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Handwritten Arabic distinguishes letters by connectedness. For instance, medial ذ looks similar to medial ن, but ذ is unconnected in contrast to ن (لنل vs. لذل). Connectedness is thus integral to Arabic script. Using isolated "block forms" would make it clunky and require very wide spaces to mark word bounderies (cf. ل ن ل). Arabic letters used to be writted partially above each another, with many ligatures. The modern style stretches them along a line. This required less blocks for printing.

Cursive printed text was used with Sütterlin (vs. Fraktur) pre-WWII for informal texts and children books in German (e.g. https://www.amazon.de/Struwwelpeter-Ausgabe-Sütterlin-Schrift-Walter-Sauer/dp/3937467580/ref=asc_df_3937467580/?tag=googshopde-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=310734722334&hvpos=1o2&hvnetw=g&hvrand=4658460547234564962&hvpone=&hv...)

You're basically looking for something like Linguistic Field Methods.

Some universities allow you to focus on language documentation, which is what I did, actually.

>Also, is there any set of sentences for getting it's grammar completely by translating them?

It's way more complicated than that.

Actually, it was historically pronounced with a /t/ (hence the t in the spelling). The /t/ was lost in the 1600's, but has begun to be reintroduced in recent times.

Source:

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/often

I found The Language Hoax by John McWhorter pretty good (even though I don't like him otherwise): It's quite readable and very brief. despite its brevity, it discusses most (all?) of the cases that are typically thrown around when discussing linguistic relativity, and he's not dismissive of that kind of research, but shows critical appreciation for the sometimes very convoluted/ingenious study designs

No good reason; potentially entirely random. English has rather complex fricatives.

I'm almost sure Japanese has no phenomic dipthongs; it certainly has phonetic dipthongs.

Here're some examples; to my ears all of the pronunciations are definitely [ai].

I can't tell you any more, I'm afraid - it was my best guess as someone who has taught Deaf students and also has a linguistics degree.

Something like Remembering the Hanzi takes an approach that doesn't focus too much on sound with more focus on meaning. I've only used the Japanese equivalent, though, so I don't know how similar it is.

I don't think I've ever heard "they is". Singular 'they' takes plural verb forms, in my experience, without exception.

Looking at google ngrams, that seems to be backed up. It's important to note that this is not in any way a scientific test. Nor is it even particularly fair as a non-rigorous comparison, as there's no way to separate the singular they uses of 'they are' from the plural they uses. But when 'they is' falls two orders of magnitude (actually a factor of almost 200 at the most recent point) below 'she is', it seems safe to assume it's a very uncommon usage.

Modern Italian would probably be the best choice among the Romance languages. In fact, even as recently as the 1300s, the Italian dialects were still referred to as "Latin".

Reference: https://books.google.com/books?id=pE2N7noPfEoC&lpg=PA131&ots=sbPTUmXdHY&dq=italian%20language%20dante%20latin&pg=PA131#v=onepage&q=italian%20language%20dante%20latin&f=false

I hear “mother of all” in my dialect of English (Australian). Not particularly frequently, but I wouldn’t think it was unusual for someone to say it.
It’s also in the Cambridge and Webster online dictionaries.

It's sometimes used as a contraction for "you is" in AAVE. For example in the first track on Dr. Dre's "The Chronic" he uses the phrase "You'se a penguin lookin' motherfucker."

http://genius.com/Dr-dre-the-chronic-intro-lyrics/

It was more popular in the 1800's than the 1900's in general which is weird because lech came from lecher. I guess the latter saw a resurgance for some reason.

Here's a link to the graph for both. You can enter any terms you want in the top to see when they were most used. Note though that almost any term will spike up in the 2000's simply cause we have more material from then in the first place.

I would say that particular usage of 'X and I' in object position is due to hypercorrection. If I had to hazard a guess, I imagine that particular usage hearkens back to Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, which has been extremely influential on school-taught 'grammar'.

Then start with an introduction to general linguistics. There are many out there, some can be found online for free. Pick a book, not a blog or website. This is an example, you can often find used copies of older editions of it online for very little money.

here there is a second hand copy for 17€

and here a new copy for 22€

Langauge files is also fairly popular and you can likely find a cheap copy of an older edition. If you really try you can also find books online free.

> because you have not provided sources when asked about an actual claim you have the burden of proof about.

sorry, what? did you not read my replies? I directly mentioned two authors which have made the explicit claim in question. If you need it, here's the link to the relevant book. It contains additional sources on the matter. Although less explicit, McWhorter's book is also relevant.

> The links you posted are completely irrelevant to the issue we are discussing here.

They are not. They explicitly test whether L1 influences ease of acquisition of L2 features. Which is one of the topics at hand.

You still haven't provided a single source, even a crappy one, for your claim. This whole discussion would have been avoided if you could just follow the god damn rules of the sub.

Interesting. This contradicts a lot of recent phonetics research I'm seeing on Google Scholar that treats ATR and tenseness as equivalent. One example from 2014:

>At this point, articulation feeds back on perception: If speakers hypo-articulate, then allophonic distinctions will tend to be acoustically less distinct than comparable phonemic distinctions. Indeed, such patterns have sometimes been reported (e.g., Gick, Pulleyblank, Campbell, & Mutaka, 2006, report that, in Kinande, the high vowels, phonemically contrastive in tenseness or advanced tongue root [ATR], are articulatorily more distinct than the low vowels that differ only allophonically in ATR; see also Johnson & Babel, 2010; Spears, 2006; Ussishkin & Wedel, 2009). I

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amanda_Seidl/publication/261564527_Acoustic_correlates_of_allophonic_versus_phonemic_dimensions_in_monolingual_and_bilingual_infants'_input/links/551ab1c20cf2bb754076cbf7.pdf

But perhaps ATR is only a subset of tenseness, meaning you can have tense/lax distinction without ATR. Also, these sources make these comments in passing which could give way to simplification, so I would like to see some clarification of the affinities and differences between tenseness and ATR.

According to OED, its first known use was around 1230, used in the street name, "Gropecunt Lane." I read a version of Canterbury Tales that had the word as well, in the Miller's Tale, but that may have simply been the translator's decision.

Scholars aren't sure, but think it originated out of Proto Germanic languages, and is linked to many forms, in Germanic and Norse languages, to forms of "kont," "konte," and other various forms, originally meaning "prostitute."

If you ever have a question about the etymology or age of a word, just check out the Oxford English Dictionary website. It has pretty much any available information on every word it has access to.

Check out Romance Languages: A historical introduction by Alkire and Rosen (2010), and see section 2.1 (pages 26-28) and 9.5.1 (pages 217-218).

https://www.amazon.com/Romance-Languages-Historical-Introduction-Alkire/dp/0521717841

Because modern greek helps me read the news earlier than waiting for the US to wake up.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gr.kathimerini.kathimerini_app

I have had several instances where this app updates and I get to see the news break for the next day.

But I will def check out Athenaze

The three Austin Powers movies came out in 1997, 1999, and 2002.

The Ngram graph shows that the steadily increasing usage actually dropped in the late 1990's, only to resume its upwards trend in 2000.

On the basis of this, one could argue that the Austin Powers movies actually interrupted the growing usage of the word, rather than spurring it on! Clearly more research is needed...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=randy&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crandy%3B%2Cc0

The ngram database for American English shows that it has long been in use in American English books. However, it clearly had a big helping from American GI exposure to Brits as you can see from the graph.

Spanish -- fair point: /b/ and /v/ have merged, but are preserved in the written language.

In Italian "cioccolato", the doubled "c" actually corresponds to a geminated consonant: it's pronounced <strong>tʃokkoˈlato</strong> rather than *tʃokoˈlato.

There’s this journal article: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/An-Austronesian-Presence-in-Southern-Japan%3A-Early-Summerhayes-Anderson/44636240d95f4542e76a6a42d61b22de5c3f1b8a

The possibility of Austronesians in southern Japan is also discussed here: http://www.rogerblench.info/Language/Austronesian/General/Blench%20Ross%20Festschrift%20paper%20revised.pdf

Short answer: read a lot

Longer Answer: Extensive Reading. Read just to read. Read the news. Read stories. Read reddit posts. Just read. Choose what to read based on what interests you. Don't choose what to read because of vocabulary or grammar lists. Don't read and then take a test on what you read. Just read. Read a lot, and read often.

It's better to choose something that's too easy than it is something that's too hard, but make sure that it's interesting. A good rule of thumb (if it's a book) is to quickly scan a random page and count how many words you don't know. If it's more than 5, it may be too hard.

Check out some of the writings by Willy Renandya (if doing so interests you) who is considered one of the leading experts on the data in support of extensive reading.

Almost definitely no. Perhaps if you could write down what you were saying they may be able to pick out the general concepts due to root words and all.

A good example of this is portuguese/spanish. Many words that are written exactly the same are pronounced very differently to the point that someone unaware would find them unintelligible.

To get a good idea of how different I'm talking about check out this link

Compare how 'OscarP' of Spain says "realmente" and compare it with 'oscarnegrinny' of Brazil.

Obviously since you know what you are looking for you might see how they are similar but in real life speech if both weren't familiar with the others languages they would likely have no clue. Same word, identical meaning, but pronounced quite differently (R in general is pronounced as an 'H' sound in PT).

I found this 2016 paper on "Early Old English Foot Structure" and it mentions syllables with "three or more moras":

> Old English has a large number of monosyllabic words with three or more moras, and words such as lēoht
‘light’, frēond
‘friend’, and torht ‘bright’ could only be made bimoraic by assuming the extrametricality of multiple consonants

https://www.academia.edu/24196378/Early_Old_English_Foot_Structure

So it appears that superheavy syllables, including quadrimoraic ones are still accepted, at least in Old English. Nevertheless, it makes sense that this would translate over to modern English, per Hogg.

The closest I could find was a claim in the Wikipedia "mora (linguistics)" article, which said that "most linguists" agreed that no syllable in any language had more than 3 moras. But that claim was unsourced, with a "citation needed" tag, and contradicted by the literature I've found (so I removed it and replaced it with that Hogg source).

No, since each character in Mandarin is a logograph that still represents a spoken word—if you know even just a little about Mandarin as a spoken language, you can still read those logographs and repeat what the writer said word-for-word. This is different from proto-writing, where characters tend to be symbols so you don't have to know something about a spoken language in order to use them.

I think a better example would be writing Shakespeare using emojis (yes, it's a thing) or telling a love story using emoticons.

Interesting theory, and if you superimpose the two words in an Ngram search you get this nice trend after 1965: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=onto%2C(+surjective+*+1000)&amp;year_start=1880&amp;year_end=2000&amp;corpus=15&amp;smoothing=3

Of course then you have to explain why it was even being used before the first occurrence of surjective, and why 'onto' is literally a thousand times more popular than surjective.

1. Through immersion only, it typically takes around 2 years to become socially conversant in a language, 7+ to become 'fluent' (but typically still not to a native level). Direct instruction can hasten progress, as can high levels of motivation and/or need, but not to any extreme degree. If you like, I can find and link my sources for this.

2. People don't all mean the same thing when they say 'fluent'. After 4 years, assuming a decent level of immersion, he was likely proficient in Italian, but only in relevant contexts. There would probably also be higher proficiency in speaking and listening than reading and especially writing.

3. I understand there exist military crash courses in foreign languages. In the US School of Language Studies, the 'easiest' languages to learn take 24 weeks of study and 600 hours to reach 'advanced' proficiency. That's hypothetically 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 6 months. I don't know what exactly they class as 'advanced', but the focus is on 'social and work-related purposes', and especially interactive speaking and listening. Plus no idea to what extent accuracy is considered relative to clarity. See https://www.clozemaster.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/fsi-foreign-service-institute-language-difficulty.png

This is normal in all languages: components simplify. Consonants soften, syllables join, drops begin (e.g., pro-drop -- to hell with a pronoun; know what'm saying).

You'd likely be interested in John McWhorter's Story of Human Language lecture series from The Great Courses. No, I don't work for the company, but they do have a lot of interesting stuff and they often have deals for time-based "unlimited" access. I've also heard rumours about torrented courses usually labelled "TTC" but that's nothing I'd testify to in a courtroom.

Concordancers are essentially just tools for searching corpuses for words or terms in context by revealing the surrounding words or the entire sentences within which they are found. For example, Linguee is an online bilingual concordancer.

They don't necessarily need to list the different results so that the keywords are aligned vertically, but some definitely do.

As for what they are used for, that depends on who's using it. Linguists will use them to try to find contexts in which a word occurs or to see what words, phrases, morphology that commonly accompanies a searched term. Translators will use concordancers (especially bilingual concordancers) to see words in context, find idioms, and/or to see how words were translated in context (generally this is more helpful than traditional dictionaries).

A feline is called Felis in Latin:

https://www.wiktionary.org/wiki/felis#Latin

Cattus is a slang term for feline in Latin:

https://www.wiktionary.org/wiki/cattus#Latin

It came from German, which got it from either Africa or Asia if the etymology on there is to be believed.

Even while including references to well-known linguists such as Jakobson, Langacker, and Sapir, I have to be honest and say I didn't find that Robertson paper all that useful.

Don't get me wrong, if it works for you and you find it useful then great - but in terms of what the paper actually says linguistically I think it's highly dubious.

Mainly, this is because, as a rule, linguists are trying to explore and identify the patterns that are in use, but not produce those patterns themselves - in other words, the observations of linguists do not make for rules for choosing a brand name. At best, it simply suggests factors to think about when brainstorming.

Also of course it's from 1989 so everything in that paper basically predates the Internet and Social Media and I find it hard to believe that the latter won't have had a sizable impact on how brand names are created and graphically designed and presented.

The prefix "e-" for instance (eBook, etc.) and the suffix "dot-com" (e.g. Match.com) couldn't have featured in that paper.

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Not really an book on evolution of language, but similar.

The Atlas of Languages: The Origin and Development of Languages Throughout the World (Facts on File Library of Language and Literature)**OUT OF ... Library of Language and Literature Series) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0816051232/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fabc_01Q35HPNFZXYZSWXF7SG

I have this book and it's useful

if you want a real answer instead of the amateur stuff peddled on this sub, you could pick up this book for a nice primer: https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Language-Guide-Oxford-Linguistics/dp/0198701888

it's true that many answers about the origins of language are lost to the sands of time. but that hasn't stopped researches from investigating whatever evidence they can.

> Fair warning: you’ll have to catch up on 100 years of discussion and research.

Slightly relevant question: What are your (or any other linguistic)'s thoughts on the Language Hoax by John McWhorter as a way of going deeper in this topic? I know a bit about the weak and strong hypotheses but I haven't really delved into linguistics as much as NLP which is only remotely related.

There surely are academic sources but people not using Genitiv has become more or less common knowledge. A few years ago some "proper German"-gatekeeper landed a huge success with a book whining about it. My point is that the classic 4-cases system that learners are tortured with is pretty much just a prescriptionist fantasy. Some dialects (e.g. Berlin) don't even distinguisch between Akkusative and Dative.

It's worth noting that which words are taboo is not static -- words like that vary in how acceptable they are over time as culture and language change. You note a stereotype that older generations tend to be more religious and therefore more averse to cussing, and that may well be true for sexual swear words like "fuck", but it's absolutely not the case for some other types of words. In particular, ethnic slurs are way more taboo now than they once were (and many have fallen out of use entirely: I've only heard the word "Polack" from my grandmother and in Streetcar Named Desire). Relatedly, in the middle ages (roughly, I don't remember the exact time period), religious swear words were far more taboo than sexual ones, whereas the opposite is true even among the most religiously conservative since at least my grandparents' era.

If you're interested in someone talking about this in more depth, check out Melissa Mohr's <em>Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing</em>, as most of what I know about this subject is stuff I half-remember from reading it a couple years ago.

I've been scouring the Internet for the last half hour for you but I can't find my first linguistic book! I loved it. I'll keep looking and get back to you when I find it. It had a yellow cover with the indo European language family tree on the cover, and was called something like the World Tree of Languages. Update: found it. https://www.amazon.com/Tree-Language-Helene-Charlton-Laird/dp/B002BUHG6I/ref=mp_s_a_1_5?keywords=laird+the+tree+of+language&amp;qid=1568813618&amp;s=gateway&amp;sr=8-5

I also like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Romance-Comparative-Introduction-Languages/dp/1475246633/

If you need the super basics, there is Linguistics for dummies. Here.

I have the PDF if you need it and can’t find it, hit my inbox.

Paul Elbourne's Meaning: A Slim Guide to Semantics is fun, simply-written, and a great way to start thinking carefully about language!

To my knowledge there isn't an online translation tool for Old English. UToronto has a dictionary/corpus that may interest you.

If you can get it, the Mitchell and Robinson Guide to Old English is a great book for learning translation (though they do standardize the OE texts substantially).

There's actually a convergence of data points on archeological finds that match cognates in many IE languages, which places the point of origin in the eurasian steppe. So there isn't actually a conflict here, but a synergy of different information painting a stronger picture. You can read Anthony 2010 which is a pretty approachable read on the subject which lays out its reasoning from a multiple-disciplinary perspective.

That there is agreement and not conflict here is pretty typical in general because historical linguistic techniques tend be very good. There have been many finds from historical linguistics that were ahead of other disciplines, such as linguists proving migration patterns based on language data before the discovery of DNA and the subsequent era of genetic testing. For example, linguists were the first to know that the inhabitants of Madagascar came from Indonesia, because they could deduce they spoke a Austronesian language with no obvious substrate. This was later confirmed with DNA testing.