[ɐ] [ʌ] [ä]

I cannot distinguish between any of these vowels. To me, they sound identical—or, at best, very similar. My native language is Rioplatense Spanish, and we do not have these sounds.

In my phonetic dictionary, the German ending "-er" is represented by the vowel [ʌ]; however, in an updated version of the same dictionary, [ʌ] has been replaced by [ɐ].

Are these sounds actually that different? Is this a matter of allophones or regional accents?

I look forward to your response.
Thanks in advance

Hi guys! My toddler is 2 (27 months to be exact so freshly two). For context, he has always talked extremely well and been early on his speech milestones. He is saying full sentences now and starting to ask “Can” and “What” questions. He also has almost every book memorized on his bookshelf that we consistently read as well as nursery rhymes and bedtime songs I sing. Something weird he has always done though is struggle with pronouns. Since he started talking, he has always referred to himself by only his first name. Not I or Me. For example, “Tim is sleepy” or “Tim wants to hug Mommy”. He is starting to use pronouns but now mixes up me and You. For example “Mommy, hold you.” Instead of me.

Is this normal? I never thought much of it except that I was reading somewhere it could maybe be a flag for Autism or Hyperlexia.

Just wondering if anyone has experience with this. Thanks!

After reading some comments, thank you SO much for the people who commented. You were so kind and informative in your answers and didn’t make me feel dumb for asking. Which isn’t always common on Reddit. Thank you ❤️

Pretty much what the title says. Could a hypothetical native speaker of Classical Latin from 2,000 years ago speak with a Catholic priest or deacon who is taught Ecclesiatical Latin and has never been exposed to the Classical pronunciation?

I've always thought of Netanyahu as the "standard" for bilinguals and I just recently found out that most bilinguals even who are fluent in both sometimes make errors when saying a standard sentence where the other one just slips out and they don't even notice. Would you say he's more perfect than the average bilingual (even if they're fluent in both) and if so how do you experience your languages and how do you think he does by comparison?

Hello ! I’m pretty sure that in modern French notre and le nôtre (our (+ thing) and ours) and votre and le vôtre (your (+ thing) and yours) come from Latin’s noster et vester/voster roughly like…
Noster voster/vester (latin)
↓
nostre vostre (old or Middle French with s still pronounced)
↓
notre/le nôtre votre/le vôtre (both pronounced without an [s])

Does anyone know why when pronounced the same and coming from the same root, why one (pronom possessif) preserves the circonflexe and the other (adjectif possessif) does not ? I tried looking this up and all I got were guides explaining the difference between les pronoms et les adjectifs possessifs. 😅

Thanks :)

Hey, I am interested in this topic, I would like you to share with me which language or states that did orthographic reforms, whether it's the alphabet, spelling, or grammatical rules and segmentation, these types of things. I saw that Uzbek did some update, i was able to understand the issue with the help of Gemini, however, if you could elaborate with other languages and what they did. Thanks.

As an example, if I accidentally called Sophie, my coworker, Ava and said "I'm really sorry, that wasn't intentional." Sounds more impolite (or at least more awkward) than saying "My bad, Sophie, I won't do it again." even though the second apology seems more casual.

To me, the concern expressed in the first apology implies that I am someone who takes calling others by their correct name very seriously, and so to mess up Sophie's name as someone who ostensibly values respecting others makes it seem like I was unusually inconsiderate with Sophie specifically. The more I go out of my way to explain that it was an accident, the more it makes it seem like there was a possibility that it was intentional, or that I don't actually care about calling others by their correct names as much as I say I do.

This is entirely hypothetical. I'm curious as to whether this phenomena is widely observed. I'm aware the first apology doesn't feel explicitly *impolite*, I just mean it sounds more impolite when put into direct comparison with the second apology. Not very experienced with linguistics so sorry if this is the wrong sub! Thanks

At some point there must have been a transition from the earliest forms of verbal communication with simple words for things and actions, into the modern day level of complexity with all the grammatical challenges.

So at what point did this happen?

I've been more curious about indigenous American families recently (initiated by learning about Dene-Yeniseian) so I've been looking at pre-contact language maps, and I noticed it seems like most have a blank patch between Miami-Illinois — Shawnee, the Northern Iroquoian languages, and the eastern Siouan languages (roughly across S Pennsylvania, SE Ohio, and West Virginia). Is this the result of a lack of data from the area, a lack of people in the area around the 15-16th centuries (say due to migration), any data there seeming to represent isolates, etcetera?

I mean when you think about it a soldier or yakuza guy screaming in Japanese isn't cute. But when I think Japan I think anime girl. Or vtuber. Is the language cute sounding on its own? Or is it just the anime association?

Out of boredom, I've been reading up on place of articulation lately and learning about the different ways that one place can be called depending on the language, family, or academic discipline. This started by learning about Aboriginal Australian peripheral consonants and the way they group their coronal phonemes into laminal and apical pairs, which seemed super cool to me, but as I've read some of the terminology has gotten confusing—particularly the term domal. The Wikipedia articles for laminal, retroflex, and palatal consonants all say that domal has occasionally been used for retroflex/palatal places of articulation via terms like apico-domal and lamino-domal, but they lack any sources referring to such, and subsequent research has turned up virtually nothing. Most sources online seem to begin and end with defining "domal" as an alternate term for retroflex consonants, and any language I've found that has been described as having a domal place of articulation (Damin, Pintupi, Warlmanpa) only use the term "apico-domal" as a stand in for retroflex with seemingly no languages using the term "lamino-domal" despite Wikipedia claiming it to be attested. I understand that Wikipedia probably isn't the most reliable source on linguistics, but other websites do mention the use of "domal" as a synonym for retroflex, so I'm assuming that it's not entirely erroneous, I just don't really know where to start.

With all that being said, I guess my questions are:

• Where did the term domal come from?
• What languages/language families/linguistic disciplines tend to use it the most?
• Is it still used, or is it obsolete in linguistics?

And particularly: does "domal" refer to the dome of the mouth (as in the alveolar ridge/soft palate) or the domed shape that the tongue makes for retroflex consonants? This last question is what I've really been trying to find out before falling into the rabbit hole above.

Thank you for any responses!

Unfortunately I've only found papers on its phonology and some of the lexicon lately but not really anything on the grammar, any suggestion? Thanks

I'm not a linguist so please correct if I'm wording it poorly. What are the most spoken languages you know of that neither feature a voicing or aspiration contrast phonemically? As far as I'm aware, Hawaiian is one of them. Hawaiian doesn't feature /b d g/ or /pʰ tʰ kʰ/, only /p t k/.

what is a language with mainly voiceless plosives, approximants, and sibilants in its main usage of letters?

I recently, by chance, watched a video comparing the various Gaelic languages and was really suprised by how similar they sounded to Hebrew (as a semi-fluent speaker), especially European/Yiddish accented Hebrew. They also sound similar to plain Yiddish, and in some ways Arabic.

It has routine use of the hard "chkh", which I haven't really seen outside of semetic languages and maybe German, and a lot of the rhythm and indentation are similar.

I looked it up and​ they don't seem to share any common linguistic origins. Do ya'll have any more insight? I've vaguely heard of a potential genetic Levant connection within Ireland, so maybe Celtic is a mixture of some Semetic and European (like Yiddish)?

Why do people introduce themselves as he/him, she/her, they/them and so forth instead of just he, she, and they?

I can already say the alveolar lateral affricate ejective [tɬʼ], but have issues with the other lateral affricate ejectives.

I can say uvular sounds, but not the uvular lateral sounds.

English is a dominant language globally for so many things: business, aviation, love in some cultures. Is there something different about the English language or is it just colonialism and the exportation of American culture?

How far back in migration patterns do you need to go until you find the connection?

How did "kitten" become the diminutive of "cat?" To my non-expert brain it seems like something a Gaelic language would do.

Is there a term for that sort of diminutization? And are there other examples of it in English?

In non-rothic English dialects, there are five "long vowels" (car, care, mean, more, tune). All of them are understood as belonging to one syllable only: /kʰɑː | kʰeː | miːn | moː | tjuːn/.

Now, I'm aware some of them are actually diphthongs, such as /iː uː/ being really [ɪj ʊw], or /eː oː/ being often diphthongised to [ɛə ɔə].

In Spanish, we don't really have "long vowels" (in the sense they're not phonemic) but a couple of words are expected to have some sort of them. Words like Saavedra, albahaca, leer, vehemencia, friísimo, nihilismo, cooperar, alcohol. However, in all of these cases the duplicated vowel belongs to another syllable: [sa.a.ˈβ̞e.ð̞ɾa] [al.β̞a.ˈa.ka] [le.ˈeɾ] [be.e.ˈmen.sja] [fri.ˈi.si.mo] [ni.i.ˈlis.mo] [ko.o.pe.ˈɾaɾ] [al.ko.ˈol].

It is quite widespread the synizesis of most of these. Saavedra > pronounced as Savedra, albahaca as albaca, alcohol > alcol, and so on. However, some of those words don't accept this phenomenon. Leer will never be reduced to ler [leɾ], to the point a common ultracorrection is using a glottal stop [le.ˈʔeɾ] and the same can be said for friísimo. At first, I thought the simple rule to this was when the second vowel carries the stress it isn't reduced, but cooperar and albahaca don't follow, nor alcohol.

Now, with elision taken into consideration many more "same vowel adjacent syllables" may occur: cagando > ca'ando, todo > to'o, etc. Now, none of these will have the glottal stop mentioned above, but I'm aware these aren't standard forms.

While contrasting English vs Spanish long vowels and after levelling the vowels and omitting the glottal stop, to ignore such contrasts, I still notice a substantial difference.

- car vs ca'a (cada) = ka: vs káa

- lare vs lee = le: vs lée

- more vs moho = mo: vs móo

English vowels do feel elongated, but Spanish ones seem to change in "tone", as if they were doing some sort of pitch accent or smth.

Does anyone can bring me some insight into this? I thought about some sort of "falling tone" for Spanish going [ka˥˩a] ca'a and a "straight tone" for the English one [ka:˧], any other take on this?

In French, the historic first person plural pronoun nous has been replaced colloquially by on, traditionally an impersonal pronoun that takes a singular verb. So one can say both of the following:

On va au cinéma pour voir des films. One goes (or "People go") to the movie theater to see films.

On va au cinéma demain après-midi pour voir Wicked. We're going to the movie theater tomorrow afternoon to see Wicked.

In (EDIT: Brazilian) Portuguese, the traditional nós has been (EDIT: largely) replaced by a gente, literally, "the people", also impersonal.

Is there a connection between these developments, with one of the languages influencing the other, or is it coincidence? What gets in the way of me assuming they're related is that a large chunk of Spanish-speaking territory is in the way. Unless Spanish at some point also started going in this direction? I don't have a realistic opinion on the possibility of that because I don't know when these developments came to be.

Languages have a lot of unnecessary complexity because people have been using them for centuries.

If civilization collapsed and humanity had to start over 300 years later, which existing language would make the most sense for everyone to learn from scratch?

Ignoring how widely spoken a language is today, which one would be the most efficient?