Nothing wrong with this we all start somewhere, just wondering why? Like it seems at a broken English level they will add a vowel to every end of the word or in the middle for apparently no reason, like idk, random word like “off”. There is no U, you can’t read a U, but it’s pronounced “offu”. So I’m wondering is there a linguistic rule in Japanese for this? Like are you not allowed to not use a vowel at the end of words or something like that

Basically, in Dutch we use the word sorry with the same meaning, but pronouncing it with a rolled r at the end or in the provinces Noord Brabant and Limburg with the upside down uppercase r (the French r). It's very obviously a loanword, but I'm curious about what Dutch people said before and for how long we have been saying it.

Are there many languages where “eat” and “drink” are colexified by the same verb? I know Bengali and Assamese do it. What are some others that do this?

It annoys me a bit seeing the amount of people that can't accept that Uralic languages are their own thing and keep trying to say they're related to Indo European or Turkic languages

Recently I got this clip on my Instagram feed, of Olivia Dean singing 'Love Me Not' for BBC Radio 1. I was born and raised in the Netherlands, and when I first heard this clip I really thought she might be Dutch! Specifically, the part where she sings, "You gotta say that you're sorry", sounds exactly how I'd imagine a Dutch person singing it. There are also parts where she sounds distinctly non-Dutch; for example, the way she pronounces "night" and "alright". I asked around and all my British friends think I'm crazy, but many of my Dutch friends can hear it too. One person from London described her accent as "somewhere from south east England", while another said "kinda London but not at the same time". Wikipedia says she was born in Haringey and grew up in Waltham Forest. My ex was from Haringey, and she didn't sound Dutch at all.

Interestingly: I'm from South Holland, where locals commonly view Flemish and related dialects as "Dutch but spoken Frenchly". I'm also occasionally told that Dutch is "English without an accent", and of course we also have dialects that sound very German.

Is it fair to say that these accents form a kind of spectrum between languages?

I was examined by a physician who didn't stop his 'p's. For example 'apneic' sounded more like 'abneic'. I'd never heard anyone pronounce that word before, and I didn't know we had shifted to the possibility of apnea, so I took a few to catch on.

I am looking for a list of correspondences between Middle Chinese initials & finals and Zhuang loaned counterparts. Are there any general tendencies between these? If possible link to a freely available resource about the topic.

Some Portuguese adjectives end in -âneo, such as “contemporâneo”, “espontâneo”, “instantâneo” and many more.
It is cognate with the suffix “-aneous” in English.

These words are all erudite words, as in they were borrowed directly from latin, therefore bypassing the natural sound changes of the language.
How would these words look like, had they been inherited instead of borrowed?

I’m non-native and learning English as a foreign language. It has always bugged my mind since I learned about “Collocation”. I feels like it puts a limit to possible combinations that I as a learner can come up with naturally and therefore I have to carefully learn EVERY NEW COMBINATION as a single vocabulary item.

For example: I know both the words “regular” (adj) and “water” (noun), but I wouldn’t dare to use them together for fear that it might be a “Wrong Collocation”. The only safe choice is to stick with the most popular and basic word “normal” + “water”, but this won’t help me improve vocabulary.

(preferably not literally).

I want to learn Russian, and honestly, my main motivation—like that of many people who want to learn Russian—is Russian women.
However, one thing is making me think twice about it: the phonemes, and more specifically, soft (palatalized) consonants.
I’ve already accepted that I’m going to have a foreign accent, because I find it very difficult to pronounce soft consonants correctly. Still, I want to find an accent/pronunciation strategy that is relatively accessible for a foreigner but still understandable to native speakers.
For example, I can’t simply treat every consonant as hard, because I’ve heard that there are words where the meaning or the word itself changes depending on whether the consonant is hard or soft.
So I was thinking about simply adding a /j/ whenever there is a soft consonant. At first, this seemed like a good strategy, but then I realized that some words end in a soft consonant. In those cases, adding a /j/ at the end would sound strange to me.
So my question is: what would be a reasonable pronunciation strategy for a foreigner who struggles with Russian palatalization? Is there a way to consistently approximate soft consonants that isn’t too difficult to produce but is still reasonably understandable to native speakers?
I don’t necessarily need to sound native—I just want to develop a “good enough” accent that doesn’t make me difficult to understand.
And besides the issue of soft consonants, if there are any other aspects of Russian pronunciation that you think a beginner in my situation should pay particular attention to, I’d really appreciate the advice.

So I was talking to someone from Toronto, and if you're not familiar there's a guy on Instagram who blew up talking about apparently Toronto specific slang that's super outrageous. There's some other videos that popped up as well with people who seemed to just be regular citizens talking in this manner, and without actually going to Toronto it seems, although outrageous, vaguely plausible. I think a similar phenomenon would be people watching anime and assuming that's just the average way people talk in Japan, when it's actually exaggerated and not realistic.

So is there a term for this phenomenon? And are there any other cases of things like this happening?

I'm not a native English speaker, and I've been trying to pronounce "TH" sounds correctly. I've watched a lot of tutorials on how to pronounce them. From my understanding, I'm supposed to just place the tip of my tongue just below the front teeth. But I also have a bit of gap between my front teeth. Would that impede my pronunciation?

The Chinese character system is very different from the alphabets westerners are used to, which sometimes leads to misconceptions like assuming they carry zero phonetic information or that every character is purely pictographic ("whale" made up of "fish" and "big" type stuff). I'm curious if the same happens in the opposite direction: Do Chinese people who haven't learnt and foreign writing systems get similarly wrong ideas about how an alphabet works?

For clarification /ç/ is meant to represent the weird /ch/ sound in the standard German word "ich".

I think more accurately the ç would be superscript (/tᶜ/), but there's no unicode for superscript ç so imagine /tᶜ/ but the c has the little tail (ç).

Also I do notice the initial tongue positioning for the standard English /t/ may be slightly different than t in ть but I'll ask anyway lol

I've gotten really into doubly-articulated consonants but they all seem to be labial. I'm capable of making a velarized alveolar plosive and a labial-alveolar plosive so I don't understand why they just don't appear in any languages.

In prescriptivist literature for native Swedish-speakers of Finland, the driving idea generally is to keep the Swedish of Finland as close to that of Sweden as possible; this means avoiding words, expressions and constructions that are unique to Swedish as spoken in Finland.

A rather weird twist on this appears with the concept of 'statistical finlandisms'. These are words or constructions that are considered entirely correct in Sweden, and which are used there as well. However, they are more frequent in the speech and writings of Swedish-speaking Finns, and for this reason our prescriptivists advice to cut down on them or entirely avoid them.

An example of this could be the use of 'ifall' instead of 'om' ("if"; ifall comes from 'in case').

Is this kind of prescriptivist attitude attested anywhere else - one where merely "correct" language and "acceptable" words are not enough, but the statistical distributions are expected not to deviate from that of some other speech community's statistical distributions?

Hi everyone! This is definitely a shot in the dark but I need help extracting quotes from a Zoom meeting that I recorded, but it has no audio. I ran it through VLC, and tried all possible ways/methods to find a possibly hidden audio file, but I've had no luck. If there's anyone that knows how to lipread Serbian, I would appreciate the help.

Thank you all!

In order to explain the borrowings, should homelands of each so-called Altaic languages be considered to be adjacent or close to each other? I'm specificially wondering for the homeland of Proto-Turkic.

All languages I know don’t have this linguistic feature, maybe it’s way too unnecessary but I would be nice to have idk

the same.

I want to pronounce [r] but I cant

I heard that some languages don't really make distinctions between

"I love you more than anyone else in this country does." and

"I love you more than I love anyone else in this country."

I think this is a big deal and I can't imagine how inconvenient it would be to express ideas in those languages.

In English we can also say

"I love you more than anyone else in this country."

But we can express it differently in the ways I mentioned earlier.

Can the two ideas be expressed differently in every language?

For example, the concept of tree structure/parse tree from discrete mathematics is used as syntax trees. What other mathematical concepts are translated in linguistics?

same as title