I'm from Southern Italy, and I don't aspirate my p t k even in English, and that sometimes causes confusion. I'm moving to Germany, and I'm learning German, and some people told me that speaking German without pronouncing aspirated p t k is even worse than in English, that my accent would sound super heavy and comical. I want to know when I should actually aspirate p t k in German, because I couldn't find much about this on YouTube.

I was intrigued to learn that the Arabic term for a porpoise is خِنْزِيرُ البَحْرِ, literally “sea pig.” My native language is Japanese, and I have also studied Chinese. In both languages, "sea pig" (海豚) is likewise used to refer to dolphins or porpoises.

When I looked into whether these terms might be historically related, I discovered that the English word "porpoise" also ultimately derives from an expression meaning something like "pig fish".

Since dolphins and porpoises do not intuitively seem particularly pig-like to me, I find this convergence rather puzzling. How can this shared naming pattern be explained? To what extent is it plausible to suppose that these terms ultimately go back to a single historical source?

Hey all. I minored in Linguistics in college and really loved it. I applied for grad school after I finished my undergraduate degree and got in, but I let that go when I was accepted into military flight school and have been working in that field for several years. I now have earned my GI Bill and am ready to transition back to the civilian world and would really like to study linguistics again.

Does anyone have any suggestions for online programs and courses I could take to prepare myself again for grad school? Or advice on how to get into research or something similar? I feel like I need to brush up my studies and build a stronger application before reapplying. I have found some summer schools and seminars through the Linguist List that interest me but most seem to be for those already enrolled in school or actively researching.

I really enjoyed psycholinguistics, morphology, semantics, computational linguistics, and historical linguistics. I got into grad school originally for comp ling but am open to that or general linguistics. Just looking to pursue a masters at this point. I would also be open to night/weekend courses (I am in LA/Orange County area)

Thank you all in advance for your help!!

Hey all. I minored in Linguistics in college and really loved it. I applied for grad school after I finished my undergraduate degree and got in, but I let that go when I was accepted into military flight school and have been working in that field for several years. I now have earned my GI Bill and am ready to transition back to the civilian world and would really like to study linguistics again.

Does anyone have any suggestions for online programs and courses I could take to prepare myself again for grad school? Or advice on how to get into research or something similar? I feel like I need to brush up my studies and build a stronger application before reapplying. I have found some summer schools and seminars through the Linguist List that interest me but most seem to be for those already enrolled in school or actively researching.

I really enjoyed psycholinguistics, morphology, semantics, computational linguistics, and historical linguistics. I got into grad school originally for comp ling but am open to that or general linguistics. Just looking to pursue a masters at this point. I would also be open to night/weekend courses (I am in LA/Orange County area)

Thank you all in advance for your help!!

Other than names like “Euler”, “Freud”, “Reuters”, and “Seuss”, are there any German loanwords commonly found in English where the “eu” digraph is pronounced as “oi”?

most sources are scientific and it's very hard to learn something from them
i post it here because it was banned on r/languagelearning for some reason

Hey, I hope this is the right place to ask, or at least people will be able to point me towards the right place!

I need to use Ant Conc for an essay that I am writing. I am an absolute dunce at anything involving computers, and Ant Conc is not super intuitive. I am looking for constructions consisting of a form of BE + a word ending in –ing with a maximum of three intervening words. How do I do this? I assume there must be some kind of regex I can use for -ing, but I might have to look for all forms of "be" individually. Is this correct?

Please explain as if I was a three year old, because that's the kind of capacity we're talking about. I am able to upload my corpus to AntConc and do simple keyword searches and that's about it. Thank you so much.

https://imgur.com/DztyOxG
This is what I have tried (I hope the link works). I click "apply" and then search, but it says "no search term entered". I feel like I am making some kind of stupid mistake. I have tried this before on another version of AntConc and it came up with no hits, which is probably not a good sign.

Hii guys!

I have a Master's in English lit. I picked this major because I genuinely loved writing and wanted to work as a freelance / remote writer, so I went for an English major at university thinking that it would bring me closer to my goal.

Over time I lost motivation even though I truly wanted this major. I simply do not feel fulfilled. I feel like it does not have much of an impact on the world or any jobs.

I am jobless now. I worked my butt off for the past years and I feel so hurt and angry that it got me NOWHERE. I am too burned out to start a new education in a STEM field now. I am also not passionate about such fields. I like creativity, reaearch, and self expression. I also want to see if there is something that can be done to save my efforts and not completely overthrow my previous degree.

I would like to opt for a funded PhD, but I would like to switch to linguistics though. I find it more useful and fun. The problem is that I don't have much knowledge in this field and I have no clue which topics are understudied and have strong research / job opportunities in the future.

I am completely lost and in dire need of honest advice. I would truly appreciate it.

I have terrible auditory processing, but when I overhear someone speaking and can't understand them, I can pretty quickly tell whether they're speaking another language or I'm mishearing what they say into gibberish. Maybe it's something about how the sounds align with their vocal inflections? Or maybe how the sounds fit together in a particular way?

If I mishear someone as talking gibberish, not even the way the sounds come out of their mouth makes sense. But if I hear someone talking in another language, I can recognize that I'm not mishearing them.

It takes a little extra time for me to figure it out, but for some reason I can tell whether I can't understand the English they're saying, or if they're not speaking English in the first place.

Hi everyone! Does anyone know where I can find a vowel chart showing the tongue position of the GOAT vowel in General American and General British?

for context, none of my native languages (amer. english, mandarin) contain trills.
i’m currently studying french and after learning the r, i started doing uvular trills for fun.
i then looked up tutorials on how to do the alveolar trill such as in spanish, because my friends can and i feel left out :(, but i just can’t get it. i see tutorials that talk about doing the alveolar taps, and i think i have that, but i cant get it to trill.
is there something different about this place of articulation which makes it more difficult or different to learn?

As I understand in Malay to express that the agent is pretending, the verb of what is being feigned has to be reduplicated. In Arabic, a broad causative verb depending on the dialect takes a reflexive pronoun as an argument along with what is being feigned. There's probably more examples like this in other languages where there is no simple ditransitive verb that takes the agent and what is feigned. Is there a term for this? Like a pretend clause or construction? What are related terms to it?

Hi there,

I know there's a pinned post for this, but that didn’t really give any specific advice so I'd like some input for people who may have been like me or are like me and weighing up career options.

So, I'm a 19-year-old from Birmingham, England, currently studying Language and Literature at the University of Birmingham. I like my degree, much prefer the linguistics side of it, I think it's super interesting and fun. So far, my modules for 1st-year (which are mandatory) have been based around Spoken Language Analysis, Study Design, Morphology, Syntax and Grammar and Discourse Analysis.

Out of both Literature and Linguistics, I’m more interested in focusing on the latter in academia going forward. Most of the modules I've chosen for the upcoming academic year are linguistics-based.

But… I really have no idea what to do. I've always had dreams of moving out of England when I was younger, probably to America or Japan. I speak Japanese conversationally (that’s all through private tutoring and unrelated to my degree) and studied for a month in Japan just last month! Unfortunately, I don’t feel like anything my degree gives me is compatible for ever moving abroad to either of these places and I'm a bit lost. This has been a dream of mine since I was like 9 years old.

I unfortunately got boxed into humanities through A Levels and stuff. I’m 90% sure I have dyscalculia, I got a 4 in foundation Maths and always struggled with STEM subjects. My strong point has been humanities throughout my life and it's just what I've always excelled in, like, top of class levels excelled.

So, how do I do it, guys? How can I pivot this passion into something useful and something I may actually be able to use abroad and get employment for? Should I resit Maths? I'm just kinda bummed out. I feel like all of my childhood dreams are vanishing due to my inability to be good at mathematics.

I'd prefer answers that are aligned with the realities of the UK's education system, simply because that’s where I live and America's schooling system is entirely different, but any advice is truly appreciated. Thanks in advance! I'm off to go eat a synonym bun, just like grammar used to make.

*second vowel I mean

From what I can tell, older recordings of Chicago speakers seem to pronounce the “a” like the vowel in caught (https://youtube.com/watch?v=tN2s58v0r0U&ra=m), while nowadays it’s more common to hear it as the cot vowel (https://youtube.com/watch?v=fBc-kp4Qze0&ra=m), and that’s even how outsiders will frequently mimic the accent, “Chicaaaaahgo”. It’s not like the Northern Cities Shift would induce that from what I understand, Chicago English retains the caught-cot distinction and I can’t think of any other such words that switched phonemes in that context (maybe there are, I just can’t think of any, being a merger speaker myself). I find it particularly interesting because, well, Chicago is such a “core” word for that dialect, presumably.

Is there much to be said about this or is it just “I don’t know, language changes, random things happen”?

(Apologies if this has been discussed here before, I searched online and didn’t find an older discussion of it)

Edit: I’ve done some more digging, and it seems the caught-vowel variant is more prevalent among white and older speakers, with the cot-vowel variant more prevalent among black, younger and potentially transplant speakers. It could be that the former represents an older “original” local pronunciation and the shifting to the cot-vowel reflects influence from non-local/General American pronunciation, but I’m not sure if that’s true. Regardless, the difference is documented and seems to have age and ethnic differences.

https://theskydeck.com/es/chicago-facts/how-to-pronounce-chicago/

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/442490/what-is-the-local-pronunciation-of-chicago

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-in-society/article/demarcating-place-authenticity-in-the-chicago-vowel/6FA1D11AE4F38FC4C9C57D1F627E8464#toc-list-mobile

Hi! I am currently reading Stefan Müller's Book, specifically on Government and Binding theory, but I am having a hard time understanding it. I also tried to look for other resources myself, but it is still not enough. Do you have any other resources (books, videos, etc.) that could also help me understand this further?

I wanted to understand deep structure, surface structure, transformational rules, and government and binding theory for my report, but I'm becoming overwhelmed with all this information.

I just noticed that I pronounce "do" like [dɪu] but "due" is something similar to [djɪu]. (I can't figure out how I say "dew" because at this point I'm overthinking it.) But they seem to be perfect homophones for most people, I think.

For context I'm from the Midwest US and I now live in New England, and I think my accent is a mix of both. And I do mostly pronounce the [j] in words like "new."

I'm curious if this is just an idiosyncratic thing where I'm subconsciously trying to match the spelling or if this is common?

ESL learner here. When this person says “very, very,” I noticed that he wasn’t touching his lower lip with his upper teeth. I’ve noticed native speakers doing this many times, so I was wondering whether that was correct.

https://youtu.be/pdYeCsLNC8c?si=J4hp3TIzvPFOL2mJ&t=53

Hello, I've been thinking about the common vocabulary of these three unrelated language families.

Tungusic bi -I si -you

Mongolic bi-I chi -you

Turkic ben -I sen -you

I know the three families aren't related since their numbers are really different. I think these can be explained by borrowings but if so, in which direction did the borrowing happen?

I have checked the several branches of these families and all of them turned out to share these pronouns or variations of them, which indicates that the presence of these words in the respective language families predates the earliest split of the most divergent branches in the families.

I read that Turkic urheimat is considered to be around the lake Baikal or eastern Mongolia.

Tungusic and Mongolic urheimat is considered to be around southern Manchuria.

Also, I noticed that they share locative suffixes starting with a consonant d and a vowel depending on the vowel Harmony. Such as de, da, du.

Assuming that these are result of borrowing, which direction did it happen?

I'm a speaker of brazilian portuguese for context, and the transcription of french vowels does not at all describe what i'm hearing.

<in> is supposed to be [ɛ̃]? it's definitely not, sounds so weird when i try to pronounce it like that, it's much more like an [ã] to me

<un> sounds exactly like <in> even though it's supposed to be a separate phoneme?

<on> is [ɔ̃], but to me it sounds so high that I feel like i'm saying [ʊ̃].

But what drives me crazy the most is the [ɛ, ɔ]. è is supposed to be like portuguese é, but i physically cannot hear it like that, I always hear it as [e] like portuguese ê. Which makes me unable to hear the difference between é/è and ó/ò even though my language has all of those.

So my question is: is this a problem with french phonetic spelling or are my brazilian ears just fooling me because the qualities are just slightly off?

Binary grammar rejects syntax trees in favor of a theory of grammar that posits neurons, a function that converts the state of the program to a symbol and a function that advances the state of the program or halts the program.

It rejects the idea of words, instead having "symbols".

I give the example of a binary grammar:
A is not B

A is B

B is not A

B is A

I have show that it is possible to deal with recursion.
I accept the distinction between compentence and performance. I also accept the distinction between I-language and E-language.
I give an example in Python.
I propose the idea of directionality: a -> b -> c rather than hierarchical tree structures.

I'd like to see criticism of my proposal.
https://en-wikiversity-org.translate.goog/wiki/User:Semantism/sandbox?_x_tr_sl=pt&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Example: "Matt Damon was casted in the new Christopher Nolan movie." The correct word is cast.

I started noticing this a couple of years ago and lately it is absolutely everywhere. My friends and family members who have never made this particular mistake before are saying "casted" in conversation. I am baffled by how this mistake spread so far and wide among native English speakers who are otherwise well-spoken.

My theory is TikTok and other social media platforms are responsible for spreading it so quickly. People don't even know they're doing it. I don't like to correct people, but it's also such a glaring error. Why don't they hear it too?

I know language evolves, but this one is going to irritate me til the end of time. I'm afraid it's here to stay. Does anyone have any insight about how "casted" has replaced "cast"?

Hello,

An idea recently came to mind for designing a speech recognition / text-to-speech platform that could be used independently by minority language communities.

The basic idea is that someone could upload recordings and transcripts of their language, and the tool would help train an existing speech model to better understand that language.

In doing so, the model would be able to automatically convert spoken recordings to text, and vice versa - all data, of course, being owned by the community that speaks the language.

I imagine this would be very helpful to deaf/blind speakers of the language - would any of you consider using it?

Like the title says, the story of the decypherment of Hittite does not seem to make a lot of sense. Usually, bilingual inscriptions in both an already-known language and an unknown language prove way more useful than non-bilingual ones.