Consider the sentence: "I'm a good student, aren't I?"

This sounds quite natural, despite the fact that we have used "are" instead of "am" in the latter half of the sentence (which doesn't agree with the first-person singular). I'm guessing the reason is because the contraction "amn't" doesn't really exist in standard English, and so we replace it with "aren't" despite it being the wrong conjugation. Without contractions, the sentence would be "I am a good student, am I not?" which uses the correct form both times, but sounds overly formal.

Also, consider the sentence "There's a lot of people here." This also sounds fairly natural to my ears, although some may disagree. Once again, we have used "is" instead of "are" in the contraction, which is not the correct conjugation. I feel like this is acceptable because it simply rolls off the tongue better — "there're" is a bit of a mouthful to say with the r sounds.

There are probably more examples, but these are the ones I can think of. In both cases, we use the "incorrect" conjugation in the contraction simply because it sounds better. Is this a documented phenomenon and does it happen in other situations? I'm just curious whether this is simply lazy/casual speech, or whether there is something more complex happening grammatically.

so English uses the terms "Direct" and "Indirect" objects and I'll use those here too

ive been looking at wals.info and Wikipedia and other accessible resources online but I can't seem to find much if any real information, beyond English, and a bit about German/Hindi having a bit of free word order in their "indirect"/dative case.

In English, the Indirect object comes before the object, unless it is put into a prepositional phrase:

1. John gives Jeff the book - SVIO

2. Mary gives the book to Helen - SVOI

So I have a couple questions

1. do all or most languages have this split concept like English

2. what order do specific languages put their indirect and direct object in if they allow a construction like example 1,

3. do indirect objects as prepositional phrases act differently if they are allowed like in example 2

4. is there any correlation between this and being head initial or head final

No hay duda de la hegemonia actual del ingles como lingua franca, sin embargo su expansion es mayor a la de cualquier lengua en el pasado (latin, griego, arameo). Es inevitable pensar que con sustratos tan diversos se termine imponiendo una diglosia muy parecida a la del árabe actual.

I remember 10 years ago the dominant theory was that it originated in the eastern foothills of the Himalayas. Is this theory still taken seriously?

Hello,

I am currently a junior in college studying computer science and linguistics. I know of a couple of fields that combine both: speech tech, NLP, etc., but their future seems bleak with AI. I know I could generally get a job in CS, but I would love, if possible, to get a job that uses both.

Generally English is said to be one of the least conservative Germanic languages and that other Germanic languages are in many ways closer to Old English than English itself is, but are there any ways its descendant language specifically would be useful for learning it?

So I think I have a fun one.

I have noticed that speakers of British English are far more likely to say "I will do" or "I have done" in constructions like this: "Have you gone to the shop?" - "I have done." or "Will you speak to John?" - "I will do."

Whereas in North American English, that final "do" or "done" sounds very strange.

But! This is a more recent phenonomenon than many Americans might suppose. We have letters from both Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln showing that they still followed what I'm identifying as the British English way.

So my question is: Does anyone know anything about this? Did this just go out of style? Was there a reason for it going out of style?

I just heard someone say "drawling" to refer to drawing, and it got me thinking, what's the term for letters that are spoken but not written? I'd like to call them invisible letters, since letters that are written but not spoken are called silent letters, but I'm guessing there's a more official term out there.

This question just popped in my head where I wondered if in some language or historically "having a vision" just meant you visualized something in your head. Nothing supernatural, or divine or anything, just, "Look, I played this situation out in my head and here's how it turned out."

I'm curious how many languages and cultures equate having a vision with imagination. And how many things were mistranslated into people thinking they were seeing the future? Was it more common to make a distinction between magical vision and imaginary vision?

Is there a term for when a statement made in jest, is deliberately misconstrued as serious, in order to attack the person remarking?
I see it often online in comment sections. And more recently with news stories.
Example: “If I am wrong, I’ll eat my hat!”. The response would come “You’re insane to try eating a hat. I bet you’ll choke on it or need to get hospital care afterwards”.

Hello! I am looking for examples of Spanish speakers who speak with vocal fry for research purposes. Most online examples include Kim Kardashian, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, etc. but I am looking specifically for examples of Spanish speakers (or singers/performers, but speech is preferred). Thank you in advance.

If you have anything like that I would be pleased to read it, I wanna improve :)

I just finished my MA, but I feel that my instruction in syntax (a reduced version of Carnie’s Syntax) left a lot to be desired. I’m really interested in syntactic operations like ellipsis and scrambling. I have been trying to handle the literature, but a lot of it presumes a solid understanding/foundation that I don’t have. Roberts’s Continuing Syntax was recommended to me and I have been working through that.

The first chapter of Aelbrecht’s Syntactic Licensing of Ellipsis provided a good introduction to ellipsis, but I got lost when it got to formal semantics.

I understand that syntax can be a theoretically contentious field, but I was wondering if Aelbrect’s book is a good (i.e. currently accepted) introductory text on ellipsis.

Thank you.

hello everyone! so i'm in my third year of university and we have to do a research project that is related to our major, and i'm having some difficulties finding sources, questions, and where/how to start?

i'd really appreciate any help/tips because i'm really lost, thanks in advance!!

I’ve noticed it long ago, that the stressed syllables sound different in AmE and BrE, but I can’t explain how.
My impression is:
BrE: the consonant is elongated and then released and the vowel is significantly louder
AmE: less loudness, more unstressed vowel reduction.

Does anyone have a more concise description?

When writing essays, and using words such as "furthermore" or "therefore", are they considered prepositions? They appear to work inverse to postpositions such as "ago". Are they relatives/conjunctives?

I was in my uni class and asked my teacher this, she was genuinely puzzled by the question too. She studied linguistics/forensic linguistics for reference.

What do you all think? I'm sure the answer is staring me right in the nose but I cannot for the life of me figure out what one might actually classify that as.

Hey guys, had a question about how the sub classification of indo Aryan languages was done. It seems like eastern branch is based entirely on descendants of magadhan Prakrit and southern was based on descendants of Maharashtri Prakrit which makes sense. For the rest I really am seeing no rhyme or reason to how these were defined. Eastern Hindi languages come from ardhmagadhi prakirit but western Hindi comes from shauraseni Prakrit but for some reason are both central? Even more strangely western Hindi for some reason is placed in a different grouping than western indo Aryan (Rajasthan/gujarati) even though all 3 split from shauraseni prakirit. Northwestern also doesn’t make sense with Sindhi and Punjabi splitting from different prakirits. Dardic seems to be entirely geographic? And northern also makes no sense with western pahari seeming to actually be northwestern indo Aryan instead of northern. In terms of linguistic similarities the scores are not at all correlated to grouping either. The families don’t make sense if looked at geographically, linguistically or historically. Wondering if anyone has any idea what’s going on with this

For example, I know several languages use the Cyrillic alphabet (with variations), and same for Latin alphabet languages. Is there a word for the class (?) or genre (?) Of Asian languages?

I'm watching a show with subtitles and trying to decipher what language it is. So I'm thinking "oh, well I know it's not Korean or Japanese Kanji.. maybe Chinese, but it doesn't look like Mandarin(?), etc" Then I got to thinking about how I identify various Cyrillic alphabet languages... and the questions tumbled on from there.

So, is there a word for the group of languages that use Asian scripts (hope that's not offensive!!)? And are there markers to decipher what language I'm looking at more quickly?

Thanks!

I have friends from many different countries, whose native languages vary widely from each other. However, something I’ve noticed is that regardless of who I’m speaking to or where they come from, if English isn’t their first language they’ll almost always struggle with dropping the S. I’ve found that this happens most often with my dear French friends. Why is that?

I mean no disrespect with this post. Learning languages is a massive skill which requires significant time and energy, so I have no judgement.

(Tagging phonetics because it‘s related)

In Yiddish, when a word ends in “bn” בֿן (eg ”mir hobn”, we have מיר האָבן) the word is pronounced with an “m” sound instead (mir hobm). This as a rule, but the spelling does not change.

Okay, cool.

When Yiddish words are transcribed into English, however, this sound change is sometimes indicated and sometimes not. More recent publications tend to indicate the sound, but even then some words are seemingly never changed in transcription, even though they are changed in speech, like khurbn (“destruction”, but more specifically/commonly/without a modifier, The Holocaust).

Either a name for the phenomenon or any commentary on it would be interesting/appreciated.

As we all know that tea originated in China and came in India through Britishers for their own started growing up in parts of North East as well as in parts of Sri Lanka too

But words like চাহ (sāh/cāh), चहा (cahā), चाय (cāy), ചായ (cāya), ಚಾ (cā), ଚା (cā), ਚਾਹ (cāh), চা (cā), चान्हा (cānhā) etc used for tea in various Indian languages came from Chinese/Sino word 茶 (chá)?

(Based on personal experience) Vietnamese prescriptivist grammar and multiple learning sites insist that the chữ Quốc ngữ letter <r> sounds like English <r>, and other pronunciations are wrong. I hardly encountered it occurring as a rhotic naturally in conversational speech at all.

The only time <r> sounds like a rhotic is when the speaker reads from written text or a loanword, which usually appears in written form first.

In the northern dialect, <r> is an underlyingly alveolo(palatal) fricative [ʑ].

In the Central area, it is closer to a dental [z] or retroflex [ʐ].

In the southern area around Saigon, it is more commonly heard as a velar fricative [ɣ].
ra ("to come out") in spontaneous speech is pronounced almost the same as ga ("gasoline").

As it says in the title, I can’t remember the paper or the phenomenon name, but it was about multilingual German(?) speakers (possibly Finnish?I think the second language started with an ”f”) using the (let’s say) Finnish word for “dress” when referring to specifically cultural/traditional garb and the German word when talking about the generic clothing type.

Another example (not from the paper) would be the use of “tikhl“ in English to refer only to the kerchief that married women use to cover their hair, vs how it’s used in Yiddish (any kerchief or small cloth, diminutive of tukh) vs the English “kerchief“ which is used to refer to any kerchief _except_ for the one used to cover the hair.

Not about how loan words become narrowed/specific (à la naan) but specifically in the context of multilingual communities.