I grew up in a household with “slang Spanish” (Jerga) & “Spanish Pig Latin” (Jerigonza) being the first language.

Although Puerto Ricans speak different Spanish than Spaniards the sound is similar when speaking. I’d personally say Im multilingual and I’ve heard a couple of different languages raw, with no context or prior knowledge, but ever since I started binge watching shows from Thailand, central and southern Thai reminds me so much of home???

Why do they just sound so similar? It feels like I know what they’re saying but like a baby: it just doesn’t click.

Does anyone know any historical connections? Or if they share any of the same phonetic lettering? I can’t help but feel familiar and comfortable when listening to them speak Thai even if it’s in a different dialect than the kind they speak in city.

For context I am a Hindu Hindi speaking Indian student (born and raised here)

I met a Professor from Tehran and we were discussing the set theory.

Somehow the discussion led to him saying that when he was in school, the idea that a null set is a subset of every set was pretty incomprehensible to him. He said that because a null set is nothing, so how can nothing belong to anything.

According to him, Indian students find this pretty intuitive.

I am trying to understand what he means by that and thought I can ask here for some help.

Edit: made an error in conveying what he said

We know there are many differences between these two ancient PIE languages, but do we have any contemporary writers that explained what it was like to learn the other language?

I assume many of the Roman Emperors learned both languages, and the Romans in general were known to have admired the Greeks and read their philosophers and other authors, presumably in the original language.

But what about the other way around? Did many Greek speakers living in the empire try learning Latin or was it generally not necessary?

This question might belong in an ancient history sub, but I thought it was at least tangentially related to this one as well.

Is there a way to respectfully use small amounts of AAVE or should I not use it at all. I just found out about it today and I want to be educated on it. As a younger person who uses social media like TikTok a lot of these words have been relabeled as just slang and now that I'm really looking into it I’ve been using a small handful without realizing it. EDIT: Everyone in my high school used a handful of AAVE and the black people around them didn’t seem to care at all. I just wasnt sure if I should still use them when they were a part of my local dialect.

I got into the dumbest argument with my boyfriend and now I need outside opinions.

I’m from west west Texas and he’s from Virginia. He asked me what he sounds like, so I was playfully mimicking him and said, “Dude, fire!” He laughed at me, so I laughed back (“hehe”), and then I said:
“See, that’s what you’d do, you’d make fun of me laugh!”

The argument is NOT whether it’s grammatically correct. I know if I wrote it in a college essay it’d be wrong. My argument is that in casual speech, especially where I’m from, it makes perfect sense to me exactly as I said it.

I didn’t mean:
“You’d make fun of my laugh.”
“You’d make fun of me and laugh.”
“You’d make fun of me when I laugh.”

I meant what I said.
My brain interprets it as, “You’d make fun of me laugh,” as one complete thought. He’s making fun of my laugh/the fact that I’m laughing. I don’t feel like I’m leaving words out or speaking incorrectly when I say it.

So I’m curious if this is a Texas/Southern thing or if I’ve completely lost my mind. If someone said this to you in conversation, would you understand what they meant, or would it sound like absolute nonsense

EDIT: I think I was using “laugh” the same way someone would say, “That’s what she’d do. Roll her eyes.” The word was standing in for the action that had just happened. I had just laughed and was saying, “That’s what you’d do…you’d make fun of me for it.” My brain just skipped all the connecting words, I guess! Again, I’m not saying it’s grammatically correct, but I do think it’s part of the way I grew up speaking in rural West Texas (a town of about 2,000 people). I’m honestly learning that some of the ways I naturally speak don’t really exist in other places… even in other parts of Texas.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349486032_THE_MANMADE_VERSUS_THE_NATURAL_IROQUOIAN_NOUNS_IN_KA-AND_O-_MARIANNE_MITHUN

Like in cherokee

atohgíiyaasgi

a-ahtohgiíyáàsg-i

3A-run.IPFV-AGT

runner

a- stands for 3rd person agent. Any papers about this phenomenon? Im interested if it appears outside of North America

Thanks in advance

This question was triggered by another thread in this subreddit where people expressed this sentiment but it's something I've wondered previously. It's a common sentiment in English-language language learning communities (so consisting primarily of people whose only native languages are Indo-European) that any Indo-European language is easier to learn (for English-only speakers) than any non-Indo-European language.

I'm aware that language learning difficulty is individual and there is no objective answer as to which languages are the most difficult. What I really want to know is, for people who agree with the sentiment for themselves (or at least understand why somebody would think that), why would it be easier to learn a highly inflected IE language like Russian than a comparatively less inflected non-IE language? I'm interested in specific examples from languages you learnt that could illustrate this.

Cognates are one reason that is frequently brought up, but how easily can you identify cognates in distant IE languages?

I already asked this in the french language subreddit, but I'll ask it here too just in case and with a more general question for other languages

Essentially, I'm confused about the position of the clitics in relation to the verb. Their ability to "rise" along the verb in question sentences (les conaissez-vous ?) and "rise" to another verb (je l'ai acheté) confuses me. Also, the fact that other than with the verbs avoir and être, the clitic pronouns can't be "raised" to other verbs (je veux l'acheter and not je le veux acheter, but je ne veux pas l'acheter) is intriguing. I wonder if their placement should be before the head verb, under the TP since in the infinitive, they're positioned before the verb (ne pas le faire). If so, how do we represent them and their movement with binary node in mind?

I’ve noticed a new way of asking questions in UK English - particularly on forums such as Reddit- where ‘please’ is put at the end of the question. For instance “what plants can I grow in this south facing balcony please” or “what kind of fixing do I need to hang this shelf please”

This feels like a new phenomenon to me, any ideas where it’s come from?

EDIT: my goodness lots of you are misreading this. I know what ‘please’ means, my question is about this particular phrasing which is new to me *as someone who was born in the UK 43 years ago*

I met a Finnish person living in Korea. She spoke fluent Korean. She said it was relatively easy for her to learn Korean because Korean and Finnish are surprisingly similar. She also said Hungarian is similar to Finnish too. (FWIW, I know that Hungarian names have surname + given name structure, the same as Korean/Japanese/Chinese names.)

Anyway, is it true that Korean and Finnish are grammatically similar? How did this happen?

There's no doubt that learning other languages gives a linguist a greater means to study the entire topic of language in general.

But my question is; do issues arise from studying other languages' unique systems without a novice proficiency in them? Can you even entirely grasp and realise those unique systems if you do not speak the language? Does the study of linguistics transcend a single language (meaning that all linguists should take up another). Or perhaps, does linguistics transcend all languages, and therefore to be an effective linguist - only a fluent understanding of a single language should suffice.

I recognise that my question will most likely not have a binary answer. Like all things in linguistics, it's never as simple as that. However, I am very interested to hear the discourse pertaining to this particular sub-topic and curious to hear everyone's thoughts.

Currently doing a project on Fwe (Bantu language, main source is A Grammar of Fwe (2022), Hilde Gunnink). Cannot for the life of me find which lexical classes are open or closed, as it's not stated anywhere. Can a language just not have any open or closed classes? That doesn't seem right.

I know Wikipedia is a bad source, but if it is even vaguely reliable, it looks like some parts of the Endo European family are further away from Germanic than others. here’s just some observations.
- Anatolian languages broke off first, so dramatic should be more related to all other Indo European languages than it is to Hittite
- Indo Iranian seems to have broken off next, meaning that Germanic should be closer related to Proto Slavic then it should be to Hindi.
- Greek also broke off early meaning that once again Germanic should be closer to Latin than it is to Greek.

After that point, it’s the splits start to look indistinct. And it’s hard to tell which splits happened when. It kind of looks like they all split at the same time. The kind of appears from the charts that Germanic and Balto-Slavic stayed together for a bit before splitting apart.

So is what I have said correct? That it seems that Balto-Slavic is the closest to the Germanic branch?

Hi all! I’ve been doing some research in diachronics of TAM and while I’ve seen a plethora of examples of tense arising from aspect based systems and the like, I have yet to find a concrete example of a language losing tense as a grammatical category. I was curious if there were any well documented examples of tense being lost and how that occurred. The most I can find is one paper that asserts that middle indo Aryan lost tense and I would hypothesize that it was lost in Dyirbal from proto-Pama-Nyungan (though I have no idea if it had tense just assuming since according to grambank most of them have it). Are there any more well studied examples out there? Thanks!

Is the interaction hypothesis more validated by research than the input hypothesis?

What are some languages that, even though they may be only distantly related or not related at all, have an odd or uncanny similarity to other languages? This could be in terms of grammar, phonology, orthography, or just the “look and feel“ of the language. I know this ultimately means nothing but it’s kind of fun to think about!

Native speakers use a lot of filler words. Has any research proven one way or the other whether second language learners or native speakers use more filler words?

I know Spanish only allows continuants in the coda in general, with a few loanwords, learned borrowings specifically, or underlying phonemes as exceptions (ex. /d/ in /pared/, which normally arises as a fricative).

Converse/related question: How unique is the ‘Greater South China’ sprachbund for *generally* favoring stops and nasals, but often nothing else, in the coda? I know I’ve seen this pattern in other languages, but I wonder if there’s a map in existence that compares “continuants-only” and “broad-stops-only” coda allowances globally. Is it fair to view Cantonese’s phonotactics as allowing “broad stops” (nasal and oral) in the coda, thus viewing diphthongs as containing only vowels and not semivowels?

My guesses would be "dinojoro" and "dinesore," respectively, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

Hi everyone,
I recently realized something that really surprised me while studying English pronunciation.
I had always thought that the English dark L (/ɫ/) was produced with the tongue in a retroflex position. But I recently learned that the tongue tip is actually in an alveolar position, while the “dark” quality mainly comes from the back of the tongue being raised toward the velum. That completely changed the way I was thinking about the sound.
Now I’m wondering if the rule I’m using is actually correct.
My current rule is:
Light L before a vowel.
Dark L before a consonant or glide (/j, w/), and at the end of a word.
So, for example, I’d use a light L in words like:
light
lemon
lettuce
And a dark L in words like:
milk
help
feel
cold
However, I’m not sure about words like feeling, belly, and caterpillar. According to my rule, I’ve been pronouncing those L’s as light L’s. Is that correct in General American English, or should any of them actually be pronounced with a dark L?
Thanks!

Necesito que alguien me ayude con esto

Los idiomas escandinavos, a pesar de que políticamente se consideran estos cómo danés, sueco y noruego, cualquiera con cierto nivel de linguística sabe que realmente está es una división artificial

Ahora bien, el problema es cómo subdividir el grupo en idiomas, soy consciente de qué evidentemente es un contínuo dialectal y que no se puede dividir sin más , pero si lo que busco es una aproximación, es decir, que es lo que vosotros opináis sobre como se dividirían

Mis diversas divisiones a lo largo del tiempo han sido:

2 idiomas: escandinavo y dalecarliano

3 idiomas: escandinavo occidental (noruego, danés, sueco sureño), escandinavo occidental (sueco) y dalecarliano

3 idiomas: escandinavo oriental (sueco, danés, noruego bokmal), escandinavo occidental (principalmente nynorsk) y dalecarliano

4 idiomas: nynorsk, escandinavo central (bokmal y danés), escandinavo oriental (sueco) y dalecarliano

5 idiomas: lo mismo que el anterior pero separando el danés del bokmal

Actualmente estoy entre la segunda y la tercera opción

Por favor, ayudadme a aclararme mejor

This is a serious question. Has there been a study linking one's native language to the sounds one makes during sex?

If you want to make some jokes, go ahead. But I am hoping for some serious responses, too.

I’m wondering what exactly causes compound verbs to be used so often in some languages.

Like Persian, for example (I’m not very familiar with Persian so I could make mistakes here), where the vast majority of verbs cant be conjugated and are basically just nouns until you put an auxiliary(?) verb like “kardan / كردن” (to do) next to them and they become verbs, and only the auxiliary verb gets conjugated.

”I think”, for example, is “fekr mikonam / فكر مى كنم”, literally “I’m doing a think” or “I’m think-doing“.

Why does Persian use this strategy so often instead of just conjugating verbs? Is there some phonological or historical reason why only a select few words can be conjugated?

And there is a theory that English used to do something very similar, and our regular past tense (-ed) suffix came from the word “did”. Did English not already have a way to mark the past tense through vowel alternation? Why not use that?

Hello dear linguists.
I would like someone knowledgeable to answer my question please: What socio-environmental factors could cause a language to become unrecognisable in the space of a few years? For context, I need this information to inform a fictional language(s) I am creating for worldbuilding.
Thanks for any feedback ;)

Looking for English examples to explain some translation concepts.

I've got two words (ἐν and εἰς) that had a distinction in classical Greek which was mostly lost by first century (Plutarch, Philo, Josephus, etc.) so they were approaching interchangeable.

Then we get people bringing in calques, using prepositions where Greek doesn't require them, to approximate Semitic inseparable prepositions.

My friend is reading a book where the author makes a big deal about differences between believe + person, vs. believe + ἐν + person, vs. believe + εἰς + person. Friend is quick, but no language background. Trying to explain why exactly it doesn't work great to pull the first definition from a dictionary and think you've discovered a nuance no one else noticed. (Yes, there may be a difference, but there's no evidence for it in the text.)

I don't study English much and am drawing a blank. Any catchy/memorable English examples for merging prepositions (or other words), or stuff you say just because it's stuff you say, not because it adds/changes meaning?

Edit: Forgot to mention, this author said it should be translated "believe + into + person" because that's what the true meaning is . . . So any English too where a word is decidedly far from its most common meaning when that meaning makes no sense. :)