The CBB

/m n ŋ/ <m n n ŋ> /p b t d k ɡ q/ <p b t d k q> /(t͡ɕ)/ <ç> /f v s z ʃ ʒ (x) ʁ h/ <g v s z ş j h ğ h> /l j w/ <l ı w> /r/ <р> /ɘ~ɪ ʉ ə ʊ/ <i ü y u> /əj~ɘj ʊw~əw~ʉw~ɘw <ı w> /i̯ɘ y̯ʉ~ø~œ u̯o/ <е ö о> /æ ɑ/ <ä а> That usage of <y> and <ı> seems kind of... exactly backward from what I'd expect, both b...

Then again, if we exclude recent(-ish) loanwords, Hungarian doesn't really have word-initial clusters at all, AFAIU. This does in fact seem to be the case too. It's particularly noticeable in the word Görög (Greek). There's also words like iskola 'school' - or indeed the aforementioned István – whi...

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/35134811.pdf says Hungarian does have some word-initial three-consonant clusters. I'm quite sure most European languages have those by now... Kind of inevitable when people are highly literate, orthographies are mostly phonemic and new scientific and technological co...

:hun: föld "earth, soil, field" :eng: field I would have guessed this was a borrowing from some variety of German but evidently not For what it's worth, Hungarian Wiktionary does suggest that it's "maybe" a borrowing from German Feld . There's also the possibility in cases like this that the associ...

Portuguese(/Iberian and Neapolitan) o ' DEF.ART.MASC ' and Romanian o ' INDF.ART.FEM ' have been causing me some annoyance recently... I see a sequence like Rom. o casă 'a house' and I immediately want to parse it as definite. By extension I guess Portuguese a ' DEF.ART.FEM ' also adds to this, bec...

It's strange, yeah, but how can you control your feelings like that? Could you please cut it out with the 'everyone but me is a heartless monster' business, please? I kind of doubt that was the intended interpretation. Again, benefit of the doubt, and all that. Most people probably experience some ...

So *waćV is PU reconstruction for a shamelike thing? What is the PU form for 'stomach'? My understanding of Uralistics is very fragmented. Honestly, I think the only people who have anything more than a fragmented understanding of (historical) Uralistics are those who study it as a full-time job. A...

How is that obvious? "Shame" is a classic example of a thick moral concept - it's a complicated concept that only exists within a particular culture and is extremely difficult to translate. Indeed, I'd say it's only just hanging on to existence in modern Western culture (philosophers have a concept...

A false friend that has been causing me some trouble: In (written) Finnish, the 123 singular pronouns start with m~s~h. In the related North Sami, they start with m~d~s, and this change of the initial s- is really throwing me off. Cf. Finnish s(in)ä , s(in)ut 'you-NOM, you-ACK' with North Sami son ...

Wow, thank you. Wasn't expecting that. Sorry for snapping. I instinctively react badly to silencing tactics. It's okay. I was too quick on the draw, too. There's been a lot of people sharing bad information on my Facebook feed, so I suppose I'm primed to expect it. Yeah, there seem to have been a f...

My parents are insufferable. Literal denialists in the midst of a pandemic and calling me an idiot millennial for actually listening to medical experts who know what they're talking about. Nothing but "why can't we believe what we want to believe" and "well, it's not literally killing me this insta...

I guess, in the interests of clarity, I'll explain what I disagreed with to begin with, in simple terms. Thanks, this does help clarify a few things. At the very least, it seems to confirm my suspicion that we were approaching this from completely different viewpoints. Thing is, I didn't mean to de...

Right. There's also the minor issue that a private business has absolutely no obligation to respect your "freedom of speech" on their platform in the first place. They certainly have a moral obligation! I'd say they also have a moral obligation to, say, not aid in the spread of dangerous misinforma...

Right. There's also the minor issue that a private business has absolutely no obligation to respect your "freedom of speech" on their platform in the first place. They certainly have a moral obligation! I'd say they also have a moral obligation to, say, not aid in the spread of dangerous misinforma...

We've just had someone at work kick off about how YouTube has started demonetising videos that mention the words "coronavirus" and "COVID-19", saying that it's an "affront to freedom of speech", and how one streaming site has, apparently, completely banned people from saying those words at all. I'd...

Thank you guys. [:D] I wanted to know after a friend asked me a question about it. He's reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and took note of some German names in the book that seem to employ both strategies, e.g. "Bürgerbräukeller" written as "Buergerbräukeller". I assumed that was just a ...

Although "bolt" has a short vowel. Like holt, colt, dolt and molt. Wow, I pronounce those words just like "bold", "hold", "cold", "doled", and "mold", except with a /t/ (phonetically a glottal stop) instead of a /d/ at the end, respectively. Are the short vowel pronunciations the standard British p...

Well, kind of. In general, though, doubled consonant letters in English are exactly the same as single ones, so <xx> = <x> = /ks/. Doubling a letter can do weird things. Normally C is pronounced /s/ before E, I, or Y, but when you double the C in "tic" or "soc", you get "ticcing" or "soccer", which...

"Beta-buxxer" (an incel term for settled-down boring straight men with boring wives) has a double X. So does "Maxxinista" (an avid TJ Maxx shopper). I would imagine people avoided doubling the X because X is pronounced /ks/, so writing "Maxx" would really be writing "Maksks", and writing "anti-vaxx...

Short vowels are followed by doubled consonants, long vowels by single consonants. Its such a good spelling rule that even people who don't consciously know it have generally internalised it. [...] "salixing" (the act of encasing in Latinate willow products) doesn't have two 'x's because it's a wor...