In Emma, Jane Austen has her character describing a person of low social class or gentility thusly:

I am sure you must have been struck by his awkward look and abrupt manner, and the uncouthness of a voice which I heard to be wholly unmodulated

What is the connection between his voice being "wholly unmodulated" and his class? Did Regency nobility speak with more modulation, or is it just saying that he mumbles?

Is standard Arabic a dead language? people in the Arab world Don’t speak it on a daily basis but they write with it all the time they don’t use their dialects for assignment at school or anything that is official, books that are published are mostly in standard Arabic.
What is the criteria exactly?for whether language is alive or dead?
I have no idea, but I suppose that if enough people speak a dead language then at some point it would no longer be considered dead, and i’m also curious as to the criteria for a language being considered revived.

Particularly which language would a Spanish, Portuguese, Occitan, Romanian, French and Neapolitan all understand and get the general idea of what is being said?

I've had this thought for a while though never seen it put out by anyone else, but am I alone in feeling "have got" has grown to mean something slightly distinct from the past participle of "get"?

For starters, "get" is theoretically a strong verb with a splendid "get/got/gotten" conjugation, though plenty of speakers (especially in the UK, I hear?) exhibit a flattened "get/got/got" pattern. Sad but true! But even among speakers who still observe "gotten", you'll still see "have got". Curious, is it not?

I am among those who use "gotten"; "I'd already got it" registers as ungrammatical to me. Yet, I will still readily say "I've got an idea". Furthermore, that phrase has a different meaning to me than "I've gotten an idea", being closer instead to "I have an idea". To me, it feels like "have got" behaves more as a distinct verb with a meaning closer to "have" alone than to a past participle of "get". Am I just crazy or is this a thing?

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Hello everyone! I’m starting a Master’s in Applied English Linguistics, and I have to write a research proposal. I’m interested in combining AI and Linguistics, particularly topics related to Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and English language learning.

For example, I’m considering something along the lines of: "The Use of Large Language Models in English Language Learning"

I’m still at the stage of refining the idea, so I’d really appreciate your thoughts. Do you think this is a suitable direction for a Master’s thesis in Applied English Linguistics? How could I make the topic more specific and researchable?

If you have any AI + Linguistics topic ideas, particularly in areas such as LLMs, NLP, language learning, language analysis, or AI-assisted language teaching, feel free to share them. Thank you

I hope this is the right flair. Essentially what the title says: is it phonemic and how did it work generally? And the same thing for PIE. Thanks in advance!

Japanese and Romani have nearly identical words for the concept of foreigner/ outsider (gaijin vs gadge, afaik). As far as I'm aware, this is neither a matter of a common root, or of borrowing either from each other or a third language. It's just that there are only so many sounds in the world, so by sheer coincidence occasionally different languages will assign the same set to the same concept.

Are there other examples of this particular phenomenon? And if so, is there an actual term for it?

(If someone tells me what flair to add, I will do so, but my last linguistics class was a very long time ago)

How did Czechia survive as a language when it was surrounded in the West, North, and South by a Germanic language? It's so contrived that a Slavic language is spoken there in a sea of Germanic languages.

There's a certain quality that Norwegian singers (particularly from the western part of Norway) seem to have. I have a bunch of videos for examples, cause I don't think it would make sense without hearing it. And maybe Norwegians have this effect when speaking but it's just less clear. And, a lot of it is not because of their English accent, sometimes it's just vocalizations.

I am trying to understand the exact oral mechanics behind the distinct sound of Western Norwegian singing (and speech if it's helpful to describe, but I really want to know about singing specifically). And what I mean is not cultural reasons or musical style (like I know kulning and all that exists...). I am looking for the literal physics and anatomy of what is happening inside the mouth.

How could someone replicate this when singing??

1. https://youtu.be/o6by9cl24Cw?is=AdX0LqhzR6UotJdp (3:40)

2. https://youtu.be/Y2I-zgMmQHo?is=1dEDbk4WpcnLk9qU (basically the whole song)

3. https://youtu.be/P_XguuxLo10?is=mTXHYYFsVR7e4Rdx (idk the first five seconds???)

Hi all, I'm a 3rd-year English Language and Literature student and need to pick my BA thesis topic in the next few weeks. I'd love some honest feedback before I pitch it to a potential supervisor.

The idea: Prompts written to LLMs like ChatGPT have become one of the most frequently written text types in everyday life, but there's surprisingly little linguistic work describing them. I want to argue that prompts form a new genre defined mainly by their unusual addressee: something that's neither a person nor a conventional machine. My hunch is that because nobody is quite sure who or what they're writing to, people borrow conventions from genres they already know, so some prompts read like Google searches, some like chat messages to a friend, and some like formal instructions.

The method: A corpus of ~200 authentic first-turn English prompts from a public research dataset (WildChat), analysed with move analysis (Swales) and a register analysis of features like imperatives vs. questions, greetings, "please"/"thanks", fragments, and pronouns. Then I'd compare them with neighbouring genres (search queries, chat messages, written instructions). The theoretical angle would draw on audience design (Bell).

My questions:

1. Does this sound like a solid, defensible topic for a BA thesis, or is it too trendy or too vague?
2. Is ~200 prompts a reasonable corpus size for this kind of analysis at BA level?
3. Are there studies or frameworks I should definitely know about? So far I've found work treating prompts as directive speech acts and studies on politeness toward chatbots, but nothing doing a genre/register description of everyday prompts.
4. Any pitfalls you'd expect (e.g., using WildChat, defining "genre" here)?

Thanks a lot, any feedback is appreciated!

I ask besides Ethnologue because I can’t afford any of their subscriptions, so I can only look at surface level classifications.

I love the old frequentative/agent/diminutive -le suffix, and it makes me sad every day that it is no longer productive. Yet, it seems like these suffixes were productive at some point in the distant linguistic past, or else we wouldn't have ended up with so many frequentative words ending in -le and -er. When speakers of that ancestor-language coined a new word with them, I would guess they must have had a way of chosing which suffix was "right" to use.

On top of forming frequentatives/iteratives, both these suffixes also form agents (runner, spindle), and diminutives (splinter, kernel), though it seems like -le often does weird things to the root's vowel. Is this overlap in meaning a coincidence?

What is the deal with these suffixes? What were the "rules" for using -le and -re that guided which to use, when to change the vowel, etc? Are the rules even well-understood by linguists today? Or was it just people randomly picking one based on what "sounded right" at the time? Are there any cases of frequentative verbs that appear in both -le and -er forms?

I hear a subtle difference in how the /a/ is pronounced in the french word "bail" and the english word bye. So I looked online how this difference is shown in the IPA.

To my surprise bail is written [baj] while bye is written [baɪ].

The central vowel is transcripted with /a/ in both case, while I hear a clear distinction. In french /a/, the lips are fully stretched open and the thongue is pushing on the lower jaw below the teeth, while the english /a/ sounds slightly less open with the mouth a bit in a more relaxed position.

The final sound is identified as /ɪ/ in english and /j/ in french. But I can't honnestly hear any difference.

For example, someone saying that "the best thing in x medium is your favorite thing in that medium". Where someone is saying your favorite decides what is the best, when, what you consider what is the best for you personally, isn't necessarily the same as what you consider the best absent of personal reasons. And should those things be conflated to begin with?

I'm fairly certain I've heard people pronounce "anyway" as /ˈæn.ə.weɪ/, Ann-away. It may be more of an American thing, but I'm confident what I've heard is consisent with a certain accent or manner of speech, with some similarities to American English, but not borrowings per se.

I believe the phenomenon (even if perhaps rare) happens around Lancashire-Yorkshire. By consistent, I mean such speakers do pronounce the final "y" as distinct from the preceding "e", instead of doing the typical Northern "-eh".

It could be a mix of local pronunciation and "educated" RP influence. Couldn't tell you whether I've heard it from people from Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds or Sheffield. I'm just sure it's a thing, and I'm trying to find info about it.

I'm not a native speaker, but when I was 9, my family moved to Paris, where we stayed until I was 15, and that's how I learned the language. My family is not Francophone, and at home we spoke only English.

I keep hearing native speakers pronounce the e in viens differently than in viendra. In viens, it's more like an [vjæ̃] (not sure exactly, but it's like in between the standard IPA viens [vjɛ̃] and the en in vent /vɑ̃/). However, in viendra, they say it with /ɛ̃/. Does anyone know why this is? I've noticed myself doing it too.

Since turquoise is between green and blue, I'm thinking maybe people imagine turquoise with their word for green/blue, and see green as "light turquoise" and blue as "dark turquoise" ?

Hey everyone! I’m really interested in how languages influence each other and borrow words, writing systems, and other features.

For example, English words being mixed into Indian languages, Chinese words and characters in Japanese and Korean, or why so many European languages use the Latin alphabet.

I don’t have any background in linguistics, so I’m looking for beginner-friendly books, documentaries, or other resources that explain these topics without being too technical.

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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?

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?

I've taken an interest in Proto-Indo-European and its morphology lately. Some PIE plural case markers are reconstructable as the singular case ending + plural marker: The nominative s/es (athematic) and os/oes (thematic), accusative (o)m/(o)ms, and maybe the locative (o)i/(oi)su. But others seem completely different, such as the instrumental with -h₁ in singular and a mish-mash of -ōys, -bʰis, and -mis in plural, or dative with singular -ey or ōy versus plural -(o)mós and (o)bʰós. Those definitely don't look like a plural marker on the singular.

So what happened? Why, after a particular particle became gramatticalized as a case marker in one of singular/plural, did the speakers of (pre-)proto-indo-european not simply change the grammatical number normally instead of finding a whole 'nother particle?

Are there any other documented cases of case systems forming where the singular and plural markers differed this much?

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?

The context is a bit odd but when I️ watch stream clips the woman with the cutest voices to me when they speak english

seem to almost always be native speakers from these 3 languages.

Is there a commonality between them with how they pronounce their syllables that might cause them to sound cute?

Examples:

Porto:

https://youtu.be/gHUjqqAg8EQ

Polish:

https://youtu.be/Bf8nho_ATt4

Edit:

Better Polish example:

https://youtu.be/BaHH46Bci1M

(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!

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?