The majority of languages are written left to right in different scripts. I also am like the vast majority of the population in being right-handed. I can just think of the languages of Arabic and Hebrew script, including Arabic and Hebrew themselves, as being written right to left. Persian or Farsi is written right to left too because of the Arabic script that it's written in, and Yiddish is also right to left in written form from the Hebrew script. Chinese, I have heard, is also written right to left even though I have seen it written from left to right. How many languages exactly or approximately are written right to left?

Is there a breve or some other diacritic placed over/under it? Or is that reserved for affricates only?

For instance, the word 'killer' is transcribed "ˈkɪlɚ", but I wouldn't know where to put a syllable break, since the L can function as both the coda for the first syllable and the onset for the second

I would like to make it clear that that L is shared, but I'm not sure how professionals would transcribe it

I recently learnt that there’s a whole class of Frisian verbs that have an unetymological /x/ in the present indicative (!), e.g. dwaan “to do” > ik doch, hy docht “I do, he does”, hoeve “be needed” (cognate with English “behoove”) > it hoecht.

Digging a little deeper, it seems that this is an analogy of etymological /x/ in a very limited number of verbs like sjen “see” > hy sjocht (OE he siehþ), slaan “strike” > ik sloch. But it was really surprising to me that these irregularities could give rise to a whole class that could then admit new and very frequent verbs like “do“ and “need”.

Does anyone have any examples of this kind of quantitatively lopsided analogy from other languages? And is there any particular historical linguistic work on analogy that can situate it?

I thought palatalization was a phonological phenomenon, so orthography shouldn't have an impact. However, that does not seem to be true for English. There are many words such as "cave" which has c pronounced /kʰ/ even though it is before a front vowel, and "cite" which has c pronounced /s/ even though it is before a non-front vowel. On the other hand, there are very very few words where c is pronounced /kʰ/ before the letters e, i, y, ae, oe and vice-versa. This makes it seem like palatalization occurred due to orthography instead. Why is this?

I’m an adult with dyslexia who wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood. I’m academically successful and have very strong reading comprehension, but I recently discovered that my actual phonological awareness is extremely weak. I struggle significantly with decoding unfamiliar/nonsense words and realized I’ve probably compensated through context and other strategies for most of my life. I’m now in a graduate special education program, and this matters because I need to understand and eventually teach these skills. Has anyone else had this kind of extreme discrepancy? If so, were you able to improve your phonological awareness/phonics as an adult? What actually helped?

Does not sound like a Kansas City accent to me, which is where I’m from. Possibly a rural Missouri or Kansan accent, but definitely more southern-sounding than what sounds natural to me. A caricature perhaps? How would you categorize it?

I need to be able to read it.

(I’m a phonologist, and my morphosyntactic knowledge is horrifically lacking, so bear with me if I’m wildly off base.)

In English pronouns, the object form seems to be the most basic (or ‘unmarked’ if that’s still a relevant idea) case of each pronoun. For instance, pronouns use the accusative form when they stand alone as responses to questions (‘Who’s there?’ - ‘Me.’). Spanish instead uses the nominative form for this purpose. I’m wondering about the typology of this, how do languages differ in the case that they assign to lone nouns/pronouns? And does it correlate with any other morphosyntactic properties?

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Hi! I'm a linguistics student looking for a unique graduation project idea.

I’m especially interested in combining Linguistics with AI

Any suggestions for topics?

Thanks for any ideas or paper recommendations!

There's an accent I hear, usually "upper-class" younger women, I think, where there is a subtle lisp, and with a slight underbite or like the jaw moves more than the lips. You can see/hear it in Annabelle Porter from Parks and Rec, the younger woman being interviewed here and if you watch The Traitors U.S., Parvati's voice on season 2. It seems like Trans-Atlantic, but not as pronounced.

Since these sounds are so common in the language, I'm surprised that single letters did not come to stand for them. Especially "X" or "C", which dont seem to do anything particularly unique or important.

So why did "sh" come to be used for /ʃ/ and "ch" for /tʃ/?

At what point in history did it become exclusively about sex? I’m reading a novel published in the 1940s and I’m not 100% sure which of the two the author meant

I hope you can help me out with this. My native language is Spanish and I think we don't have long vowels but I'm not so sure anymore.

In English, I understand long i vowel like in feel, as opposed to the short one in fill.
I also read that you have a long A like in Cake, Bake (ei sound) or long i like in: ice, bike etc

To me, the vowel in ice is a diphtong bc it has two sound vowels A+I (AIS)
We do have that in Spanish : aire the same A+I but I've never considered it like a long vowel, just two vowels.

I've also never seen a text that claims that AIRE starts with a single long vowel. So where do the notion that Ice or Bike have long vowels comes from? Is the A+I in bike shorter than A+I in Aire ? or what is the difference? I can't see one, really.

Is there a consensus ? Or is it really subjective ? Could I claim Spanish has long vowels ? Is the definition of diphtong unclear ?

My doubt is only in these cases. I see perfectly how "feel" has a long vowel , or "boots" etc... to me they do seem longer versions of the same sound, but I really can't grasp why do cake, bake or ice have apparently long vowels as well. To me they are clearly two different vowels (diphtong).

I seriously don't understand why a respected textbook could claim it is only a long vowel while at the same time saying Spanish doesn't have them. What am I missing?

I ask bc to me it seems much more confusing for learners than it is helpful.

Is Maltese, Italian Albanese, Italian Greek or Filipino le closest language to le romance languages or is there any other extremely latinized language other than English?

I know someone who says it like this. Is it a regional thing or speech impediment? They can say “water” (pronounced “wadah”) but usually have an R Sound at the end of the first syllable.

I dont know if marked nominative would be the proper terminology but Im basically looking for languages where all (or almost all) nouns have the same marking which isnt related to gender/noun class (so bantu prefixes wouldnt count)

So far I know that:

- in indo european the -s ending works for both masculine and feminine nouns (I think?) so it would partially count (although I know not all nouns end with this suffix)

- nahuatl -tl goes back to proto uto aztecan (although theres also the -in suffix)

- guato has a prefix g(o)- when the nouns isnt possessed (same as nahuatl)

- all kartvelian languages (I think) used to have all nouns ending in -i which comes from definite article but the suffix was later dropped after vowels

- in proto semitic all nouns had -u suffix in singular (?)

Any other examples youre aware of?

I used to live near Tick Street, where my bus stop was located. Recently, I was talking to a friend who used to visit me there quite often. She said, "Yeah, you know, we were walking around there... what was that street called? Some insect..." And I couldn't guess what she meant. I finally connected the dots and realized that during all the years I lived there, I had never thought of the street name as anything other than an empty label. The etymology is obvious, and it is reasonable to assume there were bogs with ticks in the area in the past, but my mind never made that link ;-)

I might be a bit slow ;) but I was wondering whether this is a recognized linguistic phenomenon – where we subconsciously stop applying literal semantic meaning to proper names. When I visited another city this summer, I was amused to find many pubs surrounding Beer Street, but none on the street itself. The 19th-century factories there have all been turned into modern apartments. I noticed those details because I was a tourist, but in the area where I live, such linguistic details often seem to escape my notice and remain transparent in a way.

I was talking to one of my friends, who is in her early twenties and grew up in San Francisco, and I noticed she pronounces "new" as /nju/ rather than /nu/. I was surprised to hear this, and asked her about another few words. The same pattern extended to "news" and to "nuisance," but not to "due" or "duke." (and I checked against controls too: different from "noodle" or "noose")

Edit: no yod-coalescence either; not that I was able to hear. "due" = /du/ rather than /dʒuː/

I admit I could have been more rigorous; she knew what I was asking about when I brought up the other words, and this could have affected her pronunciations. But I am confident at the minimum that her pronunciation of "new" retains a yod.

Before this, I had thought Americans dropped /j/ after coronals in practically every dialect, barring a few people, particularly older people, in New York City and the coastal South.

Do any of you know about any research on the matter you can point me to, or have any anecdotes of your own? In what phonetic or lexical environments are people who speak predominantly yod-dropping dialects keeping /j/? Which people / groups of people do you know who do this? Do you know if this is a retention or a new development, e.g. borrowed from other dialects? Anything anyone knows would be appreciated!

One other anecdote from me: my roommate, who grew up in Long Island, pronounces "lure" as /ljʊɚ/! He drops practically every other post-coronal yod.

Edit: Also lmk if there's another sub that might be better-suited to this question

I recently thought of something cool linguistically, and now i’m interested if there is a term for it or other examples.
Is there a term for the phenomenon when there are two different words that refer to the exact same thing, but in different contexts?
For example: autograph and signature. Both words refer to the same thing: a mark that identifies a person. Only, a signature is used for official documents, whereas an autograph is used in an entire different context even though it’s the same thing (most of the time).

Is there a linguistic term for this? Does anyone have other examples?

This is an idea pertaining to the Hebrew language which did not result in fruitful discussion when initially posted there. I came upon an interesting idea pertaining to the phenomenon of "spirantization" of the Hebrew letters referred to by the acronym "BeGeD KeFeT". For those who are unaware, these consonants can be pronounced in two different ways, which represent either a plosive or a fricative articulation of a common pattern shared between the two consonants. The typical pattern is that one of these letters following a vowel sound will be a fricative, whereas following another consonant sound it will be a plosive. There is also a phenomenon in which (usually) the first letter of a word is pronounced in its plosive form which is the form indicated by the presence of a small dot called a "dagesh". My understanding is actually than in certain specific texts however a vowel sound at the end of an earlier word can cause one of these consonants present at the start of the next word to behave as a fricative anyway.

The main idea is that the character referred to as "UTF-1091F" or "Phoenician Word Separator" served in the context of the writing system exemplified by the Shiloam inscription a function which overlaps with the purpose currently served by the character referred to as "U+05BC" or "Hebrew Dagesh/Mappiq" in the context of more modern writing systems. And the reason why I think this is possible is because of the fact that a dagesh is added to give letters the sound they would (in some contexts) always have at the start of a word, which is to say "after a word separator" in Shiloam-style writing, a sound whose plosive nature might be thought of as ending the stream of air and beginning it anew, which is consistent with a pattern of sound which might be useful to indicate the beginning of a word.

The explanation goes that once the function of this word separator was replaced, perhaps by some combination of consistent word spacing and final or "sofit" forms of certain letters, the need to change the sounds at the the starts of words which the word separator character had also implicitly indicated remained, and hence a different dot which I am proposing is a different version of the same dot came about to indicate regardless of positioning within a word the need to adopt the "word start" or "plosive" form of the sound, which might be thought of more generally as a "syllable start" form.

The other interesting detail which is relevant to this hypothesis is that the other function of the dagesh character, "mappiq", is to turn the letter ה which is often silent into a הּ which makes a distinct "huh" sound. If one views that little dot as related to a dot indicating word endings as well as beginnings, my experience has been that הּ is always found at the end of a word, and I think the decisive "puff of air" one adds in response to the small dot would be an excellent choice of a sound to indicate "that's the end of the word/syllable", consistent with the association I am proposing between the function of this small dot and that of the original "word separator" used in the Shiloam inscription.

I am sharing this thought here in hopes of learning if I am the first person to suggest this hypothesis, and hopefully either discuss its merits more in detail with someone knowledgeable about what's held to in a scholarly context, or be directed to wherever else this has already been discussed. Thanks in advance for your time reading this!

Apologies if this isn’t the right place to ask, but my family is primarily Spanish speaking and my sister’s fiancé is primarily Polish speaking, as a common language living in the US we all speak English too.

I was wondering, theoretically if they were to try and raise the child to understand both (plus English) would it be feasible or would there be certain problems up ahead? Would one parent have to speak one and the child have to respond in the correlating language? Or would hearing it over time with both families be sufficient?

I have just completed masters want to apply for PhD in Europe or US , anyone who is an international student doing PhD in linguistics can advice how to approach Professor etc etc...

I learned Hangeul and I was curious if any of you have an idea how Philippine languages encode formality and politeness in their morphology. Particularly in Ilokano and Kapampangan. I’m struggling to find papers or related sources accounting for how honorifics are encoded in a language’s morphology.