By base colors I mean colors that are not considered a shade of other colors, for example "lilac" is a color in English but it's considered a shade of purple while pink is not considered a shade of red (in other languages it is). I recently fell down the rabbit hole of color term hierarchy and I'm wondering where latin was.

Note: I am aware that Latin, like any other language, has evolved over time, so if you have any knowledge about how it changed over time that would be even better.

There are some words that are formed from reversing the orders of phrasal verbs (come in → income, standing out→ outstanding, put in → input) but there are others where the phrasal verb order is still kept (run off → runoff, break down → breakdown, back up → backup).

Is there a difference between the two ways of forming words from phrasal verbs?

for instance, how would such a language distinguish between "i quickly began to dance" and "i began to quickly dance"?

Same question regarding

“The sport industry” vs “The sports industry”. When is it one over the other?

The sentence I want to formulate: “The game(s?) industry will remember.”

Earlier today I sent my friend a photo of my window and said it was "autumn pilled". If you think I sound insufferable then fair, but it makes me wonder if the kind of mutually shared irony in so many of the words we used is an entirely new phenomenon, and if slang was more earnest in the past.

Other examples include me and my friends calling things "epic", phrases like "many such cases", "based and redpilled", "fire" as an adjective, anything -maxxing, etc etc

I can think of how surfer talk has been made fun of for many decades, but that seems more insular. Did any previous generations have tons of ironic slang?

If it is a new phenomenon, what is it about modern society that has caused this?

*TO AN ACCENT I DIDNT GROW UP WITH

I am white and in the last 5 years or so in my life ive started to have a very mixed friend group, with many Arab friends. In my country there is a distinct accent- studied in linguistics as a sociolekt if I understand it correctly - that I myself didnt grow up with. And yet I distinctly switch to speaking it when I am communicating with say a shop keeper or my doctor or anyone with a heavy accent.

My partner has pointed it out to me and ive begun to notice myself how incredibly cringe it is and yet I don’t seem to think about the fact that I’m doing it in the moment. It needs to stop. I’m literally white and I want to disappear through the floor with embarrassement whenever I notice it or worse yet, someone else points it out. It is so racist. Please help, how do I stop. It also doesn’t help that while I grew up relatively posh, and I feel embarrassed also when people used to point out that I sounded snobby.

I guess I’d rather be cringe than snobby but I really don’t want to make anyone feel like I’m in any way making fun of them or mocking their accent somehow. How the hell can I stop this nonsense? Idk when it started or why and I don’t know how to stop it

And I'm asking because not only English does this: Swedish has a number of words like this as well, like "skjuts" where the t is silent, unlike all other words with ⟨ts⟩, or "ladugård", which is pronounced but gwnerally not written as "laggård".

Loanwords being pronounced irregularly is nothing strange, but this is more narrow: colloquialisms becoming standard for promounciation but not spelling for various rare terms.

We call when vowels are held longer as phonemic vowel length, I don't see why we don't do the same and just say phonemic consonant length, it's more intuitive and i don't see why we don't call it that.

​

At what point do two languages stop being dialects, are there specific parameters that distinguish a language from a dialect, like I know the Chinese government considers the Chinese languages dialects of each other to maintain the perception of a homogeneous nation, but at what point did Tamil and Malayalam stop being dialects and become two independent languages?

Title. I've found some that mention small parts of PNC, and one reconstruction of a subgroup of New Caledonian, but I haven't yet found a paper which is about Proto-New-Caledonian.

I have recently developed a curiousity about the development of language and the applications linguistics has in determining the urbanization of text thats supposed to account historic and religious text to determine where embellishment takes place.

I am not extremely well studied or studious, but as my understanding of science and history have developed as I have aged, I have become agnostic and developed a more pragmatic mindset.

Overall my curiosity lies in a few points I would love to learn more about.

1. In religious and widely popular texts that account earlier points in history, such as the genesis of the Bible where from my understanding between periods of time the development of language for that point mismatched what speech should be for a person of that time? I know that translations, and the urbanization of language could impact this.

2. How complex does language develop within isolation of groups, or amongst communities like tribal settings in comparison to languages that have developed over the last several millenia?

3. I know English and a lot of other languages that are eurocentric have roots in latin, and our language has developed, but I am curious about the more historic roots of other languages such as Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese, etc.

If I understand correctly, the modern Turkish Latin alphabet was designed in 1928 by a commission that strived for perfect phonemic consistency. <q>, <w>, and <x> were eliminated, as they were not needed. And they were even outlawed. But what if Turkish had had /x/ as a phoneme? What letter would the Language Commission have picked to represent it? Again, if I understand correctly, they weren't a fan of digraphs either, so <kh> or <ch> would've been out of the question. Would they have used some variant of h with a diacritic, maybe?

Hi linguists! I noticed that in both French and Spanish, 'today' can be expressed as 'the day of today' ('aujourd'hui' and 'el día de hoy', respectivley). Why is this? Is it a common construction in Romance languages and can it be found elsewhere in the world? What's more, 'jour' and 'hui' both mean today, though I believe 'hui' isn't in common use any more. Why do two words for today apear in 'aujourd'hui'? Thanks for your help!

tl;dr: I'm looking for good typological literature on the finite|non-finite distinction.

tlbigtria†:

I'm re-reading Luigi Rizzi's 1997 paper 'The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery' for the first time in a few years, & I'm struck by a typological claim that is vaguely familiar to me, but about which I don't have anything but impressions & gut feelings: Rizzi argues that the complementiser domains is articulated among various subdomains, the lowest of which addresses matters of force (speech act type) & finiteness. Complementisers host a feature [±fin] which selects for broad classes of verbs that are either finite or non-finite. Here's a lengthy excerpt:

I will assume here that the finiteness distinction is a valid linguistic one, even though its morphological realization can vary somewhat from language to language. Languages tend to split verbal paradigms into two classes of forms. Finite forms can manifest mood distinctions (indicative, subjunctive, conditional and/or other distinctions of the realis/irrealis type), manifest tense and subject (person) agreement, cooccur with overt nominative subjects. Non-finite forms do not manifest mood distinctions, in the core case they do not express person agreement, and do not co-occur with nominative subjects, they have a more rudimentary system of tense distinctions (e.g., in many languages non-finite forms do not have morphological present/future distinction, can express past only through the periphrastic form aux + past participle, etc.). The first class of forms co-occurs with complementizers of the that [+fin] kind, the second does not. Various dissociations from these core clusters are apparently tolerated, but a split along these lines is robustly attested cross-linguistically. (284)

There's an endnote that gives some examples of "dissociations" (English lack of subject agreement outside the present indicative; Scandinavian verbal paradigms; Portuguese inflected infinitives; Latin tensed infinitives).

A finite/non-finite fundamental division of verbal forms feels tidy for Romance & Germanic languages. It's less obvious to me that it works for Afroasiatic, tho perhaps it can be made to. Is there good typological literature on a finite|non-finite distinction & the properties of these two major classes? To be clear, I'm not looking for further generative literature (which I feel pretty capable of navigating), but for typological literature on this division.

† Too long but I'm going to read it anyway.

What’s the most common stress pattern? I know WALS distinguishes between fixed and free stress patterns as well as placements of stress in fixed stress languages (initials, secondary, ultimate).

In the UK we seem to refer to a baked wheat product + filling combo by the kind of bread it’s in.

If it’s chicken in sandwich bread, it’s a chicken sandwich. If it’s chicken in a tortilla, it’s a chicken wrap (except for burrito). If it’s chicken in a baguette , it’s a chicken baguette.

Crucially, if it’s chicken in a burger bun, it’s a chicken burger. A British person would in no way think of this as a chicken sandwich.

However, for Americans all combination of baked wheat product + filling seems to come under the heading of “sandwich” and therefore a chicken fillet in a burger bun is a chicken sandwich.

What gives?

I’m a native Thai speaker and speak English and Mandarin as well.

I’ve noticed that the use of ending particle words at the end of sentences helps to communicate not just the factual statement itself but also the emotions of the person speaking it. This is common both in Thai and Chinese. In Thai we also have a “polite” particle that even Chinese doesn’t have. Whenever there is an online argument, if you just use the “polite” particle or the “soft/friendly” particles, people will notice and change their register when replying to you.

It’s also important to note than in Thai, unlike Chinese and English, the personal pronouns are fully replaced by a large variety of words like “brother”/“sister”/other kinship terms rather than just “I” and “you”. This is different from English where the word “I” and “you” cannot be changed, but words like “bro/sis” are added in the sentence alongside them. In Thai, the terms fully replace the pronouns, so it’s not optional. The choice of pronouns each person chooses can convey the emotional state of the speaker and how they feel about the other person in the conversation.

In English, I’ve anecdotally noticed that while spoken English is very expressive, it heavily relies on using tones and prosody and other phonetic qualities to convey emotion, intent, and emphasis. Written English, as in online text communication or other written modes, feels quite lacking in this regard.

I assume that adding particles is just one of the ways different languages deal with this. I know many languages have different conjugations (like Japanese and Korean) and other modifications when changing language register.

English seems to rely on changing the words altogether, opting for different sets of vocabulary that have different register and vibes （”Do you want to?” vs. “Would you like to?”). But because modern English is quite neutral in this, it doesn’t seem to put too much effort into this area, making it feel more sterile.

In online written communication, I’ve noticed and theorized that the phenomenon of adding words like “lol” or “rofl” functions similarly to particles. When added, the sentence feels softened and much more approachable.

So to summarize, I want to know if there are any significant documented differences between different languages in terms of how they manage to convey emotions and intent, rather than just facts, in written language, without relying on phonetic modifications or having to purposefully explain their emotions/intent.

When the last syllable in EVERY sentence is drawn out. You probably know what I'm talking about, the generic, monotonous, almost fake-sounding narration that is so typical in YouTube essays and top/tier lists, even across languages, or at least present in both English and Spanish.

Since I noticed it years ago, it's been so annoying. So, did it come from somewhere specific? is there a reason for it? Any punctual information about, or is it just "a thing that happenes"? And just so we're clear, I'm not talking about AI voices, I've been hearing this forever, way before gen AI became what it is today.

I've been looking into why people can read the same written message and come away with quite different interpretations, particularly where the wording leaves room for assumptions.

For example:

"Can you check with Sarah and get this sorted by Friday?"

On the surface, it's a fairly straightforward request. But depending on the context, there are a few things left open. What exactly does "this" refer to? What does "sorted" actually involve? Is Sarah expected to do something, or is the recipient responsible for the whole thing?

What interests me is where the ambiguity in the language ends and the reader's own interpretation begins.

I understand that this isn't necessarily structural ambiguity in the strict syntactic sense. Some of it falls under vagueness, underspecification or pragmatic inference.

I'm curious how linguistics approaches the distinction between what a message explicitly communicates and what someone infers based on context, expectations, and their own way of processing information.

Hopefully this is the right forum to ask or get redirected. Is there research into why some people settle on the most likely interpretation while others recognise several possibilities or seek clarification?

I'm also interested in whether making implicit information more explicit reliably improves understanding, or whether there's a point where adding detail creates more cognitive effort without much benefit.

I'd be interested in any relevant research or theoretical perspectives, particularly around pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and how meaning is constructed between speakers and listeners.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading.🙂

was saying in the us, i wish we were taught a mexican dialect or intonation since we’re closer to latin america. my partner goes yeah but that wouldn’t be real spain spanish. and i said ok sure but it’s still spanish, only slightly different (cause it’s what 60% the same before it starts to become another language?). anyways i told her an irishwoman that then by that logic she’s not speaking real english. and she said no english is the same everywhere. she started shaking her head when i opened my mouth again to try to explain. idk if im making sense here. but english is not the same everywhere and nor is spanish and they can be so different while also being the same, no?

Native English speaker here, and I've been very interested in learning about phonemes and the IPA symbols over the last year. I've read IPA charts for languages like Portuguese where [kʷ] is included. My question is simply: is there an actual difference between the sound in English at the beginning of "question" and the labialized velar plosive [kʷ]? Why is it that I never see an IPA chart for English that includes this phoneme? What distinguishes an English "q" sound [kw] from a Portuguese [kʷ] in practice? Would I be able to hear the difference?

Why do words like “know” and “knife” have a silent “k”?

I read the rules for posting questions, and I do not believe this is off topic, but if it does break that rule please forgive me... I fear I am falling into a sense of fear for my applications next year. I am going to graduate from UT with my bachelors in Linguistics next year, so I also plan on applying for my phd next year. What should I do to strengthen my cv/profile? I have no real research experience, and frankly I doubt I will get any during my undergrad. All I have really is Ia side project I am working on which will hopefully be a thesis level paper, but my actual honors thesis won't be ready by the time I need to submit applications. In other words all I would have to back me up is that one paper I am writing, and to my eyes I feel like that weak of a profile would get me rejected from almost every university I apply to. I would rather not do a masters in between, because they are expensive and from what I was told by my professor is that there are few funded master programs, nor would I like to do a gap year (but things may happen that way T-T). Any ideas would be very much appreciated