Uvular nasal

The Japanese "syllabic" or "moraic" or "final" nasal sound is that rarest of nasals, the uvular nasal.

What is a uvular nasal?

How do children know what words mean?

Assuming that children can recognise a word (see this post on how they manage that), how do they know what it means?

Why do languages gain and lose sounds?

I attended a fascinating talk recently by Professor Andrew Wedel, who has discovered how to predict whether a language will gain or lose sounds.

Giriama

I am embarking upon a project to learn Giriama, a Bantu language of Kenya.

If you are interested, you can follow along at teachyourselfgiriama.blogspot.co.uk.

Misunderstandings and borrowings

The history of language contact is the history of thinking that what other people said was the answer to the question that you asked.

"Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool." ― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

Here are a few borrowed words showing that whoever appropriated it didn't really understand the language they got it from...

How common is that sound?

In "Which languages share sounds with English?", I posted an interactive IPA chart with some consonants from the world's most widely spoken languages. I mentioned that English dental fricative sounds (<th>) were odd.

Today, you can find out how odd. Using data from UPSID (the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database), here is a list of the sounds of the world's languages by percentage of languages which have them.

Which languages share sounds with English?

More accurately entitled, A typology of consonantal segment inventories of the world's most spoken languages, and also Welsh.