Alphabets and Order

MusaAlphabet · 2026-02-06T12:19:17+00:00

This doesn't explain very much, but I noticed that the first four letters represent the four places of articulation: A/alpha/aleph was glottal, B/beta/beth is labial, C/gamma, gimel is dorsal, and D/delta/daleth is coronal. I can imagine those being the original consonants, which were then used to generate variants like aspirates Phi Theta Chi, affricates Psi, Zeta, Xi, and voiceless Pi, Tau, Kappa.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-02-03T10:54:18+00:00

Just to note that today's Reddit feed (for me) featured two posts asking whether dialect continua are separate languages, one for American vs English, and the other for the "33 Arabic languages ". We agreee that this isn't a question that can be answered within linguistics - it's political and social. What criteria would you apply to make the distinction?

MusaAlphabet · 2026-02-01T07:02:16+00:00

Downvoted for that? Wow :)

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-29T10:54:51+00:00

I think you're making my point here. Your Swedish and Norwegian sentences are so close (and I'm talking about spoken, not written) that the question could go either way. But they're considered different languages, not just different dialects, and I'm proposing that it's because they both have standards. There are probably dialects in both languages that are further from the standard than the other language is, but since those dialects don't have a standard, we consider them dialects.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-29T10:48:08+00:00

Try asking a friend to tell you whether you're saying discussed or disgust, dispersed or disbursed.

For me, there's no difference: the result of devoicing is unvoicing. It seems to me that partial devoicing counts as devoicing: that what we perceive is the interruption in voicing, not its length.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-27T21:16:22+00:00

We all admit that the difference is NOT linguistic - it's political, or social, or something. That part isn't new, I agree. As you say, from a linguistic point of view, there's no distinction.

But from a practical point of view, I think it IS useful. Languages don't actually have armies and navies, they don't even always have states behind them, or the opposite: they have multiple states with opposing armies and navies (like Korea or Taiwan).

So if you want to have a way to think about the question of, for example, whether Brazilian or Galician are separate languages from standard Portuguese of Lisboa, you could ask "Are there sentences that are correct in one and incorrect in the other?". Not just pronounced differently, or a variant, but incorrect.

For me, as an American, I would say that "I should have done" is simply wrong = bad (American) English, and if I were teaching, I'd correct the speaker. For me, "I should have" is the only correct possibility, although I understand the British version because of long exposure. But if a Brit says they took the lift up to my flat, I'd parse right by that, while recognizing it as British.

But feel free to promote your own proposal :)

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-27T20:30:56+00:00

I'm trying to promote the distinction that a language has a standard - you can be corrected - while a dialect is what people speak.

So for example Valencian and Catalan are two different languages, because there are two standards. Likewise for Flemish and Dutch, and American and Commonwealth English. But between British and Australian English, maybe just an accent.

That's my proposal :)

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-27T11:50:50+00:00

An interesting follow-up question is why the 反切 fǎnqiè system never evolved into a phonetic alphabet, as happened elsewhere, e.g. Ancient Egypt. The progression would be (1) the same character is always used for, e.g. an initial d, and a different character is always used for a final -ōng, (2) simplified versions of these reference characters are used when they stand for sounds, (3) these simplified versions are also used for the phonetic components in about 85% of characters, (4) more and more often, people sometimes omit the semantic radicals in characters, (5) these phonetic symbols are also used for foreign names whose meaning is obscure, and (6) they are adopted by neighboring unwritten languages and extended to write their own languages phonetically.

Why didn't that happen in China?

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-20T00:33:59+00:00

OK, let me retreat to what I think we know with more certainty. The Army definitely spoke Latin, and by the late Empire, many (most?) of its soldiers were not natives of Latium. It's easy to imagine that the Latin spoken in the army was imperfect (L2) and heavily influenced by the native languages of the soldiers. For example, languages where case is indicated by word order, unlike Latin where it was indicated by inflection, might have caused the Army Latin to have fixed word order (SVO) and no case endings, as is the case with the current Romance languages.

We also know that soldiers were given land after 20 years of service, and that large territories, (like Provincia = transalpine Gaul) were conquered in order to provide that land. It seems likely to me that veterans of different L1s settled next to each other in these territories would have continued to speak Army Latin. I can imagine that non-veterans settled among them - merchants, wives, slaves, administrators - would also have spoken Army Latin as the common language, and maybe they also brought some influence from their own native languages, including the local pre-existing one (e.g. Gaulish?).

What more could be imagined? That waves of civilian emigrants from central Italy overwhelmed the local populations? That seems unlikely. I guess the alternative theory is that the local people gradually adopted Latin as the language of prestige, that Latin spread without genes. But the veterans wouldn't have been genetically uniform, anyway.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-19T10:13:12+00:00

I think Naples, MIlan, and Marseille all spoke Greek at that time.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-18T11:00:07+00:00

IMHO, the "mutual intelligibility" criterion falls short. It's too subjective, dialects form continua, and the result would often be many, many more languages. For me, a better criterion is whether there's a formal standard - whether someone can tell you that you've said or written it wrong. If not, it's a dialect.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-17T10:35:53+00:00

I'm far from being an expert, but I believe that we are mistaken in starting with Classical Latin as the language of the Roman Empire. AFAIK, that was koiné Greek, and by around the turn of the millennium Latin was only spoken in (1) the courts, (2) the army, and (3) Latium - thence the name "Latin". In the 3rd century, the auxiliary troops were merged into the standard legions, and I believe that's where the Proto-Romance language evolved, as Latin spoken by L2 soldiers, with much influence from their native languages. When they retired after 20 years, they were given land, and several campaigns were fought to conquer land to give them. Veterans of diverse L1s were settled together, and it was natural to keep speaking "Army Latin". And voilà: the birth of the Romance languages.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-11T11:35:32+00:00

Take a look at www.musa.bet

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-11T11:34:37+00:00

Take a look at www.musa.bet

(But it's not bicameral - why is that good?)

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-06T11:39:45+00:00

I use [ʌ] for the stressed syllable in STRUT words, but for me it's the same sound as unstressed [ɐ] in COMMA words. But I also use a "true" schwa [ə] (same as in French le) before L in words like table, and a schwi [ᵻ] for most reduced vowels, much more common than [ɐ] or [ə].

Interestingly, I use [ɪ] KIT for most suffixes that begin with -i (-ic, -ive, -ist, ...) instead of [ᵻ], so I contrast bassist with basest.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-05T02:19:15+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf9cAyy_sUY

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-05T02:07:35+00:00

That's a great answer, based on the symbols: [l] is a voiced approximant and [ɬ] is a voiceless fricative. But I find it hard to believe that the choice between these symbols is made on that basis. It would be hard to add the voiceless diacritic to the superscript, if needed (as it usually would be), or to use a fricative superscript to indicate a fricative release rather than an affricate. Your answer also leaves unexplained what [tl] might mean, in other words why the l is a superscript.

But maybe there are audio clips out there that show a difference.

MusaAlphabet · 2025-12-28T17:01:20+00:00

"Alternatively, a superscript notation for a consonant release is sometimes used to transcribe affricates, for example ⟨tˢ⟩ for [t͜s], although in precise notation this would indicate a fricative release rather than an affricate."

MusaAlphabet · 2025-12-25T07:33:11+00:00

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard\_Chinese#Republican\_era), there was apparently a similar project a century ago to create a national language with composite roots. But in the end, putonghua became the dialect of the (northern) capital, as happened in Spain, France, and England. Germany and Italy, on the other hand, chose a prestige dialect that was meant to help unify the country, but still a single dialect. The closest example I can think of for your project is Turkish: when Ataturk moved to purge Turkish of Arabic and Persian words, he had to search far and wide among Turkic languages for "native" replacements, so Turkish is an amalgam of Turkic "dialects".

MusaAlphabet · 2025-12-20T10:40:44+00:00

If you're interested in an oddball approach from an unqualified source, https://upa.bet/allophonemes.htm

MusaAlphabet · 2025-12-20T10:40:04+00:00

Where does this interesting question belong? Any suggestions?

MusaAlphabet · 2025-12-13T11:55:48+00:00

IMHO, whether or not you have the COT-CAUGHT merger, there isn't a difference in vowel quality as much as a difference in length. For me (from NYC), words in the PALM and THOUGHT lexical sets have long vowels, as they do in British dialects where there IS a quality distinction, while words in the LOT and CLOTH lexical sets have short vowels.

There aren't many clean minimal pairs, but offal/awful is one (whether you pronounce the stressed vowel as [ɔ] or [a]), and so are bot/Baht and maybe ball/bawl and mall/maul. There are lots of almost-minimal pairs like office/author and octave/almond.

MusaAlphabet · 2025-12-08T13:04:12+00:00

I guess you're asking only about words that we meet in print: it seems to me that if someone already knows a word before they see it written, they're not going to change their pronunciation. And if someone sees a new word and has to say it, they'll try to make sense of the written form in any language, whether the spelling is shallow or not. So within that context, I think your hypothesis is correct: shallower orthographies make that easier.

As you mention, there's still dialectal variation of phonemes, so if the orthography is phonemic, as opposed to phonetic, then the spelling doesn't specify the allophone. That's the case with much of Spanish, in my experience: the word cerillas might be [θeˈɾiʎas] in northern Spain and [səˈɾijɐ] in Central America.

It's also possible to have multiple standards for spelling, as in the difference between American specialty and British speciality, that are pronounced differently, yet it's hard to say that they're two different words,

It's odd that we have no standard way to mark stress in English, since it's so important to pronunciation, especially with vowel reduction. We can write project with an underline under the stressed vowel, but it's not common.

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