Linguistics

1219 readers

1 users here now

Welcome to the community about the science of human Language!

Everyone is welcome here: from laypeople to professionals, Historical linguists to discourse analysts, structuralists to generativists.

Rules:

Instance rules apply.
Be reasonable, constructive, and conductive to discussion.
Stay on-topic, specially for more divisive subjects. And avoid unnecessary mentioning topics and individuals prone to derail the discussion.
Post sources when reasonable to do so. And when sharing links to paywalled content, provide either a short summary of the content or a freely accessible archive link.
Avoid crack theories and pseudoscientific claims.
Have fun!

Related communities:

Resources:

Grammar Watch - contains descriptions of the grammars of multiple languages, from the whole world.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

lvxferre@mander.xyz

fossilesque@mander.xyz

2,500-year-old slate containing drawings of battle scenes and paleo-alphabet discovered in Spain (www.livescience.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lvxferre@mander.xyz to c/linguistics@mander.xyz

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm sharing this here mostly due to the alphabet. The relevant region (Tartessos) would be roughly what's today the western parts of Andalucia, plus the Algarve.

Here are the news in Spanish, for anyone interested.

The number of letters is specially relevant for me - 32 letters. The writing system is a redundant alphabet, where you use different graphemes for the stops, depending on the next vowel; and it was likely made for a language with five vowels, so you had five letters for /p/, five for /t/, five for /k/. Counting the "bare" vowels this yields 20 letters; /m n s r l/ fit well with that phonology, but what about the other seven?

all 4 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] Shyfer@ttrpg.network 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was someone who just stumbled onto this from my Everything page and doesn't know much about linguistics, what's a grapheme? Is that like a letter?

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

Sorry for using a bit more "technical" term unnecessarily; I could've simply said "letter" instead. That said:

A grapheme is the smallest unit capable of conveying meaning in a writing system. In an alphabet, that typically includes the letters plus di/tri/polygraphs; for example in the English version of the Latin alphabet ⟨s⟩, ⟨h⟩ and ⟨sh⟩ are three different graphemes.

[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here are the news in Spanish, for anyone interested

Gonna have to read and digest this later, with this level of excitement I think I could only handle 1 single new right now.