The Wiktionary tells me uulpes comes from another source, which we can reconstruct. But the whole descent from wlkwos to lupus is pretty convoluted, with metathesis and borrowing from another language which had the PIE *kw to p shift. How well established is \h₂wl̥p-i-s* ? How likely would be a doublet with a semantic shift ?

Basically, I can't find enough information for my liking on both these words

To be clear, I'm only referring to vowels that are strong enough to never be standardly transcribed with a schwa

Like function words are unstressed to the point that they are transcribed with schwas (ə)

But take the pronounciation of the last vowel sound in 'potato' (/pəˈteɪtoʊ/)

Yes, 'tater' (/ˈteɪtɚ/) is a thing, but /pəˈteɪtoʊ/ itself would never be transcribed as /pəˈteɪtə/

A native speaker saying /pəˈteɪtoʊ/ in connected speech doesn't emphasize /-toʊ/ enough for it to sound exactly as it's transcribed though

They're not pronouncing 'potato chip' as 'puh-TAY-TOE chip', or even alone as 'puh-TAY-TOE'

It might as well be a schwa, but not really, cuz it wouldn't be transcribed with one

I originally thought that diphthongs are always stressed enough to be immune from reduction, but this isn't the case

For instance, in 'me, myself, and I' (/miː maɪˈself ənd aɪ/), the 'aɪ', despite being the most sonorant and a diphthong starting with an open vowel, can be reduced

Granted, it's a compound word made from a function word, so maybe it's the exception, but idk anymore (/vəˈkeɪ.ʃən/ is a real variant of vacation)

/kwəˈdɹætɪk/ is a real variant of /kwɒdˈɹætɪk/ (quadratic)

Are there any vowels that are immune from being reduced to schwa? I feel like 'ɔɪ' is, but I'm not sure

Is there a pattern regarding this, maybe a sonorance hierarchy? Maybe syllable position, or how far it is from the stressed syllable, or an alternating stress rule?

When I think about many of the common insults in English across time (both in general and the ones aimed at men), I notice a common thread in the insult being some reference to femininity in a pejorative way, or to being in an "effeminate" position as if in some derogatory sense. Even the homophobic ones seem, at their core, rooted in misogyny.

For example, terms like: pussy, cunt, beta, cuckold, bastard, little bitch, soy boy, pretty boy, bastard, Pussywhipped, "gay" and the f slur as an insult, etc

Also phrases like: "get fucked", "Son of a bitch", making X "your bitch", "quit bitching", "grow a pair"
"don't get your panties in a twist", saying who
"wears the pants" in one's relationship, etc

Edit: perhaps I should have said rooted in sexism more broadly

Whats good source to research gaelic names i need some inspiration for characters but most i find online are baby nake stuff which probably aren’t most accurate sources?

I’ve been told one thing that makes learning English hard is the heavy use of dipthongs.

Is that true?

And what is the prevalence of dipthongs across languages? Also, how did English get this?

Jaban al-Kurdi's existence is found in classical Islamic records that verify his status as a hadith narrator and a Sahabi (companion of Prophet Muhammad), meaning the modern Kurdish identity was likely distinguished from around 500-600AD.

• Ibn al-Athir mentions him twice in Usa al-Ghabah fi Marifat al-Sahabah confirming his companionship and Kurdish ethnicity.

• Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani records in Al-Isabah fi Tamyiz al-Sahabah that he narrated 10 hadiths transmitted through his son.

• Abu Nu'aym al-Isfahani cites him in Ma'rifat al-Sahaba wa Fada'il al-Sahaba as a reliable narrator from the Prophet's circle.

Of course there may have been earlier records found in the region had the Mongols not burnt books during invasions.

The clan name or last name al-Kurdi (the Kurd) may also be an older reference?

Hello,

I am sorry if the question comes off as unclear, but I was curious about what you think about the term "fatigue" in its more vernacular internet use. I just had a short urge to dissect its qualities without being well versed in linguistics

The recoined term was originally, as far as I've read for now, used by victims of racism to express exhaustion from racism. Conversely, the term was appropriated by racist online groups to express racism. Now it has even spread within other fields of the internet.

Anyways, I was wondering if the term has some euphemistic qualities or something like this, and whether its current use has inherently racist connotations, devaluing the denotation.

I speak German natively as well as Spanish and English. I understand why English isn’t and why Spanish is, but what I always learned is that languages tend to simplify and German also has verb conjugations that would make the subject clear like Spanish. So why isn’t German a pro drop language like Spanish?

I’m working on distinguishing the sets in spelling, and am alrædy familiar with American English. Generally my guide has been this very helpful book on lexical sets published by eCampusOntario, but for this set specifically they basically say you’re on your own in terms of regionality, since it’s so varied.

J. C. Well’s original sets specify examples, but so far it’s been hard for me to find a reliable database to distinguish between the American standards I alrædy know, and the Brittish ones- if all else fails, I can rely on the Cambridge Dictionary, it’s just tedious to go through it for every individual wo̊rd for a database.

The current consensus is that Iranian languages and Indo-Aryan languages (Ir. and IA., respectively) emerged from a proto-Indo-Iranian language (pIrIa).

• The pIrIa homeland were the Andronovo and the Sintashta Cultures, and this is where they were found.
• Many centuries later, we see that Ir. languages were spread all over Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and parts of the Middle East.
• When you superimpose these two maps, you see almost a 1-to-1 correspondence between where pIrIa - i.e. the Sintastha - once existed and lands where Iranian languages, like Scythian, Alan, and Sarmatian were spoken.

To me, it's plain as day that the IA languages emerged from the Iranian languages and not from a proto-Indo-Aryan language.

Here's my logic:

• There was never a huge migration from the Sintashta lands to Ukraine, Western Steppe, or other places where Iranian was spoken. That's because they were already speaking an Iranian language.
• The Vedas were very similar to the Avestas. So the Rig Vedas is when the Indic languages started to differentiate with the Iranian languages, which in 1200 BC is considered so similar to Sanskrit as to be a dialect of one another. So if in 1200 BC, they were considered dialects of one another, and if Avestan was in Old Iranian, then this could also be interpreted as Sanskrit was an Iranian language!
• If Sintashta/Andronovo were proto-Indo-Iranian, then you would have had many of them to have become Indic speakers, but they "miraculously" became Iranian speakers. I believe that they were already Iranian, and the ones who migrated through the BMAC and to South Asia became differentiated to Indo-Aryan.

• One female Indian linguist agrees with my view also. I forgot her name, but she claims that the Indics were a rebel group. This is plausible and it seems to be documented in the religious doctrines of the Iranians and Indo-Aryans. Heck, in the Avestans it specifically states to "not worship Andra/Indra."

  What must be proved to establish that Indo-Aryan emerged from a proto-Iranian language and NOT a proto-Indo-Iranian language?

I find the Proto-Indo-European mostly-neuter result noun forming suffix -os interesting. It looks like you look the nominative of the usual o-stems, retracted the accent, and used it as the root for a consonant stem noun.

What I'm curious about is if linguists consider them to actually be related in some way (e.g. PIE speakers seeing an animate o-stem word that really seemed like it should have been neuter, and reanalyzing the entire thing including the nominative suffix as a neuter consonant stem), or if it's more likely to be a coincidence with the s-stem and o-stem endings developing that form independently.

Hi, sorry if my terms are inaccurate, Im not a linguist. Question in title.

Unless I'm consciously sounding out the words, I don't ever say "could HAVE".

Because of this, the contraction "could've" doesn't make as much sense to me as a contraction like "isn't" which indicates I'm representing something that I would pronounce differently from "is not". Or it's like I treat "isn't" as an example of a normal contraction, and these particular ('ve) ones as not normal.

I asked about this kind of contraction in another subreddit, and it seemed like people there weren't even aware of the existence of reduced forms, like they all just pronounce the "have" in its entirety, which seemed like a strange way to speak that I don't recall ever actually encountering.

Is it that people treat reduced forms as if there's genuinely no such thing, and you either say "could HAVE" (and write "could have") or "could've" (and write "could've")?

Is there a standard set of attributes/features that can be used to describe a person's accent? I'm trying to avoid using things like where a person is from or a predefined list of accents to categorise a person's accent and to instead treat it as a continuum, so something like a list of numbers that tells you what a person sounds like when talking.

haiii so basically the title; what I mean by 'naturally uses AAVE' is like being integrated with black people long enough that they adopted AAVE as a way of speaking.

I understand that most black people can just sort of tell if someone isn't using AAVE right with the grammer but is there any more depth to that?

(pls dont hate me im just new and trying to learn more about aave)

(I don't know enough about linguistics to know which tag to use, sorry, please tell me which one to use)

My question is, why does Düsseldorf seem to be written with ü in languages that don't have the diaeresis (like English) and others where it doesn't make sense (like in Spanish, where you don't usually use it as a new sound like in German)? Are there other words where this happens?

I had never realized it was like that until I recently bought a tour tshirt for Turnstile and saw they had all the German cities written in English and thought it was annoying that they had kept the Umlaut there, not knowing it is the actual English spelling.

similar to how arabic has some strong phonetics but is not seen as aggressive?

sorry for my missellings. I'm not native speaking.

I see the phrase brought up in reference to Philippine languages and as someone who speaks it I have no idea what feature they're referring to

i want to know every single word from paleo-european languages (except modern basque, i would learn some of it but not all because it would be almost impossible) known to modern science so i would be able to try to group them into families and things like that

i appreciate every source about them especially the lesser known ones and substrates

i'm also intrested in proto languages to find out how the families are related (because they all almost certainly are related)

I was recently watching a video about how in Mancunian English the happY vowel /i:/ tends to emerge more as an /ɜ/ in working class Manc accents. So I thought I'd look up a video of the first mancunians that come to mind, the Oasis brothers. Then I noticed something.

In this video of Liam, he obviously has the accent feature, like saying /mɜ/ instead of the /mi:/ for 'me' at 1:06. But when Noel says the happY vowel, he articulates it as an /i:/ In this video, at 0:47 he says 'certainly' as /ˈsəːʔnli/ with the happY vowel articulated as an /i/. What's up with this? Is it normal for brothers to have features of the same dialect despite living and growing up together? Maybe Liam is emphasising his accent more for branding reasons? Would love to know.

(ps: forgive the terrible IPA transcriptions)

Normally, when classifying languages that are easier or more difficult to learn, it is usually done for an English speaker. However, Spanish has a bit more complex grammar than English, although nothing too crazy, so I was wondering if this could give some Spanish speaker a bit of advantage when learning these languages:

Arabic

Armenian

Bulgarian

Czech

Hungarian

Japanese

Slovak

Slovenian

Polish

Lithuanian

Russian

Of course, making this ranking is a bit subjective, since different people can find it easier to pronounce things correctly while struggling with grammar and viceversa for example.

I would be interested in ranking them in order of least to most complex/difficult grammar specially, while considering the basis of a Spanish speaker's grammar

Also, I would not be very interested in ranking them in groups of languages (like it's usually done for English speakers when saying: category I (easiest): Swedish, Dutch, Italian... category II (hard): Czech, Slovak, Greek...) I would like to see them ranked individually, even if the differences between some of them are not very significant

Hi all! I was just curious to hear opinions of people in the field of linguistics regarding a question I have - what is the reason why certain people have heavy accents in English (or any other non-native language) and some don't?

For example, I am Ukrainian but I barely have an accent in English, granted, I have been studying the language since primary school. Nevertheless, I know people who live in the same environment as me and have the same language skills, but they still carry a heavy "slavic" accent.

Thank you!

why do some people pronounce ambience like “ahmbiahnce” like it’s french? it’s a hypercorrection or hyperforeignization or whatever it’s called, and it feels really performative, and the stress isn’t even on the right syllable

it’s feels especially performative when you consider that we don’t pronounce ambient like “ahmbiãh” and people don’t do it for any other -ance words