I just came across this example of a Pali sound change:

smarati > sarati

smrti > sati

I imagine a Sanskrit grammarian noticing something like this would immediately recognize sound change as a mechanism for creating grammatical irregularities and then extrapolate it to explain Sanskrit irregularities that we now know are due to sound shifts in proto-indo-iranian (e.g. huta vs juhoti, ghna vs hanti).

Why was work like this never produced and why did the Indian linguistic tradition largely seem to ignore historical linguistics? Or maybe there is work like this and I'm just not familiar?

I've thought of incorporating the influence of social media and digital content but would really appreciate some other inputs from y'all! Thank You!!!

Salvete amici,

As the title states, I'm looking for recommendations on books or theses on the history of the Latin language. However, I come from a linguistics/philological background, so I would like to read some serious academic text on the subject. I've checked on Amazon and have come across New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin by Andrew L Sihler and The Blackwell History of the Latin Language by James Clackson, Geoffrey Horrocks which seem to fall into this category. Anybody have experience with these books? Any and all recommendations are welcome.

Gratis vobis ago.

TL;DR: Chozo looks a lot like a dying language, but that might just be because it's English under the hood, and English looks a lot like a dying language (even though it very much isn't). There's not enough evidence to say for sure one way or the other, but it's still fun to think about.

Full text:

Metroid Dread brought with it mountain of new data on the Chozo language, primarily in the form of Quiet Robe’s speech around the midpoint of the game. Based on this new information, as well as what we already know about the Chozo from Metroid series lore, I believe the evidence points to a language that is actively on the decline.

So what do we mean by “death” when we talk about a language? Well, ultimately we mean no one is around who can speak it anymore, but that rarely happens overnight. In this case, it’s a more gradual decline. There are speakers around still, but their numbers are dwindling; and the thing about natural languages is, they’re so complex and nuanced that no one speaker can keep the entirety of the language and all its idiosyncrasies in their head. Speakers rely on each other to keep their linguistic competence up to snuff.

All dying languages exhibit similar changes during their obsolescence, and coincidentally, many of these are also features of a perfectly healthy language the reader is no doubt familiar with: English. Now, I doubt the creator(s) of the Chozo language went quite this far in their thought process when choosing English as the grammatical backbone of Chozo, but it’s a fun thought exercise nonetheless, so let’s continue.

Dying languages often see a great deal of what is called analogical leveling. A great example of this in English is the past tense, where many formerly irregular—also called “strong”—verbs have become regular—or “weak”—over time. Today the past tense of bake is baked, but a few centuries ago, bake was an irregular verb, and you would say something like “yesterday I book a cake.” Over time though, speakers became less proficient at using these irregular past tense verbs for a multitude of reasons, and bake/book became bake/baked on analogy with any number of other regular verbs. From what we can tell so far, most verbs in Chozo form the past tense with a simple -i ending, much like English -ed. If there was a more robust system for forming the past tense before, it appears to be largely gone now.

Similarly, dying languages often undergo morphological leveling. If a language has a complex case system,

I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.

Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.

Instructions below! As of posting, I am a research assistant to the Department of Linguistics at Oakland University, and a recent college graduate preparing data to take to conference and creating a database of vowels for future research.

Looking for as many people 18ya or older who are both born and currently residing in the state of Michigan. Survey is creating a database of vowels in the state to perform both synchronic (current) and diachronic (historical) phonetic/sociolinguistic analysis. Any results used will be published as part of a group. All data and published results will be anonymous and used only for linguistic research.

There are two surveys available. One is for people with limited time and the other for those who are willing to give more data. The quick version only takes a minute, the longer one about five minutes. Contributing to either is super helpful.

Short Survey (apx 1-2min): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qiWJ6Scj-YTU2d7HUkvqb7dmhsJPYcNJ/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=113053589261426712322&rtpof=true&sd=true

Long Survey (apx 5min): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Iy7spA6b5cwHFp8zayQDsRm5LuD-588c/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=113053589261426712322&rtpof=true&sd=true

Participants are to record themselves reading the stimuli (a wordlist) from the provided presentation. Recommended software are either Praat or Audacity, though any recording that can be converted to a wav file will work. The recommended software is linked here: Praat: doing Phonetics by Computer (uva.nl). Audacity ® | Free, open source, cross-platform audio software for multi-track recording and editing. (audacityteam.org)

Download and present the google slide presentation attached while recording. Once you have finished recording all the words, follow the instructions at the end, saving your recording and sending it to the provided address: pgehringer@oakland.edu

When you send the email with your recording, please include the following information:

-Year of Birth

**-Biological sex at birth (You may include your

Wie aus Bildung Indoktrination wird

The " Staatsbürgerkunde" ("civics") notorious among students in the GDR returns - not as a separate school subject, but unspoken and interdisciplinary. The critical, responsible citizen is no longer the educational goal for today's "interpretive elites.

On November 4, 1989, actress Steffi Spira demanded at the large demonstration in East Berlin as part of the Peaceful Revolution: "Never again civics!" Her wish was not fulfilled; the subject is back as interdisciplinary constructivism in the spirit of totalitarian ideology, just as communism is back thanks to the West German left and left-liberals and the failure of the CDU/CSU, this time in the form of the climate-neutral society. Instead of a hammer and sickle on a red background, a load wheel and a wind wheel on a rainbow flag. Not critical citizens, but believers of a civil-religious orthodoxy are to be educated in school, cargo-bike-riding inhabitants of a Prenzlauer Berg or Kreuzberg extended to the territory of the Federal Republic, including Görlitzer Park.

The totalitarianism of the left and left-liberals - whereby left-liberalism has come to mean liberalism minus freedom - is evident in their image of man. Not the critical citizen, the responsible citizen who judges and acts by virtue of his intellect, but the indoctrination object dependent on the welfare state, who in boundless trust in the "interpretive elites," as the Steinmeier biographer Lütjen calls the activist media creators, the agitators and propagandists of left-wing and left-liberal worldviews, is the educational goal of the Red-Greens. They need the financially and intellectually dependent person who believes and goes along with any nonsense.

To realize this goal, to drive critical thinking out of schools and universities, leftists and left-liberals have continuously conquered the cultural, media and educational sectors. The historical guilt of the CDU/CSU as a formerly strong bourgeois force is that it allowed this hostile takeover in the period before Merkel's chancellorship and even supported it in Merkel's time. Even the once neutral Federal Agency for Civic Education has now become a federal agency for civic education, a Red-Green propaganda tool.

If the CDU and CSU lose the elections on September 26 and Germany successively plunges into a dictatorship of ideas, the failure of the CDU/CSU in the areas of c

[Author's note: This is the first part of my two part series on Symmetrical Voice, or as you might know it, Austronesian Alignment. It covers terminology, how it works, voice selection, and possible extensions. The next part will cover the development of such systems]

#Introduction

Other than triconsonantal roots, there's probably no feature that captures a disproportionate amount of conlangers' interest like "Austronesian alignment" does. However, there's not many resources about it, and those that do exist generally use confusing terminology, don't follow a valency-neutral/symmetrical voice framework and ignore broad swathes of languages that fall in this system while missing various important (non-morphological) features of these systems. Furthermore, these prior works are essentially static, ignoring how it develops and what it can develop to. Thus, my intention here is not to provide examples of how symmetrical voice (SV) works (Wikipedia does an excellent job doing that, as do many other guides) but instead discuss the typology, syntax and development of these systems, followed by various extensions, attested and otherwise. In this sense, I am continuing the tradition of the Wikipedia article, which was a piece of garbage when I first had a stab at this many years ago but (as noted on the talk page) is still missing the why of SV. I draw heavily from a number of sources about SV and encourage you to read them for more information.

One important note: Since SV are found pretty much in only in one family and is best described using languages from a single closely related sub-branch, it is hard to say what is inherent to the system and what is simply an artifact of relation. However, this probably isn't too much a problem for conlangers for similar reasons to triconsonantal root systems always being so damn Semitic. Y'all want to do something cool but also "natural" so when there's just a single source, you hew close to it.

#Terminology

Austronesian voice system- A system where obligatory markings on the verb tell the thematic role (well sort of) of the privileged syntactic argument in the clause while maintaining the core status of non-privileged phrases. It is not a simply a system where the verb agrees with the (pragmatic) topic though topicality is often an important part of it. It's not even really an alignment (maybe), but I'll let the syntacticians argue about that. From an alignment perspective though, it might be described as a split-tran

Hi all, last year I studied in Seville and took some linguistics classes as well as some literature classes. I thought it was really interesting how Spanish has evolved and I wanted to take a diachronic and diatopic approach to hypothesize what kind of phonemes Cervantes most likely used when speaking. I was really inspired to find this out after learning that Cervantes and Shakespeare lived in the same time period, but the way Cervantes spoke doesn't seem to be as well known as the way Shakespeare spoke.

The question is actually a lot more interesting than it sounds since linguistic changes were occuring on massive scales during Cervantes's lifetime. Around this time was when the dialect that we now associate with Latin America (and Southern Spain, the OG) became very distinct from the dialect we now associate with Central and Northern Spain. On top of this, further complicating matters is that Cervantes moved all over the place, had parents from different parts of Spain, and had exposure to many different social class environments.

The logic of the paper is that I tried to identify all the possible dialects Cervantes would have had significant exposure to, and then analyze his personal philosophies and linguistic background to hypothesize what dialect he most likely spoke. I was fortunate enough to find one article written by a scholar named Daniel Eisenberg who analyzed Cervantes's writing to find phonetic markers. At the end of my paper, I compare my theory to Eisenberg's analysis and see what similarities and differences we had in our conclusions.

Just as a disclaimer, I did no "original" research and I did not go through all the original texts. All of my analysis was based on what more established scholars have written, and I just consolidated and analyzed them for my own project. I don't claim any expertise. I'm not entering academia least of all for Hispanic studies, but I am completing a Spanish BA degree. You can expect I don't have the depth of knowledge to be very sure that I haven't missed something, especially since my native language is not Spanish. I just did this because it was fun and very interesting. I think it was worth the months of research though!

Here's the powerpoint I made, accompanied by the essay I wrote. I think I took any identifying info out, but please let me know if I left anything in there. Oh, also the sources can all be found online, as I had to do this during Covid. And such a shame because I was less than a 15 mi

Do your worst!

Pigáxio is a Carib a posteriori set in the Alto-Xingu region of Mato Grosso, Brazil. In this short write-up I will consider the various morphosyntactic aspects of Pigáxio possession, while also providing insight into the diachronic happenings that are important with respect to this matter. Possessive constructions in Carib languages can be characterized by a few simple parameters: the word order within the possessive construction is possessor-possessed, the construction is head-marking (i.e. the possessed is marked instead of the possessor), and in most cases, there is a suffix which marks the noun as being possessed. This "possessed" case marker is rather idiosyncratic and as Spike Gildea, one of the leading researchers on the field of Carib linguistics, states in his 1998 book on comparative Carib morphosyntax: "[The morphology of the possessed case marker] is sufficiently irregular to require reconstruction of each lexical item with its own idiosyncratic possessive form." In the 23 years since the publication of this book, research on Carib linguistics has made incredible progress (cf. Gildea [2012:1-2]). Hence I decided to reach out to Gildea himself and inquire about the reconstruction of the possessed case marker, but he has yet to respond. If I receive a reply, I will make sure to inform those who are interested. Now, let's talk about Pigáxio.

The origin of the possessive prefixes

Just like all other Carib languages, Pigáxio employs personal possessive prefixes that are attached to the possessed noun (cf. above). These prefixes are reconstructed in Meira et al. (2012:489) and shown in table 1, along with to the Pigáxio reflexes:

Table 1: Proto-Carib personal possessive prefixes and Pigáxio derivatives

It is important to note that the vowel-initial allomorphs for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person trigger vowel change so that a subsequent ə changes to e. This may have severe morphophonological consequences, and causes irregularities in some nouns. The NP marker derived from *j-, glossed as LK by me (following Meira & Gildea [2009]).², is very interesting in its distribution. It appears if and

I'm surprised it hasn't decade.

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

It really does, I swear!

Because she wanted to see the task manager.

Heard they've been doing some shady business.

They’re on standbi

BamBOO!

I think it was in the movie Blade Runner, where the protagonist mentions that everyone spoke a mixture of several languages, for example: Spanish-English-French-Portuguese.

Do you think this is true in the future?

I say there are words that certain countries use that are now used throughout Latam and I think it would be like the beginning of that "Dialect" that is mentioned in the movie.

What do you think?

Pilot on me!!

Nothing, he was gladiator.

Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.

This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.

If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.

Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.

What did 0 say to 8 ?

" Nice Belt "

So What did 3 say to 8 ?

" Hey, you two stop making out "

When I got home, they were still there.

I won't be doing that today!

Christopher Walken

[Removed]

This morning, my 4 year old daughter.

Daughter: I'm hungry

Me: nerves building, smile widening

Me: Hi hungry, I'm dad.

She had no idea what was going on but I finally did it.

Thank you all for listening.

Where ever you left it 🤷‍♀️🤭

There hasn't been a post all year!

You take away their little brooms

It was about a weak back.