linguistics

Early farmers in southern Scandinavia helped to influence Proto-Indo-European language.

I have just read this BBC article: Celebrity names you're probably saying wrong. The celebrities in question are often Americans with non-English surnames (German, Dutch, French, Italian, etc.) and they claim that many people pronounce their name wrong. That may be true as most Americans have no...

Which languages can you correctly pronounce? Which languages do you understand? Which languages do you speak fluently or at a native speaker's level?

I have come across four or five forumites of Sicilian background, with a good grasp of Sicilian, its linguistic history, etc, and I thought it might warrant its own thread - noting I have made a habit of waylaying other threads, which I prefer not to do. Either way, the linguistic history of...

http://vocaroo.com/i/s1HaoDTy1Jhk Here I am speaking Armenian. What languages does it sound like?

http://vocaroo.com/i/s1yQXzDh8yZU Can you guess what language I am speaking here? Please vote.

French language has become weirdly corrupted and illogical over time. It has even been said that the French are so rational and cerebral because it is necessary to understand all the grammatical oddities of their language. Let's have a look at the word aujourd'hui, meaning today. In most...

A major new linguistic study led by Dr Morten Christiansen, professor of psychology and director of Cornell's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab found that most languages use similar sounds for common objects, body parts or adjectives. The study analysed the 100 most commons words in 3700 languages (62%...

There are hundreds of English loanwords in French, like in most languages. The Académie française tried to create new French words like courriel for email to keep the language pure from yet another Germanic invasions (forgetting that French was originally the language of the Franks and possess...

This poll is inspired by the favorite Romance language poll and thread. What is your favorite Germanic language, and, if you are willing, why? You may base your favorite on anything - the phonology, look of the writing system, grammar, literature, music, or associated culture. If you are a...

What language did Haplogroup I1-bearing peoples speak most frequently before Indo-European? I am looking for your own opinion and/or speculation based on what you know of the research. Nobody is going to be called out on the correctness of their answer. If you believe that I1 peoples spoke...

One of the most painful aspects of learning to spell correctly when learning a French or English is to know when to use double consonants. This is all the more irritating when learning both languages, because for unknown reasons French and English linguists have decided to use practically the...

Listen to this audio reconstruction of what Proto-Indo-European language of R1a and R1b people might have sounded like 6,000 years ago in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. Here is the explanation from Archeology.com.

Many linguists have attempted to reconstruct how the original Proto-Indo-European numerals may have sounded like. Unfortunately they tend to end up with overly theoretical prototypes that are unlikely to have ever been uttered by people. Here are two examples of reconstructed dating from 1995...

Inspired by a recent discussion, which will hopefully soon be moved here, the idea is to collect place names that are obviously not of Roman, Greek or Celtic origin (and also not Germanic or Arab) but relate to older languages, as a base to identify ancient population movements and trade...

I have searched the web for a list of phonemes by language, but couldn't find any. Therefore I thought it would be useful to compile one from scratch. Of course the number of phonemes will vary within a same language depending on the regional varieties (especially for English, which is spoken...

PIE: *T + T, *"TT" (two dental stops) has an "s" between them "TsT" giving "st" in Greek. If the ancient Greeks encountered a language and a word within that language where a set of coronal stops like "tt" was present and the Greeks interpreted the sound of this set of coronal stops as dental...

We have discussed this topic extensively in various threads on the forum over the years, but there doesn't seem to be one thread dedicated to the subject. I will summarise my thoughts here so that I don't have to repeat myself every time. As I have explained in my R1b history, between 2500 and...

​What is the next step? Would it be too difficult considering the various political structures of member states, languages, lifestyles and cultures?

We have hypothesised in Germanic words of non-IE origin that Proto-Germanic borrowed a few common words from indigenous pre-IE Scandinavians. I believe that there may be a much bigger proportion of Latin and Greek words (including those inherited in modern Romance languages) that are not...