in romance languages such as Italian, French and Spanish?
