A distinction has to be made between (a) a sound that functions as a consonant but has a vowel-like quality and (b) a symbol that sometimes represents a vowel sound and sometimes a sound that functions as a consonant but has a vowel-like quality.

It is interesting that when linguists first described Basque, an ergative language (i.e. one that marks the object of a transitive verb in the same way as the subject of an intransitive verb) they did not understand what was going on and declared

Wikipedia is often a good place to start, but a book on phonetics would probably give you a better systematic introduction.

I confess to being equally puzzled. This is what I said in a thread about a year ago, but did not receive a lot of comment: 1. I am having some difficulty in distinguishing between instances of ergativity and the middle voice. Are they (in

The point of articulation is the place in the vocal tract that is obstructed when a sound is produced. The manner of articulation is how the sound is produced. /p/ and /m/ are both bilabial consonants i.e. produced by the lips coming

There are two currents of confusion running through this thread. The first is that some are confusing symbols with sounds. If you ask an English schoolboy how many vowels there are in English he will say that there are five, and may add that

English is one of the easiest languages to learn now because it has become such an international language. In one sense you are right. English is not intrinsically easier to learn than any other language, but if you live in a community where

The right one depends on the situation, and using the not-expected one in a certain situation gives a strange feeling, usually humorous or making you feel uncomfortable. I remember listening to a radio pogramme about the varieties of forms of

I would like to know what triggers the switch. People who code switch don't seem to know why. As they say in Gibraltar: I begin in English y termino en Español.

The idea of bilingualism seems mostly to fascinate those who are not bilingual. I have seen estimates that about half the world's population is bilingual, so for many it is pretty normal and I do not expect they think about it. In monolingual