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When I was learning to speak as a child, for a while my parents noticed I would vocalise /l/ in coda positions, and they assumed I would stop doing it once I got a little older. That never happened. Funnily enough, my mother once told me I used to vocalise these /l/'s as a kid when I was in high sch...

That's a nice read! Is there going to be any borrowing from Turkish, Italian or Albanian? Also, the greek influence, is that intirely through liturgical in origin? Does that also mean more Latin influence after the 1500's?

I need help with 2 languages I know practically nothing about. Say a Dutch person named "Sien" (pron. [sin] I think) moves to Sweden and picks up a diminutive nickname. What would this likely be? Would something like "Sinnan" work? I can't comment on the diminutive form the name would take in Swedi...

/a e ɛ/ raise to [æ ɛ ɪ] I think you've mixed up your symbols, /e/ is lower than /ɛ/, so you'd expect a raising change to show /ɛ/ > /e/ not the other way round. Thanks for catching that. You're right. The way I understand it low vowels do nasalise more easily than high vowels. Low vowels, if I rec...

The way I understand it low vowels do nasalise more easily than high vowels. Low vowels, if I recall correctly, are intrinsically slightly nasalised as a consecquence of the way our mouths are shaped. For instance, nasalisation in French started with /a/ in the ninth century and then spread to incre...

First, I hope you don't mind I suggest a small correction in this topic's title: Nog een vraag over het Nederlands. Intervocalic /d/ is often elided in spoken Dutch. Is there any evidence of it weakening to something else, such as /ð/, before disappearing? Then, I'm afraid I don't really know the an...

Two candidates come to mind: Czech ř and the paperclip sj in Swedish. Any others? What does "paperclip" mean in "the paperclip sj"? Is it a description of the shape of the IPA symbol <ɧ>? My impression was that this phoneme gets a dedicated IPA symbol more because there is no consensus on the corre...

Geoff Lindsay has made an interesting proposal for conseptualising the vowel space as fundementally a space of frequencies of the first and second formants of the acoustic speech signal. He's used that as the basis for a proposal for to change the IPA vowel chart, and he arrives at an essentially tr...

One thing I've considered is, what if plagues decimated the Americas a century or two before the Europeans showed up? As we know from the Black Death, such plagues can force dramatic social and political change, and it could also have forced Americans to figure out quarantines, etc. that would've h...

You're probably more interested in the answers of anglophones, as those of us non-anglophones are somewhat predictable. But here it is anyway: English. Studying English was compulsory in school (as were French and German), but English is impossible to escape living in the Netherlands. Also most of m...

[y], [ɘ], [ɵ] -> [ʉ] [ʌ] merges with [ɐ] [ɒ] merges with [ɔ] Metathesis of second (semi) vowels and consonants <Lo! the glory of the kings of the people of the Spear-Danes in days of old we have heard tell, how these princes did deeds of valour. Oft Shield Sheafson robbed the hosts of foemen, many ...

Word initial s is seperated from a following plosive with a schwa [rʲ] -> j Any consonant following a palatalised consonant within the same word becomes palatal, [w] becomes [ɥ] Syllabic [l] vocalises to , syllabic lʲ vocalises to [ʉ] <Spring has come, with all its gentle showers. Methinks t'is tim...

Consonants preceding nasalised vowels get voiced [w] becomes [gw] if followed by a nasal vowel low nasal vowels and nasal schwa merge in [a] non low non front nasal vowels merge in [ɔ] non low front nasal vowels merge in [ɛ] <When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people t...

It appears like I have something to write on topic. My first name is Miłosz [ˈmiwɔs̠], it is a Slavic name with no counterparts in Western European languages. My second name is Andrzej [andz̠ɛj], a Polish version of “Andrew”. I am thinking about going for a student exchange to Hämeenlinna, Finland,...

EDIT I'm sorry, I missed the warning to Sirdan. I can't remove my posts can I? Removed content. I don't see any posts of yours responding to sirdanilot. If you ever want a post yours deleted completely, you can use the report button to request this of the mods. No the post you cited was the one whe...

EDIT
I'm sorry, I missed the warning to Sirdan. I can't remove my posts can I? Removed content.

Initial voicing basically seems to be plausible . Yeah, and in Dutch it's not just the initial /s/ that got voiced, but initial /f/ did so as well. Compare English fare, Germen fahren, Dutch varen. In contemporary Dutch word initial fricatives have a tendency to de voice, so that <varen> may be pro...

I do not come back to the ZBB much anymore, but I do have to say that, from reading this thread, as much as I disagree with sirdanilot here I sense a certain classism here, as if all Dutch people are supposed to be upper-middle class and the lower and lower-middle classes ought to be looked down up...

One that you still haven't bother to support with anything like an actual argument. He never does, Grunnen. Danny-boy's SOP is "state a naive, insensitive, or bigoted opinion as Holy Writ, wait to be questioned, repeat a few times, then start personally attacking anyone who hasn't given up in disgu...

Let me guess, you are only surrounded by white, educated people. You live in a high-end Vinex-wijk . You drive a fat Audi or another fat car. You have only gone to the higher levels of higher education (gymnasium). You have never even interacted with people of the lower class. If you would just sto...

Because your name is what your parents called you, and changing that is preposterous. You keep asserting that. Repeating an assertion doesn't make it any more true. It was a classical concert that happened to be in a Church, it wasn't a church service, mind you. This would never happen in a church ...

Of course I do, but that doesn't mean that that is a core value of being Dutch these days. So what *is* a core value of being Dutch, then? Acting normally and not making yourself look more important than you are is certainly important. Or maybe you are pretentious yourself and are therefore so vehe...

but people who are so pretentious simply are no longer deserving of politeness . (...) A very important Dutch value is: doe normaal dan doe je al gek genoeg (act normally, that's already weird enough). (...) And thus they have to adhere to Dutch cultural values, i.e. not being pretentious. And if t...

Of course no language is better than any other. But using a plural pronoun for plural things, and a singular pronoun for singular things seems much more logical and easy to learn (for L2 learners) to me than using a plural pronoun (their) for something singular. Who says the pronoun is a plural pro...

I would use 'his', as that is what you would say in Dutch, and English is my L2 so I will often calque Dutch structures into my English. Iemand heeft z'n telefoon laten liggen (somebody has left his telephone (lying, remember in Dutch you always have to specifiy the position of the object) Perhaps ...