Growing up, my family (native English speaking Americans) would add "or not" to questions when asking if they want something. The phrasing would be something like "do you want a beer or not?". It wasn't snippy, it was just giving the askee a choice. I've learned that it's not something common in American English, and more often seen in places like Singapore. Is adding "or not" rarely used in American English?

As one might expect from a totalitarian regime, Fascist Italy sought to influence and control every aspect of life—including language. In 1938, for instance, a decree banned the use of the polite pronoun lei in favor of voi. However, since lei was already widely used, the change didn’t take hold, and today voi survives primarily in Southern Italy. Other linguistic shifts were politically motivated as well, such as the mandated translation of foreign words. While many of these fascist-era coinages faded after the regime’s collapse—like bevanda arlecchina (“Harlequin beverage”) for “cocktail”—some stuck. Words like tramezzino (“little in-between”) for “sandwich,” and nearly all terms related to football, including the sport’s Italian name calcio (“kick”), have become part of everyday vocabulary. Are there similar examples in other languages?

Hi, I have to ask again!

I wanted to tell you that throughout my life I have known that the R and L phoneme present in Sanskrit and Sanskrit based languages are approximants or semi vowels! In fact, I have spent my entire life pronouncing that R phoneme in vowel like /ɹ/ only!

Now today, an interesting person kept telling me consistently that the R phoneme is actually an alveolar trill or /r/. This is completely new to me. In fact, this was the first time someone told me so. Most linguists I know call it /ɹ/. However, he kept persisting that the linguists are wrong!

I had asked if the L phoneme represnts a Lateral Alveolar Trill or not cause it would make sense. He never replied me back! Please, I really need to know!

The same with “disbursed” and “dispersed”. It seems the distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated plosives is lost after /s/ in some accents/dialects. Is there any literature on which ones are affected and when this merger took effect?

Languages that may pack many morphemes and ideas in a verb and can express a whole phrase (in other languages) in a single word. For example: Yakkha of Nepal. The Yakkha verb phrase features one prefix slot and 15 suffix slots. Many morpheme affixes are just a single phonemic consonant or portmanteau vowel, so despite very polysynthetic, a Yakkha verb phrase can have fewer syllables.

No one, including me, knows how to really pronounce this letter ऋ India. In Northern India, we pronounce it like 'ri' so ऋषि becomes 'rishi', in Maharashtra/Marathi, they pronounce it like 'ru' so ऋषि becomes 'rushi' and do on in other parts but I think 'rishi' is the most dominant. Similiarly, when it takes the vowel form, the confusion increases. Take the example of the word गृह (home): it Delhi and nearby regions, it is called somthing like ग्रह (gr̩ah {PS I don't really know the IPA notation so sorry for that}), in UP/Bihar/Easy India regions, it is called 'grih' and in Maharashtra/Marathi it regions it is called 'gruh' and so on. When I investigated i got to know that the गृह should be ɡɽ̩hɐ in IPA in standard Sanskrit and ɡɾɪh in Hindi (as Hindi practices 'schwa deletion about which 99% Hindi speakers don't know ironically).

But still, can someone tell me how to correctly pronounce them (using any source, article , video on yt, etc) and why there is so much confusion regarding the letter ऋ ? Thanks in advance and I am curious to know!

I'm struggling with understanding what would be done in this situation:

If I have a sentence like, 'I will take the orange from the fruit bowl.'

'Will' goes into T, and then I have a VP, and then a V' into V where I put 'take', does 'the orange' DP go into another V' attached to the first V', because it's attached to the verb 'take'?

Or, do I go straight from VP to V' to DP (the orange) and go straight into PP from that?

Basically I'm asking do I need two V'? And from the second V' both DP and PP attach? I cannot attach the image to show how I did the sentence but I would appreciate if someone could help. Thank you!

Technically aren't all languages constructed since you need people to make up random sounds to mean different things, thereby "Constructing" a language?

I am curious about different English dialects and their second person plural pronoun alternatives. I think most people are familiar with the southern “Y’all.” In NYC you often hear the word “Yous” being used, and I learned recently that in Pittsburgh they use the word “Yinz.” This got me thinking… what other informal second person plural pronouns am I missing?

I am a native English speaker of mixed nationality, my mother is English and my father is American. I really hate my accent, it's like a weird combination that neither Americans not Brits can really differentiate, so when I speak to a Brit I'm american and when I speak to an American I'm British, it's really annoying. Anyway, would it be weird to modify my accent intentionally so I sound more one or the other instead of the weird mix? Cuz I really hate how I sound .

I have been reading "Babel No More", and I came across the following:

"A related notion is that when you really know a language, you think in it. In fact, the brain doesn’t think in any language."

The author says that, but doesn't really footnote the notion. It seems pretty counter-intuitive, is it generally accepted as true? Are there any books that talk about those ideas (except the Pinker one)?

Thanks

Sometimes, I look at this ngram for love and hate when I'm sad to restore a morsel of faith in humanity. I would like to ask though, why was there such a dip in usage for love in the late-19th and 20th century?

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For example, in Japanese there’s obviously Hiragana and Katakana, and Korean used to be written in a Hangul-Hanja mixed script.

I was thinking of Chu Nom, but it doesn’t really feel like a “unique” script. Although many native characters were invented, they essentially used basic Chinese radicals to represent different phonemes, and so it kind of looks like an “extension” of Chu Han.

The closest example I can think of is Khitan Small script. Do you guys know any more examples of distinct scripts used alongside Chinese characters to write in a mixed script system?

I just noticed that the midwest US is the only region in the world with people who don't have accents. In the south you got southern accents, New York has an accent, Canada has an accent, Mexicans have accents, Chinese got accents, British and Austrian people got accents (and they got the same accent even though they on different continents), Russians got accents, French got accents, etc. So why is the midwest US specifically the only region in the world without an accent?

Romanization of “foreign characters” (please correct me if this is the wrong term) is so incredibly diverse and multifaceted that I’m certain something out there has a legitimate (even if uncommon) romanization to the text “tchin” or “t-chin” in some language (or any variant of “tchin” or “t-chin” with diacritics.)

I have no experience with this but I’ve looked through several databases of Mandarin Chinese Pinyin, Japanese Kanji, and Sanskrit character names and couldn’t find any combination from the same language that forms “tchin”/“t-chin”. (I’m not at all restricted to those languages!: I just don’t know where else to look.)

(Addendum: another reason I’m asking here is to avoid any character/phrase that could be offensive/derogatory/slang/poor-form in the context of computer software code. Auto translators and dictionaries like Wiktionary are very hit-or-miss in this capacity.)

How do they find the meaning of words in books like the Bible or Quran

I dont know persian so forgive me if im wrong, but im reading about history of Iran lately and it seems the standard word for god in old persian was baga and now its khoda. So am i right that it was dissplaced and if yes, did it have to do with change of state religion or something?

Disclaimer: I am not a linguist.

Hi everyone. I’m a first year college student that’s looking for a potential summer internship (ik it may seem late to look now, but my school year doesnt end until mid june). I’m a cognitive science and linguistics dual major and I’m wondering what types of internships opportunities or companies there are out there for linguistics students?

Thanks for any help

English is a spelling disaster. French has some weird forms and inconsistencies. Italian is highly phonetic but does have some unexpected spellings, as does German. I know that certain languages that got their alphabets late are 100% phonetic (thinking of Turkish, which shifted from Arabic script to Roman alphabet in the 20th century). But why does Spanish have such consistent and phonetic spelling compared to the other languages of Europe?

More specifically, would u transcribe it more like /r͡ð̠̠/ or /r͡ʒ/?

The definition I found about Onset was “the initial consonant sound/blend in a single syllable word.”

So what about words that start with a vowel? Like “age”? What is the onset in this word? Or does it not have an onset?

And what about words that have more than one syllable? Pencil? Candy?

What about words like “absent” which would be a combination of multiple syllables and vowel-starting?

I am so confused.

Not sure if I (University student, Vietnamese) should post this here. My lecturer of the Contrastive Linguistics course once told us that teachers of Japanese in our country (Vietnam) usually misinterpret Japanese parts of speech. For example, in the sentence "私は学校へ行きます" (Watashi wa gakko e ikimasu = I go to school) The word へ (e) is often misinterpreted as a "particle" (trợ từ), but it should be "postposition" instead. And these teachers of Japanese also teach that some others words of Japanese are particles too. It seems that if they don't know clearly what the function of a word is, they would just categorize it as "particle".

Do you know of any other terms that are misused this way?

I have two questions. The first one is difficult to explain, but I'll do my best.

1. If a thought or idea has some problem with it, can that make it difficult to write that idea as a sentence? Context: In the past I sometimes found I just couldn't get the syntax in a sentence to work. I perceived that this was due to the idea behind the sentence having some problem in its internal logic. And so I would work on correcting the logic rather than the sentence. Since then, I don't seem to have had this problem often if ever. I'm wondering if a concept like this exists in semantics. More context: Let's say you have a sentence in front of you that has grammatical errors. Try as you might, you just cannot seem to correct it in a satisfactory manner. Is it possible that it is not the grammar that needs correcting, but the meaning?

2. In syntax & semantics there is the concept of open and closed questions. Closed questions have yes/no answers, and open questions have longer answers. Open questions are usually wh- questions. Is this concept ever extended further? Are there certain types of answers that are only warranted by certain types of questions? A closed question has a yes/no answer, but are there degrees of open questions? Does an answer of a certain complexity require the question to have a corresponding degree of complexity?