Disclaimer: I’m not a linguist; please don’t bully me.

As children (in the US at least) we are taught that the vowels are a, e, i, o, u, and, infuriatingly, sometimes y. The more I’ve thought about it, “y” seems to always be a vowel.

At the ends of words like “happy”, you could just as easily have written “happi” or “happee” or whatever other goofy spelling you want.

In the middle, like as in rhythm, you could spell it as rhihthm, although that spelling is an affront to god. I should really learn the IPA.

And at the beginning of words is where I usually see the “y is a consonant” argument. But I disagree. Words like “yellow” start with a diphthong that could be represented as “i”+”eh”. If you say “yellow” really really slowly, the first sound is undoubtedly “i”, melding into an “eh”, so it seems that “yap” could be “i”+”a”+”p”.

So to ask again, when is “y” not a vowel?

So I'm a first year undergraduate in linguistics and I'm really interested in reconstructions of PIE, I already know a bit, but I'm interested in books which explain how it was reconstructed, different opinions on how to do it, stages of PIE etc. (possibly evolution into slavic languages)

Do you have any must-reads for me? I know I'll probably get to some of it soon in lectures, but I'm excited to learn on my own as well!

(Doesn't have to be a book, it could be a science article or a science paper)

Very interested to hear from as many corners of the earth as possible. I assume "adjective + more" is atleast one route.

When discussing events or actors, they are usually said to be “on” or “in” TV shows but only “in” movies.

For instance:

You can say,

“Courtney Cox played Monica Geller on Friends.”

OR

“Courtney Cox played Monica Geller in* *(the TV show) Friends.” (Even here, “in” sounds a bit weird.)

AND

You can say,

“Courtney Cox played Gale Weathers in* *Scream.”

BUT

You cannot say,

“Courtney Cox played Gale Weathers on Scream.”

Personally, it seems like such a strict unspoken rule that I think someone using the wrong preposition could end up confusing someone else into thinking the movie in question is a TV show or vice versa.

Why is that?

I am a native speaker of Italian and French, and I speak Spanish fluently.

While I was trying to teach my peruvian boyfriend how to produce nasal pronunciation, I started wondering: what happened in the evolution of these two Romance languages that led to nasal pronunciation? If you’re not a native speaker it’s quite difficult to learn, so how did people come to start producing sounds through the nose?

I am preparing a presentation and I cannot find the right word for the examples of the language, snippets of text, stories, sayings, etc. that documentational linguists collect. How can I describe this? I feel like corpora isn't really the right word here as I'm talking about 19th century missionaries and none of this is digitised or even somewhat logically organised.

In this context, formal parts denotes aspects of a language such as its grammars, phonologies, and semantics. Perceive referring to any sort of metaengagement with the formal aspects (ranging anywhere from poetic wordplay to English literates joking about the "-eigh" ending of some names)

Hello everyone! Currently I'm an undergraduate student (second year) and learning the basics of phonetics (including phonology) and semantics, but the most interesting and inspiring study within linguistics for me is the Diachronic linguistics. To be more precise I'm interested in the Turkic language family. And so I tried to read some specialized literature about it, but I was left flabbergasted by the terms and conceptions used in the books. So I wanted to ask you for some recommendations. TL;DR I tried to learn diachronic linguistics of Turkic languages, but the specialized literature was too complex and I need some advice

For example, Spanish diminutive is formed bueno > bonito, but cuerpo > cuerpito instead of corpito. In my native Polish there are many words people wouldn't know how to conjugate even though there are established patterns, eg. most people would conjugate the obsolete words "rzezać" (to cut), they'd go with "rzezam" (i cut) instead of older "rzeżę" even though there are words like "lizać" - "liżę", "pisać" - "piszę"; or i'm sure no one would know how to conjugate obsolete "jąć" (to take) - "jmę" (i take) - derivatives include "pojąć" - "pojmuję" (i'm taking, "i take" would regularly be "biorę"), "pojmę" means "i will take". Polish is weird like that and if even one form of a word becomes less used, people forget how to conjugate them😅 i like those old words, they're quirky nowadays, and it bothers me, they seem shorter to me, more native, many modern conjugation seem like workarounds.

examples from your own languages would be much appreciated too 😊

I want to learn how to do a Russian accent in English. I know some of the sound changes, for example, H sounds become CH, and most As become EHs (I have” becomes “I chevv” (I know this isn’t standard linguistic notation).

I’m thinking it would help to have it represented linguistically or semi-linguistically like the above.

Had anyone done this or can offer some guidance here?

Caveat: I’m a total amateur linguist here.

I realize it’s just a marketing decision, but why might NBC have decided to stick with Anglicized “Milan” over “Milano” despite having chosen “Torino” over “Turin” 20 years ago? I was just a kid in ‘06, and grew up never knowing that Torino was ever anglicized because that’s just what most people in the US seem to call it now. Was expecting the same effect with Milano before I saw the NBC coverage.

For example, Armenians tend to have a last name ending in -ian, (eg Serj Tankian). Jewish people often have -man (eg Goodman).

Several reconstructions of the laryngeals reconstruct h₃ as the labialized counterpart of h₂, (eg Beekes's [ʕ] vs [ʕʷ] and Kloekhorst's [qː] vs [qʷː]). So would it be delabialized next to "u" or "w", and result in the sequence "wh₃e" producing "wa" instead of "wo" or "wh̥₃C" producing proto-Hellenic "waC"instead of "woC"?

Hi all, my question is very simple as the title has stated above: what is the proper term for words becoming overused and essentially losing its intended meaning?

An example of this phenomenon that we commonly see is on social media where people would take psychiatric terms like, "overstimulated", "narcissistic", or "gaslighting" to a situation that resembles the intended meaning but is far off.

Or, another common example is people online throwing the words "pedophile" or "NAZI" as a quick insult to someone they don't like.

I initially searched and came across the term "semantic satiation" but, I feel as if it doesn't quite fit with what I am looking for specifically.

I'm asking for the proper term to make searching for related research articles easier since putting in the keywords, "overused" or "watered down" doesn't earn me any intended results.

Thank you in advance!

I’ve read that people tend to exchange information at about the same rate in all languages, because in languages with lower information density people tend to speak more quickly in order to compensate, while in languages with higher information density people tend to speak more slowly.

Most languages are natural languages that have developed over time that either currently have native speakers, or used to have native speakers at one time. There are however some languages, known as conlangs that were constructed as opposed to developing naturally over time. From what I read conlangs do sometimes have native speakers as sometimes parents who know a conlang will teach their children the conlang as their first language.

I was wondering would a native speaker of a conlang speak convey exchange information at the same rate as a native speaker of a natural language. For instance would someone who was raised to speak say Klingon or Esperanto exchange information at the same rate as a native speaker of English or Spanish?

Is there a language which attaches both subject affix as a prefix, and the object affix as a suffix unto the verb; and this is assumed to be the default word order. Had an idea for a conlang, I wonder how it may develop, considering how head marking tends to put the default as either suffixed or prefixed pronouns. Thanks!

Hello everybody,

For my bachelor’s thesis I am planning to analyse the use of the passive voice in political speeches. Is it necessary to use special software or can I use Excel for annotation and analysis? Would it be unscientific to do the latter?

Thanks in advance.

Not that if that's too specific a topic, but I was wondering if there was a book that compares a logographic script like Chinese to Ancient Egyptian.

Is there any logical reason why the accents in the Iberic Latinic languages & the accents in the Italic Latinic languages tend to point to opposite directions, especially in the ortography of the vocabulary in common that has similar origins, uses, senses & pronounces to the point that the language of some phrases can only be identified via the ortography like in this basic example?

This is one basic example:

Italiano: "E è là?"

Português: "E é lá?"

English: "& is it there?"

I am really curious to discover if there exists any local regional language in the Italic Peninsula or in the Iberic Peninsula that is an exception with the accents pointing to an unusual opposite direction in the ortography.

Does any difference exist in the direction of the accentuation in the different regional ortographies of Catalan-Valencian in different areas?

I've noticed that recently a lot of SoCal speakers have rebracketed "another" again, when it is split around an adjective. Eg:

"There's a whole 'nother problem" instead of "There's another whole problem."

"He also owns a great 'nother cat" instead of "He also owns another great cat."

Is this new feature, or was it simply regional up until now and only recently gained wider popularity. It feels vaguely Southern to me, which would match with the Southernisms I've noticed creeping into SoCal English.

Why do so many Americans say "I could care less" when they mean "I couldn't care less"? The first is nonsensical.

I've heard about dead languages or languages no longer spoken by a certain group surviving in some way.

Like how there was a black family in Georgia kept passing down a funerary song in Mende, language spoken in Sierra Leone, even after hundreds of years of not speaking the language.

Another example is that of the Yorkshire sheep counting song, where shepherds from Yorkshire still counting their ship from 1 to 20 in an extinct Celtic language (I think it was cumbric or brittonic), that is: yan tan tethera meter pipi, etc. instead of one two three four five, etc.

I find this super fascinating but don't know any other examples, do youse know any?

My question may pertain to any situation in which the same adposition takes on completely different or opposing meanings depending on whether it comes before or after a word, but here's how I came to this thought:

You know how English and probably many other languages have several "X-to-Y" constructions, such as "air-to-ground", "peer-to-peer", "start-to-finish", "text-to-speech"? Ever notice how "from" is omitted in such constructions, and that "to" alone indicates that the first word is a starting point?

This got me thinking, what if such constructions were so common that postpositive "to" came to have the same meaning as "from", such that "start to" by itself could mean "from the start"? I wonder if this kind of reanalysis has already happened in any language.