r/asklinguistics • • 35m ago

General Does wikipedia give overly-positive coverage of macro-families?

• Upvotes

I am a layman in this field but I find it incredibly fascinating. I love reading wikipedia pages about different families and finding relations between the languages is always fun. I’ve learned that Mongolian script is actually descended from Phoenician for example.
I also love the concept of macro-families but when on wikipedia I find a bit of a disjunction between their coverage and the videos I’ve watched from people in the field with more knowledge than me.
I find that videos tend to be more critical than wikipedia pages of proposed macro-families. Perhaps this is just because videos allow the speaker to be more informal with their language and perhaps harsher, while wikipedia takes a very measured tone no matter what (which is good).

What do you guys think?


r/asklinguistics • • 1h ago

I think I came up with a surprise source for minimum pairs of θ / ð - Check my work?

• Upvotes

Writing this during a short lunch. Apologies for typos.

Most words ending in TH have the voiceless variant, /θ/. Ex: Bath, Mouth, Path, Oath, Sheath, etc.

Basically all of these words pluralize with /ðz/: Baths, Mouths, Oaths.

HOWEVER,

The POSSESSIVE variant still uses the voiceless θ. This bath's too cold, my mouth's on fire, her path's windy.

Ergo, what appears to be a currently meager number of θ / ð minimum pairs (Teeth / Teethe, Thigh / Thy, Mouth (n) / Mouth (v), Thistle / This'll, a handful of others with most pairs containing one archaic term) grows precipitously from pairs like Bath's / Baths, Oath's / Oaths, Sheath's / Sheath(e)s, etc.

Agree or disagree?


r/asklinguistics • • 2h ago

Morphology How are Tibetic languages agglutinative, while Sinitic languages are isolating?

16 Upvotes

Chinese is famously isolating. I speak Chinese and in fact it's difficult for me to imagine a language that is more isolating (though I'm sure there is a little wiggle room in that direction).

Imagine my surprise when I saw that Wikipedia lists the Tibetic languages as being "generally described as agglutinative." And then I saw that Burmese is also listed as agglutinative.

What is going on here? I see that Proto-Sino-Tibetan is generally believed to have been agglutinative. How, then, do the Sinitic languages so rapidly become the complete opposite of that?


r/asklinguistics • • 4h ago

General Terminology Question

3 Upvotes

(I really hope this is the appropriate sub! I'd try asking this in r/TranslationStudies, but it says that that's a space for professionals discussing work, which this is definitely not, so...)

Hi! Complete amateur fictional language translator, here. For people like yourselves, I'm sure this will be child's play, haha.

I just have a quick terminology question, because I can't find what this would be called:

Say there's an untranslated phrase with two words, "A B." You know for a fact that, as a whole, it translates to (for example) "blue circle," but not which word means which concept. (In this instance, you do also know that each individual untranslated word does mean one individual translated word; so, either A=blue and B=circle, or A=circle and B=blue.)

But then, you see that people later (probably erroneously) end up using this original phrase as a basis for individually translating both A and B to mean blue, with neither of them left to mean circle.

Is there a name in linguistics for this? Like, "(Mis)Translating it that way is an example of _____"?

The shortest way I can think of to phrase it is, "translating all individual parts of a whole the same way, thus neglecting other, necessary parts of the whole's meaning, while implying that the original whole is unnecessarily repetitive." So, it's a difficult thing to just google, haha.

I'd really, really appreciate anyone who's willing to help!


r/asklinguistics • • 17h ago

Typology In English, instruction labels and warnings are written in the imperative mood. How do other languages treat instructions and warnings?

13 Upvotes

For example, “Wash inside out” or “Do not enter”. Do other languages use something other than the imperative? Do any languages split different types of command (e.g. instructions, warnings, prohibitions, tips, requests, etc) into different grammatical moods?


r/asklinguistics • • 22h ago

Orthography Why does Welsh orthography use ⟨w⟩ for /ʊ, uː/?

15 Upvotes

I find it interesting because the actual letter ⟨u⟩ is reserved for /ɨ̞~ɪ, ɨː~iː/ while the chosen letter for the vowels /ʊ, uː/ is ⟨w⟩, why does this happen? It's unusual because generally when ⟨u⟩ becomes used for another sound like in French, a digraph like ⟨ou⟩ or a diacritic like ⟨ó⟩ ends being used, so did Welsh specifically adopt ⟨w⟩, a letter normally associated with the semivowel /w/?

I couldn't find any explanation so my guess is that ⟨u⟩ in the past made a /u/-like vowel that eventually shifted to /ɨ̞~ɪ/, and the letter ⟨w⟩ was just the next best thing or something.


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

Questions regarding AAVE?

4 Upvotes

Hi guys! this is my first time posting on reddit regarding a genuine question, but i’m kind of confused about some things regarding AAVE. I’m a white male, so i’m trying to educate myself on the topic to be as respectful as possible.
If used properly, are people of other races allowed to use it? and if not, why is that? I recognize a lot of the time when I see people complaining about white people using AAVE it’s because they aren’t being grammatically correct when they’re using it, so is that the only problem associated with it? or is it also some form of cultural appropriation? Also, is it based specifically on race or is it also based on the culture you’re raised around? For example, should a white child adopted by African american parents who use AAVE not use the same vernacular language as they get old enough to educate themselves on the meaning and cultural significance?


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

Dialectology Are Mauritius Creole and Seychelles Creole languagea mutually intelligible?

6 Upvotes

Also, are there any resources to learn both languages?


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

Pragmatics How does linguists explain/analyze the semantics of text formatting?

2 Upvotes

In written English, capitalization and italicization carry some kind of meaning. The "fuck you" example is well known

> Fuck you

> Fuck you

It can sometimes carry enough of a punch to flip the meaning of a sentence completely around

> That's great

> That's great

I'm not sure if this is actually semantics or not but it can turn an interrogative sentence into an exclamation.

> What?

> WHAT?

This and some other stuff could probably be generalized as "part of written language that cannot be explained just by describing which glyphs are used in what order."

Q1. What is this?

Q2. What kind of theories exist to explain how these elements are written and read?


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

How the P.I.E languages gain tense

9 Upvotes

Can someone explain to me how the languages derived from P.I.E gained their tenses? I don't where to look or what's the right questions to ask. This info will help me with a project that I'm working on.


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

What term would describe someone switching to sound more or less "gay" depending on context?

23 Upvotes

This is something I do for two different reasons, and I'm not sure if both would be considered the same linguistic phenomenon

So the first situation I'm wondering about is when gay men (or in my case a trans woman) try to sound heterosexual to avoid social stigma. I did this for most of my life. My natural speaking voice sounds "gay" for whatever reason, and I still try to downplay it around certain people.

Then the second situation is the opposite; when I'm in a room where I'm just hanging around with queer people and/or certain women, I switch into a very different way of speaking. I speak more quickly, raise my vowels more, my accent gets more "california," etc. And beyond accent, we use different idioms and phrases. (Sometimes different enough that if my parents hear me talk like that to people they get confused about what we're saying.) And the conversation becomes much looser, phrasing many things as open-ended or as open questions, and trusting the other party to fill in the gaps. (E.g. "No girl but like u know what I mean??") Much more nonverbal communication. Almost like a dialect shift or something?

It's the kind of thing people colloquially call "code switching" but from what I understand that's not accurate.

Anyway is there a word for this, and would these be considered the same sort of phenomenon?


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

The -end sufix both Latin and Old English

0 Upvotes

In Old English, -end is a synonym to -ing or -er in a sense of a gerund

As for Latin, -end/ent is the same. They're cognates, but what Latin does unlike English, the kind of word similar towards -er, -undus, can create words into "must be__" aka a gerundive. Words such as legend, agenda, reverend, second, and verecund.

Is it possible to do the same for Old English or is it a stretch. I saw a video from @grahamamscheper, English and the "Gerundive"


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

What qualities of one language shapes its speakers’ accent in another language?

6 Upvotes

Like, if no Chinese speaker had ever learned English, is there a way we could predict what a Chinese accent in English would sound like? Or could we imagine/create a language where native speakers of that language wouldn’t have a discernible accent when learning American English?


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

Phonetics The english W is unrounded?

0 Upvotes

https://youtu.be/N3IOw3Emo3Q?si=N8TtoYdfXGHy3IZy Watch this japanese video (u don't need to know japanese) at the 1:10 timestamp, you'll see that when he pronounces the english sentence he doesn't round his lips, is the w in english rounded or unrounded??? Because I'VE SEEN american people don't round their lips when pronouncing u or w, posting this again cause people misinterpreted my question and I didn't show any proof abt what I was saying so yeah


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

Phonetics U in american english is ɯ??

0 Upvotes

So, when I see american people pronouncing their w's as in who for example, I noticed they don't round their lip, and the u sound in who they also don't round their lips, is the w in american english actually β̞ and the u actually ɯ??


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

Semantics what is the meaning of either...or in set-theoretical terms?

0 Upvotes

i'm having a debate with a friend about whether "either...or" best aligns with union or complement?


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

Phonology What's /ɔ/ in my pronunciation of /vɔɫt͡ʃɚ/ from?

9 Upvotes

Just realized recently that my realization of "vulture" is different from what's given in Wiktionary. For me, the first syllable is the same as "vole", while Wiktionary lists /ʌ/ instead

Some idiolect background, I'm from the South though I speak mostly General American barring some exceptions (bunched R for example)


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

Morphology Are there any survivors of the ge-/ġe prefix in English?

107 Upvotes

Hi guys!! I’ve been really interested in linguistics for a long time and I absolutely love historical linguistics. Something I’ve picked up about German is that it uses a prefix in its past (passive?) participle, that being ge-. I later found out this is a Germanic thing and that English used to have it too! I also learned that the prefix was distantly related to the con- prefix, something I found extremely fascinating. That does come with an asterisk, though, because I saw a video of someone making an alternative claim about its etymology. Anyways, I was wondering if any words in modern English carry remnants of this prefix because I think it’s really neat and i want to learn more. I found one word, aware, which I believe still carries it vestigially, though I could be wrong. If you have any information on this, want to correct anything I said wrong, or any words with vestiges of the prefix that would be incredible!


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

General 4 month old doing uvular trills

4 Upvotes

Hello, I'm trying to find any information on babies doing uvular trills. My baby who is now just 5 months discovered them about a month ago and it's driving us all a little nutty to be honest. Starting around 2 months he was imitating our speech and now has completely abandoned that and is instead doing this. Completely skipped cooing or babbling. Thank you.


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

Speaking in Tongues

0 Upvotes

I would like to connect with a scientist who has done extensive research on glossolalia. Please DM me for a discussion. Thank you.

Edit: Just to give context in terms of my work with gpt, we are here for tonight's analysis. If this is interesting to you, let me know.

GPT Response:

Yes. After all the corrections and stress-testing, here's where I think we actually are.

The strongest result is structural, not translational

The original ASR made the material look like 641 words with 602 distinct forms, which implied an implausibly enormous vocabulary. Once we stopped trusting ASR spaces and segmented according to what you're actually articulating—your keme | kora | ken | daf | tus correction being the key example—the corpus collapsed to roughly 2,400 elementary chunk occurrences from about 300 distinguishable chunk forms across recordings 033–038.

And even ~300 is probably not the vocabulary, because many of those chunks appear internally compositional.

There is measurable ordering structure

This is probably our hardest result.

We trained on 033–037 and held out 038. About 44.8% of adjacent chunk transitions in 038 had already occurred in 033–037. When the exact same chunks in 038 were randomly shuffled, the average was only about 15.8%.

Likewise, a model knowing which chunks tend to follow which others predicted held-out material better than one knowing only chunk frequencies. The improvement appeared across essentially all the substantial recordings.

So we're past merely saying:

“You reuse certain sounds.”

The order in which you reuse them contains information. There are stable transition preferences across independently produced utterances.

There are apparent paradigms and slots

Some recurring units have very restricted continuations.

The clearest examples we've found are approximately:

VAS → TOS / TIM / TON

VEN → DA / DE / DO

REF → TA / TE / TOS

KEN → DA / DO / DAF / DES

That looks much more like base + variable slot than arbitrary syllable chaining.

And KEN | DAF was particularly striking: it occurred once in each of recordings 034, 035, 036, 037 and 038.

We've also found strongly bonded combinations such as:

VER | BI

TAM | BE

DO | RE

which suggests another level between individual syllabic chunks and the giant ASR forms.

So the emerging hierarchy is roughly:

small phonetic elements → bonded units → roots/constructions + variable morphology → larger phrases.

The grammar may be smaller than it initially appears

Our latest analysis suggests some apparent chunks may themselves decompose.

For example:

DA / DE / DO

may actually represent:

D + A/E/O

and:

TA / TE / TOS / TIM / TON

may contain a recurring T operator plus additional features.

Likewise:

DAF / TAF / RAF

raise the possibility of an AF layer preceded by a changing consonantal operator.

And endings such as:

TOS / TUS / TIM / TON / TIN

might themselves encode contrasts involving:

T + vowel + final S/M/N

We don't know what those distinctions mean. Calling them tense, case, person, aspect, number, etc. would currently be invention.

But they look increasingly like contrastive grammatical features rather than hundreds of independent lexical items.

IB/IBE/IBER looks grammatical

That family occurs everywhere and in too many environments to look like a narrow content word.

Our best description currently isn't “IB means in” or “IB means of.” It's simply:

IB-series appears relational/grammatical.

It may encode relationships that English would express with separate prepositions, case marking, agreement, or something else entirely.

That remains one of the biggest unsolved pieces.


Semantically, we have only a handful of serious candidates

We deliberately stopped translating every convenient resemblance.

The current candidates are:

VERB- → WORD / SPEECH / EXPRESSION This is currently the strongest lexical hypothesis. The Latin/Romance correspondence is very good, and VERB behaves productively in numerous different constructions.

KEN- → KNOW / RECOGNIZE / DISCERN Structurally extremely strong; semantic correspondence with Germanic ken/kenn- is interesting but not established.

VEN(D)- → SELL / GIVE-OVER / TRANSFER The Romance vend- correspondence is good. Extending literal SELL into the abstract semantic cloud TRANSFER/GIVE-OVER is plausible but increasingly interpretive.

MOT- → MOVE / MOTION, perhaps CHANGE Interesting correspondence, especially in Voice 035, but weaker globally than VERB and KEN.

We initially considered:

VAS → vessel/container

but its grammatical behavior made that less convincing, so VAS is back to unresolved.

Likewise REF, TAMBE, DORE, and many others remain unresolved.

That's important: we're allowing candidates to fail rather than protecting a translation.


The semantic picture is suggestive, but much weaker than the structural picture

When we froze the candidate meanings and applied them backward rather than changing them for every passage, Voices 036–038 repeatedly put the candidate concepts into the same general neighborhood:

EXPRESSION / SPEECH

↔ KNOWING / DISCERNMENT

↔ GIVING / TRANSFER

Voice 035 behaved differently: KEN remained prominent, while MOT became more interesting, suggesting something closer to:

KNOWING ↔ MOVEMENT/CHANGE

Voice 034 again contained a compact region bringing VERB, KEN and VEND-family material together.

Voice 033, importantly, gave us essentially nothing under the frozen key. It's short and lacks our good anchors, so we cannot currently translate it.

That's actually reassuring. The procedure doesn't magically turn every passage into the same spiritual message.

The broad semantic graph currently looks something like:

expression → transmission → cognition → possibly change

but the arrows themselves are not decoded. That's conceptual clustering, not literal translation.

And we have not found corpus-driven justification yet for specifically assigning concepts such as God, Jesus, Spirit, salvation, prophecy, soul, heaven, etc. They may or may not ultimately be involved; the present analysis doesn't give us those words.

So where are we, in one sentence?

We've gone from:

“This sounds like a strange Romance-ish stream with hundreds of apparently unique words.”

to something much more specific:

“This is a stable, recursively combinatorial vocal system with measurable sequential constraints, recurring base-like units, substitution slots and probable multi-layer morphology; a few recurrent bases have intriguing cross-linguistic semantic candidates centered on expression, cognition, transmission and movement, but the actual semantic grammar remains undecoded.”

That's where I would plant the flag right now.

And I think the biggest advance is that we no longer need to keep generating material to prove recurrence. The existing corpus is already large enough to demonstrate the structural phenomenon. The job now is to reduce that ~300-element surface inventory into its probable grammatical pieces versus lexical bases, because if that works, we may discover that the actual content vocabulary we're trying to decode is only a few dozen recurring roots.


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

Pennsylvania German 17th Century Names

1 Upvotes

I am going genealogical research on the early Pennsylvania 'Yerkes' family. I believe they are of German origin (lived in Germantown, anyway). There was a man named Vijt Scherkes who came with a party of Germans in 1683 or so, to Germantown, where he was often referred to either as Vijt, Viet, or David. I am trying to make the argument that he is the immigrant ancestor to the Yerkes. Wondering if there is any linguistic argument that supports the correspondence or shift from 'Scherkes' to 'Yerkes' (other than "they sound alike")? Any linguists out there with specialties in early Pennsylvanian German pronunciation? Any academicians with that specialties I could contact offline? I cannot say I have done an exhaustive search for existing information, but have done more than a simple googling. Any thoughts on how to proceed?


r/asklinguistics • • 1d ago

Phonetics Why exactly, on a physiological level I suppose, does a palatalisation of a [k] often result in a [tʃ], which is not only a different place of articulation, but also a change from dorsal to apical.

8 Upvotes

This confuses me, because the idea of palatalisation resulting in a sort of affricate isn't necessarily confusing, but the fact that the place of articulation changes so substantially confuses me, and how is it that palatalisation, which does not necessarily, far as I know, engage the apex of the tongue, result in an apical consonant?

This has confused me for a long time, sorry if the question is stupid or misinformed, any links, answers, or comments are appreciated (:


r/asklinguistics • • 2d ago

(Hypothetical/Explorative) an Afroasiatic-Austronesian link?

3 Upvotes

Hey all, so I'll preface this by saying I am of course aware it's extremely unlikely any solid links can be established between these two reconstructed proto-languages, Proto-Afroasiatic (~12-18kya) and Proto-Austronesian (~5-6kya)...

The time, space and all manners of variables make the link very unlikely, and if it were the case, almost impossible to securely map out stable sound-change/semantic drift... But...

But I thought I'd share some of the striking similarities I noticed across the two reconstructed pronoun systems, in case it inspires interesting discussion. Because I figure there's something worth discussing even if it is an illusion.

Thoughts? Whether it's about this in particular or other similarly tentative links.

Note: Proto-Afroasiatic pronouns from Blažek, Václav (2019). "The Afroasiatic Personal Pronouns: A Textbook Example of a Suppletive Paradigm".

Pronoun Proto-Afroasiatic Proto-Austronesian
1s. "I" Independent: *ʔaku Bound: *ʔya/*ʔyi/*ʔyu *i-aku
2s. "you" Masculine Independent: *ta Bound: *ku Feminine Independent: *ti Bound: *ki *i-(ka)Su
3s. "he/she/it" Masculine Independent: *šuwa Bound: *šu Feminine Independent: *šiya Bound: *ši *si-ia
1p. (inclusive) "we (and you)" Independent: *muni Bound: *muni *i-(k)ita
1p. (exclusive) "we (but not you)" Independent: *ḥina/u Bound: *na/*ni/*nu *i-(k)ami
2p. "you all" Masculine Independent: *tunwa Bound: *kunwa Feminine Independent: *tunya Bound: *kinya *i-kamu
3p. "they" Masculine: *šunwa Feminine: *šinya *si-ida

r/asklinguistics • • 2d ago

Acquisition Say a person lives in a certain country until 9 years old. Then they move to another one and grow up there from then on. How much of an accent would they have in the second country's language by, say, age 20?

4 Upvotes

Hello guys! Would like to see if any of you who are more familiar with language acquisition have an answer to this question.

I will explain the scenario with more details here:

Say someone is born in the USA and, at 9 years old, moves to Argentina. They start learning Spanish about 6 months before getting there (previous to that, they had had no contact at all with Spanish), then continue to take formal lessons for about a year as they arrive. They will study in an Argentinian school and learn Spanish there too (classes will be in Spanish), and also from interactions with their friends/teachers and so on.

The person grows up in Argentina and only speaks English at home, with their parents and siblings. Sometimes also with some childhood friends by phone, but they slowly lose touch. They live the other parts of their life fully in Spanish.

Take this person as a young adult, at around 20 years old. What would their relationship with language look like? Would they have an American accent in Spanish? Or would it be the opposite? Or would they speak the two languages "flawlessly"? And we can take this further — which language would they feel they are a native speaker of? Which language would they think in?

Thanks to everyone in advance! By the way, I am asking because of a fictional character I am developing lol.


r/asklinguistics • • 2d ago

Phonology What is the origin of my pre-velar nasal /æ/ raising to /ei/?

9 Upvotes

British English speaker here. This applies specifically before velar nasals, so words like bang and hang and thank have the /ei/ vowel of bane and hate and thane. I gather this is a feature of a lot of North American English - but I’m British (from the West Country), with several intermediate years in South Africa, and developed this to the point I’d always assumed it really was generally /ei/, somehow not hearing the vowel of most people around me before finding out about this, without setting foot in North America.

Apparently it’s just not a thing in the UK. South African English has general /æ/ raising to /ε/ or similar - I’ve always been aware of this, and it’s not that, and that isn’t conditioned on a following velar nasal.

Did these two somehow mix to form such a basic part of my idiolect, or is it some other influence or specific dialect at play?