So I've been messing around with Gleb for a while, and I think I've found a couple of the absolute ugliest languages it can spit out, perfect for orc-like creatures. My first batch Uglang tests did not take practical considerations into account and I was left using huge phonologies or impossible clusters. Here's the one that lasted the longest in my notes, phonology stolen directly from Gleb:

Syllable Structure: (C)V
Once I realised I'd have trouble explaining to a layman how to pronounce some of these sounds, I gave up.

 
By the second round of testing I was consistently using the third randomly generated word as the name of the language. I give you my current project, GLEB 0.3.1a/5.0a seed:181634334 or Ragrgik:

Syllable Structure: (C)V(C)(F) Where F is non-stop, i.e. one of /m n f s h ɾ w/. The allophony listed is quite complex and I still haven't officially codified it:

I plan to make the language OSV and isolating. I plan to use a latin-based orthography so that the ugliness of the words can truly be appreciated, possibly written with a "low register" without allophony and a "high register" where I just go nuts and apply all 36 of the sound changes that Gleb demanded of me. As for lexicon, it will be entirely randomly assigned, except for o̯ø̃gakʰh which obviously means coconut.

 

So what do you think? Is it sufficiently ugly on first appearances, even more so when the "local accent" is applied?

EDIT: /ʔ/ was missing from the table.

Whenever I see IPA transcribing Portuguese words with nasal vowels, they simply put a tilde to indicate nasalization (eg: bom=bõ) but I'm pretty sure there's also a short "ŋ" sound after the vowel, I'm leaving a link of a song where this is somewhat audible https://youtu.be/8Fnm8AM_xhE?t=1m23s

So this task is due tomorrow, and I thought it'd be a simple one - come up with two mnemonic devices for remembering the places of the English vowels in the vowel quadrilateral. Well, apparently remembering all of the English consonants and their descriptions was easy for me, but this is proving impossible...

I'm not a native speaker, which is why I've already given up on coming up with words for each of the vowel sounds (in order, counter-clockwise from the top left, ending at the top right and going down through the two centrals), since I can't for the love of God figure out matching words.

The teacher gave us free reign on what the mnemonics exactly are about (e.g. the descriptions of each vowel in a particular order, or going through the sounds in the quadrilateral in some order) - our task is simply to come up with two mnemonics, and be able to explain them.

If anyone has any ideas, or could point me in the general direction of some help, I would highly appreciate it!

Edit: Here is a picture of the quadrilateral I'm talking about. To specify, we're working with the vowels of Received Pronunciation, not General American - so BBC English all the way.

My tutor told me that the schwa [ə] in English is never in the underlying form, but instead vowels are realised as schwas when they don't have stress or secondary (alternating) stress, or long vowels.

I really like this explanation, it makes a lot of sense to me. Including schwa in the list of English phonemes is not intuitive to me, since we seem to place it in words automatically, and it can't be stressed.

The only problem with this analysis is that there exist some words with unstressed syllables that still contain full vowels, eg. accent [ˈæksɛnt], mascot [ˈmæskɔt] (Australian IPA).

So how do you account for these words in the phonological analysis? The only ways I can think of are assigning tertiary stress to these syllables, which seems like a bit of a cop out, and just making schwa a phoneme, which doesn't seem right.

Are there any other solutions to this problem or studies of the matter?

Tl;dr: Is schwa in the underlying form, and if it isn't how do you explain unstressed syllables with full vowels like 'mascot'?

Good day,

I have this project on teaching English pronunciation for L2 learners, which proposes that a knowledge or awareness of English phonological history plays a role in ameliorating and supplementing learning strategies and memorisation. Subsequently, it provides the learner with a linguistic awareness of the dynamic and reasonable, non-arbitrary nature of language and that of its pronunciation and the orthographic representation of the pronunciation. Any suggested reads on this topic and general ones on learning theory that supports the proposition that learning and memorisation is more efficient when the learner is provided with 'the causes behind the current system and its intricacies' will be very appreciated.

I know that's quite a specific case, which is because it came from specifically thinking about the phonology of Russian. For those who don't know, Russian has two sets of vowels, the first which causes the preceding consonant to be "hard" (non-palatalized), and the second which causes the preceding consonant to be "soft" (palatalized). In stressed positions, the vowels themselves are pronounced exactly the same. So that would indicate that 'а' and 'я' are the same phoneme (namely [a]), likewise with 'у' and 'ю' (namely [u]). Since consonants can be palatalized when not followed by a vowel, and then require a "soft" vowel in various inflected forms (e.g. жизнь, genitive жизни - [ʐizʲnʲ] and [ʐizʲnʲɪ]), it seems to me that the palatalization is a feature of the consonant phoneme and not the vowel. (But I could be wrong)

But what indicates that the "soft" and "hard" versions of a vowel are actually different phonemes is the fact that they reduce differently in unstressed positions. For example, 'a' reduces to [ʌ] or [ə], while 'я' reduces to [i] or [ɪ]. 'ё', the soft form of 'o' (pronounced [o]), mutates to [ɪ] or ɛ in unstressed positions, which is the same as the phoneme represented by the letter 'е'.

How are these sounds typically classified?

I've noticed that a generation of middle class Britons (born around WWI) produced noticeably higher æ sounds

see 'as' in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9lmepH9STs

'massive' in https://youtu.be/A2xqgT5mtd0?t=15

'that' in https://youtu.be/qh29gBLoHVU?t=38

Can someone give a more technical explanation as to how to produce this sound and perhaps even speculate on why it disappeared from British speech?

Wikipedia has nice comprehensive overviews for all sound changes in the history of e.g. English, French and Portuguese. Is there such an overview for the Sound changes leading to modern German?

I'm already aware of Wikipedia's Phonological history of English, but that list isn't as exhaustive as I'd like. For example that list doesn't mention the Cork-Quark merger

I was wondering if anyone was aware of more extensive resources on the topic that they could point me toward.

I'm most interested in changes that took place from Middle English onward.

After comparing vowel sounds with a Norwegian (speaking ESL RP), I've come to realise that our vowels differ in the NURSE lexical set. While she uses the standard RP /ɜː/, I have a rounded vowel that apparently sounds just like 'ø' in her native Norwegian — perhaps /œː/.

I came across a 1982 reference to front rounded vowels in this position in Cockney, but although my dialect is rather like Estuary English, I am not at all Cockney: I'm from Bristol. I also talked to some Estuary English speakers from the South East, and they didn't seem to share the trait.

tl;dr – What dialects of English feature front rounded vowels?

Well, guys, it happened again.

So last time I said that I wrote a big post about Angws morphology and its historical origin, but then realised that it would be too long of a post, so I split it up. This time, I wrote the history, and then, looking down over it, realised that nobody in their right mind would see the text cursor shrink into nothingness and still bother to read the post. So I pasted the last half the post into a draft which I'll post tomorrow or the day after that.

This post covers Proto-Anguÿa (along with a few notes on Pre-Anguÿa), conditioning of consonants, the origin of consonant weakening, and lastly the development of anticipatory vowel harmony. Tomorrow, I'll cover the merging of enclitics with their hosts, vowel reduction, consonant hardening, rhinoglottophilia and lastly the various issues I discovered while writing out these posts.

Links to previous post:

Introduction to Angw and its aspectual morphology:

https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/dk6emh/an_introduction_to_the_angw_with_particular_focus/

Old and outdated post about the history of the language, in case you want to see how far the language has come since then:

https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/aavd5b/sound_changes_from_protohayahaya_to_modern_angw/

Proto-Anguÿa

Vowels:

Phonotactical rules:

/ʡ/ becomes [ħ] intervocally and word finally

/ʔ/ is phonetically a glottal stop, but behaves like a glottalized pharyngeal approximant /ʕˀ/.

/t͡s/ and /s/ were retracted /t͡s̠ / and /s̠ /, somewhere between /t͡s/ and /s/ and /t͡ʃ/ and /ʃ/.

CV(C) structure, /h/ was permitted syllable-finally in certain context within word-borders, while

Hello all!

I'm from western Montana. While my accent generally goes uncommented upon in interstate settings, inevitably something peculiar comes up, and it becomes a topic of conversation. More obviously, I show some signs of so-called Canadian vowel raising, as well as what I'd call a "rounding out" of what would usually be realized as /oʊ/. I suppose it's less fronted than most. None of these are particularly notable, and are well-attested, at least in form. These attributes aren't universal to Montana, but they do appear in various strengths depending on location, and are certainly not uncommon.

A few aspects of my accent, however, I've never seen written about anywhere. Occasionally I'll see reference to something similar, but always with a few major differences. In many cases, the supposed dialectical feature mentioned seems to be the opposite of what I (and others around me) do, in terms of which sounds assimilate to what, or under what circumstances certain changes happen.

For example, when people from elsewhere hear me say, "vague" or "plague", they immediately pick up on the fact that I don't say /veɪg/. Instead, I pronounce the word with a monophthong. I've always been curious about this, because no one back home has ever commented on it, but it seems to be very easily noticed by others. In fact, after paying attention to those from my home-state, they pronounce that word (and similar words) just as I do, but in a way that's apparently distinct to people from more eastern areas. After digging, and finding lots of anecdotal remarks online, I finally found a paper published by the University of Washington that stated that some speakers in the Pacific Northwest (the scope of the study did not include my home state) were said to exhibit a merger of /eg/ and /eɪg/ with /ɛg/, in which /e/ lowered, /ɛ/ raised, and /eɪ/ monophthongized, meaning that words like "vague, egg", and "keg" rhyme, more along the lines of /ɛg/. I'm vastly simplifying for my point, here, and the paper goes into various other aspects such as distinction between age and gender, but the gist is this merger.

While the above is the closest description I have found to what I (and, anecdotally, others from my area) exhibit, and in fact how people from outside my home area describe what I exhibit ("You said 'vɛg'."), my pronunciation is very much *sepa

I've seen cases such as capillum > cheveu, where the /a/ developed into a schwa, but there are other cases such as palatium > palais where the first /a/ resists such a change. Is there some sort of pattern to this development or is it random? They're both unstressed and in open syllables, so does it have something to do with the surrounding phonemes? Plosive vs fricative, for example?

So just as an example of the phonological process of the Synalepha in Spanish, when a Spanish speaker utters the words "a una" or "a una", it will sound like one word. IPA wise it would be /a'una/ rather than /a 'una/, which is how they mistakenly teach American students to pronounce "a una", myself having been one of them never taught up about the synalephas. So "a un" will sound as one syllable, kind of like the "own" in town but slightly more closed... not as two syllables.

I've been starting to self-teach myself French, and I was wondering what the phonological term for this phenomenon is in French because it seems like it occurs all the time.

But when I checked wikipedia's article on Synalepha, it said it just occurs in Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

So what would you call it in French?

Here are a couple illustrative examples of what I mean.

"***Où ha***bites-tu? (Where do you live?) <-- Here it sounds like "wa"

J'ai un chat et un chien. (I have a cat and a dog.) <-- J'ai and un merge and are pronounced as one syllable it seems... and so are chat and et one syllable phonetically.

Thank you for any help. Since I'm trying to learn French on my own using online resources, I don't have a teacher to ask these kinds of questions.

I know this seems like such a technical detail but I know that a huge part of 1914 was the "Race to the Sea" in which armies tried to outflank each other, and when they reached the coast there was no more room. Except, when I thought about it, there had to have been at least some room, even if just dozens or hundreds of feet; it would seem ridiculous for soldiers to keep digging all the way into the beaches and only stop once waves were crashing over their heads.

Likewise, and more generally, how close could the edges of frontlines get to the borders of neutral countries? If my house was on the border itself, would I be able to look out my window and see soldiers just outside or would there be a "courtesy zone" of a few miles to prevent diplomatic incidents (i.e. like soldiers accidentally invading a neutral country because they got lost, or stray artillery shell falling on neutral territory)?

I'm currently looking through the Varieties of English series from De Gruyter and finding it really helpful in learning about the phonologies of different English dialects. I love how detailed the descriptions are, and that they cover specific regions and variations within larger dialects. These books seem to mostly focus on L1 varieties of English, though they also cover some L2 varieties in countries with many English speakers.

I'm looking for similar resources that describe the phonologies of L2 English varieties in this level of detail. In terms of books, I've only seen a few targeted at ESL teachers that don't go very much in depth. I do see the value of simply learning about another language's phonology and comparing that to English, and then guessing about the L1 interference that might occur in English, but I'd like to find something more concrete and research-based.

Any suggestions?

Hey so I have a question. Obviously there is an ongoing joke in the states about Chinese speakers switching l for r (ie herro, engrish etc). It is mean to make fun of someone for their accent. I'm not trying to do that, but I'm DYING to know what phonological motivations lead to this alteration?

I mean I looked up the phonology of Cantonese and.....there is no rhotic! Only the lateral! Mandarin has the retroflex rhotic, similar to english, but only in very specific environments, and only in certain parts of the country (notably, beijing).

So either this phonological process is mislabled to the chinese and actually belongs to speakers of a different asian language (in which case I feel like a total idiot and ignorant), or I'm missing something major here.

Can anyone shed light on to this? I mean obviously the rhotic and lateral release share a lot, and are often involved in the same phonological processes, which is what made me think about this phenomona to begin with.

Thanks for the help! Also I apologize if I said something incorrect; I'm only a first year in my first degree!

I.e., are there any significant syntactic or morphological differences? Obviously dialects differ within the respective groupings as well so feel free to comment on that as well but I was wondering if there are general trends on either side of the pond.

Here is a comparison of the two words:

• cease
• seize

To me the Finnish word siis [ˈsiːs] sounds more like English seize [ˈsiːz] than English cease [ˈsis], even though it has [s].

The same applies to words like back [ˈbæk] and bag [ˈbæːg]. If I say [ˈbæːk] it sounds more like bag than back. The sound [g] also doesn't exist in my dialect of Finnish.

How do native speakers hear these?

Hi /r/conlangs! This is a snippet of the phonological history of a language family I'm working on. It's obviously heavily inspired by Slavic, as seen in the similar sound changes. However, I tried to still retain some uniqueness, especially in the vowels. Let me know what you think- criticism is welcome!

Proto-Volodnian Phonology

Vowels

Diphthongs

Consonants

1. Allophone of /n/ before velars

Sound Changes

Notation

! - Except

?? - Sporadic

// - Note

Short Forms

F = V[+front]

B = V[+back]

J = Any consonant affected by the Second Palatalization

Sound Change List

First Palatalization

• k g x ɣ → c ɟ ç ʝ / F ! _ɛ
• sj zj kj gj xj ɣj → ʃ ʒ t͡ʃ d͡ʒ ʃ j

Palatal Shift

• ʝ → j ??
• c ɟ ç ʝ → t͡ʃ d͡ʒ ʃ ʒ

First Vowel Fronting

• ɔ o oː uː → ɛ e eː iː / j_

Yod Absorption

• Cj → Cʲ

Vowel Shift

• oː → aː
• i u → ĭ ŭ

Diphthong Shift

At this point, Yod Absorption remains productive.

• ei ɛi ai → iː iː eː
• eu ɛu → juː joː
• {ou, ɔu, au} → oː
• {oi,ɔi} → ojə

Second Palatalization

• ɣʲ → ʝ → j ??
• k g x ɣ → t͡s d͡z sʲ zʲ / _F
• k g x ɣ → t͡s d͡ɕ sʲ zʲ / F_
• kʲ gʲ xʲ → t͡s d͡z sʲ ??

Second Vowel Fronting

• ɔ o oː uː → ɛ e eː iː / {j, J, Cʲ}_

Prothesis

In this case /a/ is counted as front, while /aː/ is back, suggesting different phonetic quality between the two.

• F → jF / #_
• B → wB / #_

Glide Shift

• w → v

A-reduction

• a → ə ! #j_

Low-Mid Vowel Shift

Yod Absorption is still productive.

• ɛ ɔ → je vo ! when this creates inadmissible clusters // *Many resulting clusters with /v/ undergo metathesis to fit pre-existing clusters- e.g. lɔzju → (lvožĭ) → vložĭ
• ɛ ɔ → e a

Palatal Assimilation

This spreads through clusters

• C → Cʲ / _Cʲ

Greater Volodnian Phonology

Vowels

Con

Has the pronunciation of the vowel [ʏ] ever been attested in standard American English? I am from Florida myself, and I hear that vowel when I say words like new, you, shoe, and do. However, I also hear [ʏw] sometimes when I say those words, so you would be [jʏw]. All articles I've read about American English phonology say that those words would be pronounced [nu], [ju], [ʃu], and [du]. This could all be a matter of my personal pronunciation, but I hear that vowel being pronounced a lot by other people I know. Perhaps I'm hearing a vowel besides [u], and maybe the vowel is a bit different than the way other languages pronounce it. However, I know there is no possible way I'm hearing [u].

According to hockeydb.com, in the history of the NHL there have been 7596 different players who have played at least one game (regular season or playoffs). The list of such players who don't have a vowel in their last name (A, E, I, O, U, or Y) is as follows:

• Frk, Martin

End of List

I'm sure this will be a trivia question someday, so you're welcome in advance for the answer.

I feel that this question must have been answered before, but my search skills were not great enough to produce something. From what I've read, all instances of moraic consonants (spelled ん and っ) come from a loss of earlier /u/, i.e. a reduction of earlier /mu/ and /tu/. This makes me wonder how they came to be, since both む and つ still seem to exist in the same positions where ん and っ appear.

I am at the very beginning of learning Japanese, so please gloss examples. Thank you.

edit: The absence of a suitable flair makes me wonder whether this is the right subreddit for this question. Should there be a more fitting one, I apologise.

I know that when you are addressing someone as "friend" or "teacher", caraid becomes "a charaid" and you would address the teacher as "a thidseir".

However, there is no lention or letter a in front of "athair" and "ollaimh" in similar sentences that are addressing those people.

Alright, continuing off from where we got to yesterday.

Aspectual Merger and other fun stuff, or: REMOVE CONSONANT!

So up until this point, the aspectual enclitics were just that; clitics. At this point in time, however, they fully merge with the verb stem. The process is... weird. But it works like this:

The results are not quite predictable, but all initial consonants are dropped, except for the ejectives which simplify to glottal stops /ʔ/. (With nouns, I imagine, initial consonants of the merged clitics remained)

1 =tiʔ -> (V)-i

2 =ˌal -> ˌɑl

3 =hujat͡s -> (V+, C-)-ɯjæt͡s

4 =suɰḁ -> (V+)-ɯɰ

5 =ˌhaj -> (C-)-ˌæj

6 =xis -> (V)-is

7 =k’un -> (V+)-ʔɯn

8 =ˌɬaq -> -ˌɑq

9 =q’iʕax -> -ʔiʁ̝ax

Note that following /h/, the ejectives consonants in 7 and 9 maintain their original pronounciation /kʷ'/ and /q'/, while /h/ drops out.

Note that the glottal stop is best treated as an neutralization allophone for /k'/, /kʷ'/, /q'/ and /qʷ'/ following other consonants in a stressed syllable (so /ˌkat-q'a/ -> /ˌkat-ʔa/.

This is part of a general tendency at this point in time towards clitics merging with their host. With the noun in particular becoming much more agglutinating than previously. I imagine that the merger happened sometime around the same time as the vowel reduction in the next chapter, and that together they helped push the language towards a more lenient syllable structure.

Vowel Reduction, or: REMV CNSNANT!

Alright, so now we have accounted for how most of the phoneme inventory came to be, as well as how most of the stem alterations got started: Consonant weakening came about as a mutation caused by a clitic-initial /h/. While the neutral vowel and vowel hardening processes came about as a result of ablaut obscuring the original root vowel. We're stilling missing two major elements: Vowel reduction (and the accompanying vowel weakening stem alteration) and consonant hardening, I'll get to the consonant hardening in a while, first, let's start with vowel reduction:

Historical vowel reduction in Angw is fairly straight-forward on paper, but becomes quite complicated when combined with agglutination and the anticipatory vowel ablaut:

First of all, this is the point where the modern Angw syllable structure fully emerges: (C)V(C), where V may be any vowel or syllabic sonorant.

Starting from the right of any word and going left, delete any unstressed vowel that does not result in an illegal syllable accord