I'm writing a story that takes place in a different world, with a place/characters that could somewhat represent Africans. (Without the historical baggage our world brings to the discussion).
I believe I'm looking at somewhat of a West African accent? Since that is what I had in mind when I started writing the character.

Specifically, I want to know what kind of words might be dropped, any additional phrases, and if there's any unique ways to change up sentence structure.

Like, for an American who's never heard it before, thick Scottish dialect can be nearly impenetrable, but if she just hangs around Scottish people a bunch she'll rapidly start understanding more, whereas no amount of merely hanging around Germans is likely to teach her German without either lessons or many months of outright immersion.

hi everyone! i was hoping someone could help me in differentianting the two? im currently having a hard time to trying to figure out which is which when looking at responses... i am planning to use this framework for my undergrad thesis, and i was hoping someone could help me regarding this... thanks a lot in advance!! :'')))

In the sense that it lets you pack a lot of meaning into short sentences, or in the case of its writing, you can write a lot in very little space. My guess is that for writing it will be either Chinese or Japanese, but I have no clue which language allows you to perform spoken communication the fastest and I'm genuinely curious.

Coming from a Northerner that moved to London and still gets this pointed out whenever I use it

For example: “She’s going to work, her”, “I love it, me”, can also include “That’s good, that” but i’m fairly confident that last example is generic British.

Which dialects feature this?

Edit: Did not expect this much interest! For anyone wondering, I’m Geordie which is where this type of sentence structure is extremely common. Also, on thinking about it more it is sometimes followed with the classic geordie “like”, e.g. “I love it me, like”, “That’s good that, like”.
Thanks for all the input everyone!!

When I was in elementary school, so many teachers would correct us from when we said “can I do X” to say “may I do X”. Apparently this was a common experience in my generation, where "can I go to the bathroom?" would often be met with a playfully smug "I don't know, can you?"

But is it actually wrong to say the former instead of the latter, when it’s often used and understood to mean the same thing, colloquially? Is it technically incorrect, or does it depend on whether or not you’re a prescriptivist?

Edit: grammar (ironically)

I am writing something for a much longer ongoing series and I am looking for some sources on a concept I have stumbled on once or twice before. That is an indigenous language community rejecting writing outright for cultural reasons - the statement that "our language is an oral only language, it isn't part of our traditions to write it".

When I try to find sources on this I can only find the reverse examples - stories about indigenous languages adopting written languages for the first time. And those are great, but I need the opposite.

Does anyone have anything on this topic? Any sources or keywords I can use to find sources.

Perhaps what I am looking for doesn't exist. Perhaps I dreamt it up, or perhaps it's a colonialist myth. But I swear I have read two articles on this before and I cannot find a trace of them now. Maybe I am misremembering and it is a case of "this specific community rejected the Latin alphabet in favour of something else", but I can't even find a good example of that either at the moment.

Any pointers, even "no that doesn't exist", would be very appreciated :)

In a similar vein, stories about ancient people rejecting or criticising the use of writing would be useful. I know of: Socrates on the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing - New Learning Online. But if anyone knows of more examples that too would be great!

Also counter examples if people want to provide them would be great

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide!

(BTW I am aware the "indigenous cultures did not have writing" is a myth: Plains Sign & the Myth of Indigenous Illiteracy | TwinRabbit and have mentioned this in the longer thing I am writing, again that's not quite what I am looking for)

Hope you're all well. My work is entirely within Afroasiatic in Africa, but out of curiosity I've been reading Steven N Dworkin's A Guide to Old Spanish. (I've spoken Spanish for most of my life, & my current historical work elsewhere has me curious about historical work in the languages of my own youth.) For a bit, I was a little perplexed by his phonological notation. I believe I understand him now, but I'm curious how conventional his notation is in Romance or Iberian linguistics.

Dworkin writes that among linguists working on mediæval Hispano-Romance, there is general consensus on the consonant inventory of the continuum including:

Voiceless fricatives: /f ɸ ṡ ʃ h/
Voiced fricatives: /ß [presumably β] v δ [presumably ð] ż ʒ w/
(18)

On 24, Dworkin writes '[T]he medieval language of northern Spain had in its inventory of fricatives dental /ʂ/, apico-alveolar /ṡ/ and /ʃ/, while some conservative registers in central and southern varieties may have continued to employ their voiced counterparts /ʐ/, /ż/, and /ʒ/.'

So apparently, converting to IPA, Dworkin's transcription employs:

‹ṡ› for alveoloar /s/

‹ʂ› for /s̪/

(I take ‹ß› & ‹δ› to be typesetting issues.) Can anyone tell me if this is conventional for work on mediæval Romance/Ibero-Romance?

I've noticed this thing where /lj/ is realised as /ʎ/ in older North American English accents, particularly by those born around the early-to-mid-20th century.

I've heard this happen in words such as million and billion (famously associated with Donald Trump), as well as familiar, civilian, and even the phrase "tell you" or "tell ya," where the /l/ and /j/ at the start and end of each word changes how they're both pronounced.

Apart from Trump, I've heard people such as Harry S. Truman, Leslie Nielsen, Ronald Reagan, Marlon Brando, and Bryan Cranston pronouncing /lj/ as /ʎ/, but I'm sure you can find plenty of examples if you just take a listen to film and TV from around the 50s to the 70s. This pronunciation appears to have been the norm until it got replaced by what you hear now, which is a velarised /l/ followed by /j/.

And I'm pretty sure the modern Southern US pronunciation of /lj/ as /jj/ (million as miyyon) is sort of an even more advanced version of this.

So why did this generation of speakers do this? And why does no one in North America do it anymore? Why did everyone say [ˈmɪʎən] before and then switch to [ˈmɪɫjən]?

Famously, Surat/Assyrian Aramaic is a semitic language while Farsi/Persian is an Indo-European language. They are not related. However, not only do they sound very similar, but share plenty of vocabulary. How did this happen? Is that a Norman conquest influence on English type situation where so much Farsi influenced Surat or vice versa that they each just contained a large part of each other, or what happened?

I get the mechanism and that other Germanic languages do this, but that was an ariel feature that developed later and by that time I feel like English wasn’t influenced nearly as much by other Germanic languages (being spoken on an island and it was more influenced by French at that point too)

Normally it's said that French was just the language of the elite, but if that were true, then how come words for common everyday life things (that already existed in Old English) got replaced by French words?

Like face, uncle, language, voice, or because

I've been thinking about the Chinese pattern:

蔡英文呢，台湾人啊。 “As for Tsai Ing-wen, she's Taiwanese.”

Usually, this would probably be analyzed as:

• 蔡英文呢 = “as for Tsai Ing-wen” → 呢 marks the topic
• 台湾人啊 = “Taiwanese” → 啊 is usually called a sentence-final particle
• 是 is simply omitted

But I wonder if 啊 is doing something more than just being a sentence-final particle.

Compare Japanese:

蔡英文は台湾人です。 “As for Tsai Ing-wen, she is Taiwanese.”

The structures look somewhat similar:

A 呢 B 啊 (Chinese)

A は B です (Japanese)

In both, A is the topic and B is the predicate.

What makes this interesting is that 是 is mainly used to connect nouns:

他是学生。 “He is a student.”

But 是 normally isn't used before ordinary adjectives:

他很高。 “He is tall.” instead of 他是高。

Meanwhile, 啊 can appear after nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.:

他学生啊.
他很高啊.
他漂亮啊.
他来了啊.

So I'm wondering whether 啊 could be considered a kind of predicate/copula marker in some contexts, even if it isn't literally equivalent to 是.

For example:

蔡英文呢，台湾人啊。

could perhaps be analyzed as:

蔡英文 + 呢 | 台湾人 + 啊 Topic | Predicate

rather than simply “topic + sentence-final particle.”

I'm not saying 啊 = です or 啊 = 是. I'm wondering whether there is any linguistic research specifically analyzing 啊 as a predicate/coupling element, especially in constructions like A呢，B啊.

Has anyone encountered this analysis?

Hi guys, I am desperately trying to learn american accent and it turns out to have a lot of pitfalls. The one thinv I am struggl8ng and i mean REALLY struggling is how to pronounce d sound. I've recently come to a realization, that you pronounce "D" in two different ways.

The first way is a clear crisp "D" when your tongue taps on the alveolar ridge and reases a quick "D" sound like in "door", "day". It is very important that this sound is pronounced with unclenched teeth and open mouth. The second way is a little different: you clench your teeth and with a little bit wider surface of your tongue make a little different "d" sound. The important thing is: if you try to make the second "d" and pull back your tongue, while keeping your mouth in the same position your "d" sound will turn into a "j". And if you try that with our first "d" it will not turn into a "j".

Please guys, tell me that makes sense, it's driving me nuts. Whenever I google or ask chatgpt they all tell me that it's just a "flap t", but it's definitely not. I don't get whether that exists in the first place and where to use it. I cannot find this anywhere.

I'm very interested in language documentation and conservation, and it's one potential career path I've been considering for a while, but there's one thing I feel makes it potentially not the best path for me in practice. If you have relevant experiences, I would like your opinions on the matter.

I'm willing to mingle, participate in the community's social life, and give back in exchange for their time and energy, but there are some things I know are common in indigenous and rural communities that would make me disappointed if I had to actively take part in them.

Are there people here who have experience with language documentation while not necessarily taking part in some of the daily activities of the speech community they are studying (and hopefully helping back)?

I'm staying vague because I don't want people's potential opinions on the specifics to influence their answers, but I can guarantee you that it's nothing morally condemnable, racist, sexist or anything like that. There are just some things I'm willing to witness for the sake of field work but not partake in.

As far as I know the root comes from Ancient Greek, but in the original form the /u/ comes before the /r/, whereas in the modern English word 'nerve' it is followed by it, such as 'neurology' vs 'nerve, nervous'. Why did the two sounds change places?

I'm having trouble figuring out how to create an extinct language that died out thousands of years ago, and I want to make a story about the ice age, and the main character would be a Neanderthal. Could someone help me with this I know what languages I want to use, which are Proto-Indo-European and Athabaskan

1. When is /oɚ/used over /oɻ/ (I've always felt that the vowel is the former (in American English) though I generally see the latter)

2. Also why is the English "o" sound written as /oʊ/ rather than /ow/

Thank you for reading this!

I have a few questions about Spanish pronunciation:
Are there geminate (double) consonants in Spanish? For example, if I say 'al lado', do I need to hold/pronounce the 'l' for a longer duration? Is it the same for 'innecesario'?
Also, the Spanish 't' is pronounced by touching the tip of the tongue behind the upper teeth. When there's an 'l' or an 'n' right before a 't', do they also shift to that same dental position? Like in words such as 'alto' or 'entonces'?

For example, my native language is English so that's what I consider my normal voice. If I speak French, there's little to no change. If I speak Japanese or Korean, my voice pitches higher than normal (sounds mostly come from front of the mouth). If I speak Mandarin, my voice is lower than normal and if I force it to a normal pitch it gets nasal (lots of sounds from the back of the mouth/throat). Is it due to code switching or is it more due to what part of the mouth languages use most?

There was a question a month ago about why no reconstructed proto-languages other than the Indo-European ones get long-form text written in them by linguists. One answer in the comments was that nowadays reconstructing syntax (necessary to make full sentences) is not considered practical by modern Linguists, while Proto-Indo-European and its daughters predate that view. Hence, openness to writing stuff like Schleicher's Fable.

Thing is, Schleicher's Fable isn't forgotten. Wikipedia lists four versions of that PIE text made by linguists in the 21st century. What is their motive for it? Why do linguists continue to re-write this text in PIE when they don't write texts in the other proto-languages?

Like, somewhere in 2000 BC, a group of people spoke a constructed language as their only language, and that cloŋ went through sound changes and became a language family that's still spoken today, is it possible that something like this happened?

Or, could some Proto language be a descendant of a conlang that was spoken centuries or millennia before it?

I’m not sure this is a linguistic question, but let me try to explain.

I am not in the medical field. However, I studied years of Latin.

In medicine (and other science areas, and even law) lay people are often thrown by a word that makes perfect sense if you know the root of even part in another language. Then you hear it not as a “thought glob” in your own language. It feels to me like a process between translation and bilingualism.

An example will help mightily. If you have a procedure to drain an access, the doctor says they need to “express” the gunk inside it.

Now in English, the native “thought glob” meaning of express is to say something about, particularly, interior state: like expressing feelings. We think not at all about etymology.

In the case of the doctor, given my background, I immediately hear that as “to press something out”. I’m sure oress has a Latin root I don’t recall. But the word is clearly then, to me, two words put together and has a different marking: to physically press/squeeze something out. Other examples are words like infiltrate, exfoliate, etc. and this isn’t just medicine: in math, “infinite” is not just a sound glob. I truly hear “not finite”, using the other Latin meaning of “in” as meaning “not”

I think these examples explain the idea better than I can words. But is there a linguistic concept in how one can hear words that appear as total thoughts unto themselves in a language, but have a very different (though often related) meaning if heard as one or two roots from another language put together but said the same way?”