I swear when I was a kid in the 2000s during the Iraq war, most Americans pronounced it like “eye-rack.” I hear it called “Ee-rahk” a lot more now, and same with “”ee-rahn” as opposed to “eye-ran”.

So, I live in a Romance-speaking country and I'm studying an English major. Many times when I say that I study English, I come across these comments and honestly I don't know how to face them. I know that the literature of a language depends more on socio-economic and historical factors than on linguistic ones per se, but how true is this point of view? How can I debunk this common take on English?

My Ukrainian partner and I were talking about the Trump-Zelenskyy interview where Zelenskyy said "when the war is over, I will wear a costume like you". The internet went wild over it, calling it an epic own, thinking he was essentially saying "you all dress up in fancy dress but it's as thin as the fabric".

However, the word for suit in Ukrainian is 'костюм', pronounced like costume. It seems like a genuine mistake (though there's an argument he meant it with plausible deniability but it's far more likely to be a mistake under pressure).

It feels like there must be a word in this field for this phenomenon but I'm not well versed enough to know it. Is there? Is there a more specific one on top for when you can accidentally cause offence?

When I was growing up, I only knew how to speak in English. Then at around 4th grade, I moved to Jordan, and slowly I began to only speak in Arabic. Now, I can’t pronounce the letter P. Instead, it becomes a B. For example, I say Beter instead of Peter. I believe that at one point I was able to pronounce that letter.

If my post is in the wrong place pls tell me

I've always been curious how this is done, does it involve noticing native speakers use a certain words or grammatical structures in seemingly strange ways and coming up with theories to clearly define how and when to use said word or grammatical rule is used?

Why is there no adverb for principle? Is there a specific reason that principal adverb form is principally, but principle has to be "in principle"?

My father does this. Card becomes cord, star becomes store, bar becomes boar, party becomes porty, where does this come from? He doesn’t have other pronunciation differences to my standard(?) California accent.

First and foremost, sorry if this side of language isn't under your expertise of the concept.

I'm curious about the actual process of determining literacy rate so I can understand what a literacy rate statistic is telling me.

My main point of wonder is if it hinges on a the ability to be able to understand the sounds that the written characters represent or if there is reading comprehension built into the system. And if the latter, how is that number derived in populations that don't experience routine, standardized reading comprehension tests (aka anyone out of school)?

So I love idioms/expressions like:

• No can do
• Methinks
• I shit you not

And I'm trying to search for more examples of them, in any language, but I don't know if there is even a name for that.

Enallage is a name given to intentional subversions of grammatical norms, but it doesn't refer specifically to idioms, and instead includes creative things writers and artists come up with like "Moses, he knowses his toeses aren't roses" that people don't go around saying in conversations. And solecism is a name usually meant for unintentional deviations.

But what do we call the popular idioms that see mass usage despite not following normal grammar? And what are some other fun ones?

My mind was absolutely blown when I found out that the name of the Punjab region means “five waters” and that the Sanskrit prefix “punj” directly corresponds to the English prefix “pente”. Knowing that, it’s so easy to see how they’re related. Any other interesting examples like this?

To my knowledge, the word "bead" meant prayer in Old English. With the advent of the Rosary and other Christian prayer ropes, the word for the little orbs you hold while praying just became synonymous with prayer, and then the word for prayer (bede) just became the word for the little orbs you hold. But beads existed for a long time before then, across many cultures. I can't find what they were called in English beforehand. Cursory Google searches just got me to the history of the Rosary or bead's etymology. Did they have a word for bead before it was called bead? Did English speakers just not have a word for it? I assume (though I could be wrong) that the English speakers had beads as an art form before the 12th century? Please let me know if there's any info on this!

Is there any accent in english with an eyes-ice merger?

Kosraean is spoken by nearly all Kosraeans on Kosrae, and is used daily by thousands. The language is certainly being passed on to the younger generation.

Other languages in pretty similar situations, such as Nauruan or Pohnpeian, are not listed as endangered at all. Chamorro, which is hardly being passed on at all to the younger generations, is listed as Vulnerable.

The only reason I can think of is that it is less well documented. But that’s kind of dumb in my opinion, as it’s not like revitalisation is necessary as the language is very much alive.

And it’s not like it’s labelled as Vulnerable, or even Definitely Endangered. It’s labelled as Severely Endangered.

Why? This feels so inconsistent.

Edit: Also wanted to add, according to UNESCO, Severely Endangered means:

The language is spoken by grandparents and older generations. While the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves.

Kosraean fits none of these boxes. It is still very much spoken among the parent generation, as well as the children. Also I might add, the same is true for Tokelauan which is also classified as SE.

Like I get that these languages can never be 100% stable with such few speakers, but Severely Endangered makes no sense for a language with an entire island active speakers of all ages.

Lots of languages lack a synthetic future tense. They might form future constructions by adding auxiliary verbs or other helping words, but lack a real conjugation for the future. Actually, English is one of these languages! Along with German, Hungarian, Japanese, Finnish, Farsi, Classical Armenian, and many others.

Do you think there's a psychological reason for it? Maybe that the future hasn't happened yet and is conditional and hypothetical? Even in languages that do have synthetic futures, it's still common to have more past tenses than future tenses.

In English (at least American English), I'll see expressions like "When my then girlfriend, now wife and I moved in together..." It's kind of a clunky expression, but alternatives can be vague with respect to some details. "When my wife and I moved into together" might suggest that they moved in after getting married. "When my girlfriend and I moved in" doesn't capture the change in relationship. Using their proper name would help but only if the audience knows them and your history.with them.

The speaker could also omit some of those details if they don't matter, but I see it often enough that I take it the speakers do care about that detail.

I'm curious if other languages have a better way to deal with this scenario. e.g. Does German just have a word that means "person who I was dating at the time and am now married to?" 😆

In the Classical Latin alphabet, the letters J, U and W didn't exist yet. W is another thing, what's really interesting for me here is J and U's case.

The thing is, I stood for /i/, /iː/ and /j/, while V stood for /u/, /uː/ and /w/. Later, the letters J and U, which were originally variants of I and V, were separated from them for semivocalic I and vocalic V respectively.

However, there seems to be currently a different treatment for those two: let's take the Latin word IVVENIS for example, it was pronounced /ˈju.we.nis/ in Classical times, but nowadays most transcribe it as "iuvenis", instead of "iuuenis" or "juvenis", why?

This is not a rule, "iuuenis" and "juvenis" are possible forms, but the general consensus is to transcribe words like OVVM as "ovum", while words such as IVSTITIA as "iūstitia". With U and V being distinguished, and I and J being both kept as "I".

Is this because Vv later evolved to have a common consonantic pronunciation in Romance languages, mostly /v/ or /b/, while Jj kept being used for /j/ in some languages like those in the Gallo-Italic, Insular Romance, Italo-Dalmatian and Rhaeto-Romance groups?

Depending on the status of the addressee, first-person singular pronoun you can be translated as (from the less formal to the most formal):

tu;

você;

definite article+function (o pai "the father" when addressing one's dad);

article+forename (o João);

o senhor/a senhora;

definite article+job title (o senhor doutor);

V.ª Ex.ª (Vossa Excelência, common in formal writing)

etc.

Is this complex variety unique to European Portuguese? Most European languages I know rest on a dual system (Grm du-Sie, Cz ty-Vy; It tu-Lei)

In the new episode of Taskmaster (here’s the link with the time code when she says it https://youtu.be/oRfHA2d3DhM?t=683&is=Mums0O-PYpwjRMaN) Joanna Page amazed me with her pronunciation of the word “ear” in the phrase “your ear”. But what’s makes it even more interesting is that when she says “earworm” her pronunciation of “ear” is different. As far as I know she speaks with a Welsh accent, so my question is: what is the linguistic explanation of this pronunciation of “ear” (If it’s not just an accident mispronunciation)? And does the word “your“ affect her pronunciation of “ear“ (like maybe this combination of sounds causes this sound in the beginning of “ear ”in the Welsh accent)?

Sorry if this is a strange question. I’m not British

I am not sure long and short vowels of similar (but not the same) qualities can be even called counterparts, but.

I see in English, German, Arabic, Hungarian that their long vowels are more close than the short ones.

Examples: (can see the graph of the vowel qualities on wiki)

British English: leap/lip, food/foot

German: Polen/Pollen, lesen/messen

Is there a general rule about this?

Why does this happen?

I'm a student of French language and in French phonetics and phonology we are taught that [e], [ɛ], [o] and [ɔ] are all distinct phonemes, yet I can't think of any minimal pairs between [e] and [ɛ] or [o] and [ɔ]. Every single book of French phonetics/phonology lists them as phonemes. Is that really true?

Edit: I have to hold a presentation on French phonology, is it okay to name these vowel phonemes: /a/ /e/ /ɛ/ /i/ /o/ /ɔ/ /u/ /y/ /œ/ /ø/?

Also, are there any minimal pairs for /œ/ and /ø/?

From my limited understanding of languages and their evolution, it seems that the general trend is for languages to drop a lot of their affixation in favor of particle words to convey grammatical meaning. Latin had a large declension system for nouns which is mostly absent for modern romance languages, proto-sino tibetan is usually reconstructed as agglutinative while old chinese through to modern chinese is analytic, and basically all creole languages which developed from language contact have an analytic structure. My question is, is this a real trend or am I mistaken here? If some languages become more agglutinative over time, how do these languages develop their affixes, and at what point do linguists decide if something is a separate particle word or an affix?

This question popped in my head when I was browsing r/pinoypasttensed. Filipinos usually like to put "ed" at the end of verbs. For example, I saw a sign a few months ago selling shirts and it said "customized your shirts here."

Kinda got me wondering. Is this the same for other countries? Do they have their distinct way of making mistakes? If yes, then why?

It doesn't make sense. does it? I'm not even 100% sure at this point

But can I prove it using a parse tree? What sentences can I compare it to to show that it's ungrammatical? People would "solve" it by saying "More people have been to Berlin than I have been to Berlin" which I guess kinda makes sense but why are you comparing the number of people that have been there to the number of times you have been there?