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2. Are /θˠ~θˤ/ and /θ/, /ɸˠ/ and /ɸ/ likely to remain stable as seperate phonemes? And if not, how might their later forms/reflexes remain distinctive? The distinction between pharyngealized and plain consonants has been stable in Arabic and Aramaic for a couple millennia at least, so I'd say you'r...

To clarify, what I meant is that "guy" (singular) is never gender neutral, but "guys" (particularly but not exclusively in the phrase "you guys") can be based on context. The only people I've ever known to get upset over the phrase "you guys" are Southerners, where the default second person plural i...

symphony [ˈsɪɱfəni]
infinitive [ɪnˈfɪnəɾɪv] (yes, that's an [n])
Caleb [ˈkʰɛɪ̯ɫəb]

...huh? I hear 'gal' all the time, generally as the feminine counterpart to 'guy'. Then again, I work in an industry that's male-dominated, and with terms that have historically used "guy"—so, at my company when using those terms, we'll throw in 'gal' also. For example, "We're looking for a couple ...

Perhaps they could denasalize to /p t/?

The notion of PIE speakers being Mongol-like nomadic steppe horsemen is a strawman the proponents of the Anatolian hypothesis and of Paleolithic Continuity like to whack. Nobody believes in this anymore. The last hypothesis for PIE expansion that I heard... OK, the last one I heard was just that ev...

The notion of PIE speakers being Mongol-like nomadic steppe horsemen is a strawman the proponents of the Anatolian hypothesis and of Paleolithic Continuity like to whack. Nobody believes in this anymore. The last hypothesis for PIE expansion that I heard... OK, the last one I heard was just that ev...

I once had a Vietnamese classmate who the entire rest of the class thought was Mexican. I was sort of astonished. My brother was mistaken for Mexican in high school, too. A lot of Americans seem to have a bad habit of thinking anyone with black hair and a skintone between white and black is Mexican...

- the na-dene samples were american with a dash of asian (90-10). This doesn't seem surprising - while the na-dene have long been considered linguistically and culturally distinct, a later migration, most athabaskans have been known for a while to be pretty amerindian in genetics. This suggests a c...

Ironically, I'm not really a learner of English, and haven't been for years in the sense that I've always been exposed to it since I was born (and learning since I was 5) because, being born in Finland (arguably the most Americanised country in Europe; I mean, every time I watch videos on Youtube a...

Thanks for the info; it confirmed what I suspected. :) I'll look into it more deeply when I'm feeling better. As far as the revitalization goes, last I heard Haida still had a dwindling elderly population of speakers who spoke a simplified form of the language (which Mithun notes is the usual sign o...

therapeutic Something like [θe̞ɾɐpju̟ːt̪ik~θɜɾa̠pjəʊ̯t̪ik~t̪ʰe̞ɾɐpjʉ̟ːt̪ik~t̪ʰɜɾa̠pju̟ːt̪ik]. I swear, if Americans/native English-speakers would hear that as "thettapeutic" and wouldn't understand, I'd facepalm so hard I'd need therapy... :P pulchritudinous delitescent synderesis By process of eli...

The problem is people really tried hard to speak properly during the communist period in Poland and many adults raised in this time have a weird feeling of what is appropriate and good. Do people in other, especially Anglophone countries care less about that as there existed and still exists region...

in my variety of American English, I have father/bother/cot/caught all with the same vowel, and talk/walk/stalk are pronounced with the same /a/ as father (tock/wok/stock), with no remnants of the /l/ present in the spelling. My father was horrified to learn that I did not pronounce the /l/ in talk...

Not a word I've ever used, but I've heard my dad use the term "rubbernecking."

Vijay wrote:

KathTheDragon wrote:Boringly, "not show up".

I would probably use the same. I would also accept "flake out," "ghost," and "stand me up."

To me, "stand someone up" specifically refers to a date.

"Not show up" for me, too.

Well, if you have all that in a hot dog, then you certainly don't need ketchup. :P Oh, Americans and messy-ass food... This is in accord with the American national character. Like the electric guitar, and NASCAR, and President Trump. However, the Correct hot dog preparation is with sauerkraut. The ...

Soap wrote:I find /kʷtr/- an unlikely word-initial cluster

Why so? Many languages allow labiovelars in clusters. Cf. the Alaskan town of Yakutat, from Tlingit Yaakwdáat /jaːkʷtáːtʰ/.

the laughter in this case being a sort of default reaction when I'm not really sure how to respond emotionally I laugh when I'm upset. Which makes me more frustrated and upset, because my brain is aware that it's the incorrect response (and also because people don't exactly treat you like you're up...

Some think "big brother" and "big sister" sound childish and sound more like how a child would refer to their older siblings. Yeah, I'd pretty much only use "big/little" with "brother" or "sister" when I was consciously trying to invoke childhood associations. Well, the last time I hung around sibl...

Disclaimer: I'm an only child. However, "elder brother" and "older brother" both sound rather formal to me; in my experience most siblings seem to prefer the term "big brother/big sister" informally. However, especially in a joking context, it wouldn't sound strange to me to hear a younger sibling c...

Well, if theyre direct cognates, it would have to involve either metathesis of /u/ or deletion of it, so either way it'd be irregular. If its just / kʷet-/ its likely to have just meant "pair(ed)" in both languages. I'm not sure if /kʷe/>/ku/ is normal or not for Hittite. Hittite <ku> is /kʷ/.

[*]Make voiced stops emphatic, then make the voiced aspirates simply voiced. That seems possible but unlikely IMO. I think a more Armenian-esque shift would make more sense: P > Pʼ B > P Bʱ > B The reason why I suggested converting the plain voiced stops to emphatics is it preserves the relative ma...

I think there is a generational issue, yes. But there's also a subcultural issue. Most of the internet abbreviations, ime, are primarily used by what you might call internet 'natives' - people who use the internet extensively, not merely as a tool for organising their RL, and who use parts of the i...

My /s/ and /z/ are dental, if not interdental. You have a lisp like Jamie? JAL To my knowledge, dental sibilants are extremely common in some varieties of American English. The tip of my tongue is pressed against my teeth when I form a sibilant; it is nevertheless entirely distinct from [θ], which ...