Language Evolution, it's Fantastic, it's Incredible

[science_man_88]

Originally Posted by a1call

It depends on language and even race.

My Russian grandmother could not pronounce "H" and would pronounce the words containing it as "kh".

A South American friend could not pronounce the sound of "kh" no matter how hard she tried.

Arabic does not have the letter equivalent of "P" or "JH" which is why after the Arab conquest of Persia most of the "P" containing Persian words were pronounced with "F" instead such as "Parsi" to "Farsi".

English does not have the pronunciations for "JH", "KH", "GH"

There is an South-African letter/sound that is made by clicking the tongue from the roof of the mouth which is absent in every other known language.

There are sounds that can be made by human phonics which is not present in any known language. You can make one such a sound by pronouncing "N" by touching your upper lip by your tongue. It will sound a letter in between "N" and "M"

I think old voice synthesizers had 256 phonics which was sufficient but sounded robot-like.

In German there are about 2500 Diphones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech...hone_synthesis

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/ex...glish-language

Inevitably some are Multinyms.

http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/...multinyms.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWDKsHm6gTA&app=desktop

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by xilman

Two nations divided by a common language.

My girlfriend is English/Bajan. Her business partner is American/Bajan. I'm Canadian/English/Bajan. Oh, the joys of misinterpretation that can involve!

My girlfriend is in a meeting, and needs some information which she doesn't have on hand, so she calls her partner and says "can you please look in my purse, it's there.

Her partner looks through her purse, and doesn't find the information. My girlfriend comes back from the meeting and looks in her wallet, and finds the information needed.

TL;DR: To English women, their purse is their wallet. What North Americans' would call a purse is instead their handbag.

[CRGreathouse]

Originally Posted by science_man_88

How many sounds can a human voice make ... ?

As a quick estimate, Wikipedia has:
The total phonemic inventory in languages varies from as few as 11 in Rotokas and Pirahã to as many as 141 in !Xũ.

I would argue that phonemes is what you want to measure here; although, for example, the L sound in "pool" is different from the L sound in "leaf", they're close enough to be lumped together, and that lumped-together group is called a phoneme. These vary quite a lot across languages, of course, and are a large part of what give languages their phonetic character.

[CRGreathouse]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

The proto-germanic word for "to have" sounds almost exactly the same as the word with the same meaning in Latin, but they come from very different proto-Indo-European roots.

Let us all re-emphasize: "sounding similar (or the same)" is not how one concludes that two words (or languages) are related.

Let me just leave this here; it can't replace a good textbook but it looks like a good overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...d_(linguistics)

[a1call]

Originally Posted by CRGreathouse

Let me just leave this here; it can't replace a good textbook but it looks like a good overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...d_(linguistics)

Strange URL:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comp..._(linguistics))


The board parser had real difficulty with it.

ETA: Noted, thank you.

[a1call]

This is an interesting article about Click-Consonant, with voice recordings. There is a lot more to it than I thought:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant

[a1call]

I can't decipher the f like letter in this writing used instead of s along with s and f.

Such as "who loft his life".

The only thing I can figure is that it is the typeface of s when used in the middle of a word, but then again there is the word Husband in the same text.

I also don't understand the rules for capital letters used.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...k_memorial.jpg


Wiktionary is no help:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lost

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_En...Latin_alphabet

Any clues?

Thanks in advance.

[CRGreathouse]

This is called a long s, an alternate form of the letter "s"; the general rule is that the form "s" was used at the ends of words and "ſ" at the beginning and in the middle. It was very common in the 1700s and rare past the early 1800s.

[CRGreathouse]

Originally Posted by a1call

The only thing I can figure is that it is the typeface of s when used in the middle of a word, but then again there is the word Husband in the same text.

Oh yes, you pretty much figured it out. Generally compound words are treated as separate words for the purpose of long s, and I think husband is being treated this way as well (although certainly today it would not be considered a compound).

Originally Posted by a1call

I also don't understand the rules for capital letters used.

As in German, the nouns were capitalized.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by a1call

English does not have the pronunciations for "JH", "KH", "GH"

It's richt bricht nicht the nicht at Loch Ness.

Much the same could be said about the conditions at Lough Neagh

Please don't tell an English man how to pronounce English.

[a1call]

Thank you CRGreathouse,

Looks like you are profuse in more than just mathematics and programming.

Now if you could only learn how to use Pari-GP.