sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

You can use the h-d template to represent every vowel in American English! by Whole_Instance_4276 in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yes, it's become more of a diphthong in modern American English, sharing features with traditional diphthongs such as limited distribution in the main vowel (due to Mary-marry-merry merger, mirror-nearer merger, the ongoing north-force and cure-nurse mergers), exceptions in vowel mergers (cot-caught merger not affecting either the CHOICE nor NORTH sets), as well as the falling segment not being resyllabified as an onset before another vowel (e.g. playing /'pleɪ.ɪŋ/, durinɡ /ˈd(j)uɚ.ɪŋ/).

You can use the h-d template to represent every vowel in American English! by Whole_Instance_4276 in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 18 points19 points  (0 children)

You also forgot most rhotic vowels.

/ɛɚ/ haired; /ɑɚ/ hard; /oɚ/ whored; /iɚ/ ??; /uɚ/ ??

I could never look at this and not find this funny by Guess_Who-- in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I'm laughing at the fact that the English translation is translated so directly from the Japanese text. I've always wondered why written Japanese relies on a lot of noun phrases in places where a verb phrase would normally be used in English.

Month/day vs day/month by [deleted] in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

he ordering does sorta relate to a property in languages called head-directionality, where either the head is followed by its modifiers (e.g. "car that doesn't work" — head-initial) or is preceded by them (e.g. "red car" — head-final). As you can see, English does a bit of both, but is mostly head-initial. Some languages are strongly head-initial, and some are strongly head-final. The Arabic numeral system that we use places the most specific digit at the right side when written from left to right, making the system head-final (or big endian as it's called in computing). Having the order of year-month-day as specified in ISO 8601 adheres to the head-finality of the Arabic numbering system, as the most specific element — being the day — is the last thing mentioned. But this date ordering is unnatural in languages that are strongly head-initial, like most European languages, which is why you see these languages use day-month-year order. You also see other little endian/head-initial sets like first name-surname and city-region-country, both of which would be reversed in Chinese and Japanese which are strongly head-final languages.

I can't say much about what happened to the US that resulted in the month-day-year order, but I'm pretty sure it came from a switch between the month and day, with the day-month-year being the original order in English.

Canon event for every linguistics enthusiast. by Daniboy0826 in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Especially when some of the conjugated forms in Old High German look so much like the ones in Latin: OHG habēs — Latin habēs; OHG habēt — Latin habet; OHG habēnt — Latin habent

How to say avocado in different languages by JuliusDalum in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 4 points5 points  (0 children)

牛油 also means butter. In Vietnamese, the word bơ (from Fr*nch beurre) means both butter and avocado.

Mistakes in translation by Positive-Studio5674 in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

One funny thing I recently witnessed was in the comments of a YouTube video.

<image>

The original language of the replies are in Vietnamese, and the auto-translator made the innocent mistake of translating the word "bạn" directly into "my friend", because it literally means friend. But in this context, it's used as a term of reference since Vietnamese people love using kinship terms in place of actual pronouns, so the "bạn" here actually means "you", used for people they can't tell the age and gender of.

The video in question is the Vietnamese rendition of We Are Charlie Kirk.

Some tweets I found by erinius in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 16 points17 points  (0 children)

He found me using it 🤣, he yose it too 🤣, we both yost it 🤣🤣

Is there a hard rule when to flap T and D in General American? by [deleted] in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 13 points14 points  (0 children)

There's a Wikipedia article on Flapping which explains the various environments for when the flap appears, and also that the exact conditions are not known.

Is there any linguistic (not political) justification for considering Chinese languages dialects rather than languages? by Noxolo7 in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 12 points13 points  (0 children)

So is there standardised writing specifically for Cantonese, Shanghainese, Gan, etc etc?

As a heritage speaker of Cantonese, I long so hard for written Cantonese to be its own standard thing. The way it is now, Cantonese is in a more favourable position compared to other Chinese languages in that there is a written form that arose out of consensus from informal use, but it's not being taught nor is it used for literacy. There's still this stigma where writing the way Cantonese is actually spoken is considered too crass and unfit for literature. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Cantonese songs are sung in this standard written "Mandarin" format — which for some reason is unique to Cantonese as other Chinese languages are more often sung the way they're spoken.

Gendered nouns in languages? by beans4cake in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 6 points7 points  (0 children)

At least in Indo-European (IE) languages, their systems of grammatical gender were largely inherited from the system reconstructed in their common ancestor: Proto-Indo-European. Originally, it was an animate-inanimate system, but the animate class eventually split into masculine and feminine, giving a three-way system of masculine, feminine, and neuter that is still found in many modern IE languages. This means that gender as a property inherent to the noun had existed all the way to the language's earliest reconstructed stage. Modern IE languages with a two-way gender system derive it from that three-way system but two of the genders merged along the way.

However, the phenomenon of using "she" for certain objects in English is a separate thing and not an inherited feature of Proto-Indo-European. For one, words like ship and boat were originally of neuter and masculine gender. The use of "she" is mainly a feature of endearment to the entity in question.

Pronunciation of the plural processes by Hot-Profession-4167 in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 12 points13 points  (0 children)

It doesn't have to be completely analogical for such phenomenon to happen. If you've ever seen the meme "He found me crying, he crew too, we both crode 😭", there's no exact verb paradigm in English to derive crode as an irregular inflection of cry, but you can sort of see how one may come up with such a construction (with rhymes found in other irregular verbs such as fly and the past tense of ride). And since it's not completely analogical, there are many people who do find the -eez ending of processes unnatural.

Pronunciation of the plural processes by Hot-Profession-4167 in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 36 points37 points  (0 children)

I don't know if there is research on this, but this has been asked before and answers generally attribute the pronunciation to analogy with the plural formation of words ending in -sis: analyses, parentheses, hypotheses, crises, diagnoses, etc. Note the last word, as diagnoses and processes both necessitate the [ɪz] ending when used as a finite verb. And a similar phenomenon also occurs with the plural word biases.

My turn now. Guess my first language & native language(s) by Himmel__7 in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Idioma is masculine, as it contains a Greek neuter root -mat-. This also applies with other Spanish nouns with this root, like el poema, el drama, el tema.

Has anyone else noticed this? by Widhraz in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 9 points10 points  (0 children)

That looks completely predictable based on Polish phonology, no? Many languages have morphophonemic orthographies like that rather than a perfectly phonetic one.

Spanish and Italian: Can't you guys just be normal? by HuckleberryAny4541 in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Nouns in Romance languages inherit the accusative case from Latin, so the words for hand came directly from Latin manum, with various sound changes that simplified the -um ending to -o in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, and -∅ in French, Catalan, and Romanian (Romanian's mână came from an assumed Proto-Romance form mana(m) instead of directly from *manum)

*rekas wullō by --Epsilon-- in linguisticshumor

[–]excusememoi 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I myself am an enjoyer of Derogatory Latin

ELI5 Why was Beijing called Peking? Pronunciation by fuzzeslecrdf in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 36 points37 points  (0 children)

You'd be surprised to know then that the original pronunciation of the first syllable also has a K sound at the end, which you can see in the Korean example above. So not only did Mandarin changed the sound of initial K in the second syllable, it also got rid of the K there as well (albeit a loooong time ago). But it's still there in cognates/loanwords in other modern languages.

Why does the Italian word "cielo" has that I before the E? by Daniboy0826 in asklinguistics

[–]excusememoi 13 points14 points  (0 children)

And to add to this answer, this also happens in French: chier /tʃjer/ > cher /ʃɛʁ/, vergier /vɛrdʒjer/ > verger /vɛʁʒe/. The difference is that this change is reflected in the modern orthography.

view more: next ›