I’ve been learning Russian and I just thought…how weird is it that several months ago it looked like gibberish and symbols and now I can actually “read” it even without understanding everything, meaning my brain has made associations between sounds and letters, and now I can’t return to the previous state of seeing it from an outsider’s perspective. So is there a way to temporarily forget my knowledge of a language and once again see it as totally alien symbols? Especially one where I’m far from fluent. I just feel really curious because I cant even remember what that felt like. submitted by ..read more

I'm writing a literature review about the stages of first language acquisition. I need exact references to each stage such as the ''one-word stage'', ''babbling stage'' etc. But somehow I cannot find direct references explaining each stage. I want to find out in which works each of those stages are first defined. Any help will be appreciated, thanks in advance! submitted by /u/Salty-Percentage8202 [visit reddit] [comments ..read more

Because North American Native Americans didn't have written languages, how did some Native American names get transliterated to English using unconventional spellings? For example, who decided that Sioux and Navajo should be spelled using unconventional uses of 'x' and 'j' instead of Sue or Navaho? submitted by /u/ShadowBlade615 [visit reddit] [comments ..read more

I understand that the more languages one speaks the better, but being an english monolingual won't make you miss out on much compared to those whose only language isn't english since it has become the lingua franca of the world, if that makes any sense submitted by /u/TheeUltimateGiGachad [visit reddit] [comments ..read more

Just curious. submitted by /u/Direct_Solution_2590 [visit reddit] [comments ..read more

V2 is a feature that is fairly common in Germanic languages, and attested elsewhere. Wackernagel-position particles are attested in e.g. Latin and Russian. Is there any attestation of languages with e.g. S2 ('subject second') or "penultimate verbs" or "antiwackernagel-particles"? I think there's solid reasons to suspect no V3 or S3 or exists. O2 can be imagined, but seems fairly unlikely (or maybe we could go for, say Abs2). V2 seems to have emerged at least four times (AFAICT) in currently known languages (e.g. Kashmiri probably has a separate emergence, as does O'odham, as does Ingush). Wac ..read more

Hello friends! I'm a law professor working on an article that relates to the concept of semantic drift, and wondering if there are identified terms of art in your field or other semantic concepts for the following types of words: First, what I'm currently thinking of as dynamic meaning words, the classic in my field is "reasonable." A law that holds someone to the "reasonable person" standard is interpreted relative to an imagined, "objectively reasonable" person who is "similarly situated." How a reasonable doctor might conduct a surgery looks really different in 2024 than it did in 1824, b ..read more

tl;dr is linguistic reconstruction a thing as a job? Does it include maths? It seems cool. I have to go to college soon. I used to conlang when I was younger and was fascinated by how sound change developed into diverse morphological structures so I've been thinking of a linguistics major. I also really liked dead languages. More recently I've been doing some maths courses at school and I want to major in that too. I feel like pure maths could be (and probably already is) applied heavily for linguistic reconstruction, which seems like an area of research which would really interest me if it t ..read more

Sample text submitted by /u/Crooked_Cock [visit reddit] [comments ..read more

Forgive me if the title is poorly worded, but I was thinking of a phrase like "The man's dog." In English, the definite article applies to the whole phrase, so it's assumed that the dog being referred to is definite. I'm wondering if a language exists that allows something like "The man's a dog" (a dog belonging to the man) or "That man's this dog" (the dog near me that belongs to the man far from me). I assume so, I just can't find any examples and Google is failing me. submitted by /u/pigi5 [visit reddit] [comments ..read more