I'm just starting studies of spoken Arabic in earnest (Gulf dialect in advance of a trip to Oman) and I notice when I use emphatic consonants, the "emphasis" (idk what to call it exactly) starts to infect other consonants around it, changing the sound of the word.

E.g. instead of saying "min faDlak", I end up saying "min faDlaq" with a qaf.

Is this normal, or will it change the meaning of words/make it difficult for locals to understand me? How much effort should I put into eliminating this habit and keeping my emphatic consonants 'quarantined'?

If I have a word with an emphatic consonant in the middle, are all the vowels in that word pharyngealized? E. g. In the name لطيفة, are the last and first vowels affected too?

edit: *after they lost the ejectives

For example ṣād (ص) is given as a pharyngealised sibilant /sˤ/ but I can't even begin to understand how to pharyngealise sibilants. Best I can manage is a retracted /s̠/ but I know it's not how ص sounds.

Edit: I actually don't know how to pharyngealise anything besides actual pharyngeal consonants e.g. ayin.

Hi. Do emphatic consonant only alter the vowels on the letter, or are vowel sounds thickened on preceding letters as well, for example اِشْتَاقَ , أَطباقٌ ?

For example, Sād ص is pronounced /sɑd/ but Qāf is pronounced /qæf/ with the same [a] sound that the non-emphatic consonants use.

Short version: what do you do with your tongue to produce these sounds, and where exactly do you feel/control it? Is something else involved?

So I can finally produce all of the other letters, and I feel like I can mimic, e.g., ض (Daad) or ط (Taa)... but I have read lots of descriptions on how to say these consonants, and I definitely don't feel like my tongue is doing any of the stuff they say.

For example, "slope your tongue from low in the front to high in the back." Or "touch your upper molars with the sides of your tongue", or even "pull the root of the tongue downward toward the pharynx." (Not sure I can even perceive that motion!)

I feel like some detail is missing from these descriptions, as well. There's a lot of instruction about the "back" of the tongue, for example -- but does that mean all this action is occurring near the final molars, or somewhere farther? Should I feel my tongue touch the roof of my mouth, or is that too much? Etc. (Additionally, I even read one article that said some constriction of the throat is involved as the main factor.)

Any detailed instruction is appreciated, as well as ideas or general descriptions. !شكرا جزيلا

Basically, when and where did it originate? When did it spread to different branches (Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Berber)? As I understand the emphatics of Afro-Asiatic are reconstructed as ejectives. My impression is that a pharyngealized series isn't common worldwide so I'm guessing it originated once and spread (though correct me if I'm wrong).

Also, were (and are) the nonemphatic voiceless consonants aspirated? A voiced-aspirated-ejective split seems more plausible to me (as a nonlinguist) given that it exists in other languages like Sotho and given the transliteration of Hebrew and Arab words and names into the west (Matthew, Phineas, alchemy, &c).

I just watched Dune the other day and wholeheartedly recommend it. While watching it I was fascinated by the Arrakians which entire culture and language (Fremen) is based on Arabic nomadic tribes like the Bedouins.

Today I decided to read more about the language they spoke and found these paragraphs in the Dune wiki:

“The Fremen language was a descendant of Arabic of Earth and Chakobsa..”

“Fremen derives mainly from Arabic however it has distanced much from that ancient language, and enriched with other contemporary ones, usually towards simplification. The emphatic consonants as well as pharyngeals and the glottal stop have disappeared. Same happened with vocalic length.”

“Complex mutational morphology was simplified towards a syntactically isolating language. Gender distinction in adjectives and dual number..”

source

Note that Dune is set about 16,000 years in the future. The author (Frank Herbert) took great care into constructing actual possible evolutions of the languages used. I am mind blown!

Has any of you linguists read the book or watched the movie and noticed this immense work that went into constructing the languages?

Hello there! As far as I know, Arabic tend to transcribe foreign names close to the soundings, without using emphatic consonants. But the word Sofia (as a capital, a mosques name and a personal name) is written with ص. Can anyone desribe this to me please? Is it historical? Are there more names non-Arabic origin with emphatics?

Thank you!

I just noticed that Palestine in Arabic is written with an emphatic ṭ (falasṭin) and Somalia is written with an emphatic ṣ (a-ṣumal). This joins a number of other Arabic loanwords I have encountered in which original non-emphatic consonants became emphatic, such as soap (ṣabun, from Aramaic ṣapon from Greek sapon) and "Caesar" with two emphatics (qayṣar, compare to Hebrew qesar with normal s). Where do these random-looking emphatics come from? Were they pronounced differently in the past, not pharyngealized, so that they were actually the best approximation of the original sound? Or maybe they come to satisfy some rule of Arabic phonotactics? Is there any regularity at all?

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.

As discussed on Discord, the following is the description of an experimental Globasa dialect. The intention is to compare this dialect with traditional Globasa. As I explained in the Discord discussion, traditional Globasa works the way it does (with -li compounds and special truncated suffixes) in order to avoid the obligatory use of the type of grammatical markers (predicate markers, direct object markers, articles and the like) which are easily and frequently dropped in natlangs, even by fluent speakers who have learned the target language in adulthood. If the language relies heavily on said markers for its functionality and if certain adult learners (ordinary folks whose native languages don't use these markers) tend to drop said markers by mistake, it is not difficult to see that such a language may not work so well in practice (in spontaneous speech), even with its more streamlined design. Of course, certain other people, such as conlangers, are not the type who will have much difficulty with said markers.

The secret to Globasa's "sloppy" design is that it takes a syntactical problem and turns it into a semantic one that is more manageable for ordinary people. That is, Globasa's suffix -li is less likely to be dropped since it is typically memorized as part of compound words (dentali broxa - toothbrush). In contrast, syntactical markers such as predicate markers and direct object markers are not memorized as part of a whole.

With that said, let's go ahead and explore more concretely the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches.

I will soon be posting a sample text comparing both dialects. The first thing that will be obvious is that this new dialect is for the most part mutually intelligible with traditional Globasa.

ADVANTAGES

1.-li noun compounds are eliminated

"Noun noun" compounds are used instead, even for affixed forms in traditional Globasa: kitabu dom (library), instead of kitabudom; mena lari (dictionary) instead of menalar.

2. The vast majority of suffixes are eliminated

The only suffixes that remain are the grammatical ones: -li, -ya, -su, -do, -ne, -mo, -gi, and -cu.

The most frequently used noun and adjective suffixes in traditional Globasa become monosyllabic words in this dialect:

• dom (kitabu dom, instead of kitabudom)
• tul (kata tul, instead of katatul)
• yen (alim yen, instead of alimyen)
• pul (kima pul, instead of **

As-salamu alaykum.

I'm a beginner and wanted to write my name. I checked on the Internet for my first name, which is Thomas (I'm French so the "s" is not pronounced), and found : توما, which matched my knowledge of the alphabet.

Then I chatted with a Moroccan friend of mine, and she said she thought طوما was more accurate (even though she was unsure). She pronounced both words, and for some reason توما sounded more like "Tooma" and طوما more like "Toma". So I wonder if it's just me who's not used to oral Arabic and who's got the wrong impression that the vowel changed (being misled by the fact that in Arabic there's only one vowel for "oo" and "o" anyway), or if different consonants can affect the vowel that follows (especially emphatic ones compared to "normal" ones, like ت and ط). That's the first question, the second being what the best spelling of my first name is. What do you think?

Do your worst!

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!

They’re on standbi

Sudrish is a rabbit-hole I went down a few years ago when a friend told me that Sodor (the island of Thomas the Tank Engine) canonically has an indigenous Celtic language spoken on it. I revisited it more recently when my university's linguistics society asked me to give a talk on it for our PowerPoint Night, and my boyfriend suggested I post about it here. I hadn't really considered it a conlang because it's heavily based on real-world languages/dialects - it's more of a condialect if anything.

I started with the information about "Sudric" on the Thomas wiki, which pretty much just has a list of anglicised placenames, so I turned to information about Manx, as well as relying on my own knowledge of northern Irish and southern Scottish dialects. The Thomas wiki lists a surprisingly high number of speakers, so in working out how that was able to happen when Manx speaker numbers got down to single digits last century, I was also able to keep in some more typical Gaelic grammar features that Manx has lost. Recently some friends of mine have been doing a lot of research into the now-extinct Moyle Gaelic/Irish dialect group (incorporates Arran Gaelic and Rathlin Irish, amongst others) so I might revise Sudrish to include more inspiration from that at some point.

So, on with it!

A brief overview of Sudrish

Sudrish is a Celtic language spoken by the native Sudric people of the Island of Sodor in the Irish sea. It is spoken by an estimated 12500 people, or around 20% of the Sudrian population, including some 3500 native speakers and around 10000 people with varying levels of second language ability. The language was made official on the island of Sodor in 2001 but is not recognised in the wider United Kingdom. It should not be confused with Anglo-Sudrian, the form of English spoken on the island.

In Sudrish, the language is called “Gîlg” (/g^(j)e:l^(j)ək^(j)/), which shares etymology with the English term "Gaelic". To distinguish it from the three other Gaelic languages, the phrase “Gîlg Hudraygh” (/g^(j)e:l^(j)ək^(j) hod̪ɾaəʝ/, “Gaelic of Sodor”) is also used. The language is usually referred to in English as "Sudric", a shortening of the term "Sudric Gaelic", but "Sudrish" may be considered more correct. It is frequently spelt "Sudrisk" in historical sources, originating from Old Norse "Sudreysk".

As a Goidelic (Q-Celtic) language, Sudrish is closely related to Manx, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic and has a high degree of mutual intelligibility with Manx. H

This chapter makes a lot of references to my two earlier posts on the neuroscience of stuttering, but you shouldn't need to read those to understand the gist of it. If you're curious about the neuroscience of stuttering, I would recommend them.

I've put a comment at the bottom with links to the sources, if you'd like to read more from the original studies.

The Gameplan

Earlier chapters established how stuttered speech is the result of pathology in the brain's speech system. We also saw that the brain can respond to this neuropathology with patchwork adaptations that try to increase fluency but instead further destabilize the speech system and exacerbate dysfluency. However, intensive speech therapy can increase fluency by removing those maladaptations and routing speech through default pathways.

We're going to tackle these problems now by turning the scientific research into an actionable plan: to either make the most of a speech therapy experience or use an equally-effective self-directed program. This section also addresses mental health since anxiety disorders and avoidant behavior patterns can prevent stutterers from utilizing their newfound fluency.

This journey is how we put an end to the suffering and get to a place of durable safety.

Speech Therapy

To best replicate the neuroplastic improvements observed in the studies of Luc De Nil, Christian Kell, and Katrin Neumann, we should aim to replicate their interventions.

It's important to note that these studies used intensive programs - multiple hours per day for two-to-three weeks - yet many stutterers seeking treatment attend only one speech therapy session per week.

While I did not find any studies on the neuroplastic effects of weekly sessions, research on other disorders has shown that weekly programs produce less neuroplastic change than intensive ones; in other words, fifty hours of therapy over three weeks will be more effective than fifty hours spread over five months. These findings suggest that stutterers who are not satisfied with their progress in weekly sessions should consider switching to an intensive program.

Most intensive speech programs largely follow the same patterns a

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.

When I got home, they were still there.

What did 0 say to 8 ?

" Nice Belt "

So What did 3 say to 8 ?

" Hey, you two stop making out "

I won't be doing that today!

[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.

There hasn't been a post all year!

You take away their little brooms

It was about a weak back.

Why

Where ever you left it 🤷‍♀️🤭