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Sounds and spelling of Spanish

This post summarises the spelling and pronunciation of Spanish. I discuss below mainly standard Spanish of Spain (Castilian), but point out a few of the differences for Spanish regions and Latin America. Spanish Alphabet The Spanish alphabet includes: 26 letters also used in the English alphabet (though <k> and <w> are rare, used mainly in…… Continue reading Sounds and spelling of Spanish

Rhotic consonants

Sounds similar to the English sound spelled with the letter <r> are called rhotics. This post looks at rhotics. Rhotics are named after the Ancient Greek letter ρ (rho). Rhotics vary greatly in their: manner of articulation; and place of articulation. Manner of articulation Different rhotics are produced in different manners: as a trill (repeated…… Continue reading Rhotic consonants

Odds and ends: English

This post deals with some small aspects of English, grouped under the following headings: Spelling pronunciation meanings mass noun or count noun? word or phrase word histories 1.    Spelling 1a. Bookkeeper Bookkeeper (and related bookkeeping) is one of the few English words with 3 double letters in a row: oo-kk-ee. https://whenyouwrite.com/ points out: an English…… Continue reading Odds and ends: English

Cognate, etymon, reflex

An important concept in historical linguistics is cognacy. Words are said to be cognates if they descend directly from the same word in an earlier stage of the same language or in an ancestral language. For example, the German word Feuer (‘fire’) and English fire are cognates. They both derive from the corresponding word *fōr in the Proto-Germanic language.…… Continue reading Cognate, etymon, reflex

Language or dialect

Two language varieties are often regarded as separate languages if they differ greatly and if speakers of each variety cannot easily understand the other variety.  They are often viewed as dialects of a single language if they differ little and if their speakers can readily understand each other. In between those extremes, there is no clear distinction between a…… Continue reading Language or dialect

North, south, east and west

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Romance languages acquired 2 sets of words for points of the compass: some languages spoken in areas with Atlantic coastlines had nautical terms borrowed from English, via French into Spanish and Portuguese. other languages had words used in the Mediterranean, originating in Italian and spreading to Provençal, Catalan…… Continue reading North, south, east and west

I don’t know if ‘whether’ can survive

It often irritates me when people use if when they could have used whether. What annoys me? It is the fact that using if in those cases can cause ambiguity. That is because in English if has 2 meanings: as a synonym for whether expressing a condition In many cases the context makes it clear…… Continue reading I don’t know if ‘whether’ can survive

‘Syntactic doubling’ of Italian consonants

Single Italian consonants become pronounced as double (long) consonants (‘geminates’) if they follow: a stressed vowel some short unstressed words The Italian name for this process is raddoppiamento syntattico (‘syntactic (re)doubling’), or sometimes rafforzamento fonosyntactico (‘phonosyntactic stregntening’). ‘Syntactic’ refers to the fact that the doubling crosses word boundaries, unlike in word-internal geminate consonants as in [gattto] ‘cat’…… Continue reading ‘Syntactic doubling’ of Italian consonants

Hungarian and Finnish share more words than you might think

Hungarian and Finnish are both members of the Uralic family of languages but separated around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. https://languagemiscellany.com/2024/01/the-uralic-languages/ Some Hungarian and Finnish words still sound (and look) quite similar. Indeed, Hajdu (1975) points out that it is possible to construct complete (albeit artificial) sentences using words of similar form, for example: Kala…… Continue reading Hungarian and Finnish share more words than you might think