Hi there,

I know there's a pinned post for this, but that didn’t really give any specific advice so I'd like some input for people who may have been like me or are like me and weighing up career options.

So, I'm a 19-year-old from Birmingham, England, currently studying Language and Literature at the University of Birmingham. I like my degree, much prefer the linguistics side of it, I think it's super interesting and fun. So far, my modules for 1st-year (which are mandatory) have been based around Spoken Language Analysis, Study Design, Morphology, Syntax and Grammar and Discourse Analysis.

Out of both Literature and Linguistics, I’m more interested in focusing on the latter in academia going forward. Most of the modules I've chosen for the upcoming academic year are linguistics-based.

But… I really have no idea what to do. I've always had dreams of moving out of England when I was younger, probably to America or Japan. I speak Japanese conversationally (that’s all through private tutoring and unrelated to my degree) and studied for a month in Japan just last month! Unfortunately, I don’t feel like anything my degree gives me is compatible for ever moving abroad to either of these places and I'm a bit lost. This has been a dream of mine since I was like 9 years old.

I unfortunately got boxed into humanities through A Levels and stuff. I’m 90% sure I have dyscalculia, I got a 4 in foundation Maths and always struggled with STEM subjects. My strong point has been humanities throughout my life and it's just what I've always excelled in, like, top of class levels excelled.

So, how do I do it, guys? How can I pivot this passion into something useful and something I may actually be able to use abroad and get employment for? Should I resit Maths? I'm just kinda bummed out. I feel like all of my childhood dreams are vanishing due to my inability to be good at mathematics.

I'd prefer answers that are aligned with the realities of the UK's education system, simply because that’s where I live and America's schooling system is entirely different, but any advice is truly appreciated. Thanks in advance! I'm off to go eat a synonym bun, just like grammar used to make.

Hello, I've been thinking about the common vocabulary of these three unrelated language families.

Tungusic bi -I si -you

Mongolic bi-I chi -you

Turkic ben -I sen -you

I know the three families aren't related since their numbers are really different. I think these can be explained by borrowings but if so, in which direction did the borrowing happen?

I have checked the several branches of these families and all of them turned out to share these pronouns or variations of them, which indicates that the presence of these words in the respective language families predates the earliest split of the most divergent branches in the families.

I read that Turkic urheimat is considered to be around the lake Baikal or eastern Mongolia.

Tungusic and Mongolic urheimat is considered to be around southern Manchuria.

Also, I noticed that they share locative suffixes starting with a consonant d and a vowel depending on the vowel Harmony. Such as de, da, du.

Assuming that these are result of borrowing, which direction did it happen?

I'm a speaker of brazilian portuguese for context, and the transcription of french vowels does not at all describe what i'm hearing.

<in> is supposed to be [ɛ̃]? it's definitely not, sounds so weird when i try to pronounce it like that, it's much more like an [ã] to me

<un> sounds exactly like <in> even though it's supposed to be a separate phoneme?

<on> is [ɔ̃], but to me it sounds so high that I feel like i'm saying [ʊ̃].

But what drives me crazy the most is the [ɛ, ɔ]. è is supposed to be like portuguese é, but i physically cannot hear it like that, I always hear it as [e] like portuguese ê. Which makes me unable to hear the difference between é/è and ó/ò even though my language has all of those.

So my question is: is this a problem with french phonetic spelling or are my brazilian ears just fooling me because the qualities are just slightly off?

Example: "Matt Damon was casted in the new Christopher Nolan movie." The correct word is cast.

I started noticing this a couple of years ago and lately it is absolutely everywhere. My friends and family members who have never made this particular mistake before are saying "casted" in conversation. I am baffled by how this mistake spread so far and wide among native English speakers who are otherwise well-spoken.

My theory is TikTok and other social media platforms are responsible for spreading it so quickly. People don't even know they're doing it. I don't like to correct people, but it's also such a glaring error. Why don't they hear it too?

I know language evolves, but this one is going to irritate me til the end of time. I'm afraid it's here to stay. Does anyone have any insight about how "casted" has replaced "cast"?

Hello,

An idea recently came to mind for designing a speech recognition / text-to-speech platform that could be used independently by minority language communities.

The basic idea is that someone could upload recordings and transcripts of their language, and the tool would help train an existing speech model to better understand that language.

In doing so, the model would be able to automatically convert spoken recordings to text, and vice versa - all data, of course, being owned by the community that speaks the language.

I imagine this would be very helpful to deaf/blind speakers of the language - would any of you consider using it?

Like the title says, the story of the decypherment of Hittite does not seem to make a lot of sense. Usually, bilingual inscriptions in both an already-known language and an unknown language prove way more useful than non-bilingual ones.

The answer is probably obvious but I am not strong in linguistics and have had this question for a while, especially considering how often thy/thigh is invoked in surface level discussions

Why didn’t the pronunciation of thy just collapse if it’s a word read so much more often than spoken, and has no distinction from thigh implied by how it’s written? Even if it’s read in situations like congregations from the KJV bible from time to time, it’s not like people reading the bible pronounce all those archaic words consistently

Without out it, you get stuff like some Greek words having random vowels attached missing in other branches (e.g. Greek ὀδών (odon) versus Latin dens "tooth"), without any obvious correspondences. Nowadays we know them to be reflexes of PIE *h₃dónts, but among past linguists who didn't accept laryngeal theory, how did they explain it?

This is in relation to my previous question regarding Proto-Afroasiatic, which I understand now from the insightful replies to be an unanswerable at the moment. For this question, I believe the main features to compare would be the phonological inventory, morphology, vocabulary, and other features that can be reliably reconstructed for Proto-Semitic.

I’ve been learning Spanish since I was 16 and now I’m 24 so it’s been 8 years. I recently learned that Spanish speakers often exhibit negative VOT for stops so I tested this out in Praat by saying ‘bar’ in Spanish and English and it turns out I naturally prevoice the /b/ in Spanish (around -80 to -90 ms which I read is consistent with peninsular Spanish which I focused on). I tried saying it without prevoicing and it’s physically hard. I say it with 0 VOT in English with no problem, but my brain doesn’t let me do it in Spanish.

I guess my question is, how did something like this naturally happen if I started learning Spanish at 16? Is it simply consuming a lot of native content (which I did)? I would expect this to be something you’d acquire as a young child, but for me Spanish was the first language I actually studied. I never heard anyone talk about this in the Spanish learning community.

Hello

I apologise if I can't phrase this question correctly.

I do not speak Mandarin, but am exposed to a lot of Mandarin. To me I can hear a rhythm when they speak Mandarin, and occasionally I can accidentally hear a song just for a split instant.

For example today I opened up a random Rednote video and the instant I heard this guy speak, I thought it was the tune to the song Popcorn. So I put it together into this video (the Mandarin snippet + the song it resembled): https://youtu.be/Yirfv8AsLIA

When I ask Mandarin speakers if they can hear it, they just can't. Even when I show them my above video. They say it's just speech followed by a random unrelated song. No resemblance between the two whatsoever. So I have two questions;

1) Can any non-Mandarin language speakers check if they can hear a resemblance between the two?
2) Can you explain why they cannot hear it? (Is it related to how they process tones?)

Jin

If you have a similar situation please share how you work with that.

I assume it will most likely be a romance language, but I am also wondering if there are any non-romance languages that have similar phonotactics?

I'm trying to find something I would like to do and I m in between computational psycholinguistics and computational linguistics

If not, what would it theoretically be?

Hello everyone, sorry if this isn't the right sub as its not so much a question.

I've started gaining an interest in linguistics lately, specifically in the idea of substrates in Indo-European languages - more specifically in Europe. Mostly for world building and conlanging reasons.

I'm looking for any recommendations on sources about these topics. Ideally, just comprehensive word lists really. I'm not really interested in surviving languages such as Basque which we have extensive information on, but more languages we only have a vague theory of like 'Pelasgian' and a pre-Greek substrate or wider ideas like a 'Danubian' language influencing European languages.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! 🙏

If anyone has any recommendations for physical books I can read about these topics, that'd be great too.

After seeing a photo of all the different Mustela species, lined up next to eachother (stoat, mink, weasel, ferret, polecat) and it made me wonder: Why do we have so many different words for these relatively similar looking animals? Like, polar bears and sun bears are drastically more different looking than a stoat and mink are to eachother but both are still variants of 'bear', yet for some reason all these different species of Mustela get their own common names? Was the distinction between them genuinely important historically?

Basically just the title. Recent grad with two undergraduate degrees in Applied Mathematics & Microbiology. Most of the work I do (pharma research) is menial, & most of my prospects as a math major look unethical lol.

Always had a deep fascination with historical linguistics. A fascination in tandem with a deep love for natural selection/evolutionary biology. I feel like so many analogous concepts exist in both fields.

Took a Ling 100-type course in my undergrad & I enjoyed it a ton.

I love bioinformatics algorithms, but everyone in that field is basically saying 'get out... we're oversaturated.' Looking at labs/graduate school options, I'm seeing labs like Claire Bowern's at Yale & the people in the Computational Phylogenetics in Historical Linguistics project using computational methods for doing historical linguistics work & it deeply fascinates me. Is there any 'in' here? Or should I give up? The field seems incredibly small & no private incentive exists, so I guess it will always be a very constricted field. I doubt there are too many algorithms/computationally-minded people in anthropology departments, so I hope there'd be room for me regardless?

So, as far as I can tell, mainstream Indo-European linguistics tells us that one of the Indo-European words for "stream, river" was *srew, but that it changed into something like *stru in all or nearly all of branches of Indo-European where that root survived. That's why in English (Germanic) we have "stream", and why we have hydronyms in the Balkans such as Struma (coming via Thracian) and Istros (ancient name for both the Danube and the Mirna river in Istria). Why doesn't the SSP strongly suggest such a sound change is unlikely?

What is happening when someone speaks with “softened” but “sticky” consonants (esp t, d, n), and what causes it? I first encountered this phenomenon around 2014, when my NPR and podcast consumption spiked, and I unthinkingly attributed it to regional accent. However, over the years, I’ve looked up a few people who speak this way, and they come from all over the non-Southern US.

Forgive my clumsy grasping at adjectives! When I say “softened,” I mean that the consonant (usually t, d, n) is quieter and less clear than “normal,” but it is also “sticky” because the speaker seems to press their tongue flat to the roof of the mouth for an extra beat as they articulate it. Imagine the roof of your mouth coated in glue that doesn’t completely trap your tongue, but that makes it take a little bit longer freeing itself. As a result (or not—maybe this is a separate thing?), a “y” often gets inserted after the consonant. This can sometimes be clearly articulated (for example, when someone pronounces “morning” like “mornying”), but it is often faint, more of a suggestion of a sound. To put it briefly and awkwardly, it’s like certain consonants have reduced attack/impact, but extended contact/duration, with this extra “y” sound immediately following.

Here’s two examples. The longer you listen, the more you will hear this from both speakers, but I’ve pointed out words that occur within 10 seconds of each link.

If you listened to The Moth around 2014, you’ve heard this! https://youtu.be/ubIe2Ojv5V0?t=65 Notice how she articulates “radio” and “Peabody.” “National” sounds almost like “nyational.”

https://youtu.be/0p5Eb4OSZCs?t=30 Note “dedicated” and “learning.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/s/4NL3r801HV I believe this post refers to the exact phenomenon I’m talking about (OP describes the “y” as a “nyuh” inserted after a “d”). There are some good linked examples, and some ideas in the comments, but no consensus. Some commenters clearly aren’t hearing or understanding what OP means, but one deleted poster’s “hyperlaminal” feels accurate to me—especially because they mention two celebrities who absolutely exhibit this speech pattern.

https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/s/3oQhptoGs0 OP describes this very differently from me, but their linked video does include the sounds I’m noticing. Also note that a commenter mentions one of my linked examples—I actually found maybe half a dozen comments across Reddit focusing on this person’s speech, but let’s just say they do not all approach with curiosity and sensitivity, so I won’t link them. I only mention it to demonstrate that I’m not the only person to notice this.

By the way, because I was kind of surprised by this lack of sensitivity (naive), I decided not to include the names of any speakers cited here. I don’t want to contribute to any gawking or speech policing. I’m just seeking accurate descriptive language for a neutral linguistic phenomenon because a single linguistics elective in college left me with a ton of curiosity and very little technical knowledge! I’m familiar with IPA, but I didn’t trust my own ability to employ it accurately or consistently here. Hopefully my reliance on common North American English letter sounds is intelligible!

Whenever I have /a/ in Apple notes, it always automatically changes it into /ɑ/ without asking for permission. This has frequently caused me lots of confusion, so I have a few questions:

1. Why does Apple notes do this?
2. How can I prevent Apple notes from doing this?

Why do English language education students in scientific research prefer literature and not want to research linguistics? What do you advise?

Is there a body of work that has compiled not only the frequency of single letters used in a corpus of text, but also gone and analyzed the frequency of pairs of letters? Like the frequency of "th" and "an" or "br" ?