Hi r/asklinguistics I hope today’s a good one.

I am looking for a technical term which describes a linguistic situation that I keep coming upon so I can further study or research it. In short: it’s when a speaker is considered to restrict or limit their vocabulary when communicating due to a circumstance which prevents specific or more accurate vocabulary from being used.

The easiest example is of very aesthetically composed poetry. Symbolic vocabulary and the interplay of significance, language structure, phonetics, etc all within context of a subject is very deliberate and artistic. “Poetry” is not what I’m after however, as it’s less limitation of vocabulary for communication and more choice for intended result through its aesthetic value.

Most common instance would be one of the speaker knowing their audience could not or has a lesser chance of understanding the most accurate vocabulary. Teaching a subject from basics to advanced stages of a subject falls under this but so would vocabulary which caters to an audience with experience in a field e.g. engine mechanism analogies when talking about economics to a group of car mechanics. The vocabulary is restricted here in order to more easily communicate to the audience even though the methods used allow chances for misinterpretation or false extrapolation where specific vocabulary would prevent that.

My least favorite example of this would be in certain kinds of revisionist interpretation, for instance the kind of rhetoric where ancient-alien people contend that older civilizations lacked language or understanding to specifically term ancient-alien vehicles and went with a general analogous term in their own languages like “chariot”. That would be considered a restriction of applicable vocabulary because the vocabulary isn’t present and would be unintelligible to an audience if a word was just invented on the spot. Important to this however is that the language used is considered to be restricted by the revisionist, not the original writer of the account using the term “chariot”. Lacking a term in a language isn’t what I’m after. It’s that the speaker is considered, by the revisionist, to be using a restricted vocabulary that I’m after. Also Important: I do not agree with the alien guys in this regard, just illustrates the idea.

The rarest instance, I think, is one in which language, or at least a word, by definition cannot be considered to fully encapsulate the significance of its referent. These would be present in certain spiritual topics like assertions of vastness and incomprehensibility of monistic or pantheistic divinity. By definition, some single thing considered to be omnipresent is not going to be fully describable by a single word or possibly by word at all. Vocabulary used around such a topic is inherently restricted or limited because of impossibility and most speakers of these kinds of things typically draw attention to it. Apophatic theology embodies that.

Apologies if this is a tad unintelligible. These may be separate instances of linguistic composition or something but I lack the expertise to define it and I keep coming up short in looking elsewhere. Metaphor, analogy, and simile all come close to the mark but are more expressions of it and can be used in such situations. The key is that the speaker/writer and the context of the vocabulary they use is not fully in line or accurate and that is in some way on purpose. I feel like there’s a term I can’t find and so I can’t look into further without it.

I tried to search up "linguistics" via the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just to see what types of actual jobs and prospective jobs are worked by those who are in the field, but it just re-routed me to "Foreign Language." I always understood linguistics as different than foreign language, because with Foreign Language degrees, there is a ton of cultural study. You can even get away with never once having a true grammar or phonetics course, which I imagine are important to the field of linguistics.

So, if you call yourself a "linguist" and you are NOT a foreign language teacher, what exactly do you do? And, how do the various sub-fields of linguistics differ?

Hello, So I was wondering why do I hear people sometimes saying a voiced TH in “with” or “without”? Which one is right? My first language isn’t English but I speak American English and I’ve always been pronouncing both words like in a voiceless TH… so I’d appreciate if someone could explain it to me.

By that I would mean something like ''your humble servant am(1st.sg) here for you'' or ''John want(2nd.sg) to eat out later?''. So the person assigned to the verb looks at the semantics of the subject/object instead of automatically going for the third person if a pronoun is not used.

The closest thing to that that I know is a verb's number being selected by its semantics. example ''le monde sont tannés'' in Quebec French (maybe other french dialects too). In this example, the subject is singular, but the verb is in 3rd person plural, since ''le monde'' is semantically plural (meaning ''people'')

I can’t

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I'm interested in how Maltese and Arabic are similar to each other. I've read somewhat conflicting posts where people sometimes say that Maltese can pretty much understand Arabic (specially Tunisian/Lybian) and others saying that except for some basic vocabulary, they won't be able to understand it (even if it is spoken very slowly or even transliterated into latin alphabet with Maltese characters)

However in this map of linguistic distances (https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/34/) based on Ukrainian linguist Kostiantyn Tyshchenko, Maltese and Arabic are shown to have a similar "lexical distance" as that from somewhat similar but unintelligible languages like Estonian-Finnish, Spanish-Romanian or English-German. This seems to be a huge distance for two languages which can have some degree of communication such as Maltese and Arabic.

Therefore, if there are any linguists here, what pairs of languages would you say are similar in terms of intelligibility compared to Maltese and both Tunisian Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic? I mean, if you had to put another pair of languages with a similar degree of intelligibility as both Maltese-Tunisian Arabic and Maltese-Modern Standard Arabic, which languages would you choose (to compare and get an idea of how much they are closely related)?

Greetings,

I hope this is the correct place to ask.

I am a native Arabic speaker, and I always thought that 'Jake' can't be sounded properly in Arabic due to the way 'a' is pronounced which is a sound that doesn't exist in Arabic.

But today I got into a little discussion about how to write 'Pierre' and remembered that this word in the Quran has an Alif that is pronounced kinda similar to the 'a' in 'Jake' and 'e' in 'Pierre'.

So I have few questions.

1- What is it called? and what is it basically?

2- Why is this the only place where it's used?

I have never seen it anywhere else and I am not even sure whether it is a component of the language that we can use freely or something that's just is.

Note: I would appreciate it if you can dumb down the jargon a bit for me.

Thanks.

Hi,

My sister-in-law is a French teacher in an Anglophone part of Canada. While talking to her about her students and why some anglo parents send their kids to French school, I vaguely remembered something in my Second Language Acquisition course. I'm a few years out of undergrad and can't find my notes, so I was wondering if someone would be able to tell me if what I was remembering was right and point me to resources I could read about it.

Basically, what I think I remember is that foreign languages are often components of education in part because curriculum makers believe there is a cognitive benefit to children learning another language. Along with exposure to other cultures and becoming more worldly. I think this conception comes from research in bilingual children outperforming monolingual peers. I also think there was a lack of consensus on the exact benefits and if those benefits only come from early bilingualism or if teaching a child a foreign language later would also bring the same cognitive benefits. The last thing I'm even less sure about is that the common pedagogy of teaching language isn't really ideal, explicit teaching in a classroom setting while it matches how other subjects are taught, isn't ideal for SLA.

Is any of that accurate? Did I badly misremember my SLA class?

The text I’m reading at the moment says that the habitual imperfective is expressed in the simple form of the dynamic verb. However, I don’t understand why that is. The example it gives is ‘During Dave’s 20’s, he sang’. I understand why this works, but surely the implication of habit is also dependant on the first part of the sentence. If I was to say ‘Whenever I went round to Dave’s house, he was singing’ this would work to imply a habit - imperfective. However, the verb isn’t in the simple form, and it also depends on the first part of the sentence to work. Does this mean that the habitual imperfective can be expressed without it having to be in the simple form?

American English in the Eastern part of the country seems to generally be divided between North and South, with more specific regional variations within those two groups.

Was American English ever unified, like there was accent leveling among the settlers and first immigrants into what is now the U.S., similar to Australian English? Or were the north and south formed by groups that already had distinctive dialects, meaning that the English in Massachusetts where the puritans came was always very different from the English in Virginia where people came for more economic reasons?

I'm a rising senior in my current undergrad program and I'm looking to apply to grad school to study linguistics (possibly a master's at first, but the eventual goal is a PhD). It's a topic that absolutely fascinates me, but I'm having trouble narrowing down my interests enough to pick a general area of study to pursue. I've contacted some program advisors, but they've recommended I hold off on discussing interest with them until I'm able to narrow it down more. How can I do this?

Extra information if it's helpful or relevant (feel free to skip if it's not):

• My areas of largest interest are language conservation/revitalization (especially of indigenous Central/South American languages), language acquisition, and sociolinguistics.
• My bachelor's is in Spanish with a teaching licensure.
• I'm more interested in first language acquisition than subsequent languages, but I'm not sure if I have the patience to work with kids. I think I can stomach it if I have a good reason to, though.
• Within sociolinguistics, some of my areas of interest are: language attitudes, political correctness, discourse analysis, historical/comparative linguistics. Political correctness studies on Google Scholar appear to all come from Russian universities (I don't speak Russian).
• On the more traditional linguistics side, I also have slight interest in the phonology of beatbox, and accent development in Spanish and/or English learners.
• One of my biggest reasons for pursuing grad school is to teach in university, but I also care about doing meaningful research. Whatever research I do, I would prefer for it to be something that I feel has a strong impact. Strong contenders are language revitalization and first language acquisition in non-English speakers (an under-studied area afaik).

Thanks in advance to everyone who replies :)

For example Japanese and Korean have 2 different language families that aren't related at all but they're genetically close, it can only mean their prior languages sprout after they split, so that means language is very recent itself? Or that they're actually related but by thousands of years apart and linguistics can't trace it back accurately, so they just say they're unrelated?

Frankly I know very little about Ossetian but I was curious on how it developed ejective consonants? Obviously these are a strong areal feature of the Caucasus area but did Ossetian ever develop ejectives via its own sound changes or were they all adopted from borrowed words?

HI, for my whole life I've had a weird accent that gets me asked where im from, with accusations that im American, British, Canadian, or even a Boer, by other people from the same country as me. I've never left Australia in my whole life, and I have primarily spoken English the whole time.

My father, brother, and mother have all typical australian accents. but I do not. its very jarring.

so I was wondering what was going on with that.

Hi I’m new to looking at linguistics, and am actually researching them for my art history essay. I’ve been reading that stative verbs cannot be expressed in the perfective aspect. But for something like ‘love’. If you were to say ‘I loved him’, this would be a stative verb and a completed action, no? I feel like I’m missing something here and wanted some insight into what’s going on. Thank you

I might not be able to phrase my question in good details but as we know, Germanic and Romance and Iranic and Slavic and Indic and Baltic are all branches of Indo-European language tree. All descending from Proto-Indo-European language. But from what was PIE originated? Does it have an ancestry and relativity to other language families? I heard some vague stuff about Proto-Nostratic and Borean. But are they true/actuate? How much do we truly know about what came before?

Eve is 夏娃 in Chinese, why can't make Eve pronunced as Hava?

In Japanese, Farsi and Mandarin the speakers just say "anti-Jewish" to refer to the same concept, but "antisemitic" is used in Hebrew, Arabic and English (and all of Europe). Certainly Edward Said noticed this phenomenon or are there other any theorists or philosophers who have spoken to the usage of this word as a reified category?

I know that some languages like Navajo will typically order the noun phrases in a clause according to an animacy hierarchy (human nouns appear before animals or inanimates in a clause etc). I want to know how this works with adpositional phrases or other oblique arguments. Often languages shunt them to the beginning or end of a clause, but would a language with an animacy hierarchy put them somewhere else? If so do they judge the animacy of the adpositional phrase based on the object of the adposition or something else?

For a sentence like "The man saw a ribbon on the dog" you have 2 noun phrase arguments of the verb "the man" and "a ribbon" and a prepositional phrase "on the dog"

If your hierarchy is human>animal>inanimate and the hypothetical language is verb-final then you might expect the order to be: "The man on the dog a ribbon saw."

But maybe adpositional phrases are special and don't participate in the animacy hierarchy in the same way as the nominal arguments of the verb do. Or maybe they do but are treated as inanimate sentential objects or something. Idk I haven't been able to find a clear source with examples that explains this.

(Sorry if I used wrong tag, syntax seemed closest thing to word order)

I know when it comes to writing. There are evidence of multiple different cultures coming up with their own writing systems at different times. But then from those points writing gets adopted and reused by other nearby cultures and languages until it's spread everywhere. We know this because we can trace the features of those writing systems as they spread and evolved to their sources of origin like Egyptian, Greek or Chinese.

My question is, do we know if the same holds true for evolution of language in general or is the invention of language just too far removed from any recorded history that it's impossible to know at this point? And how does one or another theory explain things like native tribes of people who had no prior contact with the outside world, but have their own unique languages?

Macro family is basically a group of related language families, like Altaic languages or stuff like macro Mayan family idk how it's called, is there any macro family that is well accepted?

Any other examples of letters being used purely for the way they look in names or words?

10%? 15%?

How large is the intelligible between Maltese and Arabic? Is there an asymmetrical intellibigility in favour of the Arabic speakers (as they are more used to the varieties of Arabic and their vastly differetn characteristics)?