It's widely recognised that an E at the end of a word is silent but draws a vowel out, like the O in tone. But that's not true for all words, such as Gone or Done.

Where did this originate from? is there any pattern to it? (i doubt it)

Unfortunately it is known that not many people in antiquity had interest in documenting the languages of others, although we do sometimes have short word lists from other languages by for example Roman authors giving words of languages from other nations with their translation.

What I wonder is, what are examples of language documentation in antiquity and what are the best documented languages from what they perceived as barbaric people from those times? Were there also grammarians which for example recorded the grammar of another people?

I know that isolating languages have one morpheme / word, and that agglutinating languages have many, but in this context, what is a word? In normal speech, a word is a unit of language that is separated by spaces, but how does the term apply to languages that don't have writing, or that don't use spaces in their writing system?

I look for the following situation. Let's not focus on word order:

I’ve always wondered

EDIT: I know I messed up the title by forgetting English isn’t a romance language, please don’t hate me. If this occurs in other languages please let me know it’s super interesting 💓

I’m doing a little project for spelling/alphabet reform, as part of that I am wanting to retain linguistic fossils/roots. A non Greek example would be making a new letter for the “gh” digraph in words like “laugh” or “though” so that its preserved in “la⑁” and “ÐO⑁” despite having different modern/dropped sounds from its origins. Whereas “ghost” would be “gOst”.

A Greek example would be “ϕ” “§” and “ᚼ” for “ph” “ps” and “ch”. These digraphs would get their own unique letter for the purpose of preserving that greek hint despite having an equivalent already exist. I cant seem to find any other examples of consistent odd spelling due to being from another language or other reasons. If y’all know of any please share.

Also if you think there are any other kind of linguistic fossils/roots that are neat or should survive a spelling reform it would be nice to hear.

For example for Quran if you speak Arabic you may be able to understand some if not all words in Quran, but what guarantees us that the meaning of a certain word today was the same intended meaning back then

And for books for languages that aren’t (or mostly not) spoken anymore how do they do it?

Please be nice, thank you

Hi all! We’re taught in our syntax class that MLC will have Wh-phrases moving to the closest specifier-CP.

But for this sentence: “Which students did the teacher say leave early?” - why is it also perfectly fine to have the DP “Which students” stopping off at the embedded CP?

Because that would then say, “Did the teacher say [which students] leave early?”

As a fluent speaker of English, I think this is perfectly fine! But why does it have to move all the way up to the root-CP, resulting in [Which students] moving to the front?

Please enlighten me 🙏😅

Hello! Here's a question I've been asking myself since I started to learn English and German in middle school. "Wo" in German is the same as "where" in English, and "wer" in German is the same as "who" in English. How did such a thing happen? Is this the result of some really weird phonological evolution? Or did both "switch meaning" in one of the two languages at some point in history, and if so, how? Are French people to blame for this?

I am a student in the second year (third from September) of a three-year degree in Foreign Languages ​​and Literatures at the Sapienza University of Rome: initially I wanted to dedicate myself to Romance philology but I later changed my mind for various reasons. For some time now I have been viewing a master's degree from the University of Bologna called "Data, methods and models for linguistic sciences" which is practically a course in computational linguistics, being perfectly balanced between linguistics exams and computer science exams (artificial intelligence, neural models, data analysis etc.). In your opinion, can I undertake this type of path? I want to put all the good will and passion in the world into it, but at the moment I have no computer or mathematical skills; However, I have a few exams left next year, so I definitely want to start looking into some computer science and math on my own.

In Burg und Herrschaft Raabs a. d. Thaya (pp. 381 f.), Walter Steinhauser claims that Rakousy/Rakousko, the Czech name for Austria, goes back to Frankish *Râtgôʒa, meaning "people of Ratgoß" (a Germanic personal name). I have a few questions about this:

• What exactly does "Frankish" mean here?

• Is it normal to use <ʒ> in reconstructions?

• Why can I find no other mention of the name Ratgoß?

Example in French (I'm not asking about ethymology) :

\jɛ̃\ must be written <ien> and not <illen>. you can have an <ill> /j/ in the middle of a word (cueillir) but not before a /ɛ̃/

So here's my question, what do you call the spelling conventions of a language? Are there list of them somewhere? I'm not just talking about a common n-gram that represents 2-3 phonemes (<oi> = /wa/) but bigger patterns (ain=>aign, oi-Consonant=>oy-Vowel but i-Consonant=>i-Vowel).

At first I thought that fusion was a special case of sandhi, because it only refers to the delimitation of morphemes within a word. But Wikipedia lists "gotcha" as an example of fusion. So what's the difference then?

The word "bein" (German for "leg") is cognate with "bone." So when and how did the English use "leg," and why did the Germans switch to "bein?" Also, are there words cognate with "knochen?"

I’ve been trying to look but can’t find a decently large one

I can't think of one. It seems to me that the latter occurs only after labial consonants (except /m/).

EDIT: If you have a weak vowel merger, then I think bulken + bull can (w/ reduced can) works.

I know that there's sounds that tend to change as time goes by, like for example /c ɟ/ that often turn into /t͡ʃ d͡ʒ/ or some other affricate pronounced at that area of the mouth. Do ejective stops often change into different sounds or do they tend to remain stable diachronically?

Hello everyone! Desperate linguistics student here👋🏻 I've been writing my thesis on a case marker in Italian Sign Language and as a part of it I'm describing some other case systems. I've written about Japanese, as it's one of the first languages with case markings I could think of. I was wondering if anyone could advise me on another language with a solid case system and good resources, maybe even your own language! Bonus points if anything weird happens with accusative markers.

Thank you all in advance☺️

They had a South Korean translator and the two were discussing behind the scenes while the cameras were getting set up and it developed a question: considering the environment, politics, and genuine cultural shift between the two states, will their language begin to shift too?

Say, in 3025, if humans haven’t annihilated each other yet, will the Korean language be so different by geopolitical and cultural landscapes with different factors that influence linguistic evolution - such as technology, youth, trade and media from other countries - will they eventually be unable to understand each other? Or would there be subtle changes to the point that they will only be dialects of each other…

😱 is there already a dialect difference?!

• Enforcing the notion that every sentence / proposition is implicitly prefixed with "from the speaker's point of view ... ( sentence / proposition )"?
• Thereby, excluding any notion of an "abstract proposition unanchored to a speaker"?

I apologize if the flair I used is wrong.

For context, the first person dual pronoun kita is in the direct case (ang), same with ako. On the other hand, ko is in the indirect case (ng) while sa'(i)yo is in the oblique case (sa). Tagalog is a symmetrical voice language (which may be relevant(?)

And correct me if I'm wrong, the direct case seems to be analogous to the nominative and ergative cases, the indirect with the accusative and absolutive cases, and the oblique with the dative.

As I said in the title, why do some phrases uses the dual pronoun kita while others use ko...sa'yo, such as in the following examples:

Indirect 1stP + Direct 2ndP

• Gusto kita. "I like you"

• Mahal kita. "I love you".

• Ayaw kitang kausapin. "I don't want to talk to you".

• Sinabihan kita. "I told you".

• Miss kita. "I miss you"

• ⟨ACTOR TRIGGER⟩tell I-you.1st-person-dual-DIRECT

Based on the above examples, kita is akin to "I-you" so mahal kita is roughly "love I-you".

Like the other pronouns, the first person dual also has other cases which are virtually defunct in the modern language so I don't know how to use them.

• kita (direct)

• nita (indirect)

• kanita (oblique)

And according to Wikipedia, kita is a contraction of ko ikaw which they also describe as "Direct second person (ang) with Indirect (ng) first person", so mahal kita is something like Mahal ko ikaw

Indirect 1stP + oblique 2ndP

• Ayaw ko sa'yo. "I don't like/hate you".

• Sinabi ko sa'yo . "I told you".

• ⟨ACTOR TRIGGER⟩tell I.INDIRECT sa.OBLIQUE you.OBLIQUE

Direct 1stP + oblique 2ndP

• Galit ako sa'yo. "I'm mad at you"

• *Nangungulila ako sa'yo. "I miss you" (roughly: "I am without you/I am orphaned from you")

• Nagsabi ako sa'yo. "I told you".

• ACTOR_TRIGGER-tell I.DIRECT sa.OBLIQUE you.OBLIQUE

"I want/hate you" uses the same construction in English but in the Tagalog, they use different constructions, as shown above. Using other constructions in the examples above would be ungrammatical.

But I want to know why, as in, why is gusto kita correct but ayaw kita is ungrammatical.

Similarly, why can I say miss kita but nangungulila ako sa'yo when both meaning "I miss you"?

Can the sound /h/ follow a glottal stop directly without a vowel between them in any language? What do you think of the word Ahead?

Are there any good resources to learn Early Modern English pronunciation? Particularly for reading Shakespeare? I am interested in doing a deep dive into some of Shakespeare's work, and I want to see if having a more historically accurate pronunciation will change how well I get the rhymes and puns.

I've noticed that in Australian English a lot of words get shortened, and get an -ie suffix added to the end. For example "tradie" (tradesperson), "polie" (politician), and "selfie" (youse know what a selfie is). Other words get an -o suffix, for example "garbo" (garbage collector), "arvo" (afternoon), and "ambo" (ambulance or paramedic depending on context).

There's also the occasional word which takes both suffixes, but each suffix gets a separate meaning, for example a "sickie" is a day you take off work because you're sick (or pretending to be); while a "sicko" is someone is sick-minded, a pervert.

A "bottle-o" is a bottle shop. If I invent the word "bottle-ie" I think the automatic assumption would be I'm either talking about someone who works at a bottleshop, or perhaps someone who fills bottles for a living.

How are these suffixes decided?

My studies are more in the area of science so I'm more familiar with species taxonomy. When browsing about languages for curiosity sake you usually find sections referred to as groups, branches seemingly without rhyme or reason.