I'm a bit confused with the cot-caught and father-bother merger, especially as they appear in the NYC / New Jersey area? I'm a native of the area and have lived there my whole life, yet I have the merger and was very unfamiliar with the unmerged forms of the sounds (cot and caught both have the same sound as hot, taught, thought, stock, etc.). It seems like these places have very high concentrations of the sound (link). Is it something that has just homogenized over time across the U.S., or is there another reason why the unmerged sounds might be less prevalent ..read more

Is the alveolar tap executed with the same tongue movement as in the alveolar plosive except that in the case of the alveolar tap, the tongue tip strikes and moves away from the alveolar ridge so quickly that only brief contact is made and the airstream is completely obstructed for only a split second? That is, will a voiced alveolar tap always result when the tongue movements for a voiced alveolar plosive is performed quite quickly ..read more

I am learning Sanskrit and installed both Devanagari-INSCRIPT and -QWERTY keyboard under windows. However, I could NOT find a way to input the long vowel letter ॠ (ṝ). Thank you for your help in advance ..read more

So, [ɚ] is a rhotacized schwa/mid central vowel/schwar, [ɝ] is a rhotacized open-mid central unrounded vowel, [ɹ̩] is a syllabic alveolar approximant, and [ɻ̍] is a syllabic retroflex approximant. What's the difference between all 4 ..read more

Is there anyone here with experience using the Louvain Error Tagging system (ideally, on English text in an L2 corpus?) I'm trying to learn it and would love to have someone to bounce questions and ideas off of. Thanks so much ..read more

Who should the director call? Deep and serfase structure ..read more

Is there a name for Reverse Alveolar? Putting the tip of the tongue on the bottom tidge behind the teeth, if there's a name, I would think it would be along the lines of Alveolar or so something similar ..read more

I was looking at this video about Japanese Kanji on youtube, and found a discussion where people were talking about learning too many languages. Several claimed that they started to forget English because they had to invest so much time into Kanji. Some people were reporting the same problem from just trying to pick up too many. Others made claims like they started to get the languages and/or alphabets they knew mixed up, or they would start speaking English in a foreign accent, or they now seriously have an easier time speaking languages OTHER than English. And these are coming from people wh ..read more

I want to take a list of words from diferent languages (each language being a diferent file) and compare such lists by using their IPA equivalents to see how many diferent homophones are shared between diferent languages. It's there any library that will make this easier? (convert a string to their IPA equivalent ..read more

I've recently started reading more about ergative languages, such as Basque. I understand that cases in ergative languages differ from nominal-accusative languages. For example, a sentence like "I go" would be "Me go", because the subject is the patient. Unfortunately, I fail to understand certain things I read on the wikipedia page on ergativity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_alignment). The following sentence is given as an example for a possible sentence in an ergative language (with English lexicon of course): Him smiles. (He smiles) I was wondering: Is the su ..read more