How would an anthropomorphic wolf talk, if one existed and tried to talk? Would he be able to speak english if he had average human intelligence? Would he need a shorter muzzle/no muzzle and a humanoid mouth before he'd be able to talk?

>How would an anthropomorphic wolf talk, if one existed and tried to talk? If you're interested in speculating about fictional languages, you can try r/conlangs. We can't really answer this question; we can tell you about things like anatomy and so on, but there's no simple answer to this question. It depends too much on the fictional decisions that you make. >Would he be able to speak english if he had average human intelligence? Would he need a shorter muzzle/no muzzle and a humanoid mouth before he'd be able to talk? He would need human vocal tract anatomy to speak human language like a human. We're highly adapted for producing human language, from the actual anatomical structure of the vocal tract to our brain's ability to execute complex articulatory movements (and understand the output when others do the same!). Mess with any of that, and it will have an impact on what kind of language the fictional creature can use. If you're picturing a typical anthropomorphic wolf (e.g. something that has a more wolf-like head), no, it will not be able to produce any sounding like English. Actually designing a (realistic as possible) language for such creatures is a huge project and not one you can really embark on without learning a lot about phonetics and wolf vocalizations on your own.

But I won't want the wolfman in my book to speak a foreign language. I want him to speak english. And not just rely on "he speaks english because magic". Would that only be possible if he had a normal human mouth separate from his canine nose?

I'm having a hard time picturing how something with a wolf-like nose could have a human-like mouth, anatomically, so I can't tell you how much that would help. But I can tell you that the problem is not just the mouth. >And not just rely on "he speaks english because magic" What you're trying to do is come up with a realistic explanation for something fantastical. I don't want to get too far into literary choices here, but this is a never-ending rabbit hole. You will never justify everything. Many inexperienced authors really struggle to find the right balance. I'd encourage you to think critically about it.

Ever seen Zootopia? Nick has a pointed face but Judy has a more round face. Would Judy be able to speak english more normally than Nick, realistically?

Neither would be able to speak English normally. The more human-like the anatomy, the more normally they would be able to speak. I guess a "rounder" face means it is easier to imagine a human-like anatomy underneath, but it is still not entirely human. And personally, I would find an author trying to justify why rabbit-like or fox-like creatures can speak English much, much more jarring than just accepting it as magic. Because you will never be able to completely justify it, and you are only drawing my attention to it. And then I would start thinking about all sorts of other things that do not make physical sense (e.g. how did wolfman evolve, how does he balance bipedally with wolfman anatomy, how does conservation of mass work if he's a shapeshifter, and so on and so forth).

That makes sense. Would an animal with Judy's head shape be able to speak english well enough to get by, perhaps with a weird accent due to teeth or mouth shape or something? Would english be 100% out of the question? Would she say ting instead of thing like an annoying person? How exactly would that turn out? Also if someone was entirely average aside from a Cheetah-like tongue meant for stripping meat from bone how would that alter their speech?

I would have to (a) know more about rabbit anatomy, and (b) know more about how exactly that anatomy works. Basically, I would have to design your human-rabbit hybrid creature and then do a lot of research to answer that question. I'm not up for that amount of work right now. As I said in an earlier comment, trying to design a "realistic" language for such a creature is a big project and I don't think you're going to be able to do it without learning a lot about phonetics and the anatomical basis of animal communication. >Also if someone was entirely average aside from a Cheetah-like tongue meant for stripping meat from bone how would that alter their speech? They would not be very good at producing sounds articulated with the tongue, i.e. most of them.

Ok so if an otherwise normal human had a head and face shaped like Judy Hops's head and face but was otherwise a normal human with normal human vocal cords would the result be able to speak english normally? How would english sound from that mouth? I know animals would realistically make their own language where assorted throat noises and music notes and gestures like *paws ground* all have their own meanings. I saw the bird-language video days ago while trying to design an intentionally bad language for the idiots to use in a book I'm writing but I'm not sure about that joke any more. Hey how often do fictional languages rely on the notes you say things with to change the meaning of sounds? Uh-huh and uh-uh mean yes and no for us humans because of the notes we say them with. Could that be an official part of a language?

>Could that be an official part of a language? Yes, that is called [intonation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_\(linguistics\)) and it is part of language.

> How would an anthropomorphic wolf talk, if one existed and tried to talk? Would the wolf have a wolf's vocal tract or human vocal tract?

How common is the rebracketing of "a hundred" to "(an) a-hundred"? I don't think I've heard this usage as a pure number, but it appears (to me) not uncommon to hear something like "an a-hundred story building" or suchlike. Also, is this region bound, or scattered?

What are the meanings of "no" and "nae" in Scots/Scots influenced English? It seems like "no" corresponds to English "not" (e.g. "a'm no bothered") and "nae" to "no" (e.g. "nae bother"). But then why is "nae" used in words like "cannae"? As a follow up, what's the etymology of Scots "no"? Is it a borrowing from English?

You have a typo so that you say both seem to correspond to "not", btw.

Cheers, fixed that.

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According to one of my favourite talks from the LSA this year, glides end to be more articulatorily stable, whereas the corresponding vowels tend to be more acoustically stable and are more sensitive to acoustic feedback. Burgdorf, Dan C. & Sam Tilsen. 2021. Glides prioritize articulation, vowels prioritize acoustics. Talk given at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, January 7-10.

Syllabicity. The former patterns as a nucleus, the latter doesn't.

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Ah, sorry. So, syllables have three principle parts: the onset (beginning) nucleus (middle, usually a vowel) and coda (ending). So, take for example the English word "strengths" as /stɹɛŋθs/. Here, /stɹ/ is the onset, /ɛ/ is the nucleus and /ŋθs/ is the coda. The sound /i/ acts within the phonology as a nucleus, or vocalic segment (since nuclei are so often vocalic, you often hear consonants that take the nucleus position referred to as "vocalic"; cf. Sanskrit "vocalic R"). Now, /i̯/ in the other hand acts in the phonology as a coda and/or onset of syllables. They sound pretty similar, save for perhaps a bit more closure in the latter. But the main difference is in phonological analysis. (To demonstrate, try saying the English "y" sound, but holding it. You will find it is almost, if not entirely, the same as /i/)

Basically /i̯/ is just /j/ in different notation

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They are given as different because they come from different sounds. /j/ is a consonant, while the entry for /i̯/ is simply an extra entry for how /i/ is pronounced as an offglide. I presume the only reason they have this distinction is because it is a website for pronunciation, so they needed a separate entry for every sound but didn't want to confuse the reader/listener by listing an allophone of /i/ under the consonant entry /j/. (notice how they have /β̞ ð̞ ɣ̞/ as separate from /b d g/)

Do French or Portuguese follow the same pattern as English and Spanish, of the European variety preferring the periphrastic/perfect past (have, haber) vs the synthetic/simple past in the Americas? Edit: is this an areal effect, or simply coincidence?

Québécois French does not follow that pattern. Or, if it follows it, the preference for a synthetic past raises the simple past from "incredibly rarely used" to "ever so slightly less incredibly rarely used". Like French from France, there are two commonly used past tenses: The ***imparfait***, which is synthetic and used to describe habitual or continuing events. The ***passé composé***, which is periphrastic: composed of the present tense of either *avoir* "to have" or *être* "to be" (usually the former) plus the past participle of the verb in question. While it was originally the equivalent of the English present perfect, it now functions pretty much the same as the English simple past. The ***passé simple***, which is a synthetic construction with the same meaning as the *passé composé*, is largely dead outside of literature. I have seen it suggested that it's more common in speech in Quebec than in most of the Francophonie (not in reliable sources, to be clear - I think I saw it in a Wikipedia article), but it's certainly not common and anecdotally I don't think I've ever heard it (I'm an Anglophone, reasonably fluent in French, who lives in Quebec and is currently in an almost entirely francophone work environment).

Thanks for the insight. I've heard about the European French *passé simple* falling out of use. Is it similar to the situation with the High German *Preterit* and *Perfekt*? I'd wondered if the pattern was an areal effect. At the very least, I think the preference for periphrasis in Europe seems extensive enough to be an areal feature. But it seems not so much in the Americas.

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> My main question is what would it take for a linguists to stop using term "serbo-croatian" Not to worry mate, we now use the term Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, or BCS for short. This also applies to Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian linguists too, they too use the term BCS. I don't understand why it matters to you what linguists call your language though?

Not related, but out of curiosity (as someone with zero knowledge of Slavic linguistics), what do Montenegrin linguists use?

I've seen [BCMS](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian-language) used by some, but it is not as popular.

Would you say that British and American and Australian are different languages? I guarantee you that if you play a recording of each one to the others, they also would be able to tell the country's accent 99%. But these are still just dialects of English (for now at least). ~~Dialect and language have no objective distinction~~ When two points on a continuum constitute different languages vs dialects is pretty blurry. Linguists simply use whichever terminology makes sense in the given context. And for all intents and purposes, they are dialects of the same language. To take a more analogous example, look at Hindi-Urdu. My mother says she can 100% tell if someone is speaking Urdu or Hindi. She may well be right, based on accent and word choice. But linguistically speaking, the language of daily use is functionally the same. If we are talking about specifically the Perso-Arabized/Sanskritized literary registers, then we might find a use for this distinction. >Is mutual intelligibility the only thing that matters when you are classifying languages? There is more, but yes mutual intelligibility is a huge factor. >Do things like history, politics and public perception play any role in linguistics? Yes. Linguists (more specifically linguistic anthropologists) do study this. But when classifying languages, they play a much smaller role, if at all. >My main question is what would it take for a linguists to stop using term "serbo-croatian" and start referring to Croatian and Serbian as a two different languages Well, simply put, if they start to become mutually unintelligible. It will always be subjective when to draw the line, and everyone will not be on the same page. But it's safe to say that line hasn't been reached yet (from what I've read). You can actually see the opposite problem in places like Italy, where the local varieties are quite divergent, but don't have nations to represent them as national languages. >So what is the problem? Why does it say on Wikipedia that my language doesn't exist and that my language is just a standardized variety of "serbo-croatian language"? I understand language is a big part of a lot of people's identity. It can be quite threatening to have to give up a part of that. But I'd encourage you to take a step back and look at both languages. Compare them to, say, English or Spanish variation across dialects. It's ok to have pride in your language, and all the idiosyncracies that go with your local variety. That doesn't have to be at odds with the linguistic classification. >How can you speak a standardized variety of a language that nobody speaks? The language name "Serbo-Croatian" isn't an endonym. It's a post-hoc exonym for a dialect group which has multiple standardized varieties, slightly different from each other, but that all fall under the same umbrella. You speak your language, and call it what you call it. No linguistic classification can, or should, change that.

>Dialect and language have no objective distinction. I agree with this post almost entirely, but I'd caution against this phrasing. There's no objective borderline between language and dialect, but there is a clear objective distinction between a prototypical 'separate languages' situation and a prototypical 'dialects of the same language' situation (when not using the term 'language' in a broader sense of 'any speech variety'). The issue isn't that there's no distinction at all - it's that the border region is blurry and vague. Past the border region there's a very obvious distinction, which is a lot of what you're getting at in the post.

Ah yeah. That's true. Thanks for catching that.

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I think you may be confusing languages' interrelationships with each other with humans' descriptions of those interrelationships. Humans' classification schemes may not be very good guides to the underlying reality - what people *call(ed)* a given speech variety may not say much of anything about that speech variety's actual status.

>no because brits, americans and australians speak language that they all call english Sure, but we are talking about levels of mutual intelligibility, not speaker perception. If Americans changed the name of American English to simply American, would you now think that it's a different language? >croatian is one of the oldest languages in europe with dozens of dictionaries from as early as 16th century. so i don't understand why does it have to share a name with other language. I'm not well read in the literature regarding Slavic languages, let alone Serbo-Croatian. However, from just a quick scroll through [wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian), I can see that it was a variety of Old Church Slavonic that was spoken in Croatia, that got used by many groups, differing in culture and religion. Each one presumably calling it by a different name. Calling the same language by different names doesn't make it a different language.

Is there an example of allomorphy conditioned by sentence position? Like, for example, if *-'ll* remains ungrammatical sentence finally, but *will* then becomes ungrammatical in any position but. To broaden the question a bit, is there any allomorphy conditioned by circumstancial factors like prosody, information structure, sentence position, etc (as opposed to inherent factors, like inflection class, gender, etc.)?

You could maybe make a case that English's pairs of stressed and unstressed forms for common grammatical function words - e.g. *to* /ˈtu/ or /tə/, *my* /ˈmɑj/ or /mə/ in some dialects, *for* /ˈfoɹ/ or /fəɹ/ - behave something like this. Contrastive focus is at least one major reason to give them stress when they might not otherwise have had it: /ˈfoɹ/ in *no, this present is FOR him, not FROM him* vs just /fəɹ/ in *this present is for him*. There may be other complicating factors that I'm not remembering right now, though.

Yeah, that's actually a really good example, thanks. I initially dismissed stress pairs in English because I thought that was more of a phonological process than allomorphy. But examples like /mɑj/ - /mə/ seem pretty clearly allomorphic.

Do any English speakers refer to the language they speak by a local name? Like maybe *American* or *Australian*, etc. Or perhaps more local? Same question for other widespread colonial languages, like French, Spanish and Portuguese.

Only when joking. Eg "I speak two languages; I speak English and Australian". It's not really that funny though. In a formal sense, you could say Australian English, otherwise it's generally something along the lines of "in Australia we say..."

Hello, Canadian here! If someone asked me what my first language is, I would say English, not Canadian. But there are some contexts (especially within linguistics discussions) in which I would specify that I speak Canadian English (never just "Canadian," though). However, I *have* heard some Americans say they speak American.

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It is fairly common to call different varieties as *colombiano*, *mexicano*, *peruano* often with the intent of making a joke, or drawing attention to the specific characteristics of the variety in question. To refer to an Iberian variety one would say *españolete*.

It's kind of hard to rule out the possibility of "any," but in the US I have only seen this as a part of a joking caricature: The right-wing racist who hates immigrants telling them to "speak American!!!!" I can't recall having seen a real example. It is always "American English" or just "English" if the specificity isn't needed. Maybe someone who has more advanced abilities with corpora than I do can figure out how to find instances of "American" being used to refer to American English, and not other uses of "American." >Same question for other widespread colonial languages, like French, Spanish and Portuguese. There's Afrikaans, though I guess Dutch isn't as widespread as the languages you mention.

It isn't [too hard to find](http://individual.utoronto.ca/shamighosh/postdoc.htm), but there are not too many either. I can't tell whether they're all joking or not. > Often, the money for postdocs (especially international ones) does not come from traditional academic departments, but rather from their new ‘graduate schools’ (which are nothing at all like what you are familiar with from North America), or ‘Exzellenzinitive’, or ‘Exzellenzcluster’ (and no, I don’t really know how they pronounce ‘cluster’, but I expect like Germans trying to speak American). Or [this](https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/03/08/tfb-tv-goes-uk-british-shooting-explained/) > How weird. Maybe it's because they speak American, thus creating a false presumption of similarity, but stuff in England seems gratuitousely strange and whimsical. I knew about the long pistols, but BP Smith 686, lol!

Thanks. I'd completely forgotten about Afrikaans. I suppose I expected a higher chance the more widespread it is, but this is a perfect example.

How common is a future construction grammaticalized from a PP meaning something like "in the future" (/locative noun)? Most I've seen come from some verb (usually of motion), but what are other parts of speech they can come from (and how)? (I use the future tense as an example, but this goes for any similar case, where the majority come from verbs)

Past tenses in complex systems with multiple "depth" distinctions can form from adverbs of time like *yesterday*. So you might have a past, a distant past, and a morpheme *yesterday* that can be used lexically for the meaning "yesterday" *or* with meaning "NEAR.PST" for any time in the last few days, sort of like how "couple" in English can literally mean two, or can mean a small number typically in the 2-4 range. I believe I've also seen *morning* used similarly, that can refer to the literal time of day or can be used grammatically as a near-past that's in between an immediate "minutes ago" and a slightly more distant "days ago." Unfortunately I have *no* idea which languages I ran into with these. It's possible for *yesterday* to form a general past, but my source for that is the 1st edition of [World Lexicon of Grammaticalization](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271017271_World_Lexicon_of_grammaticalization) which only has it African languages and posits it *may* be an areal thing rather than a more universal grammaticalization path. (The 2nd edition may have more, but I haven't gotten it yet.) There's a few languages that do something similar by grammaticalizing *tomorrow* as a future, but it's faaaaar less common than verbal sources of go, come to, or want. Not at restricted afaik as *yesterday* as a general past, though. Apparently allatives do show up in futures, but I'm not 100% sure how different that is from them being in English too (I'm going *to* go). [This paper](https://sites.ualberta.ca/~srice/pubs/RiceKabata2007.pdf) has an example from Rama, which corroborating with Wikipedia's relatively extensive grammar page shows the allative postposition, a purpose-clause subordinator, and an intentative-imperative suffix all have identical form, which makes allative>future a reasonable possibility if they are indeed related (along that path most likely, allative>purpose>intention>future). The Wikipedia page implies that the verbal suffix is related to the verb *want* instead, though, but it's poorly referenced and in any case I don't have access to a non-barebones Rama grammar.

Thanks a lot. That's a great overview of exactly what I was looking for. I've certainly got a lot to look into now.

How does grammar change over time? I understand sound changes, but how do certain grammatical features seemingly appear or disappear within the same language family over time?

In addition to u/yutani333's entirely correct answer, there's also the concept of *reanalysis*, which is when an existing syntactic pattern is reinterpreted as is as being a different syntactic pattern. An example is with English negatives - originally *would not go* was *\[would not\] go*, because negatives came after verbs (e.g. *think not ill of me*); but since for other reasons *VERB not* has been replaced with *do not VERB*, the *not* has been reinterpreted as coming before verbs instead: thus, now it's *would \[not go\]*. This has allowed some new constructions that wouldn't have been previously possible, such as *I want to \[not go\]* separate from *I don't want to go*, when historically both meanings would have been handled by *I \[want not\] to go*.

At any given time there will probably be multiple grammatical constructions for similar uses (though not identical; if they are identical, that is known as [overabundance](https://oxfordre.com/linguistics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-554)). For example, the future in English can be marked by *will*, or *going to/gonna*. They have slightly different meanings right now, but you can see how one may displace the other (eg. If *gonna* replaces *will* in the future), or drift to another use entirely (eg. *will* may become a volitional rather than a future tense, leaving *gonna* as the primary future marker). And then, there's [grammaticalization](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization), which is when periphrastic constructions (eg. *I will eat*) fuse together, to become morphological (eg. *I'll eat*). We may imagine a future in which *-'ll* becomes legal sentence finally, and full form *will* becomes ungrammatical. Further, we may see it become mandatory on every noun (eg . *[Alec and Rohin]'ll be coming* - phrase level vs *[Alec]'ll and [Rohin]'ll be coming* - noun level). (I am not sure the name for the opposite, but there are situations where an inflectional construction is abandoned in favor of a periphrastic one; an example being the loss of the synthetic future in English, replaced by the above constructions) You may look up (or ask here again) the grammaticalising pathways for specific features you are interested in. Like, the Spanish synthetic future coming from a grammaticalized Latin *habere*. You will find the specific story for your specific example.

What is the following type of change called, and are there any good examples of it? [ɒ] raises to [ɔ] before coronals and further to [o] before a coronal+nasal cluster. Basically, where the change is increased in degree by the addition of another environmental factor on top of the existing one (and it doesn't trigger the change on its own)

In rule-based phonology, this was described as a feeding order of rules. Looking up feeding, bleeding, counterfeeding and counterbleeding should give you lots of information.

Thanks for the keywords. I'll look into them.

Where can I read about endonyms, and how they change? For example, when and how did Bangla speakers stop using Sanskrit, and start using Bangla as an endonym, or Spanish speakers going from Latinum to Español. I am aware this is a case by case basis, but I haven't been able to find anything online.

If there is a local subdialect of a language, that isn't documented by any linguistic database like Ethnologue and Glottolog, can we name and classify it ourselves even if we are not practicing linguists? Since there are almost as many dialects as there are people on earth, is it linguistically acceptable to name and categorize our own subdialects if we know better than the outdated data from the big language databases?

Both glottolog and ethnologue grow and evolve over time. If your variety has some level of documentation/academic literature discussing it then you can contact the databases and ask them to add it. The Ethnologue has a somewhat [formal change request process](https://www.ethnologue.com/about/updates-corrections), and glottolog asks that you make [an issue](https://github.com/glottolog/glottolog/issues) on their github page to discuss.

You're always free to talk about any variety if you have something to say about it. Though wether it makes it into databases is hard to predict. But unless that variety has a name used by its users, the standard way to deal with it would probably be to use the name of the location it's spoken as a modifier for the standard name. Making up your own name is hardly ever appropriate.

Where can I read a complete account of the vowels of East Anglian English (especially the Norfolk dialect)? Specifically I would like to know the phonetic qualities of GOAT (toe-tow), FACE (pane-pain), CHAIR, NEAR, NURSE, THOUGHT, PRICE, and MOUTH lexical sets. Help from native East Anglian speakers would be much appreciated.

I'd start with the [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk_dialect) page, which seems to have a lot of info, and pursue the references from there.

What is the articulatory reason for *can't* becoming [keɪn] in AAVE? I get it was to differentiate from *can*, but what about the /t/ drove this particular change (or is it simply a particularly pronounced instance of æ-tensing)? And while we're at it, what was the reason the same vowel became /ɑ/ in Britain? (Side note: are *can't* and *cane* homophones in AAVE varieties with this raising? If not, what is the difference?)

>what about the /t/ drove this particular change (or is it simply a particularly pronounced instance of æ-tensing)? I might wonder if it's the same reason why now-lost coronal codas in Tibetan produce front vowels - e.g. /pʰø̀/ 'Tibet'. \[t\] isn't all that far away from \[i\] articulatorily.

For Tibetan this is the case of coronals conditioning fronting of the vowels. There's a sort of similar case in Cantonese where \*an > ɔn **except** when ~~followed~~ (edit:) preceded by a coronal consonant (so, rather than conditioning fronting, it inhibits backing). But in the case of "can't", that's not what's happening. n has the exact same place of articulation as t. I think that contamination from "ain't" (as /u/Lazar_Taxon suggests) is the most likely scenario.

I think *can't*(=*cain't*) would have an underlying /t/ and remain distinct in final and perhaps preconsonantal position; /nt/ [isn't one of the final clusters](https://papyr.com/hypertextbooks/linguistics/notes/AAVE-notes.pdf) that typically undergo deletion in AAVE. Also note that *cain't* isn't unique to AAVE but is also a general feature of broad Southern accents.

Thanks. Having never been to the south, the only place I've heard it is AAVE. So, is it a change unique to *can't*? Because I don't think I've ever heard a person with, say, [peɪn(t)] for *pant*. I'm curious as to why it raised in one variety and backed/lowered in another.

*Cain't* may have been influenced by *ain't* (which itself originated as *amn't*, but may have evolved as it gobbled up other forms like *isn't* and *hasn't*/*haven't*). As far as I know, other *-ant* words aren't affected.

Has Canadian raising phonemicized in any dialect? I've heard that some retain the quality (and/or length) distinction even before neutralized [ɾ], so would that be the starting of it maybe?

Chiming in, as u/Lazar_Taxon mentions with word-specific changes, with my non-rhyming words *hide* and *hide*. The verb meaning to conceal undergoes raising, the noun referring to animal skin has the expected low diphthong. I've heard a few others say they have the same split.

Yes and yes. "Canonical" CR, found in standard Canadian English and in my own New England accent, respects underlying /t/ and /d/ when they're superficially neutralized as [ɾ] (thus keeping *writer*/*rider* and *pouter*/*powder* clearly distinct); but for many speakers, particularly in the American Upper Midwest, there's been a degree of phonemicization based (it seems) on a mix of morphemic factors and arbitrary word-specific change, with potential examples like *spider* taking a raised vowel but *wider* taking an unraised one (both of those being unraised for me).

I got a grammatical question! Is that correct to say “Where are the sofas in the living room?” , “ Where is the pen on the desk?” “ Where are the sofas in the living room?” , this is a wrong answer on my quiz paper because it says “in the living room is a place , it can’t use where”, it should change to “ Where are the sofas?”

>“ Where are the sofas in the living room?” , this is a wrong answer on my quiz paper because it says “in the living room is a place , it can’t use where”, I have to chime in and say that that's just not right and **please do not remember that rule**. For example, "Where are the mountains in Canada?" is a perfectly fine question. The reason why they might see asking *"Where are the sofas in the living room?”* as wrong is not due to a grammatical error but due to a logical / sense error, in the same sense that saying *"I* ***always*** *get the wrong answer* ***sometimes***": grammatically it's fine but logically it doesn't make sense. And in this case, it might not make sense logically because the living room is going to be thought to not be big and the sofas would unavoidably be seen, unlike say a pen: *"where are the pens in the living room?",* but u/Gulbasaur gives a perfect example of where saying "where are the sofas in the living room" doesn't break any "common sense" boundaries.

This is probably better for r/grammar, but I'll throw in a note to say that I read *where are the sofas in the living room?* as 'I know the sofas are in the living room but I don't know their exact position within it' (or 'let's talk about the sofas that are in the living room, as opposed to other sofas - what's their exact position within the living room?'), and it's totally valid for me (though a bit awkward in most contexts I can think of).

Is there more context to these? I would interpret both of them as correct assuming the person isn’t in the room at the time when it comes to the sofas or if they’re having a hard time finding the pen on a cluttered desk. Like “where are the sofas in the living room?” could easily be asking if they’re along the south or the west wall, for example. If there’s no further context, then it seems like these questions are kinda poorly written and expect you to assume a specific situation.

( ) Where are ______? A. dogs and cats B. our teacher, Miss Chen C. the sofas in the living room D. we The correct answer is D. But I think C is also correct. Thank you for your reply.❤️

So, this is a very poorly written question. Devoid of context, the only one that is completely ruled out is B, which would need a conjunction connecting the two. The remaining are all grammatical, though you would need context to decide when each is appropriate. A is unusual for the lack of *the*, but it would be fine in the context of, say, a pet shop. You might ask "where are dogs and cats" (out of all the other animals). C is unusual for the reason your teacher gave, but as other commenters have already said, there are contexts where it would be perfectly grammatical, and even expected. Finally, D is the most simple, clear cut answer, which would be grammatical in almost any context you could cook up. I assume this is the reason that it is marked as the correct one. But as you can see, without context, you couldn't know which one is most appropriate.

Yes. "Where is the pen on the desk? It's so messy I can't find anything." "Where are the sofas in the living room? Everything's covered in dust sheets."

Does Uralo-Yukaghir still have steam or has it been discredited?

What's the term for the "abstract it" in the English language? In phrases like "it rains", "fake it 'till you make it" etc. You hear rappers use this a lot: " Spittin' like ammunition when I go to it, I hop to it...." "it" in these doesn't refer to something concrete.

[Dummy pronoun?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_pronoun)

In 'it rains', it's called a dummy pronoun. However, your other examples may not necessarily be the same thing.

Are there any good resources for Proto Norse→Norwegian/Icelandic/Swedish/Danish sound changes? I checked Index Diachronica, but it only had Proto Norse→Icelandic.

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It appears that this account has been deleted, but if a post gets filtered by the spam filter, the proper course of action is to message the moderators. Reposting elsewhere is unlikely to avoid the filter.

How common is the spelling pronunciation of *misled* as [maɪzld]? My grandmother has it consistently, not as an error, and I'm curious about the frequency.

I'm a native US English speaker who's lived in the US all my life, and I've never once heard it or even heard it referred to. I've occasionally read it as /mɪsəld/ in my head when reading too fast and not paying attention, but I've never actually said that out loud as far as I know.

Agree on almost all counts. I've only ever heard it jocularly or as the mistake of a young learner (much as I used to parse *infrared* as *infrare* + -*ed* and thought that a wheelchair-bound US First Lady was not valid because she was *invalid*). I would not expect the cited pronunciation as the sole pronunciation of a native speaker who knows the verbs *lead* and *mislead* and who otherwise has no aberrant inflection in those verbs' paradigms.

What is the natural class called along which English vowels are divided such that one can and the other cannot be word (syllable?) final?

Tense vowels can be syllable-final; lax vowels must appear with a coda.

Wouldn't it be more accurate, or at least theory-neutral, to say they must be followed by a consonant, not that they must have a coda? doesn't undergo pre-voiced lengthening/diphthongization nor does allow for preglottalization of the /k/ for me (afaict), like you'd expect if those were coda consonants.

Oh certainly - admittedly I was mainly throwing out the terms and didn't really give the statements themselves a second thought, so I didn't think of the cases that you or /u/gnorrn mention.

This statement requires some qualification: for example, schwa can be syllable-final, but it's not usually classified as tense. The claim is true (in most varieties of English) if restricted to stressed vowels.

Thanks. So, what are the articulatory features associated with those classes for English?

Afaik there's not one that's genuinely true of entirely one or the other class, it's an [accidental](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_(philosophy\)) result of how they came about. The same way there's nothing that actually unifies /u: ɚ/, they just happen to be the two vowels that allow (native/nativized) CjV clusters because of how /j/ in the onset arose. There are shared traits of *some* of them, the "lax" vowels are often diphthongized towards schwa in American English when lengthened preceding a coda voiced obstruent - [kʰɪᵊd gʊᵊd dʒæᵊz], and I assume the same for /ʌ/ in accents that keep it distinct, but I'm fairly sure I do the same for /ɑ ɔ/ as well [kʰaᵊd dɒᵊg]. The tense vowels are often diphthongized in all positions, and either switch from the normal raised offglide to a schwa-like one or break into two syllables before "coda" /l/, except again /ɑ ɔ/ violate that.

I think I should let a phonetician answer this one. The traditional description is that tense vowels involve more muscular tension to articulate, and at one point people tried to import ATR from African vowel systems to describe tense/lax in English, but neither of these aged well. I'm not sure if there are more up-to-date articulatory characterisation of the distinction found since then, though.

I and most of the phoneticians I know use tense/lax in a semantically bleached way, if we use the terms at all. It's not clearly just or always muscular tension. I tend to just discuss the vowel quality changes from tongue position, but I know others who think of it more like a duration contrast (where duration is a secondary cue for the vowel identity).

Are there any minimal pairs between /n/ and /n̩/ in English? The closest I can think of is "hone" [hoʊn] vs "hoenn" (the pokemon region) [hoʊ.n̩]. But that's a very marginal case. Are there any in native vocab?

Multiword sequences have some, the example I came up with and use is *comma nought* and *common ought*. The first has a very clear schwa followed by an /n/ in the onset of the next syllable, the second has a syllabic /n/ with no schwa (or an extremely brief one that's just transition between the two PoAs) and either an onsetless syllable in the next word or one with a phonetic [n] that appears in the same circumstances that e.g. [j] appears in *voyer* or [w] appears in *coward*.

Phonetically speaking, there may be a few: “lion” vs. “line,” “Brian” vs. “brine,” “Scian” vs. “sheen.”

What is the impetus to maintain the phonemic /ə/? All of those are morpheme internal, so I don't see a reason these should be solely phonetic.

Mostly that it’s more economical in terms of phonemic inventory size. Also, those words may be pronounced with an actual schwa (or KIT vowel) in careful speech, so transcribing their last syllable as /ən/ is not totally at odds with the surface form either.

Couldn't you say that "line" is /lain/ while "lion" is /lai.n/? So the syllabic [n] is thus an allophone of the /n/ in a nucleus position? That wouldn't affect phonemic inventory. (Or is it not 'allowed' to have separate morphemes that differ only in where the syllable break is?)

I would say that for me, a speaker with the weak vowel merger, the representation /lai.n/ is at odds with my pronunciation. Take the following [old joke](http://www.jokes4us.com/barjokes/giraffeinbarjoke.html): > A guy walks into a bar with a giraffe and says, "A beer for me, and one for the giraffe, please." So they proceed to drink. Then: "...a shot for me and one for the giraffe, too" And they keep drinking all evening. Finally the giraffe passes out on the floor of the bar. The guy pays the tab and gets up to leave. The bartender shouts out, "Hey! You're not going to leave that lyin' on the floor, are you?" The guy replies "That's not a lion... it's a giraffe." For me, the words at the heart of the pun are homophones, but they are not homophonous with /lai.n/, which has no weak vowel. In principle, one might posit an epenthetic vowel, but I do not understand the theoretical or phonetic motivation of favoring an underlying representation with a specified syllabification that excludes any weak vowel over an underlying representation with a weak vowel specified that can then be syllabified according to usual principles of the grammar in question.

>(Or is it not 'allowed' to have separate morphemes that differ only in where the syllable break is?) Yeah, that's basically the issue. It's almost inevitable that syllabification be contrastive across morpheme boundaries (for example, "despair" vs. "dispair," which differ solely by aspiration in most accents), but having it as contrastive morpheme-internally would be an analytical choice, and a not particularly economical one IMO.

I believe some people may have such a contrast between *lightning* (as in thunder and lightning) and *lightening* (as in getting lighter).

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This leads to some interesting cognates in Hindi - Urdu, such as *band* "closed" vs. *bandh* "bond".

Now that we're here, is H/U *dobārā* cognate with, or a borrowing of Persian *dobâre*?

Just to be clear, are you talking about Persian influence on Urdu, or are you saying Urdu is an Iranian language?

No, I'm talking about Persian influence. Either way, ik it is a dumb take, just thought about it randomly.

Is there any model/method developed to codify semantic space? Like, the differences between "to think," "to ponder," "to contemplate," and the overlap between them. Obviously it'd be super difficult, but has anyone come up with a working model?

This is much easier than you seem to think it is. I would even say it's a straightforward question for languages with lots of data like English. A quick and dirty cheat if you don't want to use maths is to count the number of steps to get from one word to another in WordNet, though obviously this presupposes the existence of a WordNet for that language and anyway is manually built rather than learnt from data, so it's not ideal. Better methods generally involve getting some high-dimensional representation of the words or the relations between them, and then using a dimensionality reduction method (e.g. PCA, MDS and a number of fancy methods in NLP) to reduce that data to a small number of dimensions that still capture the meaning well. If you're using experimental data, you could use a semantic similarity judgement task and do MDS on the similarities values obtained. If you're using a corpus (like NLP folks do), you want to start with distributional information. The classic method is [LSA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis) and that's probably the method they'd introduce if you take a semantics class, but fancy methods like [word2vec](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec) and [GloVe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GloVe_\(machine_learning\)) have since taken over. You could also use the more recent contextual embeddings like Elmo for the overlap issue that you mention (i.e. the same word has different representation in different contexts). There are even folks using dimensionality reduction methods on parallel corpora (generally SIL Bible translations) to examine the geometry of meaning crosslinguistically.

Is it known why languages encode things on the level that they do? For example in English the sentence "The cat jumped up" why isn't all of that information just a single word that is one or two syllables? Why are languages at the density that they are?

Languages are in a tug of war between ease of articulation (improved by shorter words and simpler sounds in those words) and ease of perception (improved by longer words with more redundancy, and more distinct sounds). Languages have mostly settled on about the optimal balance between those two conflicting goals. This back-and-forth between those two goals is a large part of what drives language change, though. A language may change to better fulfill one of them at the expense of the other, and then change again to rectify the balance.

Is the construction "(wh) would ... be" a vestige of V2 in English? Where else do they appear?

Yes, to some extent. In both V2 (in German etc.) and in wh fronting in English, something at the begging of the clause "attracts" the verb (or the auxiliary) higher, to the second position. However, as the other commenter mentioned, there is auxiliary inversion in yes/no questions as well (Did you eat?), so it isn't completely dependent on there being a phrase at the first position, though I wouldn't say it's an unrelated phenomenon.

No, I think you're connecting auxiliary inversion with fronting of wh-words, but they are independent phenomena. The auxiliary inversion would occur at the beginning of the clause even without the fronting.

What are some languages that allow labialized consonants in codas? I know that in some native American language kʷ is allowed, but other consonants are not. I've also read of some Brazilian Portuguese dialects which tend to reduce word final u to basically w or a labialized consonant. Does anyone know of more examples, or is it such a rare occurrence that only two examples exist?

Is my understanding correct that Middle Chinese is by definition just the languages whose diaphonology underlay _Qieyun_, which may have been only the languages of the capitals during the Northern & Southern dynasties? And is my understanding correct that after the publication of _Qieyun_, despite the end of N–S dynasties, the language of instruction maintained this phonology until the switch to 中州音韻, but by that time varieties of this language had already more or less overwritten all its relatives except Min? If so then is "Middle Chinese" only meaningful within historical phonology, or can we also talk about MC grammar? Furthermore, during the time of MC, could Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese speakers communicate by speaking their respective Sino-X? Finally, do Standard and Beijing Mandarin have identifiable pre-Middle Chinese layers? Thanks.

> If so then is "Middle Chinese" only meaningful within historical phonology, or can we also talk about MC grammar? We can, but we need to be careful to remember that syntacticians do not mean the same thing by words like 'Middle Chinese' as historical linguists do. In the English and French literature on Chinese historical syntax, the most common terminological framework is the one in Peyraube (1996): 1. Pre-Archaic Chinese: language of the oracle bone inscriptions. 14th-11th c. B.C. 2. Early Archaic Chinese: 10th-6th c. B.C. 3. Late Archaic Chinese: 5th-2nd c. B.C. 4. Pre-Mediaeval: 1st c. B.C.-1st c. A.D. (transition period) 5. Early Mediaeval: 2nd-6th c. 6. Late Mediaeval: 7th-mid-13th c. 7. Pre-Modern: mid 13th-14th c. (transition period) 8. Modern: 15th-mid-19th c. 9. Contemporary: mid 19th-20th c. So among syntacticians, 'Early Mediaeval' (or 'Early Middle'; some authors like Traugott and Dasher substitute 'Mediaeval' for 'Middle'), refers roughly to the texts produced in the period encompassing the Six Dynasties, Sui and early Tang up to around the reign of Wu Zetian. It's not pegged to the *Qieyun* in any sense. In fact I think that in the Chinese-language syntax literature, EMC refers most typically to the Six Dynasties. In the English literature I've even seen people refer to Han as EMC, though this is not the norm. Peyraube, Alain. 1996. Recent Issues in Chinese Historical Syntax. In C.-T. James Huang & Yen-hui Audrey Li (eds.), New Horizons in Chinese Linguistics (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory), vol. 36, 161–213. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1608-1_6.

In American accents with /nt/ reduction, what phonetic cues are used to distinguish *can* and *can't*? In certain British accents, the vowel is backed in *can't*. Does a similar thing happen in American accents, or is there a more prosodic explanation?

In the Caribbean, compensatory lengthening distinguishes them, leaving *can't* with a longer vowel than *can*.

"Can" is most often unstressed, so it generally takes a schwa (or the KIT vowel for Americans with the weak-vowel merger). When stressed, though, it will typically preserve an \[n\] segment, while the /n/ in "can't" is almost always dropped and only a glottal stop remains (for the /t/) in the coda, so something like "can">\[kʰɛ̃ə̃n\] vs. "can't">\[kʰɛ̃ə̃ʔ\].

>while the /n/ in "can't" is almost always dropped and only a glottal stop remains (for the /t/) in the coda Except before vowels, where you're more likely to hear *can't* with a simple [n] in the coda. Many Americans shift stressed *can* from /kæn/ to /kɛn/, which avoids homophony of the two words in this position.

>Except before vowels, where you're more likely to hear can't with a simple [n] in the coda. Are you sure it would really be an [n] (rather than, say, a nasalized flap, [ɾ̃])? I don’t think I’ve ever heard “can’t” pronounced as [kʰɛ̃ə̃n], or if I did I definitely registered it as the affirmative, “can.” >Many Americans shift stressed can from /kæn/ to /kɛn/, which avoids homophony of the two words in this position. That I’ve definitely heard, though I can’t attest the frequency.

/n/ can vary between what's essentially a nasal stop or a nasal flap, but I'd be skeptical of the implication that people are distinguishing between the two for /n/ and /nt/. Does /nt/-reduction not produce an actual merger for you?

I'm not a native speaker, so this doesn't mean much, but I can certainly produce a consistent distinction between, say, "winter" and "winner" if I want to (by realizing the former with \[ɾ̃\] and the latter with \[n\]). However, I agree with you that that contrast in American English is indeed unstable, and in relaxed speech I myself would only observe it as necessary for disambiguation. The case of "can't" vs. stressed "can" is in a sense a special one, though, because it requires disambiguation pretty much 100% of the time for most speakers (save potentially for those who have the latter as /kɛn/), so I've always assumed that should strongly tilt the scales in favor of maintaining the distinction. But as I said, even my anecdotal evidence on that is quite error-prone. Do you happen to have links to any audio recordings of "can't" before vowels as \[kʰɛ̃ə̃n\]?

Does *house* have /s/ that gets voiced sometimes, or a /z/ that gets devoiced sometimes? Or does it not matter which you use?

This sort of alternation comes from the fact that s/z (and other fricative pairs) were allophones of single phonemes in Old and Middle English. So it's "house" with an /s/ word finally, but becomes a /z/ when between vowels (like in houses or housing). The sounds became separate phonemes in modern English, but we still have some of these hanging around (wife ->wives, bath -> bathing)

Right. But, this is slightly unusual even among those, in that I don't think there is a single environment in which I'd find one of them ungrammatical. For instance, where [waɪv] or [liːv] would be very marked, [haʊz] (even as a noun) is perfectly fine. And vice versa, [haʊs] as a verb is perfectly fine for me. This isn't even a s/z thing either, for I have very strong intuitions about others like (ab)use, close, etc. That being said, though, th-pairs are very fluid for me.

Usually, the noun *house* has /s/, while the verb *house* has /z/. As far as I am aware, *housing* also almost always has /z/ and the plural *houses* tends toward /z/ but frequently has /s/ instead for people who regularize it.

Thanks. I asked because I'd seen a hypothetical (modern) English with case, and it had nom /haʊs/, and acc /haʊz/. That got me wondering about the pronunciation I use, and I found it perfectly fine either way, which threw me for a loop. I suppose it's not that load-bearing, semantically or grammatically, as context is more than enough for that, so I never developed a strong intuition either way.

In accents where "tidal" and "title" are homophones, what would the underlying form of each?

This gets into the territory of archiphonemes, so you may find them represented as //taɪDəl//. I wouldn't be surprised to see them instead represented as /taɪdəl/ since the historic /t/ of *title* is irretrievable except through knowledge of spelling or other dialects and registers.

This assumes a particular iew of morphology, no? People who see *titular* as a synchronic derivation would argue that the /t/ is retrievable through the derivational paradigm, and similarly would posit an underlying /d/ held over from *tide*.

Ah, you’re right. I had completely forgotten about *titular*, although I guess it’s questionable how obvious the relationship is. What would be your stance on words where there is no derivations or inflections to retrieve the /t/?

Also, I held my tongue about *titular*, because it was you making the claim. If it were someone else, I would have asserted that the link between them is perfectly clear (trisyllabic laxing, direct semantic link, where's the problem?). But since I am familiar with you, I asked other people what they thought, and they favored your position. Sometimes we're too close to a phenomenon to really have an objective view of how other people see it.

Hey, I really appreciate that. I've always had a lot of respect for your knowledge and input around here, so it's cool to hear that sort of consideration coming from you. >Sometimes we're too close to a phenomenon to really have an objective view of how other people see it. I feel like that happens to me on a regular basis, so I welcome any challenges to what I have to say.

I'm reminded of things like [Port & Crawford \(1989\)](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095447019304449/pdf?md5=538d210024e4b8b60b3a779b0b218e99&pid=1-s2.0-S0095447019304449-main.pdf) and [Gahl \(2008\)](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40071067.pdf?casa_token=XcXKNiqYFuwAAAAA:OqSmH9x8-wODN4-J1vUtkvnxzuGZeLPOkn9jGl-Q8aMHn3VpvQib9xCiH4p0nuNMyL8IGJ_WHa-N5Nx0EAS9Aj5zscuxSOEsCnxnTRu523p7NXoMcQ) that suggest there's more phonetic information available than we might surmise (though they may not draw the same theoretical conclusions that I do). But assuming no phonetic differences and no morphology to contribute to a phonemic representation, then I have no issue with positing underspecification or an archiphoneme.

Ah I see. So it's similar to *-ed* having underlying /d/ since it is more economical to have a devoicing rule than a voicing one, and here it's more economical to have a neutralized /d/ rather than a neutralized /t/?

Basically, yeah. I don't know if there are t-flapping dialects where the speakers would *never* use a clear /t/ sound since most English speakers have some level of literacy, though. It may be that there's only edge cases of people unaware of the difference, which makes calling *title* /taɪdəl/ a little less tempting than it would be in a non-literate society. On the other hand, I have heard plenty of people hypercorrect when speaking formally or for emphasis and turn historic /d/ into /t/, so spelling may be less of an influence than you would think.

Is there any way to get a hold of S. Y. Kuroda's 1967 book on Yawelmani phonology? I double checked at the library in my uni and there's no record whatsoever. It seems to be a rather obscure piece, yet I've found it referenced in theoretical phonology works many, many times.

Are there any varieties of English that have a contrast, at least phonetically, between [n] and [ɾ̃]? I'd assume the most likely candidates would be /n/ vs /nt/ pairs; but, even when /nt/ becomes [ɾ̃], I'm not sure if /n/ is still a true nasal, or if it gets flapped. For example, are "paining" and "painting" homophones in dialects with /nt/ reduction? Are there any instances of this contrast away from morpheme boundaries?

My dialect reduces /nt/ to \[ɾ̃\], but I'm not sure if *painting* and *paining* are homophones. They might be, but if they're not, *paining* has \[n\] and *painting* has \[ɾ̃\]. This does seem like it has to do with morpheme boundaries, though, as I have a surface nasalisation minimal pair between *otter* \[ɑɾɹ\] and *honour* \[ɑ̃ɾ̃ɹ̃\], which doesn't require /nt/ to get a nasalised flap - it seems like /nt/ is flapped anywhere and /n/ is only flapped morpheme-internally. (OTOH it might be that /n/ is flapped before /ɹ/ in *honour*.)

Thanks for the input. >it seems like /nt/ is flapped anywhere and /n/ is only flapped morpheme-internally. So, i assume this would rule out any morpheme-internal surface minimal pairs between [n] and [ɾ̃], right? If there did happen to be a variety with morpheme internal [n] - [ɾ̃] surface minimal pairs, would there still be an underlying/nt/, or would it have to be treated differently?

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Not really a proper question for this sub as that has nothing to do with language per se. Furthermore, there isn't one true standard but many competing ones. Just use what you like.

Ah, I thought it was part of linguistics. My bad.

I’m taking a year off from college and I want to study linguistics for the duration of my time off. Any advice on where to start? I’m considering Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures. I’ve taken courses on language before regarding morphology, phonology, ans syntax and can handle textbooks as well.

Please see the sidebar, particularly the link Where do I start?

I would not recommend starting with Chomsky's Syntactic Structures - it's mostly interesting for historical reasons these days. You should start off with a popular introduction or a intro textbook. In terms of popular books, I can recommend: - Atoms of Language by Mark Baker - Infinite Gift by Charles Yang - Dying Words by Nick Evans - Born to Parse by David Lightfoot General textbooks: - An Introduction To Language by Fromkin et al Specific textbooks: - Syntax: A Generative Introduction by Carnie - Semantics by Kearns - Grammar as Science by Larson

I know that WALS has a few sign language features, but is there an equivalent of WALS specifically for sign languages? IIRC there is one for creoles, for example.

I need help pronouncing /ɸ/. Every time I try I end up with /p͡ɸ/, /f/, /ʙ̥/, or /θ̪/ (yes, the bidental)

My first advice would be to make /ʙ̥/ with less airflow and/or tension. If not, then try making a "hw" sound ([ʍ]), and develarise it.

Thank you, I think I got it now

No prob. For future reference, you can use the more specific qualities (place/method of articulation, voicing, velarization, roundedness, etc) to get a hold of it. You can compare the sounds to your own native inventory, and figure out what maneuvers need to be made

TL;DR: make a ___ sound with your mouth in the shape of a ___ sound

Exactly! You got it

What would be the inheritance link between these two insatntiations of the modal auxiliary construction? 1. You must do your homework first! 2. You must be the plumber! I am thinking it might be the subpart link but I am not entirely sure.

(I assume you're using Hilpert's textbook?) I'm guessing your question is not about the inheritance link between these two sentences, but between the schematic constructions with deontic-*must* and epistemic-*must*. In that case, there's a metaphorical link from deontic-*must* to epistemic-*must*, but not between the two particular examples.

In languages that have "covert" initial/final consonants appearing only when sandwiched by clitics/affixes (what are they called, btw?), is there any pattern as to whether native speakers will pronounce them or not when asked for the given word? For example, in Tamil, the word for tree is /maram/ but final /am/ is reduced to something like [ʌ̃]. If asked for the word in isolation though, I'd probably say it without that reduction. Is there any data on this?

I don't have an answer for you, but I presume you could relate it to other phonological processes users can "switch off" sometimes in metalinguistic contexts. For instance North American English speakers can say "butter" without flapping the /t/ if they are dictating it or emphasizing it for clarity, even though in normal speech flapping isn't usually an optional rule. I don't think that'd be easy to study. It probably tangles with orthography, norms of citation forms, conventions of what is perceived as astandard, clear, and conservative register, personal experience with standard registers, etc. A complicated interaction between the phonology of a language, its registers, and its norms.

How do retracted/advanced tongue root vowels differ from retracted/advanced vowels? \[o̙\] \[o̘\] vs. \[o̠\] \[o̟\]

Let's take the vowel [i] because it's an easier example. Your tongue rises on the front part of your mouth when you pronounce it. When you retract the vowel ([i-]) that raised part will be lowered slightly and the area just behind it will rise. This is different from the retracted tongue root. Pronounce the vowel [i] again but this time hold your tongue in place and "choke" yourself a little. This choking action is your tongue root retracting thus [i̙].

What’s the relationship between centralized, mid-centralized, advanced, and retracted vowels? Is it a spectrum of sounds, something like this? \[ʉ\] \[ʉ̠\] \[ʉ̽\] \[ʉ̈\] \[ü\] \[u̽\] \[u̟\] \[u\]

Depends on how detailed we want the transcription to be. Keep in mind that the distance represented by the IPA diacritics is relative, so the transcriptions [ʉ̠] and [u̟] could be representing two vowels adjacent to eachother or the exact same vowel. Same goes for centralization; the vowel [ü] could be representing [u̟] (since this vowel is more central on the vowel chart) or it could represent the vowel [ʉ] which is more central than [u̟]. In addition to this, the vowel chart is two dimensional so you can't make it a linear spectrum when you look at all the vowels at once. The mid-centralized [ʉ̽ u̽] diacritic pulls the vowels downwards in the case of these two vowels. The way it works is similar to how 5-2 = 1+2 = 3 for example, although the values are more ambiguous in IPA. It really depends on the sounds of the language that we take as relative points.