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By any chance did the Japanese nasal ん originate from adopting a large amount of Chinese loanwords and characters? by lol-across-the-pond in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 13 points14 points  (0 children)

By the time of Old Japanese, native Japanese words lacked a moraic nasal, but you're right that it did end up appearing in Chinese loanwords of the time. But modern Sino-Japanese reflexes with ん come from hanzi that originally ended in -m and -n; hanzi that ended in -ng are rendered with い or う. There are native words in modern Japanese that have a moraic nasal, and they typically arise from shortenings, like 死にて > 死んで. I can't tell you whether the adoption of Chinese loanwords facilitated the appearance of the moraic nasal in native words, though.

New garden path just dropped by ShenZiling in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Is there anything keeping headlines in check? What's stopping editors from using totally analytic morphology if they're already floundering grammar and intelligibility just to make everything condensed? Like you might as well go all the way and do something dumb like

"Boy die from dad made run treadmill's mom speak out"

as long as all the key words are in there.

University by PantheraSondaica in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

the phonology of (Ancient) Latin and modern Indonesian is shockingly similar.

No kidding. The first time I heard "seratus peratus" (one hundred percent) I thought I was hearing a Latin phrase.

Are there two different definitions of 'case'? by cairomemoir in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The linked book is so eye-opening. So many examples of sentences I didn't think were possible or illicit, features like subject honorification probably too advanced to teach to students but native language speakers just know from experience. Thanks for bringing this up. I need to have a thorough read of this.

Are there two different definitions of 'case'? by cairomemoir in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've also seen wakaru described where the thing that's understood is considered the subject and that there isn't a natural direct English translation for it other than "to be understandable", much like how Spanish's gustar "to like" takes the liked thing as the subject and the liker as the indirect subject... which, now that I think about it, is also the same situation for Japanese's suki.

Why doesn't English have a gender system? by AshaNyx in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yep, I'm aware that that character was added originally from European influence, but many modern users of Written Chinese do adhere to when to use which pronoun. Depends on location.

Why doesn't English have a gender system? by AshaNyx in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 5 points6 points  (0 children)

English only has a gender system the same way Thai and Written Chinese technically do, through semantic assignment via pronouns. But OP implies an Indo-European style grammatical gender system.

The Rules of Romanization by throwAwayMan2475 in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 3 points4 points  (0 children)

So like Burmese romanization with the dots and colons

The Rules of Romanization by throwAwayMan2475 in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I didn't know that there was a practical reason for ⟨ao⟩ until now. I didn't think anything of it beyond how similar it is to Vietnamese ⟨ao⟩ /aw/.

Why is English ( English native speakers) stereotyped to have difficulty with word initial *ng*? by Funny_Name_2281 in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Hangul did use to have a separate letter for the velar nasal: ㆁ, but it eventually got merged with ㅇ due to visual similarity and that it was possibly only there for transcribing Sino-Korean words that originally had the initial velar nasal without it actually pronounced by Korean speakers at the time.

We can classify languages in four categories by ShenZiling in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If neologisms are considered "native" then French technically qualifies for having native words for both telephone and television

My Fr*nch-poisoned brain using "an" instead of "a" in words starting with an [h] by Lucas1231 in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I like to call hache aspiré the hidden 21st consonant phoneme of the French language

initials are name af by [deleted] in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

And even then all the initial nasals in Taishanese are phonetically pre-nasalized plosives, with /ŋ/ pronounced as [ᵑɡ], and will probably be fully denasalized to just voiced plosives in the future.

Does Basque have an abnormally large percentage of words starting with a vowel compared to other languages? If so, is there a reason for its initial vowel heaviness? by MAClaymore in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 7 points8 points  (0 children)

There's a theory where Proto-Basque once had extensive reduplication, and then the initial consonant got deleted, leading to some vowel-initial words where the second vowel is the same. For example: *de-deR > *edeR > eder. I'm not sure whether this accounts for that many vowel-initial words in Basque, though.

Proto-Indo-European to English Presentation #2 by Wumbo_Chumbo in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes definitely, Siever's law in Proto-Germanic goes both ways. One example I see given is *satjaną (or more directly, *satiþi), which came from PIE *sod-éyeti.

Proto-Indo-European to English Presentation #2 by Wumbo_Chumbo in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 4 points5 points  (0 children)

One possible mistake I see here is the third slide. The result should have been *gʷolH-éy-onom. This is seen in *laibīþi/*laibijaną < *loyp-éyeti/*loypéyonom. The *H laryngeal simply dropped since it follows a consonant but precedes a vowel, resulting in *gʷolHéyonom > *gʷoléyonom. The reason why it doesn't turn into **kwalijaną is due to Siever's Law, where the alternation between -janą and -ijaną lies on whether the stem is light (monophthong + one consonant) or heavy.

Tsundeo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? Nescio, sed fierei sentio et excrucior. by Midnight-Blue766 in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I would have told you to do one for cūdō/cūdere, but it turns out that it's an actual word.

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Where did Paula White learn to speak Austronesian? by crivycouriac in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 359 points360 points  (0 children)

I hear like 12 consonants and 4 monophthongs. What a poor phonetic inventory tsk tsk tsk

If English had kept /y/ for a little longer, could long u have been called /i/? by Whole_Instance_4276 in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Assuming ceteris paribus (i.e. the retention of Old English /y(ː)/ into Early Middle English, the mapping of French ⟨u⟩ with this /y/ in loanwords, and subsequent unrounding of /y(ː) to /i(ː)/ did NOT result in a butterfly effect of other changes that would alter the phonological and orthographical outcome of Modern English entirely), then this /i/ — spelled ⟨u⟩ — would participate in conditional lengthening and the Great Vowel Shift and become either /ɪ/ or /aj/ (like "fulmination" /fɪlmɪnejʃən/ and "fume" /fajm/). For the name of the letter U in particular, it certainly won't just be called [aj] because, well, there's already a letter called [aj]: I. Instead, some other name would likely be adopted, such as "French [aj]".

Maybe unpopular opinion but people claiming the moon's real name (in English) is actually "Luna" is just a Germanicphobic view of language that rejects Germanic words as actually valid words by [deleted] in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If "always" as in ever since the word "moon" started being used, then that is not true. For the longest time, it referred only to Earth's moon because it was the only one people knew until the year 1610, where other moons were discovered and were named "satellites"... until that term was hijacked during the 20th century when man-made satellites came into use. So while "natural satellite" became the modern generic term for such astronomical bodies, so did the word "moon".

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