Dear linguaphiles ( Read more... )

Hey, everyone! Guess who's going to try and teach herself Chinese again ( Read more... )

Part 1: phonemic inventory and phonotactics

I wonder if anyone had tried to compile a list of minimal phoneme sequences that are unique for a language or a tightly-knit group of languages, for as many languages as possible. In other words, what are the shortest snippets that one needs to hear to identify languages or language groups?

This text was posted on a fail blog. It's probably fake, but I'm curious. Can anyone shed any light on this ( Read more... )

Beware of possibly incoherency due to lack of sleep ( Read more... )

Hello hello. I could really use some IPA transcription for how to pronounce the following names/words in their respective languages, since none of those languages are my forte and reading the phonology pages on Wikipedia is not something I really have time for on this. XD I have some idea about a few of these, but anything that can be provided ( Read more... )

I have a phonetics class focused solely on pronunciation in English (none of us are native speakers). My friend and I have a presentation on dental fricatives next week, which sounds pretty straightforward, but the teacher told us not to focus on the theory so much and make it 'original' and 'interactive'. Basically, she told us to think of some ( Read more... )

So please do correct me if the following is wrong:

Someone posted this on Tumblr:


( Read more... )

As I am watching my own child and other children growing and mastering their mother tongue (Ukrainian), I cannot help noticing that toddlers definitely find it easier to pronounce palatalized coronal consonants [dʲ], [tʲ], [lʲ], [nʲ] [sʲ], [zʲ], etc., especially in word-final position (like [tutʲ] instead of [tut] "here" or making the ending of ( Read more... )