(Unsure what to mark this as)

In English we have two distinct ways to refer to China—China/Chinese and Sino- (as in Sino-Japanese War), sinitic, etc. Why does this dichotomy exist? Did one come first, and if so, where did the other come from? Did this have to do with the civil-rights-era racial reckoning, differences in American and British encounters with Chinese people and culture, or something entirely different? I'm very curious if there's any evidence one way or the other!

I'm writing a script and would love to get some help here, just to make sure I don't botch any of the language. I understand the general gist of the problem; and as far as I can tell it falls under the eternal issue of "almost every categorisation made by humans falls apart once you get small enough" but could someone explain this with actual examples? I know in biology we get around the issue of classification by differentiating between case-specific concepts, is there something like that in linguistics? I'd love to have a detailed conversation on the matter. Thanks!

EDIT: Looks like I was misremembering and the actual contested definition is that of a word. Same questions and sorry for the confusion.

What sub-dialect of Early Modern is the English used in the KJV, and why didn't it beat out the others to become the standard form of Modern English?

In languages like English and Mandarin, we have this unique sound "er". It is called an R-colored vowel but it sounds like it actually contains a liquid consonant at the end rather than being a special vowel without a consonant.

I thought it had a final consonant because when we say "under a bed" it sounds like "under_ra bed" but things like this also happen in cases where the consonant isn't pronounced at all. For example, British people pronounce law and order as "law-r-and order" and idea of as "idea-r-of". But I don't think an English r at the beginning of a syllable is pronounced very differently from those at the end of a syllable. Does that mean an r in rice is also a rhotic vowel? In Mandarin Chinese, er is used to write down foreign liquid consonants without a following vowel. For example, Seoul is transliterated as 首尔, Altai as 阿尔泰, and Samarkand as 撒马尔罕.

If it does not contain a consonant, is it possible that it is gonna gradually develop into a syllable with a final liquid consonant?

I know that we use sentence stress naturally when we speak, often without even thinking about it. However, as a language learner, I want to become more aware of this phenomenon. (TL)

How can I learn to identify the moments when sentence stress is appropriate? For example, how can I tell which words should receive more emphasis in a sentence, and understand why they are emphasized?

I would like to see examples of everyday sentences, with explanations of which words receive emphasis and how the meaning or intention of the sentence can change depending on where we place the stress.

I don't just want to memorize rules. I want to develop an intuitive sense for this and learn to recognize these patterns in real conversations.

For example, consider the sentence: "I didn't say he stole the money."

Depending on which word is emphasized, we can convey different ideas or suggest that we are correcting a mistaken interpretation. How can I learn to recognize these possibilities and understand which stress pattern is most appropriate in each context?

I would really appreciate it if you could share examples, explanations, and practical tips for developing this skill.

As it is known and often joked about, Polish spelling has alot of irregularities, such as the spelling of [ʐ] being ⟨rz⟩. But how would the consonant cluster [rz] be spelt in polish? Is there any way to distinguish it from [ʐ] in spelling or no?

Hi,

I am coming to realize how much better it is to work with a linguist as an informant.

I think perhaps we can have a “linguist exchange”, where linguists provide each other native speaker judgements regularly.”

The title, essentially: I've noticed that in sentences where I would typically have referred to an animal as "it", lately I'm seeing others mostly use "they" instead.

I speculate that this is a consequence of the increase of how many people's preferred pronouns are "they / them": If you consider it disrespectful to call a person "it", then your habit of calling people "they" gets (inadvertently? or consciously?) extended to critters too.

Not yet observed: Does the announcement of a baby's (presumed) gender no longer take the form of " It's a boy! / It's a girl!"?

N.B.: I'm a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist; so I don't care either way. I just think it's an interesting phenomenon, and wonder whether others have noticed.

Preface: I am not a linguist, though I did *technically* double major in it in undergrad. My functional linguistics knowledge is very minimal, and I am purely curious about the reasons things are the way they are lol

I've heard people in the U.S. pronounce "schizophrenia" two different ways: schizoFREHnia and schizoFREEnia. I pronounce it the first way (from the Boston area but I wouldn't say I have a Boston accent per se), and I've heard it pronounced the second way more rarely but two pop culture examples that come to mind are David Duchovny (from NY) in The X Files, and Matthew Gray Gubler (from NV) in Criminal Minds. I think I've also heard my grandmother, who grew up in MD, say it this way too.

Does anyone know if these different pronunciations are regional? Duchovny and Gubler are from opposite sides of the country, so unless their parents are from the same region, the regional pronunciation theory might be a bust haha If anyone knows *why* these two pronunciations exist, do tell!! Maybe one is a product of British English pronunciation...? TIA

I can't think of any meaningful use that having gendered pronouns helps or it provides value that a neutral pronoun would not.

Also, how come every language as far as I know only has pronouns based on gender. Why not have more categories. Like babies would be a be instead of he for example. Or a dad would be fe instead of he. Why stop at just genders

"We'll burn that bridge when we come to it" but the "when we come to it" part is derived from an idiom in a different language? In other words, can a malaphor be made with idioms from different languages?

Hi! I know English has had some pretty intense vowel shifts over its life cycle, but I'm curious what caused this specific phenomenon. What caused these two interpretations of the same vowel, like a's /æ/ and /a/ that depends on if a silent e is present or not? Was this e voiced at all? Was this a systemic implement that helped speakers/writers interpret this vowel distinction? Was it coincidence? Especially coincidence that slowly became intertwined with sound rules, then eventually became required?
Thanks for any info! :)

You're probably going to roll your eyes at this one: another guy building a language-learning app who has never taken a linguistics class, asking Reddit to hand him the science. I get it. I'd be skeptical too. It seems like a lot of apps promise fluency in weeks, and very few of those promises have much research behind them.

That's exactly what I'm trying not to do.

Some context: economics background, day job in tech, zero formal linguistics. I'm building a tool for adult learners, and my goal is for people to get more lasting, usable ability out of the same amount of study time. I want the design decisions to rest on what the research actually shows, not on what feels productive or looks good in a streak counter.

My current reading plan:

1. How Languages Are Learned (Lightbown & Spada) as the intro. It keeps coming up as the accessible starting point, and people say the bibliography alone will keep you busy for months.
2. An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching (Keith Johnson) for the implementation side.

A friend of mine also suggested Loewen's Introduction to Instructed Second Language Acquisition instead of Johnson, since it focuses on how instruction choices affect outcomes.

My questions:

- Would it be a mistake to go in this order with no background at all?

- What would you add, swap, or skip?

- Johnson or Loewen for someone who needs to turn research into actual practice design? How would you choose?

- What do you wish non-linguists understood before they started building language tools?

No link, no app name, not promoting anything. I'd rather hear "you're thinking about this wrong" now than after I've built the wrong thing.

when someone switches between two languages they're fluent in, what does it feel like? do they need a second to mentally adjust? do they ever accidentally go back to the first language after switching to the second language? i've learned other languages, but not to the point of fluency, so i'm wondering what it's like for someone who is actually fluent.

furthermore, i'm wondering is if a musician switching clefs and a bilingual person switching languages are mentally similar, either in terms of conscious thoughts/feelings about the process or when it comes to unconscious processes within the brain.

(for context, i play the cello and can read bass clef, tenor clef, and treble clef. sometimes the clef can change many times throughout a piece. i can switch between the clefs pretty easily, but sometimes if it switches from bass clef to tenor clef, for example, i'll forget that i'm in tenor clef midway through a passage and i'll read a note or two as if they were in bass clef before remembering that the music is in tenor clef.)

thank you for your answers!

UPD: not glottal fricatives, but pharyngeal fricatives!

It’s the second time I hear a person from Bonn pronouncing the vocal stop in the beginning of a word in a very “arabic” manner.
For example, the name Aron - /‘aɹ.ən/ is more like /ʕɹ.ən/.
The problem is, I don’t really perceive the voiced glottal fricative well - it just sounds like grimacing when pronouncing the succeeding vowel.

But that glottal “stop” really sounded like this: https://youtube.com/shorts/83PM82BU1jA?is=HkMZhfTn6xTWAdCE

Did anyone notice something like this, maybe not in German?

came across translinguistics for the first time recently so my understanding of it isn’t too great. if someone could help break it down, that would be greatly appreciated! is it regarded as very radical? what’s the scholarly consensus?

Having always lived in a part of the anglophone world where "thou" is never used in current speech, I'm used to hearing people pronounce it /ðaʊ/ (so it rhymes with "cow" or "now") when e.g. quoting Shakespeare or the Bible. However, my understanding is that in the regions of England where it is still used, it is pronounced more like /ðɑː/ ("tha"), if I'm not mistaken? And I've heard/read that the historical pronunciation was more like /ðuː/ (rhymes with "you"). So is the /ðaʊ/ pronunciation just a modern misunderstanding of the word, based on spelling? (And if so, why wouldn't we have just rhymed it with you? Where did this come from?) Or was it ever pronounced that way when or where it was in common usage?

Or, in general, for numbers divisible and indivisible by numbers higher than 2.

Hi everyone!

I'm studying linguistics at university, and my professor has emphasized that there is a significant difference between cohesion, coherence, and cohesive.

I understand that cohesion and coherence are different concepts, but I'm struggling to understand the distinction between cohesion and cohesive. To me, they seem closely related, since cohesive appears to be the adjective form of cohesion.

Is there a more specific linguistic distinction between these three terms that I'm missing? Could someone explain how each term is used in text linguistics or discourse analysis, preferably with clear examples?

I'd really appreciate any clarification, especially from people familiar with linguistics or text analysis. Thank you!

I was wondering about this. I speak other Indian languages and Hindi seems to be unique here.

For example to say something like "I'm going to school", most Indian languages would transform school and add a case marker in lieu of the standalone preposition "to".

But in Hindi it's just school. "Mein school ja raha hoon".

I don't know if this is standard Hindi but this is what I hear in movie dialogue.

Recently, I have noticed that the phrase "the actor who played [character]" seems to have been largely replaced by "[character]'s actor," especially among Gen Z and Gen Alpha speakers. Is this due to a change in the way younger generations conceptualize characters vs. actors (e.g., the character is the primary focus of discussion and the actor's portrayal of that character is secondary), or is there another reason for this phenomenon, such as a broader linguistic shift toward more succinct language?

Not sure which flair this falls under because I dont know what all these terms mean, so apologies.

I was wondering about the name of the city Los Angeles. At first it was a name given to the area by the Spanish. Later on, English speakers moved into the area and began to pronounce it differently until it became the popular version that we all know today.

At first, it would have been a mispronunciation of the Spanish words, but now its the default way that English speakers say it. Heck, ill bet even many non English speakers pronounce it this way now.

If I were to pronounce it in the "correct" Spanish way, most people would find it odd or even pretentious.

So at what point did it go from "wrong way" to the most common way to say the name?

Thanks

In Thailand, text-based marketing channels and customer service chats often adopt a feminine language to appear friendly and safe, appealing to gender stereotypes, even when the person behind the screen is male. It’s very common in customer-facing roles, at least anecdotally from my work experience.

Do any other languages do this? I’m thinking that languages with gender based conjugations might have something like this, but I have no idea if it’s a thing.

For example, I know that in Spanish, male and female speakers use o vs a ending when using certain adjectives describing themselves. But do male speakers ever purposefully write in the feminine way in a customer service situation?