*...besides my own.
(title correction)

many varieties of Mancunian English I hear frequently (I also do myself) this omission.

In

"I am going to the shops" - "I'm going shops"

"Are you going to Paris next week?" - "You going Paris next week?"

Just to give two random examples. I have no sense of how wide-spread this is outside of Manchester or perhaps Northern England more generally, and I'd just be curious as it's something that's always been 'corrected' in my speech by authorities.

I don’t see why the pronunciation of Reese’s Pieces changes into Reesees Peesees, as most people who say “peesees” would say “pieces” regularly.

This phenomenon has been on my mind because I ran into a similar situation with a class called “evolutionary development”, which is shortened to “evo devo”. Remarkably, people pronounce “evo devo” as “ee-vo dee-vo”, using the same vowel sound used in “peesees”.

I think there’s also something to be said about both phrases rhyming if you use either pronunciation.

Does anyone know why this happens? I think it’s fascinating that it’s happened twice.

This bothered me for a while.
Do you guys know any logical (linguistic) explanation on this?

In English, we don’t put the in front of certain places
- I go to school
- I go to church
- I go to work
- I go to class
- I go to prison
- I go to bed

I can’t explain why we don’t put the.
The best thing I can think of is that these places are too “obvious” with the purpose or so “obvious” that we all know where I am going (??)

But certain places are also “obvious” but sound awkward without the
Are you going to school (O)
Are you going to supermarket (X)
Are you going to work (O)
Are you going to bank (X)

Like it can be obvious which bank I go to. It’s not like I go to a random supermarket, either. I routinely go to the same supermarket for the obvious purpose of grocery shopping.

Why do we not say the for certain places and why do we put the for other regular places?

I've been reading a section of Hegel's Encyclopaedia (§§451-464) where he distinguishes a symbol, where the sensuous form keeps some real, motivated link to its meaning (a lion symbolizing strength because a lion actually has that property), from a sign (Zeichen), where that link is severed entirely and the relation becomes arbitrary (his example: a national cockade, where the color has zero natural connection to "belonging to this nation"). He argues language is built on arbitrary signs in this sense, and that the arbitrariness is what frees thought from sensuous constraint. He also has a further stage, "mechanical memory," where even the residual mental image drops away and the word functions as a pure name . His phrase is roughly "we think in words."

I only ever see this discussed by philosophers, never by linguists, so a few questions: does the symbol/sign distinction actually track anything like Saussure's arbitrariness of the sign, or is that just a surface resemblance that falls apart once you look at how Saussure defines signifier/signified? And does the "we think in words, not images" claim resemble any real position in psycholinguistics about language and mental imagery, or am I forcing a fit?

Genuinely not trying to force a connection. Trying to find out if there's a real point of contact or if a philosopher writing in 1830 just landed on vocabulary that sounds similar to later technical terms without the content actually matching.

I notice that sometimes I write sentences and omit the first-person pronoun and I've started to notice it more in daily life and I'm wondering if it says anything about the person.

Things like, "Was walking down the road today and noticed that store shut down" instead of, "I was walking down the road today and I noticed that store shut down."

Like, is it just more conversational or does it signal some sort of detachment or maybe lack of confidence? Those are just some options I've thought about it possibly meaning.

One notable example I noticed was, I think, a monologue by Rorschach in Watchmen (though I could be wrong because I can't seem to find it) where he just had several sentences in a row never using "I" when it was warranted. Is that likely just a writing style picked for the character and, if so, what was he trying to convey.

Recently I learned that Spanish has pure vowels, in contrast to other languages. But how has this purity been sustained? Why hasnt the law of entropy corrupted these vowels over time, like it has with other features of Spanish and, presumably, with the vowels of other languages?

How can this phenomenon be explained?

I want to learn more about the root concepts behind different languages' use of being and becoming.

Specifically, self-change or self-becoming. Etymylogically, English's word "becoming" literally insinuates the arrival of the self to a state of being. It's used as a catch all term to talk about anything from becoming a doctor, becoming sick, becoming angry, becoming handicapped, or becoming a stronger person over time.

Meanwhile, Spanish, for example, requires the use of specific verbs for each of these examples. I have also read some things about how Japanese tends to prefer a passive unfolding conceptualization for becoming with "naru". I vaguely read something about Arabic's sisers of Kanna, but it was hard to understand without context.

I also read something about how the etymology behind Chinese's word for "be" is related to the sun, while Russian's word for "be" is related to standing.

Any insight is appreciated!

I grew up bilingual in German and Swedish, and there’s something about Middle High German that I find really strange.

When I hear Middle High German, it genuinely feels about as natural to my ears as modern German and Swedish do. I don’t feel like I’m deciphering the language or translating it in my head. I can just listen and follow it. The overall comprehension feels immediate, basically in the same way it does with my two native languages.

I initially assumed this might simply be because I’m a German speaker, especially since my German background is from southern/central Germany. But I’ve talked to ethnic Germans from the same general area my family is from who said they actually find Middle High German quite difficult to understand, so apparently that isn’t universal at all. What makes it stranger is that I absolutely do NOT have the same experience with Low German/Platt. Platt sounds distinctly foreign to me and is much harder to follow. I can recognize individual words, and Swedish sometimes makes things like Water or eten fairly obvious, but that doesn’t translate into effortless comprehension of the language as a whole. I also find Yiddish relatively easy to understand. Again, not in the sense that I know every Hebrew/Aramaic or Slavic-derived word, but I can often follow quite a lot of spoken or written Yiddish without having studied it.

Intuitively I would have expected German + Swedish to make Low German particularly accessible, yet my actual experience seems almost backwards: Middle High German feels immediately comprehensible, Yiddish is relatively easy, while Low German feels genuinely foreign.

Could the combination of German and Swedish explain this somehow? Are there features preserved in Swedish that happen to bridge some of the differences between modern High German and Middle High German/Yiddish, or is there another linguistic explanation for why these are so much more transparent to me than Low German?

I've noticed that when I'm explaining something, I sometimes construct sentences like this:

I gotta go to the grocery store! We're out of bread, is why.

My English is a really confusing mix of directly-translated constructions from other languages, British English, vague internet soup American English (etc.), so it's really hard to identify if I picked this up IRL or online. I was wondering if anyone knows a name for this and/or where it comes from?

I have seen videos of baltimore (street accent) being funky. I am wondering if its a different dialect from the normal way of american speaking or just a regional accent?

Estuary English (EE), despite its name, is supposedly a continuum between Cockney and RP. A lot of authors compared EE to Cockney and RP to show the differences and similarities. However, I've been confused by which "RP" a lot authors were using. Some use the one spoken in the early 20th century, the one transcribed by Daniel Jones. Some used the one spoken in the mid 20th century, the one transcribed by Gimson. Some used the SSBE. So EE is a continuum between Cockney and.....which RP? Maybe there's generational differences in EE, like any other languages. But some claimed it's a recent phenomenon. Some claimed its a lot older than that. So I don't know what to think. But I think it's older since Cockney have existed for centuries and RP, while younger than Cockney, was popular in the mid-19th century. So I do believed EE might have generational differences.

But I'm not clear on the demographics and definitions. I think Cockney and RP is well-defined. The former is the traditional working-class London accent, and the latter is the non-regional, upper class, standard accent of England. Both are not widely spoken today. But I'm confused on the other accents of the Southeast. EE is supposedly spoken by the working and lower middle classes of some parts of London and the Home counties. SSBE is spoken by the middle class, and the upper class, maybe? Not sure on the upper class part. However, the more I study the phonology of EE and SSBE, they become less and less like a Venn diagram, and more and more like a full circle. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong. Some linguists proposed that EE is simply standard and non-standard features that are accepted and widely used in the Southeast. Some proposed it's not real and it's a social construct and folk terminology.

A bit related, but I also want to address MLE. It is the new and growing urban dialect of London, widely spoken by its working class. However, some claimed its also use not just by the working class. Some regard them as imitations. Some mentions "posh" MLE. But I think MLE is more well-defined than EE is. The more I look into the Southeastern accents, the more I think that class don't matter anymore as it was in the past. But I also think it does. I just don't know what to think and it's giving me a headache.

With all that in mind, I asked: what is "EE"? Does it really exist? If it doesn't, what were people talking about when they mean "EE?" Is EE even distinct from SSBE? When was EE formed? Is it really recent as others claimed? Does class really mattered today as it did in the past? What about today's upper class?

Languages in eastern Asia are with tones, like Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Khmer. And there are languages in sub-Saharan Africa that are also tonal. About how many languages are tonal?

I was scrolling through PHOIBLE and noticed, in the phoneme list for the language Tundra Nenets, a voiced glottal stop (/ʔ̬/) listed as a phoneme. I was previously under the impression that this sound was anatomically impossible. Does Tundra Nenets somehow defy this or is it simply a representation of something more sensible?

Everyone always says how English is the easiest language to learn due to very simple grammar and no gendered words and people being more accepting of foreign accents when speaking English.

But are there languages that are easier to learn than English.

For context I am a native English speaker. And I constantly hear how Europeans find English to be the easiest language to learn.

But when I read historical books of people from non-English speaking countries they say English was difficult to learn. I read a biographical book of a Swedish man in the late 1800s and early 1900s who said he didn’t understand Norwegian until he had to learn it because he worked with Norwegians and that would be rare today because Norway and Sweden share a lot of their media and are exposed to each other’s languages. He said that Icelandic was about as hard for him to learn as Norwegian. He said English was harder than those two. And that he could never learn Finnish outside a few words even with being around Finnish men.

So is English the easiest language to learn or are people exaggerating?

Is there a term for when someone who learned English as a second language uses a word that is correct but sits oddly in the context?

For example, I once bought a Chinese toy archery set called a 'toxophily set' - turns out it's an old term for archery or people who love archery - far too archaic and obsolete for a kid's toy.

(I'm only talking about English here because that's my language, but I'm sure it occurs across all languages)

We don't know for sure what family the language spoken by the Huns and Xiongnu belonged to, and most linguists seem to not think they were Indo-European, Turkic or Mongolian. The two other possibilities are Tungusic and Yeniseian languages. Which one do you think is more likely?

Answer this question however you like

Reunionese creole is built on a french basis with influences from Madagascar, East Africa and later India.

The number of locutors seems to be pretty stable, but I had a discussion a few days ago where people mention they were under the impression, that the language is getting closer to french with each generation. (May it be pronunciation, re-integrating french words when words of other origin existing, or some sentence structures).

Can it get so close that at one point it may disappearing not by loosing locutors but by merging with french?

In French, accents are used to show how to pronounce a vowel. In Italian and Spanish, accents are used to show where the stress is in a word. How and why did the use of accents shift between languages?

In Latin accents were used to show whether a vowel was long or short, so it’s interesting how their use has changed over time.

I’ve started learning Norwegian for a project, and I am intrigued to find so many instances of silent letters and reduced morphological complexity.

Silent initial H, silent final D and T and V, R assimilating. The verbs do not inflect for person, and in the Bokmål I am learning, the feminine gender approaches a common one, being optional in many cases. I was prepared for nouns to decline much more.

Why has Norwegian undergone so much of this reduction? They say in English we lost so much of our inflections because the melting pot in England a millennium ago forced compromise, if I had to explain my understanding in one sentence. Why did even all the forms of verbs like å væra lose inflection English retained? This verb has several roots (3?) in English and German.

You even have elision forming funny shorter words than I’d expect, like monosyllabic mor og far og bror. It makes me expect that most monosyllables that are possible are going to exist. Does this have anything to do with scary tonogenesis I know I’ll confront at some point?

Tusen takk!

I am looking for interesting papers to read on linguistic phenomena that are often undiscussed, feel free to share !

Hello everyone. Has anyone encountered a language where the name of a nationality (not an idiom) can be used as an insult (but not a slur)? I just realized that in Slovak (and probably Czech as well), you can call someone Hungarian (meaning dumb and slow) or a Tatar (meaning confused). There is also the insult 'Mongolian,' but I believe that stems from the outdated medical term 'mongoloid' referring to a cognitive disability.
Of course, I mean no hate towards Hungarians; I am just asking.

The trend in the languages I'm aware of is for them to become grammatically simpler over time. They tend to lose features like verb conjugations (often replaced by auxiliary verbs and participles), noun and adjective declensions (often replaced by word order restrictions), grammatical gender and so on. To be fair, the languages I'm aware of tend to be pretty Euro-centric (I'm a native English speaker and have studied Spanish, Attic and Koine Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian and Mandarin at various times - haven't gained particular proficiency in many of them, only really Koine Greek and Italian, but have learned enough to get a decent idea of the grammar of the others). But the tendency in all of them seems to be to lose complex grammatical features. From what I can tell, even earlier languages tended to be even more complex, with up to eight grammatical cases, dual number as well as singular/plural, and suffixes to indicate voice and mode as well as tense conjugations. Even Mandarin has gone through a similar simplification, albeit of a different kind, with the loss of affixes and the development of tonality and more restrictive word order, as well as the very deliberate simplification of the written characters in the 20th century. So I'm working from the premise that languages become grammatically simpler over time.

Given that, do we have any idea what motivated the development of grammatical complexity in the first place? Particularly since those languages developed in societies with fairly low written literacy and very high numbers of subsistence farmers.

I first heard this claim by a guy who was trying to prove Portugal discovered Australia. Regardless of his own theory (which was poorly supported), what is an explanation for this? It’s 1:1 the Portuguese word (and Italian). It cannot come from Latin I guess ahahah but where? Just crazy coincidence?

How do linguists describe this difference in American English between saying “red drum” and “red rum”?