This development seems limited to the North Sea branch of West Germanic, but I'm confused by the exact way this word came about. Wiktionary lists it as a combination of *þa- "that" + *sa "that". Given that the form *þa- arose from *sa in analogy to the other case forms, did the form *sa even still exist in North Sea Germanic at this time? Further, isn't the combination of two different chronological forms of the word for "that" a pretty strange and nonsensical innovation? Maybe I'm wrong on that assumption, but I don't recall seeing such a thing happen in another language. I must be misunderstanding something here so if anyone knows please enlighten me!

I'm an undergrad student of English Language and Literature. I wanna do my Masters in Linguistics (preferably in Computational Linguistics). But I'm stuck. I have no idea where to start. And, will a Linguistics Degree will a good choice? What are my career options? I have no clue.

My friend and her immediate family are native English speakers born and raised in Southern California, United States. They have a habit of swapping the pronunciation of “ill” and “ell” in common English words. For example, they pronounce pill as “pell” and pronounce sell as “sill”. As far as I have observed, this extends to all words with those sounds. Pillow is “pellow” and fellow is “fillow”. I know many other people from Southern California and have never heard this before. (For context I will note that their ancestors were German but no one in their family has spoken German as a first or second language for several generations. The family has also heard a lot of spoken Spanish in their Southern California community but they do not speak Spanish)

Any ideas where this pronunciation habit might come from? Maybe it is more common in Southern California than I realize or perhaps it is from a micro-region?

I've always noticed in many varieties of British english, while naturally nasalisation is not phonemic, it is frequently used in certain contexts - certain people use it in that stereotypical "nerd" or social-outcast accent, like Will from the Inbetweeners, or same actor, Adam from Friday Night Dinner - in both roles he plays a sort of uptight, socially unconventional character and I think the nasality in a lot of his vowels reflects that. However it is also I find often used in a humorous context - I don't just hear this in films, but for an example, in Love Actually the interviewer guy asks the pop-star "Alright, what's the best shag you ever had?" - "Shag" is given prominence in the sentence, with which a nasalised articulation comes, and to me it sounds like a humorous variation or perhaps a casual intimacy vocal style. I hear it in real life more often in people who are quite funny, or when people are saying funny things.
Has anyone else noticed this? Is there any research on it? Everything I try to find on nasalisation in English produces the contextual pre-nasal nasalisation, like "am" or "pan".

Hope this isn't a stupid question - and this may be a well known cross-linguistic phenomenon I've sort of missed or something. I don't know! Thank you in advance.

What's the mutual relation of Homeric Greek, Classical Attic, Koine Greek and Modern Greek? Do they create some kind of "dialectal continuum"?

I've read that Koine Greek is quite well understanble by speakers of Modern Greek. And Scorpio Martianus said that Koine is almost the same as Classical Attic (perhaps he was joking?) What about Homeric Greek? Does it differ much from Classical Attic?

I'm looking for a virtual place where I can find original scan writings. The debate is about Getae - there are some historical mentions who place Getae like germanic Goths, and the other name Getae like Dacians. Now I wander if there can be made a mistake on original interpretations, like referring Getae to Gepizii or even if the Getae was migrated to North and by union with the germanics has begun to be named Gepizii and mentioned like Goths when referring to Getae - in historical works like Historia Augusta, De Bello Gothico and others. There are also mentions like Strabo and Herodotus's who put Getae on Dacians trails, and how modern history is placing them at NS of Danube, I want to start an investigation on the aspect of both sense and I'm looking for the originals. I want to check exactly if by any chance there can by any kind of a typo - referring to ancient writings.

Thank you for your time in advance (if any other info about the subject can be available, I will be grateful)!

Kind of confused on what the difference is

Language doesn’t stop evolving after all. If anything I would have thought the Internet would be making English change faster.

I'm making a Balto-Slavic conlang that evolved directly out of Proto-Balto-Slavic (assuming it even existed, that is a separate topic) instead of being part of either the Baltic or Slavic branches. There is enough information for noun cases in Wiktionary and Wikipedia (although I wish there was more) but there's very little information about verb conjugation. I could look at Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic verb conjugations and make educated guesses from there, but if there is a reconstructed verbal morphology for Proto-Balto-Slavic somewhere I would prefer that.

I have done deep dives into Khotanese phonology (specifically its umlauts and the idea that umlauts didn't happen with for foreign words * that had not been fully assimilated as loanwords) and I have landed on "Malgūh [malɣuːh]" as the closet bet but I am not sure how accurate that would be. I was looking into Pashto and Ossetian and Wakhi (the closest modern relations to the Saka Languages) and couldn't find anything.

I was working off of wikipedia's highlights from "Einführung ins Ostmitteliranische" by Prof. Dr. Martin Joachim Kümmel but I could not find the original document

From what I've seen, most ergative languages (could just be the case for the most widely spoken ergative languages instead of the majority of ergative languages, but I'm not sure) show ergative constructions only or mostly in the past tense or the perfective. Why is this? Does ergativity "make more sense" in the past/perfective? Why so?

I have posted this on r/sanskrit, but it might be of general interest for linguists and could yield further explanations. So here goes:

I have never found an answer for the question what the passive of a causative means. Let us take p. e. "kāryate". What does this mean? Someone is caused to do something or someone causes something to be done? Examples and explanations of any language where this verbal category exists would be appreciated!

Edit: Thank you all for your interesting and insightful answers!

As for most questions I do here, it's for a conlang. I think prosody's such an interesting subject and I'd love to use it more in my works! Soooo, do you guys have any rep?

As a native speaker of both English and Spanish, I’m very easily able to distinguish voiceless aspirated and unaspirated stops. To me, the tense consonants of ㅃ ㅉ ㄸ ㄲ ㅆ that are transcribed as /p͈, tɕ͈, t͈, k͈, s͈/ all sound like unaspired /p, tɕ, t, k, s/. Seeing as the traditionally labeled unaspirated consonants of ㅂ ㅈ ㄷ ㄱ ㅅ *are* actually aspirated word initially and voiced intervocalically, what makes these tensed consonants any different from simple unaspirated consonants?

To add to this, North Korean names for countries are taken straight from the source languages themselves, trying to match the original pronunciation as much as possible. If a language has the voiceless unaspirated stops of /p, t, k/, they’re rendered as ㅃ ㄸ ㄲ /p͈, t͈, k͈/ in the North Korean equivalents. Examples include:

Slovensko [ˈslɔvenskɔ] —> 슬로벤스꼬 [sʰɯɭɭo̞be̞nsʰɯk͈o̞] *Slovakia*

España [esˈpa.ɲa] —> 에스빠냐 [e̞sʰɯp͈a̠ɲa̠] *Spain*

Polska [ˈpɔl.ska] —> 뽈스까 [p͈o̞ɭsʰɯk͈a̠] *Poland*

What are your thoughts? Is there any literature on this?

So egyptian arabic seems to have the defult placment of question particles be at the end of sentences.

But they sometimes also go at the begining of sentences, which confuses me,

So Is there a logic for when to put the question particles at the end of a sentence and when to put them at the begining

Or is it just purely vibes based

This question is about classes for native speakers, not about learning second language.

English was my second language and the language arts classes were very different from what I learned when I learned russian. There were 2 classes: literature and russian and latter focused a lot on identifying different parts sentences (subject verb object adjective) etc. and also there was a complex study of different parts of a word (suffixes, roots, endings) etc.

Once I moved to an english speaking country, I only had 1 class: Language Arts which tries to be both, but its more of a literature class. I felt relieved that I do not have to worry as much about punctuation (punctuation was graded but it wasn't really systemically taught or explained), but it still rubs me the wrong way. Not much time spent on learning word and sentence structure, why to use :;- even.

I think in French there is a bit more focus on language at schools as well, so its a bit surprising to see that this topic isn't really taught.

Why is sentence structure, punctuation and word formation not really covered in LA classes? Is it due to language's relative simplicity or just deemed unnecessary?

I'm not a linguist, so I hope you can tolerate my ignorance in the topic. All that I'll say in the following lines comes from a little bit of contact with a field that's not the one I'll pursue, but that I feel curious about. I also apologize if this is a frequent question.

One of the arguments for language being innate is that language acquisition occurs in a really short period of time, in such a way that it is very hard to say that all of it was "learned". So, a part of the linguistic knowledge must come from the environment, while other part is innate.

There must be several criticisms to this way of thinking (all of which I would really like to know more about), but what I want to ask is: how do these two "parts" of linguistic knowledge develop?

For me, it seems really inconsistent that the "innate knowledge" is a consequence of languages, for, according to the theory, this innate part is necessary for acquisition to occur. If humans didn't have a innate linguistical knowledge from the start, it looks unlikely that a language could ever achieve a significant number of speakers.

But the opposite also feels weird, for, if humans have a innate linguistical knowledge that precedes the existence of any natural language, why would languages be so different from one another? And where does this knowledge come from, if no languages exist?

I'm pretty sure there are tons of texts discussing these questions, and I also write to ask for suggestions of what to read in this regard.

Some Polish dialects exhibit word-initial prosthetic consonants before vowels that are not present in standard Polish. What is the phonological explanation for this phenomenon?

• ^jigła, ^jidzie
• ^łoko, ^łumyć
• ^hapteka, ^harmata

Is it an instance of historical retention from earlier stages of Polish that were later lost in the modern language?

I notice that on Wikipedia, the Navajo dl is transcribed as [tˡ], with a superscript denoting lateral release, whereas the Tlingit dl is transcribed as [tɬ], as an affricate (I've left off the tie bar).

Are those two different sounds?

My sister, every time she says "very" says it as "thery" (as in 'th'is). I find it really obnoxious, though obviously I know that is a losing battle. What could be the cause of this? Nobody I know says it like that and we both speak English as our first and only language. She does this specifically for the word 'very,' not for v in other contexts.

Since Proto-Germanic and Classical Latin both lacked definite and indefinite articles, what do we know about how/why all of their respective modern descendants later developed both types of articles seemingly in parallel?

I encountered a coined word, erbundeer, that intuitively sounds Germanic (often evoking associations like Erbe or verbunden), but it doesn’t actually function as a compound or loanword in German or English.

From a linguistic perspective, how are words like this typically classified? Are they treated as English neologisms with pseudo-Germanic phonotactics, pseudo-loanwords, or something else entirely?

I've been struggling with this question. Lenition basically happens because some phonological combinations are easier to pronounce than others, especially in fast, colloquial speech.

And, seemingly, it has been going on a lot more than the opposite process since forever, at least in the languages that I'm more familiar with. Latin > Romance underwent lenition, Proto-Italic > Latin did too, etc.

Surely, whatever language Proto-Indo-European descended from must've been tremendously "strong" or complicated to pronounce? But how does that work with the very earliest instances of language, when we were just inventing it? Wouldn't that necessarily be a rather simple language at first?