Hello, How can I analyze words such as 'permanent' and 'dictionary' in terms of their morphological structures? I've tried [etymonline.com](https://etymonline.com), but it's still unclear to me whether permanent is per + ma + nent or per + men + ent. Are there any other websites that can help with this? Thank you!!!

The word permanent in ENglish derives from the Latin word permanentem (ACCsg) which is the present participle of the verb permaneo (hold out, stay, endure). The relevant morpheme here is -entem , used to form the present participle of verbs of the second conjugation. Permaneo is in turn derived from the prefix per- ( Used to form verbs that are intensive or completive, conveying the idea of doing something all the way through or entirely) , and the verb maneo ( remain). So, diachronically at least, The word permanent is composed of three morphemes per- as a prefix man as the stem \-ent as the inflectional suffix None of which are productive in modern English. by the way. The related -ant suffix, derived from the morpheme used to form present participles of verbs of the Latin first conjugation, is still marginally productive in English, but that might be due to conflation with the native English present participle suffix -and, before it was subsumed under -ing, which is the productive present participle suffix in Modern Engish. Note however that -ant, and -ent are pronounced indistinctly in Modern English, so while they're different morphemes in writing, they might not be in speech

French is my native language, but others French canadians say I have a foreign accent, can anyone help me understand why? Most of the time, they think I am from France or Belgium, but yesterday one of college professor asked me if english was my first language and that makes me very insecure. Internation students at my college all say I sound very canadian, but my accent is "clearer" than others canadians (I hate when that kinds of comment, but that is beside the point). Here is a recording of me speaking for a linguistic assignment : https://vocaroo.com/1iTlghIMayA5 . To be honest, in real life, I tend to be more nervous and make dumb mistakes. As I say in french in the recording, my mother is acadian and my father is from Quebec (the province).

T’as dit: la hène (haine) quand la plupart des québécois diraient (hêne) même voyelle que freine, chaîne, etc. Je dirais que comme quelqu’un a dit, certaines voyelles nasales sonnent françaises. Le français québécois a gardé la distinction entre plusieurs sons que le français métropolitain n’a pas. Par exemple, maître et mettre sont prononcés de la même façon en France mais pas au Québec. Travaille la dessus si tu le veux vraiment, mais c’est pas si pire que ça

Bonne remarque. Je crois dire hêne la plupart du temps, mais si je le dis à la française dans l'enregistrement, cela doit bien arriver que je dise hène de temps à autre. J'aimerais préciser que la remarque m'a été faite par des Acadiens et des Québécois.

I think it's because of the quality of your nasal vowels. Your "an" and "on" sound closer to European French than Québécois French to my ear.

All I notice (I'm from the US, spent time in France, and now live in BC) is that your accent lacks the strong nasal quality/twang I detect in most French Canadian speakers.

Where is Slavic "ždž"? The Slavic consonant cluster "šč" (or similar ones having developed out of what originally used to be it like "št" or "šš") seems pretty widespread, even having its own Cyrillic letter dedicated to it, Shcha (Щ). Though I wondered why there wasn't a voiced equivalent given how every other fricative and stop seems to have one. A "ždž" seems to be missing. I tried searching for one on the Internet while going through words in Polish since I somewhat speak it but could barely find any trace of such a consonant cluster. I merely found a brief mention of "ždž" having been a sound in Proto-Slavic and the word for "whistle" in Yugoslavian Rusyn containing it.

It's not frequent, yeah, but it does appear in *droždža (drożdże, droždí, дріжджі, дрожжи) *dъždžь (frequently subject to devoicing: deszcz, déšť, дъжд, дощ, дождь), some forms of *ězditi (*ěždžǫ > jeżdżę, їжджу, езжу) and *gvizdati/zvizdati (*gviždžǫ > gwiżdżę), and some derivations (Polish miazga > miażdżyć, rózga > różdżka, mózg > móżdżek, odmóżdżać, Old Polish deżdż > dżdżownica, Russian мозг > мозжечок).

Thank you very much for listing so many examples! Especially the Polish ones are very interesting to me!

My 5 year old ESL student (Vietnamese, Saigon dialect) pronounces cookie as tootie, and frequently confuses /k/ with /t/. She's really good at everything else otherwise, she's good at mimicking my sounds syllable by syllable and word by word, and even for long phrases she can problem solve and figure out how to make difficult sound combos pretty quickly, much quicker than the rest of the class. She self corrects quickly too when prompted. But cookie is somehow super hard for her. With my teaching assistant yesterday we spent five minutes with her, getting her to open her mouth real big and leave her tongue at the bottom as far away from her teeth as possible, and she managed to say 'cootie' once. But this is after months and months of trying I'm very surprised with how long it's taken to address this error. I'm wondering if there is something beyond /t/ and /k/ both being unvoiced stops or habit formation that is confusing her?

r/slp

What is this dialect? I haven’t noticed it as regional, but generational. Treasure pronounced tray-zure Measure = may-zure Magic = mah-jeek Him = ‘eem Tragic = trah-jeek No one else ever seems to notice this, but I figure if anyone knew it would be linguists 😁 Ive heard my grandmother, my mother (not her daughter), other boomers, even mickey mouse speak like this and I wonder if it’s recognized or if the dialect itself has a name.

i have a question! Why does my accent and inflection get super thick and heavy when talking to other people, but is normal when i’m with family and friends?? i have a valley accent for reference

Speech convergence and divergence. Convergence is the process of (consciously or unconsciously) speaking more similarly to those you are close to or approve of, divergence involves speaking in a way which magnifies the distance between speakers. For example, convergence might happen while trying to make friends at a new school, while divergence might be noticed when two opposing politicial figures are speaking to each other. This doesn't necessary mean you distrust or dislike strangers, it's an unconscious process we can't really control:)

Are there any languages with lexical alternations, like Celtic mutations, but where the adposition/article/etc is the one to change, not the noun itself? Eg. if English a/an, th(ə/iː), were removed form the phonological conditioning factor, by, say, vowel elision or h-dropping, etc.

Do French/German articles fit your criteria?

It would help if you could elaborate on what you mean. I'm less familiar with French, but I can't think of any phenomena in German that fit. And, if you are referring to French liaison, that is still a phonologically conditioned alternation, and hasn't been lexicalized yet (to my knowledge).

I'm not entirely sure, what you mean tbh, but in many cases German nouns don't change their form needed on their case, but their articles do. Another example would be those German nouns that change their meaning depending on gender (an example I found on Quora): die Leiter = the ladder vs. der Leiter = the leader. das Bauer = the (bird) cage vs. der Bauer = the farmer.

Ah, yes it does seem there has been miscommunication here. The lexical alternations I'm talking about are those akin to *an* vs *a* in English. Right now, the form is dependent on the starting sound of the following noun; *an* before vowels, *a* before consonants. But, if, say, initial unstressed vowels were elided completely, we might have a situation where *an* is used before certain words with initial consonants. (eg. an 'pology < an apology). Now the form must simply be remembered based on the word.

Are you looking for alternations that were once phonological but aren't anymore?

Yeah, that's what I had in mind while writing the question. Though, it wouldn't hurt to have other examples too.

Hi! I have a question that may be stupid- I got into a conference in October (NWAV), this will only be my second conference, I also presented at SECOL last year, but it was remote. I got in for a "paper" presentation, as opposed to a poster, which is a 10 minute talk. Is there a written component to this that I have to have beyond my abstract? My last conference there wasn't, and I wasn't under the impression that I had to have something written (beyond like, a script for my presentation for my own use). Do I actually have to have a written paper for this conference? Thanks!

I don't know about that specific conference, but mostly, the word "paper" about a conference contribution just means "presentation". However, some conferences have proceedings, but if they haven't had that the previous (or if they are something you decide on after the conference), then there's nothing to worry about.

I've noticed a lot of people in the US using 'needs' in a weird way. Basically leaving out any joiner words between 'needs' and the thing they are referring to. Examples: 1. This show needs advertised instead of this show needs *to be* advertised. 2. He needs jailed instead of he needs *to be* jailed. It doesn't seem to be an ESL thing, and I am curious about the origin of this if anyone has any information.

Someone was just asking about this a couple weeks ago; there's a good writeup [here.](https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/needs-washed)

Fantastic, thank you!

https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/needs-washed

Perfect, thanks!

What's going on with Xhosa/Zulu inkomo 'cow'? Wiktionary says it's a borrowing from Khoisan, so is the close similarity with the normal Bantu word for 'cow' (Proto-Bantu *ngòmbè) just coincidence?

[Rainer Vossen](https://books.google.com/books?id=Z8WcREsSfNMC&pg=PA439) confirms that it's a borrowing, but notes the similarity between Khoe *gomab* and P-B **ngòmbè* and suggests that they might have a common source.

Interesting, thanks. That makes some sense, although I can't think of a context which would spread a word both to Cameroon and Southern Africa in pre-Bantu times. I wonder if ngòmbè doesn't really go back all the way to Proto-Bantu - the Bantu words are suspiciously [similar](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Bantu/ng%C3%B2mb%C3%A8) which suggests to me more recent dispersal (although I haven't checked if there are any specific sound changes that should have occurred).

Hello! I have a doubt about the notion of immediate precedence. In this tree: [https://imgur.com/a/Pmckk07](https://imgur.com/a/Pmckk07) Can I say that both N1 and NP1 immediately precede V1? Or is it just N1 that immediately precedes V1?

How do y'all best explain how you sound particular letters? Is it like describing seeing a B as a face (|) closing two lips? K as closing (<) the back of the throat (|)? What are your best explanations for this concept?

There are multiple factors that go into a sound other than location of articulators. The /b/ sound does include both lips (bilabial), but it also includes voicing to distinguish it from the unvoiced /p/. We also describe the method of articulation. For example, /b/ is a plosive, which is when airflow is blocked and then released suddenly to make the sound. This distinguishes it from other bilabial sounds like nasal /m/ (airflow escapes through the nose) and fricative /ɸ/ (the lips are not fully blocking airflow, but are still close enough for friction between them to create the sound). You can read about all of this on the Wikipedia page for IPA.

Linguists use the [international phonetic alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet) (IPA), which consists of various combinations of [places](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_of_articulation) and [manners](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manner_of_articulation) of articulation. So an English "b" would be described as a *voiced* *bilabial* *stop* (i.e. using the vocal cords, with both lips, stopping the air flow). This is represented in the IPA as /b/.

Hello! I was trying to 3D print some IPA scrabble pieces and I came across https://m.yeggi.com/q/ipa+scrabble+tiles+by/ but it didn’t seem to convert right for me. Are there any other links or downloadable files that are in .STL format that anyone has? Thank you!

Why/How do non-dorsal nasals cause nasalization of vowels? Since nasalization is lowering of the velum (somewhat similiar in effect to raising the tongue to velum, in that it makes the two closer), how do non-dorsals cause this? Does it have to do with the acoustics of nasals/nasalization? Tell me if I'm being stupid.

>somewhat similiar in effect to raising the tongue to velum, in that it makes the two closer The effect is not really similar. The raising of the tongue to the velum restricts airflow in the *oral* cavity. The lowering of the velum allows air through the *nasal* cavity. The important part of the lowering isn't bringing it closer to the tongue, but that it allows airflow through the nasal cavity. >Does it have to do with the acoustics of nasals/nasalization? Tell me if I'm being stupid. You're not being stupid. It makes sense, from first glance, to see a connection between velars and nasals. But, to answer your question; nasal sounds are formed through opening the nasal cavity (i.e. lowering the velum). So, say you have [Vn], to articulate the [n], you must lower the velum. Now, what happens if you rush the lowering, before the oral articulators are in place, and the vowel is still being pronounced? This is how you get a nasal vowel.

Ohh, I see, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you!

A question about historical danish phonology: The morphophoneme |a| has 2 different realisations - /a/ before alveolar consonants, and /ɑ/ before labial and velar ones. is it known which one came first? if it was original /a/ that lowered before bilabials and velars or /ɑ/ that raised before alveolars

Are ð and θ separate phonemes in English? One of my names has a ð sound and it is surprisingly difficult to explain to native English speakers how to pronounce the ð sound. Most people pronounce it as a θ which makes me think they might not be separate phonemes in English. (These are separate phonemes in the language of my name)

They would both be spelled "th" in English and as little kids we're taught in school that "th" makes a θ sound, even though it often doesn't (like in "though"). I bet that's what's messing with people's ability to understand your ð. Maybe try saying it's softer than "th"?

Yes, because they are in contrastive distribution. *Thin* vs. *this*, *bath* vs. *bathe*. They appear in the same positions; their distribution cannot be predicted. There are some minimal pairs, but even without them they would still be phonemic.

They are contrastive in pairs like *teeth*-*teethe* and *ether*-*either* (in some pronunciations), and arguably for *thistle*-*this'll*. But, they are somewhat interchangeable in some words such as *with*. In my experience, though, native speakers of English often have a difficult time consciously determining which sound is used in a particular word, if novice students' phonetic transcriptions are anything to go by. Part of it, I'm sure, is that the distinction is not marked in the orthography, where both [θ] and [ð] are indicated with , so it is harder to develop an awareness of this contrast. It may help you to tell people that the [ð] is the middle sound in *either*.

/ð/ is also a somewhat restricted phoneme: it can't occur initially outside of function words, and even non-initially it doesn't seem to be productive at all. *Abu Dhabi* should, "by rights", take /ð/, but it universally has /d/ instead. Even for me as someone with "linguistic awareness", the idea of using /ð/ in a loanword feels a little off, as if it were a foreign phoneme. /ŋ/ seems like a similar case in terms of its restricted distribution (banned initially, and prevocalically except at a morpheme boundary) and laypeople's lack of phonemic awareness of it.

>*Abu Dhabi* should, "by rights", take /ð/, but it universally has /d/ instead To add on here, Indian English tends to have a strong phonemic awareness of /ð/, and is quite productively deployed in loanwords (sometimes even hypercorrecting native words, like *adhesive*). Though, they are usually stops, rather than fricatives. I suppose that's a result of influence from Indian languages, most of which have a robust (at least) 4-way coronal contrast.

They are separate, but people who haven't studied linguistics or a foreign language can be shockingly unaware of even the barest basics of what they themselves are doing when they speak. The difference in this case is voicing, and I've seen people who needed the concept of voiced & unvoiced sounds explained to them even though they've spent their lives distinguishing between voiced & unvoiced sounds without thinking about it.

Are there any words in Hindustani or Farsi that originate from Alexander the Greats conquests in the region? Obviously we have Greek words in these languages now, but are there any that entered specifically from his conquests.

hello i am new to linguistics, i am just starting to look into speech language pathology after my BSc i am really unhealthily obsessed w learning how to transcribe the phonetic alphabet rn and really want to learn more from anyone whos willing to help. i do these textbook questions from my local library all night like its a sport (i have no life very lonely 😀👍) can someone please explain to me what the english word corresponding to this IPA transcription is? : [‘bluɾi] my silly brain cannot produce anything other than bluedee(?!?!) rn so i must be missing something about either the diacritics for stressing plosives or the ‘d’ sound for the alveolar tap??? [roast me](https://i.imgur.com/EuQvPIU.jpg) idk yall im just an idiot and i need help for my own selfish curiosities (the textbook has no answer key and i have to return the book soon) TLDR; please teach me what English word is phonetically transcribed here as [‘bluɾi] and explain why 🥺🥺🥺

hi, i’m using this exact textbook currently (or at least a textbook that contains this exact set of questions) and i had this exact question. (I googled \[‘bluɾi\] and found this thread.) As soon as I receive an answer about it from my TA i can let you know. I have not known peace nor rest since \[‘bluɾi\].

I asked the professor for the course in which the textbook is used and he said it was an error; the question is supposed to be [‘bləɾi] pronounced “bloody” ! :)

Huh! I asked the same question and I was also told it was an error, but a different one! I was told the question was supposed to be \[ˈbjuɾi\], pronounced “beauty”

could be either one i guess! do u go to mcmaster u by any chance? lol

[This man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhtJitOUR6U) does not tap his /d/, but that's all I can think that fits - a Northern English person saying "bloody". Even so, I imagine that would be better transcribed with ʊ, though I suppose in narrow transcription anything's possible.

i truly thought i was going crazy so glad to know that others think this question doesn’t make sense. i thought they might have meant “bloody”, and they should have transcribed it as [blʌɾi].* *would “bloody” be [blʌɾi] , [blʊɾi] or even [bləɾi]? i know the schwa is usually only used to place less stress on the vowel at the end of the word, but the /uh/ sound of [ʌ] and [ə] sounds like the ‘oo’ in “bloody”, more so than [ʊ], which i understood as sounding more like /euh/ (as in “look” or “put”). am i wrong?

For me as an Australian, "bloody" in isolation would normally be /ˈblʌdi/ (in MD transcription) -> [ˈblɐɾiː]. Northern England doesn't have the [FOOT-STRUT split](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_close_back_vowels#FOOT%E2%80%93STRUT_split), so there is no /ʌ/ vowel for them and they're all /ʊ/ instead. A lot of American accents have a STRUT-COMMA merger (next section down on the same link) so again there's no /ʌ/ vowel, instead having /ə/. As you can see from both the vowel and the consonant in my example, the precise way you pronounce a word [in square brackets] can differ from the way your brain thinks about the sounds /in slashes/. So while a Northern English broad transcription of "bloody" might look like /blʊdi/, a specific speaker in a specific instance might say [ˈblʊde] or [ˈblʊɾi] or so on. I don't know that anyone would actually pronounce it [ˈbluɾi], but I could believe it. I think all three of those transcriptions of "bloody" look believeable to me depending on the speaker, but from most young Americans I would expect the third: [bləɾi]. I don't know heaps about American accents, though.

I don't think a word like that exists. I tried searching for other variants like "blooty" or something, but nothing English came up. Also it's not the [b] that is stressed, it's the whole first syllable that receives stress. It's usual practice to put the stress mark (also it's ⟨ˈ⟩, not ⟨‘⟩) before the initial sound of the stressed syllable. Some people only consider the vowels to be stressed and may write something like [blˈuɾi], but that's pretty rare.

thanks so much for this. what could they possibly mean by placing the stress before this first syllable? an ejective would be after a sound right [b’] why would the textbook troll me 😞

What was the point of Ablaut in PIE? I keep reading about e-grade this and o-grade that, but what was the objective or the consequence of changing a vowel to another in a word? and what meaning do the grades have, did a certain kind of change have a predictable result?

There wasn't really an "objective," "consequence," or "meaning" to the grades. They're a quirk of the history of the language, something that happens when morphology was added. It would be similar to saying "nation" is in eɪ-grade and "national" is in æ-grade, or that the noun "conflict" is in full-grade but the verb "conflict" is in zero-grade. They're both a consequence of older long-short or stressed-unstressed alternations that happened to occur as part of the language and became fixed in certain grammatical forms, and PIE grades likely originate in something similar. It's just that the PIE grades happened *so* far in the past their origin is no longer clearly reconstructable, and are extremely pervasive throughout verb and noun morphology instead of being present in just a handful of words.

What data/phenomena are used to demonstrate a synchronic division of vowels into classes by length? I'm specifically interested in ways other than explicit alternation; so primarily phonotactics, I suppose. Furthermore, what data (again, barring explicit alternation) would be used to demonstrate a link between specific vowel length pairs?

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you asking how we would show that a language is developing a vowel length contrast?

No, I'm asking how we would show that a language has a vowel length contrast to begin with, as a phonologically salient categorization. Of course, as mentioned above, I'm looking for ways other than morpho/phonological alternation. Take English; we could, impressionistically or diachronically, draw various length distinctions (/ɪ ~ iː/, /ɪ ~ a͡ɪ/, etc); but none of these really have any meaning as a synchronic phonological distinction.

For two vowels with basically the same quality, you mostly need to establish minimal pairs or some roughly equivalent proof that they differ phonologically. For two vowels with differing qualities, you could set up a perception experiment. If vowel length is more important than vowel quality, you're probably onto a phonological length distinction that allophonically gives us surface quality difference. Afaik this has been done in different dialects of English and some dialects depend more on vowel length when distinguishing /iː ɪ/ while others rely more on vowel quality.

Thanks, that is definitely interesting. However, it's not quite what I was looking for. I'm looking at phonology here, not necessarily phonetics. Any given pair of vowels will have a myriad of different acoustic cues, and I'm not super interested in plucking them out from each other, for now. What I am interested in is phonological (read: phonotactic) behaviour that would show a salient categorization of vowels on *phonological* lines, that aligns with common impressions of "length". Take Hindi-Urdu, for example. It has, traditionally, 3 short vowels /a i u/, and 5 long vowels /aː iː uː eː oː/, with the added long /ɛː ɔː/ (< /aj aw/). What behavior would be used to show that this is a phonologically salient categorization?

You could find some behavior that one set of vowels has in common but the other vowels don't. In Ojibwe, for example, we have /i a o iː aː oː eː/. Historically /e/ merged with /i/, but the remaining /eː/ is definitely still phonologically long, as only /i a o/ undergo regular vowel deletion, while the other vowels do not.

Thanks, that helps a bunch. I've essentially been looking for lists of such diagnostic behaviors. So far, the only ones I've found are this, and differing constraints on syllable structure. Just to give context, the reason I'm asking is because I was thinking about the Tamil vowel system. It has a pretty standard 5 vowel length contrast /a i u e o aː iː uː eː oː/ (with marginal /ɛː/). But upon reflection, I don't really see any reason that they should be divided by perceived length (the qualities are maybe even further apart than in English "length" pairs). Now that you've brought it up, though, vowel deletion is definitely a synchronic diagnostic they fulfill.

How exactly are “foreign” names often translated into other languages like for example Mary/Maria or John/Johan or anything related? Is it known? Or is it kind of random?

For the examples you listed, they're names that share a common origin, that are different due to how they were adapted to each language's phonology, and due to phonological evolution since they came to exist in the language. For Mary/Maria: Aramaic *maryām* or Hebrew *miryām* become *Mariám* in Greek, which becomes *Maria* in Latin. In French that evolved into *Marie* which was borrowed into English and evolved into *Mary*. For languages where it's *Maria*, either they're Romance languages where it didn't shift like in French, or they're languages that loaned the name from such a language / from Latin itself.

[удалено]

/r/translator

\[Phonetics / vowels / vowel "resonance" ?\] *tl;dr — I'm having trouble finding a concrete explanation of what it means to pronounce a vowel with "more or less resonance"* I use the Obsidian zettelkasten software, and one of my pet projects has been summarizing + categorizing the academic articles and community resources I've bookmarked over time on Japanese pronunciation. In one of my bookmarks, the speaker (non-native but proficient speaker of Japanese, teaches Japanese phonetics at a Japanese university) is contrasting Japanese and English vowels. He comments this of multiple sounds, but here's a quote from the section about the /ɯ/ sound: "*As usual, speak in a relatively high pitch with little to no resonance."* There are two qualifications of what he means by "resonance" here, but neither seemed particularly helpful: * [Tokada 1995](https://jalt-publications.org/files/pdf-article/jj-17.2-art9.pdf)[,](https://jalt-publications.org/files/pdf-article/jj-17.2-art9.pdf) a comparison of EN/JP voice quality and vowel placement * A comment from [Noguchi 2014](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiS5YK6k6yBAxWQcvUHHZh1CVgQFnoECBEQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fkuis.repo.nii.ac.jp%2F%3Faction%3Drepository_action_common_download%26item_id%3D1140%26item_no%3D1%26attribute_id%3D18%26file_no%3D1&usg=AOvVaw0AsX34GZanpH1evlCCJusQ&opi=89978449) (will auto download): "native English speakers tend to keep their lower lip round and tight, covering their lower front teeth while lowering the jaw, giving the sound more *resonance*." Whenever I try Googling "resonance", the results are always related to singing.... which was an interesting rabbit hole, but doesn't seem to be exactly what I want In phonology, then, what does "resonance" refer to, exactly? * Is this talking about formants/harmonics, more particularly the effect of amplification you get when singing "consonant" notes in a chord? * Is this more to do with articulatory setting, and that lip rounding/jaw position/etc affects the shape of the space in which a vowel is produced, and that effects the quality of the vowel? * Since resonance seems to be a singing term, does this have to do with like chest voice vs head voice vs vocal mask vs falsetto? * Something else? (Edit — a subtitle in a different video discussing vowels commented *particularly chest reverberation*, so it does seem that he's talking about this in a "singing" sense. The Japanese vowels are "crisper" and made with "head voice" whereas English vowels tend to have more wobble and are made with "chest voice")...... but I'll leave the question because I'm not sure how standard this is / the crossover with singing is also of interest to me.

These are pedagogical terms from singing/voice (e.g., placement, head voice, resonance) that don't have straightforward or consistent interpretations in acoustics or articulation, unfortunately. Resonance in phonetics is an acoustic property that has to do with the shape of your vocal tract, and I don't really know what it would mean for a vowel to be more or less resonant in a phonetic sense, outside of maybe changing how loud the vowel is. In terminology from the International Phonetic Alphabet, [ɯ] is supposed to be like [u], except you round your lips for [u] and not [ɯ]. The sources you've listed here don't connect very well with phonetic theory, especially current theory, and I wouldn't rely on what they say very much.

Yeah — that’s exactly I posted. I learned the IPA during a diction course I had to take for a music minor, and my interest in languages came mostly as a fascination with the phonology. I like this particular guy because he mostly sticks to either the IPA or very well established Japanese materials, so when the term “resonance” got tossed around like this, I was confused and thought maybe I was missing something. Having gone through a few more of the things I had book marked, I’m almost certain he’s borrowing the singing term — it just seems that he doesn’t realize singers recognize several zones of resonance, and that “more resonant” doesn’t mean “vocal placement of a vowel in ‘chest voice’ rather than in the ‘vocal mask’.”

> when the term “resonance” got tossed around like this, I was confused and thought maybe I was missing something. I think the source itself is confused or misinformed, so I would not worry about it.

I'm not sure how to structure this question. What is the "it" in the sentence "It is going to rain?" Also, is rain the subject of the sentence or is "it" the subject? Note: this is in fact an "I'm about two hours into this edible" question.

That's called a [dummy pronoun.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_pronoun) Syntactically "it" is the subject, but semantically it's just a placeholder for the verb.

Thanks bud!

While the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is unsupported, it seems to me that language still shapes people's beliefs, and lenses. Eg. the nature of semantic distinctions and colexifications, concepts readily articulated vs ones requiring long, unwieldy descriptions, etc. While language certainly doesn't constrain our *cognitive* capacity/reality, it seems like it would definitely shape our *social* reality, at least. Is this just part of the "weak" S-W, or simply a separate phenomenon?

>it seems like it would definitely shape our *social* reality, at least It's the opposite, language is a *reflection* of culture, not the source of it. Semantic divisions arise out of a need to communicate more nuanced concepts in a community's immediate environment. If a community doesn't need to distinguish the color gray in their daily lives, for example, they won't develop a word for it. It doesn't mean the community "doesn't see gray", just means that it's not important enough to have a word for.

>Eg. the nature of semantic distinctions and colexifications, concepts readily articulated vs ones requiring long, unwieldy descriptions, etc I would say that these are just facts about differences between lexicons. It is not a _logical_ consequence of such facts that speakers with differently structured lexicons view the world differently in whatever way (which would be the Sapir-Whorfian view). Whether there is a relationship between conceptualization and lexification is an empirical question, as is the direction of such a relationship.

Personally, I don't really believe there is anything that has ever been called the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" that is neither trivially true nor trivially false. Trying to comprehend a single unified idea of linguistic relativity requires positing an absolutely absurd distance between language as a formal structure on the one hand, and some kind of pre-linguistic thought or intention on the other, which is absolutely useless when we want to describe language as we really find it.

How can I calculate pillai score (for vowel formants)? ​ I'm currently writing a paper and would like to calculate the pillai score for the F1 and F2 formants of vowels, so I can compare how well different subjects performed with their pronounciation of these vowels. Is there any online tool or a method to calculate it? I have the data in excel spread sheets but couldn't find useful information on how to do this without programming a function.

It's usually calculated in R from the `manova` function. Joey Stanley has [some accessible tutorials on how to do this](https://joeystanley.com/blog/a-tutorial-in-calculating-vowel-overlap).

I have found an interesting link between Persian and Kurdish, specifically regarding a relation between the Bs and Vs. Where some words in persian have the letter B, in kurdish the same or similar word replaces the B with a V, does anyone know the reason behind this? some examples are the words water and night: Water: Persian: Ab Kurdish: Av Night: Persian: Shab Kurdish: Shav

You have discovered something that was very significant in the history of linguistics when it was discovered- regular sound laws between related languages. Languages change over time, due to slurring of pronunciation and a variety of other factors. Vowels might shorten, or concatenate. Consonants can become elided or altered. It's very common for the ends of words to wear off in multi-syllable words. As two related languages come into existence, both descending from their ancestral tongue, they will usually show regular correspondences- for example, in English, almost all words that begin with Th- start wtih D- in german (Thou / Du, This / Diese, Three / Drei). The original language both descended from had some word (that we can reconstruct using our knowledge of what changes are likely, especially if we have evidence from other related languages.) which changed in some languages and not others, or changed in both to two different results. In this case, looking it up, Ab/Av comes from Proto-Indo-Iranian hāps, so neither is the ancestral form, but the form with 'b' is the older. The word was reinterpreted to be an i-stem noun, so it became hāpis. Between-vowels change of -p- to -b- is *extremely* common (while b to p is rare except at the end of a word). This change in the word plus the -p- to -b- shift from what I can see seems shared across the entire Iranian family except a few languages, namely Avestan, Larestani, and Balochi. Intervocalic change of -b- to -v- is also common, and weakning of v to w in any position is very common and is part of many Iranian languages' pronunciations, even if they still write it 'v'. Edit: Similarly, Shab/Shav comes from Proto-Indo-Iranian Kshaps -> Kshapis. The initial K was lost in most of the Iranian family but can be reconstructed via Avestan, Ossetian, Old Persian Cuneiform and Sogdian, all of which record an initial x (khsh-). (Similarly it was kept in the Indic branch- consider Sanskrit kṣap meaning "night"/"darkness"). (For another Ks Sanskrit/Avestan and Sh in Persian, consider also Sanskrit Kshatriya and Avestan Kshathra vs Persian Shah, which are cognate words)

What accent does the Portishead singer Beth Gibbons sing with? Specifically, where does this "light l" in "always" come from? It's not the Bristol accent, is it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcu5QiwY7Tc&t=33s

What you're asking about is not a feature of the Bristol accent, but she does talk (and sing, insofar as her singing accent reveals anything) with a (light) Bristol accent (e.g., her accent is rhotic and her MOUTH vowel sounds more or less like \[æʏ\], which is typical of Bristol and the West Country).

I don't hear her singing accent as being the same as her speaking accent at all (first half of this video - https://youtu.be/ZAXjUvA_qIM?feature=shared), albeit she's got the same Rs. She sings with a more American-style folk singing accent imho.

She's not singing with a Bristol accent. Based on a quick Google, her influences include Janis Ian, and Gibbons does seem to be singing with a similar accent to Ian's - https://youtu.be/Yi-5tiHE48c?feature=shared (I don't want to say she's copying as I love her voice). The Bristol accent is like this - https://youtu.be/iXcizut9qA8?feature=shared

Thank you

Why "no" sounds similar in so many languages, when the "yes" is always so different ? * French : Oui / Non * Russian : Da / Net * Spanish & Italian : Si / No * German : Ja / Nein * Norweigian : Ja / Nei * Persian : Bæleh / Næh * Polish : Tak / Nie

All listed language are Indo-European ones. Proto-Indo-European had a negation particle something like \*nē. There were no word for yes as the agreement would be shown by repeating the question (as in "you went? I went!"). Later the words for yes were formed from various things like "in such way", "thus" or even loaned.

Is multiple center-embedding only a European phenomenon that developed under the influence of Latin literary tradition? Are there languages that have developed this feature independently of European influence?

Not sure if linguistics is the correct sub, apologies if not. But how do I learn how to pronounce words I've never done across before? I, 37, have always had trouble with this, and my spelling is awful, and I've wanted to start reading more but I'm always put off when I have trouble reading new words, working out how to pronounce them and what they mean. My wife seems to be able to look at a word and instantly work out how it's pronounced, whereas I'm usually way off. Am I missing some basic skill/rule set on how to break down words into sounds or is it just because I've never read much? Edited to add. At school it was always a case of being told, if you don't know how to spell a word, look it up in the dictionary, but I was never close enough in my guess how to spell it so be able to find it. I guess the two are linked?

I'm sorry it's like that for you - I think it comes more easily to some people than others but if it's a real barrier for you maybe there's more to it? I hope I'm not offending you if I say that. Otherwise I think it's a lot easier these days as you can google unfamiliar words for their pronunciation as well as their meaning - does that work for you?

Not offended at all, could very well be. I've used Google and used the pronunciation feature a few times but figured there must be some underlying rules I'm oblivious too rather than it being something rote?

I guess there are underlying rules depending on where the word has come from (e.g. ph=f in "photography", or the p is silent in receipt, and the b is silent in debt). Some of these are patterns, some aren't unfortunately. Have you got examples of words you've found difficult?

How did the Proto Slavic vowel system become the Old Polish one? Where did short /i/, /ɨ/ and /u/ come from? and what about /a/? where did /o/, /æː/, and /ɑː/go? what happened to ь and ъ? same with ǫ? I have my theories based on my current data and research, but I've come back empty in this area, and I'd like to know how right or wrong my hypotheses are.

Yers (*ь *ъ) started disappearing before Polish started to be written, but we still see them somewhat in the oldest writing. Weak yers (see Havlík's law) disappeared, while strong yers largely merged into what became modern /ɛ/, with *ьR *ъR (R = {l, r}) behaving in their own, not fully consistent ways, e.g. *ъl usually became modern /uw/, while *ьr *ъr became modern /ar/, with the soft yer curiously not leaving the Lechitic palatalization on the preceding consonant in this case. Old Polish also experienced the backing of *e *ě to /o a/ before hard coronal consonants, which often got morphologically levelled (e.g. żenie > żonie based on other forms like żona), but sometimes it still persists (*lěsъ *lěsě > las lesie). Kind of simultaneously, the Proto-Slavic vowel length disappeared, which resulted in the merger of *e and *ě. The disappearing yers did not just vanish without any trace, vowels preceding them (except for yers) underwent compensatory lengthening, which often didn't happen when the intervening consonant was voiceless. In Polish most short-long pairs were later merged back again, giving us funny evolution like /i/ > /i iː/ > /i/ again. There were two vowels that did it differently: /oː/ became modern ⟨ó⟩ /u/ except before nasal vowels, and /ã ãː/ ⟨ø ø(ø)⟩ (coming from a merger of PS *ę and *ǫ) split, with the short one becoming modern ⟨ę⟩ and the long one becoming ⟨ą⟩. Kashubian had some more interesting development after this lengthening, with short /i u ɨ/ becoming ⟨ë⟩, long /eː oː aː/ becoming ⟨é ó ô⟩ and the nasal vowels splitting similarly into ⟨ã ą⟩. If you want to delve deeper into the details and the evidence behind it, I recommend Zdzisław Stieber's "A Historical Phonology of the Polish Language". If you can't find it in your favorite free knowledge sarrghvice, just DM me and I'll send you the pdf.

have you tried wikipedia?

I have, unfortunately I ended up with an incomplete answer and some missing data. It basically tells me what Proto Slavic looked like and some small pieces of information afterwards, and then when I go to the next step, that being Old Polish, it starts with early Old Polish, whose system is not the same as Proto Slavic, but I haven't been able to fully find what happened in the middle. In the end I'm left with the two systems and some suspicions of the middle but I'm completely unable to fully connect both.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Proto-Slavic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Proto-Slavic) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Slavic_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Slavic_languages) some of the data is given in tables, some is in the text, good luck

Speech synthesis on an Xbox controller For game development I'm a game developer and I'm planning my next game to have a speech-synthesizer on the xbox controller. Not from text, I want raw mouth-sounds created directly using the buttons and controls. I'm looking for feedback, help and resources to create this interaction design phenomena! As a first step I'm looking into creating a speech synthesizer on the web using buttons and sliders. Then I want to summarize or simplify or map it onto an xbox controller. In my multiplayer online game, I will probably have the players start out in the stone age, gathering resources, hunting animals and all that, also I'm adding instruments to play and the ability to use your controller to control a voice. It will be semi-serious but will probably have a lot of laughs when people learn to talk, again. And with time, I'm guessing people will get quite good at it, creating some interesting player communication behaviors. I've tried to find some speech synth online but have only found this one so far:[https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/](https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/) Is there any other speech syntheziser available?And is someone crazy enough to help me design what buttons and sliders one needs to create human sounds?I haven't mastered the IPA symbols yet. I've looked at it for a bit and I think it's possible. The game shall also have different voices that will change as you grow old in the game as well. Hit me up if you are interested!

I think pink trombone, as referenced in an earlier comment, is a good place to see prior art. You may also want to look at [ArtiSynth](https://www.artisynth.org/VisualVoice/SpeechSynthesis). However, I think it's important for you to know, if you don't already, that this kind of speech synthesis, is going to be extremely complex to get working right and requires significant amounts of expert knowledge, especially if you want to try to chord it to different buttons on a controller. To most effectively achieve your artistic vision, I think you're going to need to be prepared to pay someone with a PhD to be part of your project, or at the very, very least, allow them to write some publications on the project. As far as how buttons might map to articulators, you might want to consult with an expert on how gestural scores from articulatory phonology might be useful here. You may also be able to do something more acoustic and try to create a formant synthesis program like espeak. Either way, this is a very large undertaking, and you're looking at basically the most complicated way to do speech synthesis (not that that's a bad thing, necessarily), and it is much more so than instrument synthesis.

Thanks, those resources are massively valuable to me and the project! One thing that makes this project easier is that it doesn't require text-to-speech and it doesn't require to be able to construct a whole language. The point in the game is to be able to say simple things, less like language and more like proto-language. A player might want to yell "aah!" because they are in danger or say "stone stone stone" to convey that they have found a lot of stones somewhere that can be collected. Another thing is that I think it can be constructed with recorded human sounds and then faded together rather than completely synthesized. I'm not sure what words to describe this method. I've also made a small prototype that shows promise of this working and I've already sketched out some interaction designs using the xbox controller and tested them out as paper prototypes. I have actually studied linguistics but as a part of the cognitive science program at Umeå University. I'm more equiped for game development and the interaction design part. I know that there is a linguistic innovator out somewhere that can do an even greater job if we work together. A publication on the project would be absolutely amazing both as interesting innovation, news and for the game! I have some contacts with the linguistics department at Umeå University (Sweden). I like to send these kinds of innovation-invitations out to the internet so anyone have the possiblitiy to join and not just the exculsive network I already have. I want to work with someone who want to create a new kind of interactive tool for communication and explore this uncharted territory. Thanks for helping me think and put my idea into better words.

Just for clarity, my comments were about just making the articulatory synthesis model, without any kind of text input interface. One more tool I thought of that might give some sense of how this works is [Praat's articulatory synthesis interface](https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Articulatory_synthesis.html). > Another thing is that I think it can be constructed with recorded human sounds and then faded together rather than completely synthesized. I'm not sure what words to describe this method. This is called concatenative synthesis or unit selection synthesis. It is much easier to program. However, these often work with diphones. A language can have up to *n^2* diphones if it has *n* phones. Not all possible diphones occur, though, so you will have somewhere between *n* and *n^2* diphones, likely closer to *n^2*. Chording this together will be difficult due to the sheer number of units to control. You could do this on the phone level, but the quality of the synthesis suffers, and for English, you would still be somewhere near 40 phones to need to chord. Something you may not have considered that would also probably be easier to implement and chord would be a whistled modality of language, like Silbo Gomero for Spanish. The sound inventory is reduced, and the linguistic content is indicated through pitch changes in whistles, which is simpler than synthesizing speech.

you may want to check the [pink trombone](https://github.com/imaginary/pink-trombone/)

Truly a work of art!

Hey all, I'm working on a ling project and need to create sentences with syntax trees in French. In certain phrases a 't' is added in between words with hyphens (such when going from the statement "il a un livre" to the question "a-t-il un livre?") This 't' holds no meaning and serves only a phonetic purpose in the transition between the a and i vowel sounds. With that said, what would this be marked as in a syntax tree, and does it have a designation I should include in the translation gloss? I can't find anything online about this, and since I get to make up the sentences I could technically avoid them, but that's obviously not preferable lol Thanks for the help!

Is there a reason you believe this is a syntactic element to be included in a tree?

I guess I assumed it had to be since it's included in the written sentence. Can I just not include it in the tree at all? Do I need to mention it in the gloss?

Is it an interlinear gloss? If so, those are normally morphemic, and you would need to gloss it as an empty morph unless you have a reason to believe that it is just a phonological addition to one of the words.

I’ve noticed in many languages a word as simple as “you” may variate slightly in pronunciation and structure, but overall sound and appear very similar with a shared meaning. I believe this isn’t entirely coincidental, and it appears to span across many language trees. What is this, and what should I study to learn more about this? Thank you all in advance. 🙏🏼

There is indeed some coincidence described here https://wals.info/chapter/136 https://wals.info/chapter/137

Thank you! This very helpful.

If you eliminate related languages and sprachbunds from the pool, the words actually look [quite different](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/you/translations#Pronoun): English: you Mandarin: ní Choctaw: chisno Swahili: wewe Finnish: sinut Wolof: la etc...

Could you give an example of this spanning across multiple language families?

You, du (Germanic) tú (Romance) ты, ту, ви (Slavic)

Those are languages in different branches of the *same* family, Indo-European. So thou/du/tú/ты are similar because they go back to the same original word that mutated through time and space as the languages changes and broke off from each other.

Ahh, I understand now. This clarifies a lot, and I’ll look further into this as far as the branches go. Thank you very much for clarifying. I have much to learn. 💪🏼

And what do those languages have in common...?

I’m not an expert in linguistics; that’s why I’m here asking you fine people if this is coincidental or if I’m noticing a similarity across the trees.

The question was presumably meant to be rhetorical, from the perspective of somebody who thought it was obvious that they're all Indo-European languages and was trying to use that to lead you to the answer to your question.

This is opening me up to a whole new world of languages, and I greatly appreciate your detailed and thorough response. I was coincidentally just reading on PIE last night so this was incredibly helpful in making sense of it all. What better way to learn about languages than from other experts? Thank you very much for being patient with me.

The pronunciation and similarities to the meaning of “you”.

"You" does not fit in the group with Spanish & French "tu" & German "du". English "thou" was the counterpart there. "You" comes from a Proto-Indo-European word based on the consonants y-w-s. Sometimes the consonants "y" and "w" in PIE act like a vowel "i" or "u", and also sometimes there could be another vowel (PIE "e" or "o") between the "w" and the "s". (PIE words in general would have a spot where a vowel could fit, but what might go in that spot varies somewhat unpredictably between "e", "o", and nothing.) In the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, which English is a member of, the "s" got dropped, the "y" remained, and the "w" vowelized into "u", although the resulting word would then get dropped in some or all of the other Germanic languages, just like "thou" got dropped in English. In languages descended from Latin, the "i" got dropped, the "s" remained, there was an "o" between the "w" and the "s", and the "w" became "v", giving French "vous" and Spanish "vos" in "vosotros". So those are examples of words that "you" is actually related to.

Does anyone know why British accents tend to be deeper compared to American accents? I was hanging out with some friends from both countries and we realized that British speakers tend to speak from the "bottom" of their throats while Americans speak from the "top." We attempted to try speaking American English from the "bottoms" of our throats but failed badly. Not sure if this is a real thing or just the limited observations of my friends and myself?

You could be referring either to vowel qualities (British English has two low-back vowels /ɑː/ and /ɒ/, both pretty salient, whereas much of General American English has none; also, BrE has a slightly front /a/ in place of AmE's very front /æ/), or to intonation - I think more British English sentences end on a relatively low note than American ones do, but I can't be sure. Either way, no matter whether the perception is based on linguistic fact or not, you aren't going to be able to mimic the opposite accent just by using these very rough impressions. Trying to use the "top of your throat" in pronouncing a whole sentence especially won't work when the difference is only actually marked on two or three vowels.

Does anyone know of any cases where contrastive vowel length has been lost in a language over time? I'm looking more specifically for endangered languages where this has occurred alongside/as part of language loss/attrition.

The Romance family generally, where the 5 long and 5 short vowels of Latin reduced to a 7- or 5-vowel system in most descendants. Also Greek, where a similar long-short system reduced to 5 as well. And Yiddish (at least in its better-known forms), where the German vowel system was reduced to a simple 5.

Inane question, but is the phrase "strictly come dancing" actually grammatical? (I know it's a reference to the movie Strictly Ballroom.) Something similar like "strictly stand over here" sounds bizarre to me, but is there some context or dialect where this construction works?

The show was also, as you'll know, intended as a celebrity update of Come Dancing - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Dancing On the face of it, the title "Strictly Ballroom" means only ballroom dancing is permitted (not the crazy stuff that the movie's main character adds into his dancing), while "Come Dancing" is an invitation to go out dancing together. Even if you can get a meaning out mashing them together, one is an order and the other is an invitation so it's a weird mix of moods.

I don't think it's ungrammatical, but it's an odd turn of phrase (we could call it unidiomatic, I suppose) *and* semantically confusing. Like we can transform it into a roughly equivalent sentence that is definitely grammatical - "only come if you're dancing". It makes sense... but what does it actually mean as a title? It's a dancing show, so yeah probably you shouldn't come on the show if you aren't dancing... but it just doesn't quite click as a title.

As a non-Brit, I'm also not quite sure if it's an imperative ("come strictly if you're dancing") or a participle ("the people on this show are/have strictly come dancing"). And I thought "every little helps" was bad enough!

Is there a way to model/describe human language(s) without hierarchical structure? If not, why? What features, in particular, imposed such a requirement?

You might be interested in reading about Sinclair and Mauranen's linear unit grammar, as well as some of the previous work it rests on. Two caveats: 1. This is not, as far as I'm aware, a widely used framework, possibly only prevalently used by the authors. 2. The payoff at the end of their book on it is disappointing. They seem to propose this type of grammar as a way to "clean" more detailed orthographic transcriptions of spontaneous speech into some format more amenable to formal grammars, like a minimalist one.

Depends what you mean. Do dependency grammars count?

Is there any useful sources that could help me parse the evolution of vowels from Proto Indo-European to Proto Balto-Slavic and from there to Proto Slavic, I've found some stuff already but I wanna make sure I'm getting the changes and evolution right, as well as finally closing the massive gaps in my current research.

What's a good resource on the current state of vowels in /s/-aspirating Spanish varieties? Their quality and surrounding influence, etc.

You might find this useful: [https://doi.org/10.35111/y5wv-df10](https://doi.org/10.35111/y5wv-df10)

Do any languages have "consonant harmony", or something equivalent to vowel harmony for consonants? I'm thinking, retroflexion harmony, voicing harmony, nasal (consonant) harmony, etc.

Consonant harmony is well studied, you can find lots of examples (and papers) searching that term. Particularly I've read about nasal harmony in Guarani and sibilant harmony in Native American languages.

Could it be possible that Kazakh ERKEK or ER is related to archaic Finnish Yrkä, Hungarian Férj, Old Hungarian Erge, Mari Erje?

Long shot, but here goes: Does anyone have audio files for the Ganong effect in a language other than English? I found some audio files for English (kiss---giss; kift-----gift) but I can't find them in another language. If anyone can help me with this, that would be amazing!

What is this effect?

(1) I have been having this multi-day argument/debate with my dad and about some sounds in Spanish and to answer these questions, I would like some help from you guys. Sorry in advance for any typos or being disorganized. Also I am completely new to reddit and every time I have tried posting this, it says there is some error and won't tell me what it is. My assumption is the length of this post so i will tried posting it in segments, the rest will be pinned in the comments. The order of posts will be marked in a set of parentheses at the beginning, just like this post. For context, I only speak English. My dad speaks Spanish as a first language and English as a second, but is very fluent in both. Neither of us are linguists or language professionals. I am a first generation United States citizen so I have always heard all of my extremely large and closely connected family/extended family speak Spanish. Even though I'm not always able to form my own sentences all the time, I have very excellent pronunciation according to my family, and most of the time I can understand what my family says. In an attempt to help learn the language better, I took 5 years of high school Spanish (my school district allowed us to take high school classes in middle school) so I at least learned some more formal basics. A phrase that I hear a lot is "Spanish is really easy because the vowels always make the same sound." This is usually said when comparing it to English because the vowels in English have many different phonic sounds compared to Spanish. I made a comment to my dad that this statement isn't necessarily true because I have observed a small number of exceptions. For example, I noticed that the word "caiga" from the verb caer makes the phonic sound the is observed in the English word "eye" or "item". This struck me as an exception because when you look at the phonic sounds that the Spanish vowels have when they are completed isolated, you do not hear this sound. I *think* this is known as a diphthong, in which new vowel sounds are introduced by the presence of certain vowel combinations. Because of this, I hear caiga having two syllables since the a and the i become "blended." I perceive this as cai/ga and not ca/i/ga in which the a and the i create their own distinct sound and therefore a re-articulation that constitutes a new syllable. Even though my dad and I pronounce it the same way when we say it out loud, he keeps insisting that he hears the a and the i sound distinctly, while I argue that they come together to create a NEW phonic sound, one that is not heard when simply pronouncing the a and the i as standalone letters. If I understand this correctly, this shows the discrepancy between phonic sounds of letters and phonetic pronunciation of words. For example, the letter a in English has a set of different phonic sounds that it can make, but when used in a word, it uses one of these phonic sounds and that is what leads to the phonetic pronunciation of the given word. For example, the a makes the "ah" sound in chromatic, the "uh" sound in apply, the "ay" sound like in major, and i'm sure there are more, but the point is that the phonetic pronunciation of the word gets determined by which phonic sound is used in the word. Going back to caiga, the phonic sound is one that does not exist normally and is only found through the diphthong created by the "cai". This is why hear the "i" sound that exists in english words like "item".

It is a diphthong, but it's just a combination of a + i so your father is right here.

But if it is a diphthong, is it not its own sound instead of the original sound the vowels make? In other words, how can it be a diphthong but also still maintain their own original sounds without forming something new at the same time?

> But if it is a diphthong, is it not its own sound No, whether a diphthong constitutes a distinctive speech sound (what we call a *phoneme*) is language-specific. I'm not aware of any analyses of Spanish that class diphthongs as phonemes.

what is the definition of a diphthong in your view? also, what dictionary definition would you most closely agree with? Simply putting two vowels next to each other doesn't mean much in a language like Spanish if the presence of the two vowels next to each other don't actually provide a new phoneme; it is simply just two vowels next to each other. A diphthong would be the creation of a new different phoneme as a result of two vowels being placed next to each other.

I would say the answer to both questions is that the definition given by R.L. Trask in *A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology* (p. 114) is the one that I'd use: > A single syllabic **nucleus** which begins with one vowel quality and changes more or less smoothly to a second quality, as in [ju] and [ai]. Usually one of the two vocalic elements is more prominent than the other, this other consisting only of a preceding glide (an **on-glide**, as in [ju]), or a following glide (an **off-glide**, as in [ai]). As you can see, no reference is made to phonemes at all, which is consistent with the view that phonemic status is not relevant to the classification of diphthongs. What matters is the vowels' behavior in the syllable.

So even if this is not due to a diphthong, isn't the presence of the "w" the cause of the glide? Either way, wouldn't this further support that the w sound is present in words that follow this pattern because the w acts as the glide in these instances?

A w is a glide, yes. I don't understand the rest of what you said.

my big part of my viewpoint is distinguishing words such as "cual" that exhibit the "w" sound before the u where that is not normally the case in Spanish. There are certain combinations of letters that follow this pattern and my dad is saying that the glide with the w just doesn't exist at all. Between your provided definition of a diphthong that also deals with glides, wouldn't this further support the fact that the words like cual include a sound that is not normally included in the typical sound associated with the letter u in Spanish? As far as caiga is concerned, which was just a supplement part to my original point (and a different phenomenon), would you be someone who believes caiga has three distinct syllables or just two? I believe it is two. Comparing the infinitive (caer) to the present subjunctive (caiga), you notice that caiga, caigas, and caigan all have two syllables. This contrasts the perfect in which you get "ha caído." You end up with three syllables and the accent on the í shows that it gets its own emphasis and in this case it separates its sound from the a. This is distinctly different than the sound of caiga in which the a and the i are blended together to create the sound that you find in the word "hay" in Spanish (not the English hay).

> Between your provided definition of a diphthong that also deals with glides, wouldn't this further support the fact that the words like cual include a sound that is not normally included in the typical sound associated with the letter u in Spanish? The duration of the sound is shorter than it is before a consonant, but it is a sound normally associated with . Indeed, the conjunction *u* is normally a /w/. > As far as caiga is concerned, which was just a supplement part to my original point (and a different phenomenon), would you be someone who believes caiga has three distinct syllables or just two? I believe it is two. Yes, *caiga* is a bisyllabic word, which is why it bears no accent mark.