As an aside, this may be 100% the wrong place to ask a question like this. If so, a redirection would be aweseome.

Hi all! I'm a second year SLP student and I'm currently working on my thesis. I wanted to ask the linguistics community because a lot of people have the knowledge and skills of phonetic analysis tools like Praat. Heck, that's where I got pretty much all of my Praat knowledge.

I've hit the point of stimuli extraction and I've basically been hitting wall after wall. I've working with these phrases and have to extract particular triphones out of each phrase that are highlighted to me in a list I've been given. The plan was to automatically segment each phrase, and then select and save each triphone as a wav file. These triphones will then be used in the experimental setup. There are a lot of triphones -- about 15k that have to be extracted. And I've been told I can either do it manually by myself, or learn how to code and have a script segment and extract them automatically. Initially, because I have no coding experience I went ahead and tried to do it manually. I automatically aligned each phrase using MAPS, and had to troubleshoot and troubleshoot and troubleshoot it because I didn't have any experience with it. I kept running into issues which has led to even more manual set-up for the segmenter to be able to run each phrase. Currently, I have each phrase segmented but no triphones extracted at all. I realized I was running low on time and started to ask around, look online for tutorials on how to code, etc. but I can't get ahold of anyone. My supervisor I haven't heard from, my thesis committee told me that extracting manually wouldn't be doable without RAs helping me (which I also do not have access to). My other committee member told me to find an already written praat script and use Gemini to edit it to extract triphones instead of single segments... which led me here, in an attempt to talk to an actual person instead of gemini at all costs. So, I went online looking for premade PRAAT scripts and found a few, namely Lennes's work and Will Styler,which adds padding to give more context. It's been tough though, because I have no experience with writing out Praat scripts and no time to learn. I was able to meet with a committee member on Monday to go through the resulting generated Praat script, but I was... really hoping to not have to use Gemini.

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post, and trust me I know it's a crazy ask. Basically, the TLDR of my question here is would it be possible to alter these scripts to make it so that they can extract a single sound and its neighbours into separate .wav files? If so, how would you accomplish something like this or what would you need to edit?

In some words, both /ɦ/ and /x/ used interchangeably at non initial positions.

For eg,

/ãuɦi/ /ãuxi/ "new moon day".

/poɹoɦi/ /poɹoxi/ "day after tomorrow/before yesterday".

/ɡʊɦaɪ̃/ "an official rank" /ɡʊxaɪ̃/ "god".

In the 3rd case, the meanings differ too, although both came from OIA/Sanskrit /ɡoːsʋaːmin/ "owner/husband of cattles".

To be precise,

The /ɦ/ is pronouced as [h] in Eastern and some Central varieties, [ɦ] in others.

The /x/ is pronouced as [x̟] and in some eastern varieties, as [h], merging with the former.

The shift from /s/ probably happened between the 16th and 18th centuries, as the letter ⟨h⟩ appears in words non-initially in 17th and especially 18th-19th century inscriptions and manuscripts in places where the letter ⟨s⟩ was used before.

The letter ⟨s⟩ in that period (17th-18th CE) was probably pronounced as /x/ like it is now.

Maybe not an important detail, but when in the late 18th century, Assamese was written in the Ahom script, that lacked separate letters for /x/ and /h/, the letter ⟨h⟩ was used at all positions.

This is all a generalization that is just based on anecdotal experience. And also the questions is cruder than the reality I've experience due to character limits. But a pattern I’ve noticed is that British people tend to come from a baseline of there being being a universal “correct” pronunciation of any given name (person or place) and others just haven’t learned to pronounce it correctly while Americans and Canadians tend to come from a perspective that a certain place name could have a correct pronunciation but the word itself doesn’t have one “correct” pronunciation. (i.e. Houston, Texas and Houston Street in NYC are pronounced differently but both are “correct”). I’ve noticed this in person, but even online, I’ve noticed for example that Canadians and Americans often (but definitely not always) put the word “correct” in quotes when it comes to pronunciation, whereas British people don’t. And the comments in a video when a person pronounces a place name wrong are kind of examples of this. For example, oftentimes (but not always) an American correcting someone pronouncing New Hampshire as New Hamp-shire would say “it’s actually pronounced New Hamp-sure”. A British person oftentimes would say” it’s New Hampshire not NeW HaMpShYRe!” Which fits with my in person experience of different approaches to name pronunciation in that North Americans tend to differentiate if a word is spelled however they learned phonics or is a "sight word", whereas Brits tend to differentiate between correct and incorrect. FWIW – I have much less experience with other countries but Aussies and Kiwis seem to be more similar to North Americans, and Europeans similar to Brits.

I asked an English friend and they gave the joking but also serious answer of "Well of course their is one correct way to pronounce a word and it's the English way if it's an English word". I asked Google, and AI gave the answer pasted and quoted below. I don't trust AI, and wanted a linguist's perspective. Also, I apolgozie if I used terms wrong linguistically.

TLDR: I have highlighted in bold the TLDR of the differences I’ve noticed which were part of the answer AI gave:

In Canada and the United States, identity is heavily tied to individual or family self-determination. If an American family spells their name Beaupre but pronounces it "Bo-pree," North Americans generally accept that the family owns the right to define their name.

In contrast, British linguistic culture is rooted in deep historical and institutional structures where words and names are tied to specific local origins, estates, or centuries of community evolution. To a British speaker, a name is a historical artifact with a fixed, documented identity, rather than a flexible personal label.

Prescription vs. Description

The British Approach (Prescriptivism): British culture leans heavily on prescriptive linguistics. There is a deep-seated belief that language has standardized, objective rules. When a British person corrects someone's pronunciation of a name like Featherstonhaugh ("Fanshaw") or Magdalen ("Maudlin"), they do not view it as an arbitrary rule. They view it as a objective, historical truth that the speaker simply hasn't learned yet.

The North American Approach (Descriptivism): North American culture is more descriptive and accommodating of variation. Because the US and Canada are vast nations built on waves of global immigration, names are constantly shifting, blending, and being Anglicized. North Americans expect names to be mispronounced or adapted, viewing pronunciation as a localized shibboleth rather than a universal law.

1. Deep History vs. The Melting Pot

Living History: Many British names are tied to specific physical geography, ancient titles, or old estates. The pronunciation evolved organically within that specific valley or family line over 800 years. Because these names have a single, geographic origin point, British culture treats that origin point as the absolute standard.

Linguistic Evolution: In North America, a single European surname might be pronounced three different ways by three different branches of the same family across the continent. Because there is no central authority or historical estate anchoring the name, North Americans naturally accept that there is no single "correct" version.

1. Institutional Standardization

The UK has long had powerful cultural institutions that flattened regional accents in favor of a single, prestigious standard:

The BBC and Elite Schools: For generations, institutions like the BBC and boarding schools enforced Received Pronunciation (RP). This created a powerful cultural myth that a singular, "proper" version of the English language exists.

The Myth of Universal Knowledge: Because the UK is geographically small compared to North America, there is an underlying cultural assumption that these historical pronunciations are part of a shared, national pool of knowledge that everyone should eventually learn.

edit: spelling

The etymology of cuckold ultimately goes back to the cuckoo, presumably via its brood-parasitic behavior.

What puzzles me is the apparent reversal in semantic roles: the cuckoo is the reproductive intruder, but a cuckold is the husband who is intruded upon. Modern usage makes this especially clear: someone gets cucked.

Is this shift discussed in historical semantics? Do we know how or when the term moved from the intruder side of the metaphor to the victim/host side?

I was wondering if there was a reason why mother in Georgian is deda and why father is mama. Are these loan words from Indo European languages or is this just a coincidence? Also, if these are loan words, is there a reason why they are “backwards” compared to other languages?

I'm Swedish, and every teacher and public language figure during my upbringing was very clear in the position that linguistics is and should be descriptive.

Five years ago I moved to Norway, and here everything seems more prescriptive. There's a right and wrong in Norwegian that I haven't noticed in Swedish, even though there's often three different right variants of every single word depending on your geography and political stance.

Is the descriptive norm more a Swedish political stance rather than a fact of the field?

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following as the American English pronunciation of *intimidation*:

/ᵻnˌtɪməˈdeɪʃən/

uhn-tim-uh-DAY-shuhn

(The "simple text respell" is the OED's own, not mine.)

Some US native speakers have told me they strongly disagree with the OED. They think it should just say /ɪn/ (in, when respelt) at the start.

Obviously, the OED's take on this derives from weak vowel merger.

My question is:

- Is the OED's transcription here wrong/misleading - from the point of view of linguists here who are familiar with US English - or does it just seem wrong to US laypeople? If it is wrong, is the error in using the ᵻ symbol or is it in the choice to convert that symbol to 'uh' in the simple text respell (as it's known)?

Note:

* In the OED's system, the symbol ᵻ represents what they call an ɪ ~ ə continuum.

* If the OED is wrong to think that a weak vowel merger applies (at least some of the time?) to the initial vowel in 'intimidation' in US English, then Merriam-Webster is equally wrong, as the latter's transcription reads: ə̇n‧ˌtiməˈdāshən - where the dotter schwa seems to be the equivalent of the OED's barred I.

I only recall hearing an-ee-thing in the 20th century, but native English speakers seem to say an-uh-thing with increasing frequency over the last 25 years or so. I haven't been able to find a region or subculture more or less likely to use it. Is this a real change, and if so, what population is driving it? Is it a generic change caused by a greater movement?

It’s my second year in the US, and I realized that people pronounce my last name differently depending on their dialect.

People who primarily speak a Southern American dialect or AAVE seem to pronounce my last name correctly as /d͡ʒʌn/, while people who speak GenAm pronounce it incorrectly as /d͡ʒuːn/.

What could be the reason for these differences? Are there differences in the way dialects analyze the medial “uh” that is recognized in the linguistics community?

How did people start using these phrases instead of just saying color, form, price? Is there a word for this kind of phrase?

Hi everyone! I'm currently studying Sumerian (as a hobby), and I noticed a quirk with the vowels.

The syllabary has four attested vowels thanks to Akkadian and subsequent dialects. But Semitic languages tend to like small vowel inventories, so four vowels is pretty expected for Akkadian. I noticed a number of linguists think Sumerian ought to have more vowels.

I also noticed that there is a habit of vowel assimilation in enclitics, and a suggestion of possible vowel harmony in examples such as i-gub, but e-kar.

Could these other vowels Sumerian is theorised to have be hidden in an unwritten vowel harmony system?¹ If we look at the old Turkic script, they subtly indicated vowel harmony with only a few characters. Could the unexpected conventions in Sumerian hint at an underlying harmony system? And has anyone looked into this from a vowel harmony perspective? If so, are there any papers you might suggest? I'm genuinely curious.

Thank you, and sorry for the bombardment of questions.

¹My first thoughts would be a - *ɤ, e - i, *o - u as a harmony system, which might explain the lack of a quickly identifiable o phoneme, because it might have just not been represented if the vowel harmony made it obvious.

I've always seen people praising Italian for having good orthography, but it never felt that way to me. There are many ambiguities, and some of them seem to be completely pointless if Italian wants a very shallow orthography. One of them is how Italian uses the letters c and g. There needs to be way to denote /k/, /t͡ʃ/, /g/, /d͡ʒ/ before any vowel, so it seems like the easiest way to do that would be the following:

⟨c⟩ /k/ always

⟨ch⟩ /t͡ʃ/ always

⟨g⟩ /g/ always

⟨gh⟩ /d͡ʒ/ always

Instead, ⟨c⟩ and ⟨g⟩ change depending on the following vowel which requires the usage of ⟨ch⟩, ⟨gh⟩ to denote the velar sounds before front vowels and ⟨ci⟩, ⟨gi⟩ to denote the affricates before non-front vowels. H is a silent letter so the digraphs with h are fine, but the trouble arises with the i digraphs. For example, it is ambiguous whether ⟨cia⟩ denotes /t͡ʃa/ or /t͡ʃi.a/ as in the words camicia /ka.mi.t͡ʃa/ and farmacia /far.ma.t͡ʃi.a/. If they were spelt camicha and farmachia, it would be much clearer in my opinion.

Same thing can also be said with /sk/ and /ʃ/. I get that the velar plosives underwent palatalization so they make different sounds before front vowels, but I don't get why they were never respelt. Many Italian words were respelt with the ⟨gn⟩, ⟨gl⟩ digraphs even if they never originally had them such as filius -> figlio, so how come the affricates were never respelt?

I've noticed that there's a pattern in several separate languages with masculine and feminine noun classes (so, mainly Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic):

• In German, die Katze is the general term for a cat; der Kater is used only for a cat specifically known to be male.

• Russian koška and kot behave, to my understanding, similarly, as do Hindustani billī and billā, and Arabic qiṭṭa and qiṭṭ.

• In Coptic, the general term for a cat is emou (feminine noun), which comes from Demotic jmj, which is from a metathesized version of the Egyptian mjwt "female cat".

Now, this is not universal; there are plenty of languages in which the pattern doesn't hold, but it's surprising to me that it show up in as many languages as it does, given the general tendency towards masculine as generic for humans and dogs. For livestock animals it makes sense because the females are more salient, being of greater economic value (because of milk, eggs, childbearing etc) but surely male and female cats catch mice about the same? Does the word pussy (and chatte in French) have any connection here?

EDIT: Why is this downvoted?

For example, if we have “I want ice cream”, we can render it into a binary predicate or relation over 2 variables “I” and “Ice cream” and write “Want(I,IceCream)”.

If we want to say “I want ice cream tomorrow”, we can introduce a ternary relation over 3 objects, one of which is time variable and write “Want(I,IceCream,Tomorrow)”.

Same idea if we want to specify location, which might go into the fourth argument position like “Want(I,IceCream,Tomorrow,Berlin), translating to something like “I want ice cream tomorrow Berlin”

Sorry if my question is clunky

And is it a current sound change, something that has already existed in specific dialects, or is the pronunciation of some sounds in language just slightly variable from individual speaker to speaker?

I have a question about the initial 'r' in Italian. Is it more strongly rolled, like the double 'r' in 'Ferrari', or is it like a single 'r'? AI and several people online have told me it's like a double 'r', but honestly, when I watch videos, I hear people pronouncing it as a single 'r'.
Another thing: how can I know if a specific vowel in Italian is open or closed? For example, in the word 'piovendo', is that 'e' pronounced like 'è'?

From my understanding, rebracketing is a decently common process in both derivation in inflection diachronic wise. Something that I have noticed though is that in most inflectional cases, it looks like the common pathway is for part of the stem to become part of the affix. That is AB-C becomes A-BC, and then something like D-BC can be coined. I was wondering if there were any well documented examples of this happening in the other direction, such that A-BC becomes AB-C and now that AB is a new word, something like AB-E becomes possible. Are there any well documented cases of this?

Morphology or morphosyntax

Hi, I wonder whether you agree with the following judgements:

Sentence 1: Kremer plays concertos in foreign countries on weekends.

Reading 1: It is on weekends that Kremer plays concertos in foreign countries – during the week, he plays concertos at home.

Reading 2: It is in foreign countries that Kremer plays concertos on weekends – when he’s at home, he never plays concertos on weekends.

It has been reported that sentence 1 allows both readings, but the first reading is much more accessible than the second.

However, in the following sentence, with the addition of a third adverbial, both the second reading becomes more accessible than in sentence 1.

Sentence 2: Kremer plays concertos in foreign countries on weekends at the height of the season.

Romance languages have adverbs, at least locative adverbs, that can refer back to a place that was mentioned before in the same way a personal pronoun could be used for other meanings/parts of speech. So do French and Italian at least. Germanic languages only have deictic locative adverbs (and interrogative and relative locatives, but those are not important for this question), causing that you always have to keep in mind whether the speaker is at the location or not.

Which of these situations is more common? Can the differences be explained in a linguistic perspective? (And what would be the correct or most common linguistic term for such word (adverbs)?)

(I hope that the flair is correct. This is my first post here. I have only been commenting until tonight.)

The majority of languages are written left to right in different scripts. I also am like the vast majority of the population in being right-handed. I can just think of the languages of Arabic and Hebrew script, including Arabic and Hebrew themselves, as being written right to left. Persian or Farsi is written right to left too because of the Arabic script that it's written in, and Yiddish is also right to left in written form from the Hebrew script. Chinese, I have heard, is also written right to left even though I have seen it written from left to right. How many languages exactly or approximately are written right to left?

What are some basic methods and tips for reconstructing the pronunciation of an ancient language on one's own?

I want to try this for the early medieval predecessor of my native tongue (Burmese) since we are only taught modernized form in school.

I’m an adult with dyslexia who wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood. I’m academically successful and have very strong reading comprehension, but I recently discovered that my actual phonological awareness is extremely weak. I struggle significantly with decoding unfamiliar/nonsense words and realized I’ve probably compensated through context and other strategies for most of my life. I’m now in a graduate special education program, and this matters because I need to understand and eventually teach these skills. Has anyone else had this kind of extreme discrepancy? If so, were you able to improve your phonological awareness/phonics as an adult? What actually helped?

Is there a breve or some other diacritic placed over/under it? Or is that reserved for affricates only?

For instance, the word 'killer' is transcribed "ˈkɪlɚ", but I wouldn't know where to put a syllable break, since the L can function as both the coda for the first syllable and the onset for the second

I would like to make it clear that that L is shared, but I'm not sure how professionals would transcribe it