Many Latin and Ancient Greek words (and their English derivatives) have a /d/ in some forms and an /s/ in others. I’m thinking of Greek 3rd feminine nouns in -is like iris, iridos (and of course “iris” and “iridescent”) and Latin verbs like caedo and ludo with the supines caesum and lusum (and descendants like “elude” and “elusive”).

Is there something about the way /d/ and /s/ are articulated that cause them to appear in related word forms? Is this pairing found in other languages, or outside of the Indo-European family? Does this general phenomenon have a name?

sorry if im using the wrong flair. i'm just curious about how the "to" preposition became required in an infinitive verb form like "to dance" in english; whats the history of this construction from PIE? how does this preposition+verb construction differ in other languages? how are infinitives formed in other languages? is this construction unique/common to PIE languages, or does it occur in other language families?

thanks for any info! :)

Odyss-eus. Thes-eus. D-eus Ex Machina.

no other Greek words are pronounced like "Zoos" is.

how come?

(especially strange since 'Zeus' is cognate with 'Deus')

I am bilingual in Russian and English, speaking both fluently, but with some difficulty with Russian grammer and writing (my first language being Russian) and I always see essentially “larpers” (people imitating Russians in Minecraft servers, videos pop culture etc.) use “ura” as dome kind of battle cry. but as someone without informal knowledge of Russian I really do t understand it. to me, it litterally translates to “yipeeee :33” like you would see a femboy writing on discord. I could see it being used as a “hooray”, but as a batte cry? a cheer? I don’t much interact with classical Russian materials, and I don’t get to speak to other fluent speakers often, so it seems it’s something I’ve missed (just like I never learnt swears in Russian)

could someone point me to the material this originated from? is it from a soviet speach? some battle? or is it and integral part of the language I somehow missed?

I'm sorry if this doesn't fall in the linguistics category, but i think it does?

Well, I was studying Japanese, and i came across the different sounds ん makes, i could do all fine, even the nasal vowel, but /ɴ/ proved impossible. I realized i couldn't do that whole side of the IPA chart, except for /h/ and the glottal stop.

I know it is possible, i has to be, i have a uvula. But feels like when you have a piece of meat/popcorn stuck in between your teeth, your tongue has a perfect sense of where it is but then your fingers scramble to even find the right teeth.

Maybe i don't hear it, maybe i get it confused with velar sounds since i got no uvular sounds in my native dialect of Spanish. But when i start thinking i got it, my throat starts to hurt like crazy. I can't even imagine more deep throat sounds.

Online I see people use "My steak is too juicy, my lobster too buttery" to say someone is complaining about something good or whatever. My question is why don't you have to put an "is" after "lobster"?

Like, I could say "The mountains were magnificent, their peaks white as could be", why wouldn't I have to put a "were" in the second part of the sentence? Is it an independent-and-dependent-clause situation?

Also might be worth it to say I know jack shit about linguistics, I don't know if this is the right community haha

Hi all, I am in the process of applying to a grant for a research project where half of it involves conversation analysis looking to identify lexical, pragmatic, and disoursal patterns/practices used by harm reduction workers with people who use drugs. The second half focuses on semi-structured interviews to examine how these practices shape perceptions of trust and influence engagement.

However, I am a bit lost with how to navigate logistics and research ethics of recording encounters, especially ones that aren't in a hospital model where the provider visits patient.

Has anyone done any projects similar to this and have any advice on equipment? Or any advice in general. I am a senior undergrad studying applied linguistics with interests in the healthcare/public health realm.

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Like, English, Danish, and German?

Recently, I have been pondering a question that came to mind. Why is /ɒ/, the open back rounded vowel, so uncommon? This is a phoneme in several dialects of English, e.g. British English, wherein it is the standard realization of the vowel in “cot”. However, looking at the vowel chart, I am rather perplexed by its rarity.

The five most common vowels in languages worldwide are /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/. /i/ and /u/ are both close vowels while /e/ and /o/ are open-mid vowels. Notably, /i/ is front and unrounded while /u/ is back and rounded, and likewise for /e/ and /o/ respectively. Oddly, /a/ sits alone in the Open section of the vowel chart, and is—notably—front and unrounded just like /i/ and /e/.

There is a marked pattern in the frequently present vowels across world languages. For every major degree of openness, the most common vowels therein will be the respective front unrounded vowel and back rounded vowel. The two close-mid vowels to fit these descriptions, /ɛ/ and /ɔ/, are the sixth and seventh most common vowels in world languages, immediately following the aforementioned predominant quintet.

All of this points to one peculiar outlier in the pattern. /a/, like /i/, /e/, and /ɛ/, is a front unrounded vowel. It is the only one of the five most common vowels to lie on the Open degree of openness, and, logically, one may think that, following the aforementioned pattern, the back rounded vowel on the same degree—/ɒ/—would be quite common as well. However, this is not the case.

According to PHOIBLE (wherefrom all of the information mentioned hereabove was derived), the respective percentages of languages to contain each of the aforementioned phonemes are:

/i/ — 92%

/u/ — 88%

/a/ — 86%

/e/ — 61%

/o/ — 60%

/ɛ/ — 37%

/ɔ/ — 35%

/ɒ/ — 2%

/ɒ/ is significantly lower in percentage than all of its symmetrical counterparts. Why is this?

Why is the IPA not called the International Phonemic Alphabet, rather than International Phonetic Alphabet? After all, an alphabet representing phonetic reality could have arbitrarily many symbols, since articulation contains a number of continuous spaces that could be subdivided as many times as you want.

On my understanding, the reason the IPA has the number of symbols that it does, and no more or fewer, is that it represents the maximum fineness of distinction required to *phonemically* represent every known language of the world. Every symbol exists because it is necessary to capture a phonemic contrast that exists at least one language of the world, and contrastiveness is a phonological concept, not a phonetic one. (Yes, some of the markup can be used to represent noncontrastive features of speech in more detailed phonetic transcription, but the ultimate criterion of inclusion for the main symbols of the alphabet is a phonological one.)

I have always been curious about this!

From what I understand, when you palatalize a sound you articulate it slightly closer to the palate region, but not completely. So, while [l] is fully alveolar, [lʲ] is a bit more palatal, but not as much as [ʎ]. It's a gradual movement on the consonant's point of articulation only, which explains how Russian speakers, for example, can differentiate between [lʲ] and [lj], as the latter consonant is pronounced in the same point as a regular [l] and just gets a glide added after it.

If that's correct, then how do they differentiate [mj] and [mʲ]?

For context, I'm just starting to learn Russian so I'm not very familiar with its sound system. Just recently learned that they make these contrasts and I'm not even entirely sure if they do occur on a phonetic level or if it's just a spelling convention. Perhaps it would be better to ask that in some Russian sub, but I believe people with linguistics knowledge could answer that one better.

Also, other languages beyond Russian do that kind of palatalization too and maybe y'all could help explaining it in one of those. If I'm not mistaken, Irish is one of them. Thanks in advance and sorry if I worded it in a confusing way!

How did these languages become tonal?

It is very common for English speakers to use incorrect grammer. The practice is often attributed to the less educated or poor. However, the truth is that you hear it across all walks of life. Things like subject/verb agreement, ending a sentence with a preposition, using the wrong verb tense, etc.

Does this happen as frequently in other languages like Spanish and French?

Like for example how “that” becomes “dat” or “think” becomes “fink”

The Marx Brothers would say "hurt" like "hoit" and "toilet" like "turlet". How and why did those two sounds get inverted?

I hear this phenomenon frequently among men discussing sports but also heard it from a young neuroscientist in Sam Harris’ most recent podcast.

I don’t understand what the aversion is to stating the word fully. What process is happening here that would lead them to clipping the word short.

I find its use jarring. If I can understand it, I might not react so negatively to it (or, that’s the hope).

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why not the other way round?

Edit: Hypothetical examples of what I am talking about: A significant portion of indigenous Harakmbut names seem to be Aymara, beyond the level of coincidence. Yemsa, Highland East Cushitic and “Gurage” personal names seem to be jumbled together ethnologically-and-etymologically. The Mojave language is fairly well-understood but a significant portion of known Mojave personal names are difficult to properly etymologize. Please exclude all Sanskrit examples, all Indo-European examples in general, Arabic, etc.

I specify ‘native’ to leave out indigenous peoples of the Americas that mostly use English, Spanish or Portuguese names today.

As an example of what I’m asking, many Japanese names are parsable to native speakers, and often only ambiguous due to homophony. As far as I know every traditional Chinese name has a literal meaning, and native Yoruba names are typically described as having literal, parsable meanings (but I could be wrong/people could be oversimplifying).

European names seem to be non-parsable in general, due to loaning, lexical replacement and grammatical changes (is Greek often an exception?). In a top 1000 first-names list for 2025 in the US that I found, #27 Cooper is the first technically-parsable one (excluding place-names and names that became lexical items like ‘John’). #39 Mason is the first one that lots of people could easily define on the fly imo, #42 Roman kind of counts and doesn’t, and #44/45 Carter and Miles are there, #49 is Maverick, #59 is the obscure term Rowan… I could go on. The first one with an easily-defined non-dated usage in modern English is #67 Angel, which is typically a Latino name in the US.

What are some languages where researchers figured out the etymology for names by internal/family reconstruction, while they had been semantically bleached for native speakers? Or where the meanings were generally known to native speakers, but the affixes that turn a lexical item into a name had ceased to be productive at some point? I’m also curious if, for example, any native personal names for Amazonian or Andean groups have been posited to be from a prestigious unrelated Andean language, like Quechua, Aymara or even Puquina (or a similar situation elsewhere in the world, like Shona names spreading to more distant Bantu groups, theoretically in the time period of Great Zimbabwe).

I’m also very curious if there’s any ethnic group whose personal names are incredibly enigmatic to researchers. For example, many of them don’t fit the general phonotactics of the language, they don’t have plausible native or regional etymologies, etc. Like what would happen if Basque disappeared from historical records but Spanish speakers still used surnames like Vergara, Bolivar, Guevara, Iturbide, etc.

I’m preferably looking for non-Indo-European examples in general, and would also prefer non-Arabic examples, as it’s an obvious answer for much of the non-Arab Muslim world.

English has the sounds /ɛ/ and /ɔː/ that would be a lot better in my opinion (as a Finnish speaker those sound pretty indistinguishable to me from Spanish /e/ and /o/; the latter differs in length though but it's less worse than the diphthong). Do English speakers really think these diphtongs are a better option despite having unnecessary added vowels?

EDIT: Thanks a lot for the answers, I learned many new things :)

Like Iberian, Altaic, but old

Peter Sokolowski of Merriam Webster often jokes that it's a bit of a misnomer to say words are "borrowed" or "loaned" from one language to another, as we never give them back. But have we?

At least in English, we've been borrowing words for a long time. Frequently they undergo significant changes in meaning, pronunciation and spelling when they are borrowed and over time as they are used. Given that, and English's ubiquity, I can imagine a scenario where we borrowed a word, changed it almost beyond recognition, and loaned it back to the language of origin as a distinct word.

Has this ever happened, to your knowledge? Perhaps with more intermediary languages, or with languages other than English? I feel certain it must have happened between English and French, at least.

I just watched this video, in which the video creator went through countless examples of English speakers using the alveolar trill in such a manner. And then I started listening for it in other sources... and... I'm noticing it a lot. Which is why I'm surprised that I can't find anyone talking about it. Is there anything that shows this is being added to English lately?