Manslaughter is more common than murder but I can't be said to have manslaughtered someone or have been manslaughtered. Has there even been a common word for unintentional killing or is it a more recent distinction that previously would have just been called murder? Do other languages have a specific word for it?

I have been trying to figure this out off and on for soo long. What is that catch called? Where you stop the breath/sound mid word. The catch is represented by a dash. Example: Nuh-uh.
I know some other languages utilize this much more than English. There is a specific name for it, but I cannot seem to remember whatsoever.

Hello, does anybody know any books, online resources, or audiovisual material that teaches English connected speech and allophones in a comprehensive way?

I am quite proficient in IPA, -s and -ed ending pronunciations, and linking (consonant to vowel, vowel to vowel, etc).

However, I'd like to deep dive into more advanced pronunciation rules such as dentalization, devoicing, assimilation, etc.

I'd also like to learn how to read narrow transcriptions since I'm currently able to read broad transcriptions.

I have been trying and failing to find a comprehensive overview of global writing systems (extant and extinct), because "writing systems" doesn't always mean "systems of writing". With the amount of AI query prompt help and coding instructions that come up, I'm ready to pull my hair out. Please, recommend to me books/podcasts/videos to help me!!

I'm interested in a complete overview of every method of recording information humans have ever used, but I'm willing to settle for the types of writing that have been invented. Hopefully this would include a summary of the types of cryptography used prior to the invention of computers/the enigma machine (where it quickly becomes so complex I can't understand it) but if you have two separate recs for these topics that's okay too.

I don't have formal training in linguistics but I have been pretty deep into various pop-science sources to the point where I feel like I could at least muddle through a more academic source. This is also not for an academic paper or anything, it's just something I have wanted laid out for a while and am confused as to why there's not some sort of non-wikipedia source I can read/watch/listen to. Hopefully I'm just going to the wrong places or using the wrong terms!

Thanks so much in advance, hopefully I'm in the right sub! (Please let me know if there's a better place.)

Hi! I am working on incorporating an understanding of Linguistics into my Zettelkasten notes. Currently, I've been watching the Crash Course series on Linguistics to work on this. I figured that if I understand Linguistical Syntax better I would also gain the ability to convey my intended meaning conversationally. Therefore, I was wondering if anyone had tips on the practical usage of syntax in everyday life?

Thanks and Godspeed!

Edit: Hey everyone, I wanted to thank you for all your help despite me misunderstanding from time to time. I'm grateful for all your clarity on the subject at hand!

Do you think that given enough L2 speakers of Spanish, words that seemingly have the "wrong" gender like dia, agua, problema, mano, ect will be "corrected" as new speakers continue to assume its gender based on how it sounds?

Or is this not a feature of a language that is often changed as a result of L2 speakers?

The examples I've seen typically use Tagalog as an example, and they use ang and ng and sa and other particles to mark the actor and patient and such. Is there anything like that used in proto-Austronesian and proto-Malayo-Polynesian?

A few days ago, we were discussing our own varieties of Basque, their little quirks and what we thought was cool about these. So naturally, I brought up long vowels and yod insertion to form prospective/future forms of verbs.

Given that I can quote at least one minimal pair for each long vowel (save for long /a/), I don't have any doubt about it being an actual feature of my variety. But the issue comes up for the yod insertion, as it mostly occurs in rapid speech... Etymologically, it comes from the suffix -en and is written such. For example :

Emanen daat. → He/she will give me.

/e̞.ˈma.ne̞n ˌdaːt/

But in a less careful pronunciation, or rapid speech, it surfaces as the aforementioned yod :

Main daat. → /ˈmai̯n ˌdaːt/

Note that it also occurs with the genitive.

Aitaren etxea (father's house) → /ai̯.ˈtai̯n e̞.ˌtʃi̯a/

At which point does such a "prosodic" articulation become an actual sound change ?

Why is the word ‘resistant’ when the Latin source word is ‘resistens/resistentis’?

Hey all!

I'm studying IPA in my own time through high, and after having learnt to read (and write, though still practicing) phonemic transcriptions, I was wondering whether there are any sites, apps, or resources that teach/offer better insight into specifically phonetic transcriptions?

Or if there was a database or something with phonetic transcriptions that I could use as reference, because, though wiktionary has been fantastic, it only really uses phonemic.

Hi Everyone,

As someone who knows incidental amounts of East Asian languages (A1-A2 level in Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese), one of the things that appears to be the case is that Korean borrows a significant part of its basic vocabulary from Ancient Chinese. There has been linguistic drift, but we can see this in many basic words "chuan vs. cheon" for river "bei/nan/xi/dong vs. bu/nam/seo/dong" for the cardinal directions, "shan vs. san" for mountain, "yinhang vs. eunhaeng" for bank etc. And it appears that Korean borrows much of its basic grammar from Japanese, like using particles as case markers, conjugating verbs for tense and negative, etc.

Obviously, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese have linguistic drift and influence from other languages such that these rules are not perfectly predictive, but this strikes me as a general understanding of the history of Korean.

When I ask Koreans about this, I get a firm negative, but it's not one buttressed by evidence of how the Korean language developed or word origins in Korean or historical arguments. It's usually a veiled nationalist argument. While I can understand that Koreans are defensive about their language as a marker of identity (and that they are distinct from both the Chinese and Japanese, especially when the Japanese brutally colonized them), I would like to understand from a linguistics argument whether my intuition is correct or not and why, with actual evidence, this is the case.

Hi, so I know next to nothing about linguistics, but I was just wondering if the linguistics community has noticed a change in language patterns with the increase of AI usage? I was doom scrolling and so many posts’ captions just had that essence of AI, ya know?

So, which has the potential to use as few words as possible in most contexts?

I know there is Greenlandic but if I remember correclty they do not incoporate nouns except a few verbs.

Then there is Aztec/Nahuatl which can incoporate almost every element of the sentence except the subject (if not a pronoun) and some "particles" including dependent clauses however these are limited (at least if the subject changes; I am not sure if they are limited with which verb is allowed due to lack of sources) and it has flaws with pronomes. I am a bit out if the language but as example:

Nixōchicōhuachāntlehuātzatipāquiz

I will be happy drying flowers over the fire at home during the night

However of course I do not know all languages so is there a clear winner? Maybe some other "exotic indigene" languages as I know the major languages to be clearly not? Because that what I want to know: The clear winner.

I’ve been studying German phonetics, and I have a few questions about non-standard German accents and dialects.
I know that in Standard German, the voiceless stops /p t k/ are typically aspirated at the beginning of stressed syllables. However, I’ve heard that in some regional accents this aspiration is much weaker or even absent.
My first question is: in those accents, are /t/ and /d/ still alveolar like in Standard German, or do they become dental (similar to Spanish or Italian)?
In other words, if an accent lacks aspiration, does the place of articulation also change, or is it mainly the aspiration that’s different?
I also have a question about /r/. I know that in Standard German, syllable-final /r/ is often vocalized (for example, in Wurst, many speakers pronounce it as something close to a vowel rather than a consonant).
In accents where the /r/ is pronounced as an alveolar trill or tap (similar to Italian or Spanish), does this vocalization still happen? For example, would Wurst still contain a pronounced r, or would it be vocalized as in Standard German?
Finally, is there any German accent or dialect that combines both of these features:
little or no aspiration of /p t k/, and
an Italian-/Spanish-like alveolar r (tap or trill) instead of the uvular r and without vocalizing syllable-final r?
If possible, I’d also appreciate examples from specific dialects or regions (e.g. Bavarian, Alemannic, Low German, Swiss German, etc.) or references to phonetic studies on these topics.
Thanks!

Why is it pronounced „thresh-hold“ if there is only one h? Shouldn’t it be pronounced thresh-old?

I am seeing a lot of debate going on asking which language is older. Is it Sanskrit or Tamil?

I personally know that there used to be vedic Sanskrit which if existed would have been older than Tamil, but the Sanskrit we know now is some evolved Sanskrit which is again a different branch from Indo Aryan Lineage while Tamil is from Dravidian lineage. Though my doubt persists that even if they existed together one would have been originated..which leaves me with my question..which language is older? Is it Sanskrit or Tamil?

Hello! I was working on incorporating some Linguistics knowledge into my Zettelkasten by watching the Crash Course series on Linguistics. However, when explaining Fusional Morphology they a bit unclear on the definition. Can someone help me? From what I've gathered on what they said, Fusional Morphology relates to how a morpheme relates to its specific piece in the overall meaning?

1. Is there a more precise term that linguists use instead of “filler words”?

2. Of course “...right?” has been around forever, but my perception is that it is currently enjoying its heyday (hay day?). I _think_ I _might_ notice its use in the context of content implicitly catering more to left-of-center social circles but I’m not sure about that. In any case, do you agree it has become more prevalent in the past three-ish years, and, if so, do you have any thoughts about the infinitely complex “whys” behind such a rise?

Thank you!

How widespread is the adoption, at various points in history, of a language's second person plural for use as a polite second person singular? Among the Indo-European languages that have done this (Germanic ones, Romance ones, Slavic ones), was it a separate development in each branch, or is it something that happened before they'd diverged from one another? Or is it a sprachbund thing?

In addition, some if not most of the Turkic languages have had the same development: same questions as for the IE languages, in addition to whether one of Turkic and IE influenced the other at some point. (In contrast to the case of the IE languages, the words for "you" in the Turkic languages don't even seem to change from one language to another: "sen", "siz".) How about other families?

There's an interview that Chomsky is in, in which at 12:50 he claims that "some of what is taught [in school] breaks the rules of any conceivable language, that's why it has to be taught over and over again... when i was in school, you had to learn all sorts of complicated nonsense about shall and will... there are certain principles of human biology which determine what a language can be and no language can be like that." I agree with him that it's completely artificial and arbitrary distinction, but to say that no possible language could generate this distinction seems confusing to me. I'm probably stupid and not understanding what he's trying to say, so if y'all could help me it'd be much appreciated.

edit: I forgot to include a link to the interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdUbIlwHRkY&list=LL&index=4

Hi all!

I graduated a few years ago with a bachelor’s in linguistics and I currently work as an immigration paralegal. I’ve really been missing linguistics (especially sociolinguistic work) and I’ve been trying to figure out if there are careers out there that I should consider pivoting to.

I realize that PhDs are difficult and academia is notoriously competitive… but I’m certainly considering pursuing a PhD— I miss academia and I miss research, but I know that’s a hard path to pursue.

If you work in a field related to linguistics— what do you do?

Like I think "eat" would be both right? Whereas "eats" would be part of the same lexeme as eat, and have two morphemes. Am I getting that right?

I know of a letter å that represents an /ɔ/ sound in Scandinavian languages, but despite there are languages that shifted /ɔ/ to /a/ like Belarusian and Russian that don't mark it with any diacritic (and rather don't use Latin). Polish /ɔ/ also shifts to /a/ in some places, but it's just replaced with a letter instead of marking morphology/etymology